 Hey guys, I wanted to share an interview that I was asked to do back in December of last year regarding the Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin SV split. We cover a lot of topics. We cover kind of strategy, maybe some of the strategic thinking behind Bitcoin SV and how at the time I was thinking there were a lot of minds in the Bitcoin Cash space who hadn't quite accurately identified the profit motive of the SV crowd. We talk about some political dynamics and analysis, long-term big picture thinking about the relationship that miners might have with governments. We also cover, near the end, talking about Phil Wilson's story with regards to the statistician Acomodo. It's a good interview. I hope you guys enjoy it. I hope it creates value for you. I think there's a lot of information in here that's still very relevant to some of the discussions taking place in the Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV world. All right, enjoy. Okay. All right. So, yeah, thanks for wanting to have this talk with me, Steve. Sure, my pleasure. I don't know too much about you. I am more interested. I mean, I know you're kind of doing a lot of philosophy, but I am particularly interested in the stuff that has to do with Bitcoin and to me, it seemed like, you know, most people in Bitcoin, they're so close and they're mainly talking about the technical aspects and it's kind of hard to find people that are a little more agnostic, that seem to be standing, you know, observing from a little farther away and are kind of looking at like the total, the complete picture. Yeah. To me, I find it at this point, I don't find the technical questions that interesting anymore, but what I find very interesting is like, if this is going to go global, like, how is society going to change? Is society going to change? Is this going to go global? Like, is it a guarantee that it's going to be a success or not? Like, those are kind of questions that I'm interested in to talk about and that's why I'm glad to have a discussion with you. Yeah, I agree with much of what you said. I think these are, in my perspective, these are more important than the technical questions is the big picture stuff. So first, I want to commend you for recognizing that even the big picture matters, because unfortunately, I think in the Bitcoin world right now, there are very myopic people that your average Bitcoin or tends to be very myopic and only look at what's the particular technical details right in front of them and misses actually what I think is a much bigger phenomenon taking place in the world with Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. You think you could quickly tell us the story of how you first got interested in Bitcoin? Sure. Yeah, so it was many years ago. I don't remember the exact date. I could probably figure it out by the price, but I remember when Bitcoin was around a dollar, the first time I heard about it. I think I heard about it at an economics conference, Mises University, many years ago, maybe 2010 or 2011, something like that. And like everybody else at the time, I was like, yeah, whatever, it's a novelty. And I saw go up to like $10 or so and I was like, well, that's crazy. And I think at the time, if I'm not mistaken, my wife Julia said, she also heard about it and she said, hey, you know, we should get some of that Bitcoin. I lost you there for a sec. Could you repeat your last sentence? Yes. So it spiked up to about $10 and my wife said, hey, you know, I heard about this Bitcoin thing, we should get some. And I was like, yeah, I mean, it's a cool idea, but it's like way overvalued. Like I've seen it at a dollar and just spiked up to $10. So I said, I will just wait. We'll just wait for it to come back down to a dollar and maybe we'll buy some. Yeah, and that didn't happen. So then it spiked up again and then it spiked up again and spiked up again. So it was whatever timeframe was around a dollar. That's when I heard about it. I was originally interested just purely for the economics of the whole thing. The idea of sound money is incredibly important from a big picture economic perspective and from a political perspective, I'm a libertarian and I'm a pretty hard nose libertarian. I love the idea of private money that is sound. I think that's one of the biggest, most important economic possibilities ever. What do you mean by private money? I mean money that belongs more to the people than that to the government? I mean, not issued by state decree. So not fiat money. So yeah, I guess that's about, I've always been interested in that. And I wrote a book about, people were asking me about Bitcoin. So I figured, okay, I should just write a book about it. I think that was the end of 2014. It's called What's the Big Deal About Bitcoin? And it's just a very simple introduction, the basic concepts for what the thing is, not the technical details. And that did, that had a pretty good response. Yeah, and I've been, then I've been watching from the sidelines somewhat with horror for the past few years, I think in my opinion, the failure of Segwit 2x, one of, if not the biggest historical event in Bitcoin to date. I think the fracturing of the community around that, that the way that the power dynamics changed after the failure of Segwit 2x upsets me, because I think we're still reeling, we'll be reeling from that for quite some time. And the whole block size debate, the amount of years we lost in actually progressing this community and the economy is just a tragedy. Okay, after you heard about Bitcoin in, that was probably in 2010, the beginning of 2011, how many years did it take you before you download the software for the first time and played around with it? Or was that straight away? Well, what do you mean, the software? Okay, in those days, that would have been just a Bitcoin core client. Yeah, Bitcoin QT was actually the thing that I still use because with the stuff I set up back in the day, I figured I have no reason to change over. I don't know, from the first time I heard it, gosh, I don't know, I would say it's at least a year, maybe more, maybe two years. Can you remember the first time you started using it for actually making payments with it? I have never used Bitcoin QT or the Bitcoin core client. I've only used SPV for payments. Okay, so what year was it when you first started using Bitcoin or a variant of Bitcoin for payments? Maybe 2013, 2014, something like that, is my guess. And how was the experience? Fantastic. It was unbelievably easy to convince anybody about Bitcoin because you talk about the economics and the politics and that's one thing, and then you go, look how easy this damn thing is. Pull up your phone, download the app, boom, boom, and we're done and it costs a sense. And in fact, like my whole family has kind of been involved in Bitcoin. My brother works at Open Bazaar, he wrote a book on Bitcoin before I did. My brother is Sam, Sam Patterson. We had talked to my dad about Bitcoin and he was on board, he liked the politics and the economics, and then we sold him on it. Pretty much the first time he saw how easy it was, actually, we might have even used blockchain.info back in the day. I don't even know if it was an app at the time that we downloaded on his phone or anything, but it was like, check this out. Boom, boom, it's done. He said, oh, this is a big deal. This is a big deal. And you go to the blockchain.info and you see the transaction and there's not a middleman. He was converted that way. And then, of course, all of that fell apart. What did you guys find most useful for? Like what did you buy with it that was most useful? I mean, in certain situations, I mean, it doesn't really matter if you use Fiat or Bitcoin, in certain situations cash money works the faster. So it's like you can send a letter through the mail or you can email somebody. My wife was working at BitPay at the time as well, so we're not a representative sample of just like random person. So we were already kind of biased. We were some of the early proselytizers saying, hey, literally, my wife Julia went door to door in Florida, I think it was, knocking on businesses doors and preparation for the Bitcoin Bowl. I don't know if you remember that thing that happened, I don't know what it was 2013, 2014, 15, whatever it was, where BitPay sponsored a college football game. And they, before the college football game happened, they were they had a responsibility of signing up a bunch of businesses. So this is literally going door to door, you know, doing that. So and there isn't your family was so involved with primarily because of your libertarian beliefs. I would say that my brother and I are pretty hardcore libertarians, very interested in economics and sound money. Yeah, that's the start of it. Yeah, that's the fundamental. And after you heard about it, how long did it take you before you really went into white paper to get an understanding of the mechanisms of how and why it works? I'd say probably the same. I think it was that general time frame between when I first heard about it versus when I like bought my first Bitcoin, whatever that was, or 13 or so. So yeah, maybe a year or two. And at the time, at the time, I remember it coming up in the context of, you know, you've got the libertarian community, and then you've got the anarchist community, which is smaller, and then you've got like the cutting edge of the anarchist community, which is even smaller than that. And that's where it was being discussed in those like ads. It's not really yet something to take. Seriously, if it's cool idea, but you know, let's see if this actually has legs. Okay. So if you have read the white paper and you understand the mechanisms, then the next question I have is, like how unstable have we made or has the system become by limiting the growth of it? Because it was growing pretty okay. Up until about 2016, when it slowed down in 2017, it went backwards. If you know the mechanism of how and why it works, basically the coins going into the supply, Satoshi there is kind of like bribing the miners into mining it. You know, it's an incentive for people to get involved, but that's only like the first phase. And the second phase is just it being used for economic activity. So enough coins keep flowing through the miners and then it becomes a self-sustainable system. That's the idea. But if you limit the growth of it by having that one megabyte block