The Wolf Of All Streets - The Future Of Bitcoin | Crypto Town Hall With Udi Wertheimer, Edan Yago, Bruce Fenton, Alex Tapscott & Others

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a new daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Yo. Hey, what's up? Of course, hey man. Hey, UD. Ryan is late. Man, I wish the day comes where Ryan jumps in before you, Scott. That would be a pretty concerning day.

And then a day where Ryan knows how to press accept invite to speak and then he accepts invite to co-host quicker than 10 minutes after I send it. Rand, how are you? Oh, man. Give me more credit than I deserve here, man. Hi, guys.

How are you doing? Happy Monday to you too. How's your weekend? Great. Sounds great. My weekend was amazing. I thought you were talking to Ran, you know. Yeah. Bye guys.

It's amazing. I thought I sent you that text. I was having a lot of fun trading recently. I've installed my new trading system. A lot of fun trading. Yeah, right. Short term. Hold on.

I've never asked this. Ran, you trade like short term trading? When I'm bored, I have one account that I started with. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for a while. I've been doing it for hold on. It's huge. It's new things. I never asked this.

Ryan, you trade, like short term trading. When I'm bored, I have one account that I started off with a couple of grand in it and I trade it for fun. It's actually done very, very well, to be honest. When did you start? Yeah, probably around February or March. Oh, this year. Yeah. I mean, it's a fun account. So you're trading it in watch. Oh, this year.

It's a fun trading. It's a fun account. Okay. And what's the result? What, what's this? What's the strategy? What's the result? I messed around with multiple strategies. This weekend, I deployed a strategy using crypto bubbles, which is not crypto bubbles,

banter bubbles, which is our crypto bubbles banter bubbles which is our our program and um basically i was looking for i would that on the daily and i was watching the tokens on the hourly and as soon as the tokens broke out on the hourly against the direction of the daily then i would trade so like if the daily is down and i saw that on the first hour and they went up i'd start trading them and actually a very very very successful weekend i tweeted about it once i discovered it i tweeted So like if the daily is done and I saw that on the first hour and they went up, I'd start trading. And actually they're very, very, very successful. I tweeted about it. Once I discovered it, I tweeted about it. After I tested it three or four times, I tweeted about it and it actually worked quite well.

I actually forwarded it to Scott and I said, listen. I think we lost Rand, Murray. Yeah, we did. We did. Yeah, of course we did. I'm here. I'm here. Ran, Murray. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did. We did. Yeah, of course we did. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

All right. My bathing strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, guys, I want to ask you a question before we kick off the show, before we go to the panel. Scott and Ran. Ran, if you can mute yourself, man. You got horrible background noise, horrible connection.

It's always good to have you on the show. Scott, maybe you can kick it off while waiting for Rans Connection to improve. The market, you know, last space we did, the market pumped after the XRP announcement, the judgment came in. And I won't summarize what happened last week because I think we've talked about it endlessly. But I'm curious to get your thoughts on the market since. You know, people were kind of disappointed

they waited two years for this decision. And some people are saying XRP couldn't even break a dollar. And then we saw a lot of the Yelts claw back some of the gains. Bitcoin clawed back its gains. What's your thoughts, man? I know I did a show earlier today. Yeah, I think the market reacted very favorably, very quickly. And since then, it's been largely just trying to absorb what happened and that information, which I think is not uncommon. But yeah, I mean, it's about as boring of a weekend

as you could ask for. I'm impressed that Rand was managing to trade through this because still with all of this, yeah, we saw that altcoin pump, but Bitcoin has been just ranging for over a month, basically between 30 and 31 area and not much to talk about i think for traders waiting for kind of a break above or below that to to make the next decision so the market itself has been uh rather boring but that gives us a great opportunity to talk about bitcoin and before we thought before before buying a bitcoin i was talking to an investor and you know the person uh yesterday they were on a flight yesterday and he said to me, Mario, I'm confused. I don't understand. Everyone is asking for money.

It just seems that everyone's a liquid and his investors are mainly based in the West. A week before that, or less than a week before that, I was talking to a very large investor who's from Hong Kong, invests a lot in China. And he said something. He said to us, Mario, every billionaire in China doesn't have money. So my question to you is, why are equities doing so well when just the world economy, I know it's forward-looking, but the world just seems illiquid? To be honest, I don't have a great answer for that, but it should make you very hesitant that perhaps what's happening in equities is a massive bull trap or dead cat

bounce or whatever you want to believe. I mean, we're in this sort of macro environment where we know that the Fed is going to continue to tighten again. We know that labor only has one way to go. Unemployment only has one way to go, which is up. And I think that there's still a reckoning coming. It's the most anticipated and long-awaited recession in history. But, you know, I think we have a lot more bad news, at least in global markets, to come. But, you know, I guess I'm a bit of a doomer, boomer in this crowd. But I do think that Bitcoin can travel separately than that. I mean, we've seen this sort of situation where it's decorrelated beautifully. And now we have the

ETF news to wait for. So I'm not as concerned about Bitcoin as I am for everything else. But yeah, I think people are massively illiquid. You've seen that there's almost minimal investment or almost no investment in VC at the moment. I think people are just watching and waiting and hoping that things get better. I think that you're a little bit wrong i think you're a little bit wrong i think we're in the beginning of the of the raging bull market i do think that maybe in this phase of the beginning we may get some kind of pullback because i think that the market's been a bit euphoric after last week and the market's been a bit euphoric after the etf news but i think net net if you zoom out,

I think if we talk again six months from now, we'll be higher than we are today. And in terms of the argument, and I know we're going to talk about Bitcoin, and for the panel, I'll ask you the same question, like the argument of Bitcoin decoupling. So I've got two questions, and maybe Simon, you can kick it off,

and we'll keep it brief because we want to obviously focus on the future of Bitcoin and ordinals. We've got special guests on today. But questions and maybe Simon, you can kick it off and we'll keep it brief because we want to obviously focus on the future of Bitcoin and all and all. We've got special guests on today. But Simon and anyone else, the question is, first, is Bitcoin decoupling? And then second, what does that mean for the rest of the crypto market? If equities do well, are they still going to be correlated to equities or is it going to be correlated more to Bitcoin? That is the question. That's the question of this cycle it's our first ever cycle where we may actually experience a non-quantitative easing

cycle um so this was meant to be quantitative tightening the banking system blew up um and they'll pivot back to quantitative easing so we may never actually get the answer to that but what happens on the short term not really been too concerned about that because it's definitely been coupled short term. But yeah, that is the question of this cycle. Can Bitcoin prove its use case without the government pumping all sorts of funny money that people are looking to reallocate to assets. My answer is I think the carving cycle prevails, whether we get quantitative tightening or quantitative easing, but then there's black swan events which are all interesting because we've never seen Bitcoin during a world war, for example.

I hope we don't get to experience that, but these are all possibilities in the current environment. Yeah. I want to kind of start to go to the panel as well, the rest of them to pose the same sort of question, Udi and Iago specifically, but you guys have sort of been in the forefront of pushing Bitcoin forward beyond the classic use cases and narratives. So Udi, what do you think that Bitcoin can do regardless? Let's ignore the macro, not talk about correlations. We've beaten that stuff to death. What do you think is the future of Bitcoin broad strokes at this moment,

seeing Ordinal's BRC20 starting to be more pervasive? Yeah, thanks. It's good that you didn't ask me about correlation I don't have anything to say about it also it's funny that we're like we have the week of correlation and then the week of de-correlation I don't repeat for the last few weeks yes of course

