TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #79: John Carvalho

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Join Marty + Matt as they sit down with John Carvalho, CCO of Bitrefill, to discuss his history in Bitcoin, all the dope stuff Bitrefill is working on, Bitcoin's fungibility, Bitcoin culture, and much much more. Checkout Bitrefill: https://www.bitrefill.com/ Follow John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitcoinErrorLog Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_odell Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

What's up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's sponsor. I think you may have heard of them. We've been talking about them a lot. The Cash App. They're helping us stack sats, particularly on Saturdays, but any day you want. Cash App has been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. It's the first P2P payments app to allow you freaks to stack sats and buy Bitcoin. It's also got the Boost program. We've been talking about the Boost program a lot. They added some new boosts this week, including DoorDash and Popeyes, I noticed, to very, very quality boost. I use my Boost card every day.

What you do, you download the Cash app, you sign up for the Boost program, you customize your Boost card with a little signature, with a little Bitcoin sign, a little lightning sign, whatever it may be. They send you the card, you turn the Boost on, you go to the merchant, you spend it, you spend some money, and you get cash back. So it's an incredible program. We're big fans of the Cash app here. Go to your local app store and download the Cash app today.

and start stacking sats, start using those boosts, start saving money, start developing the low time preference that we talk a lot about on this podcast. Hope you freaks enjoy this conversation that Matt and I had with John Carvalho from BitRefill. John is somebody who I have an immense amount of respect for and somebody I have been following on Twitter for years, and this was an extremely fun conversation. I think you guys are going to love it, and check out what BitRefill has been doing lately. Those guys are doing some incredible work.

Cheers. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. You're listening to a haggard Uncle Marty here. It's been a long week. It was a long night last night. We've got a great group discussion here to recap the week. and dive into a little Bitcoin history with a very fascinating person,

someone I've been following for a while. Very pumped to have him in the studio. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the Chief Communication Officer of BitRefill, John Carvalho. John, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here. Thanks for coming through, dude. We've also got Matt O'Dell here.

Cheers, guys. Yeah, so we've got a lot to talk about. You are somebody I've been following on Twitter for a while. like i said uh somebody's very principled in the space and is building cool things at bit refill before we get into all the shit that went down this week and uh what you're doing a bit refill as a part for the course here how the hell did you find bitcoin um what sort of drew you to this rabbit hole um i don't remember for sure but i'm pretty sure that it was an article about silk road um it was late 2012 sometime uh in the fall and i was like started reading about it and

i was like wait people are safely buying drugs on the internet and i have to see what's going on here so i bought a little bitcoin and then i like started digging into the forums and digging into the irc rooms and just like it just like sucked me in you know and like the whole community aspect of it the whole like thinking about all the different disciplines you have to understand with bitcoin like with game theory and development and cryptography and finance and it was just like an endless you know rabbit hole of learning you know and i just my i just find myself falling and falling for six years now so yeah and uh now you're up at refill you had exotica um which was a streaming website that allowed people to get paid in uh bitcoin specifically

geared at uh cam girls and uh now you're at bit refill um so what do we what do we want to talk about first this week let's talk about the history of bitcoin or not the history of bitcoin john's history in bitcoin um how should we take this should we should we start with the famous bitcoin cash video yeah let's start with that so for you freaks that don't know john has uh one of the best uh interviews ever recorded in the bitcoin space in my opinion it's probably about a year ago now at this point it was 2017 year and a half it was like october or so i think yeah so a while ago now but you were right before the big pump right before the big pump john interviewed uh roger about uh b cash uh bitcoin cash excuse me um so how dare you

was this pre was this this was pre or post fork um this is no because the fork had happened the fork i believe uh bitcoin cash forked in the beginning of august and so it was pretty young um at this point but like obviously roger had gone like all in on it and he was making his baby you know yeah um thank you for that interview we got a we got a great meme out of that roger giving the middle finger to the world yeah i was happy to give that to community it was like i remember beforehand like i prepared and i prepared questions and i prepared i like researched his videos and all his like current party lines and how he responded to things and i was like meditating in my room before i was just like okay i cannot fuck this up like

everybody is so fucking sick of roger like uh being in an interview and then people in the interview is just always like you've done so much for bitcoin roger like it's you know nice to have you and then like have some like softball bitcoin cash fork questions and then i was like and everybody was getting fed up with it and i was like okay i'm gonna try to like do the actual roger bear interview people want um i think in the end we but i did give them that but i wasn't done like he ended it like i didn't even get to ask half my questions yeah it was live right yeah yeah it ended with him giving you the middle finger after you just kept saying bcash over and over again right sort of i mean honestly somebody made a cool version of the video of a

cut of the video where uh they cut all the times i said bitcoin cash and all the times i said b cash and it's like i said like bitcoin cash like 14 times and i said b cash three times oh wow and it was just like i was actually trying i wasn't trying to troll him it just like and i wasn't i'm not like i was not trolling when i said i think it's a nice name like i thought b cash was a better name and i was using it as a nickname and there was kind of like a little bit of a trend on twitter or some people were starting to like use it derogatively but it wasn't quite there yet you know and but he felt it was like he just i'm literally taking the bitcoin out of his project so like that's how he saw it were you uh were you once like a not a follower of roger but you ever

like see roger in a positive light like early on a bitcoin no um i i had actually been making fun of him for a long time in in you know smaller circles and when less people knew that i even existed um no i i remember when he was doing i remember it was like there were some people when i came into bitcoin it was like everybody said that these people did good things but like i never saw them do good things myself and i was like have these guys actually ever done good things it was like gavin and and roger and i remember like roger's just always doing stuff i thought was kind of stupid and then he did he bought when he vouched for gox that was like the the first major one i remember it was just like gox the funds are safe you know he got like a gun to his

head i can go up a teleprompter i'm pretty sure he said like i could promise you that mal gox is solvent right now there was actually a meme with a gun to his head like it's uh it's crazy how much has changed since those days like a bit dev you were at bit devs last night that was a great meetup yeah that was cool having peter todd you those guys are all cool bob macklerath like just hashing it out pun intended um over pull requests and stuff like that was cool but uh it's crazy like last night a bit that was like can't like the bitcoin cash thing came up uh as a subject and i was like we honestly don't have to wear it because we were talking about how we may solve fork snoring and will it be as contentious as segwit and it seems

the market has decided in that whole saga. Is it behind us, do you think? I don't know, and that's why, if you remember, one of the questions I asked, which I was surprised nobody wanted to really elaborate on, I asked, what is the proposed activation method? And they took me literally as in it hasn't been officially decided

because it's not that stage yet. But what I really meant was, what is the general atmosphere among the developers right now about the proper way to get a soft fork activated after all this you know um somebody else there was like saying oh i have like segwit ptsd like what's gonna happen you know i think we all do a little bit yeah no yeah and it's uh i interviewed uh uh lawrence nihon yesterday from blockstream and asked him that question he was he was willing to i love that guy that guy's awesome he's willing to put something out there he's like six months to

a year of minor singling that they're ready and then enough prep and acceptance from everybody seems to be acceptable but it is weird it's like how do you put forward an activation plan yeah i don't know i'm glad it's not my problem um but whose problem is it it's nobody's problem somebody's got to do it yeah that may be why nobody answered me because they're all hoping somebody else mining minor signaling kind of makes sense and then because that's what we always did in the past and then if miners don't fall in line then we could take it from there right yeah yeah i mean that's that's what i said if they do that one more time it's like then at that point why are we even bothering to include miners in the process and why don't we just like

make everybody update the software and you know that'd be that ah yeah this gets into some hairy uh hairy stakeholder discussions here yeah i think it'll be fine i think that you know we're learning more and more that miners are just you know hired hitmen we're just bribing them to give us some blocks and they don't really have any power that's actually i don't want to get i don't know if you guys want to get into too much with the reorg stuff i find it to be a chore but like with the reorg stuff everybody wanted to talk about you know oh this is dangerous this is possible you know this is this is you can actually do this with bitcoin stop acting like you can't and you know what are we going to do when somebody does it and i'm just like no

no like did you not learn anything like like you learn nothing from uasf you learn nothing from the fact that like the network's like you don't even have to go into the the perverse details of how you could actually accomplish this because the network just is not going to accept a network where they can't finalize transactions they're just going to be like fuck you go away in some way i don't care what the way is but we figure it out we just be like okay i know we're not going to let bitcoin be something where you can undo transactions like fuck that on top of that like the coordination effort necessary to like contact the miners like people amir taki wrote a piece and Coindesk a couple weeks ago saying that Bitcoin is as centralized as Ethereum

because it was possible to reorg. And that's why Pierre said last night at the meetup as well. I probably shouldn't be doxing him. It was at the meetup, but I'm sorry. That he wished the headline was Binance tried to reorg but failed, but it was they did not try. Yeah, and I kind of agree with that statement a little bit. I thought, you know, yeah, that's probably true.

