TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #48: Pierre Rochard

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Pierre Rochard to reminisce about the year that has past since their first recording, give out free futuristic business ideas, discuss Pierre's Excel plugin that links to the Lightning Network, buyers of last resort, and much more. Follow Pierre: www.twitter.com/pierre_rochard Follow Marty: www.twitter.com/MartyBent Check out BitcoinACKs: www.bitcoinacks.com Check out Bitcoin Advisory: www.bitcoinadvisory.com Peep the Nakamoto Institute: www.nakamotoinstitute.org Download the Cash App today! cash.app

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what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt power week of content we're on day seven five people in seven days and we're wrapping up this week with the person who helped me launch this podcast at least this interview series i want to reintroduce you freaks to pierre rochard pierre welcome back thanks for having me back um just uh mike rules gotta talk to it a little bit closer we're not in the barstool studios uh we we were talking about this uh before we hit record a lot has changed since uh our first interview about a year ago uh we were at barstool number one uh we had no idea what we were doing i mean at least i did from a podcast host perspective uh you were gainfully employed uh you still you're gainfully employed right now but you uh

you were working for somebody else now you have your own business uh you were childless at the at that point in time you've had a child uh bitcoin advisory has been started and uh and bitcoin's chugging on still producing blocks how's this last year been for you yeah i i don't think anything's changed we're probably like at the same price i checked we were actually uh we're a bit higher than we were the day we uh we're about like 400 higher wow it was at like 5800 the day we recorded last year yeah it's gonna be sad once the 12 month returns are negative right now they're still they're still positive uh but yeah give it a few months right um yeah a lot has changed um and i i feel like though that a lot changes every month uh not just every year yeah that's kind of

how it goes in bitcoin it's been a year but it feels like it's been a decade i mean we say that all the time but yep truly is a lot has happened uh the debate has has moved from the fork wars and scaling too uh all right we're we're experimenting with lightning now and more people are starting to talk about fungibility some people are creeping inflation conversations into the mix as well and inflation bugs yes inflation bugs too uh big inflation bugs one in particular um yeah so it's been crazy uh we're wrapping up this week of interviews with you or it's because it's the one year anniversary i gotta thank you for being the first guest really uh helped helped uh launchpad tales from the crypt into the into the psyche of the masses

well tales from the crypt help launchpad noted i i don't think that i would have ever started noted if it wasn't for our interview really it's like i was like man that was that was fun i want to have more like recorded conversations about bitcoin well uh thank you for starting noted because uh i don't tell many people this but now the world's gonna know it's probably the only bitcoin podcast i listen to and stefan's i'll listen to as well yeah just because i'm crunched for time always editing mine writing something right uh recording uh and noted as soon as i get the notification that noted has dropped uh i i jumped to listen with bated breath and i got to thank you give me a couple shout outs in recent episodes with john noberry yeah i mean anytime

that we have a guest in common i definitely want to give you a shout out because uh really i i want to not have too much content overlap between our podcasts so that because i know that a lot of people are subscribed to both yeah so i want to respect their time and not like retread all ground uh when i have a guest that we you had on before yeah i think they're very complimentary different different styles um and one thing we have to do we have to get michael in the studio we have to get all three of us in the room together yeah absolutely i mean it would also be fun to have stefan lavera on that's true yeah we've got four seats here and uh we could uh fill it with podcasters and vortex as well we recently had vortex on noted and yeah he was just dropping

napalm bombs all over he was he was uh very excited to see uh the fruits of the planting that he's doing with his dev boot camp yeah yeah the the it's uh so it's a c-sharp dev boot camp that he's doing with Nicholas Dorier that's kind of centered around BTC Pay Server. And it's actually, it's very complimentary with what I'm doing on the Lightning side, and we can get into that at some point too. Yeah.

Before we get into that, let's reminisce a little bit. What's the narrative that has changed the last time we spoke, recorded, last time we recorded a podcast. We were gearing up for the run of 20K on the way up. now we're we're we're hovering around 6500 on the way down volatility is an all-time low we're close to all-time lows yep uh and it seems like markets are getting desperate people are getting a little tired a lot of a lot of fighting going on a crypto twitter yeah in crypto twitter and in private

slack channels that is right on telegram uh i think we're we're seeing some people plausibly setting themselves up to rage quit uh what and i i want to be clear about what a rage quit is because i think that there's some confusion about this on crypto twitter let's clear it up a rage quit is not when you're short-term bearish on the price but long-term bullish on the fundamentals to me a rage quit is when you were long-term bullish on fundamentals and you have turned long-term bearish and you think bitcoin's going to zero or it's just never going to go back up at any point in the future so that that to me is like that's when your psychology has reached complete capitulation and you you know get an op an opinion piece in the new york times blog like

like we had last last cycle with mike hearn yeah january february 2015 it was uh yeah probably right around the local bottom so i think that to get another local bottom we've got to wait until someone legit rage quits yeah it seems like the uh the tides are staring in the in the channels and the social channels a lot of people are getting antsy uh again like a time preference people just can't take boring like fraternity hazing is like you know you see like people capitulating one by one and then only the strong survive like you know not not that i'm endorsing fraternity hazing i was not in a fraternity and i wasn't it's a source of physical danger and should be illegal and is illegal but we kind of have a similar process of like hazing participants

in the markets by inflicting as much pain on them as possible and really it's like entirely psychology driven because you have people who like panic bought the top and one by one like they have to come to the conclusion of like you know what i should sell now and i'll buy back you know when it's at three thousand dollars and that means that i'll you know double my money which like will somehow make up for the losses from blah blah blah like they find ways to rationalize whether it's on the buying side or on the selling side you know they've uh the human mind is so frail and weak right it and it's only been 11 months since the top yeah not even a year this is a multi-decade multi-century multi-generation phenomena we're in the first

inning still for sure and this bear market feels different than the last one um why is that it um I'd have to look at the numbers, but it certainly feels like it is less full of hope on every bounce up and a lot more kind of, well, people, I hear more chatter about, hey, this is going to be a long bear market than I did in 2014. yeah i mean it's i mean our good friend marad uh he he's he's our in-house uh bearish bull and he thinks that we're gonna have a very extended prologue bear market i'm not sure how much i agree with him on that but yeah i'm not sure as well i think that one stat that i really want to see and i haven't seen a solid number on it is how many people are auto buying bitcoins every two weeks and like what volume what dollar volume of inflows into the bitcoin markets is that um i'm raising my hand right now i'm still yeah i'm still dcaing and yeah uh i'll

make bigger purchases every once in a while but does does uh square cash app have a auto buy feature uh we should pitch that to them if they don't i think that's a very important feature for bitcoin's liquidity i think they might uh i know they have auto buying for or auto convert like sending cash from your account to the app i don't know if they have auto buying on bitcoin yet let me check let me open up my cash app the only app we're using for buying bitcoin these days no that's that's why i brought them up i wasn't going to mention their competitor that i know has an auto buy feature uh but they'll go unnamed because hey they don't sponsor podcasts no they don't and it doesn't look like square has uh or cash app has an auto buy for bitcoin yet we'll

have to uh put that yeah we'll have to put a ticket into miles uh to see if we can get that added um but this is actually a good segue into a piece you wrote about or piece you dropped last week that i wrote about in bent uh basically describing the uh the buyers the last resort and the hodlers the last resort in bitcoin you described six different types of buyers the last resort i believe yeah yeah for sure uh and so basically my inspiration was from a podcast i did with trace mayor and what traces uh traces phrase was holders hodlers of last resort and i found that to be very it's it's first of all it's a provocative statement because you're reappropriating fed culture right so in some circles it's probably politically incorrect to to do that

uh i think on marty ben's podcast tales from the crypt it's it's an okay subject we're okay to get a little little we we don't stray down the pc path we stray off that path yeah so um the the phrase it is uh aping and imitating is uh lender of last resort and a lender of last resort is necessary in a fiat fractional reserve banking system uh because uh you can otherwise get into a deflationary spiral um when credit expansion is increasing uh and it's you know the the banking system is growing the economy is growing quote unquote um you have uh the creation of money when a bank lends out like they uh you know put money cash in your bank account um and you know they find a way to offset it well so they they then have a liability right on their balance sheet as

well um and the federal reserve makes them keep a certain reserve ratio uh but basically the whole idea is that lending new money creates new money and the reverse process is true when people are paying off loans and no new loans are getting created then essentially money is getting destroyed and when money gets destroyed in that kind of process then prices either stagnate or go down and you have deflation and that actually arguably makes it harder to service your debts and then you you get into like a deflationary spiral where people end up defaulting on their debts and banks you know default as well and then they're insolvent and then they need to get taken over or they just collapse and destroy even more money so anyway this this process is broken

by a lender of last resort who steps into the market and says you know what i'm going to lend money uh if you've got good collateral and let's get this process of money creation going again yeah um said something we're very uh abreast to in the traditional financial system and that's basically what happened in 2008 the lender last resort came in and it's weird to me that there's like this stigma of like like bailouts oh man yeah they bailed out wall street it's like well yeah that's like what they're there for that's the they're the lender of last resort like we knew about this for a while like why is this shocking to people right and they injected uh 3.5 trillion dollars into the economy i believe yeah uh trillion with a t a balance sheet at the time

of the qe expansion the inception of the qe expansion and tarp i believe their balance sheet was like 850 billion yeah so with with qe what happens is that they uh so you know the the federal government runs a massive deficit and issues billions of dollars worth of debt every year and that that's so that's a deficit and uh every year the deficit gets added to this big pool that we call the national debt um it's getting high yeah it's getting high uh and that national debt is owned by investors bond investors who are trying to earn a rate of return or trying to protect their capital and it's generally seen because the u.s government is like world superpower it's seen as the least risky lending you can do as to the federal government but point being that

the fed in with qe went into the bond market and purchased bonds from you know private and foreign investors alike uh and you know was outbidding other buyers and when they bought bonds they created money much like a commercial bank would make money when they lend out money and so in your paper you did a great job of analogizing this type of system to bitcoin and describing the different types of hodlers of last resort uh which i think is important because there's very different types of investors and people that are buying at certain points of time and i think you did a very good job of sort of drawing a broad landscape of the different types of buyers uh that that help set a floor for bitcoin yeah and really the main thing is that

uh currently if we look at what kind of system is bitcoin from a monetary perspective uh what what we have in front of us today and it may change in the future but i'm just describing present reality is that we have uh first of all a a very sound money uh that has you know very well understood uh rate of supply coming onto the market um and there's a lot of clarity around the monetary policy now there's a lot of technology risk that kind of offsets that advantage um but the financial system layer we have a 100 reserve uh banking system and so even participants like coinbase at least purport to be 100 uh reserve um you know maybe some have been hacked and they're insolvent and we don't know but broadly speaking like the the system that's getting built with