I think there's like two there's two big things happening obviously with the talk of ETF I think that the eyes of of just a lot of people who who were not really looking at bitcoin before um are starting to look into the direction of bitcoin which is which is great might take a while maybe i i do it there is a chance where maybe like uh overly bullish too soon about that and it could take like a little longer maybe but i i do think it's obviously a good development um and the ordinal stuff that you mentioned i mean it's different it's very different it's a very it's a completely different approach

um the the reason that i find it exciting is with ordinals i think that people found that there's actually this new use case for bitcoin that is actually a really good fit. Like there's been a long time people tried to kind of retrofit Bitcoin into a bunch of other use cases and apps. And Ordinals seem to make like a ton of sense. You talk to NFT collectors, they'll tell you, yeah, actually, the properties of Bitcoin are perfect for this. Like maybe Bitcoin is even better than Ethereum in some ways for Ordinals. And I think that- Just quick, I want to take just one, sorry to interrupt. If you can explain for the audience, because we have a lot of people that are deep in the Ordinals ecosystem, but

others that are probably new to crypto as well. Very briefly, without getting technical, what are Ordinals? And then I'll let you continue with what you're saying. Yeah, so essentially, ordinals are a way to track Satoshi's sats through the Bitcoin system. Sats are the smallest unit of a Bitcoin. People who are used to Ethereum might know Wei as the smallest unit of ETH, and sats are the smallest unit of Bitcoin. And it's a way to track them through the system

and essentially turn them into something kind of like tokens that you can attach other value to. And one of the things that people have been doing with them is like NFTs, in Ornals we call them inscriptions. It's a way to attach image data to those tokens. And what ends up happening, those images, unlike they are in Ethereum and in other chains, they are actually on-chain, they're permanent, they're scarce because they're limited by the amount of block space in Bitcoin. So they have a bunch of properties that make a ton of sense for people who are NFT traders and NFT collectors, maybe even more sense than in the Ethereum world. So to me, it seems like it's the first time in the last five, six years that we found a new use case for the Bitcoin system

that actually makes a ton of sense. And it's a very good fit. And that's why to me, it's very exciting. So Rudy, if that's the case, then why are so many Bitcoiners so triggered and utterly butthurt by the fact that ordinals exist? It's politics. Actually, I don't think it's a lot of bitcoiner's like when when you're on twitter uh yeah you will probably see a lot of people who are kind of butthurt but they're actually a

minority of bitcoiner's um most bitcoiner's you know they're not on twitter they bought some bitcoiner they put it on a in a cold wall and they moved on with their lives and most of them probably don't know that Ornals exist. And maybe like 5% to 10% of them know that they exist and most of them are happy with it. Because either they use it and they're having fun or they're not using it, but they see the benefits. They see the benefits of mining fees sometimes going up.

So miners make more money and the Bitcoin security is paid for. They see that there's demand for developers because there's a bunch of companies now that are building on top of kernels. They need to hire Bitcoin developers. So Bitcoin developers suddenly have lucrative job offers, which they didn't have before. They see that it improves Bitcoin infrastructure. So one thing that I think is super exciting, Binance last night announced that they're starting to do lightning deposits and withdrawals on Binance. Now, lightning, mind you, has existed for like six years, I think.

And it was impossible to get most like large exchanges to, to, to adopt it. And what happened in the last six months is that due to Ordinals, the on-chain usage on Bitcoin went up so much that it became less reliable to do on-chain deposits and on-chain withdrawals because at times the fees were so high or the blocks were so full

that it was difficult for Bidens and other exchanges to process deposits and withdrawals. So they're like, okay, now that we don't have a choice, we're going to add Lightning, which is a second layer on Bitcoin and allows you to do deposits and withdrawals on another layer without affecting the main chain. So that's like a great benefit

for anyone who cares about that. Playing down Zendikit, why do we need Bitcoin to do what Ethereum and others already do? I think we don't. So that's actually a really good question. I think that Bitcoin cannot compete with being Ethereum 2.0, right?

Bitcoin is not built for that. And Bitcoin is going to be slow to change and to adapt. It's not going to be better than Ethereum at being Ethereum. But I think there are some use cases where it happens to be a good fit. And ordinals are just, you know, surprisingly seem to be one of those. Because with Orinals specifically, because the image is on-chain and because it's permanent

and because it's scarce, because you literally cannot make a lot of them because there's box-based limits on Bitcoin, that ends up being super attractive to people who collect NFTs. And so it turns out that the special properties of Bitcoin actually fit pretty well into the NFT use case. And maybe it will fit in some others as well, but I don't think that all of them. I think that's going to be the interesting exploration to find the few use cases that make a lot of sense of Bitcoin

and kind of double down on those Iago, what do you think? I don't think it's surprising at all and Udi spoke to the special properties of Bitcoin and why those special properties of Bitcoin make so much sense for NFTs or ordinals. But I think it makes sense to talk about what that special property is. And what that special property is, is actually property. It's a system which protects and preserves property. There's no other system before Bitcoin that allowed everyone to have direct access to property rights, which didn't

rely on some bigger party like a government or somebody with a gun or, you know, their own physical ability to protect their property in order to protect the property. And so Bitcoin introduced to this world a way for property to both be protected in other words registered and controlled by you as well as distributed or transacted by you everything peer-to-peer under your control and since then we've seen a huge number of systems that supposedly compete for the same space you know they're there you've got ethereum which brings smart contracts and you've got zcash which brings privacy and you've got solana which is trying to be faster and it's weird because in the now 14 years since this massive invention of a new way of creating and protecting and transferring property rights, all of the competitors have sort of moved away from the property rights side and focused on features. They've thought of themselves as technologies, which I think is a hangover from the dot-com bubble and from the the growth in tech and we started having this

paradigm where we think of everything as a technology but is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the actual system is and what is being built it's like no system has tried to be more bitcoin than bitcoin provide clearer more more reliable, more permanent protection of property rights. And actually, I think this connects to what you guys were talking about before. The increase in the stock market, right? Even though the economy seems to be not doing very well. This isn't rare. It happens frequently.

And it happens because there's a huge amount of value out there. There's a huge amount of properties that people value. And we tend to think, you know, we say in shorthand, we say there's a huge amount of money out there, but it's actually not money. Most of the value in the world is not in money. And so when people are scared, they try to move into those things which they think provide the best security for their property rights. And to the most part, right now, that seems to be things like the US dollar and the US stock exchange, right? Because the US has strong property rights, but nowhere near what Bitcoin provides. And so if coming back to sort of like the question of why organelles

are doing so well on Bitcoin, it's because NFTs are the most pure expression of pure digital property rights. And of course, they are going to be most secured and as a result, most exciting, most attractive on Bitcoin and the world is catching on to them and so i think where um you know people who disagree with ordinals on on bitcoin disagrees they they are thinking in terms of money instead of property uh and i think that's a fundamental misunderstanding and i think what we're going to see is not bitcoin competing with ethereum but bitcoin building on its ability to be the best platform for creating permanent reliable property rights because the

system is going to be the same today as it was yesterday and the same tomorrow and for your grandchildren and that you know is a new kind of thing it It's not software. It's not hardware. It's permaware. I wanted to come back to you in a few minutes and talk about then stable coins specifically on Bitcoin. But first, I want to ask Udi a question. You obviously just had a spaces with Vitalik and Vitalik. Vitalik said, I think the quote was, Ordinals is a pushback to the laser eye movement. Right. And sort of our original topic here actually was going to be something along the lines of things that Bitcoiners can learn from the Ethereum community. But we decided maybe that was too contentious and didn't have a bunch of ETH maxis here to push back. But Udi, you did have that conversation with Vitalik. Clearly, you know, he believes as well that this triggers Maxis, but what do you make of that? And what were the other sort of major insights that you got from that conversation? Yeah. So we were very fortunate to have Vitalik agree to do, you know, that live interview. He doesn't do that very often. And I think the reason that he agreed was, I think he sees what we're seeing, that ordinals are kind of restarting or reigniting that spirit

of building on Bitcoin that has been kind of subdued for many years. Actually, the title of our interview was, what can Bitcoiners learn from Ethereum? And we talked about a bunch of things. I think one of the interesting ones, we mentioned Lightning before. One of the interesting ones is Ethereum actually tried to pursue a system very similar to Lightning. And then Plasma, which is maybe kind of an evolved evolvement of that evolution of that which and both ended up not making sense both end up being um just a little too constrained and like a lot of work to end up with something that is maybe too constrained and not not allowing enough of what people want to do

and what ethereum found out is that roll-ups seem to be the way forward for Ethereum. Without going into too much technical detail, roll-ups are essentially a way to just have another blockchain and have it settle securely to Ethereum. And I think that through that discussion, I think the main conclusion that we got to was that probably a structure similar to that would make sense for Bitcoin as well, if we can find a way to do it without changing Bitcoin too much and while keeping Bitcoin's strengths. So those are kind of open questions. But it's's very optimistic i think vitalik saw it as a very optimistic option i think i think for everyone it's like well you know maybe we don't have to

like maybe the biggest learning is the bitcoin community seems to have like kind of committed to the lightning solution and maybe it's not you know maybe it's not the perfect one like maybe it's a good idea to to attempt different types of solutions and then just see which one works the best and go with that instead of deciding ahead of time, like five years ago, Bitcoin has kind of decided, yeah, Lightning is the way to go. And now five years later, we can get anywhere with it. Well, maybe just for the people who are more less technical in the audience, maybe just talk us through what you believe the shortfalls of lightning may be.