It would have been better to just actually show everybody one more time to stop it's like sometimes i think about with bitcoin if there's like a certain inevitability with everything and all of our like like kicking and screaming and worrying is just like us like just being dumb humans with their with our heads cut off like chickens like that's like and bitcoins are so over there you're just gonna do what it's gonna do anyway that's true um no again like going to the coordination thing too like i i do think mining has gotten more decentralized over time and it would be pretty hard to coordinate with with all the pools it's way more than you know like late 2017 or whatever massive improvements

i think yeah i mean i'll be honest i'll say i have no way to measure i have no way to know how centralized mining is so i try to think more about whether it matters i mean look at bitmain right like bitmain got absolutely clobbered i would say that they were the main centralizing force but that was like also like a narrative like this is like every all of the information that we were getting about mining and about like the bitmain ipo and all this stuff it was like fed to us through like people with like some kind of reputation sorta btc king 555 yeah and like they're like feeding us this stuff and like why are we just believing it i'm not trying to defend bitmain but it's like i feel totally detached from understanding the mining environment how

centralized it is how weak or strong bitmain may be like there's all kinds of like supply power issues where like where who can get chip time to get chips made and who can't and it's like look i'd rather just figure out how do we make sure we think about bitcoin in ways that we just know we don't have to worry about it like it only has to be decentralized enough we don't need to worry about like if there might actually be a significant amount of centralization that bitcoin can handle what uh so what are the thresholds in your mind what are what is sufficient decentralization i with mining like i'm really starting to wonder if it matters like i obviously you don't want one because it's just too disruptive if they misbehave but like as long as there are

some miners that are going to accept that bribe transaction to to do the reorg that are going to accept the other one as long as there are some miners that will accept blacklisted transactions like it's it's a it's game theory you know you can't risk going against the network if somebody else unless you have total cooperation that's consensus and the consensus in mining is just more like hostile you know like if you try to flex your your supposed power in bitcoin bitcoin just is going to kick you off the network and if that happened to a lot of miners yeah we would have some kind of issues with like hashing and getting transactions and with the difficulty adjustment but like it would we would adjust and we would be fine and there would be miners happy

to mine those bitcoins if some miners don't want them but john miners are the only full nodes that matter man yeah do you guys think that uh miners should or will run lightning nodes that's a good question i think they should especially pools especially um individual miners uh i don't know that's a good question i've had it works well for pool payouts yeah i think that the way i see it is i think uh if you have an efficiency to gain you probably will gain it in bitcoin in the bitcoin environment and so like they already have a node they're already touching a lot of bitcoin um well that's that's the thing right now with mining the pools run the nodes right so or unless you're like an individual miner like at your house but like

most of mining is done via pools and right now with the stratum protocol like that dictates that the pool operator runs the node that's actually something i've been talking about with matt corral a lot of this is better hash proposal and yeah so if that comes to fruition the individual miners are going to have to run nodes and that is actually like a hurdle we're going to get over because apparently not all miners are like as technically apt as some people would assume and not all of them would be able to run a full node yeah but if we have that situation then it makes that whole reorg situation even harder yeah exactly exactly and like also like like pools like people point at them as if they're centralization but like if a pool i've said before many times

in other podcasts any attack on bitcoin is a glass hammer like you can you can break somebody's face with a glass hammer you're gonna break the hammer too and you won't get to do it again so as soon as you like flex any power you have of your centralization over the network the network will see you doing it like because it won't be worth doing anything unless they it's something that they can see like it's just the way it works out like you will undo a transaction you will double spend you will you know you you will fuck up with somebody's money and they will complain and they will notice and then the network will try to kick you out in some way or another did you remember when ghash you remember ghash.io the cloud miner and they were close to 51 at one point i think

they had 51 they got caught over they had over 51 remember when they got caught double spending they were double spending like gambling sites I don't remember no I don't remember that and like immediately there was just like a ton of backlash

like people were pointing their mind I remember the response but it's like a pat it's like after it's like a it's more loose it's like a loose game theory

type of situation yeah yeah well like Bitcoin can can get a black eye but you're not gonna kill it you know yeah

it can take punches pretty well I really love that glass hammer analogy that's a good one that's the first time I heard that That's why I like to think that's why I like I don't like to get into all the details about what like the reorg debate, because I just think of it as like, look, like if they try, they're just going to waste that that one chance on trying to do something evil with it.

And, you know, in the end, if you do something evil to Bitcoin, it's going to kick you out. Yeah. So it seems like we're we're talking about noise that we probably shouldn't focus on. What do you think we should be focusing on? This is maybe more a little biased to my own interests, and I don't know if it's like what everybody should focus on. But, uh, I really am fascinated and intrigued and excited about, uh, what's actually possible with the lightning network for Bitcoin. Um, and I'm, I think that people are taking for granted, like how big it actually is. Like, I can't hype it enough.

Like, and I know it sounds like super Bitcoin religion culty, but it's not for that reason. It's like people are missing that there are actually some interactions that lightning has added to the networks and utility that it's not just about fast transactions and high frequency transactions like there's other things that you can do now um and people are like taking it for granted and i'm trying to figure out how to get bit refilled to position to take advantage of those things because i see them and there are other people i talk to that see them but there's not a lot of people doing them or planning to do them yeah i saw your tweet yesterday uh what was it like something like uh i feel bad for you if you don't have a lightning strategy

yeah oh you don't have a lightning strategy yeah it's true like that's how that's how that's how exactly how i feel that's why i made that tweet was this feeling i'm just thinking man like these people aren't i i feel like i have like a some uh you know asymmetric asymmetric information and i'm just gonna i want to share it and i share it with with people that can have a good conversation about it but like i also want to hide it because i'm just like wow like this is gonna be fucking awesome what do you have to say to the people who thinks it it's unworkable from like a network route it's just fun everybody's job that isn't a bitcoiner is to campaign against bitcoin there's even some bitcoiners that don't think lightning network would be a horrible job

campaigning against bitcoin i wouldn't want to have that job yeah not either would i and that's what happens with like coinbase and people like this is like they they end up at making bitcoin their worst enemy you know like they you can make bitcoin your best friend or make it your worst enemy but if you you make that choice like it bitcoin is your biggest problem all the time like like coinbase bitcoin is like just a big problem for them like it's how it's their reason for existing but they don't embrace it you know they just try to like well not even that like put it in a corner did you see the uh interview that brian armstrong did with chris dixon like a few months ago and he just completely missed the plot of what bitcoin's about he's like i'm trying to

build the world's best uh payments network and it's like that's yeah yeah and they were talking about like uh gemini's doing this uh coinbase is doing this and they're being like build the crypto economy and you know talking about we're gonna this isn't about replacing finance 1.0 this is about replacing it and i'm just like i don't really understand this this logic like the industry on that side of the industry i don't have a perfect name for it we'll say like the vc blockchain side of bitcoin uh that they still touch bitcoin and actually provide a lot of people access to bitcoin like i think what they get wrong is like they don't realize that bitcoin is actually for breaking rules and when you're like when you're saying things like uh crypto

needs rules yeah like revolutions need regulation it's like i get that maybe they were trying to target like uh sophisticated traders or something maybe or investment you know like i think it kind of worked i think it was a good advertising campaign for them even if it was out of touch but it but it's totally out of touch because what like what happens is coinbase and gemini they're gonna they're not gonna serve bitcoin users they're gonna serve investment people and they're not gonna like change banking they're just gonna compete with banking and try to move the money over there right and this is why you see them doing all these custody things like wanting to have to hold all the bitcoin is is an anti-bitcoin action you know what i mean and they really do

they want to hold all the bitcoin and this is why i say like i don't like bitco and stuff because they're helping everybody want to hold all the bitcoin do you think you think we get in a situation in america at least where they don't let you self-custody anymore so stuff like circle i could see that like circle just doesn't let you withdraw there's no withdrawal option really yeah i got kicked off a while i feel like i feel like that's like the way a lot of it is going because uh from like a regulator point of view yeah obviously they don't want us to have self-custody you are seeing some things like this or where uh they're giving people exposure to bitcoin but not the ability to have bitcoin right um there's this popular like credit card kind of app thing

i'm not sure what it's based out of but maybe you guys have heard of revolute yeah i've heard of that it's europe right it's pretty popular like in romania and stuff like and people are like shill it to each other like oh you guys should get this check it out it's cool and what they like about it is that they can set their credit card to every time that they spend money they can set a percentage of bitcoin that they also buy at the same time so like if i spend 30 bucks on dinner i can set it to one percent and then i'm buying 30 cents of bitcoin you know and they love that they just can buy bitcoin passively but that bitcoin is not withdrawable like it's just in their account like there's an iou yeah yeah they can sell it but they can't

withdraw it it's pretty fucked what uh so this is probably the best way in which to stifle bitcoin right is these on and off ramps right you capture bitcoin the way you know you capture bitcoin you capture bitcoin users to not use bitcoin it's like it's i don't know if i'll go so far as to call an attack but it's certainly not the point you know how do we fight against this um we try to actually work more with things like lightning to start creating an actual circular economy where we just delete the system um where people can stay in bitcoin and they can do it easily um there are some problems to be solved with volatility there are some like make or die kind of uh solutiony things that i'm not so sure how i feel about but in the end like you have to have the whole

infrastructure in place so everybody can just stay in bitcoin for it to even be possible and i and that's how i'm trying to think of i'm trying to think like how do we delete the system not how do we compete with the system so how are you guys doing that a bit refill um you know obviously the the main way that at the moment is that we sell gift cards for crypto um and so gift cards allow people to convert their crypto and into goods and services um without having an exchange account you don't even have to have a bank account you know you can just if you can get your hands on bitcoin you can get your hands on goods and services so you can now that allows you to be paid in bitcoin um and and i don't know if you could totally live on off of bit refill it depends

on where you are and what your expenses are but you can get a lot um you know we have like a shit ton of products and you can pretty much live on crypto you know now we have to figure out the earn side we have to figure out the b2b side um but to get that that full circle going i think should be the goal for everybody and there's no kyc right no no and what about like when you use the gift card at a merchant can they tell it's a bit refill gift card like does the merchant kind of know you're a bitcoin user the i mean so there's a whole ecosystem of gift card that it's way before that you know from way before bitcoin right and so there's uh that industry has grown and gotten deep and there are providers and there are like providers of the aggregate all the

different gift cards and so there's this whole stream of where gift cards come from in the legitimate sense not like with paxful where like they're right peer-to-peer selling to each other um these are actually authorized gift card sales that are they're meant to be distributed by resellers and so that's what we're doing and so i i don't know of any but i'm not involved in all the customer service of where they they would shut it down because it came from crypto i meant more like maybe they could you know be tagging users as these guys hold bitcoin you know if you if if they knew was coming in through bit refill they would they wouldn't depending on who they were in the loop uh like we have suppliers and suppliers certainly know which cards they sold

