TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #54: Yassine Elmandjra

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Yassine Elmandjra, Crypto Analyst at ARK Invest, to discuss Yassine's insanely low time preference decisions post-college, Bitcoin mining, how Bitcoin changes you, and much more. Follow Yassine on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yassineARK Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent

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what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent in the relegation studio tonight i kicked out of my apartment my wife's getting ready for a party uh so i've been relegated to the second floor common studio in my apartment building uh i don't know if we're gonna have any uh surprise guests join us during this recording who knows this is a this is an open studio but if they come in here they're going to get a very nice conversation they're going to learn about bitcoin uh like to introduce you freaks to my guests i'm very excited for this conversation um this is somebody who has hopped onto my radar more recently on twitter in particular it's running very good uh analysis and coverage of the space let's introduce you freaks

to yassin almandra yassin welcome to the podcast thank you so much marty honestly uh trying to keep my cool right now oh stop it but no i mean this is first of all this is my first podcast but more than that that tftc is my first podcast you got a lot of fanboys out there and i'm one of them so it's really an honor to be here surreal to be honest stop it but uh i'm just some some nerd with a with a microphone i mean you're you're a pretty cool nerd so uh thank you i'll take that as a compliment yeah um no it's uh been sweet seeing like you jump onto the scene again more recently in the summer i didn't realize you just graduated college until minutes ago uh so you graduated college in 2018 let's drive right into your

tale how the hell did you get the bitcoin and how did you get to uh your position at ark invest uh crypto asset analyst yeah i mean well that's first of all that's the beautiful thing about twitter is that no one knows your age until they meet you and you're like wait what you're only 22 exactly so i mean for me that that's been great i i really sell that a lot i'm like i'm the young guy who's allowed to make mistakes right um and so honestly my my break into bitcoin was definitely not your typical 2012 hobbyist miner who found a satoshi white paper and a back page of the bitcoin talk forum um my break into bitcoin is actually very recent as recent as last year um uh-oh yeah so i'm a newbie so watch out whatever you read it's uh to take it with a grain of salt for sure

but it was actually so this is the end of my junior year so that's right i graduated from Penn in May of 2018 beautiful college yes and last time we spoke I I learned that you knew all all about the bars all about the bars I actually have a there's a good I have a good case to make that I should get an honorary degree from Penn because I went to DePaul University we were on trimesters we had off from Thanksgiving to New Year's and Penn was still in in session when I would be home in Philly on that break so where'd you go you went to Copa I know Copa uh blarney smokes this guy next time you're in uh the crew house shout out 208 uh you see that i don't even know the crew house oh the the the actual pen crew yeah yeah that's right that's

right so you do you have like affiliation with pen uh yeah i had really good friends who went to pen and uh i would go annoy them when when i was on break and they were still like in finals week and training for crew shout out to the pen crew team pen crew team yeah you know my freshman year uh the pen crew team would actually hand out flyers for people who were you know tall and a little bit big and like you should try out for pen crew and so a bunch of my friends uh i feel like every crew team does that that's right i bet my friends the first week they're like yeah i'm a varsity sports player they try out they realize that they have to uh go train for 5 a.m every single day and and on week two there they quit so um it's uh if you're not if you're not uh down

for the hard workouts of crew which i never was uh if you're not cut out for it it's it's a very uh arduous practice yeah erging is no there's no uh easy easy feat yeah and so i've been told you see you think that those machines are are easy but there's a specific technique and it's it's quite grueling it's an endurance sport uh we talked about crew with alex legal when he was on so you're at penn what are you studying how'd you find bitcoin in particular yeah so i'm at penn i'm studying systems engineering and finance uh so from the get-go i was kind of really fascinated by this intersection between management and technology um i knew i kind of didn't want to be a corporate engineer right out of college but at the same time know enough to speak the language

and not just fluff uh your way into into the business world um and since the beginning i i didn't i kind of knew that i didn't want to take the the traditional pen route so wharton they're a bunch of hardos super cutthroat and competitive you go your freshman year and everyone's in a suit and has you know there are 600 resumes at hand and they're still a freshman and you go into that info session and they're just like uh this is how you're going to shake the guy's hand this is how you're going to follow up on the email this is how you're going to land that golden sacks job and i'm like there's no way i'm doing that so grooming you sorry they're grooming you they're grooming you that's exactly right there's a playbook and if you don't follow

the playbook then then you know you step out of line you're you're a loser so i i i chose voluntarily to be that loser i was like there's no way i'm doing this so kind of my approach um I didn't discover Bitcoin until my junior year, but my approach was like, I want to do something outside of your traditional route. So I got into Bitcoin end of my junior year. I was actually back home a couple of weeks with my dad. And for those of you freaks that don't know, Yasin is from Morocco. Yes, I am from Casablanca, Morocco. Casablanca, eh?

Yes, Casablanca. What's it like being from Casablanca? such a it's so great because you get to say you know you're from casablanca it's super exotic um there you you also pick up the french language because we were colonized by the french i don't like the french for that reason but okay um i'll let them know when i'm in paris yes don't care you're going to paris so uh you'll you'll come to to understand um and the the great thing is that that so casablanca is a city that is you got a code of the city not really to visit but more so if you're living there it's kind of like the financial hub uh so i actually my childhood i

was in the u.s and then moved to morocco um and did middle school and high school there and then came back for college um what part of the u.s were you i i live in california uh so northern and southern california both um and it's just it's it's great because it's very family oriented So I'm, I'm, I'm the family oriented guy. Um, and I just kind of, uh, learned to love my, my culture and my people and, and knowing very well that I'd come back to the U S, uh, to at least study and start out my career. Uh, fun fact, uh, every spring break, instead of going to your basic, you know, PV on the beach, I'd go on a road trip with like 10 of my friends and we'd go road tripping in morocco uh and it would just be such an amazing time uh so if anyone's out there who

wants to go to morocco hit me up and and i'll set up a trip and and you will not regret it yeah it's beautiful i was telling you uh before we started recording that the uh briefcase that i have sitting right here is from morocco when my mom took a trip to marrakech she brought that back the beautiful leather i wonder uh strong leather it is it is that's i've had that for like almost a decade now yeah and in marrakesh and in fez specifically they have these tanneries where you can actually see how the leather is being made yeah uh and so towards the end you know you you kind of have to buy the leather because they showed you how it was made they force you into buying it so um yeah so at end of my end of my junior year and my dad randomly serendipitously

comes up to me and he's like yo before you leave so before i like i was going to be starting an internship and he's like before you leave uh we should just find something to invest in let's find something to invest in straight up boss boss woke and half jokingly i was like why don't we just buy bitcoin and at the time i honestly had no idea what bitcoin was uh i had kind of heard it through through the grapevine in in college and and read your your typical uh bloomberg articles on how this was a tulip mania 2.0 very mediocre and so very very very media and so you can imagine my perception of Bitcoin. Uh, but you know, neither of us were, were opposed to it, uh, in, in terms of like this being a potential Avenue. So, uh, I literally, you know, that night, so I didn't have

