TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #90: James C.

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with James Chiang, currently spending his Summer at Chaincode Labs, to discuss James' journey to Bitcoin, his experience with Libbitcoin, how Libbitcoin compares to Bitcoin Core, working in the renewable energy sector, working on a Python library for Taproot, and much more. Checkout https://teachbitcoin.io/ Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/digi_james 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.

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty, here to introduce this week's episode with James Chang, who's in town as part of the Chaincode residency doing some incredible stuff. James is an incredibly humble man, incredibly intelligent man. We had a far wide-ranging discussion, everything from LitBitcoin to Taproot to energy and solar and renewable energy in particular. I must warn you, freaks, I'm sorry. i must apologize up front while we were recording uh my my idiot self had the leg chair of my chair sitting on james's mic line i did not notice until after we had recorded i was worried that it was going to affect the audio after i hit uh stop record and my worries were warranted because james's audio is a little gravelly at times uh i contemplated not posting this but i feel that

the conversation is uh still able to be be listened to if you can put up with the noise and it's an important one i think so i hope you guys enjoy despite the the audio issues and i know this is an issue that plagues this podcast in particular and just know that we are working on upgrading the the sound equipment as i speak and this is hopefully a problem that should not be a problem in the future going forward uh very soon um this episode of tales from the crypt is also about to buy the cash app you freaks already know all about it they're helping us stack sats they're helping us save money at merchants uh and now they're letting us send and withdraw bitcoin uh to and from the app which is pretty cool uh they're letting you send to back 32

addresses as well so if you want to send straight from cash app to wasabi or another coin drain service like samurai that is totally possible now um and then on top of that uh yeah they got the boost card you can personalize that i used it this morning again another low time preference move excuse me high time preference move went and bought coffee but i did save a dollar um and every time i go to whole foods i use it say five percent so go down to your local app store today when there's google or apple download the cash app and then when you download it make sure you use the promo code stacking sats one word that's stacking sats you're going to get five dollars and then five dollars is going to go to a charity owls lacrosse which very near and dear to my heart

doing great things in chicago um again that's stacking sats one word five dollars to you five dollars to owls hope you guys enjoy this despite the the audio troubles we had um james again incredibly humble incredibly smart and we're lucky to have him working on bitcoin what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent back in the foreign chain code lab studio it's uh it's always a pleasure to be here sitting down with somebody i'm very excited to speak with uh who's relatively new to bitcoin but has done an immense amount in the what'd you say year and three quarters that you've been into it yeah and uh so i'd like to introduce you freaks to james chang who's the uh the founder

of teaching bitcoin.io uh we've been shooting the shit here for like the 15 minutes and you're a very fascinating person you've got a marty that's that's very kind of you um thanks for having me on look forward to uh look forward to talk to you yeah yeah so thanks for agreeing to sit down with me i always feel um i always feel very uh very um what's the word i'm looking for very honored to be able to come here and speak to the people working on the bitcoin core or not bitcoin core just on bitcoin in general that's actually shouldn't say bitcoin core because you started out in the bitcoin which is right what i want to start with right um and what we usually do here on tales from the crypt is how'd you find bitcoin what sort of drove you towards

bitcoin and how'd you first sort of learn about this whole network yeah uh i want to say i first learned about bitcoin like back in 2014 15 i was on vacation i remember this i haven't told the story that that frequently but um i was on vacation in japan in tokyo and um we had just arrived and i read this news news article about i can't remember was it was it a price price um uh hike or whatever is in the news and uh i started reading about it and uh and i i just sleep for the entire entire night like my my partner was was lying in bed right next to me and so i ended up taking the phone to the bathroom where i could turn the lights on continue google this thing on bitcoin um but i kind of ignored it for for years i ignored for

years you had like an initial rush 24 hour period where you googled the hell out of it yeah yeah and what were you doing before uh you came to work on the bitcoin protocol i think i was running i I was running my own software firm back then. We were building a solar simulation tool for people who wanted to figure out whether it was economical to run a solar power plant with perhaps battery storage at their homes. So we built a web tool for that where you could upload your consumption data so you can see what kind of battery capacity makes sense, whether that west-facing roof actually produces when you actually consume at home.