exchanges is 100 reserve um so in that kind of system the new money gets created when people are mining and there's there's real money being uh spent on mining so it's not like this money's getting created out of thin air uh like i don't know that miners have that great of profit margins right now so it's probably break even very thin yeah or very thin so in that regard i wouldn't even consider that senior age like people see that as senior age i don't because you're basically earning a market rate of return yeah no that's important uh it's an important concept to understand what mining in particular and why proof of stake might not be a good alternative that and and like for example like ripple ripple spends zero dollars when they quote unquote mine

uh their xrp well this is actually a good you're king of segues for me and you're in another twitter or i don't even know if the first thing we talked about was on twitter debate it was a paper euro but you were in a twitter debate with a a multi-coiner uh talking about uh the bitcoin's initial distribution comparing it to ethereum's and whether or not uh one is more ethical than the other yeah it's subjective yeah for sure um oh uh well let me get to that i wanted to uh just put a button on it in that um the system i described with with uh bitcoins uh coming onto the market for mining means that bitcoin is not vulnerable to the same problem that i just described with fractional reserve banking and so bitcoin doesn't need a lender of flaster sort

there's barely even a credit market on top of bitcoin so like that would be it's minuscule and it's not like if if the bitcoin credit market collapsed it's basically like people who borrowed bitcoins to to short sell it or something like that okay and that wouldn't that you know it wouldn't cause the price of bitcoin to collapse um people argue that if if like tethers was fractional reserve that that would cause the price of bitcoin to collapse i don't know where they get that idea from like the mechanics of that don't make sense to me at all why is that because you have people who are holding tethers who are out you know x number of dollars how is that related to bitcoin at all i i get that it's it's people who maybe they were active traders and that

perhaps they would have been buyers of bitcoin at some point in the future um but look there's a lot of competition to buy bitcoins today like i don't see uh them being the the marginal price setter yeah no i mean i'm just sick of the tether thud it just needs to go away i mean i think they're actually i think what hasu wrote they might actually sneakily just be unwinding tether uh look i i have no inside knowledge on it i but my troll opinion is that i want tethers i want each unit of tethers to turn out to be worth zero dollars and i want it to just collapse immediately and then uh look i'm pro bitcoin all right i'm not pro tethers i don't know why you're not pro fiat coins yeah and i feel the same way about ethereum like yeah i do hope its price goes to

zero tomorrow i want everyone to be punished anyone who didn't hold bitcoins i want them to be punished whether it's tethers or or eos or xrp so i don't see why people are so spun up about it yeah and does this stem from uh the uh initial distribution uh or the signage that these projects uh no well i mean with tether specifically i think it stems from the fact that people want to be effortlessly or frictionlessly trying to time the market of bitcoin usd yeah right and so they're trading in and out of tethers because one day they think that bitcoin's gonna go up tomorrow and the next day they think it's gonna go down and like i i find uh short-term speculative behavior like that to be i frown upon it like i and i have this bias because

i have this bias in equity markets as well is that i don't think you should be timing the market i think that like the way that you make money should be by creating goods and services and selling them to on the market not like trying to time capital markets yeah trying to short term bank on bitcoin uh wholly that's another thing there's a lot of people out there who live solely off bitcoin i just want to like send out like a message of uh of caution to these people who live solely on bitcoin like it's it's very risky i like the fact that i have a a paying job that uh yeah it has a steady paycheck so i think it's important to still make usd where that's true of currency while being a bit corner i i would caveat that with like the concept of a safe

withdrawal rate in finance where basically with like a portfolio of stocks and like it's you know let's say the s&p 500 if you back tested it since i think like early 1900s they did this it's called the trinity study they basically determined that you could withdraw four percent per year and you would continue to have like the standard of living that you have with four percent so like if it's a million dollars that's 40 grand a year that you could be taking out to live off of now that that research was done with like equities market which is a very different beast than bitcoin and if you did it again with bitcoin i think you would have some like very different results and like who knows what percentage is a safe withdrawal rate but with that caveat like

if you're roger vera and you're sitting under hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin the safe withdrawal rate is greater than zero percent like it's gonna be okay if you spend some bitcoin on um whatever the hell roger vera spends his bitcoins on it it seems to be on twitter sock puppets but i won't i won't stoop down to that level i won't to speculate too long on that we only like to share facts here up here we can't have this fake news spread yeah thanks for fact-checking me marty that's why i come on your show i don't know if you may you may have just spoken a fact though i just i just i don't i'm not i don't know for sure you did speak a fact because bitcoin.com was paying people to retweet shit back in the day so look trust don't

verify that's true that's that's all i say yeah that's uh don't don't trust don't trust ver verify yeah got the sticker on my laptop it's a good one thank you it's a it's a lonely sticker yeah you know actually i got uh more stickers at the lightning hackathon i just haven't gotten around to uh pasting them onto the back of my laptop i also i i have um i have some anxiety about putting more stickers on my laptop because i've had uh laptop cases that i put a bunch of stickers on that i was very proud of and then like the case like somehow broke or wasn't or didn't fit my laptop because i changed laptops and then i have to like leave those stickers behind so i wish there was a way of uh you know traveling with your stickers from

laptop to laptop of different screen sizes in different cases might be a startup idea that sounds like a very i think that would get funded pretty quickly yeah i'm not a big i don't know how you would even technically do that that sounds like it would be pretty hard it might be impossible but yeah i uh i'm not a big sticker guy i roll dog it on the laptop no yeah i mean it's also like these are beautiful pieces of engineering and maybe don't defile them with your nonsense stickers with your propaganda yeah my propaganda propaganda is important especially in the bear market yeah it absolutely is and i think that um i i try to think of propaganda that is first of all like has some semblance of truth to it

you know like there's an objective third party the reasonable person off the street after you know hearing from different parties and like trying to gather some facts himself would come to the conclusion that like pierre has a plausible argument that he's making here you know like not not something that's absolutely uh ridiculous because i do see like absolutely ridiculous propaganda out there both like on for bitcoin anti-bitcoin for all coins or whatever what's the most ridiculous propaganda you're seeing these days uh well like an egregious one is the premise that ripple is decentralized i think that one's first of all it's like hysterical but also that whole community is basically and it's funny because you know we bitcoin critics are

like oh bitcoin maximalists are in a cult i like this cult big fan of the cult yeah i'm a big fan of the cult and it goes back to like the the reasonable man off the street like give me nine hours with a jury you know and and then have them deliberate is pierre beyond any reasonable doubt inside a cult you know like i think that would be an interesting trial to have and i will represent myself as you know my own attorney in this trial um and and then have a let's i maybe you'd want to have somehow a sample of ripple shills off of twitter and have them be like the other side counter-argument the counter-argument the counter-argument yeah and and then we can switch places and then i think that a jury would would at least have like maybe not beyond any

reasonable doubt but they would definitely rank the probability of the xrp shill being in a cult higher than the one for for bitcoin yeah i would agree um if you're just uh randomly screaming at people on twitter uh because they should on on ripple it might be a sign if you're lashing out you know yeah there's that and then they just have like bizarre notions of how how does a currency how does a money accrue value um and it accrues value from more people holding it they think that it accrues value from press releases about from ripple that don't use XRP. Like these people are on a different level of sophistication when it comes to the issue of money.

It's really funny to watch them try to de-alienate between ripple and XRP because there is no, we're being honest. There's no really a separation. Well, they also have absurd memes. Their most absurd meme, I find, is that basically the killer use case for XRP is in facilitating Forex transactions because it can be a neutral, almost a reserve currency, what Paul Krugman called a vehicle currency in international trade. and so someone who has usd would buy xrp to send it to someone else who's like in the uk

who would then sell the xrp for the british pound and like that that narrative when you know they use an absurd pair like british pound or usd that narrative gets challenged by inevitably gets challenged by someone who's like look british pound and usd like is one of the most liquid forex pairs in existence how the hell would xrp be more liquid than that like that's inconceivable and they're like then they back away from that and they're like well look there are very illiquid pairs that xrp would be good for you know like for example british pound to um i don't know uzbeki whatever ruble they use over there right like it's some kind of very small developing country uh uh currency and it's like yeah but those are illiquid because no one does those

currency pairs like those are illiquid for a reason so who's who's going to consume the liquidity that you are somehow providing it doesn't make any sense and and how would xrp accrue value from that um so i i think that they are uh one of the most absurd and the the other thing that you can add to their absurdity is the size of their community like i do think there's a non-negligible size of um i can't tell if they're real or not well so you would think that you would think that they're not real because of their presence on twitter but i've met some in real life and i know some through you know like a friend of a friend and there is like a real real retail market for xrp which has been you know promoted by ripple and uh i think that it's

absurd also that ripple tries to frame itself as like oh no we're for like banks and institutions and then all of the buyers of xrp are retail investors right it's like wait why does a retail investor need to have like swift tokens in their in their investment portfolio like that doesn't makes sense yeah and the bet the banks are purportedly part of their consortium have come out and said we'll probably never touch the token it's a total scam uh and then they hire bill clinton who's a rapist yes to attend their their conference they a rapist and a statist and a statist uh but in this era of me too i would think that they would that's kind of tone deaf to invite bill clinton to your conference hey whatever pumps the bags you know it didn't even pump the

bags though like i i don't know what that accomplished at all yeah uh he didn't even really talk about it at all and i'm sure he got paid like 250 grand to be there so maybe he could at least be like you know if you support hillary clinton then maybe you should buy some xrp do a little infomercial like thing like that but at least get a paid shill yeah yeah exactly use my big banks referral from the president brought you graham leach bliley yeah now bringing you this shit coin i wish i could do a better bill clinton invitation i should practice that right um so that and then they had ben bernanke come to the previous conference so uh they hired ben losky to be on their board of directors i think talk about a

conflict of interest there hey let's let me uh let me draft a bill that makes it uh exceedingly hard for people to start businesses that pertain to bitcoin in new york and then hey i'm gonna go lobby on behalf of some of these companies trying to get through uh my lofty regulations well there's that and um i also think that they have a relationship with like a former sec commissioner so they're trying to get out of the whole uh ico trouble oh i thought you i thought you meant chair i thought you meant uh like no no not a chair i thought you meant green spanner yelling volker still kicking too yeah well um there is a former chair of the sec who has done bitcoin related and you're talking about the sec not the fed i'm way off right yeah yeah uh but