size, even with Segwit, I think at the maximum you can do maybe two million transactions a day, then, you know, you don't end up with a stable system. And for any other coin to get or Bitcoin stopped growing might take three, five, I don't know how long, and then it's just there. So, you know, you kind of get a little bit of a weird system there. Yeah, this is why I say I'm disturbed and saddened by what's happened in Bitcoin for the past few years. The failure of Segwit 2.0, in that I mean the failure to raise the block size on BTC. I think it was of paramount importance. So there's a lot of things unpacked there. One is, so imagine the circumstance in which block size is capped at one megabyte. Well, what happens in the long run when miners maybe don't have the incentive to keep binding if there's not enough transaction fees coming in because maybe people don't actually want to pay $1,000 for a transaction fee. I would put it this way, the blockstream scenario in which you kind of take things off chain and you have a small group of people that are allowed to access the block chain, it might theoretically work. It's a logical possibility. However, at the very least, it's a completely different system than the one that was envisioned by all the Bitcoins essentially in space prior to 2015 or whatever. Now, not only is it completely different, I think it's a bad idea because we live in a world of competition. So the block chain that actually is functional and works and you get transactions for a penny or less is going to out-compete the block chain that works when you pay $1,000 to access it. So I think actually the BTC chain is fundamentally not going to work if I had to put my money out, which is why I sold most of my BTC. Now, everybody has done so much talking about this, so let's try and look into the future instead of going back into the past. One of the things I'd like to talk about is how do we move forward from here? Like, what are decent strategies to achieve adoption? Now, on one hand, you have Rick Valvinke talking about that or a way forward should be through profit mode. We should convince businesses to start accepting Bitcoin payments because they'd profit from it. But I kind of disagree with him at this stage because, to me, Bitcoin got a little bit of momentum. It being used for payments and commerce when Steam and Microsoft started accepting it, but that momentum was killed. And what happened towards the end of 2017 was almost completely speculation driven. So that means that there is no network effect of money at play at all because when you're speculating with something, there's no network effect. The other thing it means is that you still have very much a check-in and an ag problem because, sure, if the entire world starts using Bitcoin, then businesses will profit. They might have lower costs and stuff like that, but they're only going to profit if they have a lot of customers making sales. And I would say, on average, any offline store, Brick and Merchant Store that accepts Bitcoin will maybe have one customer that makes one purchase a moment with it, on average. And part of the problem is that we hardly have any metrics to give Bitcoin a proper valuation. We have no idea where its price is at in comparison with the real value it has. For instance, BitPay, they say that they have 100,000 customers, but they're not sharing any data whatsoever. So I've been gathering little tiny bits of data from companies that do share their data. And basically what you see is the same curve that you see with everything. It's just that little peak in 2017. At the end of 2017, they had the most amount of sales and ever since then it has been dropping. So how do you see these ideas that, first of all, we have no metrics to say if something is really being successful in commerce, or we have very little metrics. And second of all, we are making assumptions talking about the network effect of money while I don't think that's very much in play yet. And then the last question would be the profit mode is not really kicking off right now for businesses because they won't have enough customers that have the Bitcoin in the first place yet alone wanting to make payments with them. So then the question is, what are tactics to get more adoption? Anyway, yeah. So good questions. So I want to start off with what not to do. The worst possible thing that you could do is split the network in two. When we're going from BTC to BCH, we have a minority hash rate. We have a minority of the community, the important people in the community. The worst thing to do would be to split yet again into BSV and BCH, which not only splits the community, it makes the usability and reliability of the network drop that much further. And now there's a even greater disincentive for any companies or anybody to get on board and deal with this dramatic crap. I don't think it's in their financial interest right now to be accepting these cryptocurrencies because hey, if a powerful enough person wants to shut down your payment network, they can effectively do it and then you're just screwed. So I think the split in the community is horrible. Maybe even something that won't be recovered from, I'm not sure at this point. However, I don't think speculation is a bad thing. So part of the gimmick of Bitcoin, part of it, it brings itself into existence is that when you have the price spikes, it took many years of building the infrastructure necessary to be able to convince enough people that Bitcoin is such a big deal that you're going to have a ticker symbol of it on CNBC every day and people are going to watch the Bitcoin price. But that didn't happen in a vacuum. That happened because of the many years prior it was established that this was actually the technology that was going to change everything. So naturally we're going to see what we saw, which is this unbelievable spike in the price and a spike in the usage. So if it were only the case, that Sec 2X didn't fail and we didn't shatter the network and we didn't completely change the dynamics of the whole damn thing where now it's not, it doesn't scale with box size increases, all of that speculation would be completely justified and the people that bought at $20,000 in the long run would make money. But now it's not justified. Exactly, now it's not justified, especially for a BTC. So however, I don't think that's actually a terrible strategy. If we can actually demonstrate, hey, this Bitcoin is the one that works. This is going to have penny transaction fees indefinitely and it can scale and it has all these properties that the original Bitcoin was supposed to have. I do actually think that's going to be sufficient to draw quite a lot of speculators into BCH or BSV or whatever it happens to be. And I do think that's actually part of the mechanism for getting people to spend it more is when they see the price increase that much. And historically that has been the case because we've gone through many peaks and troughs and all people spend more as the price goes up and then the usage plummets as the price plummets. So I think that's actually a pretty good mechanism so long as the technical details are in place and the speculation is justified. You were saying some things about the network splitting again, the user splitting again. I want to make a couple of remarks about that. First of all, if you're a business and you're starting to accept Bitcoin payments just by yourself, not by using a payment processor, but just by turning your own note. Just for receiving coins, I don't think it's that much work to flip over between chains or between different coins. Can I interject here? So I think that the percentage of merchants and businesses that are interested in accepting Bitcoin cash directly is approximately zero. There's going to be a handful, but it's approximately zero. And the percentage of people who are going to accept Bitcoin cash and do any technical work whatsoever is a smaller approximate to zero. So I think that is essentially an irrelevant market. What I've seen is that for brick-and-mortar merchants, if they are going to accept cryptocurrency, they usually accept multiple ones through a payment processor like Bitpick. Yeah. I think that's mainly true. But also just by the shops I was in contact with in Kenya, they're just using apps on their phones and they just have multiple apps installed. That's interesting. I have not heard. I would bet a lot of money on it. Martian stores, but then online, it depends on what kind of, if there is a website that is digital native, they would support one. If something like yours would just support one coin because that wouldn't be possible for them to accept multiple coins. I think even for point-of-sale transactions and brick-and-mortar places, I think you're going to have the vast majority around the world are going to be using payment processors. So it may be the case that in Kenya, for example, maybe there's legal requirements that I don't know if it pays, offers their services there, but the actual amount of people that are going to download the stuff and keep care of it. Bitpick is only a BTC and BCH. While I'm looking at brick-and-mortar merchant store, and it says Litecore in Ethereum, they usually accept four or five or six different cryptocurrencies. How many of these companies have you seen? I have no data on it. This is just like watching the news and seeing, for instance, like in Australia, you have a lot of adoption for Bitcoin cash, but if you look at their screenshots from their terminals and stuff, they accept five or six different cryptocurrencies. It's the same in Venezuela, and it's the same when I'm for the BCH Pizza project when I'm calling. So far, we have only been in touch with shops that already accepted cryptocurrency and now also accept Bitcoin cash. So they support four, five or six. And to them, it's kind of like a little gimmicky because they might, in Venezuela, they probably have the most amount of transactions over it, but in other places they have maybe one or two or three people a month that come and use cryptocurrency to pay with. So for them, because it's such a low amount, it's so gimmicky, right now, for at least the brick-and-mortar merchant stores, it really does not. They are going to accept, and if somebody comes into the store with kind of a weird cryptocurrency, they might just install the app just for this person, especially in countries