TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #84: Bull Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Francis Pouliot and BTC Sessions from Bull Bitcoin to discuss the Montreal Bitcoin scene throughout the years, consulting in the "Blockchain" space, SegWit2x,... the common mission Bitcoiners have, and much more. Check out Bull Bitcoin: https://bullbitcoin.com/ Follow Francis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/francispouliot_ Follow BTCSessions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTCsessions Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_odell Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsor, Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty, here to introduce this week's sponsor, the Cash App. You know all about them already. Cash App has been the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years. They were the first P2P payments app to let you freaks buy it and sell Bitcoin. Then they were the first P2P payments app to let you withdraw Bitcoin to your own private keys. And now they're the first P2P payments app to allow you to withdraw excuse me to deposit bitcoin on the app and then do with it what you may i participated in a cash app wednesday last week and i sent my hashtag they sent me five dollars worth of bitcoin and it was really cool on top of this they have their boost program
Starting point is 00:00:43 which allows you to get a merchants like chick-fil-a whole foods taco bell i go to whole foods and use it almost every day and then i'll go walk to the coffee shop down the street get a little coffee and use it a second time that day to save a dollar the boost program is incredible so make sure if you download the app you get the boost card as well and if you download the app make sure you use the promo code stacking sats because that'll allow you to get five dollars for free and then we will give five dollars to a charity of our choice we're whittling that down right now the the charity will be decided on soon but let's help a good cause raise some money download the cash app today use the promo code stacking sats and enjoy this episode with the
Starting point is 00:01:23 bull bitcoin team matt and i sat down with btc sessions and francis paulette and we had an incredible conversation talking about the old days we actually talked a lot about the segwit 2x wars and it's a lot of history a lot of history in this episode it was fun to finally sit down with francis and and benny and and we had a really good time hope you freaks enjoy what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt second recording of the day sitting down with two fine gentlemen and matt odell's with us again so fucking pumped so happy to be here guys uh we're sitting down with francis paulette and btc sessions from bull bitcoin very excited for this is a long time coming welcome to the pod guys yeah thanks so much for inviting us yeah
Starting point is 00:02:11 thanks for having me i love the show by the way i listen religiously thank you i uh like i was telling you earlier your your youtube videos from from years past i was a big fan of you're a good advocate no shit actually yeah you were traveling the world chilling bitcoin you actually watched oh shit that's fucking cool yeah it blows my mind whenever somebody's like oh yeah you were like on a beach somewhere talking about hardware wallets yeah i'm like what no it's crazy so we're at what wanted to start with is we had eric spano on the podcast months ago and he was the original founder of my bills and handed it off to you guys so i i want to hear about the montreal bitcoin scene back in the day how you came to meet eric and how you came to acquire my bills yeah the the
Starting point is 00:02:54 montreal bitcoin scene uh those years were the years with eric and the bitcoin msc were 2013 2014 they were insane like uh when i think back of like what we were doing we were like way too early for doing what we were doing. So the Bitcoin Embassy was a nonprofit organization that was founded by three early Bitcoin adopters and Bitcoin entrepreneurs. And it was kind of it was a four story building downtown Montreal. And we kind of started it as a coworking space as a, I guess, meetup space. Mostly we did some, you know, kind of coin center, public advocacy and stuff like that. And Eric came on board. He was helping us with the finances because he was studying in accounting but he came up with this great business idea so he came
Starting point is 00:03:41 on board as kind of one of the resident like founders and entrepreneurs and i don't know how he came up with the idea for bills exactly uh but um i was working at the bitcoin embassy so i was just helping him out on on his project and it did extremely well and like bills was really awesome because if someone's like well what can you spend with bitcoin and i was just like well first of all you can just use a prepaid credit card and you just don't have a bank account you can spend fiat everywhere just paid off with bills you can pay any of the telcos with bills with Bitcoin so that was like a great soundbite to like every journalist so and he was running bills like as a one-man operation he did pretty much everything
Starting point is 00:04:19 himself he designed the UX he he really created the just a concept the brand and and and the website and then well you know not unfortunately but after a while he just got a really good opportunity to move to the US and to work for in consulting and like I was kind of crushed you know because like I've been pumping bills as part of you know my job at the Bitcoin Embassy I was promoting the Bitcoin companies in the space that were that were like residents there I was pumping bills I was helping him out on it and it was like we can't let that go but it's such a difficult thing to operate like a bill Bitcoin bill
Starting point is 00:04:57 payment payment business it's such a difficult like not a lot of people were able like how can you sell that company to someone else when you built it entirely from the ground up and it's all dependent on like what you imagined um so luckily i mean i had some experience with it so we took it over and at the same time we were also running like a bitcoin cash to bitcoin counter so the bitcoin embassy had a legit like trading desk where people would come in sit down like here's a bunch of cash we're like all right take our phones out you know pay them you know sell them Bitcoin on the spot, put the money in the safe. So we were kind of doing a bit of local Bitcoin initially,
Starting point is 00:05:31 and then it just scaled, so we created this trading desk. And it was great because in bills, people pay their bills with Bitcoin, and at the counter, people would buy Bitcoin. So we would get the Bitcoins from bills and sell it to the people at the counter, get the cash, and then use that cash to pay the bills. So this idea of the two-sided merger
Starting point is 00:05:53 of a payment processor on one end where people are paying Bitcoin and an OTC desk where people are buying those Bitcoins made it so we avoided the exchanges. We didn't have to leave a lot of money on the exchanges for deposits. We weren't paying as much exchange fees. So it just turned out to be like a perfect match, right?
Starting point is 00:06:11 The OTC desk on one side and the bill payment on the other side. You didn't have to touch Quadriga at all? We did. We didn't have to touch Quadriga, but we stopped using them I think like two years, two and a half years ago. Of course, being in Bitcoin since 2013, we all use Quadriga.
Starting point is 00:06:28 Quadriga was like the Bitstamp of Canada, or the Kraken of Canada. Everybody uses that. But it was pretty obvious to a lot of the Bitcoin community that it was sketchy. And I think a lot of the people that left their money on there, they kind of knew that they were taking a gamble, that it wasn't going to be them when the exit scam happens. But yeah, so we tried to avoid the exchanges as possible. And eventually, you know, I took over Bills.
Starting point is 00:06:56 I hired a software engineering team to have everything in-house. So Bills was built by a contracting company before. Now everything's in-house. So if you want to, like, you know, add a crazy feature, I just, you know, my devs are sitting next to me. I just ask them. and we merged bills and my company that acquired the bills from Eric with Bitcoin Brains from Calgary, Alberta
Starting point is 00:07:21 and they were running kind of the same operation as we were at the Bitcoin Embassy so they had a physical space, they had like meetups, people were coming in to buy miners and ask questions and stuff like that. So we merged the two companies to create like a pan-Canadian bigger company
Starting point is 00:07:39 We didn't want to scale with VC money. We didn't want to scale like internationally at all. So we had the both the same mindset that let's just serve the Canadian market extremely well and just focus on one cryptocurrency, which is Bitcoin, obviously, and not do anything else. Just serve the Canadians extremely well with Bitcoin and forget about everything else. And that turned out pretty well. Yeah. It seems like what you guys are building with Bull Bitcoin is you're building on momentum of the last five years. So it seems like everything's coming together for you guys in particular.
