TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #46: Justin Moon

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Justin Moon, founder BUIDL Bootcamp, to discuss Bitcoin and life. Follow Justin - https://twitter.com/_justinmoon_ Follow Marty - https://twitter.com/martybent Checkout BUIDL Bootcamp - https://www.buidlbootcamp.com

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt recording number four of the week we did two on monday one on wednesday and now we here we are here friday afternoon happy hour after exciting week in new york city with the chain code uh chain code labs lightning residency boot camp i've got somebody who was just at their their hack uh their hack day the final day of the residency demos the demos uh where everybody was demoing what they built i saw the future marty well he hasn't even let me introduce him yet he can't even he's just keep interrupting he's got bated breath waiting to tell me about everything uh that went down today i want to introduce you freaks to justin moon justin welcome to the pod it's a pleasure to be on the pod i've

listened to probably a third of the uh a third of your episodes and i appreciate that i'm getting close i'll get to 100 eventually it's not uh it's not like you get a merit badge or anything if you listen to all of them but i'll make my own i'll make my own little badge hang it above my door yeah um before we jump into the exciting news of the day we were just reminiscing and talking about your journey uh and how you got caught up to speed with bitcoin i didn't know this until you just told me but you you were relatively new to bitcoin like the last 10 oh yeah 11 months i was a no-coiner a year ago totally i thought the whole idea was ridiculous so i think yeah i was just telling you you're so you're a developer and we had an episode a few episodes ago with hasu

who is not a developer and he is somebody that got caught up to speed with bitcoin uh relatively quickly and i was fascinated by that so we talked about what he did to get caught up to speed very quickly and it was a fascinating episode people love it and i think your story in particular can be a very good complementary story to that because you are a developer and you have a different avenue through which you're approaching the subject and you caught caught up really quickly so let's jump into that what's your tale how the fuck did you get into this yeah that's a good question uh i mean i think i think uh well i'll just go with this in a sort of a roundabout way thing that kind of got me interested the most was about a year ago my mother called me and was

concerned because my dad was buying meme coins or he was trying to i couldn't i don't think he could figure out how but he wanted to buy like putin coin especially he thought was like oh what he thought it was the funniest thing i wasn't interested in bitcoin at all or any of the real ones but he thought the like putin coin fuck coin was one of them he thought he wanted to pay at the grocery store with that so what is your dad where is your dad finding these shit coins i don't i don't it's still a mystery how he discovered that i mean he's recently retired i mean he likes the stock market likes trading likes that sort of stuff and so uh yeah i mean i think the kind of penny stock aspect to it was i mean he just thought it was a fun thing to do

on his retirement and so i always thought that bitcoin was something for internet nerds and like i wasn't even nerdy enough to get into it and so what do you consider yourself a nerd though borderline i mean i sort of go in and out i can i can play like kind of a little bit of both i like that yeah i think i try to be both go both ways right yeah uh so but yeah i mean there's parts of me are super nerdy i just sit and program all week sometimes like that's a pretty nerdy thing to do uh but so the thing that really opened my eyes is like all of a sudden my dad like you know a total you know he's like 70 years old not really interested in technology like he he saw these coins is real and i didn't think that would ever happen i didn't think we'd ever cross that

threshold uh or else i would have like read the damn white paper sooner i didn't read it until like december or something so so that's the thing that really opened my eyes and the first thing i did was try to like make sure he didn't buy these things or like at least had two factor and i got tried to lock everything down then after a while it started downing on me like this is quite an interesting like you know like the the uh the anthropologist in me let's say like like so like this is an interesting human phenomenon what the hell's going on here and so i slowly started doing my homework and i mean way back in the day i was interested in like i read you know benjamin graham uh intelligent investor all these the kind of the foundational texts for traditional security

analysis with stocks and bonds and stuff i read this stuff in high school in some of it in maybe middle school so like i you know read all the you know warren buffett letters so i have an understanding of like the core uh investment ideas and then when i was whatever like 20 the financial crisis happened and i actually the first time i ever bought a stock chose to buy a stock i bought it i bought it for my brother we we decided to uh we were reading the wall street journal we saw these charts going down right by the dip so i bought this i convinced my brother with his 500 dollars like we were both broke at the time 500 go buy american home mortgage within two weeks it was bankrupt so like that that gave me a healthy amount of conservatism right get wrecked right

away yeah i mean like it's a good way to it's a really good experience like i'm not gonna be scammed in my lifetime i know it because i i scammed my brother when i was still like a teenager so so that that that was kind of what uh so that was kind of my background is when i came to this crypto stuff i was really conservative right like this is this is really dangerous like i have a preference for uh productive assets right and bitcoin's not a productive asset like pierre has some really interesting points about this recently he's talking about you know bitcoin buying bitcoin is not an investment it's really a speculation you're speculating that this becomes the money of the world or at least like the new digital gold and it's not really an investment

you're not putting capital up for a productive enterprise no and so uh uh so that that's why i never got into it and so i started re-questioning these beliefs when i saw my dad and you know over six months i kind of slowly decided it it started to make sense uh the things that really you know like i was looking at my bookshelf i bought that chris berniski book chris crypto assets so like that set you back a little bit i just want to keep it just as proof that i'm not making this up like it's highlighted there are notes in the margins this is like a really damning wait before you dive deep into like your your like your journey down the rabbit hole what were you doing before

were you programming were you well that's a good question i said i was going to go at this in a dark disorganized way and that's it's important yeah so uh so i got into programming like five years ago i i did university a little late uh i actually dropped out of high school and then university once and then went back for a math degree so i had like a weird a weird path and so when i was doing the math degree i was i did it really fast and got sick of school and was going to drop out again but then i did a study abroad program which sucked and in china it was like the press was really bad and so i did this thing called thinkful it's just like an online programming school three months 10 hours a week and the uh the innovative thing they did is they

just match you up with a mentor you talk to every week and basically they just help you get unstuck because when you're learning to program the really hard thing is you just have these problems that any experienced person could solve instantly but a noob it's the end of your entire career yeah you just can't get past it it's a roadblock and so that helped me get up to speed and within i came back home after that graduated a semester later moved out to silicon valley without a job actually lived in my car for a little while and really found a found an interesting job at a startup i was like the first non-co-founder at the startup as an intern which is an unusual situation i just met the cto at a at a meetup uh he was an early programmer at pinterest so

a really impressive guy and i mostly just looked at it as like hey i'm gonna learn a lot here and so what that what we did is we made uh we basically were making programmable money like a crypto way of describing it we were making a kind of like an api for issuing debit and credit cards if you want to look for an analog you can just google stripe issuing stripe now has this business and so we were really on to something it could have been a big deal and then the second thing we did was we had like a an expense management solution for companies that would uh that didn't have reimbursements so people could all the employees would be issued debit cards and they'd use an app to uh you know request funds for expenses and then to upload receipts

and everything so it's a cool thing we so instead of having the people spend their own money they'd spend the company's money be reimbursed and it was all free to the company and we'd take the interchange right that that two percent approximately two percent uh fee that visa right that the crypto people hate you were a middleman yes i was a middle like we were we were the house man it was a great business model uh but we just didn't pull it off for many reasons probably because we tried to do two things at once but it was a great experience right i built a couple mobile apps i built a i've actually built the first the uh i was part of a group of about four or five of us that built the api that's that uh square cash's debit card program was first

prototyped on hell yeah and so like we were sitting in the office when jack dorsey swiped and we're like oh we thought the program was gonna get killed right it was uh we had venmo and square were like it's like two years ago or more and so it was uh sorry i keep pulling the mic away and it's all good marty gesticulates uh so so that was a really great experience you know and we were we were close to having a big win like we just didn't pull it off and then i got real burnt out i stuck around too longer than i should i should have done something different but i got kind of burnt out and i didn't didn't do any work any real work for a couple years and then so i did some soul searching a lot of reading and and i was doing

all kinds of different traveling a lot and so that's when i kind of encountered bitcoin so it was a good what were you reading where were you traveling to so i did a long trip uh so the last thing i did for that company was i set up a remote team in india but they wanted to do some remote development we hired a guy an indian guy who had done a lot of this outsourcing in india and he was really good at it and so we needed a programmer who was uh cavalier enough to just go go to india and and organize this and you know traveling in india is not the most organized thing in the world and so i was the only one who'd do it so i was like okay if you guys pay me to do this i'll do it uh and so i did and i set up this team in india in in a couple small you know hyderabad indoor

they're like smaller cities it's an amazing experience like you know got to meet got to really understand this whole industry this outsourcing industry got to meet a bunch of interesting people uh it was interesting that's when the trump election was happening so they were all like the joke was that they were all praying trump got elected so their friends would be deported and they could hang out with them again oh if trump's elected vj comes back i miss vj oh my god this that is so funny that is actually i actually worked in the uh the outsourcing industry as well um but uh our our developers were located in colombia and ecuador interesting um it's an interesting business model yeah i mean it's like it's one of those cool things where uh

you know you can do you can work from anywhere and so excuse me i'm definitely not editing that out we're gonna get justin's loogie on the podcast we can cut this out this is at minute 11 35 minute 11 justin's already hacking too much cheese on the pizza apparently do you need do you need anything we have a mint right to the left of the flour

bag bag yeah what are you doing getting the grocery store pizza when you have Joe's pizzeria right there so where'd you walk did you walk to to kent yeah i'm sorry rich people thing okay where were we i totally forgot what i was talking about uh we were talking about outsourcing development the business model that's an interesting business model yeah yeah so uh so that was that was an interesting experiences so that my trip started there and then i went to i forget exactly i think

i went to cambodia vietnam uh i was gonna ride my motorcycle across vietnam and as i was negotiating to buy one for 200 bucks i witnessed a fatal accident on a motorbike and that uh sort of made me reconsider right that was probably the saddest thing i've ever seen uh and so that changed my trip a little bit i ended up going to to nepal i went to nepal uh i stayed in a monastery for a while i hiked the annapurna annapurna circuit it's like a big uh 20-day hiking trip around a huge mountain that sounds pretty amazing when you get up to the top you uh like you wake up at 4 30 in the morning uh because you want to get out before the sun hits because the sun's a lot more intense up there and you get up and you're just surrounded by these white mountains and like

they're higher than you think they'd be there it's just like you're surrounded and it's maybe it's like 5 000 meters or something it's really or i think meters yeah it's it's really high up there so like you know when you start hiking you take once one one step every two breaths kind of like that's what i was doing because it's just hard to get oxygen and it was it was an amazing experience and then uh i went to china for a little bit after that i used to speak chinese still kind of speak chinese mandarin or cantonese mandarin uh don't test me nearly everything but uh yes that's that's my trip and so you know i came back and then my parents retired so i was like hanging out with them playing golf a little bit and uh and so i i

had some time off and was i did a little like contract here and there built a couple projects for fun but that i was in a really open open mind when you know the whole bitcoin bull market it happen and i was aware of it like like i tried to build an ethereum dap in like 2015 what yeah i uh i mean i i was aware of ethereum pre-ico i thought it was an interesting idea uh it never has an investment like i never bought any uh i thought about building stuff with it and so the thing i built i mean this is kind of it's funny to look back on it right because i'd almost totally forgotten about this and so the thing i'd built was like i was like okay what what is ethereum good like what can we build an ethereum that you can't build elsewhere well it's

like it's it's like this extra judicial thing right we can get around laws with it right so i tried to build a bookie right i called it vinny it's gonna be the name of the bookie kind of like a new york you know it's kind of hey what's the spread on the bulls vinny hey we're gonna take the over on this one all right exactly so that's that's what it was gonna be and i mean it's funny in a couple ways first i didn't finish building it because it was really complicated and that's what i gave up on i was like i don't know why i need to do all this to make a stupid book and second is like i couldn't think of anything to build except for something that's uh very easy to build a centralized system but illegal right and so you know you look at like the people behind

eos right now i mean like multi-chain capital is like one of the big funders of that maybe their partners were just tweeting recently like you know multi-coin capital or polychain multi-coin multi-coin or polychain yeah multi-coin they're probably both i'm talking about multi-coin yeah good so they were tweeting like hey uh you know eos we thought that all the gambling stuff would happen on ethereum look it's happening on eos yay we have all this good daps and like so even these guys are like excited about this thing that i considered like three years ago and just said ah this is kind of not a good idea right let's just like i don't know maybe just wait until they legalize sports books or something like that or like maybe which they have maybe

bookies are essential yeah yeah exactly so i mean i don't know so it's like it's just funny that i abandoned it and that i kind of gave up on it and then i mean a lot of people saw it just they ran with it for the same reasons i started to run with it and then immediately dropped the box it's like this isn't going anywhere yeah and i think i still think the problems are the same the applications people are trying to build like the eos is why i bring that up is like they're still the same thing that i tried to there's like the first thing that popped into my mind i don't think that the state of the art's advanced at all in years with some of the brightest people in the world which is shocking and so like the reason i bring this up is i was aware of this whole crypto thing

going back i just always thought that i didn't feel the need for new money like these bucks i have are fine whatever and so yeah the other thing that really got me interested is as you can see like i'm uh so we were building this programmable money at my startup like i thought it was like a cool thing to like the thing i really saw is we could help companies allocate capital with this like uh infrastructure like internal uh expense management solution that's what i the capitalist in me that's like the one of the deeply held beliefs i have is that you know uh free markets and the price mechanism and all these things are really really positive things and they get hate on a lot but like they're really they're really good and they're really important and so

