TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #77: David Bailey

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, to discuss the early days of Bitcoin, how BTC Media came to be, the state of discourse around Bitcoin, how people are underestimating Bitcoin's TAM, and much more. Follow David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidfbailey Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Thinking about heading to the Bitcoin 2019 Conference? Use the promo code "RHR" for a discount at checkout: https://www.bitcoin2019conference.com Shoutout to our sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's sponsor before our conversation with David Bailey from BTC Media. This week's episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App, the number one finance app in the app stores for the last two years straight, freaks. And that is because they are allowing you to do a lot of things. First off, they got the Boost program. You sign up for the Cash App, you get your cash tag, you sign up for the Boost program, and then you get this card send to you a Visa card that you can customize. You can put your signature on it.

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Cash App is also the first PDP payments app to let you freaks buy Bitcoin. As you know, they're helping us stack sats on Saturdays, any day really. So go to your local app store or the Google Play store or the Apple app store. Download the Cash App today. Hope you enjoy this conversation with David Bailey, a man who's been very mysterious to me. We hopped into a lot of talk about the early days of Bitcoin, the people who have come and gone as figureheads in the Bitcoin space and how they are treated these days

and looking forward to the Bitcoin 2019 conference in San Francisco in a few weeks. So if you freaks are looking to go to that, use the code RHR for some discounted tickets. And then, yeah, check out the website, smash that subscribe button, share the podcast, rate, review, trying to blow this thing up. I know you guys are going to enjoy this

because I did as well. Okay. Tales from the Crypt What is up freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent coming to you from the dopest hotel room I've ever been in in my life. We're in midtown Manhattan. This is truly decadent and incredible. I'm sitting now with a very special guest.

Somebody who I was just explaining to. I've heard a lot of rumblings through the grapevine throughout the years but I've never really met or got good information on, so I'm very excited for this conversation. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the founder of BTC Media. You probably know them if you've been reading Bitcoin Magazine over the years, David Bailey. David, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming through, dude.

Like I said, Bitcoin man of mystery in my mind. I've heard rumblings throughout the years, so I'm just excited for this conversation in particular because you were around pretty early on, so you've seen a lot change. The way this starts and tails from the crypt is how did you get to come to Bitcoin and start BTC media? Yeah, and well, I guess I'll start with this hotel room. It is very dope. It has a very oligarch like feel. We're not paying for it. All right. So Bitcoin got started in Bitcoin in college, found Bitcoin. Somebody sent me an article about the Silk Road. I thought it was a scam. i have like a compulsive personality type so i started by trying to prove it was a scam whole list of reasons why it can never work one by one cross them off get to the point i don't

know why it can't work i buy my first bitcoins what were the 2012 just under ten dollars what were those reasons that you're looking to check off the list oh man i don't even remember now it uh uh the the basic shit that all the people who are new to bitcoin think like oh the government will never allow it and you know uh no one uses gold as a transaction mechanism uh you know clearly the technology what they're promising technology wise there's no way that that can be possible just someone who knows nothing and uh who has exposure to the financial markets and just thinks you're not going to have an unregulated product like this that actually gains any traction so was there anything in particular that sort of incepted your aha moment i was like oh well i don't know

how much time you've spent on the bitcoin talk forums yes but it is a very very interesting cesspool of people and so i just rabbit hold hard on bitcoin talk and like for every question you can possibly think of there's a thread with a thousand posts on it probably still being debated to this day for any question you can think of so uh you know little by little i was just like wow this is actually pretty baked and you know the weird thing about bitcoin is like when you look at an investment typically the more you know about it you find all the warts you find like all the things that are not good about it all the hidden things that you know you don't you want to gloss over whatever bitcoin is the opposite you see all the warts to start with

and it's only like once you start digging into it you see the the inner beauty which i guess that sounds cheesy but truly it gives its worst face first which is like the opposite of every investment i've ever looked at ever so uh uh you know as you kind of look more and more you just become more fall more in love i guess no it's a it's a very common theme here on tales from the crypt and it's i love that you said it's uh it presents its warts its ugliness like abruptly like right in front of you 10 minute block times uh very few transactions per second uh you gotta wait for a certain amount of blocks before you can have a degree of certainty that your utxo is buried into the chain far enough and um this is something that so coming from like the

traditional financial background this is something that we talk a lot about on this show is trying to have the people from traditional finance come to these aha moments but it seems hard like there's a a natural like mental barrier for for most people so is there anything like philosophically growing up uh yeah so i got i was lucky because um so i got into investing when i was in middle school i started with seven thousand dollars in the stock market turned it into two hundred and fifty thousand dollars while i was in high school boss yeah felt like a badass what uh what were you trading mostly all the things that somebody my age would like oh apple that's cool i should get that google that's cool which is just like you know lucky but it was a good time to be buying

stocks and then the financial crisis came and i lost a fortune like of my 250k i don't want to tell you what percentage of it i lost but it's very bad it was winter winter pricing and i had bought a lot of banks. Once the banks started going down, I'm listening to the news, you know, thinking I'm a financially literate and every bank CEO is like, oh, everything is peachy, peachy. And you know, some of the stocks I bought down 95%, 98%. I mean, just horrendous. And so I went on this quest to kind of find out how did everyone miss this? And it turns out not everyone did miss it. And that was surprising to me. Like, why was that not covered more? This led me down the path to discovering Austrian economics I'm very lucky that I'm in Alabama we have the Mises Institute

in Alabama which is the biggest Austrian uh think tank that I really think in the world but definitely in the United States so I was uh that's at Auburn University so I was able to be exposed to that and then at the same time uh my current CTO and I were running a non-profit that did micro lending I don't know if you know much about microfinance but um basically writing financial products to people who are unbanked and so we were doing that in the black belt of alabama which is the poorest part of the united states and so we just happen to be in this like right place right time of you know understanding how shitty the financial system is for most people understanding how broken financial markets were generally then also at the same time discovering radical free

market economics like radical and it's like all of those things were infusing right at the right moment and then my friend sends me an article have you seen this bitcoin thing so it's just fuck natural yeah no that's another big topic on this uh show is austrian economics i was an econ major in college too and it's funny you go through uh at least in today's american university system if you're studying economics in particular you go through four years of school you get a degree which is supposed to represent a well-rounded understanding of the subject that you just studied But it turns out you're only learning one facet of that school or one school of thought within a huge overarching theory that is economics. Not even theory, a study, which is economics.

And you got to love the beauty of like the circular logic, just default rates. Oh, zero. That's what that's going to be our operating thesis for how we're going to measure risk on bonds. And so it's like that doesn't just rationally doesn't make sense. Well, it's like there's a detachment from reality going on. So you talk about like default rates, you can talk about CPI working, sort of manipulating the unemployment rates by not taking participation rate into consideration, stuff like that. It seems like the traditional financial world is becoming more and more detached from reality by the decade, I believe. I would argue, Bitcoiners would argue, it's a product of monetary policy getting out of hand.