to us and amazon certainly knows who they sold the bitcoin so who they sold their gift card to at the top of the chain but i don't know how easy it is to know down the chain right you know there's resellers and middlemen yeah and it's you know like it's not we are privacy is important to us you know we do want to stay uh not doing kyc um but there's also it's not always like the perfect solution for privacy either because you have to like spend and buy something you have it shipped to you or you have to spend it in person so there's a mailing address yeah so it's like it's not the best like money laundering tool if that's what people are thinking about doing with it you know well i was thinking is that it's the tangent i was going down is a lot of people think you know

the gift card approach is like kind of hacky um but you know it's i think it's a solid stop gap but even ahead of that i think it's actually could be more privacy preserving to bitcoiners then if like amazon like accepted bitcoin directly then they would absolutely know i was i was a bitcoiner and they might even have some like transaction history if i you know if i don't you know use coin join or practice like any kind of privacy techniques they could see all my past transactions but if i go through you guys then they might not even know i'm a bitcoiner um yeah but you say it's a little hacky but it's actually a perfect example of what i mean by deleting the system like we don't have to get everybody to accept bitcoin we can just have a company like

bit refill that gets all of your access for you and you come and spend your bitcoin through us and now everybody accepts bitcoin you know rather why are we going to go out and convince all these stores to do it the amount of volume actually from bitcoin right now is not justifiable for people to like be adding risky payment methods that they have to like hold their own custody and stuff or or even worry about adding payment processes that do it because they're going to get like three percent more sales maybe you know like it's not big enough for that so we might as well delete the requirement to have to do that at all and just aggregate it are you worried about spending okay so that's a good that's a good flip side to what i say about deleting the system

when the system when when when let's explain so spending is the app that dropped this week from gemini that allows you to spend bitcoin at whole foods starbucks wherever yeah and in gemini like literally is looking at what we're doing like they literally are using like words that we use to describe what we do like you have the wink of eye out there you know saying quotes like living on crypto and the fact is is that like when you are not making bitcoin your best friend like bit real specials trying to do and bitcoin is actually your worst problem you end up having to do like this it's like a fake news event that they did they said okay we we we made an app we partnered with flexa with the spendin app and but the whole thing is just all gemini and so there's

like this kind of like uh you know a sleight of hand going on and then you have to kyc to get into this loop you and if you're kyc to get into this loop that means you already have a bank account you already have the ability to like buy things at the store you know and and you already have the ability to convert your bitcoin into cash back and forth and connect to your account so you're already all set like you're not unbanked you know that's true you could just sell the bitcoin yourself through gemini and yeah pay with cash and then the app itself it's just like uh it's like a whole delusion they're trying to create to make some kind of utility for the gemini dollar because you don't actually like you you put dollars into gemini to get gemini dollars

to spend Gemini dollars and spend an app to buy coffee. Instead of swiping your credit card. The only crypto in there is crypto against being safe against hackers and stuff, like traditional crypto. There's no cryptocurrency going on here. You know what I mean? It's just like you have a balance, and Gemini is settling that balance with the vendor for you,

and they're just making that seamless for the user. I'm sure the app looks great. I haven't seen it yet. I'm sure it's slick and everything, and it's impressive. but in the end this is like crypto larping like they're not actually participating in crypto yeah and this stuff has already existed too like the fold app exists uh yeah there's us this this fold there's uh this we have a few competitors that that do the same thing that we do it's like crypto living on crypto is not invented by the winklevoss twins like come on this is what like

vinnie got famous off of this shit too right with his uh gift app yeah i mean yeah and that was Part of why I was interested in Bitrefill as well was because I used the shit out of GIFT back then. They had like a 3% kickback or something they would give you and I'm like, hey man, I'll take some profits on Bitcoin through this. Yeah, it was super useful back then. Yeah, it's crazy that we have to relearn these lessons. Fucking Coinbase had the swipe card back in the day

that people could use to spend their Bitcoin anywhere. People didn't use it. They shut it down after a year or something like that. It's because they don't understand Bitcoin. they really don't understand that like i i don't think that the winklevoss twins were like guys this is like we all know this is like a bad idea and doesn't actually mean anything it's just like a fake pr thing i don't actually think they realize that you know i'm not saying they did it on purpose that they made fake news on purpose it's just that they don't even understand that

they did that like right i think it's going back to like the comment on uh brian armstrong saying he's trying to build like the biggest payment system like there are very big entrenched companies important companies that hold a lot of bitcoin that don't understand bitcoin like they're like kind of end up like making the next paypal without but without while deluding themselves that they're actually doing something novel like right a lot of virtue signaling also the name spending fucking sucks i hate that let's stop switching letters freaks we're done i would give them this like the switching let like we had in the dot com era we had like the spelling things wrong and then we had the

illy like suffix and so like companies are always trying to find ways to make domain names more valuable and to be able to have like so now you can actually I don't think they did get it but it would be much easier to obtain spendin.com

than spend.com it's true but it's all a clout chase to ride on the back of HODL which was just a natural drunk typo and everything else is so fucking forced they could have just called it like gemini wallet right you know like if you want to market sell your bitcoin at the whole foods cash register like you can use gemini wallet to do it and now i'm thinking about i'm not sure if any of us has

actually pronounced it right once i keep saying spending but it's actually sped in sped in sped in it's a horrible name it's a terrible name um no but again like how do we need to get people in these offices and convince them to change their minds and change their sort of mental framework of how this stuff works because again like that's why we were talking to sergi last night like we me matt and sergi had like a long-ass conversation about like the fight that we're in for like freedom and stuff like that and these fund these very important companies fundamentally don't understand the fight it's a fight right yeah well as a bitcoiner i think that i could see why you would feel inclined to like get in there either to like to do more damage from the inside or fix it

um but from my standpoint being at bit refill and being like on the business side i like i kind of like it like i kind of like seeing them fuck everything up because it gives me time to be able to you know build what the proper way to do it at least through the the lens of bit refill and other people time to cover the other ends you know and i would rather see bitcoin just sneak up and just make all of them irrelevant than uh actually have them start getting it and start leveraging in more like tricky ways and making it hard even harder you know yeah yeah i mean i think they'll just keep losing money and they'll either learn their lesson or go out of business right well they're not losing money yet right they're making a lot of money as but at some point yeah

it could change if you treat all your they treat all of their customers not like bitcoin users they treat all their customers like for the values of their savings account it's like we want you to we want all your money here we want all your bitcoin here we want you to trade like i was thing about this morning it's actually kind of unethical to introduce a bitcoiner in an environment that has an order book like we were talking about this the other day and it's a horrible ux why do you say that because bitcoin isn't for like trading has nothing to do with bitcoin like it is what a lot of people end up doing with it but like if you're buying but if you're buying bitcoin like maybe you're buying it because your friends are trading shit coins and you're coming right in to

trade but like if you're buying bitcoin because you need it or because you want to have it as an investment store of value like you're not really thinking that way you're just thinking i want some and then immediately you're presented with well now you should gamble it you know like and now there's a whole environment in bitcoin of where everybody thinks they're good at trading and it's going to be good at trading someday and it's like you're just going to like you're going to fleece your customers and they're going to be unhappy and they're going to have like this negative associate this negative experience when all they wanted was some bitcoin freak freaks i know there's a lot of you out there listening who think you're going to be good traders none of you are none of

you are i mean i know some good traders but like they do it as a career yeah like they're serious about it if you yeah if you if you don't do trading as a career if you don't know what you're doing do not get into it you're going to get wiped out this is this is one thing that like i hate coinbase as much as the next guy but this is one thing that coinbase i think did really well is that they separated their uh like their trading platform and like the brokerage service so like if you're just uh i mean obviously if you're a new user going on a coinbase like you're fucked like yeah at this point i'm just saying lately i haven't seen what they do lately but i'm gonna guess they've pretty early in the process let people know that there's gdacs and i'm gonna

guess that they're pretty early in the process also show people all the other thing coins you can buy you know they want you to buy the bundle yeah that's fucked up i agree but i'm saying like like gemini kraken they don't even have a you have to go into an order book yeah yeah to to buy the bitcoin you can't you have to actually set a market you know market by order and do that and i never thought about that this morning how it was actually like if you if your if your business is just getting people to buy bitcoin and even hold it for them custodially the the concept of a uh order book is not necessary like i was thinking about like cash app for example like cash app doesn't have a word of book it's like very basic and i'm thinking oh man i hope

they never add one like i just would like to have one thing just be the thing where people can just buy bitcoin and have it cash app if you're listening don't fuck this up it's super yeah cash app is super simple that's one of the reasons we love it have you heard of get bitter no we had uh the founder on the pod uh last week a couple weeks ago we posted it this week his service is it's europe you register an address with him a bitcoin address um and then every time you send him a bank transfer he just automatically converts it to bitcoin and sends it to your address it's non-custodial no order book he's working on getting x pub keys too so you're not yeah so it's not the same address every time yeah that seems like a great model like the the the model

to avoid the capture of the coin bases and gemini of the world just don't even let it sit on the exchange and also and stuff and also yeah that but it also forces like users to learn how to use a wallet first right and to get an address to send so earlier when i mentioned that there are cool things that people aren't thinking about lightning this is like taps into one of them which is that you can leverage reputation for and use trust now for a moment because because lightning is instant the trust profile actually changes like if you're willing to if you know you're going to buy something from me and but you know that immediately you will know whether i scammed you or not you're in but i have a reputation and i'm a business you're like okay

this like why would we ever scam anybody because then we'll never be able to do it anymore you know so that this is like different game theoretical trust here where you're like you actually can trust us and so like that situation like buying bitcoin uh or selling bitcoin like at in person sucks because you have to sit there and like be like wait for confirmations and you know and you're like is this a shady deal like do i want to be involved or like that situation you're talking about where he like auto buys for you right you wouldn't there would be no way it would just be instant you know like you would instantly have your bitcoin as soon as the money got into his hands like so what does the uh the ux flow look like for this onboarding people directly on