this sec commissioner in particular is like helping xrp uh as a legal counsel or something and yeah they just don't want it to be recognized as equity because xrp is supposed to not be equity but it kind of looks like equity a lot of these shit coins do i would argue yeah highly centralized projects that advertise themselves otherwise well let's jump into the little tangent that we almost went on earlier your your call out of multi-coinism and the the initial uh distribution of coins why is bitcoins fair and why do you think you caught out ethereum specifically in this thread uh for being somewhat less ethical of a distribution yeah so uh just to like kind of frame it i think that we're talking about ethics and morality and what people should do ought to do uh you know

concepts of fairness and these are very subjective uh issues right and i don't mean that as in like hey look it's okay to stone someone to death if that's part of your culture like you know i i just mean that um different people have different points of views on it and even though i think that my point of view is correct uh i recognize i admit that other people have different points of views and thus for example people are like oh well if it's unethical why does it have a positive market price it's like all right well i mean i i think it's it's unethical to um do something like sell um i don't i'm trying to think of a good example um well uh trying to think of an example that everyone would agree is is perhaps dubious

selling crack to a pregnant woman well yeah selling crack to a pregnant woman would probably uh fall under the banner of unethical um or like and this spills over into the me too stuff of like hey this uh producer asked for sexual favors in order to have you in your movie like that's to me that's unethical um maybe it's illegal in some jurisdictions but not all uh and it seems to like have been at some point in many industries a uh too frequent of a practice yeah yeah and so it's like all right i i recognize that a i think it's unethical and i recognize that there's a market of it that's that's happening right um and so people are paying uh for things that are unethical you know whether it's monetarily or by getting a gig or whatever

um or and frankly it's also things like um if if you are running a company and you get a job for your niece or nephew right like there are situations where that would arguably be unethical um even though it's not illegal and you're not doing anything wrong per se um it's just that you kind of jaded the system a little bit of people or of some people's notions of fairness that's how a lot of people get jobs um yeah yeah and so it's like i i think that there's different views on that so and and it's not like anyone thinks that uh one view should be legal or illegal anyway i'm all i'm saying all of this to say that the ethics of the creation of money is also an area where there are different points of view and a lot of it is legal and some of it is illegal

but my my point of view is that any any kind of creation of money where you are not going to be you're not going to have anyone compete with you for that creation of money and thus the marginal return from creating new money doesn't converge to a market rate of return that you would get from other employments of capital, then you have created a monopolistic privilege that is at least unethical in my book, possibly should be illegal or violates the non-aggression principle uh you know that that libertarians view as litmus test for whether uh you know it should be uh punishable right um and so specifically what i mean is that like in bitcoin anyone can mine and create new bitcoins and as we were discussing earlier like if that means that

there's an open market a commoditized market for shot to 56 squared hash power and the consumption of electricity and a6 and all this um then a miner is not going to earn extraordinary returns and i mean like that literally like extraordinary billionaires were made yeah like maybe the benchmark isn't you know the bond market of three percent per year return maybe the benchmark is returns from owning bitcoins outright you know physical bitcoins like you have to ask yourself like is it more profitable to mine bitcoins or to buy them today right like that's a calculation that you do getting into the mining business um and so anyway all this to say is that i don't think that bitcoin's creation of money is un is seniorage and i don't think it's unethical

production of money thank you for clarifying that that's a very thorough explanation i can contrast that with other projects yeah contrasted with the theory and the one you were calling out specifically today let's contrast it with the diametric opposite which is xrp you're on a ripple tear today yeah well i i find it uh you know ripple has like i'm not as threatened by ripple i'd rather talk about ethereum and i'm not really no but i do it i do it for analytical purposes not for uh because i have a grudge against them because i'm i'm trying to show the opposite because i think uh i think the ethereum is between xrp and bitcoin in this regard okay let's talk about this let's talk about xrp so they instamined all the xrp on day zero hundred billion yeah and

allocated themselves a certain percentage of that and like have markets have sold you know some along the way you gotta keep the mic like yeah we got uh justin moon at the same probability he was like all over talking like this that's fair yeah i like to use my hands and express myself and and i also think that i i yell too much so i feel like the mic could be on the other side of the room and we'd be okay no i think you're good but these mics too these mics are uh you have to get right into them gotcha gotcha uh so um yeah they created xrp out of thin air uh so they had a monopoly on the creation of xrp right it's not like anyone can come in and be like oh no i i'm gonna be creating xrp on this on this same ledger right in this obviously they can come in and be

like stellar and create a new ledger but on the same ledger is kind of the key there is are you giving yourself a monopoly privilege on this ledger it's not illegal to do that i'm just saying that i think it's unethical uh because you are essentially creating a very centralized distribution structure and there's attendant problems to that but it's also just like um unethical prima facie because you're giving yourself a privilege and holding yourself as being more important than other people. Yeah, I would agree. It's, yeah, Instamind, $100 billion.

Kept about 70% to 80% of the supply, I believe. I've since sold some off. One of their founders, Jed McCaleb, went and started Stellar, as you mentioned. On to the next game for some of them. Ripple in particular, like I said, I'm not really worried about it. I think it's a very stupid and obviously stupid project for reasons you just laid out for us.

but it is uh i think these ethical boundaries are important to set and i would i think we wholeheartedly agree with the ethics of the scenery and i think that's why i think you're you're touching on a on a underlying sort of thing that drives my hatred not hatred i shouldn't say hatred but drives my disdain for like all coin projects i think it is unethical to a certain extent um yeah that's my little yeah because uh one of the counter arguments is always someone saying well look the developers deserve to be compensated for the time that they put into you know developing the software um and i i would really push back on that strongly because in my mind like um someone who creates something that's uh like a good or service for the marketplace

that people other other people find valuable um and other people are willing to pay for to pay for like receives money i i don't know that they deserve that money or not like i there's no there's no straight line in my book between you did work thus you deserve money or even you got paid thus you deserved that money like it's not clear to me that you like you received that money i'll grant you that i don't know right off the bat if you deserved it or not like that's a very different question yeah no exactly and you have to think like zcash with like a 25 of their block reward for the first two years goes straight to their development fund it's like do you really need that i mean bitcoin's gotten this far without a development fund

so that's yeah and i almost feel like that's a that's a separate question in terms of uh governance because it's like all right the big g word yeah the big g word um oh but the other thing i wanted to mention is that i don't think that a coin having unethical seniorage is a a uh a crippling death knell for that coin and i don't think that it's like the reason that coin is going to fail is because they have an unfair distribution or they are engaging in unethical money production i don't think that at all i think that like perhaps long term some of the most successful coins will be ones that even its proponents admit was like deeply unfair right and um so i don't think i don't see that as like a disqualifier uh what i see it is is like me subjectively like i i think

it's unethical and i i don't see any reason why i should participate like i already have a fantastic system called bitcoin that i can participate in and have no ethical qualms about now other people have ethical qualms about bitcoin right they think that for example the energy consumption is contributing to uh you know boiling the oceans we had uh we had a big uh mainstream media onslaught with the boiling the oceans today look the ocean the oceans are boiling and every time the price goes up we see more evaporation and uh arguably that's a bad thing right like uh but so they they have environmental concerns or or they think that like bitcoin's distribution is is unfair and that uh any money creation at all that's not governed by a nation-state democratic process is unfair

uh and they see this as like a giant multi-level marketing ponzi scheme and like i think that's preston bairn's uh point of view on on bitcoin uh and thus you know i i don't want to speak to his point of view uh more because i i don't know more about it but um someone could decide to not participate based on either their environmental or distribution concerns uh and and that's fine like and so like i i would analogize that to why i choose not to participate in like even for short term trading uh even like i i already had a spiel about how i find short-term trading to be disreputable but um the uh i wouldn't participate in like buying xrp or buying uh uh or uh ethereum i was gonna say equity in ethereum a little 40 and so like ethereum they they had their

pre-sale that was an exclusive monopoly held by the ethereum foundation and they took in hard currency called bitcoin uh in exchange for 18 million worth yeah yeah which today is like peanuts it's nothing peanuts five dollars um and so that's now it's like uh people are raising 200 million 1 billion 3 billion i don't i don't how much of the us do like apparently 5 billion but somebody uh actually i just gotta dive into this article i have it on my open tab somebody dove into the analytics of the crowd sell which went on for a year had many different tranches and uh they're pretty confident that there are funds being uh laundered and recycled and uh through that crowd sell in particular yeah i mean why not right like then someone made a lot of

money right yeah and so like uh you know same thing like uh i highly you know highly unethical seniorage and the other thing too like if someone uh is involved with an ico project like i don't want to be associated with them it's not even that like i think that they're going to go to jail maybe they are maybe they aren't um it's just it's like look there's lots of people i can hang out with that are have never been associated with any icos at all and on top of that i don't have the time to see all the people who i respect and have not been associated with icos so why would i ever associate with you or you know like go grab dinner with you like that's absurd yeah uh not the type of people i want to uh associate with either uh try to keep the ic overs off off the show yeah

and it's funny i started a uh meet up here in new york called nyc bitcoiners i'm sorry i haven't made it to the first two yeah no that's fine that's fine uh there's another one next weekend next week yeah uh i don't think i'll be able to make it well that's that's where i have to step up that's why i am the co-organizer yes uh so i i uh tad marty on the shoulder to be the co-organizer so that when i'm out of town now i i won't be out of town i just uh i need to see if i can line up the babysitting with grandparents it's uh it's a great uh great problem to have uh and it's great that your in-laws are are close to watch the baby that's why like we might move back to philly just for that that reason it's a blessing it's definitely a blessing yeah um not that i have

any kids on the way yet it's definitely the conversation yeah yeah we can have that offline do you recommend it all right i'm not gonna make you talk about your son yeah um no i yeah i i highly recommend uh becoming a parent uh assuming that you find a partner who is uh really you know fits you really well and you see yourself staying with for the next 50 to 60 years is well you know the other thing too is like maybe we're gonna live a lot longer than that uh so maybe it's getting only more important that you find the right partner because do you want to be getting divorced when you're 170 years old probably not i don't know i don't i don't know what it's gonna be like we're gonna have to make like mccall's and find a lover

forever yeah lower your time preference way more than you would if you were going to live to lady pierre you know they say the first person to ever live to be 200 has already been born wow that's deep yeah and they're already walking around on this earth so yeah could be us could be you and then it's going to be weird to like meet your great great great great great great great grandchildren right like that's that's going to be and and there's going to be like a hundred you know plus of them like optimistically if everything works out well right um and that would be a just i can imagine like the the business of doing massive family parties is going to be thriving wow talk about a get it on the ground floor investment uh any ideas around that particular