so that's a product i worked on for about two years um but that is during that time that i that i learned about bitcoin um and yeah i was i you know i was fascinated by that but at the same time for some reason it just it just drifted away like i never never chased it like i never you know spent more time or effort to to really improve my understanding of what bitcoin was so what was the catalyst to sort of make you pay more attention to this i i don't know uh that's great question uh i want to say i want to say nothing really unique i mean i guess 2017 18 a whole wave of people were introduced to bitcoin through the media and and and the price increase and um quite frankly i'm you know the same whatever affected those people affected me

and so like a lot of communities locally probably just reached like these meetup communities probably reached some kind of critical mass and i got swept away with everybody else um and for me personally like i i really want to understand the the the the technical aspect of of of how bitcoin worked um i think that's that that's something that's important to me like i really want to understand like how this stuff works right yeah and so that's that's what brought me brought me here i guess and you've done a great service and and uh the fact that you've been teaching people sort of your journey what you've learned with teaching bitcoin.io yeah and what's interesting to me is uh is you like got your chops learning about lib bitcoin and that uh that um

implementation in particular right so what how did you attack learning uh learning how lib bitcoin works how does yeah we'll get into that eventually like how lib bitcoin works compared to bitcoin core and yeah what you told me you took a couple train rides to milan to go to Giacomo's meet up and you met Eric Glasgow yeah so this is like February last year and as I told you before

I had I could take the train in Switzerland for free so I'm living in Switzerland close to Zurich at this time and I can take the trains for free so Giacomo back then was in Milan his meet ups were about 3 hours away by train so I realized I could go there for almost free just to pay for the small

trains ride segment across from like to chino to to milan so i went a couple times and and one of these meetups i i um eric vasco was was speaking um and he was speaking about a couple topics he had added to his crypto economics work um and i i still remember the first first article that and i read it the the day he showed up i was like who is this guy and what he's going to talk about what is he crypto economics and the the the article that i read was called um the dedicated cost principle um and and the dedicated cost principle is fantastic you guys should go check it out but basically explains why like you try to try to do mining and you try to use let's say waste heat or

you try to produce any kind of secondary product that has some kind of marketable value like eric will argue that or actually prove if you accept the premise that um like there's no there's no energy saved through that um and we can go into why but uh it explained like a very specific aspect of mining which i had questions about myself but nobody really answered and economists talk about law and yeah let's just dive into something that fascinates me as well um so what is the premise that we have to accept uh that he proves yeah yeah or excuse me that makes it something that he proves is correct right right um i guess one is for example um you know like you have to accept that there there there is a free market right so miners compete freely

uh so like if you if it's a free market and there's no you know hurdle to to entry we can all start mining tomorrow so if let's say if let's say you are particularly profitable as a miner um and um yeah so if somebody's particularly profitable or the mining market as a whole is particularly profitable then capital will necessarily come in and join the market because they're they're getting better returns right so over the long run the the the tendency for for the mining market is is that is that the margins tend to go to zero so so if somebody starts mining and they can kind of extract some marketable value from from waste heat now they're they're they're mining with higher margins um and everybody starts doing that um

more capital will join the market more miners will come online and that competition just drives that margin back down to zero i can't do below zero because then miners will leave right so um yeah that's a that's a very logical fact that you can reason about and and if you if you if you accept that you know like capital can join and capital leave and they're they're free markets then that all kind of makes sense that all explains it very nicely the waste heat basically being used first to cut costs somewhere else where maybe like cleaning water

or something like that that's fascinating I mean there's so many chains that are that attempt to utilize a different proof of work or proof algorithm

to produce some kind of alternative marketable product thereby supposedly you know saving energy or or making things more efficient but but the cost has to be dedicated to mining otherwise or in other words the cost needs to be dedicated to the security of the coin otherwise it's yeah yeah that's crazy well it's crazy how uh extensive eric's crypto economics wikipedia pages that wiki insane it's a trove of of great uh yeah sort of thoughts on bitcoin and economics in general absolutely um and you know we could go down crazy rabbit

holes just talking about that wiki in particular right and mining in particular so do you think your experience like creating the solar simulation tech um sort of helped you understand this stuff better or i was very i've become very very disillusioned by uh alternative energy why is that uh through just through the subsidies and how the markets work or don't work um i think we we see that now you know the a lot of the um there's there's like increasingly little capacity being added at least in the western western world partly because the subsidies are are being withdrawn slowly slowly um and and you also see like where a lot of overcapacity is being built because of artificial incentives like like you know local or federal subsidies and um

yeah these capacities may or may not actually benefit the the the system as a whole the i'll one example like in germany till this day like they they heat the heat railroads like the what do you call them the the rail the rails the rails right train tracks rails train tracks yeah you know what the kind of yeah train tracks basically and you know they have a lot of these have heating systems so that during you know during winter like they don't they don't ice over um and so there's they're they're in a lot of these sections they have heating systems and they will actually heat these tracks during the summer because the the grid the national uh let's say the the grid in germany uh cannot find a buyer or taker for the excess capacity during peak peak production

times because it's like sunny sunny all over the continent right yeah and is this renewable energy in particular or uh this is this in this case it's only a lot of it's solar yeah i mean i know they do a lot of other things like uh wind and but in particular these peaks during summer where everybody's just producing what producing water to try um and so so yeah that's like you know Whenever I hear the energy efficiency argument, I'm always a little skeptical. No, that's what you were actually alluding to earlier when your product is to help people recognize when they're profitable, given, because that's the thing with solar and wind in particular, right?