Twitter. Um, and historically I've never really been a social media guy. So the fact that I'm now actively tweeting is, is a big deal for me. I'm happy you joined us. I'm, I'm, I'm happy I found you so um and so i went on youtube typed in bitcoin first video i find is a 37 minute video of andreas antinopoulos's introduction to bitcoin and very i was very lucky because immediately the argument was just super compelling right this idea of a non-sovereign global monetary store of value that was permissionless right but at the same time um you had basically full control over your wealth and so um given that i was living in a in a third world country uh given that in the past i've had very close relatives of mine who've actually had their wealth frozen and seized like

this was the two and two equals four kind of thing right yeah um and so i kind of consumed his whole whole library that night told my dad we're gonna buy some bitcoin and within the next week uh i bought my first bitcoin uh and honestly from there i kind of fell in the rabbit hole and i've been at it ever since funny thing about the first bitcoin that i bought um so in morocco the legislation is still kind of up in the air about about bitcoin uh and so we don't actually have any established exchanges and so my first encounter with with bitcoin was was through local bitcoins oh nice oh my gosh dude i went i went balls deep explain that experience what was that like so how'd you set it up uh so i mean i use a site but yeah i

use this i use the site i download the wallet so i i was literally going on youtube saying okay you know andres is very you know cautious about the hot wallet thing uh you know make sure that you you store it cold so we downloaded a desktop wallet um and i and we basically reached out to the guy um he told us where to meet him i had cash in one hand my computer on the other and we literally met in just this random alleyway in casablanca holy shit and imagine like us kind of our first exposure to was like this is for criminals and drug lords meeting and so i'm meeting now and it was such a great conversation this guy had been in bitcoin for the last five years he was just doing his own little thing he really nice guy he do he was doing it with his

father as well boss and uh and and yeah so he he i gave him the address he counted the cash he sent me the bitcoin i saw six confirmations i'm like we're chilling you stood there for six confirmations i did so in in in i mean because you know was it a quick six or uh it took like it took about an hour um but uh when when i we had we had a good conversation he looked at me he's like you know i I can tell that you're just getting into this. So he knew I was a noob. He definitely knew I was a noob. What was that?

Well, that's interesting. Most people's first experience, or I don't even want to say most people. Most people I know, their first experience is probably buying via Coinbase or something like that. So doing it like P2P for the first time, you definitely have a different type of aha moment where you probably reached it quicker. whereas like just like connecting your bank account to coinbase and seeing it on a web ui is a lot different than actually meeting somebody in person exchanging cash and getting back this digital gold absolutely so did you get it like right away like you saw the six confirmations for the first time like holy shit it's working yeah no it's working so i mean you you receive

that it's pen like you receive it immediately that it's pending right and then it it depending on on the number of confirmations you're like okay it's good to go but that's right coinbase we tried i mean we tried your traditional exchanges there's coinbase and there's also coin mama i don't know if you know coin mama coin mama that's rings of so coin mama is for the international it's it's it's really uh prevalent in africa okay but they charge like 30 premiums on bitcoin so it's like you know let's just get it at nav so what'd you do did you have like a phone hotspot did you yes exactly phone hotspot uh we had the an electrum wallet yeah and and and we we got our bitcoin and i came back and it was just so funny

and my it was with my dad with whom it was with my dad's computer and i come back i'm like all right here's your bitcoin and i hand him the computer did he get it right away too was he like palms was like honestly we we didn't get it until yeah like we didn't actually get it um on i mean it took us a couple of days literally to say okay let's just try this out and i mean we didn't we didn't buy a lot but it was at least just kind of dabble and then the more i i started looking into it the more fascinating it was so and so like beyond andreas like let's let's hop into like a hasu like episode like how did you learn what were your sources yeah what uh what was your strategy because obviously it seems like you have uh bootstrapped your knowledge

pretty quickly yes i i mean so i listened to hasu's podcast uh and and i actually reached out to him right after and we kind of had a quick call after that because i was just so fascinated at how much of what he said resonated with my my learning experience as well where you know there's just so much filtering that needs to be done right you find that one person or that those few people were like this guy clearly has some some dank signal and you just go and you just keep and you just keep like just just following him and then you're always striving for that dank signal i like that it might be a new band tagline there you go and then you create a mental model of that person and then you move on to the next uh and so for me i i was really lucky because after so after

having having bought my my first bitcoin um i was off to an internship um in the valley so i was i was interning at at a vc okay and it was a really small vc there were three partners and and myself and it was an enterprise software which is like super unsexy uh and there was a realization that i had where i was like there's only so much value that i could provide to these guys who have decades of experience beyond just you know sourcing some some deals and looking at some industry analysis and assessing momentum and so I was like okay there's got to be something that I can provide to them that they're not necessarily aware of and at that time it was also the first time I had been exposed to Bitcoin so I'm like you know what why don't I just spend

the summer just day and night looking at Bitcoin from a research and investment perspective and it wasn't just bitcoin is obviously crypto and in general the landscape yeah uh the landscape and so i i went kind of through the whole phase of you know you start with bitcoin and then you look at you know eth and you're like wow dude fuck bitcoin and then you're like oh wait what what is this even to begin with uh and so you go through the whole fat protocol phase and then slowly but surely you start to realize wait it all comes back to bitcoin um and so that's kind of the realization that i had uh i'm kind of very lucky that i i was actually pretty it was pretty easy for me to filter out the signal from the noise so you obviously have your blockchain versus you know

crypto and then within that you have your web 3o versus your money right uh and and i found the web 3o thesis to be interesting um i do as well i i i think that there's a that there is a a lot to do there but if we're talking from an investment perspective it's still quite unproven and at the end of the day both you and i know it's like cryptocurrencies are money uh and not equity or and so you know yeah and i mean what we're seeing now lightning too it looks like the web three vision could be built out on top of bitcoin oh yeah i like i like to say that laps are the new daps right yeah i mean for the new daps the laps are getting uh like crazy usage yeah i mean we we saw bit devs all the stuff that was going on right uh that was quite fascinating right quite

quite fascinating and it felt like uh we had like a glimpse into the future it was and and i think that we're going to continue to kind of see this this migration from your crypto devs to your bitcoin devs where it's like now you're actually wanting to just go back to the to the basics and build on top of bitcoin and and you know there there seems to be like this this misconception that uh bitcoin's ux is never going to actually look nice and and the apps that are built on top of it but we were definitely proven wrong yeah and and that's actually like a good thing to bring up like the ux is getting better but i will say like i said this in the newsletter like hey we should give like ethereum and the web three uh builders quote unquote uh little props because

they build out these ux flows that are actually beautiful and uh probably should be instituted to some degree but again i mean i mean jewel was taken from the metamask yeah metamask and my crypto like a combo of the two exactly and then uh but yeah like those apps are being built on a foundation of sand i would argue and i believe others would argue as well and it is the whole uh sort of uh i don't want to say ethos but it's like the mentality of bitcoiners is hey we want to be building on sound sound ground like on solid foundation and right now bitcoin in my opinion is the soundest uh of all the the cryptocurrency foundations right now yep and if we continue to kind of see this layered architecture uh who knows what what lightning

interfaces will look like in in a decade from now right we'll get we'll get more into the technical stuff first you have a very low tie preference story to tell us what so tell it so for you freaks you guys obviously don't know this yet you will find out momentarily but yassin uh i have been told by many people has gone to extremes to to prove to prove how low time preference he is yeah so this this one's for matt specifically because matt doesn't know about this one and so i'm gonna lay it down from from the beginning but um so there's this saying that as bitcoiners we know it's like you know you don't change bitcoin bitcoin changes you right very yes very important i first heard it through arjun uh and it's this