idea alone could be could be a good time to start that business uh i i got late lots of great multi-century business ideas so or dyson spheres involved well if we want to get cosmic right like so something that i think everyone should be doing is is buying uh land that is about like two hours outside of major metropolitan areas i think that on a relative basis those plots of land are going to go up in value due to driverless cars you'll have people commuting into work and they'll be working while commuting so then like meetings will be from you know 11 a.m till 4 p.m and then they they would be commuting back and working i really like that yeah i like that theory yeah um oh and then the other thing too the other ground floor investment to get into

is autonomous rvs so build us like you know a very high-end multi-million dollar rv that you can rent by the day uh and you can you know go across the country with your kids uh on a an adventure where you can be working while you're driving too or while you're not driving uh yeah i think that's that's the future is nomadic lifestyles i like that a lot uh also if you can get like access to options on black market organ transactions if autonomous vehicles do become a thing and a reality uh there's gonna be a big shortage of organ donations uh because a lot of what drives those is car accidents that's true though i mean not to get too morbid but there will be situations where your driverless vehicle gets hijacked by a crypto locker type

virus except of instead of encrypting your hard drive it will lock the doors and drive you to a underground hospital that will extract your organs while you're still alive so i don't think that like that's going away completely uh it's just it's yeah not to be too morbid because like hopefully maybe they'll they'll uh maybe they'll ransom you you know they're like all right we're about to extract your left kidney how much is it worth or you can pay us 50 satoshis oh that's a bargain well this is a yes no it's not actually it's very expensive so i just doxed myself better not be a no-coiner uh no that's sorry that's a very dystopian vision uh believe me we're gonna have driverless vehicles that are uh not getting hacked like

that we're gonna have the best cyber security the best the greatest uh that was a funny little uh tangent there it is crazy to think about those thought experiments though like if the hyperloop or like autonomous vehicles become like huge i've been thinking about this like i would commute here i would commute here from philly like i want to move to philly but there's just too much going on in new york city i what i want to see is driverless electric cars going into elon musk tunnel system and so in manhattan basically what we would do is we would take all the streets and we would strip them and plant uh a massive garden and so every single area where there was a street before in manhattan would have the equivalent of central park and then all

of the driverless cars would be driving underground in these massive tunnel system with elevators up to garages that you know and then like basically you would have uh valet service without valets and it would be you know less expensive than the subway probably to uh be transported on the system that's my vision for the future of new york would there be roaming cattle at all in this new grassland i don't know about roaming cattle because roaming cattle could trample small uh domesticated animals as well as human beings so we wouldn't want that liability but we could have like uh maybe sheep or uh maybe genetically modified miniature cattle i like the sound of this that have been like tamed so they uh they would be very uh just straight veal now it's the veal market the only

yeah how would we stop people from hunting these down maybe if we uh have enough of them coming off the uh supply chain then we could outnumber the number of poachers this would be uh this would be good uh revelation if that turned out to be true but as we're as we're finding out it's nobody really wants to step up you know that's why the poachers come in and then people have to pay like fifty thousand dollars to go hunt wild animals and in africa yeah yeah for sure um and actually i i do think that uh i so me personally i will confess i've never been hunting before and it is like a lifelong dream to go hunting um and i don't i don't want to go to hunting where it's like hey uh we put this um feeder for deer and we're gonna wait for them to come and we're gonna sit

in this blind and we're gonna like shoot it at you know 20 yards away that that to me is like the least interesting form of hunting you want you want to lay on a hill for hours just waiting for something to well first of all be hiking for days yes and then with a go tena and nothing else a go tena and a cell phone with no service if that you know like also maybe like with a few buddies and and some beers we should make this happen one day i actually want to do this a lot too yeah that that would be fantastic uh so that's one approach is kind of going really in the backwoods uh and and trying to find like the that one sheep that you're looking for uh not packing any food you're fasting the entire time and you gotta you gotta find something to eat uh so that

appeals to me or the diametric opposite which is having an assault rifle and be hanging out of a helicopter and shooting at wild boars yes this happens in texas right yeah it happens all the time uh it is like shooting fish in the barrel it's also like a necessity because they're pests uh and you're an helicopter with a it's all right it's pretty dope yeah there's actually videos of ted nugent doing that if you if you want to look them up uh i might have seen them that is like a crazy way to go hunting though actually it's a problem in south carolina too i've got family down in south carolina i have farms and uh they actually just so happen to have a couple helicopters too i have seen them hunting for wild boar in south carolina as well

they are pests they eat your crops and dig holes all throughout your land now maybe like when when the federal government is strapped for cash due to running too high of deficits as we described earlier they'll have to sell some military assets and we could use a real like assault helicopter to to take on these wild boars with with missiles and what a gatling gun and whatnot don't we want to eat the meat though no no this is this is just for cleaning up i you know okay okay you have like coyotes to come and eat the meat and vultures yeah it's not like you're you're uh you're not nuking the place and making it uninhabitable you're you're accelerating nature's process yeah that is crazy how weird things like animals dropped

into new landscapes can fuck up an ecosystem have you ever seen the infamous youtube video the wolves coming into yellowstone being like reintroduced to yellowstone they changed the physical landscape yeah um no it's crazy so that that's the other thing about the driverless rv that way you can do not only every national park in the united states but in canada and in mexico And eventually what we'll have is a highway that goes across Panama and into South America so that we'll be able to have driverless RVs taking us throughout the American heavens here. That would be incredible. Imagine going from the Rockies to Patagonia.

That would be awesome. I wonder if you could create a cruise ship that is meant for RVs and you like somehow strap them down and they're integrated into the cruise ship like where your cabin would be and it's like an aircraft carrier you know it's like dropping off rvs yeah uh and it's just traveling around uh wherever uh people's whims are uh and you have uh nice restaurants of course and whatnot i want to pass on the cruise i'm a big cruise guy i would hate to get stuck my parents are violently anti-cruise uh because basically they they're sailors their background is sailing they've always lived around the ocean and so that for them cruising is getting onto a

sailboat with you know your immediate family and uh just sailing around the ocean like most normies would be appalled by the idea of having to hang out with your family for that long well hanging out with your family for that long uh being on a ship by yourself without any land in sight for you know extended periods of time is like terrifying for a lot of people because it's like yeah you're in you maybe you have a satellite phone you've lost your attachment to reality potentially you don't know you don't know until you see that land again yeah you don't know you know you know who does this a lot a good friend of ours bitcoin sign guy big sailor as well really yeah yeah yeah i i maybe we should do a bitcoin sailing cruise not like a cruise ship

you know but like a sailboat i'd be down yeah that'd be fun i think bitcoin sang i can actually make that happen so my my parents are against uh big motorized cruise boats with thousands of people because to them you should be on a sailboat a little sailboat yeah i'm opposed to them because i just don't want to get a viral disease yeah there's there's that for sure i've never been on one i i do find the idea appealing because i just i i love the ocean and but i also like creature comforts you know like uh creature comforts never heard that one before you know like a a bed with a memory foam mattress i guess you could put that on the sailboat why not yeah you definitely could you build that up you know i think the the problem in my case would be

persuading my wife that this is an okay idea uh she's she doesn't like getting on a sailboat on a lake much less the ocean on a lake yeah yeah yeah you're gonna have trouble there but you know what i think that it would introduce a great opportunity just to hang out the guys and to uh talk bitcoin all day all day long so yeah just move our conversations from twitter into the ocean yeah yeah exactly in international waters not that we're doing anything at all that would require international waters but hypothetically speaking we could do yeah we do some high stakes gambling on the sea with bitcoin can you use is it is it copacetic to use um bitmex when you're in international waters right because you can't use it when you're in the u.s technically uh i think

you might be good um maybe you need like an address abroad so just make sure you bring your go tana use uh use use tor he's a vpn you'll be good you know uh just make sure you don't have us ip address something that's going to be interesting that i think that people haven't really thought about enough yet is uh with with amazon but really with any sort of physical delivery service uh thanks to quadcopter drone type things they're going to be able to deliver packages at gps coordinates rather than addresses and so it'll be pretty trivial to be in international waters and and and not just like packages but like you're seeing these quadcopters that you can fit a human into are we creating a true sea stead on the sea yeah it's going to become pretty

trivial to have a de facto sea stead like it's not going to be like a an oil rig platform type setup right off the bat but you could have like a few boats that are hooked up in the general same area and that are receiving shipments you know they're they're paying with the lightning network to uh receive something from from amazon or whatever it could be food you know or or uh it could be a laptop or anything in between it could be full nodes anything you know uh now i love these these future tangents it's uh well i i come on your podcast to do future tangents let's not ourselves like the drones scare the shit out of me though because have you seen like skydio the one that can follow you uh that's not that's actually not what scares the shit out of me

about drones what what scares the shit out of me uh i i built my own drone from um from parts okay and uh what scares the shit out of me about drones is i'm falling out of the sky and uh giving you a very deep cut because those motors are extremely powerful and they will gash you because the the the blades are sharp and uh the more powerful the drone the bigger the gash uh so i i would be afraid of like and and the hardware is very hard to do like creating a reliable hardware product is way more difficult than creating a reliable software product because uh hardware today with like a drone is software plus hardware so already you have all the problems associated with reliable software and then you're layering on top of that the problems of unreliable

hardware the environment that you're operating in you know like uh the salty sea air of uh you know your your boat delivery system uh let's say the drone gets there and for whatever reason goes on the fritz and uh crashes onto your boat while you're sun tanning uh what a terrible first world problem to be having right there you are enjoying your beer and this drone was bringing you more beer and it crashes into you like that's uh it's a disaster and it ruins your virality for the rest of your life yeah it actually it's a buzzkill had a former co-worker of mine uh handsome hank at barstool sports he actually lost the tip of his finger with a drone he was uh he was doing a drone shot and went to go catch it and cut off the tip of his finger so it's a real danger

I think the friendly drones are a bigger risk than enemy drones. Now, that said, I have another business idea if anyone listening is interested in far-fetched business ideas. I'm listening and I'm interested. All right, so malicious drones that are... So basically, you're out on your boat and you know... Amazon is telling you about the drone that they're sending you. So you know to expect it and you're not afraid of it

and you're not going to deploy countermeasures. Now, let's say an unidentified drone enters your airspace and you do need to deploy countermeasures. I think that a good system that would have good value would be a platform that you can install any sort of gun on, right? And I think that the ideal form of gun to install on your platform would be like a tactical shotgun. and basically it would be motorized

and be using your radar essentially to identify the unwanted drone entering your airspace, would target it, and then blast it out of the sky in an automated manner so that, you know, it's like four in the morning, this drone is coming to kill you or to steal your Trezor hardware wallet, your automated defense system would blast it out of the sky.