when when the when the capitalist in me realized that our most important market the month of the market for money the market for capital that this was run by the government like i just didn't ever it never occurred to me and so when i realized that that like it's a government kind of cartel uh well technically it is not the federal reserve is a private entity but it was given powers via the government jesus christ marty give me a break i don't care i don't care what the legal stuff says man who appoints the guy that or the woman that runs it i don't know who's who runs it now jan is it still janet you know no she's going it's pal now yeah um powell yeah the president right the president yeah so i don't buy that at all no yeah the president appoints a fed head

right yeah this is not the look of a private enterprise actually exactly but uh i actually didn't even realize that janet had had i don't i think i think bitcoin sign guy drove a stake right i was talking to bitcoin sign guy last night i fucking love that kid oh he was my favorite podcast uh he's a lot of people's favorites he uh he's an interesting guy he was waxing poetic on that one he uh i mean the perfect guy to become a meme really we also crushed a whole bottle of vodka during that and we gotta get going i'm talking too much we recorded for like 30 minutes and i wasn't recording we had we had a conversation for like 30 minutes i wasn't recording we had to start over while already very inebriated and uh it turned into a great

conversation people love it i still love it yeah i'll go back and listen to it shout out uh bsg thanks for doing what you do this is like the third shout out he's got a bitcoin sign guy he's already got an acronym yeah i gotta catch up i gotta catch up so speaking of catch up how the hell did you catch up like with the bitcoin so you with the bitcoin knowledge yeah so you had built an app on ethereum or tried to at least thought it was shit forgot about like no one's built a daft really at the end of the day i mean there's a couple i guess but none of them really well i guess something like silk road could be argued who have been at that yeah sure but no i'm just trying like just yeah so how did you get caught at like how did you come to see the forest

from the trees like you seem like you avoided it took time right like what did the ico you were telling me that the nakamoto institute helped you out a lot yeah so i mean i i was i went and it's funny i started reading like an ico's white paper once i think it was called like true it was called but uh and then i it occurred to me i hadn't read the bitcoin white paper okay you know the uh the that's something i should do so i went and read the bitcoin white paper and was like wow this is like because i got a math degree i can program i understood everything basically like i could understand it right and i think it's you know that math degree helped in that uh quite a bit like i could i could really understand what they were

what he was talking about and uh and so and i was struck by the elegance of it it was like like this is not a joke system this is this is built by a pro this is built by like this is really novel really interesting i don't understand it totally but it's like like every sentence like i was really struck by that and so i slowly i think i bought the mastering bitcoin you know somewhat shortly after that i read a little bit of it got kind of bored with it right i mean i was i was moving slowly and and so yeah i mean like uh over about four or five months you know while reading all kinds of other stuff i read mastering bitcoin i think i read safe's book the bitcoin standard as soon as it came out i mean i was it was like april right yeah i was one of the first

i mean basically as soon as it was announced i bought it and read it and so that was one of the things that really maybe not as soon as it came out but shortly afterwards and then so that and the thing that really did it was the nakamoto institute that was really like uh i started reading uh all the stuff pierre richard bitstein uh a lot of zabo nick zabo even kirk crasswitz the guy who's kind of not really there anymore he had a couple interesting things back in the day he's got some great pieces yeah yeah coined hyper bitcoinization yeah exactly so i'm turning into bitcoin was uh is a great little meme yeah yeah so i don't remember exactly what like i've i just went through and just like just just uh inhaled it for like two weeks i read a lot of the site

as most should yeah exactly nakamoto institute is one of the the richest treasure troves of information when it comes to bitcoin uh the cypherpunk movement and cryptography innovations in general exactly i mean and and bitstein at bitstein that's you know he's pretty soon doesn't have a christian name anymore he's he's just a handle at this point right you know his name is this it's gonna be forgotten but i've been calling him michael bitstein yeah i mean i realize he's gonna change his legal name like get on it man he's got the greatest handle of all time right uh yeah but what they've what they put together is incredible he's a great uh he's kind of like a cataloger of these things there's like a real word for that like a historian yeah he's kind of

a story like he there's just a lot of this stuff i mean like the nakamoto institute has some of the earliest versions of the bitcoin core c++ code base and that was one of the first places where i like i went and downloaded that and started looking at it it's like well shit this is like i don't know c++ really but uh it's only like a couple thousand lines of code it's pretty small i can kind of read it you know as a hacky prototype but you know like the first version of the code like people people like to revere satoshi and for a good reason but like they're all kinds of you know it's kind of a parts of it were a piece of crap you know like he had a whole payment channel implementation that just completely didn't work which is why we have lightning 10

years later uh this is i'm gonna give a short talk about this at the hack day this weekend but so it's like you know he had all things it's he had a bunch of things that he screwed up but like it's just amazing how the things that mattered he didn't figure it out right yeah he got he got enough of the really important and he worked on the code base for like two years before launching it correct i mean i don't know i mean so another uh resource on the nakamoto institute is uh satoshi dot nakamoto institute dot org the complete satoshi oh they just launched that right they've had that for years okay um but they just redid it and made it like more responsive for mobile and shit like that um but in that like you can go see satoshi's emails uh his blog or his forum

posts and you can see him interacting with the community yeah over like a year and a half and at one point i forget i forget whether there was an email or a bitcoin talk posts but he basically it was like yeah i've been working on i wrote wrote the code before i wrote the uh wrote the white paper yeah yeah you know the code work and he he mentioned like uh just like haphazardly like yeah uh i've been working on this for like two years so it makes sense i mean i i admire that like uh i mean it's it's really different from the current uh way people are trying to improve bitcoin right they say i'm gonna start with a white paper i'm gonna fund my venture and then i'm gonna see it's just an experiment guys just an experiment i'm gonna see if we can improve it

right and you see the opposite with satoshi's like hey i'm gonna sit in my basement i'm gonna i am you know i'm a cyberpunk i'm gonna sit in my basement i'm gonna write this thing until i'm satisfied that it works and then i'll tell people about it i mean maybe i'm saying he because it's masculine name maybe there are a few of them probably i mean it's such a great achievement it would make more sense yeah uh and and then he writes the white paper right it's so it's it's a And it's an eight-page white paper. It's not some 40-page technobabble. I was just reading that.

That sucker is like 45 pages or something. Yeah. So, yeah, there were a few of these. And I'm sure there were other things, but I forgot them. You know, the big ones. I also read a, I mean, I read a textbook by Thomas Sowell. He's a great economist who's very good at putting complex ideas into simple language. and uh he's just also like kind of a he's really wise man he's a very wise man yeah i mean there's

like a tweet twitter account unofficial twitter account that just tweets out quotes of his and it's just like it regularly trends like 5 000 tweets retweets it's yeah huge follow on twitter and then i highly recommend checking out his interview i believe was on the rubin report last year yeah yeah yeah uh april of last year and thomas soul he's uh he's a dude from harlem from yeah it's crazy he's a dude from not only from harlem i mean he grew up he he's like i think his parents died uh he grew up in the south and was just sent to his grandparents to live up in harlem and like yeah i believe he was born in north carolina got sent up here like you said after his parents died he's just in a crazy rags to riches story he he joined the navy then uh went

to harvard afterwards and became like an emeritus professor at stanford now yeah and like a great economist and so he wrote this great book which i i really encourage any of you to read if you don't know economics really uh it's just called basic economics it's like a it's a pretty long book but it's all in plain english like one of the problems with economics is we got they got all these silly graphs that sort of like uh it make it hard to understand what those really pure ideas are you know you can read a whole economics textbook 101 and then you leave like well what were the ideas what should i take away from this after i've forgotten all the specifics right let me pull up the lapper curb for you yeah it's like i don't want to i don't want to learn that and so

the cool thing about uh sowell is he doesn't have a single graph it's all like these it's all kind of like thought experience well what will happen if you fix the price on housing right or like what will happen if you you make it so you can't uh build right well the population will continue to grow so you have more people per house and so then the prices will go up it's just like simple uh experiments like that which like a city like san francisco just completely fails to understand they desperately need uh thomas soul giving them they do quality quality in more ways than one and he's only 30 minutes away i don't know what's wrong right no and then like his his uh explanation of minimum wage laws and exactly why they're bad and how they

sort of block out a part of the world he's got a lot of stuff about affirmative action that's really interesting uh he's got he's just got a lot i mean he wrote like 30 books like all this stuff like guns germs and steel by jared diamond it's just a big thing about you know kind of re that's my dad's favorite book yeah so he's like rethinking like what really was going on with colonialism and i mean i'm not an expert on this but apparently like i mean a lot of these ideas i read a few of the books a lot of these ideas were articulated by sowell very similarly like five years earlier and jared diamond got all the credit partially because sowell's like a black conservative and has been really hated on by mainstream everyone because like black conservative

is not supposed to exist right and so he's one of these like you know forgotten intellectual figures that'll probably be more revered after he's dead because he was just uh just playing on a different level right he's above the rim the rest of us are on the court he's above the room i've been pushing for a public debate between him and alexandria cortez uh ocasio or cortez yeah that would be that would be tough right because i mean he's kind of past that debating age i think he's like 90 i know but i think it's important i think if people are seriously pushing democratic socialist uh intentions in this country it's dangerous and like socialism has proven many times doesn't have a good track record that it ends in misery and there's people openly pushing

for socialism in america right now which i think is scary yeah it is and i think a debate between those two would enlighten a lot of people yeah i mean he's got some great debates if you go on youtube like you know from from against that perspective but like i mean it just speaks to how long he was you know like uh william f buckley was the moderator has been dead for like a generation it's insane like and we're we want him to you know debate now it's just like the debate like a 27 what uh and you know he's like this super suave dude with a fro it's like the 70s yeah what a baller man yeah he's a boss yeah so i read his book and again i encourage you guys to like if you want to understand a little bit about economics like maybe i wouldn't got into all this

if i hadn't read that book i'm not really sure i maybe uh but it really helped uh you know understand incentives and for me it was really like the importance the importance of a price mechanism you know like the the the price and i you know i read this like six months ago eight months ago so i don't really have a great handle on it but it's like you the ability to set a price on the free like a great example he gives is like you know people don't like that in a disaster zone the merchants will will uh will increase the price of bottled water right like everyone hates that what a terrible thing to do to exploit people but what happens if you artificially cap the price of a bottle of water in a disaster zone somebody's gonna corner the supply yeah so one guy gets all

the supply and his family's great and then everybody else dies of thirst because like a bottle of water in a normal everyday life is not a very big deal it's not a matter of life and death in a disaster zone it is and so it's a very different commodity at that point a product in that at that point and so if you don't allow the price mechanism to coordinate like who gets what at least to some degree you're gonna just have you're just gonna have one guy take the whole thing and it's terrible yeah and this this mechanism you know kind of happens everywhere and it's it's you know it's a big reason why the u.s pulled ahead of the soviet union because you know he has a lot about this in the book it's like you know they had the smartest

people in the world coordinating the soviet economy and they had to set prices on 10 000 goods and so what would happen is all the lower functionaries would they were just trying to advance their own careers they'd start like gaming the system right if they were required to you know uh paint their tractors red they would hoard red paint and then all of a sudden the rest of the economy wouldn't have red paint and so you'd have green fire trucks and like it's like the hell's going on and so you know that's a great example of the importance of the price mechanism and so like you know let's bring it back to crypto like when somebody wants an artificially stable coin i'm like you you fucking idiot you know right it's the biggest meme in crypto right it's the

this price mechanism is so important like it's you can't the stable coin is just hide volatility or attempt to hide volatility until a black spot happens and you want like the beautiful thing that's happening i mean i'll speak from the the perspective that that bitcoin i'll i'll attempt to say what bitcoin is it's like i think we're kind of witnessing the monetization of an asset right at least a partial part part of the way right you know like you could monetize any asset you could use candles as money wouldn't work so well like safe's book the bitcoin standard is a great thought experiment of what happens if you try to monetize copper for example or silver which was tried in like the 80s and so go read that if you want to kind of understand what i'm talking

about but uh so it seems like that's what we're seeing a new assets being monetized and like this is not going to be a stable transition like it makes sense that the price goes all over the place because we're negotiating money whether or not we believe this is money the definition of money the the entire reality of our everyday lives how we pay for diapers you know like i'm still wearing diapers by the way dude i am too man that pizza i had on the way over it gonna really cut into the diaper supply i brought here to new york but uh please edit that out no no uh we're proud adult diaper wearers yeah so and that's so like i like markets i like markets so i just keep he keeps pulling the mic away from himself yeah uh so i like it though you're like you're deep in

thought i'm deep in thought yeah like going to get a real good man spread he's got a very very big power pose i'm sure you're yeah or high so uh i mean we're so yeah the price mechanism is really important and prices are i mean it's like one of these everyday things like money itself you kind of neglect the role it plays and it's really important to important to learn a little bit about it and then like on the other hand i don't think you need to be an economist to understand it like this is one thing all the normies especially the silicon valley normies like to shit on us about is like well hey i trust nobel prize winners over you and i'm like fair point like that is that it like but as somebody who spent four years at universities studying