I guess we need to ask what lightning is, first of all, because I assume most people in the audience never tried it and maybe never even heard of it because it's honestly not very popular. It's awesome that Biden's integrated it last night. That's a very good step, but also it took five years.

It kind of shows that maybe no one was really in a hurry to do that um so lightning is is a payment solution it's it's a way to make bitcoin payments in a way that is fast and cheap and and in a way that allows users theoretically to keep their funds in self-custody um and like there's there's a bunch of arguments about why there are like technical drawbacks there i actually don't really want to go too much into that i think the more interesting point is that we're not sure there's a product market fit at all we're not sure there are people who actually want to use that product even if it works well um of making decentralized Bitcoin payments that are fast and cheap. I personally don't like spending my Bitcoin.

I don't particularly want to do that. I want to keep it. And when I need to buy something, I tend to not want to pay with Bitcoins. That's me personally. I know that not everyone... Does that mean that there's a shift in the narrative of Bitcoin from being what maybe Satoshi intended, which was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, and what maybe in 2017 we thought Bitcoin would be, which was money. We thought Bitcoin would be a replacement for money.

Do you know there's been a fundamental shift to say, look, maybe Bitcoin isn't money anymore, and actually Bitcoin is just gold or a store of value. And therefore, if that's the case, then we don't need micro-payments. Like you don't need micro-payments for gold. You don't really need micro-payments for Bitcoin. So I'm not a fan of the ideological statements.

I'm just looking at data, right? I'm just saying, are people using Bitcoin right now to make payments? I would say overwhelmingly not so much uh there are some people of course i'm not saying no one does it of course some people do but in general it's not super popular it seems like even within the crypto ecosystem people tend to prefer paying with stable coins or maybe some other coins sometimes bitcoin doesn't seem to have any particular preference in payments. And I'm actually, I don't know, it might change.

Maybe Satoshi was right. Maybe over time, this is something that's going to change. Maybe 10 years from now, a lot of people will want or need to pay with Bitcoin. I don't know. But I'm just looking at the data and what people are doing now. And it seems like it's not a very attractive use case for most people currently. Good question. Can I have two both use cases together, a store

of value and a form of payment? Yeah, I would say, of course you can. I think you can. But I think my only criticism towards Lightning would be that it seems like big portions of the Bitcoin community have kind of put all of their

hopes and dreams on Lightning as the only ultimate solution for pushing Bitcoin forward. And that's the only part I disagree with, just because it seems like so far, you know, the reception was not amazing. It could be one day, and it's not a reason not to do it. If people are passionate about the payment use case, yeah, go ahead and build it. But I think that Bitcoin is going to need more than that. I think what we've seen with Orinals is just a taste of the fact that there's probably other use cases that people are going to want to use. And there's beyond Orinals, I'm sure there are others. And if we focus only on Lightning, it really constrains what Bitcoin can do because Lightning is focused only on the payment use case. And I'm sure that some people want to do that, but I think there's a lot of people who are looking for other things. So that's one.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why isn't one vertical expanding Bitcoin into being usable money and another bunch of people or another stream developing Bitcoin into being usable money, another bunch of people or another stream developing Bitcoin into ownable property. Surely the core principle of the underlying technology or the base layer remains exactly the same. And we should encourage as many people to build as many use cases as possible using Bitcoin. Yeah, I 100% agree with you.

I definitely think that. And Bitcoin is permissionless, right? So literally, that's the point, that you can build whatever you want into any direction you want in any use cases you want. I agree with that 100%. And I think maybe people who are not as familiar with kind of the Bitcoin community, Bitcoin politics,

might just not know that. But it seems like the Bitcoin community is focused on this one particular use case of payment for a very long time. It doesn't have to, though. I would agree with you 100%. I think people who care about Lightning should continue to push that forward and can probably do some amazing things over there. But the idea that anything else is a bad idea is it's not healthy right um so from their point of view just hold on i just wanted to ask one question if you don't mind i want to move it back to eth and then because i know that yago and simon have their hand up and travis as well

but sanjag i wanted the question i asked earlier i want to ask it again before we move too far off is um why do we need ordinals when when the solution is already available on eth that's question number one and then question number two um what do you think developers or the bitcoin community can learn from eth and i'm asking you as a fellow um punk holder please don't block me for removing my part but we'd love to get your thoughts on uh i know you still hold the puck, so it's fine. Look, I think the main takeaway, and some might disagree, is I think there's a lot of, in my estimation, a lot of rigidity in the Bitcoin community or a big subset of it. And I think in the Ethereum community, historically, it's been a bit of an open mind and more of an exploration. It's so early still in the design space for blockchains. And I think to Uri's point, the ordinals really have reignited the initial spirit of crypto, which is to say, look, these systems are super powerful.

We don't really understand how we're going to use them still. But the idea of doing restless execution and capturing time and space in immutable records is super powerful. And so I think the Bitcoin community sort of said, historically, they've been bitter about the success of perhaps Ethereum and have been critical of their migration for mistake and whatnot.

But I think Warner has really reignited sort of more practicality into the Bitcoin cam saying wow like we have a lot of security here we have the best more muscle indie blockchain out there and there's a lot of static compute and economic power here what else can we do with that and so oh it so happens that we can do wardinals um and so i think I'm really excited from that perspective because I think that energy is very much needed. Now, of course, the big question is, what else can you do with

Bitcoin? Can you ever have a smart contract with Bitcoin? I think a lot of those are still looking questions. I'm not the right person to ask that, but at least it's exciting to see that because I think in Ethereum, that type of thinking has served the community well. If you look at how, look, I mean the transition to Brutus State was very ambitious. It took a lot of time and different types of designs. I mean

there was Plasma and there was a whole bunch of different designs that were thrown out of the window but it required that level of open-mindedness to say, sure I mean as time progresses you have more lending, you have more value. You have to be sort of more methodical and structured. You can't, like, move fast and break things, right? But I do still think that at least being open-minded as a community, and it served ETH particularly well to be the de facto kind of the most dominant share contracting platform today.

But hold on, guys. I think just like a few people here in the crowd, I have maybe a fundamental misunderstanding, which is why I think you're running a little bit too fast for me. The way I understand it, Bitcoin is an open protocol where anyone can do whatever they want on the Bitcoin protocol or around the Bitcoin protocol and use it however they wish. And what I'm struggling to understand here is, I'm going back to my question that I had with Woody when I asked him this. If I want to build property rights and you want to build money or something else,

we must just go ahead and build. Isn't that the foundation of Bitcoin? What is the benefit of pushing back to people experimenting on a blockchain? Now, that's the part that perhaps I'm not understanding, and I'm sure that if I'm not understanding, a lot of other people in the audience are also not understanding it. What is the... Does it mean that we have to change the design of the protocol? No. Does it mean that we have to change anything else?

No. So I'm struggling to understand why it's one or the other and not, let's just all do whatever the hell we want. And one of us will get it right. Maybe two of us will get it right. Maybe five of us will get it right. Who cares? I think you have here on stage, like people who all stage people who all agree that everyone should do whatever they want and that Bitcoin is permissionless. I think that there is a group that would disagree.

They just don't have a representative here on stage to present their case. But there is a group I call the Bitcoin laser eyes. What's that? Well, for one, let's get the Bitcoin laser eyes on here, because I think that's what crypto town hall is about. If you can give us some names now of people who you believe are in the opposite camp, our team is listening in the background and let's get them on here because I'm a member of the crypto community. And I really want to try and understand both sides of the argument. I think that's what town hall is about. I think to have a whole lot of voices here that are all in one vertical

and all screaming, we all agree on something is not fun. I think what's more fun is to say I see this as a permissionless network. I want as many people as possible to be able to conduct as many experiments as possible. But if there's anybody else that has a different view, let's hear from them. Yeah, and I'm seeing a few laser eyes in the audio. So guys,

feel free to DM me or Ran and the team will bring you up or just request to speak. I would love to have you on stage. But if someone could, like Ran's question is a good question. I wanted to ask as well. Yadav, do you mind you or Alice,

I'd love you to play devil's advocate. Like what's the stance of the other group? Because there's some smart people on the other side of that argument. So I'm genuinely curious what their position is. Sure. Even if you disagree with it. Sure. So I think a good way to think about it and this

goes back to what ron was saying is why can't we have property and money and we do on bitcoin right we've got bitcoin and we have btc but they're not the same thing btc is a use case on the bitcoin blockchain and it's the primary use case but it doesn't have to be the only use case now when you start having more use cases bundled in then the blockchain starts to become much more complicated much more difficult to understand much more difficult to maintain and introduces all sorts of risks uh you know, MEV, which is myleros extracting value. This is what I want to understand. This is what I want to understand.

