The Pomp Podcast - #723 The Early Days of Bitcoin w/ Jameson Lopp and Pete Rizzo

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Jameson Lopp is a cypherpunk, software engineer, columnist, and Bitcoin advocate. Lopp is also co-founder and CTO of bitcoin security provider Casa. Pete Rizzo is Editor at Bitcoin Magazine and Editor...-at-Large at Kraken. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the launch of bitcoin, Patoshi, and Satoshi’s email communications.  ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com  =======================

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jameson Lopp is a cypherpunk, software engineer, columnist, and Bitcoin advocate. Lopp is also the co-founder and CTO of Bitcoin security provider Kasa. Pete Rizzo is the editor at Bitcoin Magazine and editor-at-large at Kraken. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the launch of Bitcoin, Patoshi, and Satoshi's email communications. I really enjoyed this trek through history with both Jameson and Pete, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:03:22 People have been hired at everywhere from Coinbase, Gemini, BlockFi, Kraken, Anchorage, BTC Inc., Strike, and many, many others. So if you want an open job, go to pompcryptojobs.com, but if you want to go through the training program, go to pompscryptocourse.com, and we'll see you there. All right, let's get in the episode with Jameson and Pete. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should
Starting point is 00:03:50 not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right. Jameson, Pete, you guys there? No. How are both of you? Good. Excited to be rekindling ancient Bitcoin debates with you all. We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. So here's my suggestion is where we can maybe start
Starting point is 00:04:20 is, Jameson, maybe we can start with you in terms of the actual launch of Bitcoin. Can you walk us through just like a high level of the sequence of events from your understanding in terms of how that launch went? And then Pete, we'll come to you in terms of what the importance of some of that was yeah so uh bitcoin prehistory is basically you know october 30th or halloween really of 2008 was when a new anonymous entity emailed this white paper to the uh cryptography mailing list and basically said hey i've designed this new cryptocurrency system and of course almost everybody who responded to it told them why it would never work and you know why the game theory was broken and it would never scale and so on and so forth and then um i forget if there were
Starting point is 00:05:12 more communications in between that i think there were some you know early beta uh releases and code that was shared privately amongst a few people uh but then around january 3rd um whereas alex actually was looking at the time stamp uh just a few seconds ago it was uh the afternoon of january 8th 2009 at least in america time zone was when satoshi released the bitcoin v 0.1 so that's when people could actually download the software and start running it and it was almost 24 hours later on the 3rd of 2009 around 1 p.m gmt when the the first real mind block appeared and of Of course, one thing that I think people get confused about is the fact that the Genesis block was actually minted with a timestamp. Well, no, the Genesis block was minted with a timestamp of the 3rd, and then the next block was minted, I mean, I'm looking at it right now, the 8th of January, very late in the evening.
Starting point is 00:06:27 So, you know, there's a number of days difference here. I think people get confused as to whether or not this was something that was taken advantage of by Satoshi. But we'll go into the details of why the timeline is actually about as fair of a launch as you could get. Got it. So, Jameson, what you're basically saying here is on January 3rd, there was the Genesis block. And if we go all the way back, right, the Bitcoin.org was registered, I think it was in August or September of 2008. then in uh october 31st of 2008 we get the white paper january 3rd 2009 we get the genesis block which uh satoshi got uh there's 50 bitcoin there um and we'll talk about those 50 bitcoin in one second but then the second block which i think a lot of people didn't know is that the second
Starting point is 00:07:11 block doesn't come to actually january 8th uh which is also the same day that satoshi ends up emailing the cryptography list and saying, hey, there is the V0.1 Bitcoin. There's this public client. You can now go and participate. Pete, before we come to you, maybe James can also explain the 50 Bitcoin that came out in that first Genesis block. Why are they not spendable? This, I don't think a lot of people understood either. So the first 50 Bitcoin can't be spent. Why is that? It's just an eccentricity. It's an oversight in the software itself. So the the Genesis block is hard coded, like it's actually in the code of of whatever Bitcoin node software that you're running. And that's really what bootstraps the ability to then go out and ask the network for the rest of the blocks and transactions.