It's like you could have a cloudy day or a stretch where there's no wind, and there's a sort of uncertainty of when you'll have power and how much power you'll have. 100%. 100%. And then that variability in production, that's also a cost. You either need to store, or you need to find a way to buffer, and a lot of these aren't factored in. Again, through these subsidy schemes where for every kilowatt hour you produce, the state would reimburse you a very good rate. That does not take into account the fact that sometimes the sun doesn't shine at all, or sometimes everybody's producing but we're not consuming.

so for you know yeah it's just when when when the market mechanism is kind of kind of overridden by policy top-down policy um you know you tend to see a lot of inefficiencies and things don't work so you think um you were like uh you seem like to be a huge fan of the free market do you think bitcoin uh made you that way or were you that way and you found bitcoin and it sort of it clicked I think Bitcoin's given me a lot of that education. I think I am in many ways, and I was just a very average person in my thinking and in my indoctrination.

And I don't think I can argue that that's changed that much. I think I'm still victim or, you know, I'm still in that sense just a very average person. I consume the same information everybody else does. but bitcoin it definitely has has um as you should just speak to this world like austrian economics or just just rational thought and you know these these mental like these i think a lot of the things that you hear about in bitcoin space are you know like little logical thought experiments right um uh bitcoin in a sense is also like it's a it's a really cool thought experiment like what

you create it like fucking money and it's a P2P system and here we are I mean this question is nagging you so much that you've been driven to write code for the protocol I'm not a prolific contributor

to contribute that will be decided in history I bet in retrospect could go down a little cosmic tangent there but we'll stop ourselves for that but whether or not you recognize this you are so fascinated by this

it seems to me at least now you're here at Chaincode doing a residency for the summer you spent hours diving so you dove through every line of code or not every line of code a lot of it but I looked at a lot of the

a lot of different interfaces that that Libby Cohen has internally and they were very instructive to my understanding of how Bitcoin works so yeah let's walk through that what what where'd you start and how did all sort of come together so for me for probably the first five or six years on this journey not that everything's fully formed in my mind it's definitely more form than it was in the beginning but everything sort of like floated above my head just like disparate ideas that eventually all the time you put together yeah um since you have that experience looking at the code I felt the same way, felt the same way, felt the same way.

You know, I started out just trying to figure out what transactions are, and I had trouble doing that. Like, you know, so I'd run, you know, the core daemon and the RPC interface, the command line, and then I struggled to get a deeper understanding beyond just the RPC interface, and so... But then I had trouble really understanding, like, how to work myself through core.

Bitcoin is really nice in that aspect it's an alternative implementation it's a completely different architecture than core itself a lot of different design decisions I'll leave it up to the user to decide whether it's better for him or her or not but it's got a lot of very nice internal interfaces so that the user of the Bitcoin

either as a full node, as a command line tool or perhaps just as a library it's it's very you know the again the interfaces are are very structured and clear and and so you can use the bitcoin as a very modular toolkit you can decide like let's say i just want to build a wallet so i'm just going to use the transaction library if i want to build like you know maybe some spv client i don't want to have actually a full node i'm going to use the pdp node class And so I just run a PDP object that connects automatically to the different, to the Bitcoin network. Or perhaps I want to run a node without a server.

I want to develop my own server. That's something I can do, too. So from day one, they've actually structured the library. So, you know, it's almost like Lego. You can pick and take whatever you need. That's the one thing that fascinated me when Eric came to BitDev last summer and presented the Bitcoin. I didn't know it didn't have a UTX. it doesn't work on the same UTXO model

that Bitcoin Core does. It's more transaction index-based, right? Yeah, let's say they have a, there's a transaction database. I mean, maybe step back, like, because it's alternative implantation, they took different design choices. And when we talk about, like,

the mempool or the UTXO set, it turns out, like, we're often talking about core-specific implementation data structures. So in LibbyCoin, there's no mempro per se because they're simply transactions which are all stored in the transaction database. It's a memory map file, so they wrote their own database in that sense. It's a very clean, it's a very nicely written database, database template that they also use for blocks and headers. Sorry, headers. And the headers then point to the transactions, thereby creating blocks.

and um so if you want to if you want to know what transactions are uh unspent uh they're just flagged in the transaction database as unspent there's no separate data model that says this is the utxo set yet we talk about it all the time it's kind of entered the bitcoin what do you call vernacular yeah yeah right it's it's it's every every intermediate user of bitcoin will know what the UTXO set as a mental model. But it only has its origins, I think, in an implementation design choice. And that's definitely very deeply seated in my mind

as sort of the mental framework from which I approach using and interacting with Bitcoin. Yeah. The UTXO set. Right. I mean, there arguably is a UTXO set in the Bitcoin. It's just not, you know, like an explicit data model. Yeah, and so were you learning about Libitcoin at Core in parallel?

