TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #97: Eric Voskuil

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Eric Voskuil, lead maintainer of the libbitcoin Bitcoin implementation, as they discuss: - libbitcoin - Austrian Economics - Attack vectors - Eric's experience in the Navy - How Bitcoin fails - Dust - much more Check out the libbitcoin Wiki: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. 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. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's episode with Eric Voskuhl, an incredibly interesting man who's been working on Bitcoin for years, particularly the LibBitcoin implementation. Matt O'Dell and I sat down with Eric a couple weeks ago, talked about LibBitcoin, Austrian economics, being a Bitcoin realist, Eric's time in the Navy, and a bunch of other stuff. So you guys are going to enjoy it. Before where you do enjoy it hear me out all right we got our our sponsor the cash app if you freaks are in the u.s and you have not downloaded the cash app yet what are you waiting for go do it go to your local app store download the cash app use the code stacking sats you're gonna get free

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side where you tie up your cash app to a debit card that you can personalize and then you can go to merchants that are partnered with boost and save money when those boosts are enabled so go to your local app store today download the cash app use the code stacking sats get that five dollars get five dollars every day owls and then uh yeah start buying start stacking sats on the at. I think you guys are going to enjoy this episode with Eric. I know I certainly did. Okay. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here

on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting down with two fine gentlemen. Very, very excited for uh this conversation today uh we have eric vasco in the house uh maintainer of the bitcoin software developer ex-navy pilot maybe seal pilot or just navy pilot just navy pilot they don't have seal pilots i don't think maybe maybe they pilot some mini subs yeah my bad um no thanks for coming we're also we got matt adele in the house as well sub freaks uh yeah i was just explaining eric forgot about this conversation but i was a part of he was a part of one of my favorite conversations of 2018 last year at riga uh we were standing outside just talking about libitcoin your thoughts on bitcoin your thoughts on economics which i'm very fond of i come from

an economics background as well um very excited for this conversation because uh matt and i are two bitcoin cheerleaders and eric is a bitcoin realist and we're going to get to that's a new one i ever heard bitcoin realist yet that's what i that's what i got like i again like i i was telling you i listened to like a few pods that you've been on this morning i drove up from south jersey i feel like i've been talking to you for like four hours now at this point uh and that yeah like i'd like to believe that you view yourself as a realist is that fair to say i don't know if the traditional term you know realism from whatever philosophy school that came from is uh It's fully descriptive, but, yeah, I tend to look at things from a very rational perspective.

Rationalist, maybe. I don't know. Rationalist. But, yeah, labels are hard. When it comes to what I say that I know, I have to be able to prove it or, you know, consider it opinion. And so, you know, I seek to prove things using rational economics. The code's different. It's much easier to prove.

something you can verify um before we jump into like the crux of everything we want to talk about uh we don't have to rehash too much but like how did you come to find and work on bitcoin in particular on live bitcoin in particular uh so i guess it starts back in the early mid 90s when i got uh i guess i discovered around 91 that i was libertarian i was a card carrying party member for probably 25 years until I finally decided that I was an anarchist but um that got me into um privacy um I was interested in Phil Zimmerman's work PGP and uh then I found uh David Chome and the work on DigiCash I read the patents and found my own name on one of the patents that was interesting um I'm Dutch and so they were in Amsterdam and I contacted them and never got a

response but there was a guy with with literally with my name working on the project I met David shown the other night and I mentioned that to him and he was he was curious what happened that guy so I had some interest in it you know did you cash didn't really work out I was in the Navy I was busy I kept writing software I was computer science major in college and so when I got out I got out to do a software company I did a couple that were successful I did another one that wasn't. And the day that I shut that down, so I had kind of ignored Bitcoin and other things like it for years because of, because of DigiCash essentially. And it's funny, I actually

told David that. But then I decided to pick up Forbes magazine Silk Road article by Andy Greenberg and I read that and immediately went to the Bitcoin white paper, read that and realized, you know, this was different and I've been working on it ever since. Within, I don't know, a day, i found um the bitcoin i looked for a software project that i could work on contribute to whatever and uh found the bitcoin got together with one of my multi-company friends employees and we sat down decided to start working on it and we've both been working on it ever since what in particular was the impetus to push you from libert being a libertarian to an anarchist rothbard rothbard yeah when i finally i'd studied economics for years along with you know this

politics and economics are deeply intertwined and um so it leads you to a study of you know various things so i i found all the austrian school guys which i tended to gravitate towards um but eventually i decided to really formalize my understanding and i i read man economy in the state by rothbard with power market the whole big thing you know and i read it like i was going to school so if I couldn't follow his proof on something I would read it you know sometimes all day just a couple pages you know till I really fully understood it and then I got to the end and I I'd always I'd already been kind of on the edge anyway but then I just realized it just I couldn't deal with the contradiction of small state you know so that's kind of when I made the

decision that i just really am an anarchist and not a libertarian do you think anarchy is possible in today's world um so i i i don't look at anarchy as a person who is trying to overthrow or disrupt or anything like that it's more it's more for me a personal philosophy um non-participation right to the extent possible um so in other words you don't have to see it you don't have to see the state is a social good um just because you live in it and just because you can't avoid it doesn't mean you can't be an anarchist right um so for me it's more about how i live my life um than than trying to get rid of it right and that's funny because you're in the navy flying jets how do you uh like line up your your belief in anarchy with with well it wasn't always a libertarian or

anarchist and it was during that time probably 90 i joined the navy in 86 i was working at ibm on a co-op uh cooperative you know employment thing during college and uh it was during that time i was i got if i'd gone somewhere else my life would be very different but i got kind of bored and i realized i just liked riding my motorcycle up around the catskills and playing softball on the weekends so i decided it was something i you know i needed to do something a little bit more um engaging and so i think i picked up hunt for red october tom clancy book and bookstore i was like ah great i'll be a submarine guy you know yeah i actually rode to the recruiter you know uh and uh they talked they talked me into being a pilot so they thought that

i guess they thought my personality was was right for it so um you know that's how i got in the navy and uh um it wasn't until 91 that i started to become kind of more politically i actually got a poli sci minor but it didn't amount to much um but yeah i started to get more interested in things and uh that led me to uh libertarianism and that led me to just keep reading and learning and i find the stuff very interesting especially the economic stuff i find the politics a lot less interesting there's really not much to it but but the economics yeah politics is more exhausting than interesting if anything yeah it's just a it's just a battle of opinions and and uh you know i don't know it's it's not uh you know there's no how would you say it's not rational right it's

more emotional and i find you know i can't really i can't get really interested in making these emotional arguments about things you know i want to know what's true i want to know what is so i gravitate towards the economic side of things i do as well and like staying on being a pilot do you think that experience helps frame how you approach bitcoin development and thinking of security and attack vectors and such well i you know i had a had a long background in in programming as well and which again is is kind of purely rational it's just symbolic logic and machine does what you tell it and um but also my experience with physical security you know but i mean you can't really not very high level as a pilot but you get to see things

and understand how big organizations the state tends to think and how it tends to work. And so that does inform some of my opinion. Like people underestimate the capability of states and people that work in them, right? Yeah, and you said that on the Crypto Voices podcast, and I am one of those people. I'm one of those people that believe that state may be too incompetent to...

Yeah, that's a mistake. State's not incompetent. It just has different motivations than everybody's, So it looks like it's doing stupid things, but it's doing things in its own interest that are not necessarily the interest of individuals. But, you know, it can be very effective and, you know, certainly very powerful. So and the people I worked with were amazing, capable, smart, creative and driven. And so, you know, it's not maybe that way everywhere, but, you know, if you had a problem, you had a threat, tactical problem, whatever you wanted to solve, the creative solutions that people come up with are kind of amazing, you know. And I taught tactics for years.

I evaluated people's tactics and modeled the threat. You know, got in an airplane and pretended to be a Russian whatever and showed people that, you know, it's not as easy as it looks, right? You can't just assume you're going to kind of walk in there and do what you want. So looking realistically at threats is something that, you know, I have experience with. And also the understanding that all security comes down to human beings taking some risk. Machines don't provide security. They're tools for people. And I also spent a long time, I still do, practice martial arts.

And that's another case where you just people make assumptions about, you know, the adversary that don't always hold up so well. And so it tends to make you more realistic about modeling the threat. What do you think? I guess we're going to jump into it now. What do you think are some threats that that apply to Bitcoin today that maybe some of us cheerleaders are overlooking? well the state is the threat to bitcoin that's to me without question it's the you know the state wasn't taking control of money then people would do what they wanted with money and and um you know bitcoin wouldn't really be necessary it wouldn't be necessary so there's you know there's two kind of levels of threat model there's you know securing your

wallet from the random thief or from your own incompetence which is probably more scary and then you know the system level security is how I refer to it right the model that Satoshi laid out in the white paper is all system security it's not

talking about how to secure your keys or things like that and so the threat is the state right if you don't have that then then the security model would be very different yeah and so in the conversations i was listening to this morning you think we're still in the honeymoon period when do you think the state

begins paying attention and seeing bitcoin as a threat to it well if you look at the state as a rational actor which it is with different motivations you realize that there's no reason to spend the money to do something about it until there's a cost um you know that that is exceeding the the enforcement cost right and there's really not it's too small um so uh if if you just look at it from that perspective when bitcoin starts making enough of a difference in other words effectively taking away enough tax revenue which is what it's saving people presumably right it's allowing them to move money across borders save money without signage um transact um in in ways that aren't allowed, right?