Are you somebody who... Totally. Yeah. and you know it's interesting it's if you look at like the soviet union how did the soviet union get to where it was how did no one see the soviet union collapsing even just a couple years before it collapsed it's like they have to distort truth in order to perpetuate the status quo of what they're doing and so you you know if inflation is going to challenge what you're doing you change the definition of inflation so that there is no inflation and it's just like these word games

that are ridiculous um yeah totally totally yeah it's something uh we've got a couple guests in in the room right now but something the guest to my left duane and i were talking about at lunch um earlier today was uh what were we what the hell was i just about to get that we um we were uh we're talking about disconnect from reality oh shit economics all right i forget that um but oh um we were talking about only knowing that you're you're going through a crisis in retrospect so that's what i said we could be going through something bad that and we look back in retrospect like oh yeah it's obvious thing things were wrong like bitcoin was the obvious answer so to us it seems like obvious that oh totally that's happening

right now for sure i mean we uh you know people who lived in the dark ages didn't call it the dark ages exactly like if you were a serf you didn't realize you were a serf it takes detachment from that environment in order to be able to identify it so like i'm a big believer that we live in a modern dark ages and you know instead of the catholic church dictating what knowledge is we have you know the federal government and our institutions that really control the source of knowledge and people's access to power etc and you know back in the day if you wanted to be an up-and-coming man of the world and have some influence you became a you know you know priest is the right word but you entered into the catholic church and you it was a political

uh apparatus and you know we've just recreated that system it's a modern day of serfdom except now the farm that you you live on is much larger so you know as long as you don't go across the border you're okay but otherwise you got to make sure you're paying your taxes every year to the to the fiefdom to the fiefdom yeah we're we're debts that slaves right now that serves that's right um and so you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of of this this debt fiefdom that we find ourselves i'm i'm incredibly optimistic incredibly optimistic the most bullish time maybe in the the dark well the dark ages was the best time to find opportunities because after the dark ages you you have the enlightenment era all right like it can only

to get better right so i i think the next 100 years are going to be incredible and you know i see i see you know the computer and the internet is like our monitored modern printing press and uh when you had the printing press 1300s people could actually read the shit that they were being told all right that changed a lot of minds and then you couple with that and i don't think these or coincidences, you have the double entry accounting system emerge at basically the exact same time the printing press emerges. And now you liberate the financial interactions between people. So for the first time, you're able to have companies and the trading empires that are able to, you know, trust strangers effectively, not be just family owned enterprises.

So I think crypto, specifically Bitcoin, that's our triple entry accounting system. And so I think those two things mirror together they bring in a new golden age they liberate people to go and create value independent of the institutions that formerly enslaved them and it doesn't in a way where it's not like a revolution where we have to go wave guns in the street we just make the old system irrelevant we just it's like what you know uber did to taxis it's just like no one even cares it's just maybe irrelevant no it's uh it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from a bitcoiner neil wood fine shout out neil uh if uh bitcoin does become successful neil yeah all right cool yeah if bitcoin does become successful it will usher in the next enlightenment because

it forces people to think about monetary policy philosophy computer science mathematics game theory um sort of forces people to think uh yeah i don't know i'm i'm less maybe bullish on people i think they like they like to be lazy i don't blame them it's nice but you know you think about it like half the planet doesn't have a bank account you know how many jack ma's of the world are rice farmers right now because they just lack access to basic financial tools that if they had them they would be building the next amazing breakthrough technology so literally right on its face half of human potential is just lost because these people are not able to plug into the the system in which they're able to socially cooperate and create value truly yeah and so

bitcoin opens up this opportunity now absolutely so what types of innovations and so obviously there's an opportunity cost to to living under the monetary and financial system that we do now which can be sanctioned can be censored can basically wipe somebody off de-platform people if they wanted to now to a bitcoin world where not only that is not possible but now anybody with a cell phone and you don't even need an internet connection anymore you just need to be able to connect to a node connected to a satellite or something or send smoke signals yeah so i um dude i think i think that that's the interesting question what is what does the world look like when all of these people are plugged in and they actually have some sort of

skin in the game and some mechanism in order to impact change i don't know that's what more people should be focusing on and and i think it's going to be quite the movie to watch you know the the dark ages kind of the overthrow of the catholic church was mostly peaceful but there were a couple people who had to be burned at the stake also during that time so uh i think if you give a lot of people knowledge and power to take care of their own economic freedom there's going to be a little bit of drama period of tumult yeah yeah no that's uh this is going like straight into like the sovereign individual theory like they talk about the 500 year super cycles and the last inflection point was a printing press that destroyed the church and as you've been describing

the inflection point that we've been born into is the internet and bitcoin coupled together and it's crazy being born in that inflection point right like in that in that so lucky we're i mean it's like incredible that we have like a front row seat and not just a front row seat like we're getting to direct the movie too which is just i mean dude so special so special so special it's scary too right this is like rip your face off pace of change it's scary for a lot of people it feels like society is like trying to grasp the hold on to to how fast things are changing yeah yeah i mean you know so i look at kind of like three different points in history i'm sure you could go back further in this but you have the emergence of writing at the same time you

have the emergence of uh basically the single entry accounting system and a form of money and like society is born and then fast forward to the printing press and to the double entry accounting system and we go from like feudal society to where we are today and it's like you know just think about how big of a change that has been like i mean it's if you if you gathered all of the the artisans together at the time. And you said, imagine what the GDP of the world will be in the year 2100. They couldn't even fathom one building, one cell phone that sits in someone's pocket was beyond the total aggregate comprehension of all people. And so it's just like, wow. I mean, we're not creative enough to even know what, you know, 100 years from now can look like in this

world. It's going to be amazing. All right. Are we going to space? Absolutely. You know, I think is be really cool quite poetic if if bitcoin becomes the mechanism by which uh we finance uh a space exploration in the same way that when we had the double entry accounting system shortly thereafter we have the first stock uh issuance first uh joint stock companies and then we have the first stock market just like 100 years later and that financed uh ship exploration and that's how the dutch went from a tiny little rock to literally like running the world and then they basically took over england with you know uh william of orange going over marrying into the family so it's like uh uh that was like a new technology that enabled like the

discovery of a new world it'd be cool if bitcoin could do the same no it was uh it reminds me of a piece that uh a man named connor brown wrote last week sort of uh arguing with the naysayers to say bitcoin has no intrinsic value so therefore it can't be valuable or useful at all and comparing it to other stores of value like real estate and gold in particular which have little intrinsic value um but basically bitcoin opens up the opportunity where people do not have to store their value in something like land or gold and then uh basically allows for a better allocation of capital because people aren't worried about using their gold or their houses as stores of value instead you can open up gold to create machinery that can take us to space that can

go mine asteroids and stuff like that so we were talking about the opportunity cost of people not being part of the financial and internet world now that's just one aspect of it like thing about like another aspect is opening up capital to be allocated in a different way which leads for probably more efficient better investments in the long run totally totally you know it's uh you know we just humans in general suffer from such a lack of creativity and you know you talk to any economist or any person who comes from the powers that be and all they see is um projection of the status quo and things getting worse so it's like you know any day now there's going to be population decline you know any day now we're going to have just

rapids you know rampant stagnation etc it's like you know i think the population is going to explode like start putting people in space give them the mechanism to to create value make money like we're going to have a hundred trillion people in 100 years from now like and it's going to be you know a whole new set of people saying this is this is the end we're going to not have any more growth but dude i mean i think just the continuation of what we've seen for the past 10 000 years it's probably the same thing that we're going to see going forward for the next 10 000 years yeah we're pretty adaptable as a species aren't we unbelievably so unbelievably so yeah it's um again going back to like the pace of change seeing how like like you're saying

there's naysayers or like doom and gloom like oh the world's gonna end the world's gonna end and uh technology's changed drastically throughout my parents lifetime like they remember the world without the internet and obviously now with the internet and it was a big meme when the internet first came out and the iPhones came out, I was like, ah, the parents are going to be able to use this technology. Lo and behold, my mom's using an iPhone, texting, using Snapchat, all that stuff. But even more importantly, I look at my three-year-old nephew who can barely read, but he knows how to open his mom's iPhone, find pictures of himself, find videos.

Like, it's just the world is becoming more sort of innately digital for a new generation. If you could go back 40 years and tell people we'd have three-year-olds running supercomputers 40 years later, people would be like, you need to go to the crazy house. Right. Bullshit. Yeah. I think the future is unbelievably bright. And, you know, one of the cool things about Bitcoin that I've always thought was super promising, and we really haven't seen that much of it. I actually wish this would come back into the narrative in a big way.