So I think for the members of the audience, a lot of people in the audience don't understand when you say that BTC is just one of the use cases of the Bitcoin blockchain. I think that's very confusing. I mean, I certainly understand it, but I think it's very important that we explain that concept to people listening here.

And once you've done that, if you could explain to us why the blockchain, I think you refer to it as almost like blockchain design, blockchain maintenance. Why would that need to change if we started to do ordinals and things like that on Bitcoin? Why would it need to change? Why can't we just use the blockchain as it should? So think about the difference between if you go to Amazon Prime Video and you download a movie that you want to watch. Let's say you want to watch, I don't know, The Three Amigos, right?

So you download The Three Amigos, you pay $3.99 and now on your computer you just have the three amigos versus Netflix right so Netflix bundled together a whole bunch of content most of which you don't want and you're paying I don't know $7.99 or whatever they're currently charging every single month you can think about the difference between sort of Bitcoin which is the one specific movie that you want versus ethereum which is bundling together you're downloading all kinds of information about assets that you don't care about and defy projects that you don't care about mean coins that you don't care about so ethereum is far more bundled but what's happening um with both both Ethereum and Bitcoin right now is it's become obvious that you can't bundle everything into one blockchain. You have to provide a way for users to opt in to decide what it is that they want to use.

And so the way that Ethereum is doing this right now is with road ups right so you've got optimism and polygon and and and starkware and a whole bunch of other systems that um if you're not using one of those systems you don't see the activity on those systems uh you you literally have to get like a special wallet a special client right uh to interact with those systems. And then you start seeing the activity there. Ordinals is the same thing on Bitcoin. But Bitcoin's been far more conservative. It's been far more strict about trying to reduce bundling to a minimum, right? So with Ordinals, unless you have a special Ordinals wallet,

you don't see the Ordinals, right? You can't interpret activity that's happening on Bitcoin as ordinal activity. There's a whole bunch of additional information that you, and this is an analogy, but you basically haven't downloaded. And I think the exciting thing that's happening in Bitcoin right now is that there's a lot of excitement around building more tooling and building more standards which will allow people to issue tokens, mince tokens, create smart contracts or DeFi tooling which is up in, right, which isn't bundled in strictly with Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin and Ethereum

are basically moving in the same direction, which is giving users much more choice about which use cases or which aspects that they want. But Ethereum started out with a much broader scope of, okay, everyone's got to download everything and see everything. And Bitcoin started out with a much stricter, okay, we're just going to really try and keep the block size small we're going to try and bundle as little as possible now there are people that like woody has mentioned that are confused about this and they think they're bitcoiners and therefore you know because they're bitcoin maximists they're what they say has weight right and they um are confused

and i think this is actually a very small percentage of the of the population definitely not like technical bitcoin but they think they got confused right they saw that bitcoin wasn't bundling additional thing and so they decided that anything that wasn't bundled with bitcoin was a scam or was wrong or was like some kind of religious attack on bitcoin i think that idea is going to die a quick death because it makes no sense. It's not logical. And really, the competition is between these two approaches of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Do we start out by bundling everything, which makes it easier to then build more tools and more standards that people can build more stuff on? Or do you start out more strict and force users to build up

in terms of the kinds of standards that they're taking advantage of or use? You know, one of the things I think I'd like to just touch on is the fee. I mean, one of the open questions around Bitcoin is, hey, what happens when do you miss? Like, what happens to a security bubble once, you know, because right now, 90 plus percentage of all kind of fees are block rewards. So how do you create a sustainable system after block emissions go to zero? And fees represent a very small subset of what's on chat. Are we talking about 150 years down the road for that? No, it's really, well, I mean, that's always been the default answer for people.

It's like, oh, we'll figure it out. But when you think about it, like... Yeah, I fully agree with you. It's nice to see that there are times when mining rewards are not the primary fee or order, but I'm just saying, there are a lot of people who misunderstand and think that's going to become an immediate problem.

It's not an immediate problem, right? Because you still have healthy, I think, block commissions. But as everything, you discount back and say, well, at some point, it's not when they totally dry up. You have to then think about, okay, where are the fees going to come from? And I think that's when ordinals came around, I think that was the overwhelming kind of sentiment, at least in my estimation, was like, oh, wow, fees actually started to trickle up quite a bit because you saw this activity and like i just think it's sort of a paradigm like a mindset shift which is we're so used to thinking around this 21 million number and and that scarcity drives

value but i think in the assyrian cap and perhaps in other communities, it's sort of, no, no, no, utility drives value. And I think that's a big difference in how we think about, if your system, sure, Bitcoin can just be pure like a store of value, it could be a digital gold and look, it's an eight, nine trillion dollar market, massive, but you still need a security budget that is supported by fees and so you have to it's not really a trade-off in my mind it's just the more you layer on tooling as yago was saying to allow people to build on top of the network to create kind of wallets and easy like minting to mint or knows and to have much more functionality than than fees become a pretty important and viable i think kind of you sort of fix the security budget that bitcoin and bitcoiners have sort of punted and i think um that's probably the most important shift that i've observed in bitcoin community since ordinals came around. Simon, I want to ask you that same question.

And I know you've had your hand up. Before I ask the question, I'll let you comment first. You've had your hand up for a while and then I'll ask you the question. Yeah, it's definitely... So, you know, in 2012, we were all talking about putting the whole stock market and everything on top of Bitcoin. And then obviously, we had this scaling debate and it was such a painful experience uh we've all got ptsd and all sorts of stuff from that um but to me the the whole conversation of um scarcity versus utility um for me i think of it like um i'm so grateful for what bitcoin gave the world and there's an element

of just being grateful for what it is and not wanting to break anything not wanting to mess with anything because it it works but shouldn't but shouldn't but sam is some shouldn't bitcoin be unbreakable uh yeah and that's that's where it becomes a bit of an ideological difference so one is look at the amount of innovation that happens when you start to get these higher transaction fees. The only reason we ended up getting SegWit was because we pushed it to the limit. SegWit came in and then the lightning development started. There's been a slow burner, but it does actually perform and do what it's meant to do.

It's just not got the level of adoption at the speeds that people are used to. But where it gets really interesting to me is when you talk about the use case of Bitcoin. We're not sure if there's a market match for spending Bitcoin. And that's true. I don't want to spend my Bitcoin because I believe it will go up at a higher rate than fiat currency over the long term. And so it doesn't make financial sense to spend your Bitcoin if you believe in that vision. do what everyone tried to do in 2022 that blew up everything because they went to centralized parties but if i could stay on chain and i can borrow a stable coin against my bitcoin which has both tax benefits and financial benefits and then you can buy a security and or stay native on the protocol um or an nft you know that is what eth what Ethereum demonstrated that people actually want to do. And if I can

do that in Bitcoin, where I have more reliability on the underlying asset, this ability to make financial sense. But the fear of something like that being used as some kind of regulatory arbitrage, but I think it's a it's a force it's a forced narrative um because you're right bitcoin should be pushed to the limit bitcoin should be tested to the limit and the second all the fees start coming up all the exchanges start integrating lightning and we start to push the innovation um to its limits so it's it's it's uh how you know it's it's the open-mindedness versus this all sorts of thing. And it's just a chaotic, decentralized argument that happens and biases move in one direction.