Starting point is 00:08:13 So what was the journey for combining all this into one umbrella company that is Bull Bitcoin? Well, yeah. Great question. So when we first, around 2014, I mean, we had these Skype groups that were like today's Telegram groups of early Bitcoin OGs. Well, back then we were just like Bitcoiners and we had a Canadian Bitcoin like Skype channel and they were in there and we kind of knew what they were doing there's like 2014 and then we just started to talk and then we started to do some trades between each other right some OTC trades for for liquidity and then they kind of
Starting point is 00:08:49 just became our mentors because they had been doing that for like two years before us or a year and a half before us so we were just kind of like pen pals I guess like just we were doing trades and talking shit you know making fun of coins you know reviewing like GPUs and like minor ASICs and stuff like that so we just yeah we just became friends and eventually we just started to trade exclusively with each other like every single day so at some point I decided to quit doing blockchain consulting at a blockchain consulting for a year and a half and that was like horrible yeah what was that like that was like your
Starting point is 00:09:22 soul dying there's every worst thing you can imagine about a job like were you consulting for I was consulting I created a subsidiary of Grant Thornton in Quebec and we were consulting for like like energy companies miners some tax stuff like just typical big five consulting but like we were extremely Bitcoin only and trying to push that into the mainstream and I didn't see I didn't see me having the patience to like wait 15 years to convince the mainstream and then i became much more interested and i talked to like uh pierre achar and bitstein and save dean and through talking to them i was like fuck the mainstream i don't i don't want to
Starting point is 00:10:08 i don't have to i don't have to sell bitcoin it sells itself okay and i should be focused on just one thing like we were we were thinking oh we're going to be the trojan horse of bitcoin in the institution so we're going to start with uh open timestamps and like ecdsa signatures and pgp pkis and like try to make them think that they're doing blockchain but they're actually just doing like bitcoin and we really had like a plan to do that and like you know sneak bitcoin through the back door so oh now you are using bitcoin you can't say you're not but we decided that i just i was just grew tired of that of all the bullshit like i'm allergic to bullshit and i was having like severe allergic reactions every single day uh so yeah so i stopped doing that and then yeah that's
Starting point is 00:10:48 how that's how i made dave so we just became super good friends and i quit that i spent like a year a month on vacation and then uh you know kind of like you know when jack dorsey came back from his like meditation he like went full bitcoin maximalist i had a kind of yeah yeah yeah i had a similar kind of experience where i was like just a month on the beach and doing nothing and i was just like i just i don't know i spent too much time thinking i don't know and i just decided to go full full bitcoin maximalist and uh called dave and said yeah this is like the time and we both felt like this was the time to go bitcoin only and to like specifically make a bitcoin only brand and to make that like our thing i mean our main thing which is bitcoin only cypherpunk
Starting point is 00:11:29 and just the highest standards and i think that was like really a good timing and i'm seeing a lot of other companies that are kind of going in the same direction and i see this just spontaneous convergence of like what we should be focusing the priorities basically everybody's priorities are getting straight and i'm pretty happy with that what uh what priorities in particular you think are are becoming aligned uh well i mean when when we first so so i got basically francis and and bitcoin brains uh they poached me from my old job so i was you know i was lucky enough to be already working full-time like in the the crypto space as i think a lot of people do initially even though they're like i'm i'm into bitcoin but i'll put up with this so i can do this full-time
Starting point is 00:12:14 you know that's that's seems to be a lot of people's trajectory and so like um you know i i was working in the space um but the job became like hey we're gonna we're gonna add every coin as part like the the business model that you see basically everywhere that's not a bitcoin only company um and and we're just gonna do the trading fees and we'll just we'll just add whatever doesn't matter like how many coins can we get and so i i got a little disillusioned there and so when i remember having a conversation with i was at work and so i went i went for a three-hour walk because i was talking to francis and that's how conversations with francisco and uh and you just basically dumped your brain of like everything you wanted to accomplish to me and i remember
Starting point is 00:13:01 there's a few key points where where we both came to this like mutual i think the wording was unapologetically bitcoin maximalist and we just started shooting the shit and saying like i i think we were talking about the the term maximalist and how um you know instead of rejecting that term people just just you know took it on they're like great that's what that's what we're called cool we'll go with that and we've seen a lot of that and so i think our with with bull bitcoin it was just whatever people call us we'll just we'll just take it and like we've seen a lot of that with like our bull bitcoin kind of marketing push we're like how about those advertisements those video ads people there's there's like a a it's very segmented
Starting point is 00:13:49 it's either one or the other people are either like that shit was hilarious or you guys are cancer and so like you know i got a lot of a lot of like i can't believe you guys spent money like calling out shit coins and making a professional video about it and i was i was like guys we had the money to spare because we didn't buy any shit coins the funny thing is they still they still use our services they they still do convert to bitcoin and use us to to cash out in fiat so you know jokes on them they have to pay you know exchange fees somewhere else the dirty little secret of every shit coiner is that they have a huge bag of bitcoin oh they all do oh they all totally do yeah absolutely it is the uh the reserve asset
Starting point is 00:14:30 of the space for a reason yeah and and you know the priority i think if dave was here he would say uh this is our only chance of getting at getting a decentralized selling point around sound money ever like if we have to do this now right and for me it's it's very much the same uh i'm a huge sound money austrian economics uh advocate i was an economics researcher before i joined bitcoin i was uh working at the montreal economic institute which is a very notoriously austrian economics focused think tank i worked at the institute of economic affairs which is the same and the phrase institute in canada which is also an austrian economics uh focused think tank and i was trying to kind of exactly that strategy of incremental change of like moving the overton
Starting point is 00:15:14 window over time by like producing research showing how the free market can help and that kind of stuff and uh liberties and it's just it was going nowhere like and then you know uh bitcoin for us is is political uh it's uh it's a a force of disruption uh and let me contrast that for example with other bitcoin companies that started out maybe 2013 2014 where for them bitcoin was a market and it was a a new innovation that they can get funding for to uh subsidize their entrepreneur lifestyle they didn't have a mission to eradicate the fucking bank of international settlement right All I can think about is Coinbase when you're talking like that. Maybe, probably.
Starting point is 00:15:55 And BitPay. Coinbase and BitPay. And Blockchain.info. These three are the worst. But yeah, so the priority for us is that's what it is. So how do we get there? Our motto is building the Bitcoin standard. So that's the software and financial infrastructure.
Starting point is 00:16:12 So the on-ramp, off-ramp. And one of the hugest priorities of both Bitcoin is Cyphernode. People do not realize how much of our time we spend on CypherNode. An insane amount of time. Me, personally, I probably spend more time on CypherNode than the rest of all Bitcoin. And CoinJoin and that kind of stuff. Because our goal as a company is to accumulate more Bitcoins. We don't have a target for an exit.