economics like you realize pretty quickly what you're studying like these people fucking don't know what they're talking about like and you couple studying it while you're actually working in finance and it's like holy shit this is like all the really the really troubling thing is that you know i mean it's safe uh i mean you were at the nakamoto institute dinner in dallas he was i was like sat next to him he was he was telling me how like you know you basically can't study like no practically no monetary economist in the u.s is unfunded by the fed like directly or indirectly they you know get their money from the fed you know whoever pays your bills is basically owns you like to some extent right uh which is you know why it's important we have independent

bitcoin developers for example right yes like uh like luke like luke exactly he's just recently kind of like doing his patreon and so you know go support him yeah i mean he's the most i mean the guy's kind of crazy sometimes but like definitely crazy it's i don't believe what this is but yeah i mean but look at all some of his interesting like he had a lot he's had a lot of really huge contributions soft fork segwit yeah exactly how to do that and so you know this is the opposite side of the coin it's important to have some independent bitcoin developers but you know that's a really fucked up thing about you know monetary economics it's like the simple understanding of economics that i have is like incentives are all important and you guys all make your money

from the same same institution that's trouble so like you know well this this criticism is kind of valid like yeah i did learn the shit on twitter you know like it's true you got me is that a criticism i mean there it's not criticism or not there's like a shade of truth to that you know you want to be wary of some you know internet tough guy and uh you know somebody who you know you got to be wary of this sort of person who's you know has has not studied deeply read some youtube article or wikipedia article and thinks they're an expert it's it's true yeah uh skeptical but but yeah so uh so yeah i forget what my my point in bringing that up was but uh but yeah so i mean the the point is the point of this whole thing is like this this whole idea of like you

know you don't have to have a deep understanding of economics and i got enough where when i encountered bitcoin i was like wow this this is like an extrajudicial system to restore a free market in money and well i agree but as somebody who's studied economics like that's what like baffles me i'm like economics has like become such a pseudoscience and you're trying to turn life into an algorithm basically into a model yeah that like economics at the end of the day is psychology it is yeah it's the science of why people make decisions if you're going to get economics down the science of human action exactly if you're going to get economics definition down to one sentence it is the science or the observation of human decisions based off of

scarce resources uh and it really should not be that complicated like it should not be something where people look at it as like a daunting topic to understand it's pretty common sense at the end of the day yes exactly i mean it's how you run your household and that's why like when you go to economics classes like sometimes the best example of pure economic systems are like drug dealers or black markets or people that never went to get an economics degree but they just know how markets act from interacting and being a part of them and it's not something that should be some daunting experience to learn economics economics is very approachable if you are applicable yes very applicable if you're able to see past the veneer of models and and and just

yeah exactly which really are are more distracting yeah they're very exactly that's they're very distracting so they're all based on like retrospect they're trying to basically explain what happened in the past like backtesting your bitcoin trade exactly beware right and that's so one thing where that model did when i did work in finance one of my jobs we were a fund of funds So we, we were at a fund that invested in other hedge funds and my job would be to sit there and have, I would literally have billionaires come and pitch me their funds. Like this is what our trading strategy has done in the past. And actually we're going to launch this new strategy and here's the back test of results. And, uh, the back test of results always gave me the biggest laugh because sometimes we give these funds like, all right, this is a convincing argument for, for your investment thesis.

uh your back tested results look okay we throw some money at them allocate some funds and then live performance would look nothing like back tested results like back tested results are fairy dust yeah that's rough and a lot of what our economy projections in our economy are based off of are similar models that are built using similar sort of data structure not data structures but uh heuristics for how to explain things yeah so that's that's one of the things that's so refreshing about bitcoin it's like you know hey we're not gonna we're not gonna write a dissertation on why this monetary policy is correct you know it's like it's really like something an engineer would do like let's choose something simple let's have a fixed supply uh let's have it have every

four years and you know let's have this whole peer-to-peer network that can enforce this policy and like i have i really appreciate that about uh i appreciate the difference in that decision between that decision and what like an economist would do where they want to like prove everything and and and supply data for every decision and and uh and i really like that about about bitcoin and i think that's one of the reason why you know it's important that you have a simple protocol and the more i work with bitcoin and the more i see what other people are trying to do as they try to improve bitcoin the more i appreciate the simplicity of the protocol the simplicity of the transaction model the simplicity of what it takes to join the network as a node which is

something we you know i teach this little boot camp little boot camp this is one of the things we do we write raw python code to join it's basically a full node and to start doing initial block downloaded we have no dependencies you have to process every byte by hand we have to learn what every little bit and byte means and by the end we have like a script that can basically you know we parse the first couple hundred blocks execute the scripts and the first one is uh satoshi's transaction to health finney it's like block 170 it's a pay to pub key transaction it's the simplest kind no one does this anymore that's uh it's not they don't hash the pub key they just pay directly to the that's uh john newberry told me an interesting theory about this okay so uh if

bitcoin were to be a quantum computer alarm system uh the fact that oh this is when we get what do you call it we're getting cosmic we're getting cosmic now it's happening uh satoshi he still has his coins in a pay-to-pub-key wallet it's not pay-to-pub-key hash so uh it is more uh susceptible to quantum hacks it is so maybe that's intentional uh so if we see satoshi's coins move we can assume that potentially quantum computers are here oh john it's not his theory he was reiterating it to me but i love that theory yeah i mean it's hilarious uh but yeah so that's that's you know one of the things i really kind of appreciate and this is so so like let's kind of move into why like so i started uh so what i started doing after i so i became convinced like bitcoin might

be new money and i wanted to approach it as a programmer right because it's like uh yeah so so i wanted to approach this as a programmer so i did the first i did something that turned out to be really smart i went and signed up for jimmy jimmy song's programming blockchain boot camp a little two days a two-day workshop i you know i live in texas i had to fly to toronto it was expensive his class is thousands of dollars but i got like airborne so to speak i got so i could uh you know you learn to to create and sign a bitcoin transaction got to a point where you're dangerous yeah i'm dangerous and so uh excuse me and and i have ideas now i have stuff i can do because like when you approach it it's like this monolith right like what the hell

am i going to do with a peer-to-peer network it's like this impenetrable uh monster right and so doing something like jimmy song's boot camp or uh you know his class was really helpful it got me up to up to a point where i could do some projects and so like the first thing i started doing was i started to and this is basically this is my story of like how i got up to speed in five months how i got to a point where like now i have like a business now that you know is a bitcoin business it's cool people pay me in bitcoin and so that's how i got up to speed uh one thing i did is i i after i left his boot camp i started writing a little uh i tried to figure out how to do initial block download in python and how to you know go and connect to the network and you know uh how to

request various things from my peers you know how to request a block how to interpret the block how to uh request my peers peers how to go and visit those how to do that recursively until i've met everyone in the network right like if you have ever gone to the website bit nodes which you see every node in the network that's all they do they have a python script that goes and sends i think it's a get adder message it's like hey peer tell me your uh peers and then i it puts them into a little queue and then it has another kind of you know it just it pulls these things off the queue and it goes and visits them just via the network effects of six degrees of separation yeah and sort of figure out everybody yeah you can you can go and visit everybody and so like

i wrote a little script that does this and then so once i could kind of do this i taught some of my friends i met at a i went to a hackathon that was also smart i went to building on bitcoin in portugal it was freaking expensive i had to fly all the way to portugal for a two-day conference but i met a lot of people and i joined a hackathon team that had some really we ended up admitted like letting everyone onto our team that wanted to and so we had 13 people and we made the first lightning hardware wallet that was ever created and so we won the hackathon it was like we each got a thousand bucks like was this the raspberry pi blitz no no i mean this is it's a it's a it uses an arduino and so basically all it does is when you have lightning it has this like hsm file

excuse me that's just like a secret file that has this the secret that signs the channel open channel close uh commitment or the transactions and signs i think routing routing uh stuff i don't totally understand lightning yet but all we did is we grabbed that one file and and you know normally it would be sitting you know sitting for everyone to see on your computer so if anybody got like root on your computer like root permissions permissions for everything they could see that file and what we wanted to do is we wanted to move that file from your computer onto a raspberry pi that would only communicate over a very simple protocol using a usb wire via through the serial port of your computer and so the idea is like something similar trezor what trezor yeah basically

the same thing and so the idea is you just move that secret onto a little thing that only does it only basically responds to hey i want to sign a transaction and and what happens is then you can no longer it's no longer sitting there for any for anyone who who gets control of your computer to see you'd actually have to also kind of you know you have to have physical control of the computer you couldn't hack in remotely and get you know you'd have to actually get the device and you plug it in and plug it in yeah so it's like it just reduces the surface attack the attack service and uh yeah i mean it's still it's it's like a you know it's the secrets weren't encrypted it was really basic setup but it's strictly speaking more secure than using hat lightning at the time

so it was pretty cool we built a little ui you could pay for stuff you would go and request this the signature from the hardware device it's hey do you want to sign this yes no uh more information and you hit yes uh it's on a 20 piece of hardware arduino anybody can buy one of these and then you know it would pop up hey successful and you'd see your your dick pic on satoshi's face right yes secure dick pics uh that's that's what it's all about people's secure dick pics we're just trying to make dick pics secure around the world yeah so that's it's a conspiracy at the end of the day so uh so that's what that's what we we built and so that was another smart thing you know i went and so what i did is i met all these people who are really interested in bitcoin and also

learning and so then i had like a little uh class i called it the bitcoin corpse core bitcoin core c-o-r-p-s like the marine core kind of a joke on like at the time that at the time everyone was trying to reappropriate the name bitcoin bitcoin core there was an altcoin in bitcoin core to try to like uh you know that's what bitcoin core is the name of the open source project the other repository on github where and so it was it was a stupid joke and let's do a little history lesson here like bitcoin core was brought on by mike hearn who famously rage quit and actually did it was uh so bitcoin core the name for the repository was suggested by mike hearn and sort of accepted by gavin andress or uh gavin anderson who uh isn't really involved in the

well one's rage quit and the other a lot of people think is part of the cia i i don't know if i find satoshi including satoshi might be the reason why satoshi the last message right yeah he's like you know hey satoshi uh let me go talk to the cia and i'll never be back and but wire has gone dead uh there's so much fucking consternation towards bitcoin core and yeah the two dudes that created it uh are not involved with bitcoin anymore and or i would argue uh not aggressively but they are uh very obviously opposed to the ethos of bitcoin and and its mission yeah so i had this stupid joke and then so i just talked this little clap talk into the mic man i just want to get you i get i just did you yell that

for audio this is okay guys it's not it's really hard man it's like you move this thing one centimeter from your face and he he throws tomatoes at you he he does all kinds of shit man he starts turning the music down i need to bring the pot out to calm you down so yeah i mean i'm a terrible guest i'm sorry no you're incredible but so uh so what we did was we had i so i met all these people and i started making a little class basically everything i learned i taught them and what you learn when you try to teach something is you don't know it like when you try to teach something and this was like so what i was teaching them is just like try to do initial block download in python a simple language like try to connect to the network it's called a

version handshake right what you do is you you can choose any node in the network and this is what was like it was shocking to me right because at our company that was doing the the debit and credit card stuff like the only reason we existed is because we had a ceo that was like the most charismatic dude ever and he could go walk into a payment processor and convince them that they were fucked if they didn't partner with us yeah and then he gets 50 of the equity and that's his the one thing he does and after that you know it's all up to you guys yeah it's then then it's got to be built and so like the great thing about you know bitcoin is like hey i want i want to be a part of this network right okay well compose a version version message go go find a peer okay

go find a peer go find their ip their host name their port everyone's seen one of those before now compose a version message tell them what version of the software of the protocol you're running right like you know current versions have certain messages that old versions don't have when they're talking to each other so it's like what version of this this this peer-to-peer network language can i speak and you tell them and they'll say oh thanks i'm going to tell you my version the version i speak and they send it back and then you say okay i acknowledge that you got my message farrakh and they send the same and then your your peers you're talking to each other and so like compare that to the business development required to get into anything

with visa or mastercard or any kind of bank or financial institution it's like emails i was my jaw just dropped like you got to have 20 years of experience to even be taken seriously and here it's like you know can you work with raw bytes over a socket like or can you download a library off github like that's all it takes i really like this framing and i've never heard bitcoin framed in this way the only that's because i went and got my hands dirty right and like i was playing with it on my own trying to understand it applying what i learned in jimmy song's class and uh and then i'd go and teach it to my friends and it's like well how would i have the friends i met at this hackathon right my normal friends aren't interested in this fucking shit

all these freaks i met at the hackathon right and so it's like there's like four of them four of them who show up every month or every week i had it once a week and we'd do this class like one of them in portugal one of them's in london one of them's in new zealand try to coordinate those time zones it's terrible it's like all over the world and so uh yeah there was this kid in houston who like drove from houston to austin to one of my meetups like what a savage you know uh it's like it's like a two hour drive yeah it's a two three hour drive it's a huge drive and just for a shitty meetup i don't run a good meetup man i've heard good things about your meetups okay yeah well now they're good but uh he came in the early days and so so i i teach these classes i'm like