lightning i think uh the first probably need to get exchanges using lightning um since we know bit refill is not going to sell bitcoin so we're not going to solve that problem um but we we are going to be part of the solution um which is like doing things like uh we have our turbo channels i don't know if you guys know about this but uh we sell channels and so that lets people be able to have liquidity on and be able to get inbound yeah this is thor right yeah thor we we use this service for our website for our btc pay server all right cool yeah yeah um and and so we're gonna we're gonna be setting up making that easier to use like like in an api environment for example um i think we're we're also looking at there are some trustless ways we could

do the channel selling um on chain uh and the onboarding can be uh the exchange you withdraw out of lightning or it can be when you buy your bitcoin it's already in the lightning wallet that channel is somehow either automatically provided or the fee you pay is worked into the ux process so you like with turbo it's instant so it's like the there's none of this weirdness of okay i am going to explain to you what channels are and how you have to like you have this side of balance and that side of balance and now we have to i'm gonna make you install a lightning wallet but it's not a bitcoin wallet it's like this tech coming through lightning and through products from people like bit refill that's just gonna like mask all of that and it's just gonna be like

you're gonna pay a bitcoin at you're just gonna pay and you're just gonna receive and then you're not gonna even care whether it's lightning or on chain and and if as long as you're willing to pay the fees to have access to the people to make that convenience for you how far away are we from this do you think you think lightning's uh mature enough at this point what what what needs to happen i think things are going to escalate in the next you know uh six months in the next year i think things are going to escalate a lot um i don't know if they'll escalate in tandem with users like if we'll get a pump and we'll get a lot of new people at the same time it would be nice for them to kind of uh harmonize but i do think that the the development landscape the product

landscape the people doing like serious investment in lightning projects is gonna escalate for sure i can already see it yeah do you think uh what other layer two solutions are you looking at or do you think do you think lightning is a panacea do you think we need other other uh layer two solutions um i think it's certainly more than enough for now um uh this liquid the side chain thing is like always kind of been like the redheaded stepchild of cool bitcoin projects it's like the hope that never happened um and and now it seems to kind of be happening but i don't know if it's because if it's actually happening or if it's just blockstream doing a better job promoting it um it's like like it's kind of like the ripple model on top of bitcoin right

it's like a federated 16 servers 20 servers yeah but like the the server model makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is when you remember that it is a centrally issued asset anyway right um and so it's uh but it is a little bit like janky you know like to have hardware involved in the process to have to like just make disclaimers about decentralization aspects of what you're doing um and then with it with the they're they're demonstrating product with liquid um it's cool but they're promoting it for a long time as a way to like facilitate arbitrage and i've gotten to a lot of debates with people about this and i might be wrong but i actually don't think that facilitating arbitrage is a thing like it's an oxymoron like arbitrage is overcoming

obstacle and if you help people overcome obstacle you are actually removing that arbitrage yeah opportunity and so it'll end up like the actual people using liquid for uh arbitrage is going to be like the the fastest person with the most latent lowest latency with the biggest bank count and it's just that's the only person that's going to get the arb of any connected and there's also a negative kind of weird interaction where uh you end up creating a unified order book when you do this like if you have both sides like if you have tether on liquid and you have bitcoin on liquid and you can complete both sides of the trade there's no more arb anymore like that means and there's also no more difference between the order books so it's like kind of like not in the

exchanges best interest to participate for us right would you say that's good for the average bitcoiner no you don't think it'd be like better price discovery no no i don't think so i think that the the there's gonna always going to be like a regional slash regulational that's not a word but so that's regulatory uh regulatory premium yeah like there's always going to be uh um an info infungibility aspect of bitcoin based on like its presence in the world you know where where you're getting it who's getting it who you're getting it from i mean people talk about bitcoin being fungible but i've never heard of people paying the same price for bitcoin you know like it's fungible on the on the the protocol level but as far as like actually being able to

not tell them apart like it's a waste it's not happening you know so you're saying it's not fungible like at the trading level like just on the order box or i actually don't believe bitcoin is fungible at all why not um so uh the utxo set is literally designed to track the uniqueness of every you know utxo there it's like saying which who has permission on the it literally tracks what makes them different it's what it's for so just on like that level they're like not behaving fungibly they're they're separated and they're identifiable in separate ways just to the network um and because the way a utxo is kind of like it's kind of like a coin purse there there's more or less satoshis in each one and the ones that have the most satoshis in them are able to

get different pricing in fees um and so they actually spend less so they're not even fungible when you use them because the ones that are that are in small like if you have a small amount of satoshis and you have to do a lot of utxos you pay the the fee amount of what you pay is a higher percentage and if but if you have a bunch of satoshis in one txo the fee you pay as a percentage per satoshi comes down so lightning flips that on the head right because lightning the fee is based on the actual amount you're sending not the bite size uh yeah but i think that you're going to see some things like this in lightning too i think you're going to maybe see um some uh non-fungible token stuff i think people are going to get experiment with putting people going to try to

put everything on lightning and so you're going to see some aspect of that there too but in general yes let the way lightning works is it has to be fungible um they all have to be the same because we're passing them through each other you know fungibility is a big uh it's a big marketing word for bitcoin is uh is bitcoin failed if it's not fungible um not to me um and it's not big to me um i actually like the idea of of keeping bitcoin uh human readable um and i would rather see privacy i think is what people's real goal and what they actually want i don't think any actually anybody actually gives a fuck about vulnerability um i think what they want is privacy and they want they want to be able to have not people not know what they're doing with their coin and be

safe um fungibility and privacy are you know very tightly related um in most theoretical conversations but in practice it's nonsense like fungibility ties more to utility i would argue right um because if if you have like a tainted utx it's just like one of those words i end up the more i debate people about it the more i realize it's such a useless fucking word i mean the thing is like the binance hacker whether it's an inside job or whatever whoever has the binance stolen coins the 7 000 bitcoin 7 049 yeah like that person's going to be able to spend those bitcoin they just have to be creative about it i mean look we have a lot of advancements we have samurai doing all kinds of cool shit with their wallet for mixing and

whirlpool and you know all these things and then we have the coin join uh progress with wasabi wallet making it easy and you and and there are things now that i think that people are going to figure out to do with lightning that make it easy to get some privacy and so i think privacy is like you your behavior dictates your privacy like if you're doing really bad shit or you're really rich or you know there you have real privacy concerns um then you're going to be way more motivated to figure out what you need to do to stay private and and i think somewhere in the bitcoin ecosystem you're going to get what you need but i don't think it needs to be like at the base layer on chain it's not important what is important like what does it need to be

it needs to be money you can break rules with and it needs to be private um ultimately uh but it doesn't need to be fungible it doesn't need to be you know where we can't tell them apart but there's things that are happening like that too like um with snore signatures and stuff uh i think that's what yeah we're we're gonna we're gonna get more and more tech that's gonna make it hard to distinguish what a bitcoin transaction is doing whether you know it's opening a channel or not especially when you're jumping in and out of lightning and going through channels and whatnot yeah like i was wondering before lightning was actually being used i was i was trying to like theory craft about it i'm thinking oh like this is gonna like add a lot of privacy i wonder if

exchanges will start like uh blacklisting coins that have touched channels you know and but it ends up just being like bitcoin's gonna have so many little things like that it's just gonna be so impractical to start like it was just going to be like banning everybody you know and there'll be someone who takes them yeah like the businesses that don't take them will just yeah exactly themselves yeah no that's that's the one thing we've uh debated or just thought experimented on this podcast before like what is the threshold of like coin joined coins like does it get to a point where exchanges like if they do start blocking them and everybody just starts coin joining like uh in spite of the exchanges like is there a threshold where they have to put their

hands up and say all right there's nothing we can do about this yeah i mean so far i don't know of exchanges uh closing accounts or taking kind of special action against coin coin there hasn't been any not yet but if it does happen in the future but i do know they notice i do um you know uh you can tell in the block explorer is like a block stream it says there's a good chance this coin was a coin join like you can tell i think it comes down to what we were talking about earlier that really the only way they can force any of this shit is that they just ban self-custody altogether like you it basically comes down to like if you're gonna if you're gonna block a transaction that has a lightning history or coin join history like eight hops away then like you

basically just banning self-custody altogether i have a quick feeling that like bitcoin will find a way to fuck that up too for them like because if you start segregating a market too much from the ultimate international market you'll start getting like uh different pricing and they'll end up being in a closed market where there'll be like you know uh white bitcoins and black bitcoins and you know uh blacklisted ones are going to have a different price and the price will probably end up being like higher and then people won't want the white listed ones because the blacklisted ones are just like people need those more and they want to be in that market you know you know This has been debated in the past.