That's all about saving people money as opposed to alternatives. And that means that's money that's not flowing into the state, right? Through foreign exchange controls, enforcement of other tax laws through signage. And when that becomes enough to make it worth enforcement,

then presumably they'll start enforcing. And you see this already starting. It's little dribs and drabs here. And it would never be complete and comprehensive. That's not the point. It's just a question of whether it becomes, it starts becoming an issue for Bitcoin. But most arguments I see come down to,

well, it's either going to be so popular they can't do that, which to me reduces to the status quo, right? If gold was popular, money in general is popular, why do we let them do these things with dollars, right? Why do we have foreign exchange controls if it's so popular to not have them? Why can't we program money? I mean, PayPal tried that. It was a nightmare.

I programmed in the PayPal APIs for a long time, and it's a nightmare. It's all these things that they don't want to do, they have to do. So, you know, the arguments about security tend to come down to things that just don't really make any, you know, majority of them don't make any sense, right? We'll just, it'll be popular, and we'll vote for it, right? i uh i mean i also think that the state is you know should be the main focus in terms of you know network level security particularly the american government but would you say that that you expected a you know the reaction seems to be more downplayed than i would have expected would you agree with that well i don't know i don't know what you expected but um like i thought

i thought at this point when like i i started like focusing on bitcoin like 2012 2013 i thought by this point it would be basically illegal in america at least self-custody um it seems like the reaction has been way less aggressive uh so far than i would have anticipated otherwise well the impact so far is probably way less more way less than you expected as well but that would that's what that would be my response right the the impact that bitcoin is having on tax revenues is not high enough for the state to care yet. And I've actually heard regulators, like ECB regulators, not too long ago say this on a panel, I think at Oxford.

Well, yeah, we're keeping an eye on it, but really it's not big enough for us to care yet. Yet, right? Yet, and I know you don't like to think about the future, but do you think we ever get to a point where they do care? I think about the future all the time. I mean, it's the only place where things happen, or the present, I guess.

so um do we ever get to that point um possibly is it knowable no right um but we work on it because we think it's possible um and we think it's possible to defend against state controls otherwise what would be the point you know you would go work on r3 or something and have a rage quit if you didn't believe that was possible yeah and do you do you think so as you're building like live bitcoin out and maintaining that implementation in particular like what mindset do you have like are you trying to fortify the system or simply make it more useful the bitcoin um you know it's a developer um a miracle a toolkit right uh it's a set of libraries that make it easy to build uh actual bitcoin stuff right as opposed to like building on web

service APIs which tend to be very easy to take down and control so it doesn't really tend to advance you know new innovations new new things and it didn't tends to absorb them as they as they come along and its objective is to provide a full stack set of libraries that is readable understandable well-maintained, reliable, both to help people understand how the code actually works, but also to deploy their own applications around it. And that is so that people can build actual Bitcoin stuff that can operate locally at small scale and provide a more securable environment for Bitcoin.

Right. So I always said that the role of a core developer is advantaging the individual or disadvantaging the state. Right. If you're working on something that doesn't do that, then you're not doing core development. So things like privacy are important. Right. We tend not to work on new privacy tech. We absorb the stuff that that people have developed once it starts getting used. but we work on making it easier to build and more reliable to build things that people can use which is you know part of that advantaging individuals yeah and let's dive into like the differences between the bitcoin and the bitcoin core implementation because as you came to bit

devs i believe it was last summer and presented the bitcoin and it was the first time i was aware that you guys have, like, a different transaction model than the UTXO model that Core is using? Yeah, I mean, the model, the abstraction is the same, right? It is what it is, but the implementation is very different. It's evolved over time. It's probably started out, you know, and it did start out closer to the Satoshi,

what I call the Satoshi prototype, right? But Amir was very aggressive in redesigning things, and then I continued that. So, yeah, the implementation has different objectives. It's a library. It has, you know, full node and, you know, client-side command line tools. So, you know, we can actually see it in operation. But the objective is, you know, the Satoshi client tends to be, in all its various variations, it's an application.

and so people chop it up or connect to it using you know some fairly clunky apis um and um you know our objective is to kind of open it up and factor it so that um people can build on these pieces directly right um so it's just a different engineering approach the the conceptual model is the same but for example we don't have um a separate store of utxos we just store the transactions okay the transaction have the utxos and we want the transactions because we want to be able to allow people to obtain the chain um so why store them twice all you really need is some metadata that says you know at what height was this output spent and that's sufficient to know that it's either spent or unspent in the current strong chain

another thing we don't have is a mempool you know people talk about the UTXO set and the mempool as if they're actual necessary aspects of bitcoin but they're not there's a transaction pool which is a term we use for the set of unconfirmed transactions that are confirmable um there's um there's weak blocks right there blocks that could be confirmable if they were in a longer chain um that are otherwise valid uh and there's unspent outputs but these are all just transactions and headers that's all they are right so we have a store of transactions we have a store of headers um and they're well indexed so we get constant time retrieval no matter how big the chain gets how is it maintaining this and trying to get developers to come help you

work on this when obviously bitcoin core is the lead implement not lead implementation i don't know what the correct phrasing is the most downloaded the biggest stations you know by by far the most used um so it's uh it's very easy to get people to want to come work on the bitcoin there's a there's a line of people who want to work full-time on the bitcoin and there's you some that put in a lot of time voluntarily and we've had some generous contributions from you know community people directly to developers to work full-time for years which is great that you know during the last price disruption that that kind of you know took a hit and that hit a lot lot of people i think as well um so uh as a result of that uh myself and tom bachia who's a

new york bitcoin kind of money guy here you probably know him right we we uh i'm not sure if i know i have met in person but i know yeah like twitter yeah he was he was at fidelity for a while ran their their bitcoin blockchain stuff and then came out and has his own um fund in progress and so he he's done a lot of work to set up a non-profit that that'll allow people to donate to the Bitcoin without you know and get the tax benefit basically so we we're calling that the little Bitcoin Institute right so just just a way to help facilitate getting money to developers so they can work full-time but it's it's a small team and I expect it to remain a small

team and i kind of prefer that you know i could i couldn't imagine having hundreds if not thousands of people trying to jam stuff into the code base it would just be a nightmare you know why why would you want that just go you know go make your own um uh if you got that many people who want to do something so it is a challenge to get money it's not really a challenge to get people who want to work on it there's it's very elegant code base it's um it's rewarding um people love it when they start working on it um but yeah anybody out there that's uh you're listening uh throw us some cash and we'll make even more what would you say to somebody who thinks that multiple implementations is stupid what they're out there there are multiple implementations you know it's inevitable

so you can they can say it but i mean i just kind of ignore it it's like you know there's there's multiple implementations of the satoshi client running on the bitcoin network right every time they make a change it's a new implementation and those changes lead to the problems that they tend to describe so it's not it's not possible well i guess you could you could freeze at the original satoshi implementation have everybody run that and it would never change right that's the only way you get one implementation yeah so it's certainly not feasible and uh the nature of competition uh you know makes things better and i've seen this i've i've seen things that we've done be more aggressively adopted or things be more focused on in other nodes um because we're

you know we're making improvements in some areas that people want to be competitive with so it's it's a good thing in in many ways um but yeah the the idea that um that there could only be one implementation is false and and that's i mean even what was it even last year at riga was like the day that they announced they had introduced into the code base a hard fork, right? So it happens, and it's, you know, it's inevitable. And the idea that it can't happen was right there shown to be false. I mean, there's a lot of people that were withdrawing their commentary, and well-known people who said this will never happen, right, because it's so well-tested.

I'm a software guy. This happens, right? And then you have instances like, what was it, a few weeks ago or maybe a month ago now where a miner tried to give himself like an extra Bitcoin and the block reward in the Coinbase transaction and every implementation denied it. So it's like as a Bitcoiner seeing that LitBitcoin caught that. Yeah, it's pretty rare for consensus forks to be surfaced.

I think some tend to get found before they cause problems like that one we were just talking about. And I think at about the same rate that the Satoshi client has discovered these kind of things either in the code or in in live operation we've discovered them as well different things though you know like we didn't have that bug we didn't have the inflation consensus bug i was on a flight when it got tweeted out and i was like you know trying to get into the code base to see and i was pretty sure that we didn't because the design is different and and i was like no we didn't you know we don't and then uh had some had somebody add a few test

cases because we didn't have full coverage on that section and and uh the reason i think i mentioned this when i was speaking at riga and and he came back and i'm still on the flight and he says hey we have we have an issue and i'm like what you know we don't have that bug we get something else well it turned out it was just you just you know quickly put together these test cases and the test case was was incorrect but but yeah anyway so um we didn't have a chance of having that problem because we didn't have the the same design that they have it's an example that highlights maybe the the benefit of multiple implementations yeah i don't know i mean benefit benefit to whom right Like the community, it's the individual who's running the node.

I don't know. I mean, there are multiple implementations. They do tend to have positive and negative, you know, consequences, but they're inevitable and with or without independent teams, right? Even with just one code base, it's inevitable. And, you know, just switching some feature like the database implementation caused a consensus bug, a significant one, right? just having third-party dependencies

like OpenSSL caused a consensus bug without even changing your code base, right? So we worked very hard to remove as many external dependencies as we could, including OpenSSL. We had actually gotten rid of it before Bitcoin Core did using their own libsec library,

which they didn't feel was ready yet. but yeah so so you know we take that engineering approach to try to simplify the code as much as we can make it as readable as we can expose the consensus rules in a very visible rational way and you know minimize dependencies do all these things that make it easier to verify the code and there's very few people that can actually go into the satoshi client and actually look at the code and go well that's right or that's wrong right and testing's not enough you know it's It's insufficient. I certainly can't read and understand what's going on there.