that are not in the West like somewhere in Africa or in Venezuela. I don't think that's going to be much of a problem for them. So I don't necessarily think that, see, to me, Bitcoin is DID itself. So every cryptocurrency that has looked at some Bitcoin's mechanisms and is using them, some of them or all of them, is in a way Bitcoin. So people start using that DID spreads. Even when it looks like it splinters, I feel like our approach within the community of us all getting angry at one another creates a very negative atmosphere. But offline, you don't have that atmosphere. You go into, away from the distortion of social media, you go into places like Venezuela, you will not see two people that are paying with different coins start to fight each other. So this whole atmosphere of your coin is bad and your coin is a scam, at this point, we really should not care about it because even if a less inferior solution would get accepted, if it stops working and people needed to work, how necessity is the model of all inventions, if people use a coin and it becomes successful and it stops working, well, they will switch to something that works better. So if there would be pizza places here that for some weird reason start accepting Ripple, well, it's still easier for me to convert my Bitcoin cash onto Ripple and pay with that in a store than it is to sell my Bitcoin cash for Fiat and then pay with it in a store. So to me, it really doesn't matter because if a store is already accepting Ripple, it become a lot easier to convince them to also accept Bitcoin cash, which is what I want. Are you seeing my point? Yes. So there's a few things I want to say there. First of all, I agree that especially from the political standpoint and maybe the economic standpoint, it is all kind of Bitcoin. So even if even Ripple is the son of Bitcoin, well, actually again, the details of Ripple, that might not be true. It's kind of the exception. These are all essentially, so it's like Bitcoin will scale one way or another. It might be that a way that Bitcoin scales is by being an entirely different chain with an entirely different Genesis block. I do think that's true. But it's also worth pointing out that to the extent we have shitcoins that are being accepted and people are confused about the fundamentals of those shitcoins, it sets back the entire industry by years. Because the people that get burned by accepting VTC, in the actual world, the fact that we had Microsoft and you had Steam accepting Bitcoin, and then the experience was so bad for them that they said, this is a net negative for us. We're not going to accept this crap anymore. That is so bad that it would have been better for the bridge not to have been built than for the bridge to have been built to these companies and then burned and torched. That sets us all back. I agree that shouting at each other online is not a good method, not a very predictive methodology. But I think that if we're too universalist, we might be setting ourselves back that much farther. This is why I also don't think it's necessarily long-term the worst thing in the world for miners to attack chains. People say, oh, this is self-evidently a bad, I just want to finish that. Some people think that it's self-evidently like an immoral thing for a miner to attack a chain. Well, I'm not sure that's true. That argument, if you look in the long term, it might actually be a moral thing to do for miners to attack chains for the following reason. If it's the case that some of these chains are inherently fundamentally insecure, then is it better for them to go bankrupt to fail earlier or later? Because if you're building your business and you're building companies in an industry of fundamentally insecure technology, you're building on top, that just means there's more to crumble. If you can destroy the whole thing right up front, then you have less of a catastrophe later on. I think actually the idea of attacking minority chains, if they're insecure, it might not be that bad. It might be a good thing for the industry. There's two things that we should separate. There's the actual spreading of the ID, regardless of the implementation, and there's the actually spreading of the best implementation of that ID. For brick and merchant stores, they are important because then if people start receiving their wages in Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, at least they have a place to buy food with. You cannot have something become money if you can only use it online in a couple of cases. The primary use case for money is to pay a rent with and to buy food with. That's primarily it, and then everything that comes around that. I agree when it comes to a big business like Microsoft, they have to put in a lot of work. They get burned. They don't want to go through the trouble of that anymore. But for brick and merchant stores, I think that we're still in a different phase where it really doesn't matter because at any time, they could just download a different app and switch. Yeah, I'm at the persuasion that in general, the small stores don't matter. They matter for spreading the ID. They matter less than big. They matter for making a tangible, and by tangible, I mean people actually seeing the process on their phones, seeing a different customer going in using the phone to pay for it because from a perspective of somebody that doesn't know anything about Bitcoin, there's really no difference between paying contactless with your phone. An app on a phone is an app on a phone. Yeah, so I think the chronological order is different than the way that I'm looking at it. Because I was in this space prior to really any big business, I was in this prior to Microsoft prior to Tiger Direct. I remember the day, I literally remember when those things happened. It was like, oh my gosh, we have arrived. So before that, there was no small, there was virtually no small merchants. So you had the big players go in the market and suddenly the legitimacy of the thing was, oh my gosh, this must be a very, and it's on the back cover, I think, of my Bitcoin book. You appealed to, why is it the case that Tiger Direct, Microsoft, New Egg, why are all these people accepting Bitcoin? What is this awesome thing? You can't make that. But we're past that now. It's gone now. I don't think that's true. I think, in fact, the situation's worse. Where now the mom and pop store says, oh yeah, that Bitcoin thing, yeah, that was a big old failure, wasn't it? There's a reason why Steam and Microsoft aren't accepting it again. It failed. Maybe in the West, but in some countries, it's different. That might be true. That definitely might be true in circumstances where you're like in Venezuela, where you have a catastrophe in terms of people trying to access money. But I don't think that, I think that's the exception to the rule. So, well, I mean, like, if necessity is the model of all inventions, then Bitcoin is first going to see most adoptions in the countries where their own currencies work the worst. I think that the idea of cryptocurrency is definitely sufficiently distributed and in existence right now, where countries which don't have access to sound money are going to be using it. And it might look like Dogecoin and it might be Bitcoin and it might be Bitcoin Cash. Yes, I agree. But I'm interested in the rest of the world. You got to have them both. It's valuable to have people that are in Venezuela have access to a currency, 100% agree. That definitely accords with my political bias. But that's not how we get world money. It doesn't go from Venezuela to Microsoft. I just don't think that's the way it works. Well, if you just take people like us that live in the West, we don't only just in some cases online, do we really have a reason to use Bitcoin? Yes, yes. This is something that I think a lot of people get wrong in this space. Fiat or the existing systems are great. I'm not saying that's your real position. I'm just saying that there are real concrete huge economic benefits to be gained from big companies in the West using Bitcoin at present. Those big companies are only going to benefit when they already have the users that want to use it. Not necessarily. So there are supply chain benefits you can really get. If you're a big company and you have a lot of branches all over the world and you've got to go through the established payment channels to get all your people paid to track all of your packages, if you can destroy all of that and just use one currency, that is millions or maybe billions of dollars on net for all the companies that have international supply chains. What are all the negatives about them doing that? Because if they just bought some Bitcoin to pay their people with, and the price goes down 20% that day, just after that, then it's too risky for them. Here's why. The companies that are going to do that are not going to want to hold crypto, and they shouldn't want to hold crypto right now because it's too young. The companies that have the incentive to do that are going to get in and out. They're going to use Bitcoin as the back end. They're going to use companies like BitPay or other payment processors. They're going to say, hey, send $10,000 to Joe on the other side of the planet, and they're going to see $10,000 from their bank account go to Joe's bank account, but it just goes through Bitcoin on the back end. Is it already working like that? Because then you're working with another layer in between and then it takes all the properties out of it again. It's based on operational everywhere. They have to follow the laws, that kind of doesn't. Here's why. In terms of the purest Libertarian Bitcoin, when you're going through a middleman, you're giving some power to a company like BitPay. However, despite that, you still have a huge economic incentive. Even if it's a percent less expensive, which I think it's several percentage points less expensive than the current channels, even if it's a percent less expensive, suddenly that can be a huge amount of money. Can you use BitPay right now to send fiat using Bitcoin without losing any on it, regardless of what the market does, because BitPay will just observe it? I will not answer that question because I don't know exactly what services. I'm just going to not answer that question. I'll just say that if that's not something that they're doing, that is something that other companies can do. I think what