But it's machine-to-machine transactions. Machine-payable web, baby. Yeah. and so like what happens when you know machines are able to start growing and building the economy around us and then human activity is really just a minority subset of all economic activity i mean that's a world that no one's really spending much time thinking about but that's going to happen for sure that's a that's a heavy thought most active most economic activity and upcoming from humans right yeah well it's probably kind of already like that in some senses i know you know

So what's interesting about money is, like, I feel like people, they ascribe the wrong purpose to money. Like, money is a tool to enable social coordination. That's all it is in a decentralized way. So all of us think that we're free agents, like, roaming around, but we all suffer from the same innate wants, desires, greed, et cetera. And so we have things that are prices that are purely a construct of people's demand for certain goods, et cetera. and they tell people what to go do. So, hey, if I can do something cheaper than the price that's presented,

I can go do it and make money, and I can satisfy all the wants that I have. And so, there's like this invisible hand that's instructing people what to go do, and they think they're in control of themselves, but their greed is driving them to go do what they do. It's like, already, so much of what people do

is outside of their control. It doesn't really scare me that much that machines are doing activity outside of, you know, human control, so to speak. You talked about, like, tapping into greed. Bitcoin's incentive system is a perfect vehicle to tap into human greed. Totally. And it's beautiful to see how perfect it is. Like, the incentive between the stakeholders of users, miners, developers, full node operators, whatever it may be.

But we found over the first decade of this technology that it is able to have like an emergent distributed sort of consensus and basically growth strategy where it's like, hey, everybody's looking out for their best interests. Everybody's being as greedy as possible. And that's just what makes Bitcoin work. So I can get pretty far out there on some stuff. Let's go. Let's go. But like people wonder, like, like, how did inorganic matter become organic matter? and i feel like uh uh what we're watching right now is like the analog world moving to the digital world and we're watching this this formation of this new organism and you ask yourself like you know how do all of these individual cells in your body somehow coordinate together to express a singular thought like when where does that consciousness arise from and it's like all

right well when you look at the price of any good you have millions and millions of individual actors that are all completely independent of each other but they're all operating by the same rules of the system so to speak and then they express this one distinct price that's just this message that's been broadcast to all the different people who can see that price have access to that price it's like maybe that's how how consciousness forms like maybe that's how all of our individual cells uh somehow come together in this ecosystem of your body and and express one human unit you know i don't know i think it's uh uh i think there's a lot of parallels there's a lot of parallels there is this one of my favorite uh one of my favorite parallels is what is it when the

group of birds is flying together a murmur murmur is it the murmur a flock a flock well when they're flying together but they turn in unison uh very quickly i think it's a murmur when it's a bunch of like swallows or not even swallows but a bunch of blackbirds flying it is a murmur but that is like what bitcoin is just it's sort of people reacting in the moment with each other uh because they're forced to sort of act as one unit to make sure that everybody's in consensus at any given point in time um so yeah no i think uh i like to look at nature for something like murmurs like beehives like another sort of like natural uh hive mind if you will pun intended for bees um And Bitcoin sort of helping humans coordinate in that way.

Because right now you're saying the price is the mechanism that sort of signals to the market how everybody's valuing everything. But the pricing mechanism of the money that we use is centrally coordinated. It's not natural at all. It distorts. It gives all the wrong signals to everyone. So people go do the wrong things. So what we need is an unbiased form of value so that everyone's using the same yardstick to determine what is the best practical valuable use of their time. And if we had that, people would be immensely more productive.

I mean, people wouldn't be toiling. I mean, this is something that's crazy. There's a billion people on the planet that make less than a dollar a day. There's 2 billion people on the planet that make less than $2 a day, all right? I think it's 80% of the population of the planet makes less than $10 a day. $10 a day. You're telling me that 6 billion, 5 billion people on this planet can't figure out how to do something that's more productive than $10 a day.

And we got assholes on the city of New York doing nothing, making $50 a day. All right. It's just, that's insanity. It's insanity. And it's not like those people are any different in terms of their intelligence or their ability or their smartness. This is completely a circumstance of where they were born, you know, what, what shit into the stick they got, but you know, it doesn't have to always be that way.

I think that's what Bitcoin enables. It's a system without any privilege where the person in the middle of nowhere has the same economic capacity to create value as the person in downtown San Francisco. And people are greedy. They're going to create value if they can. Everyone wants a better life.

There's no one who doesn't dream of a better future. I think people in that 80% that you described making less than $10 a day are probably more motivated and more driven than anybody too absolutely absolutely it's just giving them like that's one of my favorite uh ted talks of all time is the the uh the guy who drops like a computer in the middle of india and some poor village and literally anybody who wanted to come up and use a computer could use it what you found is like the six to ten year olds taught themselves english and quantum physics like within like three weeks dope cool so that's just but that's

is one information one example of information being basically opened to a population where it was never opened before and they were talking about like again six to twelve year olds were able to teach themselves a language and then a science within like a couple months because they were just so thirsty for for knowledge totally yeah so is this a lot of this what drives what you guys are doing at btc media why did you start btc media is this too so we started btc media by accident all right so uh basically got into bitcoin price of bitcoin goes way up first bubble i guess that i really experienced it goes up to 260 uh and i'm like all right this i should really evaluate whether this is something i want to invest a lot more time in and i went to

the bitcoin san jose bitcoin 2013 conference the dopest coolest thing to this day i've ever been a part of really the most one of the most special moments I've ever seen just the immense amount of of uh everyone having this shared recognition that like what is about to happen is a really big deal and like we have to be the ones to build it and like everyone is like you know you walk into the room at like 2 a.m in the hotel lobby and there's like 15 different groups of people huddled up in like three or four people and they're like conspiring together and it's just the coolest it was the coolest thing but i i went to this event and there's you know um google engineers and apple engineers and adobe engineers and they're all pretending that they're sick or

they're all making up excuses why they're not at work because they don't want their boss to know that they're they've snuck out to go to a bitcoin conference because at this time bitcoin's still not really a kosher thing to talk about and you know they're all talking about what they're spending their weekends on building and look at this cool nifty thing it's like right you got 400 000 engineers who are sneaking away from work to go to this conference because they're that excited about it and they're spending their precious time on the weekends building for it for free and there's like a thousand of them here at this one conference it's like all right this uh this is happening and so i decided uh i needed to go all in on bitcoin and i applied to be

employee number one at coinbase got turned down so i was like well fuck this happy you're mad about that yeah oh well uh well i don't know olaf did pretty well i think olaf got the the title of uh employee number one but uh no so i just decided i'm just gonna do my own thing and um i didn't really know what to do but at this point in time if you told someone that you were in bitcoin there was like 10 questions that every single person would ask well what's bitcoin what how does it work why does it have value why would i want to use that what's bitcoin mining how do i store it where can i spend it like the same the same questions and it was so annoying you like you wanted to start lying to people but not really because you secretly want to evangelize it you

know so so we just made a magazine we thought it was going to be a one-time thing called why bitcoin that just went through and answered in the best possible way each of these questions so if someone asks you you can just be like here's a magazine leave me alone and uh we got some great people to write articles for it and uh it was really successful by accident and so um we like we got to do a second one and then that became a third one and then a fourth one and then before we knew it we were buying out the only other print publication which was a total shit show called bitcoin magazine and then um before we knew it we were rolling up other media companies and then you know we just kind of accidentally went from hey i'm going to do one print publication

so people will stop asking me questions to a portfolio of media companies all focused on on bitcoin and blockchain so did you uh pick up bitcoin magazine from vitalik so that he could go do this wacky crazy thing called ethereum that we never thought was going to work and uh i'm not sure if it works yet yeah no it's a very good point but uh you know i it did teach me a lesson that i'm not as smart as i think i am because everybody was like hey you gotta invest it's 15 cents gotta invest it's 30 cents 90 cents you gotta get in you gotta get in no i'm not gonna do it it's ten dollars you gotta get in no i'm not gonna do it then you know three years later it's 1300 i'm like i'm a fucking idiot all right anyone in this industry who tells you that they

know everything is full of shit they don't know they don't know because this is just history unfolding in front of us you can be informed and you can have good principles that drive you that that drive you but how this all shakes out who knows right and it's crazy because bitcoin is like an expanding universe that reveals itself to us every day like you're testing out the limits of the system totally every day and sort of figuring out how we can work within that and it's funny to see that's why i'm excited to talk to you how bitcoin was marketed for a lot of the first decade and how brushing out with some of the limitations of the network sort of uh really really showed that some of those narratives

