The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - MrRGnome - The Good, The Bad and The Bitcoin

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. This week we welcome back returning guest MrRGnome. Gnome is a moderator of r/Bitcoin, r/BitcoinCA, the official Bitcoin Discord, and a long time Bitcoiner unafraid to speak his mind on the state of the culture, the network, and the people yapping about both. Strap in for this one. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase. Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/ Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

Friends and enemies, welcome to Tuesday night, double interview edition. Len is here. I am here. I'm missing football for this, Len. I want you to know. That's my choice. Nobody twisted your arm to do this. Yeah, I know.

I know. I feel bad for my team. Maybe they'll be able to get it done without me. Let's see. It's kind of a weak opponent tonight, but I'm not holding my breath. We have Mr. R. Gnome here. Mr. R. Gnome was unknown to me. I don't know, even before he came on the show, really. And I don't often listen to the shows that you do on

your own, unless you tell me it's something I need to tune into. And I listened to that one. And my wife was kind of in the room or in the area when I was listening to it. And she asked if it was our show or some other show where they were just bashing our show. And so I thought, you know what? Tonight, I better make some time to talk to this fella. I'm sure we'll have some differing opinions. He has opinions on podcasters. And for this, I'll be happy to be more of a fly on the wall.

No, it's okay. I think we agree on a lot of things too. And as is always the case in Bitcoin, vigorous and honest debate is an important part of uh you know moving this thing forward so before we get started as usual the sponsors easy dns let's say bill bitcoin easy dns mark uh did a space last night with uh other friend of the show joe barbuto talking about cbdc's and bitcoin and business building and all sorts of stuff and this sort of future for uh like him, folks like us in Canada, with the way things

are going and the policy positions that seem to be gaining popularity and traction. Look at the DNC if you want to have a bit of a crystal ball glance into the future. Anyway, EZNS is a place where you can host your content. Grab a website, port one over. No matter what the case is, Mark will help you. You can run your email through that new domain of yours, fancy, shiny, GPG, PGP. Also, all the virtual private server stuff

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It's funny, Len. We do the other show for Mark, Access of Easy. And one of the things I've started to sort of look at every time I hit the Twitter machine now is I wonder if Mark will pick up on this. Because the other thing Mark will guarantee you is that your website will be secure on his platform. He's ahead of the game on all those things. So CBP media is the code. Tell Mark we sent you 50% off your first round of buys. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Can't find that. I got buddy sending me these deals on food at these apps called, like, what is this app called? Too good to go. Too good to go. It's like the, it's like the last thing at the grocery store.

Mark is even beating these guys in terms of discounts i'm pretty sure but anyway who's the second sponsor bull bitcoin look we're 57 000 so we just got under the stable coin territory 57 000 so yeah if you're gonna buy bitcoin a good time to buy if you're gonna sell bitcoin you know it's maybe a good time to sell a bull bitcoin has you covered on both ends of the spectrum you could do it on chain you could use lightning when fees are high. Fees are not high right now. Last I checked was around three sats per B-bite on average. So I would suggest continually use on chain and do stacking like that and also consolidate transactions.

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but if you haven't yet opened an account, do so. If you do that and use our promo code below 21 bucks will be added to your account after you fund your account joey we have a third sponsor too right decentral tech can't be i mean we got the best sponsors anyways i'm still learning a bit about decentral tech watching their twitter feed going to their website me and len were talking last night after the show about what the best options are in terms of home heating at Decentral Tech. You got a lot of options over there, whether you want to do some mining in your garage, your basement, or your podcast studio or living room. And maybe if you're listening to this show,

you want to buy something that's CBP branded, which I still can't believe is maybe a possibility, you can do it over there at Decentral Tech. They got what Jonathan claims. A guy Jonathan claims is the fastest board repairman on the planet. Now, I don't know about you, but I would rather see that in the Olympics than what I saw in the breakdancing. So maybe there's something to that. We could push for that in 2028. But in the meantime, these guys will help you get your mining operation off the ground, help you with yourhooting give you some hardware give you some tips best in the game based in canada based out of quebec you love to see it decentral technologies go there there's no promo code

they didn't want one they want to support the show we want to support them it's a match made in heaven so uh definitely make sure if you're thinking about getting into mining your wife won't mind essential tech head over yeah okay let's bring in our guest a man who uh lives behind a eight or nine second looping gif uh i don't know what's going on apologies for that gotta gotta protect at least a little bit of obsec i know a lot of people that are nervous to even put their voice out there they should be these days they should be these days we talk about that all the time, how now I'm waiting for the eventual deep fake

of Len and I saying something unsavory about the government or government policy. Not that it even needs to be that deep or that fake at this stage. I mean, we've been doing the show for a long time. Yeah, I'll say something unsavory about government policy if that's what you're looking for.

Listen, tell people who don't know who you are. It's your second appearance. Tell people who don't know who you are. Yeah, so I'm Mr. Arnaud. I'm Canadian. I've been a Bitcoiner for a long, long time, over a decade now. I use services like Bull Bitcoin to live on a Bitcoin standard. I really appreciate their new e-transfer features.

I really like bills. I love that they're non-custodial. I think appreciate their new e-transfer features. I really like bills. I love that they're non-custodial. I think that that's really important and something that Bitcoiners don't really think about in the larger space. They're not thinking about who's cussing their coins. They're not thinking about risk. They're not thinking about trust and how Bitcoin by its nature eliminates the need for a lot of this trust. If these companies would set up the way that Bull Bitcoin does, where they can offer a service and instead of making their money by holding your money that's how a lot of these companies work they hold your money and then they like basically gamble with it they re-hypothecate it by using bitcoin correctly you eliminate that possibility

and build bull bitcoin's showing that so i'm just a long- a longtime Bitcoiner that's become a bit of an activist in the space. I like to educate. I run the Bitcoin Discord server. And yeah, I'm just, I'm a guy with opinions. I'm a random person on the internet with a big mouth aren't we all aren't we all uh okay well tell me a bit about the uh bitcoin discord server for people who don't know like we cbp has a discord there's a couple hundred people in there you should be in this one too although i don't often comment i do lurk as the kids say uh what's that been like there's been a lot of controversy over the years i won't say how many guests and how many industry people have messaged us asking for an inroads with the Bitcoin subreddit, with the Canadian Bitcoin subreddit, with the Canadian Bitcoin discord over the years. But there's been plenty. You guys run a tight ship, sometimes so tight that people who think they deserve a look from that user base are upset they're not getting it.

What are your views on that? How is that going? Talk to me a bit about that. Oh, first of all, I'm tickled pink that they're upset. That makes me so happy in ways you can't imagine because that is the goal. The goal is for us to, through our actions, tell these people to get fucked. We don't appreciate their solicitation. We don't appreciate the way that they wish to buy influence. We think that the current social media space, especially and including around Bitcoin, is so profit-driven and influencer-driven that finding verifiable, accurate information is, in fact, very hard, and that this actually breeds an enormous amount of harm. People buying and selling influencers, and I'll give you an instance in of harm. People buying and selling influencers.

And I'll give you an instance in your industry. Peter McCormack, very popular podcaster. He was recommending one of those, what was it, BlockFi? The lending platform? Yeah. And it goes under and takes how many people with it? And his only response is, well, I've got to feed my family. I stopped, they stopped sponsoring a while ago i pulled all my money out you're left hanging but i gotta feed my family and the same is true of these you know ta artists and it's true of even

people like andreas sorry it's true of andreas this is why what's it what's andreas got going on that he's andreas makes his money uh based speaker fees, generally speaking. The more people that are listening to him, the more money he makes, just like any influencer, right? That means that he says what's popular. And it's also important that he gets out in front of things. So he's not a laggard, but he's actually in front of it. So for one, he supports shitcoins. He promotes Ethereum, even though he knows that it's not decentralized, even though he watched what happened with the DeFi drama and the DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization,

as that fell apart. He claims that they're decentralized. Well, he doesn't claim that. He knows that they're not, but he promotes them regardless because it's a paycheck for him. And that's the kind of behavior I've come to expect from influencers in this space is that they'll do what it takes to get a paycheck. And frankly, I appreciate that even though you guys are maybe doing something I don't like by taking payment for commentary, I appreciate that the people that are paying you are generally pretty good actors. I've got some problems with bold Bitcoin, especially in the form of their recent activity by adopting shit coins like Liquid. But overall, they are probably the best exchange in the world right now.