Starting point is 00:16:35 We don't have a transaction volume. Well, we do. Projection. But really what we're looking for is can we accumulate a huge stash of Bitcoins while it's still humanly possible, like under a huge amount of dollars. And also, while we are doing this for ourselves, we want to make Bitcoin the king. We want to make Bitcoin, we want to see our purchasing power do 100x over the next 10 years. So when we're talking about priorities, I mean, this is the priority for us.
Starting point is 00:17:04 Stack as many sats as possible. That is the number one priority for us. I mean, I think, I mean, you kind of touched on this. the memes are extremely important right all these of the merch you guys have um the ads those videos right like they're extremely powerful like you can release research paper after research paper or whatever but like what really gets through to people are those memes it's so the the it's i i came to francis last year as i as i joined the company and i was like listen i got this idea for like a really fucking stupid like out there video and i i basically said like i want to do
Starting point is 00:17:44 a a world vision ad for wrecked shit coiners and i was like and so like those of you that haven't seen it basically it's like a bunch of dudes on the street that look like down and out and then and yeah and haggard and then it zooms in and they're all like they've all got like their signs that would typically be like you can spare any change except for it's like send eth y'all got any more of them daps like and so and so and then it's like testimonials of them like you know and that and and and the guys in the video like they're they they're all like pro bitcoin but they're like yeah we can we can step into that realm for a little bit and uh so we we took we took aim at like the biggest three that we kind of saw through 2017 that were getting
Starting point is 00:18:29 pumps so like bcash is in there ripple and ethereum and uh and we just kind of i don't know we just the whole point was to to to take the absolute ludicrous pumps and and irrationality of 2017 and and comedically look at the fallout from that and so we just yeah i don't know we just went with it we filmed for like half a day with a really wicked uh filmographer videographer in calgary numero films that guy's morgan's a boss and he just turned it into this like hilarious looking thing and we put it out there and half the people were laughing and half the people were super mad right well and that comes back to like the shirt you're wearing toxic bitcoin maximalist and i think those videos personify bull bitcoin but francis you more in particular
Starting point is 00:19:17 because you are are well known as an outspoken maximalist and yes what's it like taking shit from people who you probably innately believe are sort of misguided in this space and being principled and not backing down when people are calling you out for calling out shitcoins? I don't really feel much, actually. I don't. I give less than zero fucks. There's, like, someone asked me earlier, a Twitter follower, and she told me, how do you know you're right? you seem like you always think that you're right and that everyone else is wrong. It's because, genuinely, I mean,
Starting point is 00:19:57 I've been researching this stuff for 10 years. And every time I was wrong, I changed my mind. And through the process of elimination, I haven't found a single new argument over the last three years. I have some minor things, but nothing has changed my world view since possibly reading Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game.
Starting point is 00:20:16 That was the last time I had an epiphany of, I focus on what's more important, what I call the remnant, after reading the really amazing short story, Isaiah's Job. Essentially, the central idea is that I want to focus on getting people more radical. I want to focus on getting people more committed, put more resources in. I want the highest quality people to get as crazy for Bitcoin as I am. And the way that you do that is by not diluting the message. And these are people that do not identify with the mainstream. And if they see you diluting your message, and really, if I see myself diluting the message, I'm going to lose interest in what I'm doing.
Starting point is 00:21:02 So, yeah, I don't even see people giving me shit on Twitter. Twitter for me is, and I say this, I'm not even joking. like twitter when i i'm still surprised that people read my tweets and i know i see the likes and everything and like i see the retweets and stuff but when people come up to me in person they're like i love your tweets man or like oh that's what you did i'm like man this is just like my own diary and i got like you know i'm very add type of person i can't sit down and write a blog for my thoughts i need that immediate it comes in my head i tweet it out and you know this also comes back to the memes like I studied working as a like PR person in politics doing
Starting point is 00:21:40 economic research I know and I did my my master's my master's thesis on this on narrative framing right so I became kind of an expert before Bitcoin on narrative framing and memes are the way that we win people's hearts and minds because they're the most kind of condensed way to share information in a way where we know what we're thinking and it's a way to get people to think about a set of ideas in kind of a box really quickly so that you can digest
Starting point is 00:22:09 a lot of really complex information that's like bombarding you into something your brain can comprehend and like make sense of. So like a meme is that, right? It's a condensed like shortcut for your brain and, you know, putting the memes out there solidifies the narrative that we're trying to push.
Starting point is 00:22:29 It's focused on Bitcoin, be cypherpunk, and protect privacy and focus on the core values. And a lot of people also, thinking about it as a business, as a way of doing business, I mean, a lot of my thinking has been actually inspired by a Montreal company called Dime. I don't know if you guys know Dime, it's a skateboarding company.
Starting point is 00:22:48 And my friend started that. We were early on the meme boards, like when we were super young, like 14, You know, YTMND, we were doing memes and they started to do memes in skateboarding and do very, very short videos, you know, doing exactly what we're doing in the Bitcoin space, but in skateboarding. And what they did is they transformed their business into a cause that people who had no financial interest in were like you guys. Seriously, like I know you guys like us. I mean, I hear I hear the comments. A lot of people, they're like, go bowl Bitcoin, you know, and instead of having to, you know,
Starting point is 00:23:24 hire raise tons of money for marketing and that kind of stuff we can just put out our memes out there and you know the the people who some people are gonna take up our memes take up our branding or take up our ideas and root for us as a cause acting you guys have like a decentralized marketing force so you know going people say like oh I was talking to a VC yesterday and like being Bitcoin only and strictly Bitcoin only and they're like I said why don't you go bitcoin only and so because we like the money we think we don't like money either like allowing to be being bitcoin only means that we have time to develop coin join we have time to develop
Starting point is 00:24:05 siphon and lightning and like the on ramps and off ramps and just focus on our core business and like this makes our business much more likely to exist in 10 years than all the ones that are scrambling fighting against each other for the next thing that grabs you know the vc's attention so it is not a it's not like selfless to be bitcoin only not only is it our mission but this is our competitive edge financially against the other companies in the long term yeah focus is key right and totally that's and reputation is key too so people are a lot of people blew their reputations in 2017 2018 and especially during those mania phases like to try and stick bitcoin only is imperative for for your long-term rep in this game yeah yeah the the twitter is a
Starting point is 00:24:48 Bitcoin Twitter and Bitcoin Journal is brutal. A lot of people, there's a lot of pressure in being an influencer. But I think that the way that... I hope I didn't blow it, but I might blow it. I don't know. I hope to retire before I blow it, actually. That would be great. That would be really good.