and some of the fast, easy, basically zero-comp payment structure was the way Bitcoin was going to scale. Obviously, as I turn around, we're talking about the machine-payable web. I'm interested to see if you think Lightning sort of enables that vision more innately because you're talking to somebody

who owned a 21 computer and was a part of the machine-payable web for a while. So that's how you know Andrew. Yeah. that well i know andrew i met andrew in new york uh talk about andrew desantis i met him at consensus here but like two or three years ago oh yeah we we had a chat on twitter and decided to uh to meet up with him to talk talk bitcoin he actually yeah that's where that's where i first heard your name was out of his mouth he said you got to find this man david bailey's a boss hey andrew if you're

hearing this podcast shout out to you long time long time no see um because he was at bitcoin magazine too right he was he was so uh you know we uh we were i guess at this point in time like maybe four people and then uh uh our current cto tyler and andrew uh were at school still and they started this this the apple banned all bitcoin wallets from the app store and so they created this like uh workaround where you could get bitcoin wallets on your iphone i think they were calling it the bit store that's the one thing about bitcoin no one knows how to fucking name anything everything's bit or block or so he's like names are getting a lot better now than they used to back then yeah you know um but uh uh and they got some money to get this going went up to

toronto burned all the money came back they're like yo route of money can we post up here for a little while it's like yes welcome to my to my uh web all right uh i didn't know really shit about technology and both these guys are really good so we they were very instrumental us getting things rolling and then um you know as as businesses grow up things change uh so i tyler still here andrew went on to uh 21 uh did some stuff with balaji uh was real hyped up on the 21 computer so much so much promise and potential there i always loved the uh like the deploy your own sensors uh and get paid as people ping ping your temperature data or whatever i still think that's like a killer killer application that's what like i think this is enabled now with the

lightning network maybe not on chain but we're talking about uh block stream i'm sure they're i'm pretty sure with their satellite they're enabling just what you're describing if somebody wants to send weather information via the satellite they can do it and charge uh basically like a stream of lightning payments for that data um cool and so i guess yeah it's like going back to how the narrative has changed yeah sorry it's just a winding conversation this is tales from the crypts there's no structure at all i'm starting to understand where the name comes from all right yeah cool all right see see it's not tales from the crypto because i didn't want to be as as obvious as you're just describing and marty's ben is just marty's bent because

i don't want to have like an avert like this is the daily bitcoin newsletter but uh thank you no but like so and you're saying like you you wish bitcoin was almost like more like it was in the the early days where people were more creative and so how has the scene changed as more more people come i mean it's inevitable if we think bitcoin's gonna become successful more people are gonna come but is it or the newcomers sort of encroaching on the original vision in your mind so you know this is where this is where i get in trouble saying things this is why i don't have a public profile but you know we um we so because we had a media company we had to get advertising dollars uh we had to have advertisers all right

and this is a point in time where everyone's broke so there's very few people who can advertise And so literally I spent a year traveling around the world, going to meetups in Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv and Berlin and Hong Kong, et cetera, meeting all these different Bitcoin scenes. And so, you know, we met and interfaced with a lot of Bitcoin companies, probably more companies than any other organization out there in the crypto landscape. and so like I knew Jihan from bitmain when it was four people and they had one guy who spoke really bad English selling miners from like a little foldable table about how they're gonna bring mining back to the home and they were gonna bring down the corrupt Titans that were butterfly labs at the time and KNC miner and like uh i knew eric vorhees when eric was running uh uh what's the dice game satoshi dice

satoshi dice and uh like a bandit on that deal well the story may be more complicated than it appears on the surface but the uh uh you know and and like i i remember dude i mean just like all of these different communities there were these different leaders that had kind of brought Bitcoin to that location and it was amazing how even if you lived in Argentina or China in the United States if you discovered Bitcoin you were almost of this like meta society like this like shared principles group and like you got along perfectly I mean it was just like every conversation you had it was like completely organic friendships developed it was super cool and so I know kind of the the the impetus and thesis and mindset that a lot of people who have ended up building

successful businesses and then today are either hated or loved we remember what it was like like in the very very early days and these guys are hardcore bitcoiners i mean they love bitcoin and you know it's a little bit distressing to see someone who Jihan I think is like for I'll use Jihan as an example here but this applies to I mean literally 50 plus entrepreneurs at least in the space Jihan is like 29 years old I believe you know translates the Bitcoin white paper when he is uh i guess 23 or 22 uh launches a mining company to take on the corrupt mining companies that exist at the time because they were like almost every one of them was a scam builds a company of 4 000 people i mean it's unbelievable in one year does billions billions

in revenue if they were in america they'd be on the fortune 500 and then you go on a crypto twitter and it's like yeah fuck that guy what has he ever done for bitcoin and it's like literally everything he's dedicated his life to it and so it's like you know um well i'm one of those haters i've said it many times on this podcast not a hater i do agree that bitmain we would not be as far along as we are particularly with asic uh asic chips as we are without bitmain But I've said that Bitmain is the Icarus story of early crypto where they flew a little too close to the sun, thought their shit didn't stink and sort of got sort of got reprimanded by Mother Bitcoin who. Yeah, no, they were the David versus Goliath. And then they beat Goliath, unbelievably so, and then became Goliath.

And then the new David shows up and beats Goliath. And it's like, yeah, fuck Goliath, you know, but it's just a cycle. It's just a cycle. and you know it's like um you know with retrospect everything seems so clear but in the moment in the time when everything's being made up kind of for the first time people don't know they don't know what's right and wrong they don't know what the what how things are going to shake out so they just kind of uh uh go with what feels right i guess that now goes back to what we're saying earlier like bitcoin is an expanding universe it's revealing itself to us and i think i mean

basically what we're beating around the bush here is the fork wars and uh some people thought the bitcoin universe was expanding and revealing information in a certain way and decided big blocks was the way and really stuck their flag in on that and the market showed that i mean i would argue the market showed that probably isn't the best way to go forward and like you said they're on the wrong side of the debate now at this point and it's like but with that being said like i would love i think of roger in particular because i feel bad for roger you look at roger these days and he looks he looks beat and downtrodden like i mean that was bitcoin jesus right i mean he was going around the world evangelist he put every i mean literally if

you had an idea that could help bitcoin he would just fund you without a business model just go do it here's bitcoin go all right and now it's he's bitcoin satan bitcoin judas i think bitcoin judas Ooh, I like that. Bitcoin Judas. I did not coin that one. But no, it's a suit. That's my mindset here is like long-term strength. That's why I'm interested in BTC Media has been around for a while.

I think Bitcoin Magazine, you guys have turned it into, I mean, what you've done with Aaron Van Weirdem and his writings and the Bitcoin focus over the years has been great. um some of the best information that the uh journalists the journalism around the four cores in particular aaron's describing what's going on aaron's amazing and what's it like working with him dude you know aaron's a historian and uh when we first started working with aaron he was coming over for he worked at quaint telegraph and he was writing like the weekly uh i never knew crypto news roundup or something and he was summarizing the little tidbits of stories for this shitty email they sent out and what's amazing about aaron he's a smart guy super smart guy super cool guy but he's a really good listener and so he'll just listen

won't interrupt he'll ask smart questions and like he actually cares about learning and then because of that developers like to talk to him and so he learns from them and then he just gets smarter all the time it's like he's just a super cool guy another person you should chat to chat with he's he's had a whole nother world of bitcoin and crypto that he's seen that i haven't seen oh i'm in his dms don't worry aaron and i actually i actually have corresponded with aaron once it was me him uh and laurent from oxt.me and and a dev from blockchain.info laurent uh called for help on twitter for people to come help him uh do research on the the spam attacks over the summers was a 2015 2016 what was that company called that did as a marketing stunt which was pretty clever

i got um i'm not i'm not sure i know the company exchange or something that like we're like we're gonna stress test the the blockchain and spam they got so much marketing out of it they sent a bunch of dust transactions so laurent sent out that like calling card like hey anybody wants to like help me look up the spam attack uh meet me in the slack room it was like me aaron and laurent and i was like that was my introduction like personal introduction aaron aaron if you're listening check your dms there's an invite to come on the podcast in there um no and that's but going back to like the what i was getting at by bringing up aaron is i think bitcoin magazine btc media in particular has had a focus over the last seven years that has really paid off for you

guys um that well i want to i want to challenge that a little bit you know we we have focus now we haven't always had focus and you know uh um we should come back to this element because aaron plays plays uh a part of that story that uh important role but i i want to i want to hit something before we move on which was the uh the roger um uh you know the the the bitcoin civil war and i'm gonna say something really controversial right here people are sometimes wrong crazy why would you ever say that yeah i mean not everyone can be like uh the twitterati and and be a hundred percent right about everything all the time not everyone has that amazing

magical mystical ability all right so uh sometimes people can be wrong and sometimes it takes people a long time to figure out that they're wrong and when people figure out that they're wrong they shouldn't have to eat a pile of dog shit to change their mind right and i feel like you know in fact i don't just feel like this i know this if roger wanted to say if he just wanted to say hey guys i've learned a lot from all of this i thought i got how it was all going to play out but i was wrong people would not accept that I would accept that Good