And I'm glad that they're sponsoring this content as much as I don't like sponsorship. Same with Decentral, like great organization. But that's not always true and there's really no mechanism for us to vet the influence of these corporations and what messages they were are trying to bring to bitcoiners so in in our social space on the bitcoin discord we don't allow self-promotion i think that's a good policy i i'll just note that from the cbp angle i think len and i've talked about this before we both have day jobs so one of the things we've talked about and the sponsors will all say this, we don't ever go to the sponsors and say, you have to pay us X amount of money. And in exchange, we will say whatever you want,

because it's my livelihood. I have to feed my family. As Wiseman once said, I think you noted there. So we don't do that. I'd be curious, when I look at some of the other subreddits, maybe not in the Bitcoin slash crypto ecosystem, but maybe like the big ones that are on the homepage, for example, these guys are paid at some level or compensated at some level, assuming they don't have jobs of any kind. And they sort of rely on that influence peddling to pay the bills. You guys are not like that, I take it. I mean, don't dox yourself or your colleagues too much, but I can't imagine you guys are making any money doing that. We lose money doing it because we host educational resources and services for free. And it's just our contribution to the ecosystem. I also was for many years as are several of our current moderators in Discord,

moderators at rBitcoin, the major subreddit yes and we also control rbitcoin ca canadian subreddit and i can tell you earnestly and honestly the people that run rbitcoin i may disagree with them about any manner number of things but they're not profiting off of it they're they get so much solicitation in their mod mail asking them to you know hey promote my thing i'll pay you a hundred thousand dollars like and they don't accept it um they they are doing what they think is right and what they think is best um even though i may disagree with any manner of it they're not like financially corrupt actors so what do you what do you make of someone like natalie brunel who you know is a Bitcoiner at some level?

I don't know if she's like the maximalist that maybe the three of us are or are closer to. But she spends a lot of time talking to legacy media, presumably getting paid pretty well for those spots on Fox News and Bloomberg and whatever else. Working for a company like Swan that maybe is or maybe isn't circling the drain and maybe is or maybe isn't going to take a lot of customer funds with them uh but also saying that by the way yeah i mean we on this show we say the unpopular thing sometimes the unpopular thing is that swan is circling the drain other times the unpopular thing is that bitcoin magazine isn't that bad we can get into that too if you want oh we're gonna get into it okay i can't i can't wait i can't wait so the how do you feel about like the brunelles the callahans the uh not to pick on that you know

power couple but these sorts of people who you know are bitcoiners but don't produce a lot of stuff that i think bitcoiners consume it's more stuff that legacy financial people consume or people who are adversarial to our cause consume like where where was your where was your line on influencer and what people should or shouldn't do as far as associating themselves with bitcoin in the broader communication space they're associating themselves with bitcoin for their own self-promotion that's what's happening there um they are influencers like you noted how do i view them I view them categorically as cancers in the ecosystems. They fill the space with noise and reduce signal. They make it more difficult to educate in the ecosystem. They mislead a lot of people with grand rhetoric, because that's what gets people excited is grand rhetoric. But the reality is, is no matter how you're using Bitcoin, it is about risk and risk assessment and managing that risk.

You are your own bank. You are your own writer of your own programmable money. You are in control and the buck stops with you. Is Bitcoin even right for everybody? Maybe not for some people. These are the hard conversations we need to have around adoption. And that's without getting into any of the technical details of like, maybe you should run a node. not for some people. These are the hard conversations we need to have around adoption. And that's without getting into any of the technical details of like, maybe you should run a node. What's your use case? Are you a merchant? Have you checked out BTC pay server? Like it's a

deep well, even at the most shallow levels. And I think that both intimidates a lot of new users and creates an excuse for a lot of these influencers to say, oh, you know what? Bitcoin is so complicated. I got to oversimplify it for people. And I actually don't even think a lot of these influencers know anything about Bitcoin. I think that they're there for the attention and that's why they're saying the things that they are. As you mentioned, it gets them TV spots. It's what works for them. It's how they make their money. You're the product if you're listening to these people. I think that's partially true. Do you think me and Len are influencers? I think that you want to be.

I don't think I want to be. That's a tough pizza to sell me. Because if I wanted to be an influencer, there's a lot of things I could do that- Like start a podcast? I could go further than that. We're just chatting for the most part. I could go way further than that if I wanted to really be an influencer. And I don't, not because I don't have time

or because I don't understand how to do it. I think Len and I both understand what we could do. And in fact, some of our friends in the space have gone down this road to trying to be an influencer at the expense of the content and the quality. I think what we try and do is a little different. You know, as far as influence, I don't have time to be an influencer, nor do I have any appetite to have most of my skeletons and whatnot picked over and taken out of the closet 10 years, 12 years, 15 years later,

because someone gets upset over something I've done once I hit a million followers or whatever. So, I mean, I don't think that but uh i'd be curious to hear what your case is for you know this you guys want to be influencers because just because we're here that we're here having this conversation that you have sponsorship that you've you've monetized your editorial content that to me says that you would like to monetize it more if you feel you could ethically do so. If this show had a million viewers tomorrow, would that not excite you? So is there ethical influencers then? Maybe that's a better question.

I think that it's possible to be an ethical influencer. I think that it revolves around a couple of fundamental tenants, including not being paid for your views. I think that it revolves around a couple fundamental tenets, including not being paid for your views. I think that when you are pushing your views and you get a dollar for them, that that inherently compromises even the most ethical person and message. For example, I don't think that Andreas is an unethical person. I don't think that Peter McCormick is an unethical person. I think that they that Peter McCormick is an unethical person. I think that they are trying to make a living. This is their career.

And this is how they do it in the real world. You can't be an idealist because you have to pay the mortgage. But unfortunately, I think that that means that you shouldn't be an influencer. You should get a job. Not you specifically, but people in- Kind of sounds like me specifically, but yeah, go ahead. Sorry, it's not what I mean. I mean to say that influencers that want to make this their career, that want to monetize their opinions should get a job because I don't believe that opinions should

be monetized. I think that changes the value of them in a very harmful way for the broader community. Okay. I think I'm like halfway there. I disagree on me and Len, obviously, but like I'm halfway there on the idea that being paid for opinions can dull the ethical, I don't know, the ethical peanut butter you put on that toast before it goes into the gullet of the listening public. The thing I would note is that, you know, there's a lot of people who are sharing opinions and monetizing them. And I think a lot of people who do that don't necessarily put the cart before the horse, right? We have opinions. And it seems to me that a lot of people share the opinions. And it's sort of the royal we here, not just Len and I, and not just you either. A lot of people share those opinions and i'm not it's sort of the royal we here not uh just len and i and not just you either um a lot of people share those opinions and if somebody wants to say yeah this is an

opinion that we think we want to push forward and it's my opinion anyways i mean you know i'll level with you like i'll take the money but as soon as it's not an opinion that you know we share with a sponsor or a sponsor shares with us you know we've already done it you know we've we've we've talked about negatively about liquid several yeah yeah bulls yeah bulls bulls yeah yeah right so i mean there are hills that we we will die on regardless of what uh our sponsors are saying people or doing just because of the fact that we believe in a particular cause so like that's a prime example so that's good i'm glad that you guys know where your lines are um but as some of the examples i've already illustrated demonstrate like it's very easy to slip over those lines it creates a conflict

um and without particularly more strong moral fortitude like you guys have it doesn't work out well um i also think that you know there's the money isn't like you guys are saying like we're not really influencers and i agree like you're not you don't hold a whole bunch of sway none of us here do um but the people who do the most successful of them the sailors of the world for example are the ones pumping sunshine up everyone's asshole unpack that i want to hear more about sailor i i actually i i share this take with sailor i think but i want to hear your uh your thoughts so i'm not a fan of sailor i'm not a fan of sailor for multiple reasons the first is that he only sees his own use case um he doesn't believe bitcoin is money he condemned uh uh el salvador when they began their bitcoin experiment um he organized miners to spread environmental fud uh and even

just organizing miners at that that's not that's horrible that's so bad totally don't do that um this last conference that they had in nashville he was up on the stage making outrageous price predictions about like what trillion dollar bitcoin like calling you not a maxi if you don't like go into debt and leverage your whole life like he he did the same thing at the top of the last bull market he told people to take out another mortgage on their house and those people would have lost their house like anybody who followed his advice would have seriously hurt themselves and that's not uncommon for sailor and then obviously he talks a big game it's a game full of analogies of cyber hornets and bees and you know rhetoric

like that but he doesn't walk any walk he's got the same problem swan does talks a huge game and then doesn't even custody his own freaking coins like let alone talking about running a node or like anything like that verifying a damn thing like he doesn't do anything that you would expect a bit yeah but he's running a bitcoin development company now haven't you heard no what he's running is a buy my stock influencer peddle bullshit scam. He is trying to make it seem to Bitcoiners that if you buy a micro strategy, that you're buying Bitcoin. In reality, you have a whole bunch of different risks associated with that.