I talked to Tor Demeester about this last year in Dallas. He believes all Bitcoins are fungible. It doesn't matter just because anybody would accept it. So this is an interesting one. The debate is like, will there be, like you just described, two markets for UTXOs? Well, we've received transactions. If someone sends me Bitcoin, I'm not checking to see what the history is. We certainly aren't here at TFTC.

like i mean either way i just take it and i throw right into wasabi and then i coin join it well this makes me think yesterday i was at um the consensus conference and i was walking in the booth area and i saw a chain analysis and i'm like okay what could i think i walked by them one time and i'm like i'm not gonna talk to them it's just gonna be stupid and then i saw them again and i'm like what could i say to these guys that would actually be kind of interesting and then i had an idea i was like oh yeah that's actually might be a good idea let me go up to them and start a conversation and i was like you know what you guys should do you guys should make a service for consumers for for users to be able to see what information you have about their

bitcoin like so they can see like where you think the origination is of any transaction and so that so that way they can arm themselves and protect themselves so they don't have to lose accounts if they get a dirty bitcoin like i want i'm like i want to keep my exchange account and i i like it it has utility um it's a place that i can sell or buy bitcoin i want to keep it and if i but i also want to be able to get paid in bitcoin i want to be able to you know play with bitcoin at a meetup and maybe buy some from someone if they need 50 bucks you know like and i don't want my account closed because i touched a bitcoin that you think i shouldn't have touched and so give me a service to do this we got into this whole long conversation and they were like um then i started debating with

them and they were like we're 99 confident that of any uh cluster that we that we recognize we're now you have 99 confidence enough confidence to hold up in court and i was like okay let's talk about that like if you can identify a cluster and then it has like one hop you just lost all confidence you have no idea you know until you have external taint about what the person where where they where that coin ended up and who spent it and where it originated unless you can complete the path and you can find out it's the same person it's like you don't have any confidence okay and you guys have a great responsibility because exchanges are using your information to oppress people and they're they will close accounts with people they will deny people access they will like

you know that they're not giving them access to banking to money like they're cutting them out because of your information and so you have to make sure you're presenting this information that john you're being aggressive with us really yeah what were they in suits like what were they yeah they were in suits they look like agents from the matrix no well no i feel like their biggest issue with that idea probably is that everyone would realize that they really can't tell yeah they have they're not as sophisticated as people think they are but but the but they're going to plan to use it and it's i think it's actually it's almost worse in a way it's not about like being provable in court it's that like coinbase can oppress people without a court or or

legal like that due process yeah like they can just be like all right you're out they're recreating the shit we're trying to get away from i guess we don't have a right to a coinbase account but it does it starts feeling pretty fucked up when you're talking about this is like supposed to be freedom money and you won't let me have it right well i mean it's like it right it's a temporary issue though because yeah you can get it somewhere else but then that hopefully that's but ultimately makes Coinbase have to behave and chain analysis irrelevant. Yeah, and we won't even need on-ramps

when people start getting paid in Bitcoin. That's a good segue into like, how far away are we from a closed-loop system, do you think? Pretty far. I think we have to get closer to where we either have to have some really cool tech that allows people to not have volatility, although I'm not sure that matters anymore either.

I have a new theory where I'm thinking that there's no poverty on bitcoin and what i mean by that is that you can't you can't have bitcoin if you don't like need it if it isn't better alternative than your it's like a last resort and as far as for poorer people and then if it's not for poorer people it's like you can't have bitcoin unless you can afford to save money because it's volatile right like you have to be able to risk money and into the future to even have bitcoin so i'm not sure if that aspect plays out you know yeah and like the volatility reduces over time and i i think like the people are very obsessed with the idea of like a stable coin uh it doesn't go up or down um but i think really

people just don't want it to go down right like if it if it just nets up all the time that's true And that's like, it's a good, good nod stable. It's good for now that it goes up. Like when you, to answer your original question, which is when do I think it will happen? Like it will happen when we reach saturation. You know, when, when most of the people that want Bitcoin have Bitcoin. But we, that has to actually happen like when Bitcoin has won. It can't happen before then because then it would just be like Bitcoin is another option.

And, you know, it has to be like when it's in its ultimate form. and then it has we have to have some kind of stability and then people will just be happy that it doesn't go down that much and hopefully it'll be more like regular currency where it's like oh it moved you know 0.1 today and that's volatility you know no it's um but i have a feeling i'll probably be dead before that happens really yeah yeah i think about that a lot i think about like how what what to care about in bitcoin because what i think is actually likely to happen within my lifespan um and it's every i think a lot of people don't think this way it's like there are the cool like theoretical things that seem very inevitable that you can logic out for

bitcoin but they always like leave out the when part and it's like yeah it's inevitable it'll happen it and everybody's like yelling on twitter this is the way it is you know like but like what if altcoins don't become pointless for like another 30 years like it could happen it could happen no you're really driving home to the point that we've been driving home for like the last month on this podcast this is very mission driven so you're talking you're building on something that you don't even think you'll get the full benefits from in your lifetime so why why do you do this um i think i already do get the benefits from it and i and i want and i definitely want everybody to get understand what this tool is for and that it's there for them they can use it

um and i want this tool to have the most utility as possible like that's it's gonna it's already happening in our lifetime i just more mean about when people are being like philosophical or theoretical about bitcoin and fundamental concepts and why like this is it's like next level maximalism i think it's like you can be the maximalist that hates all the shit coins and yells at everybody for being wrong or you can try to understand why in the current market that they do exist what they represent and why bitcoin isn't providing that to them and when it will you know and if that if you start thinking about that way you're like okay the when could literally be like way far into the future so maybe i should just like like fuck off a little bit and give

everybody a break and and start explaining why things are where they are so that future will come faster so they understand you know yeah no that's uh it's been a lot of what we've been doing in this bear market is re-architecting narratives bunk narratives from the first decade that have i would argue set us back a bit instant zero comp transactions buy coffee with bitcoin we're still do you notice we're seeing that today it's on like people fees went up a bit and the price went up so the fees in u.s dollars you know obviously scale with the price um and there's a bunch of uh you know fifa on the on the twitter today is there i thought i thought you know we had kind of got to pass it also last night i got into a whole i got a whole bitcoin cash bitcoin debate last night

i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say his name but you know he's he's an og and i uh i just thought we were past it yeah it's i think it's the the headless chicken syndrome like we like people bitcoiners want to be like involved they want to have a part they want to play a role they want to help and i think a lot of them think that just uh being emphatic and and yelling and correcting people is helping and it is kind of and i'm i'm definitely guilty of that too so are we yeah but there is like a there's like a level where it's just like too knee-jerk and and and not actually helpful and i want people to get away from that like there's some maximalists i want them to like reach their next form and i have been like privately like poking at some of them and being

like look man like you don't get it like it's not just about being right like it's about actually making this happen now it's uh and making it happen is such a weird coordination effort right it's decentralized it's just individuals like yourself matt and i like picking up mics trying to help people and there's no buddy to like centrally say hey market it this way market it that way so it's just bouncing ideas off each other trying to find the best way and uh it's like again like the the whole bitcoin quote-unquote community and what do you think about like the community aspect is bitcoin a community or is it just a bunch of disparate no it's definitely a community it's like the biggest thing about bitcoin in my opinion is that it's a community

i mean if you think about like meeting everybody this week that you hadn't met before and like just like all the hugs and all of the like everybody just feeling like they were part or something like maybe not so much like at consensus like in the hall but like at when people are actually being social with each other it's like it's total fucking community man and on twitter like crypto twitter like you can't deny that that's not community like you can't say it's not community like it's that literally is like we're just forming a fucking tribe and and we just have to make sure we understand who the enemy is and it's not each other our tribe's the best tribe yeah we're gonna trigger beauty on here there is no community bitcoin is math not as um

no it is that was the i mean the great we're meeting in person for the first time and uh that's the great thing about chick chick when we care in new york city is that everybody comes in i don't go to the conferences i get to record with a bunch of people meet a bunch of people and it's just like yeah like you said like the vibe is incredible like when we went to rega regal last year like on the flight back i wrote a newsletter about just like the revolution there's like a revolutionary feel in the air like people drinking and talking about attack vectors of bitcoin how we're going to protect ourselves against the state it's uh it's fun i would say that i feel like i mean i didn't go to consensus intentionally but i would say that i feel like

this year was the least shit coiny shit coin week it's like more bitcoin focused than ever before they closed the event with adam back right that's what i heard i wasn't in the room when they did but i think he was the last like the last keynote whatever they call it you know so just to have bitcoin be the last thing there and have adam back be on stage at consensus like compared to the last time i was at consensus in like 2016 it's like way more progress like 2016 i was trying to help bitcoin core and uh they bitcoin wasn't even going to be represented at all at all there wasn't like gavin was going to be the only bitcoiner at consensus and then we were like all right we have to get winner yeah yeah a bit corner quote air quotes Satoshi's

disciple right Satoshi hand them over Bitcoin the keys to Bitcoin and so then we work together to try to get like more in there and so that we got a fireside chat set up we got Eric Lombroso on stage and last year they had Elizabeth Stark and Jack which I thought was yeah one yeah they're getting better I could do without the the Justin Tron posters that was like intense man about him going on stage and just admitting that they plagiarized the white paper yesterday it was a translation error i meant more like all the side events and stuff right like yeah yeah like i didn't go to mcc but i heard good things about mcc but mcc was a side event right like it formed

mcc formed because everybody was like everybody was figuring out the idea of going to consensus by not going to consensus like i'm not fucking paying that money i'm gonna go in the lobby and i'm gonna go to the side events and i'm gonna meet up with you while they're in town and like we got consensus that everybody would come to consensus but we didn't get people people were just not wanting to pay that money it was like let the let the scammers pay that price let the the bankers pay that price and they can create the gravity for all of us to have an excuse to come together as a community and so that's what mcc was is it was just a side event saying hey well if everybody's here we might as well get everybody into a conference that's actually

affordable and and have some good content you know yeah i mean if you bought if you bought your consensus tickets this year at the worst possible time like a month and a half ago two months ago it probably cost like 0.7 bitcoin like 70 million satoshis or something what a horrible investment trade-off um speaking of mcc what was your favorite uh favorite talk of the weekend i didn't see all of them yet i have to go back and watch a lot because i was also like doing meetings and networking myself um but i was very happy to see how much lightning was represented how much we got as bit refill with sergey got to represent bit refill and lightning at that event um and very very lightning friendly i like that part a lot um did you go to

any of the lightning like side events that pierre or justin moon held there was like a bunch i went to bit devs which wasn't really very lightningy um last night but no i didn't um i just with my schedule we had our whole schedule as a company for like three of us came and like it was already planned before we even got here and then it just got more dense after we got here and so it was just like non-stop like i got my ass my ass is fucking kicked after this week like my my my legs everywhere are sore like it just it was non-stop it was intense thank you for fitting us into your schedule i had to man i like the podcast uh there's so many now i don't keep up with every single episode at the time but what i do is lately i've been flying more and so like i just download a

bunch and i'll just like catch up on whatever i can in those hours um but you guys are definitely one of the good ones and i didn't want to miss the chance to sit here and actually i'm enjoying this conversation a lot thank you um i miss you i miss your video content i wish you would make more uh more interviews i i do too um i miss it and i wish i would do it more and it's just like hard to like i want to do so many things like i'm just like the bitcoin addict like i want to do all the things but i can't you know i would love to do like at least a monthly some kind of video content or something um but it's like i need i probably need to do the things i could probably pull off i need somebody like yelling at me to do them to force me like i need a loud wheel you

Can you be like a Roger in your life? Maybe, no. I think I have a Roger in my life. Thank you very much. It just popped into my head. Are you guys doing any educational resources up at Refill? Yeah, we're working on a project now. I mean, not for Bitcoin, for BitRefill.