I mean, I think the biggest argument would be that people should be running multiple nodes, multiple implementations, especially if you're like a large service, like if you're like a Coinbase or something like that. Would you not agree with that? Well, it wouldn't hurt, I guess. It's an additional cost.

But, you know, most other nodes are just... I mean, all nodes are difficult to run and maintain, especially if you're running a service over them. It's really not designed for that. What would you say it's designed for? Desktop app. Yeah. That's how it was designed, right?

And, you know, it threw on this JSON RPC API, which is not designed for network use, right? It's not securable. It's not scalable. It's not very highly performant, but it's fine for wallet desktop use. So people tend to build infrastructure over that, companies, and they make big investments in building, for example, database applications that suck all the data, suck the chain out of there. They just use it as a way to get the chain, right, a node on the network.

Pull it all into some other store and then query over that, you know. So, you know, if it was designed for that, you wouldn't be doing that. Our miners, you know, build layers over it as well where they're really not doing anything unusual. They should need that complexity. Now, that's a good segue into a concept that I want to talk about after hearing and expand upon after hearing it. You talked about it on the Crypto Voices podcast this morning was the idea of scaling versus... I was on there this morning? No, I was listening to it this morning.

It was like a year and a half ago. Go check that out. Time warp bug. Matty Majingsis has the best voice in all of Bitcoin. and does a hell of an interview. And that was a good two-part series that Eric did. So I believe that came out January of last year. But it's the first time I heard this framing of scaling versus layering

and understanding that Bitcoin at the protocol layer doesn't scale and being okay with that. Yeah, Bitcoin is perfectly non-scalable, right? It doesn't matter how much hard. I mean, so from a computer science standpoint or from an engineering standpoint, I should say, scalability is the idea that you add more hardware, you get a linear increase in throughput right there's no you can't add any more hardware to

to bitcoin to get more transactions through if that's the aspect of scaling we're talking about right more transaction throughput there's a you know it's it's perfectly non-scalable but you know there is there's there's no limit to what you can do in terms of layering in terms of throughput, well, yeah, I mean, I'll just say that there's, you know, that's fairly unlimited. There's no limit to the amount of money you can push through in a transaction, put it that way. If you can get together, you know, the money and in few enough outputs, you can push through

as much money as you want up to the, you know, the coin limit. So that's not really scalability either, right? It doesn't take any more hardware to do that. So you call that like infinitely scalable, right? There's no amount of hardware required. You can do as much as you want. So when we talk about scaling, it's an interesting question from an engineering standpoint.

What are we really talking about? And those get into, to me, those are not engineering questions because the engineering is fairly straightforward. It's either perfectly non-scalable in transaction throughput. It's infinitely scalable in monetary throughput. When we talk about being able to run a node on a piece of hardware, Those are scalability questions, right? Like if you double the RAM,

if you double the number of cores that you have, you know, CPUs that you have, do you get a doubling improvement in terms of speed of validation or speed of query? And LaBitcoin is designed for that. Those are some of the decisions that Amir made that continue to be effective. The query speed on LaBitcoin is phenomenal.

Constant time lookup data can be, if you have enough memory, The entire chain just sits in memory, using up, you know, free memory with a memory mapped file. And the files are, you know, indexed in such a way that no matter what you're looking for, you're going to get a constant time response. Pass through a very low overhead network gain interface, 0MQ, much lower overhead than web-based interfaces, JSON, stuff like that. So the query performance is extraordinary. And if you increase the memory, you get an increase in performance. You increase the number of threads you have available,

you get a linear increase in performance up to some limit, which is always the case. Then something else becomes the bottleneck, and you try to make that linear, right? Right now, when I do it, it's my network. It can connect to the Bitcoin up to thousands of peers and download in parallel and store in parallel all at the same time. But then my router crashes because it's just a home router.

So the network becomes the limiting issue in your ability to do that kind of stuff. So that's the difference between scalability. And when we're talking about scalability from a conceptual standpoint, we're not talking about those things. We're talking about ultimately how useful can the money be? And those are economic questions. And I find those very interesting as well. I think it's a combination of how useful can the money be for how many people? Or do you think it just needs to be useful for a small subset?

Well, the more people the money is useful for, the more useful it is for any given person. Yeah. Right? I mean, the more people that accept the money, the more useful the money is, the more value it has to you. How do we get more people accepting this money? How do we get that?

Well, we get that because the money has value to them, right? So more people accept it, the more valuable it becomes to other people, the more people accept it. But the money has a cost of use, and that is an offsetting factor. I'm not just talking about fees. Those are potentially the most significant factor. But even now with essentially no fee issue at all, because of low usage, you have other offsetting factors. It's complex to work with.

So we work on making that easier for people, making it easier for people to build applications that make it easier for people. Um, there's risk involved, right? You know, um, there's taxes, right? It's in the U S, uh, Bitcoin is treated as a commodity tax wise. So when the dollar drops and you, and you spend your Bitcoin, you incur a tax, right? Capital gains tax. So that's, I mean, if the dollar is dropped because of monetary inflation, then that's signage transferred to Bitcoin, not at the same rate, but, but in proportion, right?

so if people want the advantages of Bitcoin they have to be willing to do it if it's not legal right and so getting more people to adopt it when it's very easy to make it criminal to use isn't is itself a challenge right yeah that's my biggest worry for Bitcoin in the long term is a combination of that and apathy, people not caring and not being strong-willed enough to make illegal transactions that may not be unethical but are just defined as illegal by the state. Sure.

I use the term moral. It's not a religious concept. It's a philosophical concept. So dealing with economics, economics is kind of morally agnostic. right it just doesn't doesn't doesn't it just describes how things at least we talk about rational economics Austrian economics um it's a system of proof based on some simple axioms um and it doesn't make a judgment about those things then you can add a judgment on in terms of what is moral and what is not and I I do that with a very simple uh principle the non-aggression principle

um which defines you know what people want to do or what they're compelled to do um and so I, you know, to me that that's the moral distinction. If people want to go, you know, buy their illegal drugs with their, with their Bitcoin, that's not, not, you know, that's their choice. They're not stealing from anybody. So, but there's a limit to people's willingness and ability to do that. But ultimately Bitcoin security model doesn't provide any protection whatsoever against the state, right?

It's not, it helps people hide, but it doesn't stop the state from passing a law, right? And people have come up with all kinds of ways to try to rationalize that, especially people invested in white market Bitcoin industry. And you have to understand that the Bitcoin security model is entirely designed around people being able to operate anonymously

so that they can hide from people trying to enforce law, this law is trivially easy to create um and even if it's not that it's irrelevant right it's if we wanted a money that was always lawful we would just use the dollar right because that is the that is the money that has the set of laws applied to it that people have seemed to have accepted um politically so and i you know and i'm and i'm referring to pretty much every other money around the world uh state money so you know in order to get the advantages out of it that the security model provides you have to be willing and able to use it when you want to even if it's not allowed permissionless right that's the whole point of permissionless so you can advocate

advocate for large-scale white market adoption but in the end that's kind of counterproductive because what does it do it just creates a big target what do you mean by large-scale white market adoption well i just draw this i just use the term white market black market to draw the line between um what is allowed you know and what is not allowed by some states always relative to some authority right so um if if you use the u.s as the canonical example of the authority and it's certainly not the only one that gets benefit from making its own money but if you use that as an example well if the u.s just passed law it says you know accepting bitcoin is money laundering including mining which is accepting bitcoin right then um then bitcoin itself right the doing of it

accepting it is unlawful and so it's black market activity now you might be able to do it under certain conditions right you you get you know you accept a little rule change that allows a state to create units of its own money now it has monetary policy you accept a restriction on what can be mind uh you know only approve transactions now you have censorship and with those two changes it's perfectly good state money um and i i call that fed coin right so if you're willing to accept fed coin you can remain in the white market but otherwise you're a money launderer and that's very easy to envision right you can't predict it will happen but either we stay in this honeymoon phase or we don't and that's likely what happens um and that likely won't work i mean people still

keep doing it some people and so now you get into enforcement which is the next logical phase if it's important enough you'll start enforcing bitcoin has this inherent weakness that no other thing has that it can be uh compliance can be enforced from one point on the earth most effectively right through through uh mining uh majority so um bitcoin has unique advantages it has unique disadvantages it's the only thing it's the only thing in the in the in the world that when you transfer it to somebody else you you pay a fee that's a function not of what you're transferring but what how many other people are doing the same thing right that's very unique and it's also very unique in the fact that it can be controlled from one point of the earth

with sufficient capital and the way that we would beat the state in this scenario would be to to pay higher fees to yeah somebody has to somebody has to pay for higher hash power to overcome the sensor right and the only way that that happens in an economical rash economically rational way is the people who are trying to transact who have value in getting those transactions through pay more to get them through you know economically irrational would be the idea that people just donate their money to this you know donate more tax right you're already paying the tax for the hash power uh that's offsetting the the higher fees but now you donate more tax to to pay for other people to transact you know possible certainly would happen to some extent

but it's not economically rational therefore not provable so i i think really the only way the reason bitcoin has a censorship resistance property is because when fees don't when transactions don't get confirmed people raise their fees and as they raise their fees it incents more hash power people to accept them unlawfully and potentially uh preventing or overcoming a um a sensor with hash power are you optimistic about uh your fellow humans uh having the will to to transact uh illegally yeah but but uh certainly i wouldn't work on it um and but it's not knowable right it's it's it's an assumption we make right like it's it's the axiom that I add to the axiomatic system

that I call crypto-economics, right? It's, you know, Bitcoin, which I consider anything that conforms to the security model that Satoshi laid out, which is basically three principles, which I call crypto-dynamic principles, the forces that make the crypto, you know, work. Anything that conforms to those, I consider Bitcoin.