is it? BitWage or something? There's a company out there that has been, or maybe it's a, I don't know, BitGo. I don't know. Some of these old companies offer those services if it's not BitPay in particular. But yeah, but they do take a cut. I mean, the thing is the cut that they're allowed to take because the economic benefits of Bitcoin are so great, still makes it profitable for really big businesses to put their back end on Bitcoin. If they're in an action. Okay. So next to that, is there any other ideas or things that we can do to start moving adoption forwards again? Like to me, what is money is in the mind? And it doesn't seem like it's going to go really fast, changing people's ideas about what money is. Yeah, I think it could have. I think it could have. I think the window for this cycle has certainly closed. I think actually, because it's such a powerful tool for speculation, and there's such a buffer zone where really people buying Bitcoin at $20,000 each, if they were buying the thing that worked, if they were buying a piece of sound money, would have a positive return on their investment. Which is insane when you think about, because especially people watching it since it's been a dollar over, you got 20,000 fold increase in the asset and you still have room to go. So the promise just of being functional, cheap, stable, secure sound money in the long run, I think is sufficient. But as you said, I don't think it's going to happen quickly, especially given the events in the Bitcoin sphere. I think it's going to take many more years before people realize that there is one scalable big block Bitcoin, maybe two scalable big block. So for now, you just see bubbles come and go. So for example, let's take Ethereum. Ethereum came out, I think in 2015. If you bought it at a dollar, you could have sold it at a thousand, like two years later. You've done a thousand times on your money, which is insane. So do you see that something like that will ever return again? Yeah, definitely. No, I think you think we're still going to have these insane bubbles? Oh, yes, I do. Oh, yes. I think we're going to have several more. I think it very confidently, just totally free economic reasons. The prospect of sound money is so great. Sound digital global money is so great that it's going to be irresistible. Then the question becomes, while the market goes down, how do we make sure that Bitcoin cash is the one that grows in adoption? Well, everybody else does not grow in adoption. That is the question. Thank you so much for asking it. Now, let me make a couple of remarks. This is something that I learned from Ameri, the lead developer from ABC. He was comparing Bitcoin to oil. What happens when the price of oil drops down? You have a lot of companies that stop getting oil out of the ground and the supply goes down. With Bitcoin, it's the other way around. When the price goes down, the supply of Bitcoin goes up because miners have obligations. They pay them in Bitcoins. The amount of Bitcoins that are is mine is exactly the same. So he was saying that whenever the price goes down, now miners have to sell more of their own Bitcoin to be able to pay for the obligations as the price is going down, these feedback loops. It's the opposite when the price goes up. So when the price drops down, the price drops down even more because when the price drops down, the supply goes up. Then Ameri was saying, and the counter to that is that when the price goes up, more people start using it to make payments with because the price goes up. They're like, okay, well, I need only a little bit of my stack to buy this with. And tomorrow they may just need a smaller amount of their stack. Now, there are people that are saying that nobody's going to buy anything when Bitcoin increases in price, but so far we've seen the opposite. The higher the price goes, the more sales are being done to lower the price. Because I can tell from my own experience, I'm making less tips. I've done a lot less with Bitcoin. I've made a lot less transactions in the last couple of months, in the last month since it's done. I don't care about 10 or 20 or 30%, but this was 80% of Bitcoin cash in just 30 days. That's a lot that has an effect on a lot of things. It has an effect on the capital in the community. It has an effect on people that are working and getting their wages in Bitcoin cash because the people that are paying them suddenly their stack, if they get paid now, their stack of Bitcoin cash goes down 10 times as fast as it should be. So that's an issue. Yes. So many things to say on that. First of all, on the last point you made, I think it would be wise for the entire crypto community to not pretend that we are in the era of stable store of value prices for Bitcoin. We're not there. The promise, part of the speculative value is that we may get there sometime, but we're not there now. So I would not recommend anybody take 100% of their wage in Bitcoin yet or Bitcoin cash or whatever. We're just the markets way, way, way, way, way too small in my opinion. I am expecting very concretely there to be multiple bubbles in front of us, even bigger than the last one. You said for BitPay, it would work if they receive fiat and they do everything. Then when the market is going down, they're losing out on it because they might not be able to get from the fiat back to the fiat again in enough time. So why would that be different with people who receive like my wage is 100% in Bitcoin cash right now? So far it's gone good except for the last point just three days after I got paid, the market dropped by 50% in just a couple of days and I didn't sell. So it depends on what you mean by getting paid in BCH. So I'm saying Bitcoin should be the back end. The actual fiat price of BCH doesn't matter other than for companies like BitPay that are dealing with these arbitrages. If you get fiat, it doesn't matter if the price of BCH is 90 bucks or 10,000 bucks. Yes, it's true, but within somebody holding it, 20% up and down is now if it goes 20% down and the next one it goes 20% up, it evens out. But when you're going in a market that's continuing to go down, it becomes a problem and people that didn't keep that in mind, they might run out of money and their business might be over because they're starting to lose money on it. I completely agree, which is why I think the smart entrepreneurial decision if you don't have a savings to draw from is don't hold BCH. BCH right now, if it is being held, is a game for speculators. If you want to speculate, I'm speculating, if you want to speculate and you can afford to do so, great, you stand to make a lot of money. But here's the thing, here's what I think the economic dynamic is. If you have a reliable back end where you're in fiat, you transact to get the Bitcoin and then you're in fiat again and you have a stable system that has functioned for a year, two years, five years, 10 years, suddenly you go, well, hell, why am I cashing out in a fiat? I'm just going to keep the middleman thing. So that is the time when you have the actual demonstrated price stability, not theoretical price stability, demonstrated price stability because the system just works. Then I think you're going to see people hold a lot more BCH and they're not going to be taken on as much risk when they do. For adoption, then I should then promote payment processors at this stage. I think that would be an excellent decision. Yes, I think payment processing is 95% of Bitcoin at this moment. It's all bad. I think it's also in my book somewhere that right at the beginning, Bitcoin, and we all knew this back in the day, Bitcoin is a new type of payment system for the internet. That's it. Now, it just so happens, there's this magical thing that drops out of the payment system, which is perhaps sound digital money that you can hold on to. But that's like way down the road in the future. Let's scale the system a hundred fold and then maybe we can talk about, hey, maybe we don't actually need to get out of Bitcoin and we don't need to get Fiat. As long as you use payment processors, you don't have to do that much scaling though. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true because the amount of commerce that can take place for big companies like Walmart, for example, the amount of transactions that Walmart would put onto the blockchain, either for tracking their supply chain stuff, paying their people all over the world is enormous. Just a company like that, one company could make massive use of a blockchain. But we're talking about payment processors. So you have a lot of companies that deal with Fiat. They still have to use payment processors though. Walmart's still going to have to use a payment processor. Okay, but if the benefit is because the flow of money for a big international company becomes easier, but they want to use a payment processor because they want to deal in Fiat, so they don't have to worry about prices going up and down, then still you have this big payment processor that has multiple offices. If they are sending the bitcoins over, that might just be one transaction that instead of a whole bunch of small transactions, so you would need less scaling to be able to manage that. Well, that's partly true. That's partly true, except it runs into a problem, which is what happens when the system works, because that's actually where we were prior to like 2017. The trouble is what happened when it works so well that everybody else wants to actually start using it. We were in that circumstance that you've just described, and it was working fantastically until we hit the one megabyte block. Well, Bitfay, the biggest payment processors, Bitcoin payment processors, while they're doing Bitcoin Cash and BTC now. Yeah, and it took a while, but I think that's slowly now people, their customers can now also more and more start accepting the Bitcoin Cash as the settlement where they get, they want to speculate they're gonna, and they can choose between maybe like 80% Fiat and 20% Bitcoin Cash. Okay, so let me try to maybe answer your question in a more direct way. I think that the way Bitcoin Cash could gain popularity is essentially the same roadmap that worked for how we took Bitcoin from zero to one. So it's, except the only difference in the thing is that you have bigger blocks pretty much. The system was working fantastically well. It is a game plan and a roadmap, and the incentives are all