He's propped up his entire company based on this propaganda. And that's why he's telling everybody these things is because he wants them to up his entire company based on this propaganda and that's why he's telling everybody these things is because he wants them to buy his stock we we agree on that i've i've been very public about my distaste for the way sailor carries himself and his media strategy he is a white whale for a lot of podcasters uh he was for us at one time we tried to get him i think two years ago alen maybe i like try email them or reached out to him somehow and we never got a response but in that two years ago, Aylan, maybe I emailed them or reached out to him somehow. And we never got a response.

But in that two years, I've come to see the light a little bit. And maybe it's because he jilted me. But I think that I've just matured a bit and seen that he goes on podcasts. And it's a lot of podcasts I really like for people who I think are akin to us in terms of the mission and focus like Lavera said Youngman's Bitcoin matrix, uh, among others. And he, he gives what seems to me like a pre-packaged address, uh, doesn't take any questions for three hours. Uh, everything he says is rehearsed thought out.

I think either written by him or somebody else well in advance shared with the podcaster at some level, like here's the themes I want to hit. And if you're the host of the show, you might get two or three questions in, in two and a half hours. Now, some people, I think the low IQ crowd will say, wow, this guy's so articulate, this stream of consciousness, this and that, the other thing. No, what you're actually seeing is something pre-packaged and a narrative that he wants to pass vis-a-vis these platforms who either don't know any better or don't care and just want the views. I think that's a terrible thing to do with your platform.

And the more I see him at conferences and at shows, the more that view is reinforced for me. Do you think I have that right? Yeah, if I could, I'd be like the applause emojis. I'd be like, yay, Joey. So proud of you, Joey. Yeah, it's pretty annoying. Len, what do you got?

What do you got? You take us to the next topic here. Bitcoin Magazine is something I love. I got one right there. I just put one up there yesterday. No, for you, buddy. Why? It was gifted to me.

I wore a real Bedford shirt yesterday on the show and put a Bitcoin Magazine behind me. So how much do you know about Bitcoin magazine, Joey? It's a good question. You consider yourself well-informed? I am probably a mile wide and an inch deep on Bitcoin magazine only in relation to the way they execute the conference.

I think more than anything and a little bit about UTXO Bailey's, you know, venture arm there. All right. Well, let's, let's try and like grab a couple more inches of depth here. Okay. Do you know who started bitcoin magazine uh no metallic really okay yeah interesting got it yeah so it was made as a shitcoin magazine in part by one of the most prominent shitcoiners

in the space um they for the vast majority of their years covered shitcoin content uh equal to bitcoin content when they decided that they weren't going to cover shitcoin content anymore you know what they did they started making their own shitcoins they started printing nfts they started doing the exact same thing as all of these other shit coiners uh they are they're the propaganda uh play thing of david bailey and that's all that they are they hire some influential people who are very smart and much like others in the space have decided to take a paycheck to work in the bitcoin space even if it isn't exactly what their values are. And that's unfortunate. Names like Shinobi, for example.

And there are tons. I'm not even going to begin to try and remember names. But yeah, they promote scams. And then there's all this Ordinal slash Rune's nonsense that they're basically endorsing an attack on bitcoin in the form of the ordinals like ordinals abuse witness scripts they basically take an if statement and shove arbitrary data into its non-executable code block like it's an always always false if statement never executes and they just shove as much data as they can in there and that explodes these witness scripts and is what it was allowing them to take advantage of the script discount that we put in with segwit right it's basically an abuse of of segwit through um a syntax yeah it's an attack yeah i think it's it's a fair i'm not saying this not a fair

characterization i may not use the word attack but i do think there's a case to be made that bitcoin magazine is using its messaging power as as great or as inferior as it is in different circles of the bitcoin world to to what's the best way to put this to support bitcoiners i would i would say to support its operations that's that's the term i would use one in the same like at the end of the day we know you know i'm not so sure it's one of the same i'm not so sure it's one of the same i think when was the last time you saw a profitable magazine joey i don't know i have no idea i bet you see a dozen profitable shitcoin casinos, though. Anybody that is making these NFTs makes money. Anybody that is promoting these communities makes money.

They're following the money. That's the problem. The problem is they want to be in the news medium. And like every other news platform out there, they've immediately realized there is no money in offering people free news. There's no money in offering people free news there's no money in offering people paid news you have to get sponsors or you have to have some kind of side hustle their side hustle is these scams and yeah i just there's there's nothing really else to say about it they

they are a coin focused magazine they always have been and they are in a little bit of denial about that and it's frankly really funny to see to see David Bailey have tantrums about it frequently on Twitter. I don't know. Like, I think that's, I feel like that's a mischaracterization. Like if somebody wants to buy one of these shitty NFTs or whatever they're called, what are they called? Ordinals? And the runes are the same thing. I'm pretty sure the runes are the rug pull on ordinals right more palatable and simultaneously reissue

them for more money while also still not actually executing them because like you can execute these scans in a responsible way they could take them off chain the only thing they need to put on chain is like the the hash of a merkle tree root that you can use to validate however many thousands of these NFTs with just a single hash or whatever. They need an off-chain system. I mean, they need to die in a fire, but saving the fiery death, they need an off-chain system. And instead of doing that, they're just iteratively relaunching the same absolutely horribly engineered. It's JSON on-chain. It's like they haven't done anything to compact their

space usage and footprint they've this is the worst engineering i've ever seen in in a project whatsoever it's it's it's a shit coin it's shit coins this is what shit coins do they engineer absolute garbage they make a scam tell people has money and sell it and that's what shit coin magazine is doing is they are both enabling and participating in that fucking nonsense i yeah i mean i think we'll agree to disagree on this one the only reason i say that is because like i said to len before and it's the reason that bailey and goodwin came on this show a while ago uh a show a show where i did give them a little bit of shit over some of this stuff as well as utxo this sort of arm's length relationship with the magazine. My stance, and I think it's relatively sane,

is that these guys could do a lot worse than Ordinals and Runes, number one, in terms of funding the operation and in terms of, quote unquote, scamming Bitcoiners. Number two, should we really be surprised that the most secure chain, the chain with the most Lindy, the chain that's going to be the most secure in the future, the most independent is the one where people want to run this kind of stuff? Absolutely not. You're a hundred thousand percent right about that. And we've always had scams on Bitcoin. Absolutely. It's about, so it's about identifying them and not socially encouraging them you understand i i get it but what like who like you know what is the why why is this now i'm not i'm not saying i buy

this stuff i don't something that has absolutely no value or function in selling it as though it does to gullible people that don't know any better yeah it is not non-fungible it is entirely fucking fungible you know how i know it's fung? They reissued the same damn shit on runes instead of ordinals. Just like they reissued the ones that were on the shit coins. Like it's copy and paste, people. We've had it for a while. Do you think that the conference is a net positive these days or no? No, I don't think that.