But I think a lot of people would like to see more utility on it. And if we've got what we've got, it's the market. If the market wants to pay really high fees for things, then we have to figure out new ways of getting lower fees for things without breaking the underlying protocol and changing the reliability that Bitcoin will always be a commodity. Will Barron 00,00,00 Can I just throw a question in here and say, is this discussion a futile discussion? Because anyway, regardless of what we think,

or you think, or the Nasais think, ultimately people are just going to do whatever they want to do with the protocol. So I'm kind of wondering what the benefit of this argument is about and the thousands of discussion that I've seen. Because ultimately, I guess people aren't going to listen to Twitter or to Goody or to Ran or to whoever it is,

but they're going to do what they want to do with the protocol anyway. No, of course. No, no, no. Simon, what do you mean it's the point? Like Bitcoin is decentralized. We're meant to decide all these protocols. We're meant to decide what use case is implemented. So I don't understand when we're having discussions and all these members are listening

Understanding and making a decision This is exactly what needs to be that these are the discussions that that what I'm saying lower age in the ecosystem You know what I'm saying is the discussions that we have here don't really you know, ultimately people are gonna build whatever they want and Only would know it but right right if we say if we start People are going to build whatever they want on Bitcoin, right? And yeah, but they're only... But right, right. If we start convincing people that Ordinals or Bitcoin is not a good ecosystem to build on and the use case of Ordinals shouldn't be a part on Bitcoin,

Ethereum is a better solution, then builders will go like, all right, cool, let me stick to Ethereum. But if we're sitting here talking about Ordinals being a great new addition to to the ecosystem and and it works well and and creators should test on it should build on it there's a lot of projects doing well then builders would move there like i don't understand your arguments like why we're discussing it where how do you know my argument is my argument is that it's a free market and it's a

decent it's a fully decentralized permissionless protocol where people should do whatever they want and if there's a product market customers will buy what they what they build or engage in what they build and in the event that there's no product market customers weren't and ultimately the free market will decide if we're having you we're having a if you go ahead there's one i think you're both right and there's one sort of hook which explains why so sim Simon, a few moments ago, was saying, you know, he would love to be able to borrow against his Bitcoin without having to go to, you know, a Celsius or some other trusted party. And so I work on a protocol called

Sovereign, and about $500 million had been borrowed against Bitcoin by people who are using the protocol to be able to do exactly that without a trusted third party. But there's one major problem. And that major problem is that in order to do that, they have to use a peg, a Bitcoin peg. And this Bitcoin peg is not 100% trustless. It's far better than a Celsius or a Coinbase or a Binance, but it's not as cryptographically trustless as it could be. And this is the crux of the debate, right? Do we need to introduce a change, and many people call this the last change that Bitcoin

will ever need, to allow Bitcoin to be used permissionlessly by other decentralized protocols built on bitcoin right and there is still and i think here ethereum you asked like what what can we learn from ethereum ethereum has really made a huge contribution through rollups showing that you can use um a type of cryptography zero knowledges, and there are other methods as well, but this is the most important one, to allow Ethereum and the things that are happening on Ethereum to interact trustlessly with the other protocols, with the sidechains or the rollups that are built on Ethereum. So, Ordinals, the reason it works is because it actually doesn't use the Bitcoin asset. We can build and we will be building.

I expect in the next year we're going to see a huge number of different types of standards and tokens coming to Bitcoin. But can they trustlessly interact with Bitcoin? And can Bitcoin be used in all kinds of new DeFi systems. And there's a growing body of people who wants to take the learnings of Ethereum and introduce basically just one ability, the ability to trustlessly move Bitcoin from Bitcoin main chain onto other chains. Because until you have that, you don't have truly permissionless ability to build with Bitcoin and to build on Bitcoin. And so why is this debate important? It's important because a lot of people aren't even aware that this is a technological possibility now. And the people who are most unaware of it are the

people who are most unaware of Ethereum. So frequently that's Bitcoiners themselves. But I think the bitcoin community the bitcoin tech community is waking up to the opportunity and um it's very likely that we're going to see more and more voices and more and more technology um built which is proposing a way to provide bitcoin with this kind of escape velocity. And once you have that, then you can truly build anything you want on Bitcoin. And really, this conversation becomes sort of just masturbatory

philosophizing because the developers will do whatever the developers do. Brad, I want to get, before going to Udi and Travis, I want to get your general thoughts. I've never asked you that question in previous spaces. Your position on ordinals um i think i think like obviously it's no surprise i think the ordinal side of it is like more of a pump and dump technology it's not bitcoin it's it's just like a lens that you can look at SATs through.

Inscriptions is the more interesting side of the technology. What you're talking about with being able to do roll-ups with inscriptions, as far as I know, ordinals is not needed for that. It's just the inscription side of things. You can, like, inscribing things onto the Bitcoin blockchain, whether you think that's a waste of space or whatever, it doesn't matter. It's just the inscription side of things. You can, like, inscribing things onto the Bitcoin blockchain, whether you think that's a waste of space or whatever, it doesn't matter. It's technically possible and it's done in a Bitcoin way.

It's just that second part of it, which everybody gets excited about because, you know, that's the crypto culture of launching tokens and, you know, figuring out to to make money and and all that that that's what the the ordinals piece gives but the inscriptions is actually the technology the ordinals is just like a pump and dump lens to put on top of inscriptions beauty i think when people uh talk aboutals, usually they just mean both. They just mean ordinals and inscriptions. They use it as an umbrella term. It's true that there is a technical distinction between them, but they were both invented by the same person, and they're both part of the same protocol specification.

So I think when people say ordinals, they also mean inscriptions in in general and and yeah to me personally the the reason i'm excited about ordinals is not you know specifically the ability to create tokens it's just because it showed that there's so many people who are you know traditionally not bitcoin only people um definitely not laser eyes and and And suddenly they became really interested in Bitcoin. And they seem to, you know, like you could say stuff like, oh, they only do it because they want to pump and dump or whatever. You can say that. But the end result is once the pump and dump is over, they end up with Bitcoin in their wallet. They end up with a Bitcoin wallet, which they didn't have before. And they have BTC in it, and they're now thinking about ways to hold BTC.

Well, honestly, what about you? They'll have BTC unless they've been dumped on. They won't have BTC, and they'll probably leave with a bad taste in their mouth. Sure. Are we, like Brad's point of bringing the ugly side to Bitcoin's relatively clean ecosystem, the ugly side of crypto, like pump and dumps were meant to have ended in 2017, 2018, and then 2020, 2021 was even worse. Yeah. No, that's a great, that's a great point. I think, I think that if you look at, you know, here's the thing, here's what happened between the last bull market, the previous one in 2017, 18, and the one we

had now, um, in the past you used to, if you wanted to interact with the ICO bubble, which was like what 99.9999% scam, you could say 100% is fine. It was like almost completely a scam, but people interacted with it. And in order to enter the crypto ecosystem back then, they kind of had to get Bitcoin. It was very difficult to unwrap directly to Ethereum. So a lot of people bought Bitcoin first, got a Bitcoin wallet, played around with that a bit, moved some of it to ETH, played around with ICOs, got burned probably. But then they became Bitcoiners. Now you fast forward to 21, 22, most people who got into crypto did that either for DeFi or NFTs. And you could say, yeah, you could

say they lost money, whatever. But at the end of the day, they have met a mask install and they have some amount of ETH in it. You could argue they could have had much more if they didn't play the NFT and DeFi games. That's for many of them, it's probably true. But at least they have a wallet, they have ETH and they have a passion now. The 90% of 95, whatever percent of people that lost money in crypto in the last bull market. I can't remember where I saw that statistic. All of that is true. They're not coming back. They're not coming back.

You're right. They are absolutely coming back. But there's the 5%. But there's the 5% who's... But there's the 5% who stays. They are definitely coming back. They are definitely coming back. Yeah.

Look, you could argue about whether or not they're coming back, but I think the most interesting part is that whether we have 5% that stays or whether we have 90% that will come back in the future or whatever it is, the point is they have a MetaMask wallet and they have ETH in it and they do not have a Bitcoin wallet and they do not share any of the Bitcoin culture values. And that's in stark contrast to what happened in 2018. Back then, people who got burnt at least had some Bitcoin. And yeah, maybe they left. What percentage of the millions of people that installed Metamath in the last cycle to buy dog tokens do you think share ethereum cultural values i would say five five percent

and then i'm you know i don't have the numbers but i would say it's something and those are and do you think the problem is all the people that installed aol cds shared aol cultural values well i will i will tell i don't understand i don't understand what what's unclear here it's they definitely don't share bitcoin values you know and and yeah i just don't get what's unclear here. They definitely don't share Bitcoin values. It's a neutral phenomenon. You have a lead. You have a point. It's not neutral.