No, no, no, no, no. No, I was just learning about Libitcoin. And eventually I started, so I got invited to do, I was teaching at Swiss universities, but I was teaching like Ethereum stuff. You know, like the ICO market was going crazy in Switzerland. and so every university until now they will offer some kind of smart contract or

blockchain course and so that was what I was doing Was that sort of what fascinated you first was Ethereum or was that just a job or were you genuinely intrigued No, I was genuinely intrigued by this thing and it's so accessible

there's this web ID and there are smart contract templates and within 10 minutes you've deployed your first contract And that's really the allure, I think, of something like Ethereum, is how fast you can get a web developer up to speed. So are you still a fan of Ethereum? I mean, it's what it is.

I think all big corners know the trade-offs. They're pretty apparent in the design choices that they made. I think it's a great teaching tool. To this day, I think it's a fantastic teaching tool if people want to understand what state chains is like it's very hard for somebody to write a Bitcoin script it's not accessible

but like Ethereum Solidity contract you know if somebody can read JavaScript they can follow that and the rush of creating your first coin in Solidity it's a non-trivial experience I still think that's one of the greatest learning tools out there

what's the process like? you know you just create a contract in Solidity and you decide how the coins are going to be created. There are many ways you can do it. You can do it by a time interval. You can do it by

proof of work. I can implement a very basic proof of work scheme in a Solidity contract. The basic principles of how Bitcoin works are reflected there but in a way that I can teach in two hours.

do you um do you think bitcoin's uh scripting capabilities being as limited as they are or as difficult as they are to interact with is that a benefit or a net negative in the long run uh no i'm i'm absolutely i i think it's it's it's i mean there's there are legacy decisions that have flown in there but overall i think it's it's it's actually it's it's a good thing it's a good thing that it's that it's so restrictive okay um so let's do this let's try to it's easier to reason about i guess is the way to put it yeah can we break down like what a scripting language is and within a blockchain like what purposes and yeah and why you might want it to be a little uh more basic or simple yeah yeah solidity or something like that solidity

yeah no that's super interesting i'm i'm currently studying um peter willie's miniscript stuff and it took me a while to figure out like what miniscript is and um so basically miniscript is say, actually, even though scripting language in Bitcoin compared to other blockchains seems restrictive already, we actually can reduce it even more. So Peter Willey and Andrew Polstrat

said, we're going to reduce it even more. We're going to take a subset and we're going to, it's almost like it's been formally verified. All these building blocks are so well understood and these building blocks are nothing than, they're just script

templates. They're like chunks of sequence script opcodes which you can then use and compose a more complicated um like spinning logic okay uh and and because they've thought so much about all these little chunks all these little if you will all these little templates have certain properties malleability properties correctness properties and they've all defined them uh very they've all so so um you know when you put these things together what the property will be of the resulting you know final composed bitcoin script and it's like a straightforward function on this um i feel like actually compiling these manuscripts are i think it's not not quite trivial but the the basic idea is because

i've understood the building blocks so well and how their properties relate to each other and how the properties change when I compose them into a more complicated script, the user doesn't have to worry about whether a script is malleable, whether all possible spending conditions are safe or not safe, right? And so it just provides a more robust way to design outputs in the future. And Miniscript's agnostic, right? It's chain agnostic. It could be used for multiple protocols or...

Yeah, I guess if another chain adopted Bitcoin script, it could definitely work on another chain as well. It's really just a scripting language. So what's... And you've been working on Taproot as well, correct? I've been working on Taproot as well, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like, again, I'm adult.

I've said this before. I am an adult, but I'm also a-dult when it comes to this stuff. And so for me, terms like Miniscript, Taproot, I'm not going to put Schnorr in there. I sort of understand Schnorr pretty well at this point, but like Raffroot, Moosig, those four or five concepts or ideas sort of are

amoebously associated together in my mind, but they're very different as well. Sort of how do they interact with each other or do they even interact? Yeah. First of all, I have to say, I don't claim to be an expert of any of these topics you just mentioned.

I can tell you about what my journey has been. So Taproot is fascinating for me because, well, for one, it introduces Schnorr into Bitcoin. So that's great. So Schnorr has two aspects. One is it makes verification cheaper because we can batch verify. So for the system, the network, it's good because, let's see, IBD will be less costly. initial blockdown will be less costly because verification happens more efficiently

but for the end user, for the person who's actually spending Bitcoin the question is like why would you care why do I care if transactions verify faster yeah my node might run more efficiently but once I'm synced up, do I really care so that's more like

a system level benefit, I think for a user level benefit that's where Taproot comes into play, Schnorr allows us to do things like I want to say tweak signatures, but I'm not sure if that's unique to Schnoor.