Tell me why. It's globally described as the bitcoin conference has yet to be because it's a platform for shit coiners okay it has always been a platform for shit coiners and misinformation and unfortunately that is a trend that continues uh even at its best at its most applauded as we saw in nashville it is a place for political grandstanding now and for sailor to try and convince people that they need to go into debt as much as is possible it is a place where you see shit coins but bad information misinformation and people trying to get one over on each other it is you know you know what i think

a good bitcoin conference is your local meetup your local meetup has more quality content in it. I guarantee you, if you live in an urban center in Canada, go to your local meetup. There are good ones in Toronto. There are good ones in Montreal. There are good ones in Vancouver. There are good ones in Calgary. There are good ones in so many different places in Canada. Why do we have a conference that costs you $600 to get into the door, that teaches you nothing, presents enormous risk in giving you horrible advice, and exists mostly as a networking event for industry, which to be fair, they have to often pay like $8,000 to $10,000 just to participate in the networking part themselves. Bitcoin is free information and code. The idea of paying this kind of money for non-information offends me.

I can tell. Okay, so I'll ask you the same question I asked Len on the air. We had a little tete-a-tete back in, I don't know, I guess it would have been May, June, something like that, in the lead up to the conference. You know, there's a lot of people who go to that conference that you just described as sort of a scam and a fraud. You know, guys like Matt O'Dell, Christian, CK, others who I think, you know, we would all sort of quantify, qualify as good Bitcoiners, solid maxis who want the best for Bitcoin. Are these people, are they perpetuating the scam? Are they themselves scammers by association? What is the responsibility?

Yeah, they're enabling it. They are? Yeah, they are. They're both giving them money. They're giving them their platform and support. They're raising hype. They are in every way enablers. Len? No more comment on this i don't know we don't we don't want to step on any popular podcast we can we can like matt matt's been on

the show i told him there's some stuff i disagree with him on i think that there's you know there's some things he's not concerned enough about other things he's too concerned about and it's annoying uh i you know, we just had Bailey and Goodwin on that was the first 15 minutes was a little bit intense. I think the chat seemed to think so as well. And there's been other guests that we've had that I think I disagree with on a lot of things. And we speak pretty freely about the things we disagree with over here. I think that the question that I don't,

the question that people have to answer, whether it's me or you or anyone else is what, at what level are we willing to share the message? Or maybe at what concentration, I should say, are we willing to share the message? If it, if the sacrifice in terms of potency is that it reaches a hundred million people instead of the 60 people at the bar at the meetup, right? Like, how many, you're not getting a lot of new... 100 million people, that's fantastic. The question is, if you had to destroy any quality to the message to do so, then it's not. You've just...

So that's it. Okay. Yeah. So the question is, is there any signal? So when you look at, like, the information that Sailor is giving people people there's no signal in anything sailor has to say it is rhetoric it is hopium it is really bad advice about debt um and it's you know his own practices of doing things like denying use cases says it says bitcoin isn't money like how can you respect a guy that says totally is money? I totally agree with that. I've been using it as money for 10 years.

How the hell are you to tell me that I don't exist, sailor? Yeah, it is a bit much, that guy. And frankly, that's not an uncommon position to have. It was so interesting watching the public rhetoric transition from, you know, in 20, we'll call it 2012, 2013. It was a lot of, you know, be your own bank. Forget PayPal. PayPal sucks. You know, lot of you know be your own bank forget paypal paypal sucks you know we're going to be our own bank uh verify everything trust no one uh and then it became all about hodl and moon and now people don't even run nodes people don't run joey do you run a node

joey i see that look in your eyes. If you're asking, you already know the answer. The answer is no. I know. I know. Can I ask why not? I've been meaning to start it for two years and I haven't done it. I'm just going to get you to start it.

I think we are closer. There's really no excuse. More than ever. It's literally a 10-minute exercise to start the thing syncing and then a zero-minute exercise to let the thing sinking and then a zero minute exercise to let the thing stay on like there's really nothing to it on my part connecting uh you know a wallet client or whatever is the next step in that process but there's no excuse for me not having done it by now obviously like there's just there's no rational reason for that you know what so here there are times when maybe you don't want to run a node and those are times when you're not transacting

if all you ever do is hold your bitcoin and you had a node when you received it, you know you have that Bitcoin. You know, well, you don't know that it hasn't moved. You can presume because you've secured the keys, but you're not actively needing to secure anything. You only need a node really when you are using Bitcoin. And I'm noticed so much more than that, Joey. Like I love my node because I can run all kinds of different services on it. Like I've got, obviously I've got lightning. I've got my own block explorer.

I've got my own mempool explorer. I don't have to leak any kind of private information to third parties. I don't need to trust that what they're telling me is in fact, the truth of the state of the chain. And I don't need to be worried about events. Like for example, the 2013 reorg where you know for however many hours we had blocks coming in that eventually got reorganized there was an active like there are occasions in bitcoin's history where active forks have happened we have two active chains being built upon at the same time

and it is crazy and it is scary. And light clients aren't entirely protected. They are vulnerable to this kind of thing. If you aren't running a node, you have to ask yourself, who am I trusting? Am I trusting the wallet provider, like my Coinbase wallet? Am I trusting Coinbase? Am I trusting a random node in the case of like electrum where they just randomly pull one from or a handful from the thin air yeah that's if you don't know who you're trusting like bitcoin's all about that trust and and verification and if you're not doing it like if it's your money of all the things to put the diligence in surely your money has got to be top of the line right it's up there yeah

with my lats and delts i would say those are the things i really should be focused i'll tell you what i'll teach all about the node running you teach me all about lats and belts i love it i love it yeah i'm into that made in heaven you come over wear a mask i'll give you my address you show your face here and we'll fucking set it up i'm into it yeah no i'll show you my face privately that's the problem i go to i go to my local meetups and stuff uh and you know don't wear a mask or anything this is a revelation i this is you know these um like you mentioned there's a genuine fear of people impersonating bitcoin influencers or sure like i mean in our discord server alone like we have dozens of people using the moderator's name is including mine on a daily basis my voice is out there if i put my face out there like i'm

i don't know i don't want anybody getting scammed in my name that would really upset me do you think there's a a lack of uh sophistication and concern in the broader space about opsec i mean we we talk a lot about we go to meetups and do these things. Like, I don't know how you introduce yourself at meetups. Maybe you don't say you're Mr. Arnone. People don't know your voice or whatever. No, I go by a different identity. Exactly.

So like, is there like a lack of concern from Bitcoiners? I mean, sure as shit, we are fucked on this show. But like, you know, people who are not sharing their information, their name, their face, like, is this the way as the meme goes? Or is there some happy medium here between being part of a community, using a name, using your face, whatever? I'm not ashamed to say that there's people I've met in Bitcoin and didn't know before Bitcoin who I've become pretty good friends with, had to my house for dinner. My wife knows their wife, stuff like that.

Absolutely. I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad idea. Where do you come down on that? I am of two schools of thought. I think both are equally valid. The first school of thought is that you share nothing and Bitcoin is a separate part of your life that you isolate. And nobody knows your face. Nobody knows your name. Nobody knows your voice. Nobody knows anything. I think that's the safer of the two philosophies of how to approach things. The other philosophy, and this is the one that I take, is that you're very public. And the first thing you're public about is your security. I don't have access to the majority of my Bitcoin. It exists in multi-sig and geo-distributed wallets.

It has time locks associated with it to both prevent my immediate access as well as to disperse my coins on the occasion of my death, for example. It basically is my last will and testament in and of itself. My beneficiaries will come together and they will spend it some years after my passing assuming that i don't reclaim it first and those looking to do something like this liana wallet is an excellent tool for amateurs to begin building something like i've just what did you call it liana or liana liana l-i-a-n-a. Interesting. And it's a fantastic little wallet. It's desktop only, I believe. And it provides a graphical user interface for you to basically drag and drop, adding spending conditions to your coins.