idea in the context of time preference specifically or lowering time preference right we're like you know as humans especially as a 22 year old they've just graduated it's like very short term in our thinking we're constantly thinking about consumption consumption consumption and we don't take time to sit and say you know what maybe we should save not only for ourselves but you know for our family and for our future generations um and for bitcoiners what what's i feel quite appealing um when you first get in is that you realize that this is really a gateway to lowering your time preference right and it's incredible and and anyone who's outside of it doesn't really understand it but when you're in it it's like it's just so obvious um and so my kind of approach

in all of this was all right i'm recently graduated i still got that rush of adrenaline uh i i can kind of you know find my way into new york uh and and so let's find a place to live right and so my first kind of stab at it was i'm just going to find a place close to work it's going to be nice i might not find roommates i'll be by myself uh and and i'll be paying enough where i can then you know save and accumulate bitcoin and then we'll see where it goes from there uh you know little did i know rent in manhattan is an absurdity it's it's actually crazy how expensive uh some of the most expensive in the world absolutely i mean by swift kicking the dick every uh first day of the month i mean i and the thing that i did not realize is that

they charge 15 uh broker fees as well if you want to go through your traditional route and so um so and so my approach was okay i i have two options the first is i can either pay a normal amount of rent in manhattan and save very little and so accumulate very little bitcoin or just completely 180 it and say you know what i'm just going to find the cheapest place i can find within an hour of my work and see how long i can survive and how long i can last where were you uh so i was in red hook so i ended up next to brooklyn in red hook and and it was just uh so my kind of, uh, my quest into finding this, this place was, I went on the back pages of Facebook and Craigslist, reached out to a bunch of people, uh, ended up looking at houses and I

had one criteria. It just needed to be clean. If it was clean, we're chilling, right? That's all you can ask for. That's all you can ask for, right? Little did you know, I go to the first apartment and they show me the apartment and, uh, there's no window in the room. That's depressing. it's dude i don't think you understand when you go into a bedroom and there's no window it's like okay you gotta up your standards a little bit yeah uh and so i end up finding a place after having visited another apartment that had like you know five bedrooms in the same room and i'm like okay if this is what the price point is gonna get i i gotta find something so i end up finding a place in red hook um that had a room that had a window and that was clean and trifecta it was the

and i'm just so happy and so for anyone who appreciates opsec this this this whole setup was also uh great the landlord i had actually never met all she wanted was was my first name and my username for my venmo account so the rent was month to month yeah no it was great it was crazy that's so dope it was pretty sketchy though now that definitely sketchy i think about it worked out it worked out i i i guaranteed i think i found the cheapest place in all of new york for that and i and i lived there for for almost five months are you willing to disclose i can i mean i can disclose yeah no problem so uh with everything with maintenance electricity uh i was paying 700 a month so which is good which is good for new york if you know it's very good it's good

for new york how long was that to me it was in an hour it was about an hour commute um would you take the jams i took the f yes i took the f up so i was living with uh with three random women never a bad thing yeah from from all walks of life from like all age all age distribution you had like a 20 year old who's still in college you had a 50 year old who had you know retired and was into urban planning and volunteering at the farmer's market and then you had someone in her in her mid-30s who had like this black cat and and just was kind of finding a a job in the meantime And so I was kind of there and, and I had a great time. I, I don't, I think that do you keep in touch with your roommates? I don't keep in touch with my roommates, but, but the, my, the, as I was departing, um, they're like, well, it was great to have you. Is there anything else that, you know, we, we can do or that you can, you can help us with? And I was like, yes, there's one thing. And I just pitched them Bitcoin. and i was like this i was like you know this is something that i i work in and and i would

highly recommend you you look into it i'm not telling you to buy bitcoin i'm telling you to just educate yourself um on understanding you know the the context of bitcoin in today's monetary systems like a true evangelist it was lowering his time preference finding finding a 700 apartment in new york with three women uh leaving with a bitcoin note going on to the next apartment with the low time preference price point and you keep spreading the word i mean you'd be shocked at like so the apartment was also uh it could fit me in a bed it didn't it could not even there wasn't even enough room to fit my clothes so you know what i did for my clothes i rented out a locker at the gym really and i would just have 80 of my clothes there and

in the morning i'd go to the gym take a shower there come back that's a good motivator to get workout in you you'd be surprised at how like the physical constraint made you so like made me just so much product more productive let's get into that so yeah you lower your time preference here you're forced to uh adapt and so how did yeah so how were you forced to that yeah get to the gym so yeah so that that's kind of so there was a there are far more takeaways that i found i mean I'm still young, so take all this with a grain of salt. But there were a lot of learning experiences that I had from this. I feel like this should have been a True Life episode.

It absolutely should have been. I'm a Bitcoiner trying to lower my type preference. I mean, did you see the tweet? This guy tweeted after listening to Morad and Pomp's podcast that he had quit smoking. Oh, yeah, and he was buying Bitcoin. And that he was buying Bitcoin instead. this is a real thing man right i mean it's a good idea uh lower your time preference higher your expected life expense expectancy too yeah your life expectancy that so that's exactly right

um for me it was like i quickly realized how we're almost constrained by our own comfort and it's true because i was i had no choice but to wake up at six and come back and crash at 10 i had to go to the gym um and and it and i never had felt more productive so i i ended up moving um so i moved actually a couple weeks ago because the ceiling actually started to leak and i was like okay can't have that it might be time to go um but in my new apartment which i'm like and i'm like 15 minutes away from work it's a struggle to wake up before eight and it's just because i can right so it's like it's so weird how it's like you you're in this almost feedback loop um when you're constrained that just makes you constantly try to outdo yourself yeah uh and then when you're

too comfortable it's like oh this is this is too easy and so it's like i'm allowed to let myself go yeah no that's why i like the newsletter it forces me to wake up and start doing something right away yeah no i freaks i have been slacking with the newsletters but coming out a little later and later it's getting hard to write you know it's getting hard to write in the bare so what's your strategy on that just wake up and try to find something to write about is it usually like you you go go through twitter yeah i guess what i retweeted and like the day before it's like all right what's interesting okay well see the first the first time i was on that newsletter you should have seen how i i was just like achievement unlocked that was just so great

i'm like i gotta i gotta i gotta tell my my mama well that's uh it's the whole point is like trying to like boost this to signal boost people and if you're putting out good shit it's not that hard to get in the newsletter thank you for providing fodder to write about well thank you for it's a symbiotic relationship probably more uh parasitic on my end but uh it is uh no thank you for putting out your shit i'm happy to signal boost it i mean it's kind of so motivating and that's that's honestly when getting into for those who aren't familiar with crypto twitter it's actually incredible how accessible people are right um and that's just so motivating because it's like you come from literally nothing uh to reaching out to people who are willing to um not only educate but

also talk to you and and directly respond to any questions that you have and uh and i think like there's a going to be a massive shift in just how we build ourselves out um and it starts starts with twitter no it's crazy man i don't want to sound like braggy i don't want to say bright i don't sound like pompous or anything but like if you say like good shit people follow you like i was i was nervous like i've been on twitter since 2011 and i was always nervous to say shit like i i'm a bad tweeter number one like i cannot craft good tweets i'm not like marty everyone everyone knows that you're a great tweet number number two i never like had the the courage like voice my opinion but uh with bitcoin i felt compelled to and started and yeah for like the first six years