Starting point is 00:25:05 I think you're on a good path right now. But let's jump on the Cypher Node. Because I believe the first time Cypher Node popped in my head, you gave the presentation in Riga last year. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, so CypherNode was born... CypherNode is an open source software project which is like sponsored and supported by Bull Bitcoin, but there's other contributors that are like key contributors that are not part of Bull Bitcoin. Well, actually that's not true because
Starting point is 00:25:31 we just hired him last week. But the idea for CypherNode was that when we started out doing builds, we were using third-party Bitcoin APIs. So we were specifically using Blockchain.info for a for a while, and then we were using BlockCypher, stuff like the BitPay API. So when we started to build the new platform, we hired regular web developers, and it's not easy to run your own Bitcoin Core full node in an enterprise setting when you can just pay
Starting point is 00:26:01 BlockCypher 70 bucks a month, or BitGo, for example. We were using BitGo as a hot wallet because my web developers, I don't want them, they don't want to manage a Bitcoin Core server for a business, I mean, that's very hard and very dangerous. And you need to really kind of know Bitcoin to interface with Bitcoin Core. And if you're building a web app,
Starting point is 00:26:20 you don't have time for that. But when the USF happened, we're like, oh shit, like we don't have a choice but to run Bitcoin Core for all our operations exclusively because we are going on this minority software project, which has not been adopted by those third party APIs. So we managed to miraculously do that at the last minutes using a software project called Insight and BitCore by BitPay.
Starting point is 00:26:46 But after that, they refused to integrate SegWit in it. And it was just garbage. So we had to build our own. And also, when Lightning Network came out, we wanted to be the first business to accept it. My thoughts on that have changed a little bit. I'd rather not rush that yet. But anyway, the concept was we didn't
Starting point is 00:27:05 know which instance we were going to use or which one was going to come out on top. So we wanted to build a software project that would be like a meta layer above Bitcoin Core, BTCD, LND, Eclair, so that we can kind of just switch from one to another and do some abstraction on top of that. So Cypher Node is basically a method of deploying a network of virtual machines that are connected together in an encrypted network that is your own network that you're controlling. So you spawn this daemon, this network that's running in the cloud,
Starting point is 00:27:37 And it includes stuff like Bitcoin Core, Sea Lightning, the Open Timestamp Client, PGP, some business logic like a timer, a web API, a web hook, all sorts of utilities that you need to run apps. And that is exposed through an API. And it's also a way of deploying web applications in tandem with Bitcoin so that you create an encrypted network, which is protecting a subnetwork of web apps and a subnetwork of Bitcoin stuff. So it's kind of like it's almost evolving more like an AWS type of thing where it's kind of like, but it's all self-hosted. So the concept of Cyphernode is self-host your own Bitcoin API. Like, why would you pay for BlockCypher when we basically open sourced what BlockCypher does? It's your own Bitcoin Explorer. It's your own Bitcoin hot wallet.
Starting point is 00:28:30 And where we're heading is adding all sorts of cool Bitcoin side projects in this stuff so that it's also a Bitcoin node launcher as well, right? So it's a way to deploy and launch a bunch of nodes in a very secure way. So secure, in fact, like, I mean, we, Bull Bitcoin is in CypherNode. Bull Bitcoin is a component, a business logic component as part of a CypherNode network. So I mean it's used in production and it definitely does work and the concept is that we wanted the other startups in the space to be able to deploy a self-hosted back-end without going the easy route which is going through these web api's and Specifically the younger generation of people that are you know?
Starting point is 00:29:12 They don't really care about Bitcoin Ethereum or EOS or whatever. They just want to work in the blockchain space they're just looking for some cool tech and And Ethereum had all these, like, tools and dev tools and dev kits that are super, like, easy to integrate. Like, if you're at a weekend hackathon, for example, Ethereum people, I was at a few hackathons, and Ethereum people would show up, and they were like, this is, like, four software libraries that you can deploy, and you'll get, like, an Ethereum app in, like, a day, right? So they get them while they're young, seriously. And then if you're doing a, you know, a thing like a startup thing, you will continue on the path of whatever you started on rather than switching to like Bitcoin, which is super difficult. You've already got an investment of time in it. So our idea was just that, like make it super easy to build and deploy Bitcoin apps and abstract away the difficulty of stuff like automated coin join for payment processing and all that kind of stuff.
Starting point is 00:30:05 Yeah. so it seems like it's very privacy conscious and that's one thing that you guys have done most recently is you guys are wasabing your coin joining all the deposits yeah yeah totally so cyphernote itself is the development philosophy is extreme lightweight and extreme privacy and no decision made on behalf of the user right so so total sovereignty um and in in bull bitcoin like we still do kyc coin join and bitcoin uh privacy has nothing to do with kyc uh but we want to protect our users like and part of our philosophy is skin in the game and i got family members that are using my my company i'm using my company the staff is in the company friends are using
Starting point is 00:30:43 the company other bitcoin influencers are using a company and like how can i accept having like garbage companies like uh what's the neutrino or other blockchain trackers analysis send us to our to our deposit addresses try to reverse engineer how many users we have they can try to reverse engineer if their users are also users of their platform um there's a lot of corporate espionage going on in the blockchain like it's it's it's hardcore so so i can't accept that like that's bullshit right so uh we figured out a way to uh coin join all the incoming coins and the way that we do it is is kind of cool because we um and actually we're working very closely with the wasabi team they're good friends of ours and they've been extremely responsive to like our
Starting point is 00:31:29 needs as a business and like I think we're each using each other as a test case for how the large-scale coin join of every business is gonna kind of evolve towards but we are using the wasabi RPC API or using a wasabi X pub we can have the user deposits be wasabi addresses and then coin join them directly without being aggregated before the coin join which means that you cannot see if you're a user of bills who else is a user of bills because as soon as like from the deposit address the next hop is out of a coin join and we can do all sorts of crazy stuff you can do fake coin join sometimes we can put
Starting point is 00:32:11 some decoys we can emerge outputs how would you do that so well you know a fake coin join is basically you splitting your UTXOs and making a coin a joint transaction with yourself without actually going through a public coordinator. And there's a few scripts to do that, like that automate doing that. But if you are, imagine a BCC pay server where you put different addresses for invoices and different people pay. Well, these are different people's UTXOs. So if you do a fake coin join with different people's UTXOs, well, it kind of becomes a
Starting point is 00:32:47 real coin join, right? And there's also, like, people do not understand how insanely difficult it is to track CoinJoin. Like, CoinJoin actually works super well. I've done blockchain analysis in the past. I was hired in a court case, and I did it as a hobby, you know, stolen Bitcoins. I really like doing blockchain analysis, trying to figure out what's going on in the blockchain. And, like, I can't see shit past a CoinJoin. And even worse, if we merge, for example, the user's outputs, which are people selling Bitcoins to us and paying bills, we merge them into another hot wallet, for example, for our own use or to sell to someone else.