You create a descriptor being a code description of your basically your private keys, your derivation path, and whatever scripts are necessary to fulfill the spending of those sets of UTXOs. And yeah, Liana Wallet create the best user interface that I've seen to date for users that want to make their own custom advanced scripts. So anybody interested in doing that, but in terms of like the privacy and versus transparency thing, I feel that by being very transparent about the fact that the most that you can ever get putting a gun to my head, the most that I could possibly give you is my hot wallets and maybe like my emergency fund, depending on the month, is a disincentive to attack me. This is the right way to do things. Len and I have been pretty public about that too. Without going into too much detail, I don't have access to any of my Bitcoin.

So I think a lot of people should operate this way. The one thing that I think the wallet community doesn't talk about enough is that the only convenience that the wallet should give you is deposit convenience. The spend should be a fucking hour long process as far as I'm concerned. And there's other wallets, like you said, hot wallets, blue, green, whatever you want to use Sparrow on your desktop, fine, where you can spend more quickly, more conveniently, and without too much trouble. But anything that requires a hardware signing device, I would say the spend should be next to impossible. I'd like to see someone come up with that. D's in the chat, obviously from CoinKite.

So maybe we can go to wallet wars here a little bit, because I'd be curious about some of your takes on what you see in the space these sort of public spats between rodolfo mdk and the seed signer guys the ledger guys all right i just want to interrupt here because i'm not sure mr arnolm doesn't tend to go on twitter a lot from what i my conversations with him so he probably has missed all this these must leak into the yeah i haven't seen a ton of this drama but like for, for example, I have previously been a big fan of CoinKite and ColdCard. Previously. Well, yeah, they've taken some steps that I'm not entirely fond of, including, again, supporting these NFT shitcoins through their whatever stats chip, whatever it is.

But generally speaking, I also, I support people rolling their own hardware wallets, stateless hardware wallets, things using like Glacier Protocol or Yeti Cold, or even building your own hardware, like with a Crux or even a do-it-yourself Jade, as much as I don't really like Jade, the things that I don't like about jade are that it phones home i don't like that it contacts block stream um so i have a problem when uh the folks at cold card say stuff like well that's not secure you can't roll your

own you need to buy a hardware wallet from cold card because it's the only thing that's going to have two secure elements to protect you. And that's dishonest because obviously a stateless wallet doesn't need secure elements, just like a seed signer, you know, like a seed signer doesn't need a secure element because it's not storing your keys. And there is an inherent risk in even in storing your keys. It's right for some models. You're exactly right with what you just said, Joey, about having tiered wallets with different levels of accessibility. Accessibility and security

are opposite ends of the spectrum. When you have high accessibility, you have low security. When you have low accessibility, you may have very high security. But certainly when you have high security, accessibility is low. So that's what people need to do.

They need to have a hot wallet that has their immediately spendable funds they need to have their like my my last will and testament scripts my liana wallet uh that is as cold as the dead itself um air gapped we need to promote air gaps more i really get uh you know it grinds my gears when bitbox engineer i have to smack him around constantly because they insist air gaps are harmful when in the reality is there's been several cves bitbox has experienced that would have been negated in their impact by an air gap what is cve for people who have common vulnerability uh and exposure exploit exposure yeah i don't know what that is.

But yeah, common vulnerability something. And it's just, yeah, an issue that their wallet had. No, they patched the issues as does every wallet. But these wallets that support shit coins, that require trusted setups, that are wired to your computer at any point, I do not like them for secure funds if you need law that that like deep security that you were talking about for like your life savings for like any amount more than maybe a thousand or two dollars whatever whatever to you is a significant amount of money that you are not willing to lose that goes in the air gapped cold wallet and you're rolling your own entropy for it you're using things like corrected coin flips or casino dice and you're not trusting you're verifying the reason we have that air gap is so that we can do things like both eliminate access to the wallet except for

this limited interface of an uh qr scan or an sd card whatever, but we're also auditing the communication. We're looking at what's going back and forth across their graph. And if we say, Hey, that's not the address I was sending to. That's how we catch that is we verify this isn't a job that's done by itself. Like you said, it could take you an hour to spend your cold coins that happens. And it's because you got to collect the keys. It's because you've got to organize the signing devices. And it's because you got to collect the keys. It's because you've got to organize the signing devices. And it's because you've got to audit the information that's transacting between this private offline air gap setup and your online computer.

It should take, in my opinion, minimum an hour. And geo distribution is... I mean, if you do nothing else, then geo distribution is, I mean, if you do nothing else, then geographic distribution is what you should be doing. You can do, you can do literally nothing else, but you have to do that. Don't make it like a three of three,

like always have some lower amount of threshold signatures so that you are allowed to lose keys. I know you guys know that I'm just saying it for everybody else. So there's a comment here from D in the chat, ordinals uh sorry sats chips have nothing to do with ordinals and you can absolutely roll your own seed without a cold card we don't say you must buy a cold card oh i absolutely roll my own seed with my core so i am a cold card user great i enjoy cold card i do roll my own entropy with it um and i think that it's fantastic.

You're able to cut things like the NFC out. And I think that's great. I'm going to have to take a look at my notes here at some point. Because I do know that Coinkite was supporting this ordinal stuff. So I'm going to have to dig into that a little bit. Let me just do that after the show, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I'd be, I'd be curious to hear what you, what you think.

You're very knowledgeable of things you've spoken on so far, even if we disagree, like I always say to Len, any guest who wants to come on, speak honestly and you know, with the receipts, we'll do it. Now I want to, I want to hit on at speak honestly and with the receipts will do it. Now, I want to hit on at least one more thing here before we go. And that thing is Bitcoin Twitter, Bitcoin Reddit, Bitcoin, all these things. I'm not convinced at this point that Bitcoin Twitter, Bitcoin Reddit is a value add for basically anybody. You know, when I think about the people who go to the Bitcoin subreddit, anytime I look over there, it's a gong show.

It's full of comments that don't make sense. People complaining, sharing anecdotes where they fuck something up or someone they know fuck something up or someone got rich doing this. What exchange should I use? Blah, blah, blah. Bitcoin Twitter to me is a lot is very much the same in a lot of ways. And so I know how you feel about Bitcoin magazine in terms of you know watering down the signal I know how you feel about podcasts in some respects anyway in terms of watering down the signal where do you come down on stuff like the reddit I mean you're a moderator but it's like

an impossible task to keep that that knife sharp is it not yeah I mean it's what we call the eternal September problem right going back to the usenet days and describing how you know with the flood of aol cds out to the world everybody poured into the internet right and it basically diluted the quality terribly and we as a bitcoin community we're experiencing that too um we are seeing that knowledge is being diluted by rabid fanboy fanaticism um by moon boy nonsense uh by just everything the lowest common denominator of conversation just keeps lowering and lowering every single year and it's not a problem that the moderators can inherently solve on their own that said uh

it is essentially the reason that i and the our bitcoin moderators parted ways that i strongly disagree with how little they are doing i believe they could do a lot more could they stop eternal september absolutely not could they stop the dilution of quality? No, but they could take substantive and dramatic actions in the form of banning corporate influence. I don't want to see any more exchange employees on that subreddit. I don't want to see any more CEOs promoting ledgers and cold cards and exchanges. I want organic users' recommendations of the highest quality. And to that end, I think that they should also moderate those recommendations. I think that when they see recommendations towards shitcoin casinos,

shitcoin platforms, shitcoin wallets, non-airgapped things, when they see the Bitbox lead engineer saying that airgaps are dangerous, I think that they should smack them around. And frankly, that's what I did while I was there. And that's got me in trouble. I love the freedom with which you use the term smack him around. This is good. We need more of this on this show.

It's frankly what I felt and still feel is necessary. There needs to be honest and combative dialogue. And that is not a bad thing. It doesn't need to be honest and combative dialogue. And that is not a bad thing. It doesn't need to be disrespectful. As I've said, I have enormous respect for the moderators of our Bitcoin, even though that isn't always shared. I'm actually one of the moderators at our Bitcoin CA. And you can bet your buns, Adam, that we censor the hell out of it. You want to talk about shit coins there?