Starting point is 00:07:59 And just due to a simple oversight, or maybe Satoshi didn't care because they didn't intend on needing to spend it, the database of spendable Bitcoin, which we call the UTXOs, the unspent transaction outputs, that database only starts getting created when you start downloading and verifying new blocks. So Satoshi could have coded it to process the Genesis block and add in those transactions, but it didn't happen. Therefore, they effectively don't exist from any Bitcoin node standpoint. got it and um pete there's two questions i have for you to start the first is i think i saw you tweet at one point that you are like a january 8th uh uh public launcher right meaning that like you recognize that as the actual public launch of bitcoin not january 3rd if you read wikipedia and many other sources they'll say january 3rd because that was the genesis block uh but obviously everyone else starts participating on the 8th um so one maybe you can talk a little bit about that but also two is that's the day that Satoshi emails the list. And you can maybe mention a
Starting point is 00:09:05 little bit in terms of what those emails said and why that was so important that the same day that the first block was available, the email actually went out as well. Sure. Yeah. I guess I'll break this down and talking about like what Satoshi did and didn't do kind of looking at that whole period from October to January. So a few things, maybe just backtrack a little bit. So one, you know, Satoshi is very publicly communicative, right? He's putting out emails and messages to the scientific and cryptography community that he's engaged with, and he's getting feedback from there, right? And he's also, you know, putting proof that he is doing things when it wouldn't be obvious that, you know, that proof was maybe harder to verify, right? So for example, he mines
Starting point is 00:09:41 the Genesis block on January 3rd. What does he do? He puts the headline of a newspaper from that time in the block so that everyone can publicly verify that that's when he did that, right? So he's talking, he's engaging, and there's a very big list of things that he didn't do also, right? And we would associate them with other cryptocurrency launches that we know today. You know, Satoshi wasn't selling Bitcoin. He wasn't making statements about the value of Bitcoin. He wasn't taking money to produce Bitcoin that we know of. He wasn't pricing Bitcoin. You know, he spoke a little bit about Bitcoin's potential and about the software, but for the most part, he was, you know, releasing code publicly, right? And so I think to your second part of your question,
Starting point is 00:10:18 why do I like to focus on January 9th as, you know, really when Bitcoin begins? Because if you look at the date sequence, you know, October 31st, he mails the white paper to the cryptography mailing list. January 3rd, he creates the Genesis block, which is really, you know, compiling the program necessary to launch it. January 9th is really when he, you know, launches the blockchain and releases the software for anyone to download. And so for me, that really is the point at which Bitcoin becomes a decentralized distributed network, right? That's essentially, I think, prior to that point, there was no code for you to run. Therefore, I think you can make the argument that Bitcoin, you know, didn't really exist in any meaningful way. It was an idea at that point.
Starting point is 00:10:57 Whereas on January 9th, the blockchain that we know and run today and continue to update with transactions, that's when that began. Got it. And so when you think of that launch date, maybe Jameson, you've got some research I think you've done into Potosi. Talk about the difference between Satoshi and Potosi. And are they the same person? Are they not? What is the evidence for or against that argument? So we don't have nearly enough time to go into all the minutia. There's about a dozen really technical blog posts that have been written researching this issue, most of them by Sergio Lerner. He was, I think, one of the first people to service it. A few others have also dug into various aspects of it. I myself have been digging into some completely different
Starting point is 00:11:45 aspects of it trying to get a little bit closer to answer this question but suffice to say that along with the eccentricities and the software that made the genesis block not spendable there are other eccentricities around mining or at least how the early uh cpu-based miner and the bitcoin client worked such that uh it's bad for your privacy like there are ways to analyze certain aspects of the blocks specifically the extra knots field which is one of the things that gets incremented by the miners and you can find certain patterns in these blocks and say well there's a decent chance that this set of blocks were actually all produced by the same miner because
Starting point is 00:12:36 we can see certain patterns and the extra knots fields and and also in timestamp fields of these blocks. So suffice to say that the result of looking at these patterns and also finding some specific slopes in these blocks and their nonces over the first year or so of mining, there seems to be one particular miner that stands out as having mined a very large number of those early blocks. I think around 40% of the first 50,000 blocks are possibly attributable to this miner. And this is one of the things that Sergio has really been digging into is well what can we learn from this uh does it seem to be satoshi or could it be someone else and there are a number of reasons why it looks like the entity who mines this large number of
Starting point is 00:13:41 blocks they really really knew what they were doing uh they probably understood the protocol better than almost anyone else which is one reason you might suspect it's satoshi also it looks like They were running essentially a custom miner that was parallelizing the mining to use multiple cores of a single processor, which I don't believe the default mining software was doing at the time. And additionally, we can see that it appears that this miner was actually shutting off their mining activity for about five minutes after each block that they mined. So they weren't trying to mine as quickly as possible. It seems like they were just trying to keep the network going and helping it get bootstrapped. And when you talk about this idea of like throttling, right, like shutting down the blocks or shutting down mining for five minutes after every block mined. Is this because they were intentionally trying to limit the number of Bitcoin that they mined?