aligned and it works spectacularly well, and then it ran into an artificial wall. So I think as bad as the damage that was done with reputation to Bitcoin, like what happened with Microsoft, which is serious damage, I do think in the long run it's able to be overcome. Because if you look, for example, if you look at the commentary of a company, I think it would be striped or one of the payment processors said, hey, we really like Bitcoin. This is an exciting idea. And then when they stopped using Bitcoin, I think it was striped. Don't take the word for it. It is something like striped. They said something like, we're going to keep an eye on the crypto industry and if we can get stable networks where there aren't high transaction fees, we're going to probably get back into the space. So a smart business like Stripe or Microsoft is going to look at the technology. It's going to look at the community. It's going to look at the stability of the network. And it's going to say, okay, can we take another risk to get back into this? Because it's inevitable, right? Digital currencies, I think, are inevitable. It's just a matter of when they're going to pull the trigger on it. And I think we could, in theory, do that with Bitcoin Cash, especially because, last thing I'll say on that, especially because many of the people that took Bitcoin from zero to one are in the Bitcoin Cash community, people like Roger Beer, that's competent entrepreneurs were, at least, on one chain. Why would Bitcoin Cash not be a stable network even if you have somebody splitting off from it every day? I mean, there's no stopping somebody forking it. It's permissionless. Anybody can fork it at any time they want to. They just need to have a little bit of hash rate and they can do whatever they want to. So why is that a problem for the stability of it? Well, because you can't get in and out of fiat when the exchange is closed down. If you're a company that wants to use Bitcoin Cash. Right, but the exchanges don't necessarily have to close down. I'm very glad they did. It was a real possibility if they didn't for people to lose a ton of money, which would have been even worse in certain circumstances. I think if there's an actor on the network that has an unknown amount of hash rate, potentially 51% of the hash rate, and they're saying, I'm going to double spend exchanges, the exchanges are going to have to close doors. But they don't have an unknown amount of hash rate. You can calculate this and you can make estimates and getting the machines themselves is not that much of a problem, but getting the power plugs for them that you don't like it took CoinGeek about a year to get 1x a hash of plugs, which is 1x a hash. That's about, is that 400? No, it's 100 megawatts. A data center of 100 megawatts, you don't build that in a week or two weeks or even a month. That takes a year. Okay, how do you know that they didn't have a warehouse out there that they hadn't attached to the network yet? Because you can block that data up on the internet. It's very hard to hide a Bitcoin mining facility that does 100 megawatts. Even if it's not mining, they're just sitting idle. Yeah, you can look at what is being built and stuff. It's pretty big, 100 megawatts. 10 megawatts is already big. So you've got a billionaire, hypothetically, you've got a billionaire who says, I'm going to attack the Bitcoin Cash network. And I'm going to buy up a lot of miners to do so. And they attach, let's say, an x a hash worth of mining to the network. And you're saying there's a way to know that there's not a bunch of other warehouses distributed, goodness knows where around the planet. Yeah. And most of the hash rates they used was just rented. And it's very easy to tell that if you're... So what? What's preventing them from renting more? But it's not about them renting more. It's just about them that you can be aware kind of what is going on. So for my perspective, I don't think... There's a reason why Bitcoin.com only brought four x's to defend, to possibly defend. I mean, there never was an attack. There was only the rumors of an attack. They never attacked the chain. They just threatened to attack the chain. And it was four x's that they put as the rumors that there was going to be an attack, not five or six or seven, because it was not the hardest thing to make an estimate of how much hash rate they could possibly bring online. And they wanted to have about the same. So CoinGeek had 3.75 and most of it was rented. And Bitcoin.com pool had four x's, just a little more. Okay. So a few notes on this. First of all, I think that it's very likely that BSV was mining a chain that they intended to do a reorg of a long, deep reorg of BCH. But I think the addition of checkpoints destroyed that. I think they essentially destroyed an alternative chain that was being mined. I don't have any problem with checkpoints. I think people's talking about it or they think they could be used about it. It doesn't really affect the dynamics of the system very much. Why do you think it's likely that they were doing the reorg? You don't think it's likely? But why do you think that that is likely? Oh, I think it's likely because that's their business model. The business model is we're going to be the one big block Bitcoin and kill the competition. But if you do a reorg, that's criminal towards exchanges. Like, if you do a reorg of a chain, you're basically attacking an exchange. What do you mean attacking? They're becoming the majority half rate of the network and they determine what the blockchain is. Because when, yeah, but the difference is between mining publicly or mining a chain in secret. There's a huge difference between it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, legally, I mean, just from a common sense perspective, if they're just... Hang on, this might answer your question. There is definitely a difference between mining publicly and mining privately. But you said, why would they reorg the chain? I'm saying because they have financial interest to do so. And if the response is, well, it would be illegal for them to do so because you're going to tell a judge, hey, look, they were mining, but it's a private chain and not a public chain. I just don't find that particularly compelling. Okay, the difference is this, if they're just like, you know, if they have the most amount of hash rates, then, you know, you know, it's one of the few metrics we can go by. So they would say, you know, they're the original chain, they have the most amount of hash rate on it, they don't want the changes. Okay. And you could see that in public, right? When they're not doing that, when they're just mining their own secret chain that they're going to publish later, well, from a perspective on exchange, that just means that all the money that's been, all the transactions have been made, they get, they get made undone, right? So that means if somebody sent them coins and bought other coins with them and withdraw them, the exchange they still, yeah, okay. So in the case of them just like mining publicly with the hash rate and not mining a secret change, then everybody's seeing what is going on. That's not that the exchanges wouldn't perceive that as an attack on the exchanges. Oh, of course, they would perceive it as an attack. I mean, it would, no, they would just mine with more hash rate on the original chain just in publicly. So, so, so then the exchanges can just stay with that chain. So I think, and we maybe we're talking past each other, I'm not sure. I think that the business plan of getting majority hash rate on a minority chain and then destroying the chain, competing chains is a, is a plausible business plan for making a lot of money when you destroy your competition. So, and I think that the threat was substantial enough where exchanges weren't very justified in halting withdrawals. And theoretically, they weren't this time, which I think they were, but theoretically they weren't. Let's just take the next scenario in which this happens and the person has more hash rate. How could CoinGeek have gotten away with still getting any benefit if they would have done a deep reorg? Well, how would they, how, how could they have possibly benefit from it? No, no exchange would ever want to do business with them. That's not true. That's not true. So here's why, here's why. Most of the world does not care about libertarian ethics. So all that it takes is people to realize, hey, if we, if we cooperate with Bitcoin SV, we're going to make a lot of money because Bitcoin SV in that scenario is the only big block Bitcoin. In fact, it's the only, as far as I'm aware, the only coin that is trying to scale on chain. But that would be the case if, if, if, if there, if all of this was done before there was a split and they would just mine on an original, like SV made some changes as well, like both of them, like because it wasn't that SV, if SV would have, if CoinGeek would have just kept on mining on an old ABC client with more hash rates, there would not have been an upgrade. And then all the, and then they would then decide what Bitcoin cash is. The new, the ABC update would then be mined on a chain with less, less hash rate on. But instead of that, they started mining on one that had a couple of changes from the original chain, which caused a split. Now they could have mined on just that with more hash rate, not a problem. But there was a split, regardless. Then for them to use some of that hash rate to then do a reorg on the other chain, would everybody would know it's them doing it. So the exchanges would lose money. Why would the exchanges and still want to list the new coins? Okay, so there's a, there's a few reasons here. One is exchanges is not a fixed pool of people. Two is those exchanges that wisely shut down are not going to lose money. So it's not the case that the way that a company operates with other companies is they try to be friends with the people and try to play nice. The way that they operate with companies is to say, hey, look, if we work together, we'll make money. So I agree, if there was a reorg, there would have been a lot of tears and there would have been a lot of burn bridges. And there'd be a lot of exchanges and powerful people who would say, screw these BSV people. This is bullshit. And there'd be lawsuits. Okay. That's not the end of the story. So what? So people don't like BSV, but then some exchange, I