You're out of here. You want to about shit coins there you're out of here you want to promote shit coin platforms there's the door what's a shit coin platform in your view coinbase okay shake pay shake pay shake pay is not a nice platform uh shake pay has problems where they they like to pretend that their audit from a non-authorized like auditor from a non-accredited auditor bit cipher i think they call it is proof of reserves they don't seem to understand that proof of reserves and this is apparently a thing that all the exchanges have decided to do is proof of the reserves was a proposal i think by greg maxwell that suggested you take your bitcoin and you create an invalid spend of

it. So you sign a transaction with an invalid input in it. So you can prove that you can sign for all of these coins. Thus you can prove you have these reserves. And it was to be paired with a system called proof of liability, which would basically allow users to show, hey, you know, this is a custodial platform, sure, but I can prove they've got my money. Another great way to do proof of reserves, give users a key. It doesn't matter that it can't spend,

you know your funds are isolated and whole because you can audit it on the blockchain through your key and the public address. So there are lots of ways to do proof of reserves. Having some random audit and say that like this is we've got all of our money isn't among the things that you would call a proof that's a testimony that's an attestation of reserves perhaps but it is not proof of shit um i mean we we've been through this with the uh the lead-in guys i think back in the day

remember they used to issue they used to issue a proof of something. Proof of reserves every quarter, I believe. Every quarter. And they used to give you, here's your sort of, you know, the PIN number. This is where your funds are. This is the transaction that represents your funds. But it didn't have proof of liabilities, I don't think. That was the...

Kraken does that, too. Kraken basically has an auditor come in, and they sign stuff through the auditor's signature. And what you're validating through Kraken is that the auditor included your funds in the audit, which is proof of audit, I guess, but it's not proof of reserves. And it's so unfortunate because Bitcoin makes this so simple. Bitcoin, by its very nature, enables you to audit proof of reserves. Or better yet, do what Bull Bitcoin does and require no proof of reserves or better yet do what bull bitcoin does and require no proof of reserves because you're not holding customer funds yeah and that's why they don't want to do this joy i was going to say there's one loose end we should be tying up i want to ask

i want to ask one more question on this topic adam seems very has a strong opinion on this our bitcoin ca censored why is he saying that what what is because it's absolutely true okay we you could categorize it as we shut down anything we disagree with and that would be accurate what we disagree with are scams and fraud if you are going to out of ignorance or otherwise you know you want to ask a question about how do i get my shit coins off of binance sorry we're not the place for it this is a bitcoin subreddit you want to ask what's going on with ethereum's new upgrade sorry we're not the place for this this is a bitcoin subreddit you want to promote your new bitcoin business in canada sorry you get one post it's got to be about bitcoin only

and that's the limit of your self-promotion for a new Bitcoin business in Canada. If you come in here every week and they're saying, hey, come use my exchange, which, frankly, a lot of the Canadian CEOs do. We've got the Bitcoin Well CEO in there constantly, the ShakePay CEO. I basically ran him out of that place. Same with the Newton CEO. Dustin, yeah. Yeah, Dustin. I don't like Dustin very much. These people don't dustin very much these people don't like me very much they don't like me very much at all and they're very right that i am censoring them that is

accurate i am not interested in platforming their self-promotion they can buy an ad like everyone else you gotta expand on that joy or that's like i mean i don't know i just it seems like i don't know uh what i'm not saying there's a beef between the bitcoin ca subreddit and adam but it's unlike adam to be in the chat unfortunately there's a delay of about 30 seconds but it's years in we're long gone in terms of discussion so it's hard i don't know but no i just want to say in the private chat, there was a loose end that hasn't been tied up. Mr. Arnum was talking about CoinKite.

I'm going to put it in the comments here while you're playing. But if you play that, it's a video. Maybe you could play that right now, Joey, because then we could all hear it, and Mr. Arnum could comment on that further. Let me pull it up. Possibilities are endless with Sats Chip. I have not seen this video,

but if I had to guess, it's going to be hilarious because it's going to be D's voice that comes on the... I do believe it is Mr. D's voice. Yeah, for sure. We're going to put it up on the screen here. Okay, hold on.

I'm going to full screen this. Give me a second here. Give me a second here. Give me a second. Okay. And then once we hear this video, then Mr. Ardnope could have an opportunity to comment on it. Okay. Tell me if you can hear the sound. Bitcoin Private Key, an artist can embed into a work of art, or in this case, a plush toy. This ensures that you as the user are getting a legitimate piece,

and not a knockoff. Let's take a look at the information the little hodler's holding. Pretty damning so far. Tap your phone on the Satch chip embedded in the little hodler. Now click the link, and the information of your little hodler should show up on the screen. This includes the title, description, creator, rarity, card identification number, and ensures that the sat ship is valid.

And that's it. All just using Bitcoin primitives. Bitcoin private key, an artist can embed into a work of art. Okay, well, I mean... We all agree that that was an NFT that was described. There was a prime minister once, right? The proof is the proof. Is that... I don't know. So whatever verbiage you want to call that... It's a physical plush doll. There was a prime minister once, right? The proof is the proof. Is that?

So whatever verbiage you want to call that. It's a physical plush doll. I love him. Okay. All accounts are saying I got to check the tweet. So I'll bring that up. You guys keep talking. I just feel like that is them enabling and promoting this NFT art nonsense. They are trying to create non-fungible art and sell it as the value of it is it's non-fungible while going through their own centralized verification validation service.

All right. I'm a big Coinkite fan. I we have to. I'm sorry. I can. I'm a Bitcoin coin kite fan. I wasn't always. They started out completely wrong with that copay wallet bullshit back in the day doing web nonsense. Then they came out with cold card and it was, you know, after the the mark three, it's been rock solid hats off to them. They're one of the better companies in the space. I am a strong believer in holding our friends accountable those are the people that it is most important to hold accountable because frankly our friends are the only ones that give a damn uh shit coiners don't

care that you know you're being critical of them and calling them shit coiners people that are genuinely want to be pro bitcoin want to want to be doing something meaningful in the space, like bull Bitcoin, like I hope Bitcoin will, these are the people that I expect are going to be the most responsive to criticism. They may be doing so much better than everyone else in so many ways, being, for example, non-custodial in the case of those two exchanges or having excellent dual uh uh dual secure element security in the cold card uh the cold card security is fantastic frankly air gap native supports rolling your own entropy absolutely fantastic that doesn't mean that they don't screw up and this is one of those screw-ups that point fights made that's all it is yeah okay fair enough i mean d i i went to my phone there and uh was not surprised d was messaging me about what was going on in the chat already but he's making the case that uh i don't agree it's just for nfts it's for an authenticator

it can be used for nft sure but it was created before ordinals this is ultimately the the crux of so many of these discussions right like it's it's not made for this use case that they're advertising it for that use case that one that one's a pretty damning example i would say d that's a that's good that's a tough that's a tough one that's a tough one to stomach for me and i'm usually the guy who says that you know things could be worse but uh the nfbs or whatever that you know tweet underneath it bitcoin bees collective bees i don't know i have so many good things to say about coin kite they shouldn't take this personally the only issues i've ever had with coin kite are them changing their source code license i think that

that was a terrible move, especially considering how much open source code they use from competitors when building their product. I don't like this SaaS card or NFT nonsense. And I wasn't super crazy about them adding NFC, but the fact that they let me cut it means that it's not a big deal. Yeah, it's big. It is big. I mean, we're big CoinKite promoters here we've we've done uh you know semi-romantic dance them both sponsorship in the past but uh my daughter did a video on how to yeah yeah it's just you know it's it's hard it's hard

they're fantastic i feel it's necessary to both celebrate these companies that are the best in class while also holding them to the highest standard that's all it is no agreed and you're absolutely right these are the ones you can expect to make the most change because they are quality companies full of quality people do you guys have a few more minutes to chat because i got a couple few more topics to go sure yeah okay number one because scalability of bitcoin is a problem for some people maybe not for everybody but there's a few proposals out there as a way to address that particular conundrum is Opcat, CTV being a couple of them that are being banting around right now.