And there's an... these are based these principles are based on math probability theory which is not math and economic theory rational economic theory and those are all axiomatic systems right there's some assumptions they're very simple if you accept those assumptions you can make you can prove things even mathematics um but bitcoin has one additional assumption which is that that's possible right it's possible for people to to continue to use it in the face of you know the state but it's not provable because value is subjective we don't know how much value people will place in their getting their transactions confirmed or how much value the state will place

in preventing it or how much people will resist the taxation required to do it but it's not as much it's not as expensive as people assume right it's not the total amount of hash power mining is profitable being a majority miner is even more profitable it's the most profitable way to mine because of the benefit the advantages there's two two advantages to being a majority miner you have lowest variance and you have lowest latency so you you could be a majority hash power miner at something less certainly than majority hash rate and so and it's happened right people can get to that level and be perfectly profitable so that's not a cost right it's a it's a it's an investment that returns it's the the cost comes when when that when that sensor when

that 51 minor starts censoring up until that point nobody cares right it's fine right but but when it starts censoring now transactions aren't getting through and the and the fees have to rise so the the difference between the kind of market transaction fee that's being accepted and the ones that aren't being accepted they call that the fee premium that difference is what is securing the money it was preventing the sensor right and or not and that's much smaller than the cost of total hash you know energy hash rate consumption and energy and stuff it's very you know could be could be uh so trivial that it can't people aren't willing people may not be willing to pay enough right to overcome the sensor it's hard to say um but we assume it's possible yeah it's um

And as a cheerleader here and somebody who likes to talk optimistically about the future of Bitcoin, it's always sobering to put these scenarios into perspective. And I think that's what I love most about the Bitcoin wiki is your section on crypto economics. I feel like you're trying to educate people about, again, to think about Bitcoin rationally and understand its limitations very, very clearly. Yeah, it's become that. It started out as a way just for me to put my thoughts down on paper so they would stop floating around in my head or to just stop repeatedly responding

to the same questions at Twitter speed. But just a couple topics originally and just grew. I did 93 yesterday. 93 rats. But again, it's just stuff floating around my head and I can't describe it very well until I write it and then I write it

and maybe sometimes I find things that aren't quite right or somebody points out something It's not quite right. I've had James Chang, who you had on here recently, was reviewing my crypto economics wiki and found two errors, real errors. And the consequence was unchanged,

but the argument was not correct. And it led to a much better argument and clarifications. And we had a good talk about that yesterday. So it helps getting it out there, too, to get peer review. um but but now it's become like it is interesting to educate people on things um because they want to know and there's not a lot of um more objective more rational analysis of these things out there yeah and i think i forget which podcast it was i listened to this

morning but you were um well what exactly were you saying that uh shit i lost my train of thought here that um we're talking about getting information out there for people yeah getting it out there for people but uh i forget exactly but that's one thing and just forgot that train of thought on to the next one educating people i think that's important and that's what that's what you're saying people don't care uh you said at the beginning of this conversation like if why why hasn't the world coalesced on a free money uh that they exist like gold exists silver exists like if they really cared about it why haven't we coalesced on a on a free free market

money right now why aren't we coalesced around a free market money and i think it's partly because of a lack of education people really don't understand what money is and that's why i think your crypto economics page yeah it's it's a hard topic i mean money is economics is one thing money is like all of that and more you know and um in one in some sense it's very simple in other other ways it's very complex and you know it's it took me a long time to get to the point where i felt like i i really understood it and now i've gotten to the point where i think i find i tend to say tend i've found errors in what people consider settled austrian economics and i you know there's there's it's a hard topic and um what are some examples of these errors well uh the simplest one

and and it's um it's um easier to explain so i'll use a simpler one for at first and it's not quite as important but the mysis is regression theorem all right so i look at regression theorem And I'm like, well, it just doesn't really make sense to me on its face. If you look at his Austrian economics, it's based on rationality, right? It's an axiomatic system. He's very clear about that. It's not based on observation. And it accepts the idea that value is subjective, which is not an axiom.

It's an exclusion of everything that we can't know, right? So you have the axiom of human action, and you have the axiom of time preference, and then you have this exclusion of objective value. And, and so from that we should be able to derive this regression theorem. And it was an attempt to settle the, you know, the circularity problem and where does the value of money come from and it tended to be circular and Mises said, well, no, it's because, you know, we value money today because what we were able to obtain yesterday. We remember there's, even though value is subjective, there's just some aspect of it

that's objectively from previous use, right? So if you can accept that, which is not really provable, it's a contradiction of the subjective theory of value, then regress back and you see this infinite regression, yesterday, the day before, and you get to the point where the money was used in barter. Well, why did it have barter value? You keep regressing back to the point where it had use value. And he's very explicit. He says industrial use value.

This was a commodity that people held and they used in production and they made these things and they and then they you know then it progressed to barter and then it progressed to money and he's really in a lot of passages he's really just trying to find ways to condemn state money right which may have evolved from that but had no use has no use value which is what a fiat is which by the way Bitcoin has no use value so it's also fiat that's literally what it means right it's just it doesn't have any use aside from money not any material use right so he's trying to he's trying to regress back and then has to terminate this

regression right at use value but that's irrational right how did it get use value how did that come about somebody had to at some point look at this thing and go I think I can use that for something it was entirely subjective right like it could no way to remember it from the day before so the original use of the thing that he's regressed back to was entirely subjective which implies right a contradiction saying that it can't be money unless it evolved from objective use right but obviously it can't it had to evolve from subjective use originally therefore anything could be money right and so basically the the theorem doesn't make any sense

anything can be money so i mean satoshi decided he wanted to make a money made a money and on day one it was a money right he was very clear about that but you know so there's really no reason for this regression theorem except to try to condemn state money but that you you can condemn that rationally in a number of ways that don't have this logical error right yeah but there's i agree hopefully but then the concept that we've been talking a lot more recently the last few months uh with some guess is the intersubjectivity of money so like some monetary goods have have better characteristics of fulfilling the the use of a monetary good certain certain commodities have better monetary use than others right you know there's a long list of or a short list i guess of

useful properties of money um you know paper money has useful properties that that commodity monies don't for example it doesn't decay right you just replace it with a new one and you know so you don't have the coin clipping problem you know other things like that it's funny people people tend to say that dollars are more portable than gold which i think is kind of funny because if you try to move a billion dollars in gold versus a billion dollars in hundred dollar bills the biggest bill you look at the volume and the weight it's not even close right you got pallets of these these hundred dollar bills right um that weigh much more than the gold so i always find that curious this is why people say it's more portable um you think they're arguing from like a more

portable via the wiring system that exists or the wiring well wiring money well that's not money that's credit yeah so you know uh we're just talking about settlement right you move money around between banks internationally it's actually physically moved right dollars do actually you know provide the money for the existing financial system and um anyway it's just an interesting observation i guess about portability you said bitcoin has no use value but what about the ability to pay fees to to get transactions or is that well that's that's the use of the money right but the money has so bitcoin does have marginal use value i mean depending on some people might think it's really important but you can use it for time stamping

right paper money has marginal use value you can burn it for energy so so it's not there's never an absolute these are conceptual distinctions right so generally you consider gold not a fiat because it has use value that's more significant right it can be used for all kinds of interesting things whereas fiat you know people don't generally burn it for heat but they might if they had to sometimes they roll it up and use it for a straw you know there are definitely uses and Bitcoin does have some of that as well but but we consider we consider those to be fairly marginal and so primarily dollars or fiat they have no

you know important use value and Bitcoin is the same thing the difference between Bitcoin so so before Bitcoin there was no other fiat than state money so people get in the habit of referring to you know an unbacked piece of paper as fiat and then they're hesitant to apply that same term to Bitcoin because it's different but it is different it's not monopoly money right monopoly meaning the production of it is not controlled by any counterfeiting laws monopoly production so when you have monopoly production you can charge any price you want or any price that the market will bear so you can obtain a price premium

which is what sign rich is right Bitcoin doesn't have unless it's under a successful censorship attack it doesn't have monopoly production therefore the cost of producing it equals the value to the miner of what they obtain the dollar costs about 5.5 cents for one for a one dollar bill the treasury charges the fed that amount the difference right that's signage um and that's only possible because nobody else can make them right if everybody could make dollars that that would the price of the dollar the purchasing power of the dollar could come down to about 5.5 cents or less right um but the problem is now portability you'd have to carry around way too many of them and it wouldn't be very useful but it would be then a perfectly it

would be a commodity money at that point right i'm still because i have been following your your writing around bitcoin as fiat too and so what is your definition of fiat is something that's decreed no uh so this is something i actually had to look up and study for a bit because that's what i assumed right a long while back it's like the value is decreed that's not what that's not what declared by fiat actually meant it meant it was declared as a money the value is driven by the market so what fiat so that there was because there was no Bitcoin there was no alternative they could tended to go hand in hand the the ability to declare any value it's not declaring right

you're just restricting supply so that you can raise the price through monopoly um so that's the effect of fiat money when it's controlled by the state which was the only way to have a fiat money before bitcoin so they went hand in hand but fiat actually meant declared to be a money right did evolve as a money it was you know somebody had to declare it and control it for it to work but what it really means is it has no use value that's the that's the economic definition of fiat and you look at bitcoin that this to the same type of degree it has no use value it's it's a money and um the difference again is that it's not its production is not monopolized anybody can go out and mine them mine it and so therefore you have competition

for mining which basically brings profit of mining down to the cost of capital or return on mining to the cost of capital so there's nothing wrong with that you know and i tend not to emphasize it because people people weird out on you know but but but but but but but but but you get you get interesting consequences from using the right concepts in the right terms right so i i wrote a money taxonomy topic you know commodity money um fiat etc but you have to draw a distinction between bitcoin and state money if they're both fiat and that distinction is simply monopoly monopoly on the production um and then you can you know over time come to other conclusions like well is monopoly production of bitcoin possible and this is actually a topic that i wrote up yesterday