mean, if they are the only big block Bitcoin, there's the rest of the world that's like, hey, I'm interested in Bitcoin, this one looks possible. I'm going to buy some of that. And then they're fine. And then there's a profit incentive for those exchanges to offer the service of getting into BSV for the rest of the world. I think if we would have seen them try to do a deep reorg, and then on the ABC chain, people putting more hash rates to reorg the chain back, so you can have a situation where they are mining, I don't know, let's say, let's say they've mined 10 or 11 blocks in secret, and they have 51% so they can do that. They publish it, everybody sees their transactions disappear. Then what the other side can do is they still have the old chain, the chain that is orphaned now, right? They can put more hash right on it. And as soon as it's longer or has more, as soon as it has more amount of blocks, they can publish it again, and it switches back over. Then you have a real hash war. And then you have a destruction in the value of the underlying currency because then you have customers that have their balances disappear and reappear. Yeah, and then exchanges can just up the amount of confirmations, put it on 60 or 70 or 80, because as they're flipping back and forth, they can only do that within so many blocks. So then you would have, you wouldn't have the checkpoints, and you would have really seen a battle between, and you would have, we saw a little bit how much the Chinese miners cared, but to me, it felt a lot like the way that CoinGeek decided they were going to split, and everything, hash war and everything around it was just them trying to scare the other site into doing as much damage as they possibly could. I think the scenario you've just painted out of competing reorgs is terrifying. And for the rest of the world, that is a, if this is a theoretical possibility, they go, okay, I'm not going to use this currency, it doesn't make any sense. If exchanges have to have 80 confirmations in order to get your money out, that destroys the whole idea of it being simple payment system for the internet. But now they were shut down as well anyways during the fork. I know. And the confirmations went up, and the confirmations on SV were a lot higher because they were there and still like SV at any time they can do a reorg on their own chain. Oh, are you there? Lost you again. Yeah, I lost you for a second. So if Kelvin wants to, he can reorg his own chain and still from exchanges. Why would he? No, no, no, no. This is where I think the BSV game plan is not well understood among many people and the Bitcoin cash community. So I can't speak for him, but I see a very clear and reasonable profit motive for all of this. The idea is the value of big block Bitcoin is enormous. The promise for everybody around the world, everybody who is unaware of Bitcoin and doesn't really give a rip about the politics of Bitcoin, they have a lot to gain from using sound digital money that cost a penny to transact. So the value proposition, the product that is being produced by BSV is sound digital money. That's it. It doesn't come attached with libertarian principles. In fact, they say they're not anarchists. They're going to incorporate with governments. It's going to be regulated. It's all that stuff. So that's the product they're producing. Which could go from, let's say, $100 a unit to $100,000 a unit is very possible. So the way that they become the global currency is by just destroying their competition. In this case, how do they destroy their competition? They demonstrate that the other networks are unreliable. They don't have an incentive to reorg their own chain. Their product is sound digital money. They have an incentive to have as many reorgs and as much drama on other chains as possible to say, look at those schmucks. They can't give you sound digital money. Right. So then that brings you back to the fact that it would be in miners and everybody's benefit then. For instance, now then it would be in the benefit for the other chain to show, hey, fuck you guys. We can do the same. So then you would say that the hash rate from the Chinese miners, she just started attacking SV and do reorgs and they have more hash rate. Ah, it's interesting. So it's an interesting question actually. I'm not sure strategically if that's the best thing to do. It's not clear to me that's not the best thing to do, but there's another right way around this. So we went wrong around SegWit2x. That's when the miners, the miners during SegWit2x, they had the power to put on SegWit2x, even though there was this bug in the code or whatever it was. And at one point, whoever it was, them together, they made the decision to play it safe and allow there to be because if you know how the mechanism works, then if you use the white paper to define what happened, then basically you have two very long orphan chains now. It's like Schrodinger's thing. You don't know if Bitcoin Cash is going to die or Bitcoin Core is going to die. In theory, what would happen is one chain dies and that's the orphan chain and the other one continues. That's how the system was designed for it to happen. Okay, look, I'm at 100% agreement with you. And in fact, if we play out the scenario of what happens with SegWit2x, the bug doesn't matter. The little bug, okay, people look at it, they fix it, it's no big deal. What happens is the people that were in power, the propaganda artists, and credit to them for understanding how the world works and propagandizing people, they would have been destroyed because it's not just that the miners were in agreement, they wanted SegWit2x. It was that all of the relevant businesses, the relevant businesses wanted SegWit2x as well. So now you suddenly have the miners and all the industry that... So why didn't it happen? I think Mike Hearn identified... Well, it's a fascinating question. I think Mike Hearn got it on the nose. It's a cultural thing. When you read Mike Hearn's piece, when he left Bitcoin, he said, essentially, the Chinese miners are too passive. They don't want to rock the boat, they want to show that they're submissive to authority and they view core people as authoritative. I think that's correct. And do they still see the core people as authoritative a year later? It sure looks that way. Because DC is a bigger block size, nobody would be able to stop them. So here's the thing. It's a fascinating question. I don't know the answer. We're not Chinese miners, but I would not be surprised if Jihan is telling the truth. When they asked him, why are you mining BTC? And he said, this is essentially short-term profits. I would not be surprised if the groundwork is laid to actually get rid of them. I don't know, but I would be surprised. It makes a lot of sense to me. Basically, you have all these people that say a lot of nasty stuff about Chinese miners and then they go on the network and they pay extraordinary fees and then you get half of that money. So basically, Jihan is being paid by his own bullies right now. Why would he want to change that? They're making a lot of money on these fees and they like money like everybody else. So there's a couple things and then I want to go back and answer your previous question. So the first thing is the way that they can make a ton of money by killing the BTC chain is by selling all of their BTC per BCH and then suddenly you're going to have an asset which appreciates 10-fold, 100-fold. They've already done that because Bitmain only has 22,000 BTC left. They have a million BCH now. I think then if I were to speculate and predict their behavior, I would imagine they would see that it is in their eventual interest to destroy the BTC chain. I think that's what's going to happen. I think eventually we're going to see a proof-of-work algorithm change. I think the community, I think there's a strategy of the core blockstream side. I think there's a strategy of the miner side and I think they're going to essentially power ways in the long run. I don't know. We know from the power dynamics that miners will always have the most amount of power in the network always. I agree. Not the only one with power but they'll have the most amount of power. I agree. So it's very weird for them to be following instead of leading. Yes, this is why. It's very weird for them to be like basically what we want, we need miner kings. We need miner leading kings. They're like we are what is described in the white paper. We are the ones that vote with our CPU power. This is what we want. We do this. And everybody else has to follow along. Right. So there's two thoughts on that. One is Mike Hearn hit the nail on the head. His article was prescient when he left Bitcoin talking about it's a cultural phenomenon. Two, it might be the case that in the long run, the current miners might be outcompeted by future miners who understand their own power in the system. If it's the case that Jihang doesn't understand, I don't know. I don't know his analysis of the system, then it may be that there is the guys behind Jihang who grasps his own power and maybe that looks like Craig Wright. I don't know. Craig Wright seems to understand. That's what I'm saying but that would be crazy. We've seen that Kelvin is like building up hash rate, but I mean they can't possibly if we have a scenario where you have a group of miners regardless of if they form a Chinese miner cartel, they're still individuals and the cartel can fall apart and they're not leading. And now we have one guy that's going to get the most amount of hash rate and now he's going to lead with the most amount of hash rate. Well you and we've talked about this in the stream, what kind of system do you get where everybody thinks that it's free and that it's decentralized, but there's one person in control of it all. But it's not really one person in control. It's one person who has been able to persuade quite a lot of other people. It's not like he can force Calvin Errer's hand or vice versa. I'm not sure who's the person in power there, Craig or Calvin. But it's his money and it's his hash rate. So imagine the population starts learning about Bitcoin and starts learning that if you put something on the chain it cannot change anymore. It's there forever. So you post a message, you put it on the chain and it disappears because unknown to you there's one guy in control and if he doesn't like once in a while he just removes