That's definitely what Taproot does. Taproot introduces Schnoor. Taproot also introduces or hides a bunch of alternative spending paths inside this normal SegWit

looking output. Yes, it's Schnoor, but it's also like um because of snore we can also create these alternative um hidden spending paths which are only uh visible on chain if i actually use them i think the observation that that one can make is like if you look at lightning most of the times you know all these htlcs and revocation uh paths they're never actually they're mostly not executed we'll have like notes will have a collaborative of close which is both side

and you don't see this complicated scripts on chain and then tamper is a similar idea we can create this output which has all these complicated spending paths or enforcement paths but most of the time

we will never actually use it interesting it's and so we were talking about this also before we hit record is trying to figure out how to soft fork this stuff into the protocol and that that actually i i don't i don't even know yeah but that's what you're saying you missed uh the segwit yeah yeah wars yeah and that's uh that's a big uh a big i don't want

to say hurdle but just a a weird constraint that we've been giving right grading this right and so um or you're contributing you're helping contribute to a to a bit that would that would implement this stuff, correct? So I'm not contributing to the bit. The bit has been written and proposed by Peter Willey and I think a lot of other people. But I'd like to provide a Python library with which people can start playing around

and getting more familiar with what you can do with Taproot. So like convenience methods, if you want to construct a path like a Taproot. Taproot has this interesting like Merkle tree structure where you can, and you're entirely free to design this tree the way you want their trade-offs in terms of how long the Merkle proofs are and that affects whether a spend

is more expensive than the other. So there are all these subtleties that I think people need to play around with so they can actually have an opinion. I have to be quite frank, having not used Taproot for that long, I really have an opinion. So it takes time for somebody

to get familiar with Proposal, how the Proposal is implemented right now. um and then thirdly then to provide feedback yeah and i think maybe that's that's that's that may be the goal to to have a you know a more uh to more inclusive maybe yeah maybe that's moving it from a theoretical level to a to an experimental level yeah a hundred percent action a hundred percent which is a hundred percent what you want to see right it's like hey figure out if it works or if it doesn't a hundred percent and people get creative with the ways they want to use this stuff

I do believe so I do hope if I can help them make that access to Taproom a little more a little easier, that'd be awesome Thank you for working on it Well hey, you know, like Chaincode's providing me with the opportunity to do so

Thanks for providing us a segue, how's your summer been? So how did you get hooked up here? Obviously you submitted a Yeah, I just applied yeah an application and i just accepted you but uh i just applied i mean i hadn't you know i'd known a couple guys here just from the meetups and conferences but i basically just applied

and i would encourage anybody else who who do you know i hear they're gonna do this again so i i'd recommend it to anybody it's it's been it's been a it's been a really awesome experience what's uh what's the process been like how how has the uh the summer been and sort of open-ended when you first start correct yeah absolutely absolutely um yeah that's that's quite a luxury you get you basically you basically come here um um you're asked what you want to work on before when you're applying and then you just kind of make something up right you're like this seems something very interesting that i like to work on but you don't really know until you start start picking apart or start start actually working your way towards that

and I initially wanted to just get more familiar with core right I you know I studied the Bitcoin quite extensively I had done a lot of trip Bitcoin training with little Bitcoin but a lot of future work like taproot for example is done on in the core community and so I so I wanted to I wanted to get more from with core and it turns out like right now I'm not not even contributing to the actual core codebase I'm building this library on the core test framework which is written Python okay right so you've got a lot of the you've got like transaction classes there block classes and it's all written Python and it's used to to test

the C++ code in core it's like for integration tests so I just build on top of that and the people can just use it as a regular Python library. Has the The Bitcoin core learning curve been steeper than the Bitcoin, less steep? It's definitely a little steeper. Yeah? It's definitely steeper. Yeah, it's like a...

I've heard the term like it's like an evolved prototype in some ways. Okay. Like the core software, you know, it's like you have a lot of people, it's the one with predominant market share. You know, you can't change the interface that quickly because people are actually using it a lot.

you like a lot of these decisions in terms of how the wall is structured and the nodes etc were made many many years ago so you can't make changes that quickly having said that like after coming here I realized there are actually a lot of people in that chain code working very hard to

to refactor a lot of different interfaces internally which actually don't change behavior so you as a user you don't you may not directly see the effect of that Now, yeah, we've got Ruskianovsky here. Yeah, 100%.