So an example of somebody Who did this is Wences Wences Cesar He was on the wrong side Of the four of course He came out after Has he been on the podcast He's a cool dude

He's not Wences I'm in your DMs as well For this one Peep them Yeah No but I do think And I've said this

On this podcast before Like I would Like I'm not gonna Trust Roger Like Have you met Roger before I have not Dwayne has

Super cool dude Yeah Just don't fight him with karate he'll he'll fuck you up no jujitsu whoops yeah roger if you heard that please don't beat me up no but i was like if you were like i'm not gonna start a business with him but it's like hey if you want to come back and like evangelize bitcoin again let's do it like that's what i feel bad for roger right now i was saying like i've seen and i don't know him so i don't know roger maybe i shouldn't be talking about him but it seems just like as an observer as somebody who's

been documenting and watching the uh the progression of bitcoin and the the people within it um i think right now like i was just using body language on youtube it is he seems like i'm wrong and i still gotta like go down this path and he seems stubborn very hard-headed person yeah stubborn man yes he's stubborn and yeah which is a good thing and a bad thing you know it depends on you know the situation but it's a question for you if you were hanging out with roger and y'all took a selfie and you posted on your twitter i'd get hate you'd get hate yeah that's crazy i know that's crazy i'm also a kid from philly and i don't give a fuck so perfect so that's the type of corrosiveness that we don't need because that's not that is not productive well that's a funny point to bring up

Because the corrosiveness probably stems because Bitcoin is money and people get really emotional when people try to fuck with their money. So that's what I think a lot of the hate is. Like, don't fuck with my money. Like, a lot of people saw Bitcoin Cash as an attack on their money. Sure. That's fair. That's fair. But that's not an individual person to hate.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, so to speak. you know so you can be upset about a controversial fork and that's legitimate but you shouldn't put yourself in a position where you personally dislike someone to the degree where you're not even allowed to be around them like that's how we ended up in the situation where someone who loves bitcoin who has a tiny disagreement becomes radicalized into the what did jihan tweet fuck your mother fuck fuck your mother if you want to fuck yes exactly like you know i wish i'd been there that night that he posted that i don't i'm curious what the circumstances were around it but uh i mean that's like radicalization and that comes from just like

getting hit from too many sides and like you know then bloods on both sides and then people are feuding over the things that are different than what the original fight was over i completely agree with you and we can analogize this to like leftist politics today if you don't fall within like the certain venn diagram of everybody you are outcasted yes and we cannot eat our own right like we cannot i mean yes exactly and it's like there's this uh virtue signaling that goes on in the space where you know if you are the most righteous you know purest bitcoiner then you know somehow that that entitles you to twitter fame and it's bullshit i'm probably guilty of this i'm definitely guilty of this i've definitely clout chased on twitter for righteousness

definitely in the past i thought you were from philly you didn't care about this stuff no but it's it's you do feel a little pressure like hey let me uh let me signal that you know i saw the biggest virtue signal campaign the other day that agitated me to the point where i actually tweeted something and i just i only typically just show my own stuff on on twitter so i don't tweet things actually think but the uh uh this rollback that was so controversial and it's like god forbid that we describe a feature of bitcoin as it works rather than all of us just pretending that that's not how it works because pretending makes it real somehow i don't know it's like like uh people know that there's such a thing as orphaned blocks and that there's just that

naturally effectively occurs in bitcoin less so now but formally all the time like there's a reason we wait for six confirmations before we accept a transaction like when did that become a like a moral thing with if you wait for six confirmations or you know three confirmations is like fuck you if you wait for three i don't know you know it's uh it's within the limits of proof of work right it is technically possible yes and so like maybe there's a now if you calculate the math it becomes astronomically absurd to roll back anything significant but like maybe if coinbase got hacked one day and 10 of all bitcoins were stolen there's a uh a formula that someone could run that says hmm maybe it's worth bribing miners to roll back three blocks so that we could save

10 of all bitcoin and the math works like we shouldn't hate but that's a thing that happens and that can happen yeah it could happen and it should there's nothing wrong with that happening in that circumstance if it's economically viable to do it should be done like if like if there's an attack vector against bitcoin that can be attacked people should attack it bitcoin doesn't survive because of people's virtue signaling like if we required virtue signaling for bitcoin we would not be here today it wouldn't be done so you know it's it's just all just all these people on their high horse and it's like turning all this stuff into moral issues and it's like guys we're building a technology we're trying to change the world we don't have to virtue signal about how

much we care about decentralization we're building a decentralized financial system that should be enough virtue signaling for everyone right just the mere participation but it is again like i'm definitely not like not intense a part but like i am on twitter like trying to add to the conversation and stuff and you can feel it like there is definitely a competition of thought a thought competition if you will but i do want to stress like you said earlier we do not want to become like the hardcore radical left here in the states where you have to agree with 8 000 things or you're not within the party lines and get tossed out we need to be a positive forward-looking inspiring community and we need to ignore dumb ideas you know if every dumb idea you heard

required a reaction to it you would spend all day just responding to dumb ideas that's what i interviewed uh andrew torva from gab last weekend and that's like what we dove into is like if you don't like something mute it like block it just don't listen to it unfollow and it seems like people in this day and age don't have that ability to to ignore they need to they need to be outraged outrage culture is a thing outrage culture is such a totally and it pisses me off i'm outraged about it it goes back to this disconnection from reality right the virtue signaling has more merit than merit today right and then then logic and and the truth right we live in a world that again is disconnected from reality the again going back to like the leftist party lines i would argue that

a lot of it it is impossible to fall within all those those sort of baskets um and it's it's a virtue signal to basically make sure everybody's feelings are okay it's it's an attempt to create a new hierarchy that's ranked by uh uh the purest uh as determined by the mob and it's not a good spot to be in i'm just saying that's historically we have a good track record of that being a bad thing to do so but i'll get off my soapbox on it but you know i feel like we're one of the few companies that that can say all this with some credibility because we saw a different time when there wasn't this dynamic and you know crypto twitter wasn't a thing and uh uh you know we saw people for who they were and what they wanted to build and what inspired them and dude there are

some really cool people out there who have just been completely pushed away from bitcoin eric vorhees i don't know if you follow eric vorhees or if you read his blog i think it's called uh money in state eric vorhees is a poet like he is he helped he helped red pill me when i was first getting in like reading his stuff about it um yeah it's like eric again it's another another character that causes much contention uh steven pear all right i'm i shouldn't be just naming people because if people hear this they're gonna be like why did you call me out but like steven pear like uh if i had to like name like five people that have uh affected my thinking and inspired me to be in the space steven pear is one of them he one time told me