Starting point is 00:14:45 Or was there some other reason that they could be doing that? I think it was really just that, well, back then, most of the blocks were empty. There wasn't really a need to have a lot of blocks. If you were only trying to get transactions confirmed approximately every 10 minutes, then why bother mining a block after a minute or two? Because there's probably not even going to be any transactions in there. Similarly, if you actually look at the slope of the rate of block creation by this particular miner over a long period of time, you can also see that they appear to back off their hash rate in about four discrete increments.
Starting point is 00:15:26 As the entire hash rate of the network increases over that first year or two, they're slowly backing off, even though they could have kept going at the same rate and mined more coins. This is just another indication that they were just trying to keep the network going. They weren't in it from a financial perspective. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. Pete, the, uh, Patoshi figure, whether it's Satoshi or not, uh, mined about 700,000 Bitcoin in the first year. Uh, we ever think those are moving. Does it matter if they move? How do you think about that? Uh, uh, that treasure chest, if you will, of, uh, of Bitcoin that's sitting there. Well, I'll start with, uh, jumping off where, uh, where Jamison started, where, uh, you know,
Starting point is 00:16:05 he was saying, this is what we know based on the data from Satoshi. And a lot of my research has gone into what Satoshi actually said while he was maintainer of the project. Right. So if we look at as public messages, you know, you have this idea that Satoshi may have, you know, kind of phased out his mining and that he may have been altruistic and trying to support the network and not money motivated. I think, again, going back to the launch, what do we know? Satoshi didn't kind of behave as a profiteer. And this might map with that. But also there's some messages from him that suggest that he wanted more people to mine and for Bitcoin to grow. So there's a famous message from Satoshi in which he sort of refers to the gentleman's agreement that various Bitcoin people
Starting point is 00:16:40 who run Bitcoin should make not to increase the hash rate too much, right? So I think people were mining with Bitcoin. They were mining on their computers back then. There was this idea in Satoshi's messages, I think, even then that he foresaw an age like today where we're mining Bitcoin with large data centers. And I think he was very keen to kind of suppress that activity or to slightly discourage it. So there's like a somewhat famous story where Bitcoin Pizza Day really kind of originates. And I think Laszlo is the one who said that Satoshi kind of discouraged him in his activity, right? He had kind of upgraded his mining system. He was mining more coins and that Satoshi may have encouraged him to sort of give back to the community. So that's
Starting point is 00:17:16 just like a little bit of extra evidence about why, you know, I think it's Satoshi, what we know from what his written messages say would map to a figure like Patoshi. I mean, as far as the actual Satoshi coins, right, that's kind of the driving motivation for this is for people to understand how much wealth Satoshi might have accrued in setting up Bitcoin. But again, I would go back to the idea of, you know, thinking about the wider how cryptocurrency network launches happen today and they're being very profit motivated. Satoshi just has a lot of behavioral characteristics that are completely opposite, right? He didn't go to Silicon Valley, didn't go to VCs, didn't try to sell this idea. He wrote a computer program, right? And he released that online. He looked
Starting point is 00:17:53 for scientific feedback. He ultimately tried to get people to participate in furthering that network. But, you know, Bitcoin had no value for a whole year post the launch, right? So in the case where this Potosi figure was mining, they were actually spending money on electricity and effectively losing money to acquire these Bitcoins at the time, right? So again, it took a while for the Bitcoin economy to be bootstrapped.