Curious to hear Mr. Arnome's thoughts on either of those two. And maybe if one is better than the other, or maybe there's something else that we're not looking at. So there are so many ways to skin this cat. There are so many ways. And that's really the crux of the problem is nobody are so many ways to skin this cat land there are so many ways and that's really the crux of the problem is nobody can agree on how to skin it we've had apo in development forever since like what before segwit we've had any previous output in development and this is

what will allow us to have things like l2 um the new way that we can resolve settlement on Lightning without penalty transactions, which would be a huge get that makes Lightning so much safer. We have CTV, Check Template Verify, which is so dead simple. I supported it when it was first proposed for SoftFork. A lot of people didn't. And going back to one of my earlier points, one of the reasons a lot of people didn't support CTV when it first came out is because folks like Andreas jumped on it. They didn't even read the BIP.

They just started making wild claims about how this can be black, like exchanges will use this opcode to blacklist certain addresses and prevent you from withdrawing to your wallet and doing all these things that, frankly, you could do with just multisig or some selective whitelisting in the first place today and have nothing to do with the BIP at all. But these are all possible solutions that have various trade-offs and benefits.

I think at this point, personally, I would support APO. I would support CDV. I would support opcat opcat if you're not familiar it's an opcode that the only thing it even does is it just combines two strings that's all it does uh it was taken out of bitcoin originally because there was a stack overflow related concern to the the bitcoin script stack but now we've added hard limits on that that concern doesn't really exist and you wouldn't believe how useful something as simple as being able to combine two pieces of information is when you're constructing these kinds of smart contracts that would allow for a lot more expressiveness and sophisticated functions, including shitcoining, as has always been the case. And unfortunately, I see a lot of people have the argument, well, they don't want to necessarily support these things.

One, because maybe it's a huge learning curve just to get up to speed on a lot of them. And two, because they know they're going to enable more scams. And to those people, I say, you're absolutely right. They are going to enable more scams, as they always have, as Segwit has, as every upgrade and use of Bitcoin, they'll be used by scammers. Bitcoin is for friends and enemies.

And that is true as much for these ordinal people and the rune people and everyone else that I'm disrespecting up here and say is that absolutely human garbage. Bitcoin is for them. And it's our job as, you know, node runners to decide, okay, is this an abuse of Bitcoin? And is it preventable? And the answer is no, it's not preventable outside, say a fork. But even then it wouldn't be preventable. They'll find some way to hide information in the witness script if they want to. That's always going to happen.

The question is are the economic costs actually aligned such that there is a disincentive for them to misuse the space? Do you think like in terms of sort of the social element to VIPs, are you concerned about stuff like open sets and other, you know, sort of the social element to BIPs. Are you concerned about stuff like OpenSats and other dev funding mechanisms, whether it's like these ETF issuers now talking about funding development

or OpenSats with Odell and that gang? Is this something that concerns you? I feel like it might be, given some of the stuff you said earlier, but I'm not sure. It concerns me too. I just don't know what the alternative is for these guys i think the thing that concerns me the most is that people aren't verifying the code they run and making coherent decisions about the consensus

they want you could fund all the developers in the world all day from one evil malicious source and try and get them to code horrible things but as long as users refuse to run it, then who cares? I think that you're never going to be able to police the volunteer funding of Bitcoin developers. But what you can do is you can say, hey, you know, I don't like this change to the code. I'm not going to run this code. It's why, for example, I'm running knots. I got frustrated with the code direction that some of the maintainers in core were encouraging. I didn't like that they didn't allow me to prevent, for example, some of these misuses of my memory from occurring. Like I can block with knots. I can outright block

these ordinals and runes from ever entering my mempool. I don't propagate them. I don't waste bandwidth on them. It doesn't stop them from existing. As we saw with full RBF, even as little as 5% or less of the network propagating a transaction will get it to miners. So this isn't about stopping them in any way. That's what the social conversation is for. The social conversation is about stopping them. The node configuration is about managing your own computer resources. You see how big the mempool got during the last two years during these attacks? Yeah, yeah.

Like, huge, enormous, functionally useless to try and navigate through an explorer or anything like that. Like, it just ate all my computer resources. So I was like, well, I don't want to look at these things. I have no interest in these things. They aren't useful to me or my node. I should be allowed to say, no, I don't want them. And core said, no, you're not allowed to do that because well, frankly, they made up reasons that suggested that I wanted to do it for to stop them. They created it like a straw man of, well, no, this is pointless because you're not stopping them from doing it. It's like, no, it's not pointless. I'm managing my node and my

resources. You let me core implements a policy saying we aren't going to propagate transactions less than one satabyte in fee, right? That's the same thing. That's saying if a transaction hits me and it doesn't meet these qualifications, I'm going to reject it just because I don't want it in my mempool, just because I don't want it consuming my bandwidth. And that's DDoS prevention at the end of the day. It's about preserving your node's resources. And unfortunately, so many of the core contributors and maintainers don't see how that relates to this current situation with ordinals and runes.

I should be allowed to choose that i don't want them and i do and not empowers me to do that i agree i think and i think it's unfair that it's been framed as quote-unquote censorship by the ordinals crowd i mean clearly it is not and if bitcoin is nothing else it is you know freedom money right down to the like you mentioned the the way that you run your node len talks about that all the time too. I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's simply not censoring. The social aspect of this is different than the, you know, layer one node aspect. And these guys didn't seem able to make that distinction when this was a really heated debate. If you can even call it that, you know, about a year ago at

this point. Yeah, it was heated mostly year ago at this point yeah it was heated mostly because um i feel i feel it was heated mostly because ordinals were abusing the script syntax that i described earlier to get that witness discount now that they've moved to op return in ruins technically they are being significantly better bitcoin citizens yeah um they're not being good bitcoin citizens for the same reasons I've already outlined. Like scam aside, they're not being good Bitcoin citizens for the reasons that they're encoding their data in JSON instead of something that is like compressed, that isn't going to take up a ton of space.

They have a human readable and that makes no sense. They're consuming so much space they don't need to be consuming. And two, they don't need to be on chain at all. Like they should be off chain with this data, creating a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin that allows their users to hold and manage this data and validate it against each other using Bitcoin hashes that are on chain. That would be the responsible way to engineer a scam like this. I fully suspect that given another year, we're going to see them relaunch with a new architecture and do some more scamming because that's what they do, especially as you can see, it kind of goes in waves, right? Waves of interest. Right now we're at a low point of the interest. We've kind of come off of all of the drama that was involved in the Ordinal and Runes business and fees are low again which was one of the primary

causes of the drama people were upset about the really high fees but it's going to come again it's high fees are inevitable the fee market is inevitable getting your lightning channels now my my big beef with the ordinals guys the runes guys and the way that they handled that at the social layer is that and you know you can tell me what you think about this. Len and I talk about it once in a while. I think that when you talk about how widely derided that whole environment ecosystem attack using the discount like you mentioned there from Segwit, to push this sort of stuff that really has no inherent value. It's only valued by people.

I think it's fair to describe this. My friendly words for Bitcoin Magazine aside, it's fair to describe it as people bought that stuff with the intention of selling it to someone who knew less about it than them from a value standpoint. My big problem is that with the community, and it's actually being mentioned in the chat here, the community now is averse to consensus in a way in terms of layer one upgrades. In my opinion, they couldn't come at a worse time because you're getting so many potentially great minds now coming from other tech silos, maybe even traditional finance silos, guys who are working

for some of these ETF issuers, for example, or are adjacent to them, who may have good ideas for Bitcoin, but will be met immediately with even more of a white blood cell response than they would have been three years ago. And I'm worried that we're going to miss good ideas because these guys just decided to villainize anybody who didn't want JSONs on chain, didn't want JPEGs, didn't want NFT stuff. And I'm a little worried about that because I don't think we can ossify now on layer one, though there's a case to be made that it's a good idea. I don't necessarily think it's a good idea yet, especially as adoption continues to increase. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Where do you stand on ossification of L1? Where do you stand on new ideas into Bitcoin? What should do you stand on uh new ideas into bitcoin what

should be the response both from the dev community which ultimately decides i think but also from the kind of broader you know dare i say influencer community you know like what should the what should the reaction be when we see these things first the devs don't decide the devs have no power except to propose something right yes And neither do the influencers decide. It's we as node runners, we're deciding by the code we run. And that's what makes Bitcoin decentralized. It's not the miners, it's us. Two, I am all for several of these upgrades.