I love the sound of that. And that seems like how the game theory is going to play out. If these malicious drones are enabled, the use case is enabled, people are going to have to build these security systems. Have you seen the videos of drones dropping bombs in Afghanistan? Yeah. These are operated by terrorist groups who are completely outside of the law, and they're dropping legit bombs onto American and Afghan and Iraqi bases.

And I think it's only a matter of time Before we start seeing that happen With like, okay, today The random nutjob is Using an assault rifle as his most Powerful weapon to kill innocent civilians I don't want to Give anyone ideas, but

I could see in the future that Being drones, and then it's like We've got to have ways of Stopping them Effectively, and so I hope that someone takes up my automated shotgun sentry gun uh seriously and uh does a demo for me i'd be i i'll fly the drone and you shoot it out of the sky that'd be fun actually you know this would be a good um sorry

this is another idea i love pierre's ideas yeah so we're saying this in jest but this legit scares the shit out of me well yeah no it does as well but i i think i think that frankly i i think we've got enough like good people who are not trying to promise that we'll be okay like and you know it's the same thing with when you're driving your car like your car is a very dangerous weapon we have seen people use cars as weapons to kill other people we've deployed countermeasures with barriers that you know block cars but when you're driving on the streets like you have oncoming traffic sometimes at like 60 70 miles per hour on a back road that uh they could swerve into your lane stupidly drunkenly deliberately uh and kill you so like we're constantly trusting

our fellow human to do the right thing and that's a very good point uh cars are two-ton weapons that that uh they do cause i'm pretty optimistic like i think like 99.99 percent of humans are uh they're in the game to improve their lot in life not to suicide kill themselves into you or to like for the fun of it harm you or injure you like i think most people are just responding to incentives to improve their life i would agree i like that you just uh made me less scared than i was 45 seconds ago yeah that's fine uh i usually charge for this kind of therapy this cognitive behavioral therapy uh i'll give you a free session we'll have to open up a lightning i'm trying to reduce your anxiety no okay here's my other business idea though uh maybe it'll

increase your anxiety um so so today like uh we were talking about hunting and hunting wild animals now there's a certain subsect of our uh of the bitcoin cult that is vegan yes there is and it would be a bummer if like we're like oh guys we're going hunting sorry mackerel you can't come because you're vegan right like that would that'd be a bummer because we want to like matt's an interesting guy and he's funny and smart and yeah we want to have him along for the ride so we don't go

hunt animals we go hunt drones I like this right alright so you got like multiple scenarios I think the one interesting one would be like essentially you're trying to recreate a first person shooter except that it's

drones popping out of nowhere and you got to shoot him down with your shotgun or with your assault rifle or whatever it may be um you know whether you're in the back of a humvee being driven around with a 50 caliber machine gun and you're shooting down drones or you're you're flying in a helicopter and drones are coming at you like and it's all pre-programmed you know like west world style uh but and eventually it will be west world where like you think you're shooting it so i don't know if people want to do that that's actually a tangent i want to go on i think a lot of people are worried about like uh virtual reality and us

getting stuck in virtual reality i think it's going to be much more like westworld yeah and and i think it's awesome like i actually i don't like the idea of wearing a virtual reality headset and and doing stuff in virtual reality i love the idea of doing it in the real world where it is simulated by robotics rather than by that's another question i have they're like fucking boston dynamics why are they making all these robots in like human and animal form like shouldn't robots have more ergonomic uh forms I and it's been my general frustration also like even with like Roombas like why has Roomba why is Roomba the same it was like years ago right to me Roomba should have branched out by now to where basically it's like robot as a service and it comes to your

house and you pay like five dollars a month and it vacuums your house and then also my my here's another business idea okay automated trash robots that go out into the streets and pick up all the trash in new york city oh my god the sanitation department would be so much better yeah by an army of robots that go out at 4 a.m and when you wake up and go out in the street it is literally spotless you know like there's not a piece of stuck gum to the pavement this might be it's all been power washed it's all been it cleaned up i mean that's the way it is in europe if you go like you're walking around streets of spain sevilla at like 4 a.m it's like oh i mean it's all human driven but they're cleaning at like 4 a.m this should be this should be done in new york city

you can get it to a you know a very deep cleaning uh detailed level uh by automating it at a very reasonable cost uh and then you would have this in every city and i i think that's like the future of cities is that they're going to be very nice places to be uh do we have the mental fortitude to get us to that scenario i don't know if we do i don't know people are people are all focused on stupid shit yeah so uh i was actually what i wanted to say is that everyone's focused on virtual reality what they should be focused on is computer vision and using machine learning algorithms so that computers can see into the real world rather than us seeing into the computer world i really like that framing yeah what what uh what do you think like what's the difference

between the two and what are the perceived benefits of choosing one over the other it's do we want to escape to a fake reality online or do we want to improve our real reality by using robotics and software and electricity and we have these like building blocks uh and i think that like we're under utilizing them so now i say that and yet like we're at the cutting edge with autonomous vehicles using computer vision in order to navigate the streets and so once we have that building block done and that's mature then you can have things like automated trash pickup in the streets right because you've you've already solved the moving people around which is arguably like the lowest hanging fruit but also like the most economically beneficial fruit because

now you've dramatically reduced the cost of transportation for individuals yeah no it's sounds like a very natural progression let's hope it comes to fruition especially the goddamn trash in new york city it's so bad it's disgusting it stinks the city literally stinks especially in the summer that's why i go to south jersey to get away from the smell it does and you can even take it to another level right of like why not have robots repairing the streets why why not have robots repairing the pierre we need dominoes to repair the streets for us now yeah exactly uh sidewalks uh subway infrastructure like all of this stuff could be dramatically uh upgraded on a continuous basis if all of these systems were essentially digitized and automated

uh using a combination of robotics and software yeah what's do you think we'll ever get there you think uh we're getting there uh yeah we'll we'll definitely get there for sure um i think that because we're already getting there with driverless cars yeah uh and they're they're currently doing like a pilot project in like tucson arizona or something where it's like um uber except it's driverless right uh so it's it's maturing we'll get there when i don't know it's kind of like asking like hey when's bitcoin gonna take over like uh sooner than you expect and later than you expect that's how i think that's the problem with like exponential curves it's like you never they're hard to gauge like estimate where you are yeah well speaking of uh

driving bitcoin adoption and making bitcoin ubiquitous uh to get back on bitcoin topic i think what you're building with the lightning plug-in on excel is a good step in making bitcoin more ubiquitous let's jump into it what are you building yeah it seems fascinating so i'm a i'm an i'm an ignorant i'm ignorant when it comes to lightning network you said you were pretty ignorant uh recently as well yeah i've been able to build this for sure um so just to put it into context like to me the the bitcoin network itself and it's complicated because we use the word bitcoin to refer to so many different things yeah uh so we have like the bitcoin peer-to-peer network we have bitcoin the monetary unit we have the bitcoin consensus

rules uh we have uh bitcoin light clients and bitcoin full nodes uh we have bitcoin miners uh we have um like the bitcoin system broadly speaking so uh i'll try to be more specific than just saying bitcoin but uh if i do i i hope people will deduce what what part of bitcoin i'm talking about um i wish we had different words for all these different things like that like satoshi should not have called or i don't know i don't know that satoshi even started calling the unit bitcoin himself i'd like to look at the how did i get the btc ticker i think that i don't know but i think the satoshi only in the source code refers to them as coins uh i'm not positive you would know more than me with yeah with the complete satoshi on your beautiful website the variables

are called like max coins yeah yeah and yes i actually do believe that as well i i'd have to i'd have to go digging around and get up to really confirm it but definitely coins is a often used term for the utxo set basically um and or the unit of what an output uh has um and anyway uh so we have this monetary system of bitcoin that is like the money and then we have the final settlement layer that's like on-chain bitcoin and that is globally broadcasted globally verified by all of the nodes on the network uh and they make sure that all those blocks and transactions are valid and they make sure that the proof of work that miners are providing uh in order to um you know provide transaction ordering uh is valid uh and they

they they define what what bitcoin is like as as a uh network of nodes um you know obviously i wrote that like governance uh article and we can get into all the nuances of that but i just want to set that aside say on top of this system go ahead i was gonna say i do want to touch on that article after this okay uh so on top of the bitcoin system we have a new system and uh this system is actually deeply anchored in the bitcoin system and i think that's like a misconception that people have about lightning is that they they they like separate it too much from bitcoin because it has a different name but ultimately like uh lightning transactions are anchored in real bitcoin transactions that are recorded on the bitcoin blockchain and the lightning network

relies on features of the underlying bitcoin or sorry the lightning network uh relies on bitcoin features like uh uh check sequence verify um and like cltv and like locking up coins for a period to time from using the proof of work timestamping slash proof of publication system that Bitcoin provides and using the same unit of value as well of Satoshi's of Bitcoins of coins as Satoshi would call it. So this layer two is fundamentally different from layer one because on layer one on-chain bitcoin you pay per piece of data that you use per byte and that means that like a payment of twenty dollars worth of bitcoin might take up as much probably like all lsql would take up as much space on the blockchain as a payment of 200 million dollars and so they would pay the same

transaction fee so that's that's how lightning works or sorry that's how bitcoin on-chain works um and then uh and the reason that is is because the block size limit is limited or the block sorry let me be very precise the block weight limit exists yes um and it's uh four million weight units in the past i've said eight million but that was just because i was brainwashed by jeff garzik to believe that segway 2x happened off by one yeah so i was off by four million uh the weight limit is uh four million units anyways uh practically speaking that's like a two megabyte block uh every 10 minutes and so we have to um or the miners essentially charge by how much a transaction is uh going to pay

what does satoshi say it would be like 80 bytes for for a block with no transactions or something that at a base layer oh yeah i'm not sure that's an interesting question if you have an empty block how big is it it was like 80 bytes i don't know why yeah yeah no that's that that's plausible yeah it's it's a very it's a very compact system um and it's a bitcoin's a very highly optimized system i think that people don't give it enough credit in that regard i think people totally totally misconstrue bitcoin as an inefficient system when it's very efficient in ways that people don't really realize yeah and uh they think it's inefficient because they're just like looking at the proof of work part but like also like that's very efficient as well um