you know to your point of like this is a different way of explaining well i had to explain this thing i just learned to these people i don't even really know but we are united by an idea and so it's like it's a really good way to go about it it's like you know when you learn something go try to teach to some other people because there's a there's a horde of thirsty people out there who want to learn more and uh and so that's that's another thing i did that worked really well every week we did this and so over two months if you go look you know if you want to see what i'm talking about go to justinmoon.com that's my my website and you i think you'll probably see there are links to my youtube and they're they're just called like uh bitcoin network programming videos it's like 15

hours of content where i was just teaching them all this stuff i was learning and so uh and so that's what happened so so we kind of did that over two months and then i after doing this hardware wallet hack then i'm like well shit i want to build a hardware wallet but arduino is in c++ i don't really like that it's a simple c++ but i like python i want to make it in python and i learned i went and bought a cold card and uh and uh i went and read the firmware the firmware is written in python unbelievably you don't write firmware in python apparently there's really why not so it's a it's slow and you want the fastest thing possible so that you're not waiting around for a signature ui interaction yeah you want really snappy does that do a ui they're under

yeah they're underpowered you know like python could do it but it would take forever and so what they did is some physicists went and made like a a specific version of python excuse me that could that could be used to to just power the the kind of business logic of these applications like you know hardware applications and uh and it was very easy to bind in c code that's really fast so uh so if you have like some cryptography that you want to happen uh really quickly you can you can do that easily and so who adopted this trezor trezor's firmware on the trezor one i think is the second version of their their trezor is in written python and so when i discovered this like shit i'm gonna now learn how to write a uh firmware in trezor and then there was another

project called tiny chain written by james o one of the guys that organized james o'byrne james o'byrne james ob he's like your your repeat yeah he's like an all-star i loved uh big fan of james yeah so he wrote this thing called another beefy bitcoin so he he wrote this thing called tiny chain which i'm sure you probably didn't talk about he wrote a thousand talk about it you did we didn't talk okay yeah i'm sure yeah because it's like a it's like a little 1000 line python program that holds all the main mechanics of bitcoin and so it's really cool if you're a programmer you can go in and see okay here's how transactions work here's how mining works here's how difficulty adjustment works here's how the monetary policy works here's how the peer-to-peer

networking works and you can get it all on your screen at one time if you try to go to the bitcoin c++ source code or even the wiki or anywhere else you can't get it all it's like it's is bigger you gotta go diving yeah and so he he he made it he just compacted it and so that was a really good learning tool for me so it's like okay well another thing i want to do is teach people how to well here's the one problem though it's like a 1000 line thing and it's like it's hard to figure out where you're going to what thread to start pulling to unwind this thing right yeah and that wasn't his goal when he did this wasn't to he was to teach himself right and if you go through the commit history he started with something small and built it up and it worked for him right uh

because he's a core contributor and so he's also a really sophisticated programmer and so i was like okay well how would I teach this to somebody and so what I did is I tried to start making a really stupid version of digital cash right because that's what bitcoin is peer-to-peer electronic digital cash that's the subtitle the white paper and so it's like okay what's the dumbest dumbest worst possible digital cash right and my solution was something I call png coin it's a png coin go to my again if you go to my phone find me on youtube you can see a whole one hour dissertation on png coin the way png coin works is it's uh it's issued by donald trump with his executive order if you've ever seen him holding up one of his executive orders and it says

i issued 10 png coins to alice great meme fodder yeah it's great meme fodder and that's that's why i chose it and so that's how it's issued right and so issuance model is terribly broken it's very easy to counterfeit these because all you got to do is go to a meme generator generate it and then you get these coins and so the way they were inflated yeah and so the way they work they're just a chain of these transactions the first one is like a coin based transaction in bitcoin it's the minting transaction the way you know it's valid is if it's a picture they're all pngs right it's a picture of donald trump holding up his executive order saying i give it to alice right and it's a signature right so it's you know it's valid

and so you verify it digitally and then if alice wants to transfer it it's you know she she writes on a piece of paper i alice give this to bob right when bob gets he goes and opens the png on his computer and says hey you know is my name bob yeah okay uh is is that alice's signature does it say alice like it's all visual validation it's everything is broken about it the signatures are physical signatures it has every problem it can be double spent it can be easily counterfeit it can be the transactions can be easily forged uh you rely on a central authority it has literally every problem that digital cash can have but it is the dumbest version it's the dumbest version and that's important because you want to find the simplest version and then so the next thing we do

something called ecdsa coin and ecdsa stands for elliptic curve digital signature algorithm and that's how your transactions are signed in bitcoin yeah and so it's fancy math uh and this is what you learn in jimmy song's class by the way how to specifically do this and uh and so all it does is it just replaces this stupid uh png photograph of physical signatures with a digital signature which is better in many ways. When you make a digital signature for a certain message, like Alice sending to Bob, it's not easy to go forge it for a different signature,

Alice sending to Mary. And that's very different for physical signatures, right? Because your physical signature is always the same. So with digital signatures, you can embed the message you're signing in the signature. Huge, huge improvement. And it's also much more space efficient, right? You don't need a megabyte of space every time.

I mean, you want to transfer a coin that's been transferred 10 times. It doesn't fit in Gmail, right? Right. It's terrible. And so we do ECDSA coin. Then we do something called bank coin. It has a central validator to eliminate the double spends that are possible in ECDSA coin. Then we do block coin because the problem with bank coin is you have one validator.

Block coin, you have like N validators. Let's say 20 of them. Yeah. So it's like EOS 20. And so it is an improvement over one. but then the question is well how do you have anyone participate as a validator right and you want some sort of a mercenary model anybody can can can contribute their resources and that was the genius of adam back and proof of work right uh and how finney too with his reasonable proofs

of work you know you've contributed there and so the idea is like you give them a computational you give them a a compute a difficult computation they have to solve and that's the that's who gets the next block of transaction who gets to submit the next block of transactions because in this sort of uh block coin model you have 21 and you just go around the circle right but if the number if it's not if it can go to 21 then 20 then 30 then 25 like who how are you going to choose who's next there's no algorithm for that right and so what they do is like well here uh you know we're going to give you a problem and we're going to give you a reward if you solve it and that's proof of work and so we make that we we make a coin that just does this is called pow coin and

so the problem with pow coin is inflation pow for proof of work the meme every one of these has like a meme associated with it right and so uh this is like the pow mia guy he's like sitting there you know the the flag that all the vets have he's sitting there on the guard saying get to work you know they're the worst coins uh bank coin is like you remember the uh bitcoin subreddit like digital or magic internet money right funny funny uh funny internet money yeah magic internet money so it's that but instead of bitcoin it says block coin this is the stupidest stupidest thing uh so they all have a stupid meme associated with them but uh but uh so so that's the the trick is like how do you eliminate inflation right and so there are two inflation problems right there's the local

problem which is what happens if a lot of these miners proof of work miners come on uh very quickly they'll they'll start you know if the difficulty of the problem is fixed they'll a lot of a lot of supply will be created instantly just like if you know you try to monetize copper as safe describes in this book well if you're a monetized copy you buy it a lot the price goes up as the price goes up all the silver miners and gold miners will say all of a sudden we should copper is more you know we have reserves that are now profitable let's go mine those they flood the market with new supply the price collapses and whoever tried to monetize you know just loses their ass yeah and so that the same problem is uh is is present here

with this pow coin and so the uh solution to this local inflation problem is to introduce difficulty adjustment which means every every 2016 blocks yeah every unit time in bitcoin 2016 blocks let's make it uh let's let's let's make it so like the last unit of time would have taken 10 minutes per block you know let's just re-average it and then so we the next unit of blocks might not perfectly hit 10 minutes but it won't hit one minute yeah it'll hit you know 7 8 12 minutes and you you avoid the problem where your your currency just hyper inflates immediately yeah i believe the average block time up to this point is like something between nine and a half and yeah because over time you know every unit you know people more more is added to the network

so you know the uh it's a beautiful feedback since you look backwards it doesn't quite hit 10 minutes and so difficulty adjustment is a solution to the local problem like how do i prevent a huge uh a herd of miners entering the network from inflating our coin but then you still have the global the global problem right if you don't if if you're uh if your inflation doesn't go to zero over time then you you never you buyers never have a a real incentive to adopt your coin because they don't have any guarantee that the supply of what they're buying is fixed and that it won't be sort of like, they won't be diluted after the fact, right? And this is something I learned in a startup, you know?

It's like, hey, if you get a bunch of equity, like I got a bunch of equity in the startup, and then we started raising money from like iffy VCs who wanted these shitty terms and like created a bunch more stock, it's like, well, now all of a sudden... I'm all diluted here. I'm diluted, yeah. So it's like, you know, you want to avoid that. And so this is, I call this like the global inflation problem. you really want in a free market so this is what we're talking we're talking about a free market

for money right you want in a free market for money you have to have your inflation go to zero because if your inflation doesn't go to zero then somebody else will do that they'll just copy your coin have the inflation go to zero and everyone will adopt that right because like it's a strict guarantee that they won't get fucked and so like if you want to keep inflation like try it i'm going to just do what you do and remove it and then i win and so like it's clear that that's kind of the solution and so this little the next little version of this little you know this series of exercises i created was one where you uh remove this global problem and have the supply capped every four years or every you know every unit time you you you reduce the uh the subsidy that

the miners get until it goes to zero and of course this is not my idea this is satoshi's idea and so these these two solutions like it's important to acknowledge that there are two solutions two different problems the local and the global inflation problems and uh and and so you know this little experiment ends up with like 800 lines of code in python really readable uh and you can now you really understand not only how bitcoin works but why it works that way because you started with png coin a stinking pile of shit a diaper full of shit right and whatever full depends yeah right and you you remove uh the flaws one by one until you arrive at bitcoin and so i think it's a great exercise it obviously helped james o'burn uh core contributor because

that's where i got the idea from it helped me and then so now you know these three projects the hardware wallet the peer-to-peer networking and the uh this digital cash series where we start with png coin and build bitcoin and python really simple code these are the backbone of my class called Bitcoin or Biddle Bootcamp sorry Biddle Bootcamp is a little experiment I launched online like a month ago I just announced like hey I want to teach people about Bitcoin it's free sign up here if you can just write a python program that can give me the first hundred prime numbers I'll let you in I let a lot of people in that couldn't even do it it's just if they look like they tried I let them in uh so 300 people applied 250 I let in

basically anybody who seemed like they tried at all i let in and it was an amazing experience like i think 10 of the cohort was from like venezuela uh in a lot of them from chile they have a whole hashtag spanish slack channel that is like i have no idea what's going on in there but they're they're working they're working yeah they're working it's great and so uh and so so yeah i mean a lot of these people have you know the videos i post more people watch them than are in the class that's incredible and so it's been a really cool experiment and uh the idea is i'm just trying to solve the and this goes back to like how i got involved it's like yeah i counted this problem i want to learn bitcoin programming and it's freaking hard man it's hard to learn how

any of this works and so i'm like okay this is a problem i had i'm gonna solve it and so to all you freaks out there like pay attention to what you encounter and then try to solve it because there's a lot of people who have that problem now and there's going to be a hell of a lot more that have that problem in the future because you're still in the small minority who care enough to listen to the one hour point of a podcast right with you know uh there aren't many people like you so solve the problems you encounter and that's what i did and and it's worked pretty well uh so far i mean we didn't get as much done as i wanted to in the first cohort and they're kind of pissed at me because i i didn't quite finish everything i wanted to but it's okay and so next month

starting on november 5th we're gonna have another cohort it's gonna be the second time i've taught all this stuff it's 500 bucks for a month worth of class a month worth of stuff like 15 hours a week it's like 10 per hour of stuff you're learning i mean like going the best thing i probably ever did career-wise is pay a thousand bucks for this bit this python programming class because it was the basis for my entire career the entire math that the math degree i got has not really made me any money the python class i took has made me a lot of money this is uh this is something see this is why i wanted to bring you on because it's fascinating again i'm about economics background you're more engineering yeah you have found this boot camp i

actually got to where i am today because i quit finance and did a ux design boot camp oh that's crazy i didn't know that yeah so it was similar it was 16 weeks yeah the interdisciplinary is really good too like if you can do if you can take something you know and then learn something that's different there aren't many people that do both right and so that's why i decided to quit i got a good deal on a boot camp it was great it was it was over the summer so it's from like june or july to september so two and a half yeah yeah and i spent two grand it was the best two grand i ever spent my life that freaks 500 bucks is nothing sign up now no seriously 500 bucks is really not cheap it really is uh but that two grand like it has it has got me to this point

yeah i would i would argue yeah and i mean the way i'm approaching it is like hey if you're not satisfied i will refund you i want to get to the point where you have a job you're making a lot more money than you used to you're happier than you used to be that's what i want my customers to get to that point and not just for my own sake it's like i want that for bitcoin we need more devs exactly we need more devs like there aren't enough so there aren't enough protocol devs there aren't enough application developers there are enough testers there are enough reviewers my god i was just this lightning residency as a like we're gonna get into that we're gonna get into that okay so but there aren't enough like there are going to be so many opportunities you guys