We're working on a project now of doing some videos to kind of do walkthroughs for a lot of the products because we sell so many things that the user experience changes depending on what you buy and sometimes like you need a little more information about what you can and can't do with a card or you need a little information about how to redeem it or when you like and there are some cards are like for a fiat amount sometimes come cards for like time period amounts some you know and so or amounts of minutes and so there's all different experiences so we're

going to make some videos kind of walking people through that yeah hodl hodl their video series is very very helpful for their platforms like a big fan like i haven't paid that much attention to them which bit me in the ass yesterday because i was trolling them about like uh having a lightning strategy it was like two days ago they announced it and then and then like they were like they just like lolled at me and i'm like all right what's why they're lolling at me and i like looked at their feet and it's like here's what we're doing with lightning no that was uh roman was bringing up the the men pulled today too who was roman from a huddle huddle there you go uh no but the mempool it's like 70 000

unconfirmed transactions right now yeah but the fees like are reacting pretty beautifully like we went we went over the stat of bit devs last night i believe the the average fee over that or the average block size over the last couple days has been like 1.2 or more megabytes um and then if you look at the mempool going back to like 2017 when we were going through the mania like the the fee the fees rising today are like minuscule compared to what it was like 2017 2018 okay but this is a little bit a little bit of fake news here like why is that like i'm pretty sure they were measuring in bitcoin and not in dollars yes and so it looked all huge and spiky in the early days because people didn't even give a fuck and they were just including random amounts

of fees and because it was still only like a few cents or 50 cents or they were even willing just to put a dollar and like they it was almost a little bit of a tipping feel to it back then because like we liked miners back then you know and so like on the chart it looks like all this like high density you know high fees yeah high fees and then it goes out down here and it's like it looks so much better now but like uh two dollars and fifty cents or something today or whatever better than it's still pretty high you know if you compare satoshi's per bite it's way better than 2017 right now yeah no no i'm saying i i do agree that things are improving i just I'm just like, it's a little bit of a fake newsy thing to measure it in Bitcoin.

I don't like when people say, you know, one BTC equals one BTC. But you should have measured in USD either, because it's going to scale up. No, it's not. Look, the measurement, what you're measuring is buying power. And the metric you use is whatever one works the best. Like, we used to use our fucking arms to measure things and our feet. Like, you know, they're approximate, but they were good enough. And so is the dollar.

But it's buying power. It's what you can actually do with the money. But so like the way I think about it is like a lot of people are worried, I guess the biggest worry about fee spikes and just fees going up in general is that if I have a UTXO and it's sitting there and it has, you know, 50 million Satoshis in it or it has, you know, 25 million Satoshis, is it going to get cost prohibitive for me to spend it? And in that situation, really, the Satoshi per byte matters more there because because as long as that stays relatively constant, even if the U.S. dollar amount increases like that, UTXO is still, you know, not cost prohibitive. It's kind of circular, though, I think, because it's like if I have a dollar of Bitcoin and it costs me 50 cents, to me, that's going to be expensive. If I have a million dollars of Bitcoin and I have to spend 50 cents, it's very cheap. um so i get that side of it but in the end as a percentage or if as an increase in dollar amount like if it was 500 to a bitcoin transaction a whole lot of bitcoin transactions seem really

expensive um but if you're sending 50 million dollars it's cheap so it's like right i'm just saying that utx that specific utxo hasn't gone priced out because that utxo also goes up in u.s dollars like if you're a new user and you come in then that's one thing but if you're just holding the utxo there um the actual balance of that utxo goes up in us dollars as well as as well as the fee yeah i don't know um so this is good we're just naturally drifting towards this bitcoin at the protocol level just gonna be a huge settlement layer probably uh you know um people like roger vera scared of that um they don't like the idea of that i definitely think that lightning is a path towards that

because we might see the blocks get filled more and more with channel openings. Yeah, I'm sending more transactions. The last six months, I've sent more transactions than the six years before it just because of Wasabi, Coinjoins, and opening channels. Yeah, and we still have block space left. I say this a lot.

I consider the blocks to always be full. That's how I think. Why? because they could if as long as the fee is is affordable they could be full at any moment and if the if the if the fees are ever underpriced somebody will find a way to fill the blocks occasionally so you always have to like be thinking as a as from a design standpoint that like the blocks are full like we can't count on anything that makes a different assumption um that's a good assumption to work with yeah i like that like a bit refill we accept we accept zero conf

confirmation uh confirmation uh for payments and it works it works fine has anybody double spent on you guys or we've had a double spend but there was also uh something we could have prevented like our setup there was something we didn't notice about our setup that where uh it happened we would have noticed it if it if that didn't happen and so it actually helped us fix a bug i mean we could be double spent i'm not saying that like we have like double spend protection i'm just saying that like in practice it works and in while it works we're gonna do it because uh the customer experience of paying instantly is like worth a lot like it's just like the double spend thing is probably like just like a credit card charge back for the

merchant so if it's not happening you're just viewing it like that at this point maybe but it's more like we've had it for four years and it hasn't really costed us and i know that like sounds like oh you know put a target i'm gonna regret me saying that someday well you're like analyzing the transaction right it's got to be under a certain amount we're not just like type of transaction there's a standard to it um and we don't share the standard because we don't want people to try right but it's like it's cumbersome to figure out how to double spend efficiently and if somebody wants to uh work with us to to stress test it um to pen test our setup we'll be happy to

like how much trouble is someone to go through to double spend a $50 gift card well you end up having to like find an angle

around how the whole company works to see how you can fully exploit it in the fastest way possible you know and that behavior

itself is like noticeable so it's how fast can you really get you know yeah it's uh

it's crazy the uh these sort of operational risks you guys have to think about uh in all areas and the bitcoin sort of provides this unique uh ux flow that that nobody has had

nobody's built mental models around until the last decade well and you have to you have to keep in mind that like we only have to have a float of accepted zero comp transmission it's not like i'm saying all our bitcoin is held in zero confirmation trend you know situation it's that there there's a flow of the the frequency of customers we're getting that are spending bitcoin and there's a certain amount of bitcoin at any given moment that is in a zero comp state and that amount is reasonable you know what i mean it's like if somebody zero comped us uh double spent us for everything that we they could possibly within that time frame we would be fine you know so like it's you have to really find a severe kind of exploit to get through this and

cause real damage if it became a nuisance to us then we would eventually stop we hope lightning will be there to catch when zero comp is no longer useful yeah are should we be concerned about the fact that to use lightning you have to use it with a hot wallet does that hurt bitcoin security from like an end user point of view because we've always said you got to do cold storage cold storage cold storage well okay but like just on chain is for cold storage lightning isn't it's for usage like you're using it because it's high frequency like you don't really need to be yeah there might be use cases with like tech that gets made or products that people might want to be on lightning just because uh like the instantaneousness is one reason like

that's something that bitcoin can't do other than zero comp but like the instantaneousness is a feature um so there might be people that want to be on lightning just for that feature but generally you're doing high frequency so you're actually using your bitcoin so you're not cold storing it you know what i mean so you're already in a situation where you're like constantly accessing your bitcoin yeah and this drives right this drives like going back to like the mental frameworks that haven't been developed like yet and the sort of uh interactions users have with bitcoin and more importantly money like bitcoin's a new form of money you're gonna have to figure out new ways to interact with that yes on your your utx is on the at the protocol level you

should probably have a cold storage and then you move like savings checkings account thing yeah i mean like i mean don't don't uh over overstate it like i bet both of you have had some amount of bitcoin in your mobile wallets that is just like totally like you would lose it like yeah i do right now yeah so it's like i have more in our lightning oh you're so reckless you know like people fucking do it they think okay i got a few hundred dollars at most in my in my phone maybe twenty dollars maybe fifty dollars whatever it is each person has an amount that's a threshold of money that they would keep in their wallet that they know could be stolen or lost and that's how we should treat lightning i don't know if it's how we should treat it i think it's more secure

than that um like it depends on what like specific setup you mean is like this question like this came up on the panel the lightning panel at consensus the other day and it was like oh about it being like a hot wallet situation and like i'm thinking about briefly i'm thinking well it's like we make our node known and and and so you know where our node is and and there's access there but you have to remember like these are all multi-sig transactions that like somebody on the other side has the ability to close the channel and take the money and like so like robbing a lightning node is like not as simple as it sounds like you know like the there other people have the keys and so the you have a certain amount of bitcoin that you've staked but it's like in a

fucked up state it's not like it's literally locked in it's not like it's just staking it it's yeah it seems like the best attack vector to steal somebody's uh satoshi's on the lightning network would be like a dummy invoice or something like that yeah i don't know i haven't thought about ways to like i thought about this before lightning was getting used like whether there are ways that people would get end up getting scammed because of people creating fake lightning situations and you can see that there's some possibility here with like for example with blue wallet being custodial um there's some scams they could pull off make everybody think they have bitcoin and then just disappear so like my bigger issue is like i guess like for routing nodes