anyway uh so uh where where where was i i forget now i rudely interrupted you you pay per a data on the on-chain network on the bitcoin or on the lightning network you actually pay by the amount of value that you're transferring because as you consume the resource you're consuming on the lightning network is a channel capacity uh due to the fact that you're routing payments through other people who are opening and closing channels uh to enable this routing and so by consuming channel capacity uh you are it's like uh it's like consuming liquidity so you're paying by the amount of value that you're transferring so at some point like there there's an equilibrium point between all right i'm sending five dollars worth of bitcoins so i'm going to use lightning

or i'm sending 200 million dollars worth of bitcoin so i'm going to use on chain and between those two extremes there's a midpoint that like might be very close to five dollars or not i i'd have to do the math today and that's obvious that that midpoint is or that that like median point sort of fluctuates throughout time yeah and it's it's going to evolve as usage of on-chain and of uh lightning evolves um but basically that's the trade-off between the two systems is that one you're paying by the amount of value and which is lightning and on on-chain bitcoin you're paying by uh the amount of data um and now obviously like to open a channel you have to do on chain so like there's this very interesting like uh arbitrage equation and

equilibrium equation between all of these different uh trade-offs yeah these trade-offs and i think that these two systems these two layers are going to turn out to be very complementary in that regard i really like that yeah figure out an arping strategy for when people are going to choose when does it make more sense to send on chain versus off chain uh and so the this is something that like sophisticated users of the bitcoin network are going to want to familiarize themselves with and these are the same people who were like uh you know quick to adopt segway and who understand the importance of batching and um so they're they're looking for ways to optimize because uh frankly like we're with the next bull market i

think that we're going to forever have fee pressure and we're forever going to have a mempool that has a backlog and fees today are a nickel in u.s dollars but and frankly like it can be even less uh i've seen things go through that are penny in u.s dollars um but blocks are almost full so you're really like uh consuming the last marginal amount of uh low cost capacity on the bitcoin network and i think that with the next bull market like blocks are always going to be full and we're always going to have a mempool backlog and that's just going to fundamentally change people's mindset and uh it's going to incentivize usage of lightning although like i would rather people be incentivized to use lightning for good reasons rather than

that the fees are too high yeah um but i think we'll have both we'll have both yeah yeah there'll That's what I'm most interested to see is the UX of lightning adoption and how easy it is for people to make those trade-offs. Maybe they won't be made if the barrier to entry to the lightning network for your typical user is too high from a technical perspective. Yeah, for sure. So where we are at today is still very early, I think, in terms of the infrastructure that's being built on lightning.

so the the protocol layer of lightning so we got a thing this is actually this is very like technical but you have like the bitcoin peer-to-peer network protocol and then you have the lightning peer-to-peer network so you if you want to be on lightning network today generally you run a bitcoin node that is on the bitcoin peer-to-peer network and that node is feeding data to your lightning node and your lightning node is on the lightning peer-to-peer network and so it is receiving information from both your bitcoin node and from other lightning nodes on the network and basically you know everyone's using the bitcoin peer-to-peer network as the source of final settlement and the way that you open channels in the lightning network um yeah yeah

no go oh so uh the that that layer is reaching a certain level of maturity right so uh the lightning network went on mainnet uh earlier this year and yes it's still possible to lose funds if you're a little reckless on on mainnet with lightning but it has significantly solidified and now really it's about creating tools for example for automatically opening and closing channels uh and so that you are maximizing the chance of your payment being routed correctly through the lightning network and that's actually one of the disadvantages of lightning is that if you want to send five dollars from pierre to marty there has to be either a channel that is directly connecting our two nodes or a series of channels that are that have enough capacity

to route our payment from me to you and so that that i think requires like a certain level of maturity on the network level of participants who are online 24 7 routing payments uh opening and closing channels in a curated manner so that they're not unnecessarily tying up capital in unused channels and also they're not uh missing opportunities to route payments because they didn't have a channel open so like that aspect of it that's where we're at is that level of maturing uh and then once it's really no issue where you open up a lightning node and uh you're on your ios device and you you don't even know the channels exist because they are being opened enclosed in the background for you to maximize the probability of successfully routing a payment

and frankly like you could reach like 99.99 percent of payments getting routed through like i don't think that we'll we'll uh have to settle for having a system that is unreliable like i think that the routing lightning payments is going to become very reliable uh as the system evolves even though it's unreliable today if you're not manually opening and closing the right channels. Yeah, that's the thing today. You have to be very selective with who you connect with. And so is this UX going to get better,

like where you spin up a node and it'll just automatically, there'll be like a drop-down bar like, hey, are you okay with connecting with these nodes? If yes, click and then we'll connect you. Ideally, you would be agnostic as to whether you're okay with connecting to a node or not. yeah it's just uh so this feature in lnd is called autopilot and basically like they created like the minimum viable product for this so it's like it's it's been surprising to me that it has

worked for me to route payments not 100 of the time but um well enough to where i actually was not manually managing uh channels um but uh eventually it'll be fine-tuned whether it's like with machine learning or just like intelligent heuristics uh to uh route much more reliably and then as as the end user who's using like a mobile wallet what what you'll want to pay attention to is like if i want to cash out and transfer my coins to my cold storage um that will require me to close channels and you want to close them in an orderly manner uh because if you don't then you're gonna have to wait longer so the metric that you're going to want to focus on as an end user who is who is desiring to cash out and to transfer your

and like i i kind of see it as like that's a use case of like a merchant who's receiving a lot of lighting payments and then wants to like pay the bills yeah pay the bills like send bitcoins to an exchange or something yeah and so they want to like close channels um there you want to be connected to routing nodes that are online so that they can cooperatively close a channel so that you know it's basically as fast as it would be sending a transfer on bitcoin otherwise your coins can be locked up to like weeks at a time uh because if in the case of an uncooperative close where basically you're unilaterally closing the channel um and that's that's where like as an end user it would be frustrating if you had funds that were locked up because you got into an

uncooperative close on a channel yeah and figuring out the ux around that like hopefully um routing nodes are on 24 7 and it's always cooperative close for end users and so they don't really see a problem there but what's the incentive for somebody not to cooperate other than pure maliciousness uh there's no incentive for it other well it's like uh you know your your node crashed and then it was offline for a few days because like you didn't get around to turning it back on like yeah that's that's not a good scenario so like ideally you would have routing nodes that are run as routing nodes because they are a profitably uh you know rewarding their their operator yeah yeah yeah that makes sense but these are like interesting hurdles that we

have to overcome but it's been amazingly incredible to me to see the the pace of growth that has happened like lightning qual and i dropped a podcast last tuesday uh we talked about building proof of concepts of using lightning network to reward players and video games might not be the best use case but somebody built a proof of concept within 24 hours i i think it's a great use case and we're you know i think that there's there's kind of uh two areas do you mind if we pause for a second no go for it albano okay i'm gonna pause here for a minute and we were talking about lightning koalas app we were talking about lightning koala uh not like koala lightning the game concept in particular right uh so i think that there's going to be like applications that

uniquely enabled by lightning and not not uniquely enabled okay so yes that's going to be a category and i would argue that like satoshi's place isn't really in that category in the sense that hypothetically you could have had people paying with a credit card yes um but i think that there are going to be applications where it's like no this is actually only possible in the lightning hour and we haven't i haven't seen that yet i think it's possible and it's just due to a lack of imagination or i haven't heard about it yet or something it hasn't been broadcasted but um something that's like quote-unquote decentralized in the sense that it's uh it's it's lightning native it's not like a website you go to and pay for something with lightning um but that aside

like i i don't think that's that's like gonna drive lightning adoption uh no but it's an interesting thing to think about um then there are applications that are online goods and services where yeah you now you don't need to have like some crazy banking relationship or stripe or uh you know some kind of like credit card stuff it's like maybe you're selling digital assets That's because you are a video game designer, you know, in Egypt and you want to get hard currency and getting paid in Lightning payments is better than Bitcoin for all the reasons that Lightning is better than Bitcoin. So that's one category.

And then like the final one is just like buying your coffee at Starbucks. Like that's yeah, there's no. It makes sense. Huh? it makes sense to use lightning over the bitcoin protocol for that yeah no but like i just mean that the advantage with this scenario where people are online and it's permissionless is that they weren't able to use visa you know like yeah but for coffee payments it's like all right now now it's really like let's dig deep into why lightning is a good use case here and i actually think that

it is a good use case for people who uh essentially got rich off of bitcoin and now are spending bitcoin day-to-day because uh it's more convenient than having to go on an exchange and sell it for fiat and then you pay your credit card bill yeah no it's uh that's actually an interest yeah no that's like a very small demographic and i wish i was in that demographic how do you think how do you think lightning plays into bitcoin's monetization path because right we're probably between collectible and store value right now if we follow this i i reject that path do you i i find yeah they're completely objectionable even though i'm not like i'm not on twitter like trolling people like nick saveau or um vijay about it because i i love them to death and it's not

it's not even something like i want to like really argue about because i don't think it's important at all in the grand scheme of things you think it's all encompassing at once yeah yeah i do I think that an asset acquires moneyness as a whole. So store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange are all evolving in lockstep simultaneously. And to single one out in particular is either an abuse of language. It's like we're taking the word store of value in a meaning that i don't think is really true to the monetary economics of it and the other thing

too is that like you can't surgically separate one property of money from the other properties i think that like those three properties are like you know people touching the elephant uh different people watching touching the elephant saying it's a different animal yeah it's like a proverb or some stupid thing but basically like yeah oh we're talking about a monetary good and all encompassing yeah yeah so let me be more clear about that for example um it's like oh well nobody is using bitcoins as a unit of account today because it's not um stable in value and so like economic calculation if you're running a lemonade stand is kind of absurd you know because you bought your lemonade for some amount of bitcoins and then you're selling it

for a much fewer number of bitcoins because the value of bitcoins has gone up and thus you're running a loss even though it's like wait like you're this is like a strange situation that you're running a loss because you invested in lemonade instead of holding your bitcoin so um i think the fallacy there is that like okay but you got to look at how do people who are into bitcoin think about their unit of account and so you'll have bitcoiners who think about oh well is trading altcoins profitable in terms of bitcoins and you'll have bitcoiners who like oh is mining bitcoins profitable in terms of bitcoins and the other thing too is that you have bitcoiners thinking about like oh well is investing in the stock market more profitable

than investing in bitcoins like once bitcoin becomes your uh benchmark your standard of value it really is your it's all encompassing it's your unit of account like that's because that's what unit of account is it's your benchmark uh and so in that regard i think that there are people who increasingly you know think that bitcoin is going to outperform on a risk-adjusted basis like any other asset and they want it to be and not only that but they anticipate that in the future it will be their day-to-day unit of account when they're like buying groceries and so i think that you can have the discounted present value of their future unit of account usage count towards being a unit of account.