that the only thing that matters is that you acquire as much bitcoin as you possibly can right now because it's 121 millionth of everything and it doesn't matter how much money your business makes it can't exceed owning a fraction of 121 millionth of everything and it's like all right that's a bitcoin bull maximalist if you've ever heard one that's a chad right there yeah and now it's like you know talk to steven and he's like yeah i don't know how i feel about bitcoin anymore all these people they're so angry and it's like dude you just is bitcoin socially scalable is it going to get to a point where too many people are cloud chasing and it just becomes untenable because uh it's just not socially coordinate like coordinatable this is the thing

bitcoin doesn't care right so you know like everything it's about separating you know signal from noise crypto twitter is just all noise it's just noise all the time you know bitcoin does not give a fuck what you say on twitter thank god you don't know that twitter exists yes thank god so um anyway anyway how can we fix the discourse what do you think needs to happen well so i guess this is part maybe we can get into uh the story i was just mentioning about why bitcoin magazine can't say that it's been purely focused on bitcoin um you know we uh uh as we've seen all of these waves come and go you know for a long time i've considered myself not a bitcoin maximalist but a bitcoin maximizer all right which means make as much bitcoin as you possibly can

that is the real message of bitcoin all right just go and and and be a pirate make as much bitcoin as you possibly can so you know we we're opportunist with our business in terms of seeing where the market is seeing where there's business opportunities seeing where the market is willing to spend money and then providing a product or a service that makes us money i again i want to apologize to everyone who's hearing this that we're a business and we try to make money i hope everyone's okay with that um and so you know we we have kind of i guess wandered through token forest and like been there and wandered back out and you know i mean uh uh we have our hands in a lot of stuff i guess um you know we're low-key

because we don't want people to know all of the things that we're involved in or connected to necessarily. But we own, for example, one-third of the biggest ICO platform in the world in China before it was shut down by the Chinese government. What was this? This was in 2017 that it was shut down.

And it was called ICO Age. It's the most profitable business I've ever seen in my entire life. It was... What a great business. what a great business but the um uh and like you know we you know this this suite is paid for well maybe i shouldn't say who was paid for but the uh in the room beside us several of the ethereum co-founders all right like um we've been there we've seen all this stuff

we've been a part of the genesis of a lot of this stuff and you know we're open-minded people who are saying like if you can build something cool on blockchain or if there's a permissioned blockchain application that someone makes that works and like creates value like show it to us and like we'd love to see it because um you know god speed so to speak but um after a certain amount of time goes by and you don't see it you start becoming uh a little disillusioned and then you know when crypto winter comes which it always comes it forces you to look at what your priorities are both personally professionally as a business etc and so you know there was a point in time like last year in 20 in 2017 2017 was such a

good year 2018 where we we hit basically 90 90 employees we were spread out across I don't know ten businesses maybe it's more or less than that I don't know some of them were blockchain focused some of them were token focused you know and and when winter came and business is hard you know business requires focus to be successful and so like you know when things are everything's going up it's very easy to paper over all of your problems by just throwing money at it which is the worst thing you can do but it's the easiest thing in the moment and then when things are going bad not only are is everything going bad all at once but things that could be salvageable

become not salvageable because you have no attention or time to give it which a real business you hunker down and you give it the time and attention and you survive and you know being successful in bitcoin is all about surviving winters like that's just survival is the name of the game and it's just hard to like if we say this a lot now at the office but if everything's a priority then nothing's a priority so uh uh you know we there was a period in time where we were doing a lot of stuff and outside of bitcoin and about i guess eight months ago what it's may right now so maybe nine ten months ago we were like this is not fun we're not having fun we're we're losing a ton of money every month uh we are dealing with fire after fire

after fire we have half of our time being diverted to projects that we really have no confidence that they're anything more than a science experiment it's like why why are we doing that and Aaron Von Wardum came and sat down with me and was like, David, I know you're excited about all of these things that we're doing, but I think you're missing the biggest kind of gap in the market, which is no one's focused on Bitcoin, like BTC. And I think that if we shifted and changed our business, that there's actually a big market segment out there for us to go and pursue and so it's like

you know that opportunity kind of snuck out of nowhere because when we got started everyone was bitcoin and then just everyone became bitcoin and then some and then slowly over time you became you know the minority of your content was bitcoin because there's so much noise being created all these different places and then before you know it like bitcoin's like the minority thing that you're talking it wasn't an intentional decision it just like organically evolved and so we looked at that and we're like you know what fuck all this other stuff that we're doing let's just focus on what we love what's proven and where we can have fun and like damn if we wouldn't live with a lot of regret if we were so spread thin that we picked the right technology the right play the

right time and didn't make any money because we just spread ourselves too thin versus if we like gave it our all knew that we left everything on the field so to speak and it just happened not to be bitcoin that was the winner like i'd be much more okay with the second option than the first option and so uh uh we reflected on this for a while and then became kind of like once you kind of we've got our mindset to like no more bullshit focus on fun wide open bitcoin opportunity it became unignorable like every time we're having a conversation about anything that's not bitcoin it's like wow this is all just a sunk cost like let's just stop talking about this topic and just shift shift gears and so uh we've really had a total mind shift change in our business and so

would say bitcoin has only bitcoin magazine was pure bitcoin from i guess 2011 to let's say 2014 2015. then it slowly started getting infiltrated with non-bitcoin stuff i'm not gonna call it but just you know uh uh science experiments let's say and then uh uh about six months ago we only bitcoin again like completely focused on bitcoin across the entire business but especially at bitcoin magazine and um uh god it's been so much better has it so much better what's what's changed mostly dude first off just the attitude at the the office the cultural attitude at the office um where it's like it's very hard to to really like uh uh feel natural in a role when you're having to wear a lot of different i'm not going to call them different faces but when you're

having to have a voice for this and a voice for that versus when you have one voice talk you're focused on one thing and you truly authentically believe in it like it becomes so much easier to talk about what you want to do you know product strategy becomes so much clearer because you're just building something that you would want to see for yourself like it's just uh uh it's a lot more fun to come into the office and a lot more people at our company know what they should be doing because it's much clearer what the vision is then spread across a whole bunch of stuff that people are you know if if the bull market's here yay you've made money but it's you know when the bear market's here it's like oh you've lost money and you don't fucking believe in the shit i mean

so as uh as a bitcoiner like i'm fucking pumped that you guys have refocused and when i said earlier that you guys have been focused throughout the years i do think your bitcoin coverage has been some of the best still throughout the years totally totally uh describing how segway works describing what was going on with fork wars aaron does an incredible job of explaining technical details um you know the one my proudest articles that we have is uh our guide on um uh how to claim your bitcoin cash and sell it that's the best performing article we've ever written really and i don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people we helped safely sell their bitcoin cash thank you for your service yeah you're welcome thank aaron thank aaron he did the hard work

no but it's uh it's something because we're talking about like old heads in the space you're looking at coinbase now they're spinning out basically a shit coin casino they're doing custody they're doing staking they seem like a company in my mind that's spreading themselves too thin and um it might be hurting them in the long run every company in the space has to learn the lesson that we learned or they will they will learn it eventually at a higher cost like it's not a unique story to us it's not a unique story to us and you know whenever you you say shitcoin casino you know whenever you look at a shitcoin casino you should always just ask yourself if you're trying to determine if someone is helping or hurting

bitcoin what do they count their profits in and if at the end of the day they're counting how much bitcoin they have they're helping bitcoin so uh i can tell you that coinbase brian that crew they count bitcoin do they yeah dude the the i can tell you they're not counting it in usdc or whatever it is i figured that i see them trending more towards like ethereum like i thought um dude trying to make toshi most of the ethereum co-founders count their profits in bitcoin i mean it's the the shoot maybe this is gonna be in trouble the the i like trouble uh uh you know it's bitcoin maximization it's the mother yeah we're maximizing bitcoin but it is it proves that everything's priced in bitcoin it all comes back to bitcoin at the end of the day

and but i also do think like the uh the all coins and the shit coin casinos if you will do provide almost like a an aurora of security because it confuses the authorities and uh people who could sort of choke choke bitcoin if it was standing by itself it was very obvious that that was going to uh take on the world financial system whereas now you have thousands of coins where It's like, oh, maybe it could be another one. Maybe we shouldn't worry about it yet. Yeah. And provides like a little bit of cover.