uh in the next five years like if if bitcoin works we're gonna have to rebuild the like entire financial software system or not the entire but a lot of back yeah you're gonna like so much is going to be rebuilt these skills like it's not for everyone i want to say it's like you shouldn't do it you already know some other stuff like if well that's what i'm trying to that's what i'm trying to get here yeah i think we're attacking the problem from different angles like i do the newsletter in this podcast because i don't learn the program you already figured out stuff that works for you right yeah like it's not for everybody i'm not like some people sort of like everyone should learn to code like i mean even like zuckerberg or something so well that's

why i took that boot camp where and that's why i picked that boot camp specifically because i was like all right it's focused on ux because i want to learn like front-end javascript frameworks i can yeah and i realized really quickly like that's not for me development's not for me yeah like i like the psychology it's not for everybody people and like being walking around and i decided to focus on the ux psychology part of it but having the option to uh to decide between the two number one was huge and then number two recognizing that all right i'm not going to be a developer was like that's a huge step because there was that yeah that sort of but that's a good reason to try it too so then you know it's a it's one of the like it's one of the best paying professions

and it doesn't take long to learn so you should try it and then learn it's not for you like i think everyone should try that and it's good i mean it's a very rational thing to do yeah and and that and it's okay to learn but that there is that that tripe out there like everybody's gonna need to program man it's not true for everyone yeah it's not for everyone but it's it's for like hey if you if you are listening and you you don't have a fulfilling career you don't have a job that pays like a lot like you should get a job that pays a lot you should aim to you should aim to yeah i mean unless you want you you have something else that you like more like you're an artist or something like sure but like there's nothing wrong with going trying to make a

bunch of money like it's a good thing if someone's willing to pay you a bunch of money it means you're worth a lot and you're helping a lot of people it's a good thing and so uh and so you know one of the things it's at this moment in time it's very rational to explore programming and you learn really quickly whether you like it or not man some frustrating shit i'll tell you that like i was doing like responsive css designs like this is just so fucking boring i can't do i wouldn't be able to do exactly yeah and and yeah i mean if you're learning like i so i had a tweet like we were in riga right for that that that conference that was a fun weekend by the way it was crazy to meet you there by the way yeah and find an airport trip on the way back yeah that

was amazing i i followed jameson lopp through airport security talk about a master course on off sec i was like hey what are you doing on your phone then i'm taking notes okay locking down the password manager okay that was uh that was a fun journey back to the states we we yelled a custom or i yelled at customs while you blew past me oh yeah that was great i to be honest i did lie a little bit about when i'm taking off i was like my flight was in three hours i told them it was in two they let me pass the entire line marty stayed in the back and was tweeting nasty things about jfk for the next 30 minutes it's deplorable it's deplorable that that is the first thing i spent a lot of time in beijing and like a lot of new york city is like shittier than beijing at

this point especially the subways it's dirty in the airport yeah it's it's rough uh what are we talking about uh we were getting on how you can find your way to help out and you can notice that you might not be a good programmer yeah you can contribute in different ways and so that's what i did is like i had a problem i wanted to learn how to do this stuff i wanted to get really good like i wanted to get to the point where i understood the leading edge and i understood how to make a really novel important contribution and it's really hard to get there so uh i found one resource that really helped i mean mastering bitcoin is like the most basic one that's really great and then the other thing was jimmy song's boot camp but it's really expensive it's like

4 000 bucks for two days it's three or four thousand depending on when you sign up and then you usually have to travel uh but it's worth it like it is worth it it's it's i'm so glad i did it it was one of the best things i ever did in my life he's teaching a class in austin where i live if you live in austin take the class like it's one of the best things i ever did if you're serious about this and so he starts out like from scratch to building a wallet correct kind of it's like enough to create and sign a transaction doing all the math yourself okay which is pretty cool yeah you can literally construct bitcoin transactions by hand yeah and and you do the math that makes it impossible for someone else sorry you do the math that makes it impossible

for someone else to steal your coins to uh i've had a little whiskey now so i can't describe this sort of thing in detail but it's it's really great and then so uh so yeah that's so that's what i you know i wanted to get good at this and so i i i took everything that was available and then i started kind of teaching my own stuff to people and there were only a handful that were willing to take it but it was the best thing out there so they they showed up every week and then i did this piddle boot camp this was like this culmination of these three different little things i i did and it's a one month class and uh and it's been really cool like uh you know i i last week i helped one of the first people who was in my initial classes to get a bitcoin programming

contract you know so he made about a bitcoin or something hell yeah uh building a prototype of a ui for a uh a mining uh pool and so it's really cool like this is just random guy portuguese guy shows up every time i teach something like me and him wrote the ui for this the first lightning wallet lightning hardware wallet ever me and him were the two main people plus a designer uh were the ones that were at the ui for this so it was like like you guys have an emotional i love this guy man i love this guy i want to get him paid as much as possible and he's got a and he's got a gig now i'm gonna get him more gigs like and so that's what so that's where this little bit of boot camp is is like so i offered one for free and now i'm like i'm just

iterating trying to figure out what to do next like what i really want to do is find a way to offer it for free and then be able to make a bunch of money myself somehow and so uh as we all would like to yeah and so and that's like you know if your business doesn't make money it's not going to be a business for long you're going to be working at mcdonald's here pretty soon you gotta like you gotta be self-sufficient and so there's a really cool thing called insight uh there's a few ones called insight data science another one called recurse center used to be called hacker school uh there's another one called lambda school there are these these programs that teach programming that are in a way that's free to the students and then they monetize

with a hiring program and so they they basically because being a software recruiter is one of the most absurdly profitable things you can do yeah you get like 20 percent of first year salary right and these are mostly sales people who don't understand anything about bitcoin they're just so pushy they can or not bitcoin software they're just so pushy they have no idea what's going on Yeah, and so it'll be really cool if I can take advantage of this market inefficiency where it's so hard to find a good dev. And I can get paid by exploiting this market inefficiency by providing good devs, developers. But I can do it in a way that's free to the developers. So like, hey, if you want to try Bitcoin programming, if you're a good programmer and you want to try it, it's free.

and it's kind of risk there's not a lot of risk associated with it and so that's where i want to get in like six months but uh i have to justin moon are you trying to create a credential system right now man jesus christ not a credential it's just enough it's just enough to get someone hired you know it's like because a credential at the end of the day it's like no sophisticated employer gives a shit right they don't no this is nothing no one's looked at my math degree ever no exactly so and this is a funny actually and i did honors i did the fucking honors program do you have any idea how much i sweat and how much i bled for this but pertaining to open source uh free and open source software projects in particular this is an interesting topic credentials in particular

so you were mentioning james ob earlier james ob and i have uh bonded over the fact that we're both in drupal uh in the past so he was a drupal developer and the company that i used to work for that i was describing earlier what we had we were outsourced development services in latin america that's what i was selling was drupal resources you know all about this shit yes oh oh hell yeah and there is like a big thing in drupal in particular is this one company aquia which does a lot of the hosting services and a lot of the development uh uh consultation if you will And they have a certification process where you become a Drupal certified developer via Acquia. I've seen that on your resume.

And that is like very, it's a cause of much consternation in the Drupal community because like who is Acquia to give credentials in the world? This is an open source project. Like who is Acquia to credential people? and it's an interesting topic that should be thought about thoroughly for bitcoin in particular because we will run the similar problems in the future yeah i mean it's it's a signaling problem right it's like how do i know you're good you're like what's the cheapest way for you like if you are good it's really hard right that's why recruiters exist if you are good yeah well the cheapest thing you can do is hire a recruiter to sell your services for you because it's like

you're probably an introvert if you're a good programmer you're probably conflict diverse you probably don't like salary negotiations so you you you know you basically give up a percentage of your you know you you you you you you don't give up your own salary but you make it such that the market takes what you would get a salary and gives it to recruiters right you yourself don't make a sacrifice but you you know because everybody acting in unison makes it such that these recruiters exact this huge fee and 25 percent just huge yeah salary of the base salary yeah it's insane and so uh all because they don't want to negotiate right and so uh so yeah that's it's a tough problem like how do you signal that you're how do you communicate that you're good

and that's one thing open source is really good at it's like hey you know if you got a couple non-trivial commits into bitcoin core you are good right if you got a couple non-trivial commits into rust bitcoin rust lightning into c lightning into lnd like we have this a little bit more of an an ecosystem now you know and bitcoin btc pay server like one of the beautiful things is there aren't many developers who've who've made a non-trivial commit commit it's just like a a change yeah in in get this the like the collaboration tool we use as programmers it's a nomenclature for that particular app exactly and so uh and so there aren't many who've done that and so if you are one you are really valuable to anybody who knows anything

about this space and so yeah i want to that's my kind of goal right now is i want to create i want to become one of these people because i'm still not actually i haven't i've been teaching my silly classes and i haven't actually like contributed anything yet what would you want to contribute if you could i mean this what would you want to help out uh that's a good question de-alienating i mean to be honest like well okay i want to so python doesn't really have python is a programming language it's like a really simple programming language and it's really easy to read the code some programming languages the code is really hard to read and the thing python did and why it's the most popular language in the world now is it had a it had a emphasis on readability so when you look

at the code you can understand what it does yeah it's not cryptic like you know code kind of used to be and so uh python's great but we don't actually have a really good bitcoin library for python right now we have some like uh jeff garzik made one that's now maintained by peter todd and it's really useful peter todd's covered jeff garzik's yeah he did i mean he took one for the team man hallelujah interesting and so he he maintains it now but it's not really like actively developed it's it doesn't when you read it it doesn't look like python code it looks like a java developer or something wrote it like it's not best practices so to speak and there are some other ones like pi coins another one uh but there's not like a really great python library

and so that's one of my ambitions with this boot camp is like you know we're going to be doing projects where we want like a general purpose library that you can do all these different things like derive you know your private keys like plug into the peer-to-peer network like talk to bitcoin d the the bitcoin uh the the like core bitcoin server that runs on your bitcoin full node uh all these different things like it'd be great if we had one python library that could do all of these things and it it kind of like it somewhat exists but not great and so that's my ambition at the moment is i want to i want to either create or help create something like this that sounds incredible and it's a great ambition to have cool i mean it's and thank you for taking

on if i didn't have drinks i wouldn't admit that i want to do this see that's that's the magic potion here at marty or excuse me bad tales from the crypt it's the only way i get you smart people to open up is by getting drunk as hell no it's good uh no but seriously that's that's what i that's one thing i'd like to do and one of the cool things that's one thing wait let me talk you've been talking for like we've been we've been podcasting for an hour and 23 minutes you've been talking for an hour and 20 minutes uh which i love and i think the freaks are gonna love as well but i want to disagree i want to hit you right now but you're right but i want to interject just to uh give you uh this hasn't been a conversation i've just been i love it i love it

i want to give you a sense of reinforcement that i love that you're ambitious to attack a goal as ambitious as this even like coming that's why i wanted to bring you on because you came into bitcoin like six eight months ago five months and the fact that you're you have the fucking balls the gall to step up create like a boot camp start educating people who the fuck are you just dude i'm nobody man who the fuck are you i'm taking over interviewing or educating people about bitcoin development but you know i'm talking at this just this conference tomorrow and i got the most the worst imposter syndrome ever these people these people have been around for five years but that's the beauty of it all once you get over the imposter syndrome and you notice hey i know i can

contribute it was funny last night wait wait i'm not done talking yet justin i got no i got not done yet what i wanted to say is though is i think you're a great example of somebody who does not give a fuck about the imposter syndrome and is proving that this is a meritocracy yeah yes you've only been in this space for six months but uh what you're saying makes a lot of sense it seems like you uh really have a firm understanding when it comes to a development standpoint and then the bitcoin ethos it seems like it rubbed off on you right away so hey somebody's been around for like six seven years it's like you like you probably know more than me and i've been around here for a while from like a development perspective yeah man one of the funny things

that you see is like people bragging about when they first first heard of bitcoin they want to push the date up as far as possible and it's like i kind of have the opposite point of view it's like i'm really impressed with people say i got involved recently and like this guy i figured it's like renee picard or something he's really good you should have him on he's a cool german guy uh he's he makes a bunch of interesting like lightning how to do xyz simple thing and lightning on youtube and he's really you know nice guy and he's like he just got involved very recently pretty similar to me and like i i really like this is like hey you know got involved very recently you know like me has only lost money buying this goddamn btc coin right you know it's

like you can trust our motives like hey don't trust me but you know no one thing i've only lost money buying this fucking internet coin of yours this funny internet money exactly magic internet money and so yeah i mean like i hope that norm goes away to be honest because i think it's kind of stupid like who cares when you right like what have you done like exactly what have you done for me lately and not that not that doing anything publicly is the important thing like hey if you bought coins in 2010 and still have the private keys hats off man you are an epic g i would have like i am so glad i didn't buy coins five years ago because there's not a chance in hell i still have that private key i would have lost that shit and i wouldn't be able to sleep

at night and so uh to the people who did and their hodling has sort of held up bitcoin because they had the private keys they could have sold in 90 down bear markets and they didn't that's one of the reasons not even 90 90 bear markets it's talking about like eight 15x bull markets yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah they never they didn't they didn't sell on the top they didn't sell the top and they didn't sell the bottom either like that's i'm not trying to uh say those people aren't really important bring that mic closer to your face justin i'm gonna have to yell i don't want to kiss this thing i mean like who knows where lightning claws lips have been let's be honest that microphone's been all over all right it's a dirty mic but no it's i mean