I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. It's not that working facts that are insurmountable. I'll tell you why. They're forever. I'll tell you why. The one who choose to stay are now learning about how they can build on Ethereum, how they can make Ethereum better, how they can build products and businesses there. They're not learning about Bitcoin

because they never interacted with it. They don't have anything against it. They just didn't have the chance to interact with it because they didn't have a reason to. Now, fast forward to Ornald's. Of course, it's smaller. The Ornald's community is smaller still. But the people who are interacting with it now

are thinking about, hey, let's find out how we can build on Bitcoin because that's what we know. That's what we've been part of. That's the wallet I have. That's the tech I understand. That's what, for some of them, it gave them some wealth. For some of them, it didn't, but it gave

them a community and they're interested in it. It's not that they have something against Ethereum. They just weren't exposed to it. Luke Gromen Yeah, I think you're actually a really good point. One second, Simon. Really, really good point. For those who came in in previous cycles, obviously 2013 earlier, but then also even 2016, 17, like myself, even admittedly, I

came in as a trader trying to make dollars, but the only trading pairs were in Bitcoin, right? Exactly to your point. So everybody who came in to crypto in 2016 or 2017, basically, if they wanted to participate in any way, shape or form, had to own Bitcoin. There was no such thing really for most altcoins as USD trading pairs, and certainly stable coins were effectively irrelevant, barely existed and still under development. So Udi's right here. I really hadn't thought about this so deeply, but every single person I know came in in that cycle, even if they just wanted to interact with shit coins or trade or try to make dollars, they literally had to own Bitcoin to do it and were trading in a Bitcoin pair, which gave you an understanding of the value of Bitcoin versus dollars, saps,

all those things. And that really did not happen in this last cycle because everybody did effectively the same thing through Ethereum, which was the base currency, whether for better or for worse, for all of the speculation. So it really, really is actually interesting. I never thought of that. It really, really is actually interesting. Innovation, by definition, if you innovate and you create more use cases through the innovation, you'll bring in different target markets. You'll also bring in different target markets.

You're going to expand the user base of the base underlying protocol. That's exactly what Ethereum did. I agree with Scott there. Yeah, and I think as Bitcoiners, we would want to do that too. You're making... We wouldn't want to stop Bitcoin doing that, but we would want to innovate to the degree

that we can attract more audiences into Bitcoin that haven't been attracted to it yet. This is somewhat of a good point, I'll admit, because I used to, in the 2017 bubble i used to think um most of the altcoin friends that i had that were like trading alt all the time they were denominating everything in bitcoin and the way that i would um rationalize or whatever was up the value of bitcoin and they were trading to stack sats at that point people were literally trying

to make more Bitcoin through trading which changed in a later cycle they were yeah they were but then as time went on and the stable coins got extremely relevant way more relevant and then this DeFi bubble happened

people stopped denominating in sats the traders i mean like the the just kind of like the the the opportunistic people the new entrance whatever the people are just fomoing in they were just measuring mostly in dollars there but then the people that started getting into you know the tech side of it or whatever, enough to get a MetaMath wallet rather than just going on Binance and trading there or going on whatever exchange. They were denominating an ETH for all their dog tokens. So for sure, there is something to that. But Warren Buffett talked about the benefits of attracting a certain type of audience,

why they didn't do a stock split back in the 1980s and 1990s. Alex might be in here. He's a big fan of following what's going on with DeFi. He tuned me into this line of thinking because if you attract casino-minded people, then you may not be getting the best holders or the best investor base for your company. And then I think that if you apply that to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, yeah, you might be having people that are opportunistic and short-sighted and trying to make a bunch of money. Maybe they're very influential, have millions of followers, but are they really the person that you want to have as your long-term investor and that debate is still up for grabs i mean just because people denominated all their trading activity in

venezuelan bolivars doesn't mean that if a good better currency comes along then which do you think brand i don't think you're wrong i don't think you're wrong at all actually but i do think that the 2017 2016 or the earlier cycles attracted more people who are now bitcoiners than the more recent cycle it's hard to measure man it's like it's really hard to measure that it's it's like well we have to wait and see how this plays out really to see what happens over the next five ten years to see how this plays out really to see what happens over the next five ten years to see how this plays out even if you get millions of speculators coming into bitcoin through this you could make the argument that even if five percent of them stay and understand the essentials of bitcoin that's a million people who would not have showed up at all

let's not forget it, let's not forget that all this discussion, we're dealing in the transfer of value, right from one place to another instantaneously with no middlemen. In this whole revolution, as such, speculation is always going to be

the biggest use case, like in financial markets. The better that you attribute a value to something, speculation is always going to be the biggest use case. Now, we shouldn't shun the fact that speculators come here to try and make money. And most people don't. Some people do. It's the same as stock market. Most people don't make money in the stock market. Some people do make money in the stock market. But the reality is that the minute

that you attribute of value to something, the biggest use case is going to be speculation. This is a pretty big statement. Like To say the biggest use case of the financial market is speculation, there's a lot more use cases such as the transfer of wealth, allowing the entire ecosystem, allowing the system, allowing countries to operate. Speculation.

No, you have to run a business. Running a business is not speculating. Let me read a quote from John Maynard Baines from the General Theory in 1939 addressing this exact point, Rand. He says, speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise, but the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be illed out. You're saying Apple's the main use case of Apple stock and Apple as a company is the ability to speculate on the stock in the stock market versus Apple creating the AI.

No, what I'm saying is the main use case of financial markets, not of the underlying companies. But the underlying company depends on what happens on the financial markets. The financial markets are representing fundamentally the value of the company. But the whole of crypto is a way to transfer value. I mean, if you think about what is crypto, crypto is a way to transfer value between one person, one person in a decentralized

permissionless way. Yeah, but Ryan, just one more thing. And sorry, I keep interrupting, but you're saying that Bitcoins or any crypto's main value stables whatever its main value is speculation rather than helping someone preserve wealth in venezuela or lebanon or ukraine no i'm saying the primary use case for crypto is to transfer value from one person to another therefore is a financial instrument no matter which way you look at it no matter which way you look at it we are in this industry creating financial instruments that we're in the industry of creating new age financial instruments, be it money, be it tokenized

assets. We are in the business of creating financial instruments. And as such, the biggest use case of financial instruments in the world today is speculation. And so we shouldn't shun the fact that people come and speculate on our

financial instruments. It's just a trading system. It's just a trading system. It's broken money. That's not a good thing. With Bitcoin, we're trying to get back to value and long-term thinking

rather than short-term speculative. But it can be long-term too. Exactly. I mean, that is to attract speculators. Some of them will speculate long-term and some of them will speculate short-term. But when speculators come to a market,

they bring with them their money and their money is what we use to invest to build the industry. We want to attract as many speculators as possible. Speculation doesn't mean long-term or short-term because you can have long-term speculators and you can have short-term speculators. And you can have speculators that want to speculate on Bitcoin's use cases of money. And then you want to have speculators that speculate on the value of a digital art object. We want to attract as

many speculators as possible because that is what brings money into industries. And the money is the fuel that fuels the growth of the instruments. If you were to say that speculation is a bad thing, which is, by the way, what the United States is doing. They're saying, look, speculation is a bad thing. Unemployed investors are not allowed to speculate. You're actually not allowed to speculate on crypto instruments in the United States because we don't know how to regulate them.

What you do is you destroy innovation because speculators bring with them their wallets and they bring money. Yeah, but it's not binary. Like speculation has a lot of advantages,

obviously, you know, allows capital markets to function. But at the same time, speculation is what led to 95% of the people losing their wealth.

And I think opening up Bitcoin, one argument that could be made. Let me know. The more let me know the more weeks california was built by a speculative gold rush san francisco became a city of whorehouses and and and pubs and it built the most wealthy state in the in the americas and then train trains were were laid everywhere train tracks throughout the united states were were laid in a massive speculative bubble and almost everyone went bankrupt but as a result a a crop that there was transportation across the entire country and then there were a thousand different car companies in a speculative bubble and what was left was ford and gm but it

built the car industry and then chuchu yagya i'm with you guys guys i'm with you i'm with you guys guys sorry go ahead okay the the dot com bubble everyone went bankrupt but it built the internet right these speculative manias are a feature of trying to do something new difficult and and and on the frontier you can't build without it and basically we have ethereum and we have bitcoin and they're like two different states trying to invite people to come and build in them and one is saying we're going to keep ourselves very very clean and we're not going to try and encourage that activity which is extremely honorable but the other is saying innovation is an extremely messy process and a lot of people are going to suffer mostly because

they did stupid things on their own behalf right this is people's freedom to make their own mistakes. And as a result, they've built out a lot of, you know, Tornado Cash is better than any coin join. ZK Proofs are a better way of creating layer twos. We have Uniswap, which allows for an actual, you know, the world's largest decentralized exchange. Tornado Cash is not better than any coin join. Hold on. Guys, guys, guys.