Starting point is 00:18:16 And I think within the lens of the times, you can look at this as an altruistic activity. Yeah. Jameson, when we think about the Potosi research and that miner, we obviously see the email communications that Pete's done a ton of work on in the same time period. What's your thought process in terms of Potosi?
Starting point is 00:18:33 Are there any major takeaways that you have, any surprises as you've gone deeper and deeper in the research? And then do you have an opinion in terms of whether Pitoshi is Satoshi or if it could be somebody else? Well, suffice to say that of all of the research that I've done so far, the research that I have not published yet is basically taking the opposite approach at Pitoshi. and I have been trying to identify as many of the participants in the early network as possible and figure out which blocks they likely mined and see if any of them look like Potosi blocks. And so far, I have not found evidence of any conflicts there. This Potosi miner does seem to be very self-contained, And there are only, I think, about 10 known Satoshi transactions where Satoshi sent funds to other people.
Starting point is 00:19:34 And it seems like, and I haven't fully sussed this all out, but my working theory is that Satoshi had a different machine, a different wallet that they used for spending. and then they had this special optimized miner which they considered to be more of the like keeping the heartbeat of the network alive so that's mainly uh interesting because it just shows like how much care satoshi really had to to nurture the network when it was in its infancy when it was really uh weak and i think that they understood how weak it was and that you know they needed to coax more people into using the network so that it would be more decentralized. Because certainly having one person that was mining like 40% of the blocks on a single CPU was not a very robust network at the time. Yeah. Pete, I know that you've thought a lot about how this launch
Starting point is 00:20:35 can't be replicated, kind of what makes Bitcoin so special. One of the things is the launch. What are the things you identify that you're like, yeah, these are the specific things that probably cannot be replicated now that everyone's kind of paying attention to this space? Yeah, there is a lot of data of people who have tried to kind of compete on the launch, right? If you look at different cryptocurrencies, there's different ways that they can be different. And one of them is, you know, this idea that they can be launched, quote, fairly. So I think that's, you know, what a lot of people focus on, right? And we have seen, you know, fair launch coins come to market, right? People did, you know, early on, post Bitcoin, try to launch new coins.
Starting point is 00:21:10 And I think a lot of the stigma towards this idea of pre-mining, right, I think this is kind of a term that's kind of lit the fire on the conversation, is really that, you know, early other alternative cryptocurrencies, they were sort of forced with this idea of how do they get their product to market, right? And can they rely on the same things that Bitcoin did? If you look at coins like Zcash or Mimblewimble, there are other examples of this that haven't gone as well, right? If you look at Zcash, you know, they tried to do sort of a fair mining launch. Instantly, the price kind of skyrockets because they're unable to kind of get all the machines online, right? So if you look at the price for Zcash, I mean, the dollar price of it has been kind of descending almost since inception, right? Because it was so valuable to this launch. So, you know, again, I think that people have tried to recreate the fair launch.
Starting point is 00:21:58 There's even WorldCoin, I think, recently, which is one of these things, right, where their idea is to kind of scan the IDs of everyone in the world and distribute cryptocurrency that way, right? You know, ultimately, I think there's a debate about whether what Satoshi did could be even replicated again. That's one of the reasons why I think alternative cryptocurrencies today, they largely operate under the basis that this can't happen, right? If their idea was so good, and they actually released it in public, they wouldn't benefit from it or the market would instantly be cornered, right, on their new product or service. So, you know, this whole cottage industry has evolved where new projects looking to raise money will go to venture capitalists, they'll raise money from venture capitalists, oftentimes promising kind of some tokens in this new chain as a compensation for that, right? So I think if you look at the cryptocurrency market as a whole, yes, there is still some competition for fair launch, right? People are always going to try to get this idea, oh, maybe we can recreate the magic of Satoshi's original launch. That seems very hard, again, because of the way that this idea was just new and nascent and allowed to develop over time. And there seems to be, you know, people who just completely want to move away from that, right?