right now i mean the the best practice that everyone's saying is and i i mean i agree with it is that personal nodes everyone should be running through tor um don't broadcast your ip yada yada yada but with the routing nodes a lot of them we seem to be seeing them you know in data centers like in servers on clear net like broadcasting their ip clearly in the data center they have a bunch of bitcoin on that node um like ellen big for instance they have like 30 of the top 50 nodes and they're all they're pretty much all in the same data center in virginia um do you have that's like a massive honeypot right like all it takes is like one person like that's not even we're not even talking about anything to do with the specifics of lightning like if someone in that

data center realizes that they have physical access to the servers like that could be a major issue right i mean for them this is getting a little into or maybe i may be talking above my understanding but i feel like you're missing that uh the the bitcoin in that node is not all like in that node and can or nor can it all be stolen from that node right like like if you have static channel backups could you just spin up a new node on yourself and recover it that way right yeah i mean you wouldn't get your channels but you would get your bitcoin like if somebody hacked into our lightning node i'm pretty sure what they could do is they could only they could only close channels right and then if they had control over whatever wallet was our channel or the

balances on our side they could steal that bit right that's what i mean yeah but like a lot of times it's it if it's a if it's a well-balanced node it's like 50 of the capacity is on the node but i think that as things evolve um what we'll see is like we already have i think at least i think it's three maybe it's four now but we have three nodes um and so we're already having to scale for various reasons like to be able to have one go down while the others be up and things like this and to have one that has compatibility with thor um so we have multiple implementations we're using not just one implementation so like there's already aspects if we're running this as a business

in a high amount of Bitcoin environment, we're already having to break it apart into pieces. And so now you have less value in each node. And now maybe we'll have to set up nodes where there's high value that aren't identifiable to us. And if you can't identify them, then how are you going to hack them? I guess the thought process I'm going down is,

I think you probably remember the early exchange days, the early bitcoin exchange days like a common the common fuck up was that their keys were were on some data center somewhere and that's how they got hacked some employee of the yeah so i feel like we're about to we're about to experience that again for a little bit while people learn you know don't don't necessarily uh now i think about you could actually grief the company hard as fuck because you could uh submit old states for all the channels and get the penalty on all the channels. So you can make them lose all the money.

That would be a good little grief. You mentioned LNBig. Do you have any good LNBig theories? What's going on with these LNBig nodes? I don't know. I don't worry about it. I don't think it's dangerous. If they want to play on Lightning, this is how the protocol is.

It allows them to do whatever they want to do. They're doing it. They give away channels. They have all kinds of money, all kinds of Bitcoin in there. i know they have a lot of bitcoin um they're not scared to put it in there so i think that at some point they're helpful because they're taking the risks and then stress testing the software and they probably have a lot more incentive to feel safe than most people because of how much bitcoin they have you're you're sitting across from a man who's worried that that ellen big i'm a little bit

less worried i had some conversations yesterday did you i don't think about them too much is really all it is well part of the reason why we spun a bar node was because i felt like as a good bitcoin citizen like we couldn't complain about someone else using it in a certain way if we weren't also um you know routing payments uh and recently but what don't you like what recently what's what were they doing that you don't like they implemented the thor which was like a thor similar service to you which i thought was interesting um my my issue was it just didn't really well what's that quote like don't uh attribute malice to stupidity yeah it like didn't really logic out to me to make sense like i understand the idea of of splitting up your

nodes to reduce um attack vectors but like if you put them all in the same data center in virginia like you're not really reducing attack vector there at all maybe they're just trying to figure out how to scale lightning like how to do it at scale or something yeah now i believe that it's like some dark dark net type whale whatever og whale who you know no one really knows like lives in like a russian block country and uh just wants just wants to see bitcoin improve and maybe there's some mixing element to it where he's trying to mix all these funds and it's possible yeah it wouldn't surprise me at all the other weird thing is like why name them all the same like if it's kind of similar no it's kind of similar to like what an attack i think would

look like if they weren't all named the same like you would try and control like 30 of the top 50 routing nodes and different names yeah so the fact that they're named the same i think leads me to believe that he's that the actor isn't malicious yeah well the malice thing i think comes from another like thing about humans is like when there's a void of information we are compelled to fill it and so this is why there's so many conspiracy theories in bitcoin it's like because bitcoin is so good at being bitcoin like there's a lot of shit we can't really figure out what people are doing and so but we always need that narrative we always need to fill that void with some kind of guess do you see the new satoshi conspiracy oh are we jumping into this this is the

best one yet i don't think so phil leroy phil leroy have you heard of him no he was like this badass uh like cartel type he's a dark web guy right oh i think i saw this and they think he created true crypt and then he got arrested around the same time that satoshi disappeared yeah and the conspiracy goes that craig worked at his company and like whistle blew to get him into jail and then took the true crypt volumes but he can't access the true crypt volumes i heard a good theory that i liked recently a new one i don't know if it's new but it's new to me uh that what happened was that satoshi died back when he gave gavin the torch um but like that he died and that gavin and craig are like one of maybe the only people that know and they're trying to use this

information in a way somehow to make money off of it and like it would make a lot of sense if you think about like how craig is behaving like he's he's like i'm just gonna say i'm satoshi because even if i can't prove it nobody can prove that i'm not because the guy's fucking dead like you know and maybe that's why gavin was willing to like vouch for him because he knew that that nobody would ever prove that for sure that it wasn't satoshi you know like they had this information they were trying to find a way to get something out of it and they they failed the gavin saga is so weird like going to the cia uh like wanting to be the figurehead like thinking he was the the lead maintainer and of a decentralized project like it's i wonder it leads

like again you said like we try to fill the void with conspiracy theories my mind automatically goes to like state actors trying to embed themselves in bitcoin i i say this about like all the tether foot i'm like what if it's like fucking the american government using tether like to buy a bunch of bitcoin in a way that like disassociates themselves from it you know like it's a lot of money it's it's somebody important it's not like it could be that or they created tether just to set the precedent of shutting it down and making it so the kyc stable coins are the only ones that can be used yeah but tether is actually has traction and people are actually using it so yeah the feds definitely didn't create tether i know i know they might have

created bitcoin but they didn't phil potter created tether as far as i know the guy from Bitfinex so yeah and he left he that dude left at the perfect time I don't know uh did he yeah he left Bitfinex a year ago or something yeah yeah he's uh he's got free in this whole this whole saga I believe he was New York based for a while which is pretty scary to be like a New York based Bitfinex employee yeah he was on a good panel at Magical Crypto what uh what panel uh there was a panel of exchanges um it was uh phil that formerly bitfinex was why he was there and it was austin from kraken there was a guy from the new uh the btse exchange and miha from bitstamp and josh olwitz uh copy knocked him was asking a bunch of questions like

about you know about stable coins about you know stuff like that and it was good answers it was interesting yeah um i watched a few the jack mauler's uh speech was great i actually interviewed him the day before so i got like a preview of that and then alex gladstein i thought his presentation was like incredible normie food like just to send people to get like uh like to say i sent it to my mother-in-law my sister-in-law my parents like watch this and you may have a better understanding why bitcoin's important yeah it's um yeah so if you freaks have not seen that video yet watch it and then send it to your friends and family who who are skeptical about bitcoin yeah i love the the live streams in general for mcc were great yeah that's another

thing about conferences i feel almost like a mooch especially here in new york like i didn't pay for any of the conferences i just streamed mcc and like met people outside and i hung out in the lobby at consensus yesterday like to meet people yeah that's the way to do it i think the conference ends up making more money if they have good live streams it's just good it's good publicity for the event yeah if it's a good event if it's a good event it'll be and if it's an annual event if it's a good event the live streams just boost boost revenue i would say yeah and mcc did a good job of like of having i'm sure they're giving some people some fomo like you know they gave away all these like toys and all these like souvenirs and they had a fucking bull in the house

and like you had to kind of be there you know they had a fucking bull yeah i'm surprised i didn't get any like animal rights people they did there was a lot of people on twitter if you're gonna really yeah they're yelling at bitcoin sign guy for getting on top of it was it was but bitcoin sign guy didn't bring the bull right somebody said he did that was the rumor that was the graffiti said him and uh bitcoin sign i think that might have been tongue-in-cheek but yeah i don't think he actually brought it but maybe that was a badass funniest picture on the mcc was uh charlie lee holding a shit coin next to the toilet and his face looked dejected like because he is the shit coin king yeah fucking uh uh twan from the block had like one of his best tweets ever

it was like that that feeling when you're posing with a bowl of shit coins and you know you sold the top on your own that's like yeah that's the other thing a lot of people in the early days who did some fucked up shitter are sort of going under the radar and getting through unscathed it seems yeah i mean i don't know if i go so far to say that like charlie lee did fucked up shit um i would say it's not charlie lee as much as it is on coinbase like the the moral hazard of allowing the coin that your cto started to be the first coin after bitcoin on your exchange is a little odd to me was it the first one i mean it took him a long time it was after ethereum yeah it wasn't and the annoying part was like like the run-up he was like really crazy on twitter

like litecoin was trading on like two dollars and he was like sending out polls he's like what price is litecoin going to be when it gets added to coinbase this that and just kept like building the fomo i'm sure he has some regrets about the way he said things but i don't know that he was never he ever meant to hurt anybody um if we actually bottomed he called it he called it perfectly because he said at the top he was like if you're not ready for it to go down to twenty dollars like you should sell now and it went it bottomed at twenty two dollars yeah which is like a fucking ridiculous call that holds that's like a fucking ridiculous call and then the other thing i will always be grateful for him putting a million dollars in the litecoin segret address