so let's segue let's segue what we've been talking to like how excited you are about building this and uh hoping for the potential in the future to contribute in a meaningful way to what you saw today like what the hell is being built like what happened at this what happened at this residency i mean today was like mixed emotions because like i uh i got in recently right and as a specific decision i decided not to learn anything about lightning because i wanted to learn about bitcoin first and then all of a sudden this residency pops up and it's like god this looks perfect i want to do this but i've clearly been ignoring the lightning like i don't run a channel i don't i haven't made anything i have a confession to make i had a very similar path

lightning where i'm like hey i'm not technically astute enough to understand what's going on i i trust the vision because i truly believe bitcoin is going to scale on second and third layers so it makes sense to me from uh from a basic design level but when you get into the degree of lightning i'm pretty ignorant yeah and like so that's what i i was like hey i'm just going to focus on the basics i'm gonna i'm trying i encountered a problem of uh a lack of educational resources so i'm going to solve that problem and it would be a waste of time for me to learn about lightning because like i want to learn the basics first and teach that and so then residency comes along i i apply and of course my application's total shit because i haven't actually you know

been working on this at all and so what was your idea to build then didn't they so my idea was dope like let's be honest so james and john my idea should have made up for it guys so you know the the lime and the bird scooters do they have this in new york yes yes yeah they i mean the taxi drivers they're not as popular here yeah they're huge in in austin in uh where i live uh in california they're the shared scooters that you know they're like kind of uber but a scooter and so uh i wanted to build a lightning powered scooter like that shared scooter that you'd pay for kind of like by the you know machine pay every hundred yards you pay for your scooter right and it would lot it would be locked and you'd have to unlock it by you know funding kind of a channel

between you and the scooter right so this is what the dow wanted to do this is gonna be the first app from the dow oh this is bad right no well it's not bad this is the point i've been trying to make all week the four i think in every this is the fourth podcast i've recorded this week i think in every podcast i've recorded this week i brought up this point like bitcoin is proving that over time yeah you'll be able to build what was once thought to sure to need a uh uh in innate native token to fulfill a certain uk use case that'll that'll be enabled on top of bitcoin and a fancy programming language embedded in your coin exactly yeah uh so bitcoin's proving that yeah exactly so uh you know slock.it or whatever right slock it baby steven the tool tool oh my

god steven the tool tool never a better nickname ever right uh i mean i remember that like this is when i was interested i was interested in ethereum pre-dow uh and so that's what slock it was it was a company to do what you just described basically yeah i remember they were like airbnb and stuff they were airbnb and stuff airbnb for like personal property for like like scooters like hey you can unlock it so that's that was my idea i thought it was pretty cool like i wouldn't research the idea i hope james and john i'm kidding so like that was the the idea was i think that's pretty interesting and it would have been a really cool demo uh and but then a german guy went and built this thing but with a bike yeah matthias i wrote about in the

bent i wrote about in the bent last week yeah so i mean so maybe james and john were right i was behind the curve uh but i think it would have been pretty cool and so but again i didn't know anything about lightning so when the residency came around i applied and of course was rejected because it's like i'm clearly ignoring it right like it's clear from my application i'm ignoring it because i am and so uh but yeah i mean like you got to make your you got look if you want to do anything here's the thing that bitcoin people fuck up on they get involved in everything and then you don't you don't finish anything right and so that's i mean i would like so yeah today i see uh i see the amazing things people built and i'm like oh my god fomo i i missed out i really did

and but like hey i i don't think like i want to go back and relive my life so i would have done just enough it's so early justin you didn't see these demos man that room was the most one of the most impressive groups of people i've ever been around this is we're three hours post this demonstration day so walk us yeah my diaper is full right now it is we're actually going to need to take a 10 minute intermission i'm gonna have to change justin's diaper get a shovel so uh yeah what was so i saw pierre so you were saying like we're gonna have to rebuild our whole financial system from scratch i think what pierre is building with excel is very exciting it's really interesting i mean it's just it's very boring but

it's very applicable it's cool i mean this is to interdisciplinary ability right like you're a finance guy went and learned ux sorry you're a finance guy went and learned ux design i'm uh i mean originally i was interested in all kinds of different shit went and got a math degree went learned a program when you know like this interdisciplinary stuff went and started a school basically like having a couple different perspectives is valid pierre is the alt is also like this he's a cpa right by training right went and learned programming learned basic python like i'm trying to teach my students right smartest shit and then he went and learned c++ he's been learning like c++ to like he like is in some of these pull requests on bitcoin core as you know

basic stuff but like uh you know is writing and has a podcast is writing medium articles that are good uh and so what does an interdisciplinary person like that produce he produces something no one else would an excel plugin that you download like it's a one-click installation of a dot exe file just like you know everything you download on a windows computer right and most people use windows programmers don't use windows but like most people do use windows and so pierre is the insight to see this he makes a one-click thing that makes a new tab on your uh excel makes a new sheet on your excel yeah well it's like on the top you have like an lnd yes it's like if you're gonna pull data from bloomberg yeah and you hit it and then you you you hit like

you know make it you know populate the sheet and then it spawns up like five of these things right and it has like your channels your payments your invoices and it has it basically is like a a really direct uh a really it's a verbose ui it doesn't like and this is another thing he's so smart with he doesn't make it like really usable and hide details he puts every detail out there because we're still at the point where anybody who's going to try this is make all the mistakes well and and they're willing they want to see how it works they're not like someone who's going to buy anything because you can't buy anything with lightning yet it's like you can't only like you can buy nick carter's fud dice right that's about it and so uh oh you got some oh he got some

like six inches from where his hand was sitting he has fud dice look at this uh the fun of the day is high fees uh not really applicable to today's environment with fud dice is they quickly become history well nick nick tweeted out today he rolled it and like landed on volatile i was like i missed the days and i was like i tweeted this like three days ago the same thing that's the funny thing about the fud dice in particular they're very very fun desk game you're bored at your desk start rolling the fud dice look at a little fud do a little thought experiment and how you and how you uh refute that fud and then you go on with your work day it's a nice little work experiment yeah so i mean that was a good thing about pierre is he he went and made

this lnd ui in excel and you see everything and it's like i even now i haven't seen such a clear visual uh printout of what's happening in your lightning node and so it's really cool he made all this and he went and you know did all this c-sharp programming that he doesn't normally do and so that was one of the really cool things i mean there were a bunch of them there was like bitmex came out they were gonna try and integrate lightning in some way there was a bitmex worker there yeah yeah there's a bitmex guy there he had a he had a demo of like actually depositing testnet coins into bitmex's testnet ui like testnet instance of their you know where the developers test out new features amazing uh and of course like it's not something they're

going to be doing within the next year i guarantee you but like in the future maybe this will be a thing and so they're way out ahead of the curve and uh you know there was uh christian decker announced a testnet or something yeah he announced like a really really awesome testing tool which i will actually i will actually i learned stuff that will go into my class from him there like honestly uh he had like these cool printouts of what is is going on with a little like network of test uh sea lightning nodes that's you know to test multi-hop payments across you know multiple channels it's like a little graph of you know which nodes are connected to which and so okay clearly this multi-hop payment they're not connected right it's like a cool uh cool ui he

made there was some things to make uh like chrome extensions that would talk to lightning and so you wouldn't have to actually copy the invoice that you're given like that big string and paste it into a wallet somewhere and the craziest thing about the lightning hack is like i was there and i think like i expected it to go on i thought i wasn't going to see i thought i was going to see half because i was going to come here talk to you and then it ended and i was like well what about the rest of the people and they're like oh those are all the mentors and i was like you're shitting me because i i've seen these people usernames but i don't know them in real life and it's like like jack mollers was there elaine was there i forget what her last name is elaine yeah yeah

she's great and uh you know there's all these like great uh you know uh lightning koala all these all these great uh bosworth alex bosworth they're all there and so i was like it's like wow it's like this is like all the lightning talent in the world like it's really cool so i mean the thing that it's the quality of the people and like when i was walking over here uh like you know you gave me a suggestion for a pizza place to go to and i just completely walked right past it because i was thinking about this stuff and so uh so the thing about lightning that's so interesting to me is now as i've had a couple drinks right and i'm no longer i've stopped making sense as the uh the record you're playing at the moment says it's the talking heads but uh

talking heads uh stop making sense live album on right now it's one of the best the the dvd is also good it's very good yeah so uh the the thing that strikes me is that bitcoin has the same lightning and bitcoin share one property and it's like one of these things where it's like this doesn't work unless everyone uses it right and then it works really really well and so like lightning has another because like right now you know like there was one of the right now there's one of the people who you know it's like they couldn't get their their channel their routing for their channels to work quite right and especially in the test net test version it's like hard to find the channels that are actually working or whatever again i don't really know lightning so i'm kind of

waving my hands but uh yeah it's it's one of those things where it's like hey like this works if we all use it right well that's the beautiful this is so the thing full incentives my highlight of the day too was also so like the company i worked at was like programmable money on these like debit and credit cards right it's like an api for issuing these what we do is like usually it takes six nine months to spin up a card program because you have to find an issuing bank and we would just automate all that for you all that regulatory compliance and so uh so i know visa and a mastercard and today jameson lopp had a great tweet uh visa was tweeting out the ceo would be open to crypto yeah he's like be open to it but we want to be in the middle well whatever they're

spending we want to be in the middle and i know that feeling because that was our business model at my last company we're the house whatever currency you pay on we are take a little we're gonna take a little snippet we're gonna take that interchange that two percent uh extortion that's the word i was looking for earlier merchant extortion right really and like that was our business model uh you know hey guys i'm not a true cyberpunk like i did that it's true but listen listen listen the so he tweeted like he retweeted this guy and he's like hey we're deprecating the middle jameson lobbs like yeah we are deprecating the middle and like because i've been in the middle like i know that it's this phenomenal business model it's like they have this great

like regulatory stronghold you know i think visa and mastercard have both 10x their stock market valuations in the last 10 years these have been really profitable companies uh because they kind of have like these legal monopolies it's like they're just protected it's not it's not you can't really get at them and so like what's what's not going to start a merchant credit card company exactly exactly so uh so it's like i see that in bitcoin it's like it's in in lightning in particular because if lightning works and everyone can just point their camera at the cash register and they're done if it works to that degree like merchants are going to be because you have to think about it economically it's like they say that of course these cards is it a 10x improvement

that's what everybody says it needs to be a 10x improvement to the current system do you believe it's a 10x improvement what i believe is a holistic experience from the user experience to the merchant i'm not going to answer that question i'm i believe i believe that merchants will be very happy to adopt it if they can get away with it because they get to save two percent on every transactions and people who are are accepting store two percent is a lot for someone accepting storefront uh credit card transactions they're uh it's not a two percent change in what kind of money they make it's like 20 or 50 these people have very what's the word like very low uh margins margins yeah they have very thank god yeah see i'm not in margins yeah they have very

thin margins and so a two percent gain is huge yeah because that really cuts into like what if their margin like walmart's margin is like one percent or something amazon's amazon's even like amazon is completely subsidized by their web services exactly yeah and so like boy is amazon gonna like to find a thing where they i mean not only are the fees gone but they're probably a huge routing node and have a bunch of routing nodes because they know aws they're like as good at networking as anybody in the world right they're gonna have a profitable business running lightning nodes and so they make money off this contributing to this instead of being extorted they make money like they're going to be really happy to adopt this holy shit and uh merchants are going to be

like that's why i almost don't want to say it but like goddamn square is in a good spot right now like they can just turn this hey they sponsor the pod shout out to uh cash app our sponsor go buy bitcoin on cash app we don't we don't use the other apps anymore these are good these are good people these are god-fearing people these are good god-fearing people uh man square is legit uh no and i worked with them like i remember the guy from square getting out of the big like like fancy escalator he was driving the guy was a baller uh coming into our shitty office and uh it's like the the the worst soma in in san francisco yeah where people shit on the streets that's where our office was and he's coming into our office and we had like this meeting with him

so like you know and that's this square cash card right yeah like that's where it started i've said this before uh square can become one of the most important bitcoin companies in the world i think just because of their ability to form fit bitcoin functionality on their proof of sales system they're close already to be honest man like when uh when fidelity launched here recently i was like this company gets it they're yeah you know they get what bitcoin is apparently they've been mining for a couple years even though that's a stupid thing to do but like now they're sophisticated right yeah they were selling they were selling goods in their cafeteria for bitcoin and people learned that bitcoin at the protocol level was a little slow yeah it's terrible for a cafeteria

right and this is like a lot of quote-unquote bitcoin people like bitcoin forkers still don't get this like it's shit for merchants right it's a nightmare like don't 10 minute deny it merchants or a user like if you really as a user want to know that your bitcoin your bitcoin transaction went through yeah they're receiving that's important maybe didn't get picked up on a chain that got overwritten yeah after two or three blocks like waiting like you're supposed to wait for six trans or six confirmations yeah to know that your bitcoin has successfully gone through with a certain amount of certainty.