Starting point is 00:23:06 They just accept this idea that we can never have a fair launch like Bitcoin again. And therefore, you know, they feel like the best way to progress is to just choose another tactic. Right. And I think we've found in practice that that other tactic looks a lot like what you would imagine venture capital to look like. yeah it's fascinating when you start to think about um kind of the non-economic actor mentality uh to do some of this and i think james and you talking about kind of the throttling of the mining the encouragement of other people getting on the network right almost inviting the competition looking for durability and long-term sustainability rather than short-term economic gain uh is pretty incredible i've got uh two of my brothers here joe what questions uh do you have yeah maybe i'll ask one for Jamison to start. So the Taproot update obviously just went live. I just want to kind of
Starting point is 00:23:54 get your opinion on what it means for Bitcoin, what it means for the average individual holding Bitcoin, and kind of just your opinion on how it'll accelerate kind of the space. Yeah, I mean, it's going to have a lot of similarities, I think, to Segwit four years ago, where this isn't something that immediately becomes a user-facing change to most people. It's going to take months and years for developers to write new applications, to make modifications to wallet software, to take advantage of these low-level changes. And we've seen, like with Segwit, I think it wasn't until just a few months ago that some of the biggest wallet providers in the industry finally got around to implementing it. So it will become user-facing, I think, for the power users who seek it out. For most people, they probably won't notice much.
Starting point is 00:24:48 Now, it's very interesting to me and to other multi-signature provider services, specifically from the aggregated signature standpoint. That's going to improve both the privacy and decrease the cost, decrease the amount of data that is going on the blockchain for our users. But once again, even with the aggregated signature stuff, that's still kind of in flux on the specific standard that I think is going to get implemented. We have seen, I think, MoonWallet already rolled out with a Mucig2 support, but I'm still waiting to see what other providers, what the various hardware key management device manufacturers end up settling on. And we have a lot of dependencies as a wallet provider on different libraries, on different hardware and firmware.
Starting point is 00:25:43 So it's going to be a slow methodical process, but also we're going to see more people just starting to tinker with completely new types of things. I think that I have seen that this should enable better discrete log contracts that you would be able to execute over Lightning. You know, that's something that I hope to see rolled out sooner rather than later. But the main thing that I caution against is the use of the term smart contracts as a very, very broad term. You can make an argument that Bitcoin has had smart contracts for its entire existence. It just has a very different way of going about doing code execution than some of the more Turing-complete or expressive contracting platforms out there like Ethereum, Solana, and what have you.
Starting point is 00:26:38 So the ability for people to do more complex scripting on Bitcoin and do that more privately and more scalably is what Taproot really enables. But you should not expect that all of a sudden you'll be able to go out and start doing the same type of like liquidity providing decentralized exchange type of dApps that just execute on the Bitcoin blockchain. That's kind of antithetical to Bitcoin development practices in general. So just for privacy and security standpoints, you'll see that the preference is to execute things as much as possible off-chain and instead put proofs of what happened on-chain. Gotcha. Thank you. John, what questions you got? Yeah, I guess this would probably be more directed to Pete. Pete, can you talk about the early people in Bitcoin besides Satoshi and kind of what their roles were as Bitcoin got started and kind of rolled out?