And we should thank all those ICOs marketing budgets for bringing so many people to crypto. All right. Because they'll come to Bitcoin eventually. They'll find it eventually. All right. Bitcoin has a natural gravity. Like you will use Bitcoin. Every person hearing this podcast, if they're not already using it, will eventually use it.

You don't have a choice. Like it will force you. Do you think it's inevitable? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Why is that? because the world needs something like bitcoin and i have yet to see one person uh propose a way to actually improve over the bitcoin mechanisms and like if you go on there's actually a great

bitcoin talk thread about this like the the places in which you can innovate around bitcoin the distribution of of the tokens or uh the i don't remember all the different the different vectors there's only a couple that you can you can tweak around and uh uh no one has come up with anything yet that's better yeah you try to make block times faster more tps like it's all vanity metrics yeah it looks better on paper but then you go and you look at the amount of hash power needed to get the equal amount of security that six bitcoin confirmations has and nobody's even close like ethereum second but it's still need 5x the time uh to get the same uh confirmation that your your transaction is buried in the blockchain totally and uh there's no free lunch

no and it's uh it's been fun going on this ride it's been fun being a pirate like you described earlier i like that i want to refer to myself as a pirate more i think i'm gonna start doing that freak so marty the pirate now uh there's a pirate code all right so there's still there's still some rules of the sea but you know commandeer ships when it makes sense and you make people walk the plank when it makes sense but otherwise you just drink a lot and you uh count your doubloons and chase tail what's it uh but what's it like being a pirate right because it was uh it was taboo to be in bitcoin like you were describing earlier like how have how is the perception of your uh family and extended friends changed it's totally changed uh uh you know this

is also one of the conclusions that we came to when we were talking so all right let me take a step back so when we made the change to focus only on bitcoin we did a blog post we announced the change it was called make bitcoin fun again and so the reason why we made it titled at that not because we're trying to uh channel trump um but because uh you know if we're going to be focused on bitcoin full-time we have to be have fun doing it and when we looked at the bitcoin landscape when we were like all right if we were all full-time bitcoin what would it be like dude it is not it's not fun like it used to be fun like there used to be like memes and we used to put fucking dogs faces on nascars and make people watch it on television and you know we used to

pay people to blow up their iphones i mean like that was fun you know so it was like all right if we're going to do this full time we have to bring bring back the fun uh what was well now i'm lost track of it how's the perception changed all right so you know when bitcoin was young it was completely seen as illegitimate you were a psycho if you were uh involved in it and so you really had nothing to lose by being kind of you know outspoken about kind of controversial ideas then as bitcoin gained legitimacy you saw this shift where everybody was like let's go fucking buy suits and let's go let's like we we are almost there where like big banks will will get bitcoin and we can really prove to people that this is a real thing and like you just gotta

appreciate that at the time we're all wanting bitcoin to succeed so that seems like the thing that can be done to like help it and then now we're so legitimate that really the industry should be pivoting all the way back to the beginning of like fuck you we don't need to impress you anymore like we've already like we already created a hundred billion dollar thing on the way to a 10 trillion dollar thing on the way to even beyond and so fuck you like this is what bitcoin is if you don't like it go away well no i completely agree i think i think we try to make things weird here at tales from the crypt marty's bent and try to bring back a little bit of weirdness and i wish i was around to experience the weirdness uh the early days that you did

but no i agree i have a sort of fuck you this is inevitable mindset uh especially in my writing and on this podcast and i think uh for me personally my journey like i'm still getting shit for my parents my parents are more onto it my own not even my in-laws but like my cousins friends like oh you're crazy you're still that crazy bitcoin friend uh but i'm like yeah yeah you guys are gonna be i'm gonna be laughing at you in a few years not laughing at you but you're gonna be my mom who's 60 years old well she's not 60 she's 35 35 years old uh she runs our back office now at our company she she she saw this she was like uh this is crazy first time she saw me get paid by a customer in sweden and the transaction cleared zero fee and the cash was then deposited

in our bank account she's like holy shit this works this is way better than credit cards and so yeah dude it's like uh people think they'll never it's like what you were saying earlier with iphones people like oh old people will never get smartphones and then it turns out they want to communicate with people they figure it out they start using smartphones so dude it's you don't have a choice those who wait last to convert to bitcoin will be impoverished by bitcoin oh powerful quote the paul krugman's of the world that's the greatest irony of it all right that's the greatest irony of it all they're the last bag holders of all the paper monopoly money and they're going to cling they're going to cling to their ideas that they need to be

need to be right uh i can't wait to go to the uh yard sale for paul krugman go pick rummage through all his like prized possessions be like pay you satoshi for that i'll give you satoshi for that yeah i'll give you 100 satoshis for your nobel prize what's the smelt value of this yeah yeah oh man uh uh so yeah i think it's an inevitability it's just like uh it's just time playing out and that's all it is like and and you know it's water running down a mountain so we you know we give ourselves too much credit when we say like oh we're building this thing because it's like all right the water's gonna make it down to the bottom of the mountain regardless of whatever you do but we are channeling the path of the water as it flows down

so that's that's still cool that's still cool yeah it is and it's cool to be a part of because it's completely emergent right like we're talking about like bitcoin the system of node operators and uh miners and devs is emergent like physically working on the system and making it work as a technical project but then beyond that it's like people like the bitcoin magazines tales from the crypt just pop up out of nowhere like we need this thing to succeed and they need us like to talk about it totally spread the word totally i mean the the you know bitcoin is is as inevitable as the internet is they're one in the same they're like the same there it's the digitization of all things and so like uh you know when people like i still hear

there's only i guess a small list of things that people think will break bitcoin one of them is like if there's a critical flaw found in bitcoin and somehow we're able to just mint a whole bunch of bitcoins that's the death of bitcoin no it's not like that's like saying if the internet there was a flaw in the internet the internet went down for two weeks that the internet's gone forever we're never going to use it again yeah it's like no we depend upon it like we need it in human society to move on we have to have it and so we're going to figure out what broke we'll fix it we'll redeploy it and it'll work again same with bitcoin that's the beauty of bitcoin too it uh amends itself every 10 minutes so you can have it uh right up to the moment that it fucked up and

go back to that that's right you know uh uh and i will i uh i guess to to to kind of go back to what we were talking about a little while ago one thing i didn't mention about the uh the civil war that happened dude we're constantly learning new things i mean like i'm constantly being impressed by bitcoin seeing things i never saw um saw beforehand and uh you know i feel like we learned something from that civil war and we should spend time to reflect on what did we learn so that people can say okay we fought this battle we learned this lesson and we don't have to fight the same battle again to learn the same lesson in the future like we should like record these lessons somewhere so that you know we can memorialize them i don't know well

they're recorded on bitcoin magazine uh that's right the path to segue right that's right you know the uh uh i think like what we learned from that is that bitcoin on layer one its principles cannot change and that forks don't fly and so like that's what we learned i don't think we learned And there's other lessons that people think we learned. I don't think we necessarily learned them. But like forks are no good. Doesn't matter if you like big blocks. Doesn't matter what your opinion is about it.

Bitcoin doesn't care about your opinion. Forks won't work. So you have to deal with the system as it is. And then you have to figure out how to work with those pieces to create the thing that you ultimately want to create. And so like if you look at math and the very tight rules that math has and arithmetic has, If you're trying to achieve some formula and the formula doesn't work out, you don't go and you change the rules of math.