Starting point is 00:33:29 Someone's looking at the blockchain, he's seeing like seven inputs, for example, that are being merged into one input or 30 inputs being merged into one input. And he thinks, oh, well, it must have been one person which is cashing out of his coin join. So I'm going to look at the blockchain backwards and try to figure out who that person is by looking at the patterns of his UTXOs. But what they're actually going to be looking at is all sorts of different random people that have completely randomly different patterns
Starting point is 00:33:56 of Bitcoin usage. And they're going to be like, whoa, what the fuck is this? Like, what is this person doing? He's on local Bitcoins in this country. So the level of plausible deniability that you get from CoinJoin is like, I mean, it destroys every single privacy coin
Starting point is 00:34:10 that you can imagine. It really does truly work. Two questions regarding Wasabi and coin joining. One, how are you guys managing the fees with that? And then two, we talk about this a lot on Rabbit Hole Recap. Is there a threshold at which there's an amount of Bitcoin that's being coin joined that affords us a degree of privacy across the whole network, do you think? Yeah, so regarding the fees, the real answer is we haven't really kept track. it's it's it's not it's not a business expense that that that I look at and I'm
Starting point is 00:34:47 like I want to I want to save on it so the the fees of coin join are I pre they're decided by the coordinator first of all so there was a B coordinator is gonna decide the transaction fees because he creates and crafts the transaction and I think that they've increased them recently so that the conjoint speed is a little bit faster. Regarding the the anonymity set fees, like the coordinator fees, I mean that's a very reasonable business expense to have. In Wasabi it's 0.003% per anonymity set. I'm not gonna say how much anonymity set we use, but we only use 100. There's a certain level of
Starting point is 00:35:25 anonymity set that is completely fine and it's actually a good thing to alternate so that people can't try to figure out who you are if you have a weird like 17 of underneath set stuff like that and the transaction fees there's just Bitcoin transaction fee so it's not it's not a huge issue the the thing with the with coin join is the more liquidity comes in it's kind of a compounding effect right so wasabi is going much faster since we we start to put our liquidity through it and it's going fairly well the level at which coin join becomes I it's a very good question actually because I was just
Starting point is 00:35:59 thinking that, and I was talking with Cezanne Bitcoin earlier on his podcast, I don't want there to be like a two-tier system of private users and non-private users. I think that's a really bad outcome for a few reasons. One, it makes it easier to track the non-private users. So it makes their situation worse, actually, if we are using CoinJoin in mass because the chain analysis can focus their efforts on them having completely abandoned the idea of tracking us or so I hope unless I'm wrong but I don't really know the answer in percentage I don't know how much I haven't really kept track we're at like five percent right now that's very possible you guys were a nice boost we need more actual like if you look at the
Starting point is 00:36:44 the amount of UTXOs holding 0.1 BTC or more it's like increased crazily yeah yeah and all those back 32 addresses with a fixed amount of bitcoins. My question is, what are you doing with the change that's below the threshold? How are you dealing with that? Yeah, I'm not the person
Starting point is 00:37:05 who operates. I have a specific guy that operates the Wasabi wallet. I think that's a problem, actually. I don't know exactly what the problem is. What you can do for those, I think you have to merge them. You merge them with an already CoinJoin transaction and you mix it again.
Starting point is 00:37:21 Or you use something like Samurai that has smaller pools. What we can probably do is I think send them out to another Wasabi wallet or merge some random coins. Send some
Starting point is 00:37:39 random coins to that to add them up and merge them later. Or possibly, we can do a fake CoinJoin actually. You fake CoinJoin them into a larger input right uh it's only like a temporary it's more of a temporary problem because as liquidity increases you'll be able to coin join of all amounts so the future of coin join is going to be a large market of different coordinators that are offering different uh trade-offs between
Starting point is 00:38:04 enemies set time and fees and stuff like that so we're already seeing that right so for example if we want to make a 200 bitcoin coin join we can also go on the joy market order book and get absolutely wrecked with a really deep order of like two percent for the coin join but like if you want to do that there's the option if you want to have a faster uh coin join with world pool or something like that that's definitely possible even within wasabi i think that uh because you can create a wasabi compliant coordinator you just fork out the coordinator with your own sure sure maybe is there going to be a high volume coin join between startups like us maybe uh is there going to be a super pleb uh tiny coin join in wasabi is maybe wasabi will have you know large
Starting point is 00:38:45 medium and small uh if you're listening that's actually not a bad idea i think they just need liquidity to increase right like there's plenty of people that want bigger amounts there's plenty of people that want smaller amounts yes just keep them all in the same pool for now because we don't have enough people using yeah yeah but i think they will specialize over time yeah yeah and then obviously the emergence of schnor and all this stuff will make will make it even more incentivized to coin join yes like that yes so schnor is going to make it much cheaper and i think there's it's not unlikely that someone's going to figure out a way to make like coin join cheaper than regular bitcoin transactions like i would not be surprised if someone figured out a way for that to happen
Starting point is 00:39:22 but they say once they say p2ep will be right oh yeah that's amazing actually that's that's something that's one i want i want us to be the first ones to use that uh so i'm actually thinking about that a lot i've been thinking about that a lot uh i talked to the uh the the joint market guys that have it i think it's the only wallet that has no summary has it as well Summary has it well. So there's pay join, I think they call it, in Join Market. And in Summary, I think it's called the Cahoot Span or something.
Starting point is 00:39:53 It's not Ricochet. No, I think it's Cahoot. That makes more sense. Ricochet is having the transaction bounce off like a random number, like seven times before it hits its final destination, cycling through your own addresses. No, so that's great.