Starting point is 00:27:43 Yeah, interesting. I mean, well, there weren't really roles, right? So there was a small group of people who, you know, definitely gravitated to the projects. I think you can look at it as a few stages, right? So once Satoshi was primarily interacting with people on the cryptography mailing list, right? So other cryptographers, academics, people who are studying and interesting in the field of decentralized cash, right? Or internet cash. From there, he sort of goes out to different groups that he thinks, I think, you know, his message would resonate with, right? So he goes to the peer-to-peer foundation. He goes to their message board and he writes, you know, here's why I believe in Bitcoin. Here's why you should be interested in it. You could actually
Starting point is 00:28:20 go back to that archive and kind of look at all those comments. And, you know, there were even people at the time who say, you know, wow, this was a great idea, right? So I think Satoshi knew that he had to get his idea first to people who would be receptive to it. You know, while there was some initial excitement, you know, Hal Finney is a great example of early excitement on the cryptography mailing list. Certainly there were detractors as well, but Satoshi ultimately had to build his own community, right? So one of the greatest resources that we have for understanding what happened with Bitcoin is the Bitcoin mailing list, which Satoshi created and wrote his emails on thereafter and the Bitcoin forums, right? So he created ultimately his own kind of online
Starting point is 00:28:56 message board for people to meet, discuss, and talk about Bitcoin. And I think that's important because that's also where the early economy starts to develop, right? Satoshi didn't price Bitcoin, he didn't make an exchange, he didn't trade Bitcoin from what we understand, like all this was done by the users and that community. And I think that's really the first important contribution of those early users, right, is they do create the economy around Bitcoin. And that was something that Satoshi himself didn't do. And if you think about, you know, other cryptocurrencies today, those processes are very intertwined. Oftentimes, the founders and developers are also sort of creating this economy and in many cases even you know as i mentioned uh how these things start to
Starting point is 00:29:37 look like venture capital you know they're pricing valuing uh you know making statements about the value of these tokens and then having those conversations with you know people with uh money or interest or even people within the cryptocurrency community who might be likely to support their project right so the economic and development actors within those these ecosystems are much more tightly coupled uh and bitcoin you can kind of i think look at satoshi as this kind of steward who wanted to create conversation but from his actions uh right we know that he didn't take anything that would um have profited him right so that's that's why satoshi i think has this altruistic um you know this lens on him where we can look at him and say okay maybe this is
Starting point is 00:30:16 someone who did have this idea that they were creating this ultimately digital economy that would expand to be as large as we still think it will be and was you know cognizant enough to do do it on the right footing pete do you have any thoughts on uh religious motifs that can be found throughout the story such as the immaculate conception and you know the the sort of disappearance of the messiah figure and so on like thoughts being other than that it's uh the the comparisons should be kind of obvious or uh do you think that that's why it's also difficult for other uh networks to to do the same thing well i mean i think one of the core debates really is like what are, what is Bitcoin and what are other cryptocurrencies, right? If you look at the
Starting point is 00:30:58 history of the space, oftentimes the people who are creating other cryptocurrencies have a myopic view of what Bitcoin is, right? So you might remember that in 2013, 2014, it was very popular Bitcoin as a decentralized PayPal. The example of a company that was being disintermediated and distributed and all these users were recreating this PayPal-like service, right? This idea that Bitcoin is a sound money. That was a new economy that we're, you know, building at the end, you know, something that's antithetical to fiat money really wasn't widespread. Right. So I think that, you know, certainly I think within these other cryptocurrency communities, like I wonder how much, you know, they even kind of think about Bitcoin in the same way that we do today. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:39 They're oftentimes using kind of older ideas and older concepts. And I think really the narrative in the whole industry is that this is still what, you know, creates most of the conflicts. I've got two more questions, one for each of you. Jameson, when you think about Satoshi, the early coins, etc., do you have any fear of the coins moving? Or do you think that there's anything specific that you would get really worried about if they did move? Mainly from a quantum computing standpoint. So there is an issue where the first style of Bitcoin addresses were called pay-to-public-key. Most of the addresses that have been used in the past eight years or so have been pay-to-public-key hash.