Helping separate the wallet and the node, correct? Right, right, exactly. And that would make it more modular, similar to Libitcoin, correct? Right, right, 100%. That's kind of how I see that as well. I mean, as a user and somebody who's not an engineer, just thinking design-wise, that seems most advantageous, is to separate that stuff, make it easier to work on individually.

Yes. And so, yeah, we were talking about trade-offs with scripting languages earlier and why you wouldn't then be more sort of simpler. But the trade-offs, like, that's interesting. You're sort of, I don't know, yeah, you're burdened to these, you're handcuffed to these trade-offs

that were made almost a decade ago at the coin corner in particular. And I guess, yeah, I'm trying to think of, like, I want to frame this question. and so there's like a sunk cost into how everything works. And I didn't appreciate this until coming here. It's like the art of refactoring something that's as complex as core is,

as I said, it's an incredible skill set. Like you know where you want to go. You know like it should look, this interface should look like this, but you have to break it down into a lot of little couple steps and each step cannot break the product. It's like if it's too long,

people won't review your PR and when you break it down every single piece has to be atomic in a sense like it's got to be you can't break things along the way and so that's that's incredible stuff that's why I like the phrase like you're working on nuclear technology I think it's like live you have to treat it with

that much respect and yeah I think the question I'm getting at here is like is there a point at which Bitcoin Core in particular will be sufficiently modular that it will like sort of a launch pad like a growth and development

and building on top of it I don't know I think we will looking at the people who are working on it I'm pretty sure we'll reach a point where this modularity is in a good place whether

that will bootstrap this entire wave of new features is that what you mean? that or maybe even get us closer to ossification which theoretically seems like a good idea to me, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

I don't know. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, I don't know. People are free to do what they want. People are free to use what tools they deem right for the job. So I guess the users will decide. Yeah. No, but it is crazy to see how much you do know

considering that you've only been studying this for the last studying this intently for the last year and a half and you were very humble uh getting into the residency and contributing in the ways that you are already is uh yeah it's uh it's great to see you man awesome thanks thanks uh thanks for doing it we've got uh we're only 34 minutes in here so we got plenty of time um or do you have to get back to work no take as long as as long as you um so when you were making the the teaching bitcoin.io like videos was that an exercise that helped you learn or did you feel compelled to to get better information out there um i did feel compelled to get better information out there i i ultimately didn't really find an audience

like i feel like um like i feel like there's a lack of um quality information which was um like technically accurate or correct um i feel like there are not a lot of explanations which which rely on analogies or you know like hand wavy metaphors and um yeah like i i wanted i wanted something that was a little more precise having said that i also realized um like the audience for that in on on youtube is probably not not huge right like like like people will go to bitcoin stack exchange they'll read the bips themselves they'll they'll read the the lightning or a C and so like that's like let's say

that's the top of the pyramid right like people who really want to get deep they'll find ways to do it they'll read a lot they'll educate themselves so who are these videos actually for like is it for an audience that doesn't have the time or prefers like something that's a little easier to

digest they may perhaps not want all the detail right they may want something that's a little more high level and so I think I failed to it was a good experience for me but I think I didn't find the balance between the granularity of the content

and the audience no it's tough that's why we do this podcast and the newsletter and we're getting into videos now as well but it's hard trying to find the product market fit and education especially in Bitcoin

you have developers who have to learn a certain way and then you have users who have to learn about the system and interacting with it 100%. That's what I think is most lacking right now is education in this space. Yeah.

How we make that better. So anybody putting in effort to make that better is A-OK in my book. Yeah, awesome. So what else? What are your thoughts on the current state of Bitcoin, both from a protocol development level, given how much you've seen in the last year and a half,

and then at a social and basically a phenomena in the... Yeah. in the world? Boy, that's a good question. I don't... I don't... Do you edit this? I can edit it, yeah.

Okay. Let me think about that. Said it another way, are you optimistic or pessimistic? i've been following the the protests in in hong kong in recent weeks um i don't know like it just feel like you know the world is falling apart or just tearing apart it seems right well that's what i'm trying to determine is the world falling apart at the seams i don't just have more access to how terrible it is i don't know i don't know um i don't know i really

don't know um the fact that i can be here in new york you know on a whim having never met these people before that's amazing right technology enables this to happen the fact that i can learn about bitcoin from anywhere in the world that's that's that's like that's a privilege of being alive today that's a real privilege right but at the same time as you say it's it's really hard to assess yeah like yeah this access also makes it hard to assess like what's what's actually happened ironically yeah what's like like the access information yeah i mean all you freaks who read the sovereign individual they predicted this like the obviously over saturation of exposure to information will lead you to be you sort of lose grip with reality or what you