stuff and nobody knows about it. And you go to your friend and you be like hey I put this message on the chain and it disappeared and nobody's believing you because it's impossible because they all know how Bitcoin works. You put it on the chain you cannot remove it anymore. Like what a horrible world would we get in. Like how much would the Chinese love to be in control of Bitcoin when Bitcoin is global? Like they're already every all the warfare they're doing with the other nations is true economic warfare. Okay, a couple things. First of all, short term versus long term analysis. In the short term it might be that let's say one person has an extraordinary amount of power. It doesn't mean that in the long run that's the case. It might be that he is the first entrepreneur who understands the power of the miners and then other miners will come around and then there will be competition in my mind because he doesn't have the most hash rate in the world. He has the most hash rate as applied to his 3% whatever it is tiny minority of shot 256 hash. Okay, so the long run I think you do see competition emerge in the even longer run. I think where Bitcoin goes is competition among nation states. This is part of the long term Bitcoin analysis. If we're actually talking about global money which is one of the biggest most important most powerful things that has ever been created if it comes into existence then there is going to be ancient states like China or whatever who are going to exert influence and try to compete with one another for control of the network. I think that is part of what is going to happen with proof of work and maybe even with proof of state too. I feel exactly the same way and I feel like this is the event where it happened. First of all, that might be the case. It might be correct. Not necessarily the nation states themselves but a little sponsoring a little influence from the nation states. I am 100% sure China is allowing this to grow because they probably feel like well if this goes global and we can have a lot of control over that will benefit us and I feel like the American companies Blockstream and Enchain I think that's kind of the American way of keeping control over it. So I already feel like this is a battle between America and China and it is very interesting for two reasons because there is another clash that is going on. America has a control system that is most accurately described in a brave new world by Aldous Huxley and China has a radical different control system. So in China they ban books. In America they don't have to ban them because nobody would read them in the first place. So in China they keep things secret. In America they overload you with so much trivial information that you cannot separate the signal from the noise anymore. So these are two separate control systems that are clashing and to me it feels like what we want essentially with Bitcoin is for every single nation state to try and gain 100% control over Bitcoin at the same time because if they're all fighting to get 100% control at the same time that would keep it decentralized. Yes. It's like a game of risk. When you're playing a game of risk with four people and you're fighting amongst each other and one guy is becoming too powerful then in the benefit of you being able to win the three guys have to first break down the power of the fourth guy and then they can start fighting each other again. Right and then the fourth guy goes that's not fair you guys are cheating. I've played risk a few times so I know that I know that. The risk you always want to you got to still play it. You want to make sure that you're not being perceived as the strongest player on the board. Right. Either through manipulating the other players or whatever it is but as soon as they perceive you as the most powerful player they're going to attack and you're going to lose some power. Right so first of all I want to commend you again for thinking through this deeply because I don't see most people thinking about the real long-term implications of proof of work. It's an interesting so here's what I thought you originally meant when you said we may have seen the first influence of nation states. I don't know who Craig Wright is. Right. It's very possible that he also has some state influence from somewhere. Right. I think that's a real possibility is this isn't just a free-floating entrepreneur out there that he might have other connections. I think it's very possible he has other connections we don't know about. Second of all to say that we want nation states to be competing with one another is that's a very big deal of what you say is correct. That's a very big deal because you're essentially saying that proof of works long-term competitive market is maybe not among private businesses but it may be among nations so well nation states will always think ahead of the curve. That's possible. So here there's another scenario. This is the scenario. This is why I'm holding out hope that Bitcoin is not like the most terrible thing ever because I see a possibility here where miners as an industry can be so unbelievably powerful and so sophisticated and have so much infrastructure developed that they can compete with nation states. So I think that we could get to a point where like so let's say we've got a huge amount of hash power in some particular country. If Bitcoin is global and let's say we're talking about a small country because it's easier with small countries and you have some unbelievably sophisticated mining operation in Haiti, who has the control in that country? Is it the Haitian government or the Bitcoin miners? I think at some point there will be a blend of the two. Exactly. I think at some point there is indeed a blending where you get Bitcoin, you know, potentially started but Bitcoin miners who potentially start as private individuals suddenly become so powerful and so wealthy that they sort of become a state among themselves. So I think that's a real serious possibility. Well what we should talk about next is the difference between the system when hash rate is inclining and when hash rate is declining. Okay because there's a huge difference. Before we do that I do want to return to something you said like 20 minutes ago. My brain has been split because I thought I have to say this because you said well strategically should the let's say the ABC chain attack SV, there are two ways to make, there are two at least two ways to try to profit from being the Bitcoin miners. You could be the good guys, you could be the bad guys. The bad guys are the SV side if you will, the dark side. That's going to say we're going to destroy our competition and make a lot of money that way. There is another reasonable way to think that maybe the way to make money is by not attacking the other chain but when your chain gets attacked you divert hash power from let's say BTC to BCH. So you defend the network you don't necessarily attack others and as we've seen I think at least in the short run the defensive approach has won. I view SV's attack as legitimate. It's like substantial and they failed because they didn't get enough hash rate. If they really attacked nobody knows that. As far as it looks like they created a little fear but they never attacked it. In my empty blocks the chain just split. I think that the check I don't think that Craig was expecting the whole checkpoint thing. I really think that actually screwed him up. Now I've always been of the opinion that it's you know it's absolutely wrong and not a good idea to attack another chain after they split off because if people want to go under different direction you let them go in a different direction but I'm only thinking about it that way because of what happened when we had the first fork because right? Because we were right. Yeah I mean it's completely wrong to claim that you should kill a minority chain when you are a minority chain because then you're basically saying well why are the BTC miners not just killing us and if they're not just killing us because they want us to survive well why are they not on our side and they're killing the other chain then. So I mean that's only started having that I mean like nobody dies when you do a reorg on a chain or something like that. I mean from that perspective I mean it doesn't it doesn't matter. I think the explanation is that there are a sufficient number of Bitcoin Cash supporters who are mining BTC where the hostile BTC camp would not successfully be able to destroy BCH. That's my suspicion. So if we go back through the model of a king like well the king has one very special aspect about him and that is that he can use violence but he has to use violence in terms of like him being a just king right using his violence to do the right thing with it in case of you know defending or attacking an other nation for whatever reason it is and the Chinese miners did not play out that role when we had the original fork. And the short run they did. I hope that in the long I hope this is just a long game but I agree in the short run I think which is again why I would recommend everybody check out my currents. I forget what it's called. I think it's called the resolution of the Bitcoin experiment. I've read it. Yeah where he talked specifically about that idea. But he stopped and he's out of it. He's no longer interested in it that much. Well because he saw this dynamic and he thought well this is a failure. Miners don't stand up for the network. The whole thing kind of doesn't work. Yeah they don't vote if they don't vote for what they want then the whole thing. Yeah right. Okay well it feels like we think about a lot of things kind of like in a similar way but you have some differences on. Is there anybody that knows how to move forward? Like how do you how do you get like massive adoption? Like I mean like BCH the last year we've recovered some infrastructure but our amount of TX are not growing at all. Yes I think that there are only a handful from just I mean I'm not super involved in the community anymore but I have been getting ever so like ever since Segwit 2x failed what was that? You got disappointed and you it's the opposite. Well I mean so yes I definitely got disappointed but I got engaged like for a while I wrote the book and it was like my wife was working pay pay okay this is fun and then I saw the whole Segwit thing and I was like well because at the time even