Starting point is 00:40:06 So P2 endpoint is kind of like a, it's a little bit like Lightning in the sense that you know I think both nodes need to be online there's some kind of key exchange going on over there but yeah I think it's extremely promising and that's a very very private transaction type yeah no I'm bullish on Bitcoin privacy as we head into the future and that's like probably one of the biggest Achilles heels would you say would you agree with that biggest Achilles heel the network is is privacy yeah I think that's I think that's well not I've never seen it like that because I all I mean coin join is like an old concept so I could
Starting point is 00:40:45 definitely see why people think that right because the way that I see Bitcoin is it's so extensible at layers on top and I have a I guess I guess a lot of imagination on what kind of crazy apps and crazy systems that are semi centralized completely decentralized are gonna pop up on top and make it more anonymous at the at the top but for example I've always been more concerned about the auditability of the Bitcoin supply and the permission lists trust validation than I've been with the privacy because it's kind of like privacy is something that you get at a higher layer but it's also something
Starting point is 00:41:20 more contextual for example when people say they talk about Monero being more private I'm like are you a drug dealer have you used Monero to sell drugs or have you used Monero to move money out of a country you're saying it's more private have you have you done it show me the whole cycle of what's going to happen? You're going to get the Monero. What do you do with the Monero? You're going to have to sell it. Where are you going to sell it? You're going to go on BISC. And then from BISC, what are you going to do? Are you going to get Bitcoins or are you going to go with some OTC guy? I mean, there's always going to be a trail. Monero is not used
Starting point is 00:41:50 out of context. If it was a 100% Monero economy, for example, maybe it would be a very private coin. But to me, liquidity is one of the biggest drivers of privacy. If you think about it, liquidity is just anonymity set. right in monero like sure you have uh some some fancy crypto but your anonymity set is almost nil and you you can't liquidate it and the less uh the less uh liquidity uh the more likely you get you know into a honeypot or you get the anonymized or something like that or you get trapped uh yeah so uh you're looking at uh assailant number one on the monero community shit list right here all right i have like a whole group of monero trolls i love my tweets
Starting point is 00:42:32 oh my god okay no but monero monero is great but i mean uh it's it's a cool idea i think it's the least worst shit coin uh it is it is the least worst shit coin as far as i'm concerned um but again like monero is the privacy moro is very theoretical i would say um and i think the the people that are using monero uh to actually hide their transactions uh are not thinking about the other aspects of privacy and maybe that's that's even worse um but i mean i'm happy that monero existed because it did obviously put pressure on on people to work out coin join into bitcoin because if you want to you know have the the one coin i mean you need to have you know the main competitive feature and i think that with coin join we we have that um and i think with
Starting point is 00:43:21 you know stuff like state chains for example uh lightning obviously and uh liquid uh uh i don't there's a demand for smart contracts at all i really don't think so actually uh smart contracts like touring complete smart contracts like the the ethereum smart contracts uh so i mean rsk i don't really care that they exist uh but as far as i'm concerned like all the the features that are missing in bitcoin on paper you know for for the uh the normies to to compare coins uh we are getting them uh at a pretty good pace no i would i would agree as well and um so i want to shift this to like you guys are building bull bitcoin you're let's say you get you're pretty radical right do you there's some big implications if bitcoin does become successful like what's it
Starting point is 00:44:11 like being this radical this this sort of like abrupt about your bitcoin love and you're you're basically building a company that's coming at the state and their power to to issue money and stuff like that are you you ever have your head on a swivel like walking around are you worried about anything from my perspective i i think this kind of an attitude in bitcoin is necessary to to kind of shift the what is normal like yeah okay we're we're for sure the most extreme company in this Like, I mean, we're like we said, unapologetically maximalist. Maybe like Rodolfo is the only one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's I love I love I love Rodolfo.
Starting point is 00:44:58 Yeah, I think that we're all we're doing is is we're taking, you know, the far side of the spectrum to help shift the normies into a reasonable level of Bitcoin maximalism. I think there is, you know, like, OK, just myself and Francis sitting here like I'm I would say like Francis is one of the more extreme people that I've met. But I appreciate that because it keeps that it keeps the narrative on a path of like, you know, you get to a Bitcoin only conference and, you know, there's some extreme maximalism, which actually, you know what I found here at the event that that everybody's been super nice. and and super inviting and and the conversations have been great but but having that sentiment in the room it takes the people that would have been pumping bullshit and it brings them into the conversation as a you know what like yeah you know bitcoin is is important and like and and they're very cautious to like try and pump bullshit and i think when we when we you know are unforgiving in the way that we approach this again we drive that that narrative into the realm where it's just
Starting point is 00:46:13 not okay to be pumping outright scams and we've seen kind of this shift i'm sure it'll migrate back with another crazy pump there's there's gonna be bullshit coming in in the next major bull market but um yeah i think it's important that we we just shift those goal posts a little bit so that people can't be as blatant with what they're trying to what they're trying to scam people with yeah and this harpens back to earlier on the conversation with narratives and that's something that matt and i talk about a lot is like we're trying to normalize coin joining like this should be a good thing like you should have financial privacy you should not feel dirty when you're coin joining your coins like yeah yeah totally just making it socially palatable
Starting point is 00:46:56 is important like when we're crafting these narratives like it is not a bad thing to want financial privacy yeah no and like you know one of the reasons i'm doing that is because i'm good at it right i mean uh i was uh i studied it i worked professionally in bitcoin before uh kind of uh condensing complex ideas into things that kind of resonate with people and you know since i like kind of made a conscious decision to really up up the the rhetoric and like quit uh like also i can i don't have a boss right so i can and not only that but my business partners think that you know my radical humor is fucking hilarious and you know i my friends think it's super funny and everybody around me that i care about uh they don't give me shit right there uh
Starting point is 00:47:46 they they see what i'm doing they get what i'm doing um but it does feel strange and weird to to to have that effect on people in the sense that to me like again when i tweet when i when i say things I do it very consciously knowing that I'm influencing people I'm very careful with the way that I say things for example but I'm still kind of super surprised when I joined the Bitcoin Embassy in the first time you notice I didn't name any one of the founders is because I really do it's because these guys they told me hey we'll take you in they we met through libertarian circles and it said okay we'll take you in we'll teach you everything we know about
Starting point is 00:48:24 Bitcoin we'll get you in the Bitcoin space but you're gonna be the public face and you're going to be the one who talks and your job is to be you have the responsibility of being that face and like i just started doing it and you know i can't really go back uh but the thing is i get a huge amount of love also like a huge i'm i'm so every time shocked when people they come to me and they like they always say like i learned so much because of you i changed my mind because of you i got into it i quit my job i did this i did that and i'm like holy crap like this is awesome like i'm having a huge ripple effect on all sorts of other people and the criticism and the the bullshit like i you know i i always imagine when i was younger i was very
Starting point is 00:49:07 romantic and the french literary sense like enamored with the resistance and the the french revolution you recently posted a picture of you when you were younger like in a leather jacket yeah yeah giving the finger to something what was that uh i think that was me in in berlin at the fall of the wall of berlin and i've always been kind of bitcoin is just the best cause right it's just like uh it's the best thing to dedicate yourself fully to and like i feel very good about myself i sleep like a baby i i don't feel like i'm scamming anyone i feel like i'm doing the right thing uh and i feel you know i'm very very content and the uh the the twitter rhetoric I think shows people that like, it's kind of, you know, some, I hope people see it as someone
Starting point is 00:49:53 standing up and being like, you know, fuck this. Like, let's just real talk. Like Bitcoin is too important. Uh, this is not a game. Uh, we're not here to make friends. Uh, we're here to like change the world, change the world. And like your feelings matter, not at all to, to me. Right. Right. And it's something we harp on a lot here too, is like, Bitcoin's provided this common mission for people to to sort of gather around and make happen in a very disparate decentralized way and it's fucking beautiful in my opinion like it's given me purpose that's why we do this podcast is why i write every day like it feels good to wake up like you said i sleep like a baby as well and yeah totally be invigorated every day around a common cause that so many
Starting point is 00:50:34 like-minded people have have have dedicated their lives to as well and like most of the you know uh Most of the builders of Bitcoin, guys that I like that I've met, all of us, most of them, they think of like building cathedrals that last for like hundreds of years, right? Like thousands of years. Like I always have this joke where I'm saying like I want to have like statues of me from my grateful descendants, which are now like barons that own Australia or something.
Starting point is 00:51:03 You know what I mean? Like I'm thinking like eight generations down where there's going to be like paintings of me on the wall, like the Medici's or something. The seven generation mindset. And I'm half joking in a way, right? I think a lot of people that are building Bitcoin are starting to really extend there. And it's something that we haven't seen since, like, there's two other things that do that to people. There is religion and climate change, right?