perceive reality was uh yeah and that's what i think the information age is is bursting people's preconceived notions of what reality is and how the world works and i mean we have a perfect example of this jeffrey epstein stuff going on over the weekend right right over suicide but people are starting to like really question the uh the institutions and the pillars of the status quo if you will that's why i mean that's why i'm in the bitcoin because uh i like to think that it provides an optimistic uh future or the hope of an optimistic system that can be built separate from this one which i my reality used to be based around and now right uh after years of sort of peeling back the onions and seeing how the world works whether it

be exposure to working in the markets or um just exposure to our our political system here in the united states or particularly the last eight years it's uh right it's interesting that's why i'm so enthralled with bitcoin because it's uh something exciting to work on and yeah a little bit i've said this before punk rock and yeah rebellious if you will right right um i guess because i my my first foray to to become came to the the eric voskal crypt economics angle i mean um the way he writes about it i think i think is as varick is like it's it's a tool of resistance right yeah it's dark dark market money it's black black market money yeah right and i love how um he's very uh very cut and dry about that like bitcoin only succeeds if it's a black market money yeah

so do you ever see how how do you if you had envisioned bitcoin uh being curbed or being stopped in the future how do you imagine that would happen or could it could it even happen yeah well i mean i've i've um you know i i just observed that that you know uh a lot of this um a lot of the, you know, like, how do people get into Bitcoin? You know, they have some kind of exchange account. There are certain on-ramps, often almost exclusively KYC'd. And so these are all permissioned transactions, right? They were using Bitcoin.

Like, cryptographically, I'm signing something and I'm depositing some funds at an exchange or to some business. But it's all KYC'd. It's a permissioned transaction. Even though, like, the technology itself, um it's it's pointless if it's if it's a if it's a white white market transaction right the implicitly um because my my identity is is is given uh you know the the i presume like you know uh if if if the state wanted to or if the regulator wanted to that could be an illegal

you know it could be a legal transaction so there's like this this whole world of bitcoin which is kind of like permission and white market and it seems to make up the bulk yeah the majority right

of what we see today you can prove that but just looking at exchange well seeing how much they hold and that worries me as well

and maybe there's some like crazy future in which bitcoin like all the all the coins held on the exchange

eventually I don't know maybe get locked up there and you have just like the free floating bitcoin people that actually took their

control their private keys and yeah they may or may well be right like two sets of bitcoin yeah right i hope not how can we how can we prevent that from happening how what would you what do you think uh how do you think users should act or can you even try to dictate how users act do you think people will just naturally coalesce to these frankly easier yeah solutions more convenient i would say yeah like it would seem it would seem like if if the so like like the utility of bitcoin today probably as as a as a as a black market money to most people is is not not very high you know a lot of it's it's like i i think i think huddling huddling for me is is actually it's um it's a speculative speculative fact like i huddle because i believe like the value will

will increase right that's the there's this there's active speculation there the future is unknowable but if i huddle i'm making presumption about what the future will be right yes so so if you'd like to like like a speculative fact um but as a as a as a medium of of transfer uh to transfer value uh we're just not quite there yet i think you know we're not we don't very few people make you know you know trade in in bitcoin um and perhaps one day perhaps one day where that becomes like the utility of that is is positive like i i will i'm a freelancer and you're gonna pay me bitcoin because otherwise my my freelance activity would be illegal or you know like i would need to acquire a license very expensively or you know yeah when we're at that point i think

the utility of bitcoin becomes tremendous right then tremendous when you see what's happening today like in argentina where their their currency collapses by i think 25 against the dollar overnight and it's nuts um i checked the the bitcoin to argentinian peso chart today and it's nearing an all-time high while the bitcoin the u.s dollar pair is still 42 below its all-time high so um the utility is also relative so like bitcoin is probably or is it relative what would Eric say about that? I just had Eric pop up. No, that's not true.

It's relative to alternatives. Yeah, is it more Bitcoin have more utility in Argentina compared to the U.S. right now, right? Because the alternatives are better here. Absolutely. That's an absolute possibility. Exactly.

Exactly. The competition to Bitcoin is just alternative money that we could use in a transaction. That's the other thing. So there was people saying last week, because I'll be frank here. I've said it on this podcast

written about a lot like speculating that i think it focused on china and hong kong in particular that there was probably capital flows into bitcoin from uh chinese nationals trying to get out of their system but a couple people last week at the end of last week were saying if you look at chinese exchanges in particular bitcoin and tether are trading at like a one and a half to two percent discount which would signal that there isn't that much demand but then you get into the question if it is truly dark market maybe they're selling and trading on wechat or something like yes how will you ever really know yeah especially if it is dark market money like the true saturation and overall use within a particular country yeah because the stuff on exchanges