i was on twitter i think i had like 300 followers and then started talking and it's at like 10.5k now it's like holy shit look at you how the hell did that happen five digits five digits yeah i mean the one comma club even beyond having a follower base it's even if you don't you can still reach out to people and most of the time they'll answer exactly um and so just as a learning mechanism that's that's been quite valuable yeah no and if sliding into dms has been that's how this podcast happens i'm just like hey do you want to come on it's uh i've said this many times on this podcast twitter is the best communication tool that that's ever been created up to this point in time 100 percent uh it's the best professional networking tool as well because

it's it's low-key almost professional networking but they actually end up just becoming your friends right uh no but it's true it's it's like what i realized with twitter is that you're what makes someone appealing is their ideas more than it is like who they are that you met them you know because they live next to you it's like you have such similar ideas to the way that i think let me reach out to you and it's like oh wow we're actually similar in a lot of yeah we should meet up and hang out yeah i mean that's that's really what it is we should definitely uh with a bunch of a bunch of guys just uh set something up bit devs is already a a good starting point for that i don't know if i told you this but the first time i met arjun

uh arjun balaji um it was out of bit devs oh really and yeah and so i i was following him um and i i don't know if he was following me back but he introduces himself as arjun and i go and i and i turn around and i'm like yo what's up dude as if i'd like known him for so long he's like sorry who who are you i'm like oh oh yeah right i just know you through twitter um my name is jesse my name is justine no that's like my first i think i told this story uh i don't know if i told the story on the podcast but i told it the other night uh my first bit devs in new york city like i was like so nervous like i'd only have the same thing like i was still uh i'd only ever like seen like people on twitter and like i was like at the bit does meet up like nervous like holy

shit like all these bitcoin devs are here like that i've only ever seen on twitter and i was like nervous and we were at union square ventures this is so embarrassing uh and uh at union square ventures where the bit does was being held you can see across union square there's a huge clock that has like it goes down like 20 digits i had just moved to new york i was like nervous like really didn't have my bearings it was 7 30 at night so the clock had shown like 19 30 and i was like standing there next to peter todd and like had nothing to say it was like all right marty say something i was like ah how prescient we're here at a bitcoin meetup talking about creating a new money we had the national debt clock across like square peter todd peter todd

looked me in the eyes was like that's uh that's a time clock buddy oh my god fuck yeah well no i mean but again even uh even after that he uh he put aside my idiocy and uh was very very good at explaining bitcoin and stuff like that so these people are very accessible and we are very spoiled here in new york in particular i would argue oh absolutely uh when my friends say what have you been up to and who have you been hanging out with i'm like just a bunch of people i met on twitter and they're like what i i genuinely think that for those who aren't um in the twitter sphere uh that there's just a a complete disconnect disconnect and just in in terms of how valuable twitter actually is at arc so um kathy the our ceo she the one of the main reasons why she founded

arc was um in terms of just the inability for your traditional asset management firms to um be able to research in a in a manner that wasn't constrained by compliance right and so she wanted to kind of create this open source research ecosystem where twitter was at the heart of that where like yeah i mean the my twitter account is a is a personal account when i'm not a part of arc but it's it's a it's a work account when i am yeah um and it's part of like kind of our research process where it's you're able to kind of constantly test your assumptions reach out to people and in the traditional world you can't actually do that and so uh there's a lot that that we've taken from using twitter just from uh understanding you know our research um that

traditionally you can't really get um that's very very interesting that like this public tool like this could be leveraged whereas like in the past would be something like bloomberg where you pay thousands of dollars a month but i wouldn't even call them like so similar twitter gives you like such another right i mean or even linkedin like linkedin is terrible linkedin is ass um i'm still on it are you are you a crypto expert on linkedin no god no um yeah the first uh first week on the job uh i was like oh yeah i'm in bitcoin so i wrote cryptocurrency analyst uh as my title and and after getting the flood of of messages i'm like okay i'm not even putting crypto anywhere near i'm a janitor on linkedin yeah janitor uh for the for the digital cypherpunk revolution

um so let's get into mining you're interested in mining you want to talk a lot about mining There's a lot of interesting stories going on about mining in particular right now. Coin Chairs recently or yesterday, just recently yesterday, came out with something that I wrote about. We'll get to that later. You've done some great stuff on mining as well. You've been doing research around it, in particular at ARK. What have you been looking at? Yeah, so some of the first research that I've been looking at at ARK is in and around mining.

um so one of the first papers um i read that kind of really clarified uh what bitcoin's core innovation was um and no it's not blockchain um was uh was bitcoin's academic pedigree by uh arvin narayan yan i'm mispronouncing that and jeremy clark uh where basically and he and i quote this He's like, they say Bitcoin is not, it's not in any of its individual components, but rather the intricate way in which these components fit together to breathe life into the system. And so that at the highest level, we understand that Bitcoin is bootstrapped with a circular dependence on three main components, right? You have your reward mechanism that incentivizes honest node behavior during consensus process. You have proof of work that does away with identity and civil attacks, and then you have a consensus algorithm, Nakamoto consensus, to prevent double spending, right? So it's the reward mechanism combined with proof of work and Nakamoto consensus that is really its core innovation, right?

um now increasingly especially in this bear market we we get so much fud around you know the viability of proof of work as you know and as coin shares know around around the energy front but also um on threats to just network centralization decentralization right um where there's this base assertion now that bitcoin's proof of work is inherently converging towards centralization right um and that at the end of the day you'll just have a handful of very large vertically integrated entities that will end up you know not only dominating consensus but also the whole mining ecosystem as a whole right and so i i when first getting into that bought kind of into it and i because i wasn't really familiar with with the mining dynamics

um and so this research that i was that i did which was in collaboration um with derrick shu who's at blockchain capital uh we actually he's a pen kid too yeah we we we graduated the same same year and i met him at pen uh and we were kind of the first two who uh we we first met at pen and we really connected just on a on a crypto level so for us um so what we decided to do is like basically explore and break down every layer of the mining stack um and the mining pipeline and assess the situation in that when you actually break down every layer of the stack, you realize that it's far more nuanced than Bitmain owns 50% hash power, and so we're all screwed, right?

But it's such an easy narrative. It's so easy. It's so easy. It is, and that's why the easy things sell. Right. And we have to, one step at a time, just debunk the FUD. So so so roughly the mining pipeline is it's broken into five stages and I'm sure that you're aware of this. But to provide context, it actually helps. It helps. It helps me to, you know, kind of get a historical look at kind of how mining has evolved.

I can appreciate that. Sure. So in 2009, we know like, you know, Bitcoin mining began as this this hobbyist activity. right where the first mining was performed by your standard cpu from desktops um and then about a year later mining hardware shifted to gpus where you had your first publicly available gpu miners that appeared in late 2010 um and then given the increased difficulty to mine the whole idea of pooled mining was was introduced the same year uh which then allowed entities to basically you know participate in a single pool and then share the rewards based on how much they've contributed pro-rata.