And same thing with medium of exchange and store of value. Yeah. Like you can say like, all right, Bitcoin's not a store of value day to day because like the price might drop or month to month the price is going to drop. But over five years, I consider it to be a store of value. So there's like different gradations of these. Yeah, no, I like that, and I think I agree mostly, you know, and honestly, I read about it last week in the newsletter.

I'm a big proponent of the VJ, Nick Szabo collectible store of value medium of exchange unit of account, and I don't think we disagree on much. Maybe it's just like it's more applicable for one of the four definitions at certain points of time. this and it's funny because like this is this is the sort of argument that for example like when when safety dean and i are it's like 2 a.m in in dallas and we're like seven drinks in and a steak in and we're talking about like hyper bitcoinization and stuff and it's like it's funny because people are like oh you know like bitcoin's a cult like they drink the kool-aid they've got

their hodl mantra but if if you go hang out with like with bitcoin maximalist quote unquote uh you know hardcore bitcoiners and like you're listening on the conversation you're like wow these guys actually like disagree with like what to an outsider would be like quibbling about details over like you know is is bitcoin going to completely wipe out all fiat currencies or only most fiat currencies you know like that's the debate going on and they're strong schools thought for each uh is bitcoin going to take over all monetary roles at the same time or one at a time is like the extent of the debate it's like so when people are like oh bitcoin's an echo chamber and you guys are just like repeating the same shit to each other over and over i'm like i you're not

part of the same conversations i'm a part of because there's no echoing going on in the bitcoin chamber there's a lot of back and forth over you know what arguably like minutiae but i think it's like interesting subject matter yeah we got people betting stakes on on podcast about where the price is going to be in january a lot of diverging thoughts on the the future uh adoption rate of bitcoin and price increase uh yeah and like there's very bullish bitcoin or excuse me very bearish bitcoin bulls right now and a lot of people that vehemently disagree with them um yeah so there is a diversity of school of thought within bitcoin we're not uh the crazy as crazy cultists as bad crazy yeah we're not as crazy as people think the fact that we're

betting stakes right like indicates that there's some kind of dietary issue going on and thus indicative of a cult or at least a religion should i spill the beans that you're staying over for chicken tonight uh well yes i mean i don't know about spilling the beans but chicken's fine the beans have been spilled yeah the proverbial beans i don't think there'll be any actual means with the chicken yeah i mean the only problem with chicken is it's a little lean yeah i like the way uh the head of michigan university of michigan football coach uh jim harbaugh or john john jim harbaugh yeah jim harbaugh called the chicken a scared bird it's not really good protein you shouldn't be eating it that's funny um i was adam crowell on his

podcast he was talking about how he was at a steakhouse and someone ordered a chicken breast and he was like i don't trust the guy who orders chicken breast neither do i neither do i or salmon at a steakhouse salmon yeah i i don't trust it you know it's okay to order filet mignon like uh or something you know lean piece of meat like that but the chicken to get into the scared bird territory uh and the the the scared fish territory as well it's uh questionable at a steakhouse uh speaking of scared birds we got to put that bird in the oven soon let's talk about your excel plugin we haven't even got to it yet what were you building last week man yeah so um oh yeah i was talking about the lightning network before we went on a series of wild tangents um

but yeah so if if you know i was talking about how the lightning network is basically uh excuse me i have to interject right now i just got a text message from my wife we're getting steak now not chicken wow big big upgrade this is quite an honor i shamed your wife into ordering she heard overheard our conversation marty's apartment is tapped by his wife it definitely is yeah hey honey uh well like i think oh we can talk about surveillance society but i think that we're gonna see more and more cameras around um oh yeah let's let's stick on the excel plug what did you build let's talk about that well we'll talk about we'll talk about the cameras over take yeah but basically the idea is that if the network the lightning network protocol is maturing

and it's reaching some level of stability where people are using it on mainnet there should be a client that so right now we have clients that either it's the command line interface and you're typing in things which has its strengths but people especially quote unquote non-engineer non-technical people um are kind of uh not comfortable in you don't have to quote quote us on that you just call us out for what we are yeah well i mean i think because like i i i don't like to frame it in the negative right i'd rather frame it in the positive of like business users or uh npcs pierre you're gonna get us kicked off itunes i know sorry i was literally talking about

video game npcs all right we're talking about yeah yeah lightning and video games um no uh so they they're not comfortable in the command line uh they're being offered wallets that abstract away all the complexity and that are like mobile wallets where you don't even know that you're using lightning i wanted to have something in between where basically it exposes all of the internals of lightning and of the lightning network uh while also not being command line it's a graphical user interface and doing it in an environment that is familiar to a lot of business people a lot of finance and accounting folks especially but frankly like across the business world whether it's in marketing or sales or whatever like people are used to using

spreadsheet software and Microsoft Excel in particular and so I created a Microsoft Excel plugin that comes bundled with a LND node inside of it so if an LND node is not detected or you don't configure it to connect to a pre-existing lnd node it'll spin one up for you uh and it's doing something like aws or something or no no locally locally and basically the same way that it would spin up a node if you're running a mobile wallet okay uh and lightning is meant to have a node on the wallet and so it's not like a bitcoin where you have to have like a light wallet or some kind of custodial wallet, a web wallet. It really, you know, they've made a point of making it

so that basically you open a private channel or a number of private channels. And so you're not a routing node and you can be offline for hours at a time, days at a time even, and not run a risk of loss of funds. So yeah, this is like an embedded node or you can connect to like, maybe you have a node, a persistent node that's on your BTC pay server

because you are running a merchant website that accepts Bitcoin. And then you can connect to it from Microsoft Excel and see all the payments you've received and also make outbound payments or sweep the funds into the main chain or sweep the funds to an exchange to sell for dollars. uh and so this lightning plugin is for people who are like what i call lightning power users pun intended i spent some time finding that pun but no it is so how so let's describe a power user what is a lightning power user and what benefits can they be getting out of the plugin you're making now i mean you just described the benefits but how would they use it uh on on one end of the spectrum you have someone who uh saw you know sadoshi's place and thought it was cool

and he too wanted to draw something that is not male genitals you know like something cool uh and they they don't have a lightning wallet necessarily um they work in you know in finance and marketing and some kind of business function where they use excel all day and they have windows running and they don't want to go through the trouble of like creating a bitcoin node to connect an lnd node to over the command line uh in order to run you know some kind of either command line uh wallet software or a web interface or something like that um and uh they they're they want to be on the desktop they're not on mobile because it's hard to draw on social place on mobile yeah uh and so this is an easy way for them to to to run a lightning node and to

have an interface into their lightning node uh so then they can copy paste in a payment request from satoshi's place and you know send satoshi's to just to create the drawing uh so that's kind of like the most boring user of this would use it as any other lightning wallet uh now someone who has been reading mastering bitcoin by adrian santanopoulos who's been listening to marty bentz podcast the node podcast to uh all the great content producers out there um and they've been following us on twitter and they're like they're they're into bitcoin but they don't really know how lightning works but they want to know how lightning works they want to see the nitty-gritty details of lightning they don't want to see the consumer-friendly abstracted away wallet

But they're actually, they're curious about, like, they want to be one of the first adopters. And maybe they want to, like, think about ways that they would use Lightning in a new way. And so that's kind of, like, another type of user. And then you have users who, they've got an idea for a Lightning application that they want to build. and like xl might be a good way for them to try to like experiment and prototype different things yeah no it's i mean it's like excel just from like being in finance is one of the most powerful tools and to to have bitcoin via the lightning network sort of embedded in that tool is incredible just from like concept just from uh the getting bitcoin to the masses like uh

so that's what i mean you already described why he came up with the idea like how how big of an impact do you think this could have i don't want to say for lightning adoption but just for for people yeah trying to get more involved for lightning adoption as well because like this is the kind of person that you know let's say the etf gets approved like they might just own the bitcoin etf but they they want to actually get their hands on uh something that's decentralized and being hyped up um and this would provide an outlet for them and i think that like part of the problem for business users is that they see bitcoin get hyped up and the only way to get involved seems to be to become a developer of some kind uh you know it's like then they get onto the

blockchain not bitcoin bandwagon because they're like oh wait this is a way i can contribute by like writing you know stupid white papers or creating powerpoint presentations about putting health records on the blockchain and so if they had an outlet that was like an excel plugin where they can muck around and like get absorbed by the technological fascination of something like bitcoin and the blockchain uh then maybe maybe it reduces the amount of like um weird blockchain stuff people get obsessed with we can only hope we can only hope that's that's actually anyway that was like a big tangent because i actually don't think that's like the most valuable aspect of this um i i think that there are a lot of people who have been following bitcoin

and who may bought bitcoins on coinbase and they feel like they missed out on the beginning of bitcoin and they feel like this is the beginning of another chapter in bitcoin and they want to like get involved and um that's a good hook yeah the difficulty of getting involved with lightning is that like it's like all right you know again i'm not a developer um and the other thing too is like we don't know what people are going to come up with and there's yeah it's still very early days in lightning so i see this as a way of like i'm giving you a tool that's a um a wagon that's going to let you go west i'd like that and you know it's it's like playing oregon trail i'm setting you up and it's going to be a fun adventure and i don't know what's going to come

i don't know if you're going to dive cholera along the way or you're going to drown as we try to ford a river but uh we'll try to get to san francisco no i could see uh some very like it's a very strong base layer from which building blocks can be on i'm just i have no idea if this is possible people just create function and excel sheets that every time you your node interacts with the plugin and updates a cell maybe another cell in another sheet does something automatically which sends your bitcoin maybe to cold storage automatically or at a certain threshold you get 500 000 satoshis all right send this to the main chain or something like that you could absolutely do that um i'm you know i i don't have them created yet but i know that they're they're

pretty trivial to create user defined functions um and you could even have someone creating vba macros that are interacting with the excel plugin uh because the excel plugin i wrote is in c sharp uh but end users would still be able to write vba macros that would be able to interact with that um and then the other thing is that you have uh because it's in c sharp uh with uh you know it takes a little bit of programming skill but not a huge amount you could write a complimentary excel plugin so this this complimentary excel plugin might connect to like a an api that has like uh real-time stats about sports you know and then like but they charge you money to use the api they charge you charge you lightning you know satoshi's on lightning