that's like the kyc stuff yes so maybe it's that's why it's true i don't know i'm making this stuff up right so i i i don't know i don't know but it just seems like you know hong kong maybe it's a flashpoint for something bigger who knows like that's that's kind of how i feel about the situation right now it's like the hong kong situation in particular is uh that's pretty nuts pretty nuts yeah uh yeah they shut down the airport yesterday canceled every flight yeah yeah it's shut down the airport um i've been very i've been following their their updates on on twitter it's like um it seems like it's just an incredibly organized movement with support from such a broad swath of population i think

that's that's unique that's different from like say 2014 yeah it was like 30 percent showed up to uh the marches maybe more which is crazy right and like anecdotally like people from all ages are are supportive like and and and and yeah so i just don't see how i just see how there's a there's a there's a obvious like solution to this um to this uh to this movement yeah which makes it so precarious i guess no it's i've been observing it like uh like very anxiously right yeah it's like it just makes me very anxious to see how heated it's getting and if china does push back how hard will they push back and yeah are we about to see something like pretty fucked up on the global stage yeah big time yeah

but turning back to bitcoin's dark market money i think it made me think about this um yeah this conversation like which makes me believe that like so i can't prove this because i'm not in china i'm not on we chatter but i do yeah i surmise that there is a lot of dark market activity with bitcoin in particular just trading it if that's it i would surmise that's happening because there was actually uh a vice documentary they actually took it down um but it was on like credit card fraud in china no in the u.s okay they like followed the gang in atlanta that figured out this credit card identity that scheme but like bitcoin was uh it was a very integral part they're going to bitcoin atms buying bitcoin and cash buying the information online and then

uh using it as black market money wow doing that but that isn't reported much here in america but criminals in america are obviously using that way and i don't want to say the chinese are criminals chinese citizens are criminals or anything but right it's illegal there and they may be using it in a similar fashion right as well right uh totally imaginable i i don't know i don't know no neither do i these are all cosmic musings of two bitcoiners what um so what else uh what are you what else are you excited for in the world of bitcoin um when else like any any consumer apps or or wallets or hardware that you're excited for no not really that's that's that's the that's kind of the

contradiction of bitcoin for me like i'm super excited about the idea the protocol um you know like the protocol implementation i'm i'm less excited about products because i just don't i'm not a user no i'm not a user of these products quite frankly i don't i don't i don't trade in bitcoin i i you know like i don't i don't get paid bitcoin i don't so like bitcoin has a medium of transfer has it's not something I use yet I'm just enthralled by the idea and I want to like I believe in it

and it's in a way obvious to me but I'm not a user day to day and that's that's why it's hard for me to you're huddling your user that's not a misinformation you are using it

just as a savings tool no but it's something I think about a lot like the timing of this quote-unquote industry and yeah where we are on the timeline of bitcoin's inception and when it will be yeah uh or if it will be like a mass market tool and yeah when like a new internet internet like system will be on top of it yeah maybe very i mean obviously because we have a lot of protocol things to figure out yeah do we have a lot of protocol things to figure out could this uh be successful in perpetuity as is do you think that's a great question that's a great

question uh it would seem the alternatives so far haven't been that compelling that seems like that's what the market is saying it seems like the basic utility of bitcoin hasn't changed much um i guess the implementation has has evolved improved as as its usage has increased in the network and um but yeah generally the the feature set seems to have been relatively constant right we have lightning now which is cool but like uh come back to like the daily you like who i presume very few people actually use lightning as a as a transfer medium right there's there's a novelty aspect in it um potentially you know like i guess yeah i guess there can be a lot of use cases for in the future but where where fees are launching remain you know okay um it seems

like it's still still still still a while out before before that becomes uh yeah mainstream yeah no it's um yeah it's uh it's something i think about a lot like is is my screeching to this microphone even even uh worth it at this point right because it's it's still so nation I mean I think so but it's I just like hearing myself talk I take that into consideration yeah

well thank you for joining me on this Monday afternoon my pleasure Marty it's great to meet you I know you've been doing this for a lot of years and you've been putting a lot of content out there so that's awesome big thanks to you well thanks for doing what you're doing

thanks for putting out my random meandering line of questioning here i feel like it was a lot of a splattering of questions there and uh that's because your background is seriously like crazy diverse and your your bitcoin from libid coin to bitcoin core um is is not a a common um journey i would say for most people i've talked to on this podcast at least i think you're like the first libid queen did you contribute to the protocol too or did you just I wrote a lot

of documentation and I did I went to a couple meetups with Eric to do like Libitcoin training for developers so you're

first Libitcoin have you had him on the show I have not but we're talking he's actually going to be in the city at the end of the month

I believe or soon and we're going to try to make it happen Eric if you're listening let's make it happen yep James

thank you for your time cheers Marty gonna stop bothering you cool you weren't you weren't uh i mean keep doing what you're doing man loving it peace and love bye guys