Starting point is 00:51:26 These are the two other things out there that get people to really think, like, extremely long term and to, like, try to see the effect of their life in a cross-generational span and be mindful of that. But Bitcoin is the third one, you know. And I'm not a religious person. I don't care about religion. Climate change, not the biggest fan of the climate change religion. But Bitcoin is that other one. And if you're an adventurer, if you're a fucking rebel, what are you going to do? Like, all the vices have been, you know, we can't even buy FAPEs, E6 in San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:52:00 If you're a rebel, what are you going to do? You're going to build on Bitcoin, right? If you want to explore, like, space, well, you can't. And the oceans are, like, boring. So, like, no, the oceans are amazing. But, you know, you're going to explore Bitcoin, right? The next frontier. So, yeah, it's just the best ride.
Starting point is 00:52:18 Like, I don't know why someone, it's the new far west, right? It's the new wild west. and the way i see it is like i'm going there and you know some people there they they discovered it and some people landscape you know they they did the maps and i'm coming in and i'm building a railway and i'm building a general store and i'm getting that prime real estate and like anybody can do that like all you have to do is pick up your bags go west and it's just like don't get killed exactly no and it's bitcoin's very punk rock that's why i like to learn that you're into skateboarding growing up like but i've talked about this as well bitcoin reminds me a lot about
Starting point is 00:52:52 skateboarding just rebels trying to figure out new ways to make something using their energy in a constructive way because like bitcoin people in bitcoin even the the craziest toxic bitcoin anonymous accounts on twitter that i've talked to in person and stuff like that like they're actually like very positive minded people like extremely like they clearly have a lot of energy and uh uh you know uh maybe some testosterone or some uh they they are contrarians they're people that are conflictual maybe but they are all driven by a very positive thing instead of you know destroying people's lives or killing people or or creating wars or like these are people that are dedicated truly to something that's positive regardless of their personalities
Starting point is 00:53:37 yeah and the toxic toxicity is quote-unquote toxicity i don't think it's toxic at all but It's a defense mechanism to make sure we don't fuck this up. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, toxic to me is like maximalist. You know, you call me toxic, you know, fuck it. I'll reclaim that word. Because I identify with it.
Starting point is 00:54:01 I think of toxic. I think of guys like Giacomo. I think of my other Twitter friends that I've known for a long time. You know, I put the toxic logo in my handle. And, I mean, screw it. If this is how you want to paint us, do it at your own detriment. And the people that identify in such a way now have something to rally around, which is funny and which offends people.
Starting point is 00:54:21 And I'm perfectly fine with that. We actually took out a full-page ad in Bitcoin Magazine when they started doing the new issue. And so at the bottom of the ad, it says, follow the toxicity. And there's the Twitter handles of everybody involved in Bull Bitcoin there. And yeah, it's pretty solid. It's funny. Oh, and there's a funny backstory I can share with you guys. We actually submitted no shit coins on our ad.
Starting point is 00:54:46 But the Bitcoin Magazine review board said that's not appropriate. So we changed it to no honk coins, not knowing that there's like a honk Pepe thing. What? Because honk for us was just like a clown. Like a clown that was like, you know, when you like censor someone with like a clown thing. and then that exact day Facebook banned Honk from their site
Starting point is 00:55:11 so we're like we just got in it's there forever if Honk ever becomes maybe in like 50 years I'll be like oh it was like using the n-word back in the 20s
Starting point is 00:55:22 these guys were socially backward I don't know but it's in there and we also love Bitcoin Magazine I think just generally people listening we're at the Bitcoin 2019 conference obviously
Starting point is 00:55:32 and I've been And like following them and friends with them for a really long time. At the Bitcoin Embassy, we were distributing Why Bitcoin magazine, which they sent us for free. I think thousands of copies for us to hand out. I don't know if you guys remember Why Bitcoin. And that was BTC Media as well. Yeah, that was Dave Bailey and Bitcoin magazine. And I saw I talked to them, a few other team for a while, and I really saw the Bitcoin only transformation.
Starting point is 00:55:59 and they announced that we're going Bitcoin only like I think a week after or a week before we announced the Bitcoin only exchange and it is a genuine true shift that they're bringing which is like let's take it back home and I'm really excited to see what they're going to be building. I think they are putting a lot of resources into and they are one of the institutions
Starting point is 00:56:22 around which the Bitcoin narrative revolves and we're incredibly lucky that we ended up with these like really good people in in different businesses and different sectors that are just holding the fort so well and that are really creating a big gravitational pull around them um it really speaks a lot to the bitcoin project just the quality of the people that are that are like dedicated to it let's give a quick shout out to aaron van weirdom who's been oh yeah aaron also i've been following his work for a long time and he's he's definitely we're lucky to have him we are very lucky his uh his technical details of bitcoin magazine throughout the years have been
Starting point is 00:56:55 incredible uh his documenting of the fork wars explaining segwit whatever it may be how to dump your bcash how to dump your bcash totally and what's great about him is his articles are like evergreen like if you read his old stuff it's still good it's still super amazing um and uh yeah we need uh we need people like that to uh and actually we need to remember our history as well and we you know we need to carry the history forward one thing that i've noticed is not a lot of people were around in uasf times i thought i i didn't realize how many new big corners there are until i i feel like an old guy like you remember usf like well i've heard about it on twitter but no and i'm like oh shit you weren't there like you missed a massive show but a lot
Starting point is 00:57:37 of people that were there too were just completely uh oblivious to it like i talked to people who came into the space you know a year two years before and they just had no idea they didn't even realize it was what a fun time to be on twitter that summer was oh my god that was brutal A few of the Twitter USF guys, we spent like four or five months almost entirely dedicated to that. It was just nonstop flying to every other place. Behind the scenes, it was a lot of effort because the Segwit2x, the Gavin, the MyCurrent. Bit 148, Bit 91, all that shit. Garzik camp
Starting point is 00:58:20 they were really active and we hang out at the same conferences so we could see them being extremely active taking people away so we just had to and then Twitter became the that started the whole idea of the Twitter signaling the idea of putting your lightning
Starting point is 00:58:35 after UASF was done I was like, a few people were like what do we put in our handles now? we need something, now put the toxic sign no 2x so yeah it was it was like uh and what it did was it provided evidence of a few things uh it also made us all learn about how bitcoin works uh but one of them was the miners don't decide the rules there is no such thing as democracy uh now that seems like a very ingrained idea that if you ask
Starting point is 00:59:05 like a a bitcoin expert or someone that's like us that's really into this like is bitcoin a democracy where miners vote uh 95 percent of people will say no that's not the bitcoin consensus but at that time maybe people do i don't know but not in my circles and at that time it was a very contested issue is bitcoin in democracy or not and i was like no way i'm getting another i just love democracy in order to change how things are run i don't want a new democracy and uh with 90 of the hash power going for segway 2x and half of the businesses uh transaction volume going for segway 2x and getting wrecked uh by the economic reality of bitcoin it's like If we have the insiders that are trying to wreck this thing and that can't,
Starting point is 00:59:50 and it's not easy to, like, screw with Bitcoin. Like, there was a lot of hardcore schemes with Bitmain at that time and, you know, funding BitPay and, like, funding other projects and getting people to, like, sign mutual, like, defense agreements against others. It was, like, super intense. And that whole, like, scheming, I think, is done. Like, it's not going to happen again.