and and then you converse with another api that takes sports bets and you're sending them lightning payments and you're actually determining what sports bets to take by doing some analytics in your spreadsheet based on the data that you're paying for with lightning and then you're placing those bets uh you know with lightning on another service that's pretty dope yeah so i think that like i want to see like mashups like that with because that's kind of the idea behind if this than that i don't know if you've ever used that website but like combining apis in a way that allows you to create a user-defined uh useful tool yeah it's like i mean zapier on crack it sounds like zapier is a great tool yeah exactly um well thank you for building are you looking

ever help are you uh it's it's definitely like it's a pet project right now is working uh there are a number of what i view is like baseline features that need to be added before i release it publicly um and then there's there's plenty of bugs that i need to fix before embarrassing myself to the public and leaving a bad first impression um but it's it's getting ironed out and uh i i do have the time and bandwidth to well i've made the time to work on this frankly because i'm very excited about it uh and i want to continue building on it uh what i want to do is actually have it uh be behind a paywall and so to to access the software itself you gotta act become a member of a website that's you know behind a paywall i don't know i don't know what

the pricing is going to be something like 20 a month sounds about right um if you want the source code because you're a developer and you want to like contribute to it that would be a free free thing on github and you can compile it and run the plugin yourself um end users don't want to do that they just want the binary and frankly like end users are a negative externality because uh you would be doing like windows support for lightning users for like 30 years for free if i put it out as a binary for free um so i figure this is a good in between uh and then have like not not just like the software available behind a paywall but also a community of people who are like lightning power users and who are helping each other troubleshoot problems coming up with

creative ideas on how to use this software and then also like having access to me as the developer the plugin to troubleshoot problems and then the other thing that i think is missing for a lot of people who are getting onto lightning and onboarding is like a main net faucet and so i i wanted to where like if you download this plugin you're online and you have a dollar to spend on lightning network up front right away so that you can get on satoshi's place and make that drawing you wanted to make uh without the friction of having to go to a bitcoin exchange to buy bitcoin So I think that a nice perk would be access to a mainnet faucet where you can be up and running pretty quickly.

Yeah, that's a good way to subsidize paying users too. Fascinating stuff, Pierre. A lot has changed since the first time we met in the studio. You more optimistic, less optimistic? I think it's a stupid question to ask you. Yeah, I mean, probably just less optimistic just mathematically because we're on the backside of the bubble and it's always uh more price optimism on on the upside of the bubble um so but i mean that's kind

of short-term like price talk uh i'm talking like bitcoin fundamentals bitcoin fundamentals uh way more optimistic because of lightning uh troubled by the inflation bug that we had uh earlier this year talk about it why you why you troubled um shot across the bow of reality yeah it could have been a really bad outcome uh if it had been exploited for a substantial period of time and uh my hobby horse is bitcoin's monetary policy and i talk about how that monetary policy is enforced by a peer-to-peer network of nodes those nodes are running software if that software has a bug in it that accidentally does not enforce the monetary policy then we've got a a big problem a big problem uh and yeah uh the reality is that software is going to have bugs

but i've i've always been in the fortunate position of meaning about other software projects bugs and not you know my favorite ones bugs um but it's it's always good to be reminded that nothing's sacred nothing's invincible definitely definitely if that bug did anything it was a nice call to action to get more eyes on the review and testing process yep which is imperative absolutely and so like today we have uh chain code labs that is contributing a huge amount to bitcoin development and uh i think that there's room for like 20 more chain code labs right like I think it would be awesome to have multiple developers on every single square inch of the Bitcoin Core repository so that not only is all the code being thoroughly reviewed by a number of very intelligent C++ developers, but also that the code is evolving in a direction of greater maturity and greater reliability and more features. and like a a network that for example we had a segwit upgrade to to help with on-chain scaling

like we're going to need to continue to do optimizations going forward uh bitcoin's not a bitcoin base layer of on-chain transactions is not a finished product uh and i think it's premature for people to be calling for like oh you know we need to stop working on bitcoin uh and like freeze it i think that's that's uh that's not a good idea no that's ideal in the long run but definitely not right now well like for example something like snort like in the long run like we're going to want to continue to upgrade quote unquote like the uh algorithms that we use in different you know parts of bitcoin in this case it's kind of the transaction signature but or the output signature but um there'll be other things yeah um if you want to check out what's

going on the bitcoin development world go on to bitcoin axe that's a c k s dot org or dot com uh dot com i got the dot com on that because uh despite bitcoin being a hot uh you know uh keyword for domain names axe is a completely you know random for the suffix yeah set of letters even though like i think i should have paid more than ten dollars for it uh that's yeah.com this is uh another thing that pierre's done the year since we last recorded built this website bitcoin axe.com you can go and check out the development and really what it does is help developers filter the most popular pull requests and what's and see at a high level what's gotten the most uh attention yeah interest yeah and i i started on this before the inflation bug um yeah quite a few

months ago and because i already recognized that like there was kind of an issue in bitcoin core of like the difficulty of the review process and the contribution process and the friction there i think was like reducing the number of contributions that we would otherwise have and i have like a very strong web development background so i i kind of saw a niche that website that i could create which would be a layer on top of github that takes the details that are inside of pull requests and surfaces them to a top level so that a maintainer or someone who's looking for pull requests to review could uh more quickly identify candidate pull requests to focus on yeah that's it and thank you for that as well uh actually very helpful from the developers i

talked to who've used it you say it could help with like three percent of uh efficiency uh when or can create a three percent efficiency gain for these developers i think you've estimated before uh yeah so uh i think that it's ended up being more than that okay my surprise um but yeah i mean even if it's like i think if it's like a 10 increase in productivity and there's 20 contributors that means that i've added two contributors right from from from doing this and maybe that's optimistic but even if it's adding one contributor like these people have very specialized knowledge bases and any amount of uh extra work we get out of them it's like it sounds like i'm like their task master but really i mean they they they want to get more work done right like they want their

their pull requests to get merged in more quickly than they are yeah no it's uh it's beneficial all around we've uh we're above two hours here it's been a pleasure we always go long the first one three hours for uh hey we can keep going but i'm gonna lose my voice at some point i think you're gonna lose your voice and uh we gotta eat some steak yeah this is good is there a parting note you want to imbue on the freaks uh for this year anniversary of our first episode uh yeah um i i think that like if you're listening to this podcast it means that you're interested in bitcoin beyond just uh buying it on coinbase and sitting on it so i i would just encourage you to like um not not just listen to marty bentz podcast also listen to the noted podcast but definitely

also uh go read books uh whether those books are about economics you know like uh human action like some austrian economics um or on the other extreme like computer science books about like c++ or about networks or about you know all sorts of these different topics that are relevant to bitcoin or books about bitcoin whether it's bitcoin standard or um you're mastering bitcoin by andrea santanopoulos uh and like dig dig deeper and keep scratching because like this i i know firsthand that this is an onion that you can just keep peeling and it's not like you're going to read mastering bitcoin and you're going to have mastered bitcoin i'm sorry that book is has not only does it have inaccuracies in it that you know i i grant that i should be

spending time fixing them but it also has things that it's simplified and so just just keep peeling the onion and and uh learning more and i think because the more you know about bitcoin the more you start to realize areas where you might be able to contribute to bitcoin even as a non-developer so for example like maybe there's an aspect of bitcoin that just isn't well explained and a lot of people think like everything's already been explained but we still have new pieces coming out whether it's like uh dan held's pieces about bitcoin's like origin story um that have like really interesting insights in them and are synthesizing existing information in new forms um or like nick carter or uh brendan bernstein like they're they've come out with content that

um is is synthesizing things that already exist and combining it with new insights of theirs and So, like, clearly there's more proselytizing, more analysis to be done. And, yeah, that's what I would say is there's a lot to contribute to beyond the code but including the code. So maybe learn how to program as well. Like, go on Codecademy, learn some Python, and get started down that road. That's where I started five years ago. I started on Codecademy and just started learning how to do Python and then learned how to do C++.

And I've contributed very small cosmetic pull requests to Bitcoin Core. How does that feel? It feels very small and cosmetic, but really, it feels fantastic. Well, thank you for your contributions. And I would agree, yeah. I mean, I like to think what I'm doing here is one of those paths through which i can contribute to bitcoin because i'm not gonna be writing any code anytime soon um yeah i think that um and i enjoy doing this as well as like giving a platform to others

right who know more than i do and like we've had like alex bosworth on the noted podcast and he now works at lightning labs so i want to have him back on to talk about that but like he when he came on and he was talking about the lightning network i had no clue what he was saying I really didn't know what he had said. And so, like, if you go back and listen to that episode and you hear me, like, change the subject abruptly, it's because I had no clue what to, like, respond with because I was like, well, that went over my head.

I don't know how our audience is going to understand this. But now I want to go back, and now that I know a thing or two about lightning, I want to go back and listen to it again. Well, Alex, this is your calling card to get back on the Noted podcast and also an open invite to TFTC. I think I've sent that to you already.

I don't know if we've talked about it, though. Pierre, it's always a pleasure. So next year, Marty, when we do this again, I want it to be like we have a co-owned podcast studio of... I honestly would love that. The Bitcoin Podcasters Union. That would be fun. We should actually sidebar that.

I've been thinking something. All right. So my better half is not the biggest fan of turning our studio apartment into a podcasting studio. But luckily, she's not here right now. Yeah. and i actually i have to kick my wife out of our home office to whatever podcast and so i think that she probably frowns upon that as well and and also like she would frown upon me like sound

proofing the entire room because i'll have fire trucks you know fly down the streets of brooklyn and ruin a recording yeah no that's like my that's why i'm looking for other studios because the the jyz going behind me at all times like in the street i'm in now it's like yeah yeah we digress though um again thank you for helping launch this podcast and all that you've done for bitcoin uh evangelizing it building on top of it uh helping people see the light you know it's been a huge pleasure and the other thing is that like i one of my cliche sayings is like life is as hard as you make it and because like i see people making their lives like really hard around and i don't have anyone in particular in mind but um the other thing too is like life is as

much of a joy as you make it like exactly if you find something that um and people often say like oh follow your passions i'm like no like become passionate about things that you're doing i like that is is kind of the opposite like sort of opposite take out take um and yeah so so seeing seeing bitcoin grow and and seeing my son grow uh there there's parallels to that i do consider bitcoin to be a a distant maybe nephew of mine like i'm not going to claim to be like you know a founding father of bitcoin but i'm a uh yeah because i'm a newbie a newbie compared to some people well we appreciate uh all you've done as a newbie uh that's all we have this week freaks this is the end of our seven day podcasting binge uh recording binge happy to end it with you pierre

peace and love freaks