Okay. You probably heard Nick Szabo's term, unforgeable cost. Costliness. Costliness, yeah. I call it proof of cost. Unforgeable means it's provable, and costliness is cost. So you have proof of cost, right? The Bitcoin is a proof that the cost was market-driven, right? But that's only if it's not under a monopoly control, right? once it's under monopoly control you could charge as much in fees as you want and not put them on

chain even right they can be completely invisible and therefore extract a premium from producing the money or the transactions or the blocks right and so you could achieve the same result um sign your through the money um so what's the proof telling you it's not telling you that right it's not there's no proof of the cost of producing bitcoin there's only proof of work that's not even proof of energy energy costs vary right or any the amount of energy efficiency to produce the computations necessary to prove the work very somewhat so you really Satoshi you know use the right term right work it's just proving that probabilistically these number of computations were performed it's not

proof of cost so anyway it was it was important to point that out because but what that led to and that's again goes back to the proper understanding of the difference between monopoly money and and market money i mean fiat versus bitcoin is is in the monopoly and then you look at it closely and you realize well what if bitcoin could be monopolized and then that's what led me to the conclusion that yeah it could be just you know you so if the fees are on chain right any miner can go out and capture those fees and you everybody assumes that all the money that a miner is making is on chain but there's absolutely no reason it has to be what do you mean by that uh so um when people

pay fees in transactions to miners that achieves um anonymity right any miner can grab the fees without knowing who the transactor is but it's not necessary it's just beneficial right so as as and we know miners do this right they make arrangements with we saw it publicly during the fee crisis they were accepting credit card payments to boost fees and stuff absolutely so these the but you have to understand that's what i that's what i call side fees that doesn't have any impact on on actual people using the money it doesn't change the amount of money the miner makes miner can put if a miner mines his own transaction he put any fee in the block that he wants for that transaction it has no impact on his return put a huge fee just capture it back

Put zero fee, get it on the side, makes no difference. You're still using the same amount of energy and netting the same amount of money. So the fees tend to be useful and interesting, but they're not proof of the amount of money that the miner's making. So we get to that situation where fees start to matter and people start doing these things. I actually wrote about that a while ago. I mean, coming up with fee arrangements.

Say you're Coinbase or somebody, right? You make a fee arrangement with some miner. we're actually raising the cost of getting your transactions mined because you know you're directing them towards this one miner so they're taking longer to get confirmed right you if I don't actually don't remember all the details but there's a there's a several there's several things that add to your cost right you're better off just letting the market handle the transactions and pay the market fee because you're going to pay at least the market fee anyway

either that or the miners donating to you or you're donating to the miner right so you have this inefficiency but it's hard to know what the market fee is if it's not on the chain right so you just keep raising your fee until somebody takes it but that's how that's how business works right you walk into a store and you want to buy something you know making on a lot of parts that would just make an offer until both parties agree and then you then you then you settle so without without the fee being without the true fee the true reward to the miner being fully reflected in the chain how do you know how much it's

actually costing to produce the block you don't and you know you could certainly see a system where you have this kind of sensor demanding people get authorization to confirm right and that authorization comes to the fee that you pay you know someone somehow else and you wouldn't see that and other miners wouldn't be able to potentially pick it up in those transactions and does this play also into your theory of waste heat? Could that play into the scenario too

where they're profiting from the waste heat produced by the miners or the generators running the miners? I would offhand I don't have a way to connect that to what we're talking about. I did write one or two topics

on that a while ago and I got some good input from some waste miner producers and positive. I think we have it right. but in the end So just just comment on waste energy mining. I mean what you're doing is you're You're not you're not reducing the amount of energy consumed, right? You know you're using a different source so presumably the same amount but by removing that

Removing the consumption take all Bitcoin mining and you move it to waste energy mining stuff that would just be vented, right? So it's still being consumed. It's either being vented or it's being turned into ones and zeros but it's still being consumed so but now you have this less less being demanded in the market for you know marketable energy well lower demand you're gonna reduce the cost right which is now going to increase demand so you're probably you know because because energy is a is a factor in production of everything so likely the going price of energy maintains itself pretty pretty constant over time right so you reduce you move everybody else somewhere else and now more energy gets

consumed so what happens is there's greater wealth right more more stuff is getting produced than before for the same amount of energy being consumed so yeah you're tapping a new energy source and um you know the same amount of energy is being consumed and people are getting wealthier great yeah um but that that doesn't uh that doesn't tie into like the profit of like so that's tech yeah so there's not like a fee off-chain fee that they're they're also getting but it is like a different profit well so if you can if you can tap a cheaper energy source than your competitors now you can make a greater profit and therefore the uh opportunity cost now accrues to your competitors and they move to that same energy source and you know people

recognize this is this is a transitional um advantage you move move there take advantage of it everybody else eventually has to move there um or the reduction in cost of the primary marketable source of energy now benefits your competitors right your cost is going to start going up people start charging you for this energy right why wouldn't they right it's now got demand and and the cost of the market energy is going down because supplies demand is being removed from it so eventually it equals out right this is um but there's there's this entrepreneurial opportunity to go and take advantage of it in the interim yeah do you do you think that that's a factor that will help distribute mining long term because i i would imagine it's hard to find you

know the cheapest energy in the world all in one place for the amount of energy capacity that bitcoin is going to need right uh well the more more places you can find energy the more highly distributed you know in small scale bitcoin mining can be presumably um i mean i don't know if what we're talking about is actually more distributed from the sense of being able to hide which is what we're really talking about right i can run a mine and it's illegal to mine can i do it hiding you know next to some you know oil well well i would say like the big one is excess hydro right this is where a lot of the focus has been um because during the during the downtimes of of energy consumption around these dams yeah the price of electricity goes down tremendously

but they all have capacity issues in different areas right so it would naturally distribute around the world because you can't power all the miners just at one dam well the problem with hydro is it's not portable so you know i mean their dams tend to be fairly large and so these ones you're going to run a bitcoin mine off of excess hydro power so they don't hide very well but the other problem with um we call renewables right uh solar hydro wind is that the the the capital cost of your mining hardware start starts to way out see way exceed your energy advantage because of intermittency of the power i looked at this you know pretty closely well it just didn't make sense if you can't have 24 7 power you're you're you're struggling yeah that's what uh james chang and i

actually talked about for a little bit he he was big in the solar industry and optimistic at one point but optimistic about it at one point but uh you can have a stretch of cloudy days a stretch of windless days and i have a good friend who's big in the wind industry um did a wind startup sold it to con ed or something you know it was big billion dollar stuff and very excited about the fact that we can get negative energy cost right you can actually get energy that they pay you to take um certain times of the day and it sounds very exciting to a bitcoiner but when you look at the the times that you get it and the amount of idle time you have on your your hardware you realize that the depreciation of your hardware is rapid enough to far outweigh the advantage of

even free or negative cost energy but shouldn't shouldn't that improve over time as well right asic lifestyle uh modification of asics and stuff well that's basically assumption that we reach some kind of limit in yeah in computational speed which in human history has not happened right and if you've read there's a paper on it it's very very theoretical paper that way beyond my ability to fully understand but the thermodynamic thermodynamic limit of computing power and that's basically the app you know once once you've reached this limit it's not possible to get any smarter right and it does exist it's very interesting it has to do with you know speed of light and distance and and computational ability as a consequence of that and okay so

we're we're not even close to that right we're so yeah there may not be innovations that we see that are going to improve computation but i think it's a fairly reasonable assumption to to assume that we'll keep moving towards that theoretical limit over time as we have throughout the entirety of human history um so yeah if if nobody could make anything that went any faster eventually you know the the the the hardware that does the computations would just get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and um you know in terms of real cost and yeah that would your depreciation of your hardware would start to become less important in relation to the cost of your energy right now it's a major factor um so yeah asics are akin to driving a car off the car dealership lot

they start depreciating right away is that fair to say i don't know if it's quite the same because that's just like this this cliff immediately right it's more of a continuous right uh depreciation but it is pretty rapid i don't i mean i'm not i did a little bit of mining years ago but um it's just a period of i think a couple years where you go from you know the full cost down to zero um you know and there are times when you can bring it back online uh becomes worth it but yeah that's a that's a that's a very prohibitive thing i think in terms of renewables now um and for probably ever but um yeah if you could compute with no hardware cost then yeah cheaper energy is all that matters but there's

and it's not just hardware costs we use that as a kind of a summing up of all the costs aside from the pure energy costs of mining and there's there's security and there's network and you know there's also the cost of latency and variants um that are kind of inherent in the protocol all. But the other costs, you know, are not immaterial. And people kind of figured this out. But the more sources you can tap and the more, you know, the smaller you can make your minds, the better it is in terms of security at a system level. yeah that just makes sense right and i think it's the economics of the uh stranded energy alone like i think it makes sense that bitcoin mining will be distributed