the whole block size debate's been happening many many many years. This was the culmination of it and when it failed I was like oh shit I gotta get involved in this space again and for a time I was up until recently planning on writing a part two book called The First Fork from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. I don't know if I can write that anymore in good faith. Do you want to just describe what happened or just do you want to be like this is my vision this is how we should move forward? Describe what happened with Segwit 2x? Well if you do any more writing are you just gonna go back in the past and write books and describe what happened or are you gonna put out a vision and be like well this is what we do wrong listen to me this is what we're supposed to do and these are the reasons. So so I thought a lot about that and I feel like I felt more than I do now an ethical obligation to explain to people who aren't super deep in the space what the hell happened and to make the case that Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin or is the Bitcoin I would put it this way Bitcoin if I'm to have so I feel like I have some responsibility as an author because there are many people who read my book and they've learned and gotten excited about this technology and and I've had something to do with that so if they're thinking that the thing I was talking about was BTC they're going to be sorely disappointed and I feel weird about that like oh yeah because I when I use the ticker symbol BTC because that's the only thing that exists back back in the day somebody reads my book and then sees the BTC network I'm going to be like no no no there's this other piece that you've missed that's not actually Bitcoin so I have felt like what I need to do is explain the history of what happened frankly as disgusting as it is the politics of what happened because what happened is politics and control and propaganda I saw at first hand people need to be aware of that and then they then I then I can say at the end you know at the end of the book the vision that I wrote about that a lot of people are excited about a lot of old timers are excited about is the Bitcoin cash chain that's the same thing and not the Segwit 2x not uh well there is no Segwit 2x chain no but what would have been more Bitcoin or what would have oh well actually so that's an interesting question right I don't Segwit 2x would still be a compromise with the Segwit I completely agree isn't isn't really needed yeah no it's an interesting question what was the failure of Segwit 2x in the longest of runs a good thing because now we get unadulterated big block Bitcoin I I don't know it's a good and Bitcoin cash kind of put itself into its whole role it has because it named itself the minimum viable fork yeah yeah it's what's the what's the what's the work we have to do so we have something that survives that's basically yeah right so it put itself in not in a role of a leader but in a role of a survivor from the very beginning by saying we're a minimal viable fork a fork a split that can survive rather than being and that was the cool thing about Segwit 2x with Segwit Segwit 2x was to BTC what SV was to Bitcoin cash now yeah it was this whole threat of yeah well if we don't get what we want we're gonna really buck the shit out of you guys and then didn't happen yeah and then Bitcoin cash has been in the victim role ever since as the minority chain that is just hanging on surviving right so the the value proposition that I saw the whole thing that I saw Bitcoin cash because it's just what Bitcoin was supposed to be with the the most obvious of changes that the system put it this way it is literally true that the system was designed to scale with block size increases now it's an open question whether or not can it do that successfully was it a technical oversight was Satoshi wrong was it all okay questions but the system was literally designed that way if you understand the architecture of the coin system but yeah we know that and everybody is going to watch that knows that as well like I don't know if that's true I don't I don't know if that's true people that watch my videos know this okay that might be the case fair enough look and this is like you know like we got to move forward we cannot stay in a like we cannot keep discussing what has happened in the past okay so like we were supposed to have a hash war during the segwit 1x and segwit 2x yeah okay we would have made it still a compromise we would have had segwit with bigger blocks we could have scaled to 800 000 transactions we would have been stuck with segwit that's not the end of the world it's still a soft fork right you can eventually screw everybody over that has segwit coins if you really want to or you can just keep segwit it would not have been the end of the world because it would have been an acceptable compromise because you'd still have the bigger blocks right well I don't know if that's true and not if it caps at two megabytes I don't think that that can't scale well if there would have been this hash war and you would have gotten segwit 2x then it would have not been a problem they would have won this war and then it would not have been a problem to go to four megabytes I think that's correct I think in practice you're correct if but actually somehow if it did I mean this is something where I realized my own social analysis was wrong but I at the time did not think did not take seriously the idea that the the proof of social media which is a good term could actually have so much power to overrule the 70 percent what was it 80 percent 90 percent of the network that was segwit 2x and all of the merchants as well the businesses that I that has in fact that's the reason why is because we do not understand the chinese mindset and what we should be doing is we should build bridges with the chinese community and learn how they think how they feel what's important to them so that we are on the same page because the chinese people in china that are using bitcoin cash or whatever form is money and I've I've heard conflicting things about the government so chinese people say the government is not allowing it to be used as money other people say that the government is allowing it to be used as money when you're talking about proof of social media well in china you basically have a new currency visit your social credit score right so we're we're asking ourselves all these questions proof of social media whatever has anybody paid attention to what has happened in china in the last five years because they are rapidly fast going in a particular direction yeah like the new guy he put himself into power for basically forever there is an immense wave of persecution of christians again and a whole bunch of other groups they're locking up muslims in internet camps there is something shifting in china at a rapid speed people are okay with it they're okay with it so we're wondering how could he be okay with this well the answer is very straightforward they are living in a system and I'm not saying their system is wrong just describing that they're living in the system where their government feels that this is the best way of moving forward having the system where the government is controlling how to move forward in a different way than the west is doing it yeah I think that's a great point I think it would be enormously beneficial to try to get into the chinese mindset and the thing is right it might be the case that it got so deep that you're talking about psychological you're talking about the psychological and cultural constructions of china something like that has a direct impact on the actual mechanics of bitcoin now just to be clear I'm not talking about you know influencing our minds making what we want I'm talking about getting information about how yeah how do they see it what do they want yeah and then finding this compromise so we can together forward so some of what the things we find important they take over and some of the things they find important we take over I agree and also to be noted is from my understanding Craig and the BSV crowd are specifically talking a bunch of minors right that those are the people with the power in the system are the minors and if you want to understand how the system operates it makes sense that you're going to try to gain information about what's going on in the minds of the people that have the power yeah the Roger Roger was Roger's group was the guy who got the white paper translated to Japanese and Jihan's group was the guy that got the Chinese white paper the paper translated to China they basically like together Jihan and Roger basically the main influencer of getting this ID to get to get into into China yes and now if you if you ask me why Roger Varys hated that much I don't know I mean maybe you don't believe in conspiracy tears but I am absolutely convinced that there were some people so extremely upset that within two years this ID moved from the English language into the Chinese language where it was out of their control it's in a different control system under a different government I feel like we're gonna have this huge class between these two systems of controls and if we see that coming we should make these bridges because if we have this clash you know this is this is from a libertarian perspective this is an amazing opportunity to get rid of a lot of government power and bring it back to the people both for the Chinese and the rest of the West have their governments fight each other that'd be amazing as long as we have these bridges and the Bitcoin is the bridge that connects these people there yes okay I want to say a couple of things and then unfortunately I do need to head out shortly but so okay point number one is right there I got a little bit of interruption again you hear me yeah yeah I can hear you just to cut out a little bit okay point number one is people of the libertarian persuasion or the anarchist persuasion I think many of them do not understand how the world works and they have a kind of naivete about their own importance and so the importance of users actually as it would be a case I'd be happy to talk about the reason I think that BCH is not going to fail is because there's a handful of very competent entrepreneurs in the space it's not because libertarian ethics it's because Roger Beer and Jihan essentially you take out Roger and