I think that each upgrade should be taken on its merit. I think that the person proposing it should have absolutely nothing to do with deciding if it is a good idea or a bad idea. I think that there are many of these proposals in what you could call the covenants camp, be they APO, be they CTV, be they CSFS, be they MAT that have merit to varying degrees. Do we need all of them? No. There's enormous amounts of overlap between their functionalities. Would we be okay if we never got any of them? Yeah. Yeah, I think we would. Would that be the ideal scenario? No. If Bitcoin ossified today,

I think we'd be fine. It'd be unfortunate, but we'd be fine. I think that there are going to be good ideas we miss, inevitably and inherently. That's just the nature of a decentralized beast. We're not Ethereum. We can't fork over phone calls. You know? Sorry? No, go on. Sorry.

I was going to say, you mentioned the world decentralized many times. And I agree with you that this community in bitcoin is very much decentralized but there's one centralized aspect in this and it's kind of a red flag is the fact that the core developers are releasing the vulnerabilities for previous versions of older versions of core and they're doing this in a series of tranches but it's and it's done in a way that it's years after that particular version was first released and these upgrades and these changes were fixed like many years ago but we're not we're now just hearing about it now and it's it's like this walled garden that they're managing and they're only releasing the stuff that they want to release

that kind of seems centralized in some nature, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. The core developers have been trying to create power where they naturally have been given none for a long time. And that includes things like the lot true debate when we were debating how we wanted to activate Taproot. There was a proposal that nodes should be able to decide how they want to activate Taproot through configuration, the lot configuration. Either choosing to minor activate SoftFork, delegating their activation time and place to minors, or doing it with, say, a flag day, where this is the day we upgrade, this is when we do it. I was among an extreme minority that chose to upgrade by flag day. Worked just fine. There was so much social vitriol from folks that I respect a lot, like Greg Maxwell,

who insisted that we were running viruses, that this code was going to fork us. And obviously none of those things happened. The reality is that you never know when a fork is safe. You don't know because minor signaling doesn't actually mean a whole lot. And we saw that during the block size wars. We don't know that they're actually running the code that they're signaling for.

And trusting the competency of these oftentimes malicious actors isn't something that I want to do. So for me personally, in consensus issues, I will always use my node to user activate my forks. I'm not interested in delegating that to miners anymore. The core devs hate that. The core devs are so focused on the idea that this risks state security and it does they're a thousand percent right it does if you believe the fallacy that a minor activated soft fork is safe then of course not knowing if you're going to have minor support for what you forked for is a very dangerous system

you could get reorgs you could get all kinds of issues that cause you to lose money if you're not careful, that cause harm to the ecosystem. They are, I believe, working in their best conscious trying to avoid that in the way that experts in their field in traditional software would. Where they are mistaken, in my belief, is that they are applying principles of traditional software to a decentralized system where the pinnacle, the key to that decentralization and its absolute height is achieved by users deciding the code they run. That is the whole ballgame. And coming from traditional software, I believe that they're applying a lot of methodologies and philosophies that basically treat users like idiots because they are. They are idiots.

Users are just dumb and they don't want people to hurt themselves. So they're trying to take some of that burden for themselves. But that's inappropriate. That's not how Bitcoin works. People are going to hurt themselves. There is no fork safety. It's all dangerous. And you're never going to stop people like me from running a uasf

you're never going to stop us from creating that risk for everybody in the whole ecosystem so you might as well just get on board that's that's all there is to it are do they control bitcoin no they can't i'm not running core i'm running knots everybody's like they can't auto push updates developers aren't don't have this kind of special power to decide what the consensus of bitcoin is and they can barely influence it they're certainly not social people um no they i i think that the power they have is grossly overestimated do i think that they have taken a couple actions in the name of user safety including these disclosures len is talking about that in my opinion are entirely inappropriate

how long they've waited for the vast majority i believe they have over classified a significant number if you have a vulnerability that is solved by me not clicking the same link twice and restarting my node that is not something that requires a three-year disclosure i will admit some things are going to require three-year disclosures like if there is the ability for someone to um steal your coins in any way shape or form running a given node version like yeah that is unacceptable to release in a timely manner but if the only risk is that your node turns off and you got to turn it back on, that is unacceptable to hold to your chest for three years. I understand it's out of an abundance of cautions.

I understand that it is very professional in our industry to if you have, like, say, the kind of situation they're thinking about. I get where they're coming from, but they aren't looking at the unique way that Bitcoin works and functions as a decentralized code base. They're empowering themselves indirectly by taking these decisions away from users that use core and forcing them to use other software. So the decision isn't gone. You can still make the decision. You just can't use core to do it. That's right. I think, Len, some of those vulnerabilities, pfizer would have disclosed before uh three years you know it would have been that long would have been that long i

got nothing else mr no this has been great so far i don't know i have one last thing and it's really quick it's just and it's more of an fyi to everybody and it's the bitcoin and beers that takes place on the bitcoin discord i just want to say it's high signal. It's a great place to go to just chit chat about Bitcoin and anything else. This happens periodically, just, you know, spur of the moment. And Joey, I'd recommend next time they have it, you should certainly jump on it. It's a, it's a fun time. And even I'm guilty of not going frequently, but I'm, I try to go as a listener as much

as possible. And I've been invited many times to go on stage but a lot of times it's due to fiat requirements fiat mining requirements i can't go on but uh yeah i mean do you have anything what kind of what time are they having beers that you're fiat mining and uh can't get on daytime honestly it's often in the middle of the day so this bitcoin and beers is basically our version of community chats. This is like how we do a podcast is we get everybody in a chat together that we can kind of like a Twitter spaces, I guess. I don't know. Don't use Twitter. And we just have a conversation and we get hammered. It's often a very blunt conversation. It covers whatever the topics are the day.

They're not scheduled scheduled anybody can run one uh and it's kind of how we've been getting our conversations out there from the bitcoin discord we post them on the uh bitcoin all caps youtube channel it's not just beer sometimes you get baked too along the process okay yeah we we always get baked absolutely frying the uh the reputation of the coherency of the discussion changes from the beginning to the end i buy my thc with sats all right uh i don't know tell people about where they can find i mean normally we say like find more of your stuff more about your company you You have nothing to show, I guess. I'm not here to promote anything, right? What do you want to say?

What I want to say to people is I want to promote, go learn something you don't know about Bitcoin. Go push the boundary of your knowledge. It's an infinitely deep well. You don't need to know everything. But go to a place like lop.net slash Bitcoin. There's a community resources there, all kinds of stuff. Go to learnmeabitcoin.com. There's all kinds of stuff go to learn me a bitcoin.com there's all kinds of

amazing technical information there go to the google developer mailing list and keep track of what people are talking about and even if you don't really understand something just kind of like keep reading eventually just by immersion yeah yeah you you start to grok it there are so many ways to expand your bitcoin understanding is it necessary to use bitcoin to understand all this stuff no no all you need to do that is know how to you know choose the code you run run a node and secure your wallet but for the grander scheme of things things like programmable money you want to program your money it's awesome you should do it you should program your money get a little taste with that liana wallet and then go check out some Bitcoin scripting stuff

like Jimmy Song's got a book programming Bitcoin. Go check it out. Go learn something. That's all I can ask of you. And if you need help understanding what you're learning or looking for resources, you can always find a helpful community in the Bitcoin Discord.

And you can find it just by searching for Bitcoin in the public discord server. You can also find it linked in the sidebar of our Bitcoin CA at Reddit. This is very strong. I want to just, for people who are curious about Liana, I am, this is wizards,

wizardsardine.com slash Liana. Yeah, that's the one. Okay. Interesting. Check it out. I'm going to check it out while I edit this, when's the one. Okay, interesting. Check it out. I'm going to check it out while I edit this

when we're done. That's it. Our Bitcoin, CA, our Bitcoin, and our GNOME. Thank you for coming back on the show, sir.

We appreciate it. Thanks for having me, you guys. Appreciate it.