And then 2011, you had your FPGA-based miners, which was even more specialized than GPUs. How long was that period of FPGA? That was very quick, short, I believe. Like a year or something like that. or it might have so when i'm not exactly sure when asics hit the uh hit the landscape um i know iterate so i don't know if you read the iterative capital uh thesis so they actually have a really interesting chart um on how hash rate increases uh based on the evolution of chips right um but

yeah so after fpgas um you had your asics right which were basically used for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin with the SHA-256 algorithm. And so with the rise of these ASICs, the mining ecosystem has really just turned into a full-out professional industry, right? Where your computation is now in these data centers. And so what was once a hobbyist activity in Bitcoin's early days

has now just turned into a fully-fledged professional industry, right? and also let's talk about the industry but a fully fledged supply chain well yeah so that so so we kind of looked at the supply chain and so it's not so that and that's what kind of the really interesting part is right where it's like okay now that we've assessed the evolution into a professional mining industry your classic fuzzer is going to go okay well now you have these large mining equipment manufacturers like bitmain who have been able to create these profitable businesses although as of late you know it's questionable hard to be profitable

when you have b cash on your or even bitcoin on your balance sheet trade trade of the year um and so so so so that's basically kind of the argument uh where you have these large miners who have exposure to every layer of the stack right uh so at the so the first stage starts at the ASIC design level, right? So you have these design services provided by these mining equipment manufacturers that develop and optimize mining chip architecture, right? And so this involves really highly trained individuals and teams, and they can basically drastically affect the quality of a manufacturer's design. And so hardware engineers who are familiar with the ASIC design process specifically uh they're really heavily coveted in the mining manufacturing

space there's like four right four foundries or exactly so they're so so they're um so so the foundries are separate from the actual ASIC design um so I'll go into that um but I'm talking more about basically for instance I don't know if you saw the whole what's minor oh yes so that's a really good example of that we're thinking of yeah I'm thinking of a step before that yeah exactly So I'll go to the, I'll, I'll, I'll talk about the step, but, but so Bitmain, for instance, you know, had a history of failing their tape outs, um, and it costs them hundreds of millions of dollars. And so there was actually speculation that that was because their former lead engineer,

um, left and started his own company, what's minor. Um, and his team, you know, was reportedly responsible for the S nine and the S seven. and so what's minor now comes out with their own minor and you kind of do the comps uh and you realize that what's minor is actually more efficient than the s9 right um and so that's exactly right so to your point you have mining chip architecture and that mining chip architecture is designed with consideration for the latest generation node and those nodes are the ones supplied by foundries yes so for the freaks out there see i've been waiting for that you know you know i i said for the practice of the freaks out there i was practicing for i'm not

gonna lie so um so what what is it because i didn't know this right so a tech node is just a standardized semiconductor manufacturing process and its design rules uh and so with that that just basically involves making integrated circuits with transistors that have specific features around performance and around size right and so each generation of the semiconductor process is classified as node of length x nanometers so that's why you see the 7 nanometer the 16 the 28 the 55 all of these are basically advancement of the node is prompted by just the shrinking feature size okay um so the small smaller the more compact the transistors are the more advanced the node is um and so this tech node is the process that's used to create the integrated circuits

present in these mining rigs and so um on a cost basis that's like the most expensive part of of the of the box yeah exactly um and so what's kind of really interesting is that as bitcoin mining chips have transitioned to asics the a rigs efficiency is now largely driven by how advanced the technology node is and the technology node is not actually in the bit mains of the world don't actually have any control over that right exactly and so if you look at the trend in the last five years of how like for instance the replacement cycles of of bitcoin asic hardware um they've extended dramatically so it's really interesting if you plot down when bitmain released their first batch their second batch versus now like their s9s it just slowly 6 12 18 exactly exactly probably

like 36 after that exactly so it's like in terms of just the the amount of times to replace that cycle it's like you had november of 2013 bitmain released its s1 that was uh that that s1 ran at like 2000 watts per terahash uh the following summer bitmain releases their s3 it's three times more efficient uh and so you compare that to 2016 where bitmain released the s9 we're now in 2018 and they just announced that they were going to release the s15 or i don't know which one it was uh the next but it basically it took two years for them uh to develop a new so is this a product of like like you said everything's just getting more efficient harder to innovate on so is this going to lead us to a period where uh it's sort of perfectly

competitive where exactly yeah so that was our that was basically our takeaway right where it's like the reason why bitmain was was able to have such short replacement cycles um where you could literally and that's where they that was their bread and butter right whereas like every three months they'd come out with a new rig and they'd screw the market because because they these these miners would have to buy this new rig in order to stay competitive um but the reason why is because they actually weren't caught up to the latest cutting edge node so i could you know if a samsung or a tsm like taiwanese semi-manufacturing company they're developing you know the 10 nanometer or seven nanometer node and the mining space is still on 55 nanometer or 28 nanometer i can have an

inherent advantage exactly they're able to have these very fast replacement cycles and now we're at a point where your rate determining step is at the node level where it's like we're at seven nanometers now and the most efficient rigs are seven nanometers um and so what's really interesting is kind of looking at the foundry dynamics as a result of that right so to give you an idea so the foundries are the ones who who provide the the cutting edge node uh or nodes right and so to date there are 28 uh foundries that provide node fabrication only three provide leading edge right and only two are relevant to bitcoin you have samsung and you have tsm okay and tsm pretty much destroys uh samsung on this front and so if we really want to talk

centralization it's it's at the foundry level more than it is um at you know the mining equipment level right no that's like the big that's probably and i've argued this uh in person like in the air in private in the past like that's probably is the most centralizing factor it's the foundries and it's but it's like such a arduous process to start a foundry right like exactly so development requires like billions of dollars of investment right and the only way that foundries can prevent increasing r&d costs is by driving up chip prices or without driving up chip prices is by just producing more chips and so you see this just i don't know if you saw in a couple months ago global foundries they announced that they were just going to halt their their development on

the cutting edge node and they were going to focus on something else so you kind of see this funneling where it's like only the large players can keep up with the cutting edge node because otherwise it just costs too much right and at each node advancement the required capex also increases so you have like the number of foundries that are decreasing while the cost to create the cutting edge node is increasing so you'll be able to just price gauge people exactly exactly uh and so to your point about kind of leveling the playing field where you know in 2016 your s9 was by far the most uh performant performant miner by far like if you run the numbers just on a specs basis um two years in bitmain still hasn't released their own because they're at now the

latest node um and now like your competition is entirely indistinguishable you have like what's minor you have in a silicon you have canon you have gmo you have ebang you have all these and it's like bitmain is kind of in the middle of the pack um and so you start to realize that the competitive advantage is is going to come not at the at the design level anymore uh it's Kind of come at like the OPEX part. Exactly. Right. That's right.