Starting point is 01:00:13 So that was like that was one of the things that made me super bullish on Bitcoin. USF, not that much, but Segwit2x, I'm like, there's no way that any coin ever other than Bitcoin could ever resisted that ever. Right. Yeah, totally. I remember I interviewed you twice during like before we worked together, before anything. I interviewed you twice leading up to this. The first one, it was like the it's it's your quote was it's over. we won and that was like with the activation of uas like we got segway and everything and then we were talking in september of 2017 and you basically called the outcome of what was going
Starting point is 01:00:54 to happen a couple months down the road when 2x failed you basically said preemptively like they're gonna you know they're gonna back out like this it's gonna fail it's probably not even even gonna run and like all of that shit happened and and for me personally like i i was still i was learning about the stuff and and i mean i i always i'm constantly trying to to learn and take it in but for me that realization when was it like 24 hours before they backed out of 2x yeah is that the one-off single letter yeah the single let like the one key email like No, the one-off bug was later because it wouldn't have actually implemented anyway. But, like, the main signer sent out, like, an email blog post where they were like, we're not doing it.
Starting point is 01:01:43 It was very dry. And they didn't apologize. There was no apology or anything. Today was a great opportunity to apologize for Eric Voorhees. He's a good guy. But I think he should have just said, yeah, I was wrong. Like, it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to be wrong.
Starting point is 01:02:01 but I think why I was so confident was I met a lot of the USF advocates and like a lot of the companies that we talked to and that were kind of on our side and we were definitely outnumbered and definitely, most definitely outgunned
Starting point is 01:02:17 ridiculously outgunned but we had the resolve that they didn't have the intolerant minority baby exactly, and it's just before that time I think that I read Skin in the Game and i read anti-fragile before and i had read the and i had read his article before it came out in the book and i and i just completely it's it's the way that i saw it was it was a game of chicken
Starting point is 01:02:39 and we were like rednecks like downing bottles of vodka like shooting in the air ready to die moonshine versus like jihan and the other business like sitcom valley valley business leaders like in their little suits and you know of course they're gonna swear out of the way uh they they they didn't believe in it as much as we did because a lot of them for them bitcoin again it's just a market it's just uh it's just uh it could have been ai but it was bitcoin by the time it happened they had like nothing to gain and they had like everything to lose so like all the incentives just stacked completely in favor of not changing yeah totally i was gonna say in that event in particular like that we got segwit uh segwit 2x did not happen i think that signals
Starting point is 01:03:21 to the greater public too like this is not what we're used to corporations are not going to come in and run this system like it is truly a system for the people that honestly was like my moment in bitcoin where i was like well there's nobody gonna fuck with bitcoin like i saw i saw that happen i was like are you kidding me imagine any other industry where every industry leader every major company gets together and says yeah we're changing this shit and people are like nah yeah not fam not gonna happen to 20k right yeah and they were definitely correlated i think so as well yeah no no absolutely uh like when when i i told people to buy three times in my life uh when bearwell got uh destroyed when uh segwit got activated and uh in uh just at the end of this
Starting point is 01:04:10 year uh when i just could not see more bitcoins being sold anywhere like from an otc standpoint it was like super dried up it was like people are just refusing to sell now and um because the the activation of segwit was like the last barrier to convincing people like that the the fact that the idea that miners are in control of bitcoin was a huge problem for a lot of people because they saw it as china a chinese coin yeah uh like uh uh that was gonna serve the and it was a big problem for for many many people and then we're like no no no it's it's it's and the idea now is that we can scale socially because we don't have to worry about these things because people will never agree on anything there's no there's no sense in trying we've seen that on a doubling
Starting point is 01:05:01 of the block size we could not agree to a to a point where people are calling this a civil war so forget the idea of going to governing bitcoin forget the idea that there's any centralization uh and that you're going to make it happen with your your your very nice governance scheme with balance incentives that you're going to impose on us or whatever uh these trade-offs that are negotiated by you know responsible business people or whatever they they think they're doing and then we can focus on other things right and bitcoiners should not have to think that much about bitcoin we're thinking about bitcoin now because we're like in the bootstrap industry but like in 20 years there should be no bitcoin community there should be like
Starting point is 01:05:40 bitcoin it experts and bitcoin economists and whatever and if we're if we have to scale bitcoin like we have to uh the idea of uh following on social media in order to be aware of what's going on uh needs to go away and this is this was my ultimate argument for backwards incompatible hard forks is that if some guy that bought bitcoin in 2012 wants to use bills uh he and he syncs up his Bitcoin node and he sends his money to me it must work you got to think about the man in the coma absolutely right and and they they when the the Segway 2x people were talking about the users and how they represent the users I'm like when's the last time you've spent a day with one of your users like don't don't bullshit me like you don't know what the users are and and the users will not
Starting point is 01:06:29 upgrade to your fork the users will lose coins when this happens and and they will be super disappointed and then i will never look at someone in the eye and tell them that i'm in a new bitcoin with different rules and his bitcoin are not valid anymore like i will never do that right and thank you for that and this has been a great conversation one hour five minutes in i think this is a great segway 2x history episode cool i'm just extremely bullish right now i am so bullish it's unreal bullish with i didn't want to be bullish i really didn't i'm begrudgingly bullish i'm just always bullish but now i'm extra bullish i really and this is a comment that so many bitcoiners have been telling me over the last few days is i really thought i had more time
Starting point is 01:07:12 it always catches you off guard no matter what yeah no matter how long you've been here it's uh it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing before we part here do you guys have any parting notes about what you're working on any messages you want to send the freaks out there oh one thing uh um so bull bitcoin is canada only so unfortunately uh bill and bull bitcoin all you non-canadian users uh you can't use us but uh we also uh just launched a art store and a merch store where we're selling some some gear um and uh we're adding uh unique items like every two couple of weeks so we have an artist that's putting some some cool stuff out there so if you want to you know uh see some merch some some bitcoin art are americans allowed to buy merch
Starting point is 01:07:54 oh they are they most definitely are and a few of them bought it and and i i will say that uh any of the trolls out there that that tell us like we're toxic or whatever it just gives us more fodder to like create new merch i was telling you guys before we started but some dude was calling one of our designs satanist and so our our artist was like oh you're gonna love the next designing did like a quick like paper napkin like design of like you know like some goat head and so that's coming so you know the trolls out there
Starting point is 01:08:25 keep it going because it gives us great ideas keep feeding the bull keep feeding the bull bitcoin yeah yeah cut the bullshit
Starting point is 01:08:32 gentlemen thank you for joining us it's been an incredible conversation alright thanks guys love you cheers peace and love
Starting point is 01:08:37 bye okay

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