i mean i wouldn't even have the balls to hold a million dollars on litecoin in the first place and then he put it on a segret address during all that fud so that was pretty fucking huge i'm not sure if that actually helped anything but it was a nice i guess stunt it was a super easy argument point you know like oh if if segwit fud's real then you know if i can steal charlie's coins like i know my biggest realization that segwit fud was bullshit was that i've been holding my coins and segwit addresses for you know over a year now and no one's taken them so yeah i mean the best anti-fud is just going and learning how segwit actually works and realizing that it's not what they're saying is stupid you know yeah it just fixes the male abilities issue just changes

the way that you crush the bits that's basically the it obviously separates the witness from the signature but that's the crux of it's just changing well i believe the fight was that like it removes the signatures so it's like anyone can spend yeah yeah it's a there's a well-branded fun anyone can spend does not sound good i mean those guys are good at figuring out like angles to to fud you know and i think what i shouldn't even say it fuck well that's what i was just gonna get into what's gonna be like the big fud going forward well i don't know that but what i'm gonna say is i think what they what they need to do to be good at fud is they have to design the fud that makes us waste the most time um which means like debating with us and getting us to talk

about things and getting us to take things seriously like the reorg thing is a good attack on bitcoin on a social level it gets everybody wasting their time talking about that when they could be like earning money and doing something productive but i think a lot of new people learn because of it right yeah that's true that's true i think what they really were killing us with was the memes for a while but i feel like bitcoin meme game has really gotten a lot stronger yeah the bitcoin meme game is is on point for sure um now be cashers like when they try to meme it just looks like embarrassing it's like bitter the fun around say what's hilarious like yeah like the certain sex on crypto twitter uh think that one day like uh anything in a beck 32 address or on

the lightning network is just going to get stolen from out from under them like that's like that's their fun there's like that's how they explain it that's it it's just like this is going to happen if you do this all right explain how and they can't i woke up one morning like eight months ago or whatever seven months ago like bryce wiener was like telling everyone that that any segway any segway address wasn't safe freaks and they were gonna prove it when then on this date right it's just like fud i'm not using my mic uh yeah it's just fun it never happened um they're a bunch of assholes whatever yeah bryce weiner in particular freaks if uh if you're new to the space and bryce weiner hops up on twitter

just ignore him he's been a serial scammer seriously useless yeah like one of the original shitcoin dons he gave a speech that said shit coins are going to change the world at one point um yeah i guess i guess they did maybe we're an hour and a half in here you've got a flight in a little bit what uh what else should we riff on here wrap on there's been a great conversation thank you again thank you it's enjoyable um i'm trying to say so bit refill like what uh you're talking about lightning network enabling new use cases and it might be bit refill specific but what use cases do you think people are not paying attention to or aren't even aware of yet that that are going to come to the fore um maybe touch on this a bit earlier but uh i like to think about

the the temporary trust thing where we can leverage the fact that we're a centralized entity without having to have custody necessarily but and only be at most a nuisance to the customer and so you can create cool little like non-custodial situations where you can help them do things with lightning and i have examples but i can't really say them yet because we're actually going to do them and and some of and some of them are gonna you're gonna see are gonna be fun like uh but there there are things you can do that aren't just adding features to the protocol like because other things you can do um but yeah uh streaming payments could be cool um i'm not interested in micropayments but i am interested in streaming payments because it allows a flow

of money um some examples would be like i've said this before uh you could do like charge for video streaming and have paid streaming and still have a central entity in the middle providing the the content facilitating the content from the content creator like a youtube but never actually have custody like you could have the person paying you by the minute or the second or whatever and then YouTube taking their cut and then you getting your money immediately. And there's no withdrawal process. There's no deposit process.

It's just you open a channel to the right place and this is what happens in that channel and you agree to that before you enter the channel. Stuff like that is possible. Maybe streaming payments for getting paid. Like a time clock. You could say, okay, I'm clocking in and you're immediately getting paid.

The money is streaming at you. like and that's it like there's no more waiting for your paycheck or you know could you imagine that i'm having to wait for the first of the 15th that'd be pretty that'd be pretty crazy getting paid by the minute yeah think about the like in a good way i'd be fine with it but i mean but we've accomplished this before it's just that people don't really realize like that you can that lightning the instantaneousness like opens up interesting little things like uh people do this with like phone sex so you know they pay by the minute right and it gets charged their phone bill or whatever and and or buying ringtones with your your cell phone account like people figure out

weird little hacks like this because the people will use them and spend money this way i haven't bought a ringtone in quite a while yeah yeah what was my worst ringtone i think my worst ringtone was rod stewart if you think i'm sexy that was my ringtone at one point um one thing i want to touch on before we leave here is before matt got here we were rapping on you live in romania now you grew up in the states and uh i think you have a very interesting perspective as an american living abroad and uh experiencing a new culture and looking back on ours so what's like lifelike in romania and how does it compare uh to the culture here in america i mean honestly like all my life i've always felt a bit alien in the u.s why is that i don't know why um i'm starting

to have some theories now that i've been in europe for a while i think what it might be is partially that uh my heritage is portuguese my father was born in the azores which are portuguese islands and so was my mother's father and the city where i grew up there's a lot of portuguese culture and i think that maybe i i grew up with a little bit of a european culture in the u.s and so like think there were just some behaviors that you know i just always felt like i was a little bit outside and it might just be me and my own personality and whatever but uh towards the time right before i went to romania right around then was like the trump election um and i just like got this increasing feeling that like everywhere in the u.s is just fucking crazy

like why is everybody worried about all this dumb shit why is everybody arguing about shit that doesn't matter why does everybody care so much about materialistic things and like i just got this kind of like the you know fall of rome vibe where like everybody was just turning into like the most perverse you know uh america problems kind of situation and i was just like i just don't even like want to be here anymore um i'm i had business partners in romania i'm gonna go visit them and then once i got there i just wanted to stay and after having been there a while it's like it's much more down to earth it's much more practical like people care about things that make sense that they care about and it's not like totally different you know there's still

there's still a modern society and uh have all the things that you would expect them to have clubs and you know people get drunk and people have nice cars and you know it's like they have things but it's like just way toned down like on on the perverse side what i would call the perverse side in america yeah america's turned into like a clout chasing uh society it's all about instagram i don't know if it's vanity or what it is but it's just like i i think it's just like they have too much time on their hands they have i don't know like why don't people care about being productive and making the most of their life and being happy and uh being happy is like again there's a yeah this sort of ropes back to why i'm in bitcoin i think

a sound money system could provide a better allocation of resources which would lead to better increased happiness and stuff like that we talked a lot about on this podcast about uh the the economic kpis sort of being off kilter where we're just fine-tuning for growth and inflation where nobody's even looking at stats like happiness and quality of life which have been depreciating for decades and in this country in particular and very sensitive the americans are very sensitive about a lot of things like just words like i don't know like i use abrasive wording a lot i use candor a lot but i'm never trying to make somebody like like feel like uh like they're an idiot or whatever like maybe i do a little bit as but it's a style it's not like i

it's not personal it's not i'm doing this because i want to show conviction not because i want you to feel like shit you know like the victim mentality is pervasive too it's it's it's it's weird it's weird time to live in this country because things are being so polarized so politicized and yeah it's like we i believe that everybody's missing the mark like the framing of all the debates of what's going to make a better future are completely off kilter like you're you're swiping at branches when you're not getting to the root of the problems yeah yeah i guess like we can start getting really philosophical and talk about like markets and i think in the end even maybe even markets make things a lot of things inevitable and you know and sometimes

all this kicking and screaming is just a waste of time because what's going to be the most effective and efficient is going to rise to the top and that's just going to be the way the current state of reality is you know yeah no i'd agree any thoughts on that matt i was just i was just thinking back to your bitcoin is inevitable i like go back and forth like that is like bitcoin doesn't need us to do the podcast or anything but like the individuals benefit from it right yeah but bitcoin is fine i think the question maybe should change to and thinking out loud saying this i think if we if you think bitcoin is inevitable inevitable then the only thing you can do to help it is make it happen faster yes i like that you know me yes start stacking sats

freaks that's how we make this happen you don't have to worry about people attacking bitcoin or protecting bitcoin you have to worry about protecting people so they can make bitcoin happen faster like right that's what i mean no i think that's why we're sitting here doing this and that's that's one thing about the shit coiners that pisses me off too it's like when uh like like i started my newsletter and actually tried to nudge myself in the barstool the here to help uh to help people like miss the shit coinery that that people naturally fall into and And I talked to a couple of people who are like really deep in Ethereum and stuff like that. And like, oh, you shouldn't be trying to protect people, like let them make their mistakes.

And it's like, ah, but I want to like is I think it's noble. It's something we should be doing. I also enjoy like the told you so afterwards. I mean, would we do anything at all if we didn't have egos? It's just trying to keep that ego in check, right? Staying humble. Staying humble. i don't i don't keep repeating it because uh i'm i guess i'm not projecting i actually need

the reminder myself to stay humble self-actualization yeah exactly yeah um yeah this has been great john do you have anything uh you want to end this on now we should start because it's been good and if we keep talking we're gonna make it boring so but uh parting note for the freaks anything you want to announce about what you're working on bit refill where can we find you um you can find me as bitcoin error log on twitter as well as telegram um we're probably going to be having a telegram set up for a bit refill soon as well and try to tap into that a little bit but bitrefill.com we sell gift cards we sell mobile top-ups and we're getting very involved in being basically like a lightning service provider um and making products in that

area i think you should keep an eye on us because we have a lot planned um and it's going to start accelerating uh and we're gonna in some cases have a little fun with it and we're gonna try to keep it bitcoin and we're gonna try to i'm i'm gonna try to do my best to have bit refill be a medium for bitcoin to succeed you know to make a circular economy to help everybody live on crypto and keep an eye on us because like we're gonna fuck shit up i uh i don't doubt that at all and thank you again for joining us and thank you for all you've done helping me learn about bitcoin throughout the years thank you you were you were that voice that helped me uh find one of those voices that helped me find sanity in this this weird space that we're in yeah thank you very much john

thanks um you got anything to say stay humble stack sets peace and love freaks