You don't go change the rules of arithmetic so that you can get your, you know, thermodynamic, aerodynamic formula to work. No. That's stupid. You have to come up with a new creative approach to solve the original problem that you're trying to solve. That's what's so cool about Lightning Network. It's like if Lightning Network would not be where it is, if there wasn't all this pressure

building to find a solution for you know people to use every day yeah no it's that was beautifully said like it's uh like lightning uh things like liquid i'm not sure how confident i am about either really but they are like just i'm actually fairly confident about both but um it's just again the market finding solutions to the problem the problem being that bitcoin has certain limitations at the protocol level and all we needed to do is be slow dumb and stupid and create blocks roughly every 10 minutes in a distributed fashion and we'll be gucci and just figuring out how to leverage those assurances on top of that protocol there but it's crazy this is an alien technology like we're learning how it works again going back we're

learning how it works and i think uh i think you're making me more of a soft-hearted bitcoiner throughout this conversation you need we need to have more we need to have more uh what's the word uh you know let people down later who who who have uh ill-conceived notions that turn out because who knows what day you'll be wrong you know i'm wrong a lot so so we'll pivot this conversation a little bit to uh the present if you're feeling a little soft-hearted we're having a conference bitcoin 2019 i'll be there i'm we're going to be recording a live podcast there dope cool biggest bitcoin conference in the world biggest bitcoin conference actually since bitcoin 2014 are we were hoping that we could make the claim biggest bitcoin conference

ever but we're not quite there yet we're not quite there use the uh use the promo code rhr are and help us get there good good chilling good chilling um and you know we've uh gone out on a limb and invited some of these nasty characters that everyone's so mad about people are not happy jihan's gonna be there uh yes we're it's a constant negotiation of jihan he may not be there so people may get their their whim we'll we'll see he's he's a little bit uh preoccupied yeah also a little nervous a little nervous just feels like there's a lot of hate uh but there is a lot of people um who you know maybe people have been upset about that are going to be there at the event they're only going to be talking about btc no bch bullshit no no big blocks no this is how we need to fix

bitcoin to make it work it's like all right all that doesn't matter just let's just talk about btc and we're going to give them a platform to be involved in the community and so this is a good place to like meet these people and like have a human relationship with them and like figure out what drives them and you know if roger wants to come to the event roger is more than welcomed at the event as long as he's not you know saying bch is the real real bitcoin he's more than welcome at the event and uh uh it's going to be a super cool moment where i think we can uh change maybe hopefully change the conversation of like uh uh big block bitcoin versus small block bitcoin or whatever to bitcoin versus the world all right and we're like all on the same team to take on the

world and to transform that and like we have minute disagreements the one thing we all know is that forks don't work anymore so don't even try to to come pitch your fork and outside of that build whatever you can build to create value and grow this this virus faster so that we can get rid of the bullshit legacy system that exists today like that's what we're all fighting against is like replacing the old redundant system that's holding back society humanity all the people of the planet wow no i i love it i thank you for putting it together with that with that mindset in mind like hey let's shake hands get back because rod and i haven't talked about people we rod and i got drinks uh a couple months ago and brought up the g-hunt there like yeah people saw

on the site like ah but it's like like you said earlier like he was at bitcoin san jose 2014 like with the he was dude jihan people don't even know this there are multiple bitcoin core devs that he gives money to for them to just do their work and they're like btc core devs and they can't tell the world that they they give the money because everyone would immediately be Like, oh, these are just Bitmain shills trying to take down Bitcoin. But these are Bitcoin core developers that you know that are super well respected. And Bitmain, in private, supports them just so that they can work on Bitcoin because they fucking love Bitcoin. Well, thank you, Jihan.

So I guess the message of this podcast is give peace a chance. Give peace a chance, right. And have fun. Just focus on having fun. if we all have fun and we get away from the outrage if we could create a uh we said outrage culture we could create like a fun rage culture i was an under rager back in my day yeah i the uh you know so i think we would all get along a lot better so we have like we're gonna have venezuelan fiat that we're trying to figure out right now how we can make

it rain from the ceiling if you tip a qr code make it so that the speakers you know they're trying to be all serious and it's like venezuelan you know monopoly money coming down on them uh we got bitcoin arcade games we have an art gallery where we have like bitcoin puzzles hidden in the art uh we have we have three people at our company right now working on uh launching a a game boy classic game boy game uh find bitcoin get make it to bitcoin 2019 game boy game where people can discover free tickets and talk to bitcoin characters within the game boy game like this is the ridiculous things that we're working on this this is what i mean by like make bitcoin fun again focus on like enjoying life and less on like being upset about

what other people are doing because at the end of the day it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter bitcoin is going to do bitcoin it's going to do bitcoin it doesn't care it doesn't it god i love this conversation thank you for putting this together rod um not david like i said like you are somebody who's been whispered into my ears a few times throughout the years like you should meet this guy and i'm very happy that i have uh i've heard a lot about uh the fun that you have down in tennessee as well what uh what do you do outside of bitcoin like what interests you outside of bitcoin uh basically nothing basically just do bitcoin literally all day every day i get off of work and i go home and i get on our bitcoin or you know i uh uh yeah i do

bitcoin all day every day honestly bitcoin consumes my life entirely um but in nashville we do have a lot of fun bachelorette capital of the united states now it's become number two for bachelor party in the united states because they follow the bachelorette parties i was at one last year cool cool and uh you know i would say i don't know nashville is basically as hot as uh layer two scaling solutions yeah yeah your boy rod's been uh been selling nashville hard and the cost of living is way lower so if you're trying to stack sats it's a good place to do it uh Williamsburg, Brooklyn is not the best place to stack sacks if you're a stack sacks. Hey, man, that's a Ethereum town.

Oh, believe me, I'm in the belly of the beast. Belly of the beast. Hey, Joe, another guy who counts it in Bitcoin. They all do. They all do. It's the mother. Yeah, yeah. It's the reserve currency of crypto.

It's the reserve currency of the other projects. well i don't want to take up too much of your time david oh man this is good it's been incredible i'm pretty buzzed after uh i don't know how much of this whiskey we've drank but it's drinks a whole bottle wow between the four of us we finished the bottle nice are you uh you big whiskey guy no i live in uh i grew up on a farm uh in lincoln county tennessee which is about 15 minutes away from the jack daniels distillery so um dry county never drank a drop in my life until i was 21 of course um i'm just kidding i drink alcohol all the time yeah no if you work in crypto you have to drink heavily i mean that's that's the name of the game that's the name of

the game especially this week yes well it depends on the season you either drink to drown your sorrows or you drink to to party you know depends on the bitcoin price i went to uh i went to dinner on saturday night with a bunch of bitcoiners when the price was uh breaching 7 000 uh like 73 50 it was a it was a fun dinner needless to say got a little rowdy it's it's a drug you just can't escape it's the worst there's a gravity to it there's a virus like it is a mind virus like why why has it infected us so bad like is it is it because it's so obvious of all value just sucks all things into it and it won't stop are we crazy you know you know if it wasn't that the fact that bitcoin was a hundred billion dollar project i'd say yes but the price tells me we're

not crazy or otherwise it wouldn't have gotten to where it's gotten it's the rest of the world that's fucking crazy and they're just now figuring it out right but i have to pinch myself every once in a while like are you fucking crazy marty well i've come to the conclusion that one bitcoin is 121 millionth of all the energy in the universe and if that's not crazy i don't know what is fuck oh are we going down the dyson's fear conversation the uh the ultimate bitcoin bull i'm i'm i'm i'll what time is it how much how long have we talked on this we're an hour and a half in right now all right so i'm gonna leave i'm gonna leave on this note all right so if you told

someone that in 1994 that there's this thing being built called the internet and that one day it will exceed the amount of information ever created in human history including every hand written letter every fax every telegram every piece of art every book ever published that it would exceed the the aggregate information of all of those things people would think you're fucking crazy now the internet creates that much information every second every second the value of bitcoin you know people want to prescribe oh if it reaches the size of equities or the size of derivatives or if it hits this size or this size that's as stupid as fucking saying that that fucking the value of of email is the value of the u.s postal system

like bitcoin will create more value in a second 30 years from now than the aggregate amount of value that's been created thus far in human history to this date like this thing is a fucking black hole and it's gonna get fucking crazy it's just the very very very beginning of it right now i think i gotta go buy more bitcoin david i can't thank you enough for No, thank you for having me. No, well, you have me in your room, so thank you for having me. This has been a pleasant conversation.

I'm very, very happy to have met the man that I've heard whispers about throughout the years. Cool. Roll tide. Peace and love, freaks. Be-kay!