I think they might be misunderstanding it. Mario, I think when you're saying speculation, I think you're referring to retail bringing in their money and buying terrible... You got me. That's what I was about to say. Let me just make the point. Let me make the point so you respond to it

because that's exactly what i was going to say like we're and i'm not mistaking it they're both speculation i think we have to be we have to distinct we have to make sure we don't uh conflate the two speculation on the next meme coin to pump or the next pfp to pump is very different to vc speculating on the next protocol to replace Ethereum. But they're all right. I think you're getting hung up on this word of speculation. It's price discovery and sharing risk. And the risk varies.

Risk can be very, very, very high or it can be lower or it can be very low. You know, for something like a brand new, if somebody comes up with a brand new 2016 style ICO, that's extremely high risk. Almost 100% certain that you're going to lose it. But that's all speculation. And, you know, I think Rand's point makes a lot of sense that this is how markets work. And this is the thing that I've talked with Brad and others about a lot.

You need this. You need this in the market. If Bitcoin doesn't welcome this, then Bitcoin isn't... People aren't going to build on Bitcoin. You need to have things fail. Failure is something that should be celebrated. You need to have things fail to have a good market.

I think, Bruce, I think maybe just to interject there, Mario, I think what you're confusing is the following. Speculation on any asset class is the healthiest thing in the world it means that people are attracted to the asset class because they think they can make an outsized return and usually when people think they can make an outsized return it's because they believe that the product may be undervalued or superior to what the market price is at so speculation is a very very very healthy thing i think what you're referring to is speculation without regulation.

And when you have speculation without regulation, then you have this, we have a gray market where anybody can just not. No, Bruce doesn't like regulation. I agree. No, this is the best thing you've said so far, Rad. Me and Bruce, Bruce is going to hate me now. Yeah, Bruce is calling for regulation. No, said so far, Rad. Me and Bruce, Bruce is going to hate me now. Yeah, Bruce is calling for regulation.

No, no, no. Bruce used to work at the SEC, man. He's a big fan of the SEC. Go ahead. Let's hear it again. Do you think that we're going to remain in an industry which, by nature, allows the transfer of huge amounts of money from one person

to another person without any kind of rules is stupid and to be honest as much as i'm a liberal like you are bruce and as much as i say that i don't want regulation it upsets me tremendously that people can take hundreds of thousands of dollars from retail investors and then just disappear and then say well you know as a token holder you have zero rights whatsoever you don't actually have a case against me here i am on my yacht in croatia posting pictures all over their instagram i think that that has to be ended and we have to play the game with a whole lot of rules now i've got but you're sorry you're making up yeah they rule 10 and it rules will

end that stuff they'll just make more of it and it will make a favor sorry i've been i've been markets right now that's was my points originally ran was saying that the whole point of quote unquote crypto is to transfer value between people and speculation is the product but that's what i was saying like the current world we live in right now is because of regulation putting up moats and giving monopolistic licenses basically to large financial institutions yeah but you can't unelect no no no but it'd be it'd be gosh guys but but brad right we have a system where it's everything is financialized and the majority of the economic activity in the world is just speculation. It has no value. Regulators are not the problem, guys.

They're flawed. They've got a lot of issues. I'm just saying the culture of financialization and futures and derivatives and all this stuff and creating moats that the central banks can set the value of money and the price of money, that is the problem that Bitcoin is trying to get away from. Fair. But I also want to point out, and Bruce, this is something I'm preparing for tomorrow. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about the drop in VC funding, the ongoing drop in VC funding

in crypto for the fifth quarter, down from $13 billion in the first quarter of last year to the last quarter, so the second quarter of this year, to $2.3 billion, from $13 billion to $2.3 billion. It $13p to $2.3. It was exactly a year ago's $8. So that's the topic for tomorrow. But there's one particular point that I found in that report by Galaxy Digital that's interesting. Bruce, we've been very critical about innovation, and you as well, right? Innovation leaving the US, and we're blaming the regulators, we're blaming the SEC. Well, VC funding in Singapore was 5.7%. It was third.

UK was 7.5%. US was number one, right? Just guess the number. US was number one. So the second one is 7.5% of VC funding in the UK. What time period is this? I think this is quarter two of this year. So now recent. I would say last quarter. I'd probably say that probably 40% of the funding came

from the US. Not from the US. This is focused on companies based in those countries. You're right, by the way, it's 45%. So then when we're criticizing the U.S., we're criticizing the U.S. and innovation leaving the U.S., well, the U.S. is still attracting the most VC funding. That was before the big SEC crackdown, Larry. That was before the big... And that was before... Again, I'm not going to defend the SEC crackdown,

but that was also before the big Ripple case ruling. Yeah, that's before. It's in spite of the regulations. You know, 45% is nothing to be proud of. One city in the United States, Detroit, once had 50% of global manufacturing. All the manufacturing in the world. But that's all US. Right, but we've been on a nonstop decline for 70 years.

I mean, look at the venture capital stats from the 90s and the 2000s and the 2010s. We've been on a non... Look at San Francisco, the home of venture capital. Look at the... And you think Bitcoin will fix this? Bitcoin helps because the root cause of it is the government. It is regulators. It's the Elizabeth Warrens of the world and the Bernie Sanders and the Joe Bidens of the world

stealing money from the people and sending it to others and then burdening us with a whole bunch of nanny state regulators like Gary Gensler who gum up the works and stop entrepreneurs from doing things. So, yeah, it's 100%. That's the reason that it's been on this decline. And I think the pendulum will swing the other way. Americans are finally getting tired of it. There's a big pushback from the industry. You know, we can hopefully, you know, have some good results in the election and set these tyrants back and then

go back to the way we were in the 90s and the 80s and the 70s and everything else when we used to be a free economy. And let's go, Travis, get your final thoughts. Sorry for not seeing your hand earlier. Your final thoughts on this debate and obviously going back to ordinals and the innovation you're seeing on Bitcoin. I know I used to listen to your podcast before and you'd compare innovation on different NFT

innovation on different protocols back in the bull market. Well, now Bitcoin's in the run as well. What are your thoughts on Ordinals? Well, there's a lot of stuff going on on that. I think personally, you know, I haven't done bad crypto now for... Tomorrow is our six year anniversary of doing bad crypto, man. So we've been interviewing so many people. Well, we're at a couple thousand people that we've chatted to. So we got a unique perspective on some of this stuff. And I think that Ordinals, and I like the inscriptions, I think that what they're doing is interesting. My concern is bogging down the network, right? I mean, people look at Bitcoin as the gold standard in crypto, right? People get in crypto. Some people get in because of speculation. They want to make money on crypto. Some people get in because they don't believe in fiat currency, right? That's what got me.

When I realized that the Federal Reserve Bank was neither federal nor reserve, I was like, what? Are you serious? And I learned that in the year 2000. So that's why I got into Bitcoin in the year 2011. Mined my first Bitcoin and then actually promptly lost it because it was very difficult. I lost 55 Bitcoin back in the day. So that sucked. And so what people care about really, I think now is transaction times. You really care about these transaction fees you want security on this so obviously bitcoin's the gold standard on that but i mean even even uh peter mccormick was chatting the other day and he's about as maxi as they get and he was talking about you know you had to send some dudes some money in argentina and he was like no i don't want bitcoin i want you to send it to me and tether send it to me on which is their

protocol obviously going to be the case for 99 99 of people on the planet right that's exactly going to be the case so until there's some sort of bitcoin stable coin of some sort or something i don't know exactly what the solution is but something along that and one final thing that i'm going to say on this is just um my thoughts on bitcoin what bitcoin in the future what this was originally is is bitcoin in the future future is gonna need to figure out this quantum computing thing because I think that's you know There's a lot more of a hubbub going on about this Google just launched a brand new, you know Quantum computer that's cool. She back home. I only anything I think if she all this client here as well guys ran I can Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. Good to be could wrap it up. I. Yeah. Sorry, continue. We're having a hard time.

I appreciate it. Really quick, Mario. I want to say, I have to go to Yaglo here because, listen, I've made the point a thousand times. Woody and I, we discussed this to death. But listen, Bitcoin is a killer use case. Outside of that and crypto, the arguably other only killer use case that has actually proliferated has been stable coins, obviously. And to be frank, as much as everyone talks about security and all these things, the bulk of stable coins are being sent on Tron because it's cheap and because it's fast and literally nobody likes Tron, right? So that points to the

fact that by and large, people are just looking for faster and cheaper and a way to get access to dollars where they don't have them. So, exactly. Maybe what we need, quote-unquote, is stable coins on Bitcoin. And Yago's doing that. If I was like that, just to be smart, the liquid network, L-C-U-S-D-T. Yeah, but, yeah. And we should also add. And I'm like, shoot him, but I'm like, don't. Right?