And so this kind of further reinforces the idea of, you know, this, the concept of ASIC commoditization, which I first heard through Tour. He, it's exactly, it's exactly that. Describe it. Describe ASIC commodification. So it's this idea that mining players like Bitmain no longer have a competitive edge because the rate determining step is at the node level. And so in the last two years,

we've been able to see a bunch of competition catch up to Bitmain on a performance level. And so now you basically have five or six players providing the exact same miner. And so the whole providing mining equipment is just completely commoditized as a result. Oh, okay. yeah so that's what okay so that's how i uh i haven't heard tours uh description of it that

way so i thought i thought yeah so explain to me what do i was getting into like so i was trying to drive us into like where are the opex efficiencies going to be driven now because like obviously people are going to be focusing on that so it's like energy costs now and right so i mean i mean if you kind of think about like the cost so that's that's for for mining right the cost to mine yeah is largely driven by electricity costs you have your maintenance you're cooling you're leasing and you have obviously the hardware costs which i mean the life cycle life cycle of hardware is going to extend out now that we are at the latest node yeah um but yeah electricity costs so you know paying 10 cents per kilowatt hour versus one cent

per kilowatt hour is going to be the difference between mining profitably and not mining profitably uh and so from that from that uh standpoint we're definitely seeing a a convergence towards zero cost electricity um which is beautiful it's it's fantastic right and that's what i mean that's what i wrote about in the bend today i was touching on the coin shares thing is like it's driving like shout out to phil geiger i believe i hope i'm getting your name right phil he pointed this out to me on twitter yesterday but bitcoin literally pays us to use renewable energy which like drives uh the demand for renewable energy and therefore the production of renewable energy uh and theoretically in the search and drive for that renewable energy there

will be excess which can be used for other things other than bitcoin mining exactly so we kind of both really enjoyed that coin shares piece give me your thoughts on give the freaks your thoughts so i mean i this idea that you know bitcoin can be a mechanism to unlock these these stranded energy assets um i think is is something that we can you need to continue pushing the narrative for because right i mean the coin shares for a lot of people was was quite uh was quite and lightning opening and it was and so let's let's so there's a lot of people uh they were in my men she said well like that that's flawed there's no way it's 77 percent uh number one i don't know if that's true it seems like these guys did some pretty thorough research number two

even if it's a magnitude of order off like say it was 25 the world average of uh industries using renewable uh uh energy is like 18 so even if coin shares is off by 50 bitcoin is still an improvement on on your typical industry in this world i mean that's the thing with these fudsters and i don't think it's 50 wrong yeah i i i mean you would know more than i i i so i i the extent to which i did research on this was literally just reading the paper okay um but they'll never be satisfied anyways so it's like if you say 70 50 10 they'll always find an excuse um but this is actually something that i've that's triggered my interest especially after reading the coin And I was talking about this to you earlier before the podcast, where it's like there's a really interesting hypothetical that I was discussing with with Jonathan Libov, who was formerly at USB and Bloomberg.

And we're. Yeah, he's great. And we're thinking about, you know, our next the next topic of research to be around around this this hypothetical or this thought experiment. Right. Where it's like we're wondering if some of the angst around energy efficiency of Bitcoin mining is just due to the fact that Satoshi may not have anticipated this situation entirely in terms of the opportunity to unlock these energy stranded assets. so what do you mean so here's here's an interesting thought experiment i like this thought experiment so you have so you have two there are two thought experiments that that we can play off of the first is is less realistic but i'm still gonna do it because jonathan was the one who presented this one and then i countered with the the second thought experiment which seems to be a little bit more realistic but um what so what would the debate look like

right if the original white paper had proposed bitcoin as a solution to this problem right where hydropower is not fully utilized because of transport costs where you know solar and wind power is not fully utilized because of variability geothermal right exactly so so um what if satoshi came and said you know what why don't we just build out this this arbitrary asset uh that unlocks this this energy demand um and so if we kind of shift the perception like that where it's like you know i am building this asset because i see an opportunity to create positive externalities i guarantee you that you know we wouldn't ever be talking about whether or not this wastes energy right um if it was just preface that certainly exactly uh so so that's kind of that's the idea

It's like, first, let's acknowledge that energy is not fully utilized. Second, let's find a better way to utilize it. And third, let's just build sovereign money. Yes. And then, so, like, that's what I wanted to touch on towards the end of the event today was, like, what does this open up from a possibility of human ingenuity now that these previously unharnessable energy sources are now able to be tapped into?

Like, how does that change the way we operate as a society? i mean i don't mean to drop a heavy question no i mean well i think it just goes back to the fact that that we are discussing that satoshi didn't necessarily realize this this insight and that you know 10 years in there's something that is groundbreaking in terms of not only how we can position bitcoin as a saver of stranded energy assets but also as in like who knows what what what that might look like in in a few years and when we kind of exactly like you say on top untap this uh human ingenuity yeah like talk about externalities that's why like yeah uh i love andrew desantis's idea that there will be communities around uh mining operations that

are tapping into these these previously untapped resources so you'll you'll have like a more disparate uh human humanity right in a good way like more localized and stuff like that it's like crazy to think of like okay again like bitcoin presented an optionality with money where it's like all right now we have which we will actually get onto the tweet that we have up here eventually but uh provides an optionality between fiat money uh that did not fiat money and a apolitical money that did not previously exist 10 years ago and now not only does it create that optionality it's allowing us to tap into this energy resource and then just like just by even like creating activity around these these uh sources of energy is going to like somehow lead

to some sort of innovation or something like that we don't even know that that's the thing we have no idea it would not have been explored unless there was a reason to expend energy to chase this funny internet money that we're all addicted to yeah and then even the the that's getting cosmic on a friday night dude my mind kind of hurts right now but uh like even more realistically um it's so there's the the flip side to that where it's like okay let's not start with the premise of there is an opera there is a way for us to unlock energy assets it's like let's start with okay let's build sovereign money right like satoshi so that's the first kind of thing is i want to build sovereign money um and then let's find a way to then build sovereign money while

keeping in mind that there are also underutilized and stranded energy assets right and so why not unlock all unused stranded energy assets by building sovereign money. And it's like, what if he had presented the white paper like that? Powering our sovereign money with stranded

renewable energy sources. There's no way that you'd have this fun. The outcome would be the same, and it would just be like, you know, that's it. The perception, though, is different. It seems like it would be too easy. It does. Right? I think it had to be this way. Oh, in terms of

uh in terms of yeah you had to yeah you got no pain no gain right exactly exactly but no i do agree it would be so much easier if that was maybe that's hey we're talking a lot about narratives in this bear market maybe this is one we should be focusing a lot more i think so i i think it's it's definitely worth exploring more so that's that's what i'm looking at right now 77 i mean if coin shares stats are correct which i i mean looking at the methods of their methodology of their research it seems like they have a pretty good grasp of the calculations they're they're making they even admit there there probably is a margin of error but it's not that that much they they said 77 as a conservative estimate um 77 renewable energy is used for bitcoin mining where

every other industry in the world like 18 of the average that is fucking ridiculous like bitcoin's the cleanest network right it's the cleanest industry like in that framing it's the cleanest it is i mean in the world yeah i i i i'd be interested to see a rebuttal to that um to the coin shares paper where it's like maybe there were some assumptions that uh inflated those numbers but regardless that we're even having this discussion should say something right yeah and and a lot of people that are like refuting with f-butter like saying china china china coal but if you talk to any miners which i have been recently like they especially china miners that have been in china like a lot of miners moving out of china so what's your what's your

i i've spoken to a few miners but most of them are u.s based uh if you can if you have like what's the general sentiment in mining in china the consistent uh ambiguity of the chinese government what they're going to do and then in uh particularly with the weather situation it's like the dry season there so like the hydroelectric dams in china right now aren't uh producing as much water but uh i talked to um somebody who knows more than i about that situation they said the weather's not as uh not as big as effect as people moving uh worried about like the government cracking down i remember watching a an andreas video where he was like yeah because that you think that yeah go for it yeah and and the government's cracking down because these miners