What kind of storefront wants to keep their customers around for a goddamn hour? In the average case, 90 minutes or two hours in the worst case. I was programming yesterday and there was a block that was testing the mainnet transactions for my BCC pay server for my class.

Amazing project, by the way. It hadn't been a block in 45 minutes. It happens. I thought I fucked up, but no. no that's why that's why that's why seeing lightning develop and proliferate and getting people like you excited to build on top of it is it's very encouraging yeah uh because that's one of bitcoin's biggest hurdles scaling and that's been the biggest debate for the last five years is are we going to scale this via block size via raising the block size or are we going to push it

the second and it's a second layer completely missed which is kind of a blessing to be honest yeah it was pretty uh it was terrible it was tedious man it was very tedious yeah still is it still is no so i had this great like twitter uh conversation with a guy i i had some shit post about like bitcoins like really good or something i don't even remember but a guy was like hey real talk uh were you always into bitcoin and i kind of told us like no not really i was into ethereum for years beforehand and uh and we were kind of going back and forth and like what and this guy's like has the word d dap in his profile right uh he's a he's a he's a huffer let's be honest he's a huffer and so but he was like he basically what he was saying is like you know it would be

really cool to be building a top of protocol that's simple and that's what i was kind of getting him on is like we weren't debating we were just sharing it was like a it wasn't it was like a good honest interaction and and he was like yeah you know that would be really great you know know ethereum's never going to be able to communicate or compete with uh bitcoin as money because it doesn't focus on that right right and he's like yeah i mean i learned this because i thought you know the reasons and yeah i really understand why having a simple protocol that does one thing extremely well and an important thing money the maybe one of the most important things and so he was really kind of he was really kind of agreeing there and that was interesting it was

like hey this guy knows what he's talking about he knows about dapps he's built more of them than i have and he's like yeah i mean i'm starting to come back to the whole let's just have a simple money token right and uh it's cool because you can't seize it right like that's the really great thing about bitcoin that gold didn't have is that you can't seize it it's the beauty and the simplicity too that's one thing i've been parroting and that's a huge thing in this podcast is like like you said bitcoin only needs to do one thing one thing extremely well and it's and it has it's got like the most insane uptime like you know there's been like tens of blocks where there's something been wrong on bitcoin how many like five or six blocks are confirmed while we're talking

here it's just or probably probably about 30 blocks we're almost two hours in yeah so uh you know potentially 20 it's cool when you sit back and it's like hey i was just engaged in something uh all the while 12 not 20 i'm drunk i'm drunk i didn't catch that i got a math degree uh uh it's cool when you zoom out and say hey bitcoin's been confirming all this time right that helps me sleep at night you know like that's what i talked about in the newsletter today too for the friday light newsletter was uh bitcoin as a living organism and i think ralph merkle put it best like it copies itself it replicates its dna every 10 minutes it's amazing geographically dispersed no like it like there could be a nuclear war on one side of the world

and bitcoin could survive because it's being kept alive and viewing bitcoin and the humans that value it as money as a symbiotic relationship as it's both keeping each other sort of alive not well bitcoin's not keeping us alive by any means but uh there's a symbiotic relationship there where money does bitcoin yes yeah you need money to maintain provides us with the sound money and in return we keep bitcoin alive exactly i mean money i don't think i think everyone underestimates the importance of money like you i don't think they underestimate the importance of money i just don't think most people understand what money is i think both man i don't like you look at a society that doesn't have money show me one that has heating you know like it's

you know if you don't civilizations without the institution of money you know generally uh you know collapse don't have anything they don't have medicine they don't have heating they don't have all they don't have indoor lighting they don't have any of these like these things we neglect like it it they they travel at the speed of human walking or horses like they can't fly to across the country like i did to come here for like 200 bucks right you know uh money is really important and i think better money is possible and that's something that i'm really learning better money is pop it's like it's happening it's happening yeah and so and that's why i love about bitcoin too is making people think about this and that i don't know

if you've seen hey i heard a guy say this once a wise man once said we're not changing bitcoin so much as bitcoin is changing us a very wise man a wise man said that a very wise man once many times yeah uh but one of my favorite tweets about bitcoin of all time comes from neil wood fine shout out neil if bitcoin is successful it will usher in the next enlightenment because it makes people think about these hard pressing issues and these complex complex topics like distributed systems economics money even psychology like you have to dive in yeah incentives when you get to the bottom of you jump into game theory incentive psychology at the end of the day it's all encompassing because you have to know cryptography math the game theory just psychology

exactly uh you have to be analytical you have to be sort of up to speed with what's going on the network at what time and adapting to the information yeah it's coming in so one of the really uh i forgot what i was gonna say sorry i completely lost my train of thought that'll happen after you polish off like a half a liter of whiskey yeah between two people it was fun yeah no that was uh it was a good podcast i mean yeah i'm just really struck by the uh oh yeah what i was gonna say is like i was in kind of a reverie there so i i so i got it so the uh so i come here to new york right and uh you know you're walking around like the streets of new york are the best for people watching and so i'm walking

around you know going to this uh i went grab dinner last night when i came just by myself then went to the chain code thing you're just walking on the streets right going to the subway and stuff and it's like man these people don't don't know they don't know i don't know about bitcoin yet uh that's one of my favorite knocks on ethereum is whenever i'm talking to like an ethereum dev or somebody and we're walking around the streets of new york city i'm like look around how many of these people can use a metamask wallet how many of these people even know what a dap is how many people could buy ethereum convert it into a token and then use it in a dap yeah or one it's not that they use it it's that they want to use it you know even that

the motivation to yes like that's any of these things it's like you got to be a white paper reader to actually buy what they're selling and bitcoin meanwhile it's like hey man uh in a bitcoin world this is another interesting thing that kind of like safe talks about the most safety in the bitcoin standard it's like well what will happen to one of the things i don't like is like uh it seems like the game is rigged against the common man because to uh to manage your money intelligently you have to like think about tax arbitrage and you have to think about corporate earnings and interest rates and all these things and it's like well okay so that's like a rigging of the game in favor of the guy who knows what's up but like in a bitcoin world

just sitting on your money no longer means getting like losing five percent a year that you could have made on the stock market and going from rich to poor over the course of a lifetime it means you just like grow at the speed of the economy and you basically maintain your stature yeah i think that's like that's really appealing to to have a simple way for the common man to retain their wealth which is just like a deflationary currency like the that seems really immoral to me uh it seems like that's why it seems like the common guy or girl doesn't need to like know the latest hustle in order to have enough money to like retire at a reasonable age and like give their kids a good life life's hard enough exactly and blue collar

people especially hard it's the complication it's like i mean i just think modern life is very uh it's a game that's really skewed to the people with high iqs right like if you can if you can handle a bunch of this complexity that's like the definition of a high iq you're doing well it's like well if you're somebody whose mind doesn't work that way and there's something wrong with that you're really in trouble and so it's like the cognitive elite so to speak have a much they're very favored in a fiat system the cognitive elite are less favored in a bitcoin system i think because they don't like the you don't have to be too cognitive to say hey i'm gonna stash away i'm just gonna sit man 100 satoshis per paycheck and in the future

we'll find better ways so that people don't have to sit on their seed wallets and seed phrases and private keys and all these things that the so-called cognitive elite are going to be a little better at managing we'll find simpler ways like cash app i mean for the average guy like go buy a couple coins on cash app and you're going to be in pretty good shape man if you're like a plumber yeah that's a good that's a good thing for you to do and just keep track of that login install one password you're going to be in really good shape and uh and so i think that's really uh that's to me one of the really inspiring inspiring things that's like a word i almost puke when i say but uh inspiring things like it's a good thing about bitcoin that it like a bitcoin world i

think would be better to on the common guy a common man right and common girl like i think this podcast started at the uh the mecca of of the common man barstool sports by the common man for the common man they have a bunch of good tweets that's the only i don't like yeah i've been following i mean i had the pleasure of working at barstool big fan of dave portman everywhere man and what he's built uh i mean it's a cool thing i like uh i'm one of those people so the yeah i love like sports are great people sports are great i love sports i played i mean did you play hockey at all i played lacrosse which is basically hockey which is like yeah it's like this the warm weather white man's sport just like hockey is

oh it's native america yeah yeah lacrosse is big in minnesota too oh man they're both big yeah so i man i've been watching there's this guy pavel datsuk oh there's this guy pavel that you know this guy who's pavel datsuk yeah dude i've watched hockey oh my god i've watched so there are some big time fans on youtube that post like 10 20 minute highlights of him like i think i've within the last week i've watched every pavel datsu goal of his career he's got those dangles bro oh my god it's so i went back to russia he left he did yeah what a baller man i admire that like he's like man i've got enough goals over here did kovalchuk do that too who did that another uh i mean uh ovechkin did it for a little while during the like lock during the uh yeah

during the lockout well he was before he actually tried to win a cup uh ovi post cup ovi's cup celebration over the summer yeah that's like i'm gonna be doing that in a couple years if bitcoin works man let's not get too ahead of ourselves yeah but uh man sports are great and uh if you haven't seen pavel datsu go watch the highlights on youtube it's the most glorious he's got some of those beautiful dangles and if i if i had to wear one jersey to like a rap music video i'd be wearing a pavel datsuk jersey red wings jersey red wings jersey number 13 uh predominantly white or predominantly red i think you have to go white on red like white yeah i think i think i i don't know man um we're two hours in dude this has been an incredible conversation it's been a good

conversation man i feel like i talk too much but i tend to shut the hell up uh i think people are gonna love your talking i appreciate that man i mean i got a lot to say i've been uh i like i like what's i like what's happening and uh i think the uh you know like i come from the startup world the key in a startup is to have the good people right yeah and when i go to these bitcoin conferences like that's why i'm here right i'm here in new york for a hack day i went to griega latvia how beautiful i didn't have it was amazing i didn't have plans to be in latvia but i showed up in portugal and so the thing the thing that bitcoin has that i didn't expect it to have was these um really interesting and diverse and uh sort of forceful people and yeah i mean

on my frame of mind here is like i was just at a conference uh a hack you know a residency seeing their demos like i'm really impressed by the quality of the people and i don't think anybody i don't think most people in the world except for those of us who went to one of these conferences and there aren't many right because the bitcoiners don't show up to any shitcoin or any other conference unless it's purely bitcoin they show out three times a year and so i don't think people understand the quality of the people that show up to these and i almost don't want to let the secret out but it makes me i mean it's one of the things that like you know it makes me believe more right like the quality of the people the ease of connecting to the network something i

said earlier it's like god there's no you don't need an api key you don't need a business development situation you don't need to give up half the equity in your company uh there are all of you know the the nature of money sense like prehistory right like this this kind of uh this instinct like this is one of the things zabo has written about is like this instinct towards collectibles right like the instinct to collect may have been a very important kind of evolutionary accident that allowed us to become humans right because if you have an instinct to collect then you have one thing everybody owns that can be exchanged in the cases of like you know you just killed a mastodon and i'm hungry here here's 10 shows you

have a you have a market exactly we all own shells right yeah and it's because of a freak genetic thing where we just have a gene where we like our hoarders right yeah then all of a sudden you have capitalism not capitalism but like in the beginning is capitalism it basically is right it's like it's money you know like let's say 50 000 years ago 100 000 years ago like uh you know understanding a little bit zaba's article is shelling out like s-h-e-l-l yeah it's a really great article that's kind of about this the idea that you know you know a b cashier says money is a medium of exchange first it's something you can spend with first so i was like no man that's uh not it money starts as a collectible right like when we were pre-humans we didn't

start with dollar bills or lightning channels you idiot right right you add to their b cash like no we were trading like blades because they were useful so they had like a fallback thing like some sort because you can look at like a burial site and they have why are there these all all these unused like cutting edges because that's what they were using as money and so then it goes to shells then it goes to gold and and now we're at bitcoin and now we're at bitcoin and so it's like learning about that is like one of these other things that's like man you gotta you gotta expand your time horizon exactly and that's and putting ourselves in a perspective both backwards and forwards like learn more about history and think more about the future exactly um no it's

important it's imperative and like you said like it's something that people don't think about often enough and it's something that bitcoin is beginning to incite in people is to think about these ideas and really really at a philosophical and personal level think about these problems and it's accessible what they think about them and everybody should have a personal opinion on how this stuff should work because it literally affects half your life money is one half of every transaction that you partake in in your whole goddamn life it's pretty important yeah i mean there's this weird taboo where you're not supposed to talk like an american like one of the things that was cool about living in china is like people would say like hey how much money do you make

you know they're just like they'd be like because i at the time i had like a little bit of programming experience or something and i like you know someone asked me like hey i'm a programmer complete lie at the time right and then they'd say like oh how much does a money does a programmer make and it's interesting because they don't have a taboo against talking about money and in america we do for some reason and i think that's one of the reasons probably why it was so it's like god how is it when i look at myself it's like you know i understand the math i understand software i understand the economics how is it that it took me 10 years to get this you know like i should have been one of the first people and how how wasn't i it's like it's kind of