So, the whole point of Bitcoin was to get away from trust. And here we have this asset, USDT, which is a company, Tether, which has already had $800 million sort of confiscated from it and its partner company, Bitfinex. And we know they were already under-connaturalized. And we know that what they're doing is they're buying government bonds in order to provide for their collateral, right? And so what we're doing is we're taking the centralized company that everyone has to trust, and we're doing it on Tron, and we're putting this in the hands of millions of people across the global South who are the most vulnerable people in the world, and we're creating terrible, horrible systemic risk. And the worst thing that could ever happen to the reputation of Bitcoin

is Tether going down, because people will not differentiate between the Tether crypto and the Bitcoin crypto. And so if we are honest about our desire to create counterparty risk-free assets, uncensorable assets, we have to build stable coins on Bitcoin. And more than that, if we're interested in seeing massive adoption of bitcoin as a payment method something that people can transfer to each other it has to be um something that people understand that is familiar and that is non-volatile and those are stablecoins and so for years and years and years and years i've been saying that game over for bitcoin right we win when we have bitcoin back stable coins and i'm

really excited by the fact that over the last year we started to see a flourishing of bitcoin back stable coins and there are now millions of dollars in bitcoin back stable coins and it's growing and so it's really weird to me that more people and you know like brad um are as you said that as you said bitcoin back stable coins as you said bitcoin back stable coins i got that shiver and i just thought about dokuan saying i want to be the biggest holder of bitcoin ever to back my stable coin yeah except that what dokuan now what is he didn't create a bitcoin stable phone right he created a stable coin that was backed by uh this nonsense token right and which was a circular loop but bitcoin is the most pristine asset that we have in the entire crypto space and probably in the world it is the perfect

collateral and the you know and the way the gold standard worked was that people weren't walking around with you know gold coins in their pockets trying to pay each other. They had the US dollar. They had the Scottish pound. And they could take those notes and redeem them for a set amount of gold. But they used the stable coin. They used the notes to make payment. And this is what we need to do with Bitcoin if we want bitcoin to be digital gold and and is there a way to get that stablecoin that

that you guys are building and make it so that it works on lightning yes so we already have the ability to transfer it through lightning using submarine swaps and what and but that requires bitcoin on one side and stablecoin on the other side but over the coming months with the introduction of of uh taproot assets and and and standards like it probably zk coins as well i expect what we're going to see is we're going to see people taking bitcoin back stablecoins and transferring them um as uh assets that are secured by the bitcoin network directly and transacted over the Lightning Network and we'll have something which is cheap are you are you

following are you following the latest with sediment and the coming ecast I'll go I'll kind of yeah I'll skip that one just cuz I don't want to get too technical and I was waiting to roll like that so much more exciting than organelles like the yeah is that it will do it we'll do it next time we'll do it next time and we'll do it next time i promise don't sleep on the layer three here but i've been here i mean you know in all seriousness somebody get into the weeds of the the technicalities i think we're all saying the same thing here we want innovation on bitcoin The more innovation we have on Bitcoin, the more attractive Bitcoin is going to be as an asset, as a platform.

But you guys typically don't invest in the actual innovative things that are building on Bitcoin. No, come on. That's a joke. And the, like, token stuff. Come on. Guys, guys. That's a terrible argument.

No, it's a good argument. I'm telling you. The Feddy stuff is going to be so much more impactful than like Ordinal's pump and dump stuff in the future. I like it. Alright, Mario. Simon, give us...

I was going to get Udi to wrap the space, so maybe get Simon to give us his quick thoughts. Udi has his hand up. Yeah, I know, why he'll have he'll have the final longest words the person that wraps the space is the guest of honor so uh we're giving uni the guest of honor position man oh my god oh my god here we go Simon i would love to get your thoughts on this and then we'll go to Udi to to wrap the space as our special guest as otherwise Ren will be upset and he'll dm me Mario stop interrupting me Simon yeah okay uh, okay. Final thought.

Yeah, I absolutely do want stablecoins on top of Bitcoin. I want to be able to do a lot of what you could do on Ethereum on top of Bitcoin, but make sure we don't break it in the process. But I just want to say stablecoins were invented on Bitcoin. People are rewriting history. The first stablecoin was on the Omni protocol, and we used it for a while and then Ethereum got faster and cheaper so then it gradually started to do it and now

Tron got faster and cheaper so people gradually started to move over there. So stablecoins has kind of proven that if you can get it on Lightning and you can get the faster and cheaper then that has been the trajectory of stablecoins because it was originally invented on Bitcoin and it migrated to Ethereum later. Udi, pleasure to have you and we'd love to get your final thoughts on the discussion. And as you're giving your final thoughts,

if you could touch on again, because I know there's a side that wasn't represented, Brad is here to represent part of it. So if we could give us a full summary of what was discussed and maybe the debates you've had on stage over the last few weeks just for the audience to know where we stand on Ordinals

Mario right before that I'm sorry we'll go to you but everybody see that hideous oh yes the red circle don't underscore town all it's there to attract you like a moth to a flame because it's so pretty. But we need you guys to all follow that account, Crypto underscore town all, because eventually that is where we will be posting from.

So go follow it because it's such an awesome logo. It's amazing. You're so bad at shilling, aren't you, Scott? You're so bad at this. I mean, we love the't you scott yes this is so bad at this yeah right right thank you thank you for that great look anyway a butthole actually follow the red button follow the butthole yeah so the red circle on stage also on the the top pin tweets if you want to come on the show as a sponsor or have a chat with us, I think we do like AMA style chats,

just hit us up in the emails there or DM me or Ran, whatever you prefer. Udi, the mic is yours. Yeah, thanks. So I think what's exciting about this period of time is really that Ornals showed that there are things you can do with Bitcoin that we didn't consider before. And there are people who want to use it. That, to me, is the most fascinating feedback we got from Ordinals. We could talk about, oh, is the most important use case stable coins?

Is it, you know, laser eyes are talking about fitments and whatever. There's a bunch of, I don't know. The point is, I do not know. I don't think any of us knows what the best use case is going to be. I'm a big believer of what Ron has said. And, you know, this kind of ties into what Vitalik said in our interview as well, which he said, look, maybe the best thing about Orinals is that it recreates this culture of building on Bitcoin. And I know a lot of people heard that.

Some people in the Bitcoin community were kind of annoyed by that because they were like, well, we've been building for a long time. We didn't need Orinals to build. And I think it's true. But what happened with Orinals is it attracted a ton of attention from outside of the smaller circles, honestly, people who have been building on Bitcoin. It brought in thousands, many thousands of new people who are really passionate about building on Bitcoin. I think some of them are going to build ridiculous things that are not going to go anywhere. But also, I think there's a very good chance that some of them will find something that

will end up being a really good use case for Bitcoin. Ordinals was one of those things. When I first heard of Ordinals, I thought they were silly. But it ended up to just make sense. And I think there are some other use cases like that to just make sense. And I think there are some other use cases like that that just make sense. And we need to be open to the idea of Bitcoin actually being permissionless

and people building whatever they want. And I think we'll find some really amazing use cases for Bitcoin that will make everyone happy, even people who don't care about those new use cases. I think, guys, I think just Mario Scott, I don't know how much you know about Udi's history, but I think to hear those words coming from Udi's mouth, in 2017, Udi was a full Bitcoin maximalist and any talk of any kind of innovation or any kind of experimentation was like, no, I'm a Bitcoin guy.

I remember I actually met Udi in Israel. We met and I was always saying, look, let's innovate as much as we can. He said, no, it's all about Bitcoin. If you're here, already do a full 180 degree turn nearly. That's all you need to know about how exciting this ordinal thing is. It doesn't matter about the JPEGs and whatever they're creating on there. It's more about the idea that we

should innovate and we should experiment as much as we can in good faith and in good spirit. Cool. Scott, final words great final words scott really appreciate it i think you've oh you know i was gonna enter oh i forgot i honestly forgot about it uh you seem so traumatized for anyone that doesn't know us you're on the panel um but we have a i have a habit and we kind of brought it to this space where we kind of give someone the final word and we um as they're speaking we just end the space while they're speaking we only do it to people we know well and i know scott well because i know he won't be too offended um and then i did it twice to scott and since then he's been traumatized so i forget about

doing i haven't done it in one piece yeah i did it once too yeah now anyway guys i'll wrap it up by the way uh sim, just a quick question on the Celsius case. Was there any updates since since Machinsky's arrest? You're hanging up, aren't you?