have just been getting away basically like siphoning off free energy and it's just like getting a bigger uh microscope on it from the government now so and you don't think like local authorities are kind of low-key in on this and they're just dying but i mean i don't know enough about local chinese culture to speak with authority on on it but i would highly uh suspect that that there's definitely some fuckery there's definitely probably some fuckery going around in other countries too with with local authorities and bitcoin mining and shit like that yeah i i think last month iran uh announced that bitcoin mining was a legitimate industry uh and so i can only imagine what that might look like well you're saying uh morocco was a bit ambiguous with their

laws when you were trying to first initially buy bitcoin but are they posturing towards being open to bitcoin mining so yeah there's so there's that 900 megawatt uh farm that's being built out um i i actually spoke to one of the people uh who who was looking into it um and honestly at this point it seems you know quite promising and exciting megawatts but that one it's a lot of megawatts and two it's still very very premature yeah and three uh the idea that there are some parts of the government that still aren't on board with this whole thing to begin with uh and so it has there has to be approval from from the top before any of this can kind of uh uh come to fruition um does it have anything to do with bitcoin being like sharia compliant or

no i i mean honestly i've kind of looked into it i think bitcoin is is pretty sharia compliant um just in terms of the idea of it not bearing really any interest the whole concept of fractional reserve banking doesn't really exist in bitcoin um and the idea of you know generating profits uh with without really just by just sitting on your money um and so if you kind of again look at this as as not an investment but as money and we're just early on in a monetization event um then you know this seems to be much sounder than any of the existing monies that we see today right which arguably are are a lot sketchier from a sharia standpoint yeah um so i would argue um no it's uh it's fascinating to see uh bitcoin making governments the world over

react in certain ways and how how does governments react to bitcoin forcing the issue upon them because it is forcing the issue upon them which actually uh leads me to a quote that i wrote down and was one of your tweets bitcoin is the experiment that allows us to experiment yes So we have not been allowed to experiment with currencies or other monies outside of fiat currencies. And like I said, Bitcoin is forcing the issue, and it's allowing us to experiment, and the governments have to react to that experiment. And you wrote this tweet in reaction to a hype quote. Do you want to expand on it at all? Yeah, absolutely.

So this quote was basically about, you know, not only has the government basically hijacked money, but that they've also limited our ability to experiment with money. And so we don't actually know what the ideal traits were because for the last 2,000 years, we haven't really been able to have a free market monetary system. and so one of the so i'm currently finishing up a paper uh with misere oh really yeah we're we're low-key collabing on i met misere for the first time on monday night it was a pleasure yeah we've

met a few times it was so funny because we have a mutual friend um so he goes to columbia we have a mutual friend in common uh and after having so we were we started writing the paper and then he texts me he's like yo are you going to be there saturday i'm like what he's like yeah at this guy's birthday and i'm like no way and so we were both invited to the same birthday and we met there uh we met before the birthday to to finish up the the paper um and small world small world uh but we're basically kind of looking at this idea of you know is a cryptocurrency or is money like winner takes all or winner takes most narrative um and why in kind of the existing framework do we have like 180 different currencies right and so we kind of come to the conclusion that okay

if you understand what drives monetary premium right and it's this just this idea that you know as it goes from a collectible to store value to medium of exchange to a unit of account uh there is basically more belief that it becomes uh a better money exactly and and it's basically a collectively shared belief that this money holds the strongest attributes you know the bullish case for bitcoin vj boy potty's kind of explanation of what makes a store of value sound goat for uh for first time uh that that's one of the explorers of bitcoin yeah that one definitely that's one i i send to to a bunch of my uh the people who kind of want to break in but um send it to your roommates send your way out mates send i send that ethics of money production

ethics of money production is a very underrated uh yeah uh piece of education that every bitcoin should read right so so basically the the idea that i i think and and we think that for the first time the technological nature of cryptocurrencies provides a bedrock for a truly free market right where it's like for the first time you know it's open source anyone can kind of build whatever they want and anyone can choose to participate in whatever network they want um and if this is to store their wealth then it seems like by default it's just a very circular in how how just monetary premium is driven and so at equilibrium it would seem like it's a winner takes all uh or winner takes most if not all um and so the technical by the technological nature

of kind of cryptocurrencies what i mean by that is that you know it's borderless um that there's interoperability amongst crypto networks right that you have this idea of economic abstraction right where uh i think jeremy rubin um yep he had that whole eth will collapse to zero and he makes some very sound arguments around the idea that if you're able to pay gas with the buzzword coin yeah uh then what's the point of ever holding eth and so at the end of the day it's driven by or the premium is driven by our willingness to hold um and so if you're able to do the same functionality um with whatever the soundest money is then you're going to converge towards that money exactly because why would you why would you risk it exactly uh combine that with the fact that

we're going to continue to see additional functionality built on on this winning money uh and so i think suma with uh james prestwich uh for instance he kind of released this whole thing where you can pay where you can verify bitcoin payments uh on top of eth and you basically had this like an nft or non-fungible token uh auction that where there was an eth executed smart contract that you paid with bitcoin and it's like okay well what's the point of eth right right so i mean but that's the idea is that under uh well there will be an app platform that will enable the smart contract and bitcoin will just be used as a fuel for that eventually like I've been saying this for, I feel like I've been beating a dead horse.

I mean, you've been saying this, Marty, but not everyone is as enlightened as you. I would not call myself enlightened. But, no, but not even staying on like the monetary premium thing. The fact that you and Masir are writing this is like one of the things I love about Bitcoin is like a force, like not just even force. It's got smart people coming together and collaborating on like media. i know it sounds cheesy but like medium posts but like very important ones like people uh enamored by a subject coming together like hasu and alexander legal hasu's written with like 15 partners he's like he's like the slut of the writing industry right now he's going around

right he's definitely one of the most original thinkers i've come across i fucking love hasu hasu we need to write a piece together we've talked about this hasu we also need to write a piece together but uh no it's like fascinating that like is something i've never seen outside of bitcoin where people like feel so compelled to to push out content like this and it forces you to learn as well right it's like it's not like we're experts and i hate the word experts because we're not we're far from anything that remotely resembles an expert uh but it's like we're curious explorers we have explorers documenting our journey i would say exactly right uh so that that should be coming out hopefully soon um and i'll love for you to

take a look beforehand definitely your thoughts definitely send it my way yep um no it's uh it's fucking we live in weird times and we're we're we're discovering this stuff uh it's actually something i was thinking about i was pacing i'm a big pacer when especially like when i'm trying to write the bent i like walk around my apartment a lot but i was thinking uh just thinking about like the narratives the changing narratives and uh specifically about my conversation with dan held when he's talking we were talking about roger vera maybe how some people had a certain perception of bitcoin at a given point in time uh and that vision uh may not be as applicable to bitcoin uh today and i i said like these people have not evolved with bitcoin and i was actually

pretty pissed that i used the word evolved where uh i truly believe like bitcoin's being revealed to us we're not it's not like evolving it's being like the the limitations of the network and everything's being revealed it's not it is evolving in some ways but it's more being its limitations again are being revealed to us instead of like evolving that that's that's a very interesting way to to look at it that obviously the whole visions of bitcoin thing is a testament to that where it's like you have these shifting narratives uh because at the end of the day and this is what i realized is that no one actually knows what's going on right and so all we can do is kind of do our own research what what makes us kind of wake up in the morning