shocking everybody has their own path man yeah but it's it's interesting and i mean i think part of it is like there's sort of this like weird taboo not only in america but you know in england i would say that's about taboo exists in china as well just uh in the form of not being able to question authority yeah so they have a different taboo and obviously i mean it seems like at least as hodlers are concerned like one of the interesting things about these conferences is chinese people aren't there no chinese people at any of these conferences right so i don't know if it's just an opsec thing they don't want to tell their government they own a lot of bitcoin or own any bitcoin or or what but it's it's one of the interesting things i was like wow it's interesting

people had always told me the chinese control bitcoin not a single person shows up here from prc right that's interesting i've never put that together yeah i was shocked very very astute observation building on bitcoin i'm like okay where are the chinese that control this right like yeah uh they uh i don't know i don't know i would imagine it's interesting like it's interesting that they are so present obviously present and dominant in the mercenary mining market right but yeah as far as developers go almost non-existent you know i guess dash i think is the chinese company i think that guy was from china but like i mean the uh you know binance binance is uh not domiciled anywhere not domiciled but i mean it's uh i think it was conceived of in

at least hong kong yeah but like you know there aren't the it's been interesting that there aren't more uh there's not more chinese participation at least the development of the hodling side no i uh i agree uh it's very money heavy from from china in particular yeah and i would argue that that narrative that china runs a lot of bitcoin is is a false narrative oh totally i mean that's becoming i was kind of joking you know yeah it's becoming less it's becoming uh the virality of the arguments because i mean i'm at a german minor that apparently does pretty well i know a minor in texas that does pretty well yeah like there's minors everywhere yeah i mean there's cheap energy cheap energy is not a national phenomenon let's be honest like

it's uh that's what most of the game is at this point well then people people will try to equate the the manufacturing of the a6 uh and equate that to like hash power percentage where there's and matt corallo described this on this podcast previously but there are economies of hell of a guy but i was observing him program today i was looking over look at that it's tmux i see okay hell of a guy i was with him when he was writing the disclosure for the cv like we were on the same flight to regan he was writing that before we got our flight i was like oh my god uh i do not want to be in your shoes right now i'm sorry but sorry uh what was i describing i don't remember um that's what happens when you go longer than two two two hours it's

good man you have to edit this show there's economies of discal with mining yeah so like people like noriel will try to equate mining manufacturing with hash power uh they'll try to equate the the amount of manufacturing they do on the hardware side and then say they control that percentage of hash power exactly what you'll find is yes you can you can make all this hardware but you won't be able to find uh the amount of hash power needed to consume that hardware one spot like there's economies of descales you probably have to go to you're not gonna be able to find a 200 megawatt farm i mean last i heard these chinese miners were like flying helicopters around africa trying to find like uh places they could drop in like prefabbed hydro uh power plants

right like yeah it's uh i mean it's cool it's like every every fluke energy source in the natural world where you have like some mass that has some like trapped gravitational energy because it's at like a higher altitude and it's gonna go lower which is what a waterfall is it's like we're gonna arbitrage all that with bitcoin anywhere that's got a lot of sun and a power grid that or you know that that's kind of cool or like you know the right combination support this yeah where anywhere where the energy that it receives is like kind of high or something totally hand waving at this point like bitcoin will be like let's arbitrage that it's like it's the it's the uh i admire that it's a cool thing about bitcoin and it's not like and it's merging this what i

wrote about in the newsletter today it's merging the physical and the digital world yeah man it's like it's merging the physical and the digital world and what it's not doing is it doesn't have like a coal powered plant that's like blowing a fan into your apartment killing you with you know carbon dioxide it's uh it's a lot of this stuff is going to be renewable resources it seems no i completely agree uh i just had to check my text so i got caught a little bit off guard just gonna make sure i mean hey man i'm wrecked i don't even know where my phone is man Welcome to Tales from the Crits. Hey, if any freaks are still out there, man, I just got to say, you guys are the best.

We were on mining, and I have to completely agree with you. Mining is creating these incentives where people don't... There's those FUD narratives like, we're using up 1% of the world's energy. But it's uncapped, unused, would have otherwise been wasted. if you're looking at these uh operations in west texas in particular which are capping the methane off these natural gas fracking uh yeah places it was still if that gas goes well the thing is if that gas just goes to the atmosphere unburnt it's worse for yeah it's worse for the earth than capping it using it and turning into bitcoin like it is literally more destructive to the earth to

just let it go to the atmosphere instead of capping it and using it every natural turning it into yes exactly it's turned into a productive good and that's where people get misled where they're like oh you're like you're burning too much energy it's like no we're we're using energy that otherwise would have been sent to the atmosphere to contribute to the global warming catastrophe or wherever it may be and this is where i'm like hey man like if you can show us a better system right that can uh that's my little class it's like we build these digital cache implementations in python and it's like hey if anybody can show us a better digital cache i'm all for it right up i will be immediately an adopter but that's the big interesting thing

about all these stupid fork wars is like people don't understand what better means like you have to include all the costs of switching you have to include everything and like no one's no one's improved on bitcoin at all in my opinion nothing's differentiated at all right and so it's like it's just all noise and uh yeah i mean duh i didn't i'd adopt something that was better but brother that's gonna be a lot harder than you think it is sister it's gonna be harder than you think it is sister sister girl seriously it's gonna be hard it's gonna be really hard and if you do overtake it and this is a narrative that i very strongly believe in yeah if you do by chance just so happen to overtake

bitcoin you destroy the whole value proposition of the whole concept of cryptocurrency because the whole concept of a store of value is you have a certain amount of faith and trust that will not be devalued the narrative is that like something gets flippant and it's like all right bitcoin was flippant who the fuck are you to say that you won't get flippant in the future that's one of the switching costs yeah it's like yeah when you talk about better you have to include all the switching costs and one of them is like psychological a psychological precedent in favor of inflation in favor of changing the money supply introducing new coins that are valid in this worldview right uh and so that's i mean that's one of the reasons like i think this is someone

like me who's like a little newer it's like i'm probably a little more open to the idea of some genius coming along with something better than like bitstein is or you know say for pierre richard like this this class of people that basically got me involved uh and so like well what it's interesting to dig in a little bit like what is the source of our their more closed view towards it and i think it would probably be that they say that the switching cost of introducing inflation and you know having two things that are sort of like valid at the same time from this perspective is like they they rate that as more costly than i do and to be honest they're probably right like i would argue they are right yeah they're it is a huge that would be a big like

in terms of just like you know an idiot would say hey you can just trade them on binance or whatever like trade them on really that's where an idiot hangs out right so uh but like that ignores so many hidden costs and again that's why you read thomas sowell right like learn about what counts as a cost you know you need to there are many hidden costs your thomas soul read paul stork paul stork goes into like truthcoin.info his blog yeah he goes really in depth into the opportunity cost especially involved with he goes deep into proof of work versus proof of stake specifically interesting and really really drives from the fact that proof of stake is arguably a lot more expensive and detrimental in the long run than proof of work because of

opportunity yeah and i mean read your uh what's his name uh nixaba nixaba yeah yeah and even feed me we had an eye connection there even yes zabo reaches zabo like he's really good at like the uh you know he hasn't a bunch of like he's a bunch of interesting stuff about why micropayments don't work right uh you know lightning has been kind of sold as a micropayment thing i think it's more than that but like zabo has all this interesting stuff about how you know micropayment bulls ignore all the hidden psychological costs of all these like millionth of a having to make a bunch of decisions yeah it's like the cost of a decision is very heavy for a human so you want to gear towards things like the current sas companies do right

one monthly excuse me one monthly payment that's expensive in financial terms but cheap in psychological terms and there's a trade-off there yeah and like hey don't underestimate that psychological cost it's ux exactly yeah design is important the market design is a lot more than what it looks like it is and not just the design of like an interface with design of the like revenue model right like how how are how is the money exchange because that's a really tough part for a human and so yeah like that's one of the things that i think this this class like pierre pitstein uh safe you know they're probably ahead of us when they say hey guys you're underestimating the total all things considered cost of anything besides bitcoin like it's got to be like

jesus christ and it literally had to be like somebody like floats down from space it would have to be this is a better money trust it'd have to be more than yeah it would have to be on that level of like more than jesus probably satoshi was like pretty close to jesus it'd have to be more it had to be something completely unseen there there's gonna be religion based around satoshi man the genesis block the parallels are too too numerous to list off right now yeah so uh i mean this is something like i think i mean i'm i'm obviously not i i don't make investment advice i've only lost money buying this shit like i'm not the guy you want to listen to but uh i think this class of this these three people i was talking about they make a good point when they

say hey like think about those costs of switching and at the same at the same time uh you know what's going to compete with it right so i don't know how are you going to how are you going to shift this mindshare that's currently working nakamoto institute dot is it dot org or dot com just nakamoto.org to be honest probably the best website to hang out on in the entire internet i do not refute that yeah like if you want to kill some time and maybe like uh have your heirs love you for it uh visit that site and read everything either start out with their crash course go into the literature literature page and the research page and then the men pull let's say men pull left men pull last and then the chari on top uh satoshi's place or not satoshi's

place uh the complete satoshi satoshi yeah uh just learn everything about the man the man we I think my third newsletter I ever wrote was about the complete Satoshi. I said, hey, if you're ever questioning what the hell is going on in this space, go back to the resource that the Nakamoto Institute has provided us, which is the complete Satoshi, and read what Satoshi was saying and how he was talking about this and how he was explaining it to people, and you'll find a lot of the same objections that we're seeing on Twitter yeah and what you're seeing in public have been hashed over and over again on these forums and

in emails with satoshi it's really true it'll give you like a just like a reinforcing feeling of like all right it's an antidote it's an antidote against these poisonous things it's like hey i give me my antibodies this this argument is no longer gonna trip me up he destroyed like the pow is destroying the environment yeah uh argument like less than a year in i'm pretty sure like half a decade before i ever fucking heard about the thing right like man what a guy bitcoin girl or whatever bitcoin uh is more of a net like is a net positive having bitcoin is more positive for the world than not having it yeah totally agree and that's another thing it's not only like in terms of economics it's not only about the hidden costs it's like what gains are available

to be had right like what are all of the uh economic interactions we can unlock by having in uncensorable money that any two parties anytime can transact in i think there's a lot it's innumerable we can't even comprehend yeah i think there's a lot of economic activity that is uh is possible and that you know the internet i mean like you should really think of the bitcoin and the internet they're like the same thing kind of we're gonna have an ad lib here i got my wife calling me so we're gonna have one here what's going on we are wrapping up right now

yeah we got a two hour and 20 minute guy right now i've been having a great conversation where are you where do you where do you want to meet uh they might be let me check i don't know if they're eating with us though that sounds good to me pizza night in nor'easter that sounds great I completely agree

I'm down. Oh, no. Are you still Manhattan? Are you still Manhattan? Okay. All right, text me when you're close. All right. All right, love you.

Okay. you gotta come back that ad-lib just ended perfectly justin just took a perfectly timed test well i talked to my wife on the telephone we're in the clear he doesn't take up that much space we're in the clear i thought i was gonna be in trouble um we're good though bonita saves the day it's a good one it's good it's my favorite uh we've been here for two hours and 22 minutes it's been incredible conversation it's been a good conversation i think we got to wrap it up we got to wrap it up we can continue it like off the record but i don't know if people actually i do think people will listen to this whole podcast maybe i hope they do maybe i mean i put out a

three-hour video with what with me coding the whole time and people watch the whole thing i think people are are gonna very much enjoy this podcast i mean the podcast what i really love about them is as uh to me their motivation to go work out it's like i won't listen to them normally but while i'm working out it's like duh i'm not gonna do my squats silence man i want to learn about bitcoin i want to learn about bitcoin if i'm gonna do a bench press that's what i watched of joe rogan podcast when i was ripping the bike today yeah it's like uh yeah he has a bunch of interesting ones too uh that's when i to me that's what these are it's like so if you guys you know just go work out you know the one thing the one problem with us bit cleaners is especially the

programmer side we're a little weak on muscle the muscle density hey some skinny motherfuckers at this residency that's why we bring the uh the beefy bitcoin boys in exactly to whip you guys into shape kidding i kid i kid justin it's been an incredible two and a half hours it's been a great two and a half where can we learn more about your boot camp i'm gonna i'm gonna launch this tonight i think i'm gonna launch this tonight that'd be good i'm not gonna edit anything by the way fiddlebootcamp.com but that boogie i had bl bl right yes so that's the idea is like i want to get you uh right now it's mostly for people who have some experience programming but hey i will hold your hand just to the extent i'm able because it's still early days and if you if you'd

fail i'll refund you and you do it next month i want bitcoiners learning to program i want programmers learning to bitcoin bittlebootcamp.com justinmoon.com has all my other stuff that's about it i think so it's been it's been an incredible uh conversation and it's been fun maybe i'll maybe i'll come back again sometime this is maybe you'll be back maybe you'll be back that was a lot of fun i hope you had fun you had some you had some tasty drink here we we polished off two bottles although not we we didn't finish two empty bottles here marty there's two empty bottles but they were both half full we polished off a bottle that's a lot of whiskey drank a lot of whiskey as tennessee whiskey is playing in the background perfect timing marty it was great

uh i love listening it's more fun to be on and hey you guys listening like you know do something cool man just find something different and do it and then come on marty's podcast uh and i think that's a perfect parting note uh peace and love freaks see ya