Starting point is 00:32:31 There's an important distinction here because when you're actually putting the public key directly on the blockchain, you're making that potentially attackable by quantum computing. And so theoretically, a quantum computer that was generalized and sufficiently had, I guess, a sufficient number of qubits, which is how we measure the processing power, theoretically, that could reverse engineer from a public key to a private key and thus spend any funds that are in pay-to-public-key addresses. Whereas funds that are in a pay-to-public-key hash or pay-to-script hash address that have never been spent from and those actual public keys have never been revealed on the blockchain, they have this additional layer of protection that gives them that quantum resistance. So it may be, and I don't think this is going to happen tomorrow or next year or even several years from now, but this is the way that cryptography in general works is that over many years, we get better and better at breaking certain cryptographic algorithms. And you tend to have a fair amount of heads up that certain types of cryptography are going to be broken in the mid to near future. So it's, I think, quite likely that at some point we will have to have a conversation where we say, look, we know that generalized quantum computing is coming. This will result in really a lot of cryptography having to be upgraded and change how it's using. And one of those things that we'll have to decide as well, what do we want to do? What does the world or at least the Bitcoin ecosystem believe is the appropriate thing to do regarding all of these early coins that have never moved?
Starting point is 00:34:24 because they will essentially become mineable in a new sense in that I expect that an entity that gets a powerful enough quantum computer early on when nobody else has them, they will be highly incentivized to use that to break various types of cryptography. And one of the most straightforward things that they can do will be to basically grind away and try to mine the private keys to that early stash of Bitcoin. That's a wild view of you. I've not heard anyone talk about that before. All right, Pete, we'll let you take us home.
Starting point is 00:35:02 When you think about all of this in terms of the launch of Bitcoin, is there one email, one correspondence, one thing that Satoshi said that really sticks out in your mind as if somebody wants to go and kind of learn about the early days of Bitcoin or learn about Satoshi's kind of intentions,
Starting point is 00:35:19 this one thing sticks out as a great kind of indicator for it? Well, I mean, Satoshi wasn't the most quotable person, right? I think maybe I would end it with just saying with, you know, Satoshi, I think the market has moved beyond Satoshi to a certain extent, right? In terms of how we're developing Bitcoin as a technology. And, you know, in many respects, we've evolved away from him and his beliefs. I think it's definitely helpful for anyone who's interested in learning about Satoshi to go back and read the archives from bitcointalk.org.
Starting point is 00:35:46 You can go to the mailing list, which is still a thing held by the Linux Foundation. You can look at what Satoshi wrote and his ideas. But, you know, again, Bitcoin's evolving. We have to build this, you know, ecosystem and move forward. And, yeah, I know as much as I like to talk about Satoshi and research his work, and I do think it's worth noting that, you know, we're going in direction. We got to chart our own course. And, you know, I don't know how relevant Satoshi is to issues like quantum computing, as Jameson
Starting point is 00:36:12 just say and a potential scenarios that we face as people who are trying to put for the Bitcoin hour. Yeah. I appreciate both of you guys coming on. Where should we send folks? Maybe Jameson, you first. You want people to just follow you on Twitter? You bet. Can't miss me at Lopp, L-O-P-P. You also have maybe just very quickly the URL for the Bitcoin resource. What is it? Lopp.net slash Bitcoin, I think it is. Or Bitcoin.page will take you directly there. bitcoin.page you are you impressed that i knew that it was lop.net slash bitcoin like off the top of my head like that i sent so many people there i probably responsible for about 25 of your traffic nice bitcoin.page and then pete where uh where do you want us to send people uh speed
Starting point is 00:36:56 editor over at bitcoin magazine um you know you can find my work over there uh definitely recommend you guys checking out the new print magazine el salvador issue hitting newsstands soon uh i'll let you guys uh read all the great articles in there awesome i dropped both of your Twitter accounts in the chat. So make sure you guys go follow these guys. I appreciate you guys coming on. This is a wealth of knowledge of the early days. And I think that the further and further we get away from the early days, the less and less people know. And there's all kinds of nuance around, you know, the 50 Bitcoin not being able to be spent from the Genesis block to the second block actually coming days later is all fascinating stuff. So I appreciate it. And we'll
Starting point is 00:37:32 have to do it again in the future. Thanks, guys.

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