in the future but it's unknowable right now um i think uh i think once you get oil producers to sort of realize this that's one thing that sort of fascinated me a decade in is that oil producers don't sort of realize this this uh additional monetization they can have via bitcoin mining if they were to right if you're sitting on an oil hoard right and you're just waiting for the price to get where you think it's going to be optimal for you to sell it you know you're you're that's depreciating right there's a cost for storing it like anything else and there's an opportunity cost that accumulates over time for not having the capital invested in you know in earning interest um in some production so it's just sitting there as inventory and and at some

point it makes sense to to convert it to capital and and uh you know so but i i you know i haven't done the math on um what those costs and trade-offs are for people that store you know huge volumes of oil you know i don't know um let's see what i got here yeah so what do you think we need to focus on right now like uh as people building building on bitcoin like what what is most imperative in your mind to to fortify like we had the the arabus attack vector was uh brought to the brought to people's consciousness a few weeks ago where isps can sort of uh just the way that bitcoin core the way that nodes connect with each other and isp can attack and partition off particular nodes if they wanted to and that seems like a pretty big attack vector but what do you

think we need to focus on as as a network right now i think the most important aspect that that we need to resolve is privacy um you know bitcoin is very transparent and that's problematic if you you know if you envision using it in the way it's envisioned uh working so um i always applaud the efforts of you know core devs that are working on real privacy technology you know um mixing only goes so far not far enough and um there's there's issues with you know true anonymity as well inflation things like that right provability so those are hard problems but i'm hopeful that they are surmountable problems and we can get you know better privacy in terms of delinking transactions or you know not having them visibly linked i think that's the most most important

issue in bitcoin what do you think it's something that could be on the horizon that could contribute to that are you interested in snore signatures it's all interesting and i you know i i tend i mentioned before online here that uh i tend not to comment on too much on the specifics of things that i haven't written myself i just don't know them well enough to be able to make an informed judgment but um from what from what i've seen you know uh there's there's good work and it makes sense and um i'm hopeful that we'll make enough progress to be able to have that you know delinking capability but in terms of what's going to make it happen i'm not it's not entirely clear to me yet and once once something does start to you know look effective and working and people are using

it then you know we'll bring it into the bitcoin um and make it um try to try to make it easier for people to use yeah and then uh another thing you were you were talking about before we hit record here you say you don't believe bitcoin's scarce um that's not really um what i what i mean um what i mean is that people overblow the importance of scarcity like value comes from scarcity well there's two concepts of scarcity in economics there's property all of which is scarce right it has it's not you know infinitely available at no cost to retrieve right but it's not a relative thing it's just an absolute concept it's either scarce or it isn't right and anything that we consider property has to have that aspect otherwise it's just not property it's freely

freely given nature given as the austrians would say um and then there's scarcity as it's used um kind of generally and uh in discussion on you know what the markets are doing you know so So that's really just a euphemism for price. There's more available on the market. There's less available on the market. There's more demand for it. There's less demand for it. So as demand increases, it becomes more scarce.

And as supply increases, it becomes less scarce. But those are relative terms. There's no absolute scarcity in any of those things. Gold doesn't have absolute scarcity. It just changes in price because demand and supply vary. so the importance of you know scarcity is important for something to be property but the idea that something is better at being a money because it has higher scarcity is not even a rational statement it doesn't make any sense and i think so i was mentioning

um a couple errors in austrian economics earlier and and i think maybe one of these propagates from an era that persists that gold is inflationary, whether Bitcoin's inflationary under the issuance schedule, right? So it's kind of, you know, it's technical economics speak, but basically the money relation, which is what we're talking about

when we talk about supply inflation, right? This is really what we're talking about. And Austrians refer to this as the money relation, the amount, the number of units of the money, right? whatever that however that's described ounces of gold if you want in proportion to the goods demanded in the money right which is equivalent to saying demand for the money right I need the money so I can get the goods so you have a certain amount of money you have a certain amount of demand for goods in the money

that ratio is the money relation and if that ratio doesn't change right either through a change in supply of the money or change in demand for goods in the money then then it's kind of just a tautology the ratio hasn't changed in other words there's no there's no there's no inflation as a consequence of either of those things right there could be inflation for other other reasons that prices change right but not as a consequence of either increasing the supply of money or say changing demand for goods right so that's what we're talking about we're talking about the importance of scarcity and it's very clear you know that the money relation changes when there's say an introduction of supply so we look at the dollar

and you know we introduce a trillion dollars at 94.5 you know percent discount it's not quite that because the hundred dollar bills have a different cost but you know we introduce this supply with a very tiny consumption of goods to produce the supply so that changes the money relation but when you mine gold or when you make any money in a competitive market one that's not monopoly controlled the competition and the the fact of competition ensures that you consume as much in goods as you produce in money right the gold miner buys consumes destroy you know depreciates his property in producing the gold and that's a trade he's traded one for the other to him they're worth I mean it's worth the trade right so in in Austrian economics that's pretty well recognized

but at the same time there's a contradiction because that introduction of gold is seen as inflationary which it's not because the money relation is unchanged when you as soon as you remove those goods you destroy them right in the production of the gold the miner doesn't have them anymore and he gets the gold and now has to go buy them so now the demand for the goods have been reduced but now they're increased again with the money. So the money relation remains unchanged in a market supplied money. So the error that the interaction of that gold is inflationary propagates into other things like bitcoin.

Now we introduce more bitcoin, it's inflationary. No it's not. It doesn't change the money relation at all. The miner has consumed as much goods that were demanded in the money as he has produced in money and then goes and spends that money to get the goods that he no longer has, right? That's so new demand. So creation of a market money is not inflationary. And so it doesn't matter if the supply of it is fixed or not, right?

The creation of, well, the cap is ultimately exists as long as you're creating more Bitcoin, it's not changing the money relation at all. You're creating more gold, you're not changing the money relation at all. So and that's true for all goods. create more goods, you've destroyed as much in producing the goods as you've created, right? Including the opportunity cost that the goods would have provided for you, which is where the return, the profit comes from, right? That's the amount that the producer makes is the opportunity cost that he spent by destroying those goods. So, yeah, I know

I'm getting all the technical about economics, but this idea that like there's more or less scarcity um it just doesn't make any sense right it doesn't matter how much there is or that more is being produced what matters is that it's produced by a market versus monopoly controlled but how's it not inflationary if i if there were ever to be more bitcoin issued than the 21 million that are now defined in the protocol how's that not inflationary it costs you as much to make the new bitcoin as you get in bitcoin that cost is destruction of demand of is destruction of goods that were demanded in the money but as that's for the miners right but what about like just somebody those miners have destroyed so say they make a hundred thousand dollar block i'm sorry for using

dollars but and they've destroyed a hundred thousand dollars in their own capital to make that block right that that capital that that that was capital that was demanded in the money right Now there's less of that capital demanded in the money, right? So I'm sorry. Now there's an equivalent amount because once they obtain the $100,000 block, what do they do with it, right? Eventually that money becomes demand for the goods that they no longer have, that they spent. They get their investment back, right? So that's new demand for stuff that's been destroyed, right?

It doesn't exist anymore. So the money relation does not change. And this is why you observe gold having a fairly constant purchasing power over time despite continual inflation of the money, right? Not of the money, not a net change to the money relation. So it nets out over time. It nets out instantly. Yeah. Right?

I mean, I have to go and take my own capital and destroy it in order to make anything, and then I get back what I destroyed. No change to the ratio. Right? And that is how this theory about inflation, that is what it means. It's the money relation, right? so it's very easy to show that the money relation doesn't change when you produce new goods right it doesn't take anything from anybody right the miner destroys his own property and produces some

new property of the same value to him right could you argue that it takes the purchasing power of other bitcoin holders or no that but that's that's exactly the point right it doesn't that's what purchasing power is it's the it's the rate purchasing power of money is this ratio of the amount of money to the goods demanded in the money right so if that ratio doesn't change you can't say that the inflation the the creation of new money is causing a loss of purchasing power because the purchasing power definition has not changed at all and again we can observe this over long periods of time with gold now the the production of gold is not controlled by some inherent property of gold it's controlled by demand for it right more demand more supply and

so people look at gold and say well it's you know only grows at about two three percent per year something like that one to three percent per year well okay so if you look at the supply of goods in the world that exist growing over time we call that growth capital growth capital growth is a consequence of what really time preference so interest you earn what the products you make and sell right those products that get sold that's the return on your investment that is the interest right the new products so interest is the growth is the creation of new stuff right but while you're while you're making this new stuff you're destroying old stuff all the stuff that exists depreciates the depreciation rate for stuff globally you know is a fairly consistent number

right if people get poor they tend to make things last longer but stuff depreciates at a certain rate stuff is produced at a certain rate the interest rate around 10% historically right so we have a depreciation that's say around six seven percent depending on what you know buildings depreciate it maybe four or five percent factories maybe seven eight percent food you know hundred percent so so this is there's it but this is constant depreciation of everything that exists and there's this constant production of new things what's the difference between that that's growth that's what remains you know that's the that's the net accumulation of stuff over time and that tends to be around 2%, 3%.

So this growth of stuff demanded in the money causes an increase in the amount of money. Otherwise, money would become infinitely profitable to make and a lot of opportunity cost for not mining it. So yeah, gold gets produced at the rate of economic growth. Not surprising. But there's a difference there with gold total supply and Bitcoin total supply

and how it's provable how much there is, right? Because there's no way to actually tell how much gold there is in the world or the universe or whatever you want to measure that on. So we're talking specifically about creation of new Bitcoin and creation of new gold. When you stop creating new Bitcoin, you have a different situation, right? I'm talking about the introduction of new units works just like with gold, right? It doesn't cause a change in purchasing power

because it doesn't cause a change in the money relation. But then if you stop producing it, So in other words, if it got more, if there was more and more goods demanded in the money all the time, the price of the cost and therefore the value of producing new units goes up with that. If that goes down, the same thing happens, right? It becomes cheaper. So you're always producing it at a cost that doesn't change the money relation. But when you stop being able to produce it, now you can produce none. What happens?