and look into whatever whatever part of it is but there's just so many factors involved that none of us i guarantee have considered that will very likely uh change whatever perception we have of the big it's like an expanding universe we literally cannot know what it has not expanded into yet we are discovering it as my head hurts discovering as it's happening which is awesome and it's fun and that's what makes it so fun and it makes me wake up and write about it every day it's like all right what the fuck's happening what else are we discovering today what is bitcoin revealing to us um it's uh we're really fortunate to be to be in this position uh that honestly i don't feel like i actually ever go i'm actually ever really doing work yeah it's a friday night

we're here recording a podcast and i'm having such a good time so you're going to paris so i took latin and spanish so i just assume i know the romance languages did i just say i don't understand french what did they repeat that you don't know okay yeah that's that's great okay i asked that because the whole bitcoin by bitcoin uh in the paris protests um that's actually where i'm going i'm going to join the yellow vest uh it's not a trip of leisure it's a trip of revolution i was gonna ask about that are you gonna have your own customized little uh little vest i was listening to a podcast today do you know why they

all have the vest why because it's like mandated of france that they had to have like a yellow vest in the trunk of your car so whenever you buy a car in france it comes loaded with the yellow vest in the back like in case it ever breaks down the side of the road like as a yield signal yes interesting so like there was like no like capitalism behind this people actually already had their vests they were able to just go in their car and put it on uh so be aware if you're you're an authoritarian government uh and you don't want to give people tools to to rebel against you um which the french government did i had no idea i thought that was fascinating um now yeah i'm excited to go to paris you got some recommendations for me correct yes i have a list

and uh and i want you to check off every every item of that list my wife's got a tome of an itinerary so we'll see we'll see uh well yeah i mean you can you can do a little combo not a big We got to have a debate, me and my wife, because I'm not a big itinerary guy. I just like to go with the flow. I feel like, especially in Paris, as one of the most romantic cities in the world, you just got to be spontaneous, Marty. I'm a big spontaneity guy. All right. So what do you got planned?

Nothing. Show up and walk, you know? Honestly, you're going to have a great time. It's a beautiful city. Most of my cousins actually live there. they they studied there and and and my mom actually went to college there as well oh hell yeah that's where i'm that's where my parents met too in paris oh really yeah so there's a whole story behind that um but yeah so you should you should have a good time how long you're gonna

be there for it's like five days okay quick oh so it's not too long quick rip i'll be back in new york the list i'm gonna send you is like three weeks worth so i might have to i might I'll have to boil it down. I wish we were gone for three weeks. That would be dope. I need to travel more. It's my first trip in a while. I'm excited.

But I do. Like you mentioned your cousins. I actually have a rendezvous with my cousins here in the city tonight. We have a nice Christmas party. Nice. Is it kind of a potluck style? No, a potluck in the sense that we'll all bring a unique bottle of wine and share it that way.

do you have do you have like these traditions that you have you play like charades or we never do charades we just talk

we're a drunken Irish family so it's all talking listening to music and drinking way too much wine nice well it sounds fun well then I

I can't I can't keep you waiting too long then no you're not I was gonna say it was the the shot clock but like what

what should we touch on before we leave this tweet about so like you bootstrapping your knowledge how much health how helpful was uh bitcoin talk bitcoin talk is amazing goodness this is actually an interesting topic because nick carter brought this up recently like a lot of the debates that we were having have already happened like the first two years of bitcoin yeah so you you have

this sweet thread which i really loved uh like explaining like bitcoin talk threads uh like have so many gems in them yeah so actually i drew a lot of inspiration from my historical digging from nick because he's the he's the historian the bitcoin historian and so i'm just his apprentice like but uh literally there's there's this one one day i'm like let me just dive deep into the pdp foundation posts and in the bitcoin talk forum posts just to just to see what what it was like and what people were talking and it you for those who haven't there's definitely some digging to do because the conversations that they were having around Bitcoin is really just this experiment

that everyone's kind of collectively trying to figure out what the next steps are. And so you see kind of these people just discovering it, them asking, okay, let's create some sort of project where we provide this Bitcoin faucet where people can just, you know... Gavin Anderson has given out, like you can go to this website and find Bitcoin for free.

I saw it and I think there's like this Spanish dude that just completely, uh, Sybil attacked it and just took it. It's like, you know, you can never have anything, uh, anything good when, with the, when you think about free Bitcoin, it's like, it's quite an attractive, uh, an attractive project. Right. Yeah. I basically, I don't remember the, the, all the posts of the, of the tweet, but anything from like, you know, exactly.

So Satoshi kind of literally having the first link to download Bitcoin V 0.1. And because this is literally on the Internet, when you see that, it's like this is a part of history. Yeah. And we're also only 10 years into this history. But imagine in like 100, 200 years, if you have the way back machine and you kind of go and look like this was download V.1. yeah um and there there were a couple of interesting uh other uh posts around people kind of just losing you know thousands and thousands of bitcoin that they lost their private keys and and their private keys um the idea of you know satoshi uh when they had first announced that uh wikileaks was going to accept bitcoin don't kick the hornet's nest exactly and

and everyone's like oh this is great this is an amazing opportunity for us to spread the word and satoshi was just like no it's it's important to kind of tread cautiously and my favorite august 7th 2010 uh satoshi destroying the the mining is wasteful yeah this is not august 7 2010 it is a net positive for the world that that that one's that one's one for the books where he's like not owning bitcoin is the net waste right from from that i guess we just gotta drop our mics because Like Nick said

They've been talking about These FUD arguments since 2011 And they're just Constantly being recycled Matt's OG tweet Of calling it in June He's like the lowest hanging fruit For this next bear market

Is going to be the Mining FUD death spiral And it came Not even six months later Matt O'Dell calling it out in June yeah but it's true that's we've heard the death spiral like last bear market too it was like that's why the difficulty adjustment works and there will always be ideological miners and each miner has a different cost point uh price point um and it's highly variable yes exactly

yeah so i i for one um so i'm i'm almost five months into this job so throughout my whole professional career i've only been in a bear market uh and i don't know if you saw derek's tweet but he's like you know i since since working full-time in crypto i've been in a bear market forever so i don't know what it's like on the other side i'm chilling it's a good place to uh to earn your chops i'm a little jealous actually when i first got i got into bitcoin like yeah 2013 2014 when i started getting down to and i still don't fully work at bitcoin yet is this a job is this a job what we're doing right now this is a job i mean we're on friday night that's just true talking bitcoin well it's always fun to me and this last hour

and a half was very fun i appreciate you coming on you have a parting note for the freaks out there not particularly i mean thank you for having me this is honestly such an honor oh stop it no really thank you because you you reached out you're like yo come on the pod whenever uh and and you know thanks for what you're doing um and just keep on grinding i'm loving this bear market I'm slowly accumulating well keep grinding keep telling your roommates about Bitcoin

and keep crushing it at ARK dude I can't wait to see the paper you and Masir put out thanks Marty thank you so much alright

that's all we got for this week freaks peace and love be careful out there actually no drive fast and take chances

this weekend okay