Well, more and more goods are demanded in the money. And the money doesn't increase, right? What you have is an increase in the purchasing power of the money. It changes the money relation. So this is a different situation when Bitcoin transitions into this no more being produced, right? But what's causing that increase in demand for goods and the money? If Bitcoin was the only money, it would be growth, right? And growth is around 2% to 3% per year.

And it's a consequence of people investing in production, not holding, right? Actually getting interest from their money. So in that sense, I mean, a deflationary money in this sense, right, has never existed before. Deflationary anything has never existed before. And it has certain consequences that people don't really look at very closely. The consequence, so you can imagine, say, you have this monetization period where people stop using one money, start using another. Like what's happening with Bitcoin, right? They use one instead of the other.

So now more and more goods are getting demanded in the money. the money is appreciating in purchasing power as a consequence of that right and it's still being produced at no change in purchasing power and then it stops and it continues to get monetized right but what there's a and as a result you're going to have increase in purchasing power as long as that monetization continues but then you hit another limit which again is unique to bitcoin bitcoin is unique in more than one way more than fixed supply it's unique in that it has fees and a fixed rate of transaction and that has consequences

which gold doesn't have nothing else has so while you can expect a growth rate of appreciation of the purchasing power that also produces

a limit to the usability of the money right because some transactions would be too small to send well they are already yeah right we call it dust yeah right so it's an interesting idea like so um the proper analogy when you look at gold you don't look at it as okay the smallest transactable unit of gold is the atom right we never use that term we use dust but in bitcoin people tend to look at divisibility

as the satoshi the satoshi is the atom right it's not the divisibility limit the divisibility limit is dust just like it is with gold you can't divide you can't spend it on something if it's below that limit that limit like gold is not a hard and fast number right it's more of becomes unusable at some point right so if the dust limit is i don't know you know like if the dust limit becomes the point where you you can't buy coffee anymore oh some people would some people wouldn't but it's right there on that that line right but then it moves up now you can't buy a car anymore now you can't buy a business anymore right you you you you're excluding all of the transactability all the things that could be demanded in the money below that level just like gold right you can't transact

those things in gold so now you can aggregate transactions right start layering like happens with gold happen with gold right but the interesting thing about gold is that dust limit doesn't tend to move because as more demand accrues in the for the money more gets created so the dust limit It tends to stay right around the same level, roughly, right? So with Bitcoin, that doesn't happen because as the dust limit moves up, you're increasing the fee ratio, right? Well, the fee ratio is the dust limit. So if you reach the point where you've got a limit, it can't transact anymore because it's, you know, 10% of my transaction is going to fees. When I start aggregating and I do a lot of transactions, you know, off-chain essentially, and then I settle, I'm still paying 10%, you know, of everything that I have left in fees.

So the aggregation process doesn't change that. It just moves up the size of the minimum transaction, right? I call it the utility threshold. Instead of being, you know, a $1 transaction is the smallest you can do in Bitcoin. It's now a $10 or $100 or $1,000 or $1,000,000. But as you move up, there's fewer and fewer types of transactions that you can do for goods, right, at those higher levels. You can't buy coffee, you can't buy cars, you can't buy these things. So you've excluded all this demand for goods while you've now moved that threshold up.

So there's this proportional relationship between the utility threshold, right, and the value that can be represented by the money. I mean, the more that goes up, you increase larger transactions and you remove smaller transactions. but there's a lot more smaller transactions, right? And there's this proportionality that you can assume between the size of transactions and the total amount of value represented by them. Say, like, for example, there's 10 times as many $10,000 transactions

as there are $100,000 transactions, right? So you've excluded all $10,000 transactions and everything up to $100,000 when you've moved the utility threshold up to that point. So basically what that means is you've, as a consequence of fees hitting the point where people can't transact you can you can aggregate you move things up kind of centralize right all these lightning hubs or whatever you know settling for people but you can't represent more utility in the money right the money the bitcoin still

you know again it can move up by excluding other stuff but it can't take on more so some people will say that well we can you know we can just keep everything off chain right and do all these low-cost transactions but that's not really very rational because if you can't settle you have no security so you know we have a channel but I can't settle because it's 100% of the cost of what I have just to open or close that channel so I can't close it so you just rip me off I have no there's no consequence it's not a realistic solution for me to settle and close the channel if the cost of closing the channel wipes out you know years of gains even 10 even a 10 fee level wipes out a full year of investment gains

and you have to open and close so 10 fee level wipes out two years of investment gains right so do you do you see this as like a huge limiting factor of bitcoin success potentially in the future no i see it as something that if understood it leads to certain inevitable outcomes right so once you reach a proportion of fees to and this is certainly what you would do if you had the usage that people imagine right the fee level would there's only you only get like five or six thousand transactions through the chain every 10 minutes right and they can be high value again excluding everything below it right but once you get to the proportion that people will no longer accept say I mean, say it's 100%.

That's fairly easy, right? I think, you know, even if you say 10%, that's pretty high. That's about the highest you see in terms of remittances and other things that people will actually pay to use the money. And, again, 10% is about a year's worth of investment gains. So that's two years wiped out for an opening and closing a channel. That's pretty high. So let's say, you know, we get to 10% fees. Now you can't represent any more demand for goods in the money.

The more you move up, the more you exclude proportionally. So what happens is you have this money that's, you know, usable to that extent, but no more demand can be represented. It can't represent any more goods. It can't take on any more economic value. So demand moves somewhere else, right? But another unique thing about Bitcoin, unlike gold, for example, is you can make another one that's exactly the same, right? Exactly the same in the technology, right, in the way it operates, not in the history of it. But you can't do that with gold.

You can't make another gold. But then again, you don't need to because you always just mine more and you don't have this dust problem, right? This divisibility problem. So I think what it inevitably leads to is at that point when it's too expensive to use the money for, you know, all these things,

you end up with just another one that looks just like it with lower security, lower transaction values. As it gets monetized, right? You could reach the same limit and do it again. you could just create another exactly the same copy just another genesis block and do it again it doesn't happen now because because of fear's law you use the better money right low fees better security use that one why would you use another one but when you get to the point where you can't right it becomes more costly to use what was presumably the better money now now you use

something else so substitutes and people just ignore you know substitutes you know it's all this maximalism and shit coiners and all this stuff but but you know this is how bitcoin evolved right and and doing it again would make sense in the case where it becomes too expensive to use and there's nothing wrong with that right would that create a scenario where that new chain just helps bitcoin as it is now find an equilibrium and lower the fee ratio for that well it would be lower on the new chain and presumably some activity that's on the other chain that you know could be moved to to the lower fee chain would but it maybe doesn't have to right the higher value transactions are being transacted on the chain that has higher level of security and people

will arbitrage you know security for um for cost right they don't want that level of security they use a lower cost but there's no reason to do that now right so it doesn't happen it can't can't ever get off the ground because there's there's a better money um but so what people imagine this perpetual increase in price because of fixed supply ignores the effect of fees just completely ignores it fixed supply is unique to bitcoin but so are fees right and um and that can't be ignored so this this kind of like we all sit around do nothing and make money off of off of speculating on people using Bitcoin more and more has a limit, right? It's monetization, you know, okay,

where, you know, the money's being monetized, but Bitcoin becomes at some point fully monetized. Gold never becomes fully monetized. There's always new gold being produced and, you know, as in response to economic growth. So that new demand would not accrue its value to existing holders as it accrues on another chain. And that's the thing that the Hodler community wouldn't like to hear.

But it doesn't hurt Bitcoin at all. It's exactly what you would want. You would want the money to continue to be useful. I can see Matt getting triggered over here. I mean, it would basically end up being like an unpegged. I try not to trigger too much. It would be a side chain with like an unpegged utility token. No, just another chain.

It can't be a side chain. Why not? Because that implies greater demand in the money itself. Right. Right. So so so sidechains are essentially if you look at money and credit in the abstract, right, sidechains are credit, right? You lightning. It's credit that's fully offset by the lockup of the of the money. Right. So it's a one to one credit, but it's it has to be settled in the money. Credit is always settled in the money. Sidechains settle in in the money.

Lightning settles in Bitcoin. Right. And that ability to settle is essential to the security of those credit systems. right and as i described before that ability to settle starts to go away when you reach this threshold but you would have theoretically you would have like multiple chains with different security models that could swap in between settle back to bitcoin in like a trust minimized manner settling back to bitcoin would cost you that high level that you're trying to avoid right so no this is it to me it's like not hard to imagine i don't know why it tends to be hard people imagine but you can imagine bitcoin is this set of chains right where once one gets fully monetized and it becomes expensive to use now there's there's potential for another

to actually take on value and as that starts to happen yet another until you've represented as much in value um that people will demand in the money um i mean there's got there is some limit to that right the the amount of all goods in the in the world for example um or the black market fraction of them or something and it may be the may be true that that there's never enough demand in one chain to for that to ever happen right we never get to a fee level that is high enough um that people care but you know we've already gotten to a fee level that's high enough that people don't do some things but um it's not reached the should say you can you can mitigate that through layering and continue to move up on chain the the size of the transaction the minimum

size of the transaction that you can do but as you create enough demand even through lightning or side chains right as you create more and more demand to settle right you're going to increase the fee cost of settling to the point where now it's not secure anymore because you can't settle in a cost-effective way i mean you know even even to just buy one thing right even if you want to open a channel, close it, settle, or you expect you might need to close it because the other person may be not so trustworthy. So if you're spending a 50% fee, you know, just to open and close, you've wiped out 100% of the money you put in the channel.

So there is a fee level at which point the money becomes unusable, even in layering situations. What do you think about, like, dust holidays? Have you ever heard that concept? No, it sounds like fun. where miners allow users with dust to consolidate UTXOs to get over that fee ratio that you're alluding to. Allow meaning miners donate to people.

So you can see it as donate or in your scenario where another chain were to start, they could also see that their capital they've invested in the miners on the main chain may become less valuable if people move over to this other chain. classic example of economic an economically irrational proposal uh because it's individual cost socialized gain right yeah there's some value to me but it's the same as the value to everybody else right so it's like it's it's very economically irrational even though people might

do it right uh you can't say that they won't because value is subjective but um if you're looking at just purely economic um and not just the financial gain right but the projected financial gain of it it's not rational it's just similar to something that somebody pointed out the other day um bishop i think he said he said hey what if somebody attacks the money by stealing and burning coins that they steal you know so reducing supply right of things demandable in the money um and yeah it's but it's economically irrational right like i'm going to take on all the cost of doing this plus the opportunity that i could actually spend the money maybe i don't want to take the risk of spending it right but i took the risk of stealing it and then i burn it

and everybody gets the same benefit that i get right brian was the one who said that right yeah twitter yeah yeah we yeah we talked about a little bit on twitter and and i think he sees that it's just an interesting real idea i guess the argument was is that like using bitcoin privately is extremely difficult right now so they would skip that hurdle right so that yeah the malware would just be like burn and once we see it's a certain amount gets burned to this address then we right If you can write some machine to go do it, right, then the only cost to you is the machine, and people do that stuff just for fun.

Certainly feasible, but like somebody going out and just stealing somebody's money and then throwing it away, right? It's like go rob the Fed and burn some dollars or something, right? It's socialized gain. It's a common problem, right? You have socialized benefit and individual cost or whatever.

So I don't see those kind of things as economically rational. It's just like the idea that people would donate hash power against a 51 attack and just pay their own money to help out the community possible might even happen to some extent but you can't make an argument that that's security because at least i don't because it's if it's not economically rational then you can't expect it to happen yeah that's fascinating i can i can hear the freaks getting some freaks getting triggered out there but these are again like these are realities and and i mean there's no the only people that would get triggered by anything I just said presumably are

people that are speculating and see perpetual price increases there's not a negative to Bitcoin not at all right this is this is a proposed solution to a problem that's inevitable if there's enough adoption great now we can see because you said well do you see it just not working I said no I don't it can work like this what's the problem with that there is no problem with that not in terms of the money doing what Satoshi envisioned or what people imagine doing which is providing a stateless money. So the whole community tends to get driven

by speculation, right? I mean, it's not investment, first of all, right? Investment is when you lend your money to somebody else for production. Speculation is betting that the price will go up or down based on future demand for goods and the money. And all prices are speculatory to some extent, but interest is predictable, right?

There is time preference, and if everybody has high enough time preference, no goods get produced. No goods get produced, then people pay more for money, and even people with high time preference will lend that money. So it's interesting, economic growth is predictable. If you have economic,

and people tend to look at these things as like, we have growth, and we have contraction, and they're kind of offsetting, it's not. Growth is perpetual and predictable. Recession is an anomaly, it's an exception. In other words, what it means is that the depreciation of goods is now exceeding the production of goods. Things are getting used up faster than they're getting produced. So there's less and less goods, you know, over time.

And what happens when there's less and less stuff? People pay more for stuff, right? Therefore, people pay more for money to make the stuff. Interest rates rise. Stuff gets produced. People conserve. They don't use up stuff as fast. Depreciation schedules slow down.

so you there's there's a natural aspect of growth which is a consequence of people wanting things and and of time preference so um i don't i can't remember i can't remember where i got on the tangent of of growth being you know kind of natural but um bitcoin's gonna pump forever that was yeah that was the tangent yeah i mean i mean doing doing nothing and making money as a as speculating on what's predictable is completely irrational in my mind right like if it's predictable you can't speculate on it's already priced in so what you're doing is you're

guessing you're gambling and sometimes you know that's a good gamble sometimes it's not but it's not this is a point I was making right speculation is inherently not predictable it's what it means right it's the part that's not known or you know provable so

the yet people who believe that there's this perpetual not predictable but but predictable perpetual growth in price for bitcoin um are assuming things that just don't necessarily hold up i mean there is growth in the in the case of monetization right people moving from one month money to another but it's impossible to say whether that has already been fully factored in right so i did a little computation i mean people do crazy computations on trying to estimate price like if we're speculating on price what is it we're speculating what's the demand that's going to eventually exist you know for use of the money and some people will take like

total amount of bank money in the world and say well if bitcoin substituted that well when i say bank money i mean credit right bank accounts well bitcoin's not credit it's money so that's not rational to to substitute that there will be credit in bitcoin as well otherwise there'll be no production unless it's in some other money right so you take the total amount of money in the world say state money and look at bitcoin just replacing all of it and then you realize well okay if it's if white market you know kind of goes away then you're left with 20 to 30 percent of the world's economy is black market and if bitcoin was to represent all that fraction of the money and you would take the net present value of that say

10 years out right bitcoin represents all of the black market you'd have a certain implied price and you know taking into account some amount of loss of bitcoin and things like that but at the current price from what i was able this is a very rough approximation but at the current price it implies about a seven percent adoption of the black market okay i mean it's something's material that's significant right that's i mean it implies a future net present value of seven percent ten years in the future of um of seven percent adoption of black market and if you imagine like it being only black market it couldn't be the only money used in the black market because the black market tends to need things in the white market right so that's why

they're always trying to get you know there's money long is why dollars get used and not just some commodity like coke or something right so so there has to be white market money used by the black market too so you could really never in that scenario i don't think you could ever really fully represent you know black market activity in bitcoin but some percentage absolutely and we already have that um but the vast majority of well i don't know i can't i can't say this is again this this come this comes down to not provable but there's there's presumably a significant portion of activity in bitcoin that causes demand to transact and therefore price that's white market right and if you're speculating on full white market adoption you're you know

you're making a fully different set of assumptions um yeah fascinating it's been an incredible conversation we're an hour and 46 minutes in now uh we got a hard stop here in like 25 minutes but But is there anything in particular you want to touch on before we wrap up here or anything that obviously we've been talking about? To the moon. To the moon. Obviously we've been talking a lot. Orange coin go up. I love this episode because we talked about, we're talking about a lot of maybe blind spots that a lot of Bitcoiners, including myself, have when it comes to the limitations of the system.

Yeah, maybe. What else is interesting? I don't know what you ask. I have plenty of things I can talk about. So how's the rebuilding of your motorcycle going? Well, I managed to keep all my fingers. I got some bad cuts from the grinding wheel, flap wheel. My wheels are coming back when I get home in a couple days.

I'll be fully done. And the frame's all welded up and got a lot of the parts. So hoping to have it together by the end of the year. What's that process like? So when you're building, do you do that to not think about Bitcoin and maybe refresh your mind a little bit? I don't know. I've had this bike since 1984.

And I took it to college, put a lot of miles on it. And it's been sitting for about 25 years in my basement. So my daughter wanted to do a project with me for school. And so she got me motivated to do it. But I ride a lot now. I keep a bike down in Los Angeles at a friend's house and go to Mexico and the desert and stuff. And I rent, travel around the world. I've been to 80 countries so far.

I like traveling. It gets harder and harder to get the new ones the more you get. Why do you say that? Well, it's just like stuff tends to happen in the same places. I go back to Riga. I'm going to Tel Aviv. I'm in Tokyo, whatever places I've been to before. So I did a, I'll give you an example.

I rented a bike in June and I bought myself in London and I went out to the channel and I did, I did a conference in Amsterdam and a meetup. And then I did, I did nine countries in Europe and I got one new country, Lichtenstein. I had to go out of my way to get to Lichtenstein. And so it's, it's just getting, it gets harder. But I got to, I got to hit Eastern Europe, I think next summer on a bike and get 10 new countries and I'll be done with

all the major european countries this is going to be embarrassing to say but i think i've only been like five five or six better than most people other countries 80s and is awesome that's that's impressive i've only met one person that's been to more i mean i know there's a lot of people have been to more but i've only actually met one person that was like so disappointed like really you've been more than me i mean how many total countries are there 220 it depends on how you count but my app i think it's around 250 yeah right his turn vase the only one has been to more places i don't know i don't i don't know andreas is doing pretty well you know yeah um but i don't i think he's in 60s probably hey well traveling let's all travel more i want to travel

more absolutely um well eric thank you again for coming by dude this is uh sure my pleasure thanks for having me it's been an immense pleasure for me as well matt do you have any i really enjoyed this one yeah thank you for coming i always appreciate your work yeah thank you so much yeah um where can we find you uh twitter evoskul uh yeah we'll put the um the link to the libitcoin uh github.com slash libitcoin slash libitcoin dash system slash wiki is where all the economic stuff is um mentioned donations how do people donate um send your money to me no um no we'll you can contact me or Tom Pachia

and get the details the organization that we're just working on a final IRS kind of you know letter

but the the organization is formed it's called LeBitcoin Institute and it's basically just a way for us to fund

development and education through LeBitcoin and if somebody wants to take advantage of that just contact me or Tom and uh we can hook you up hell yeah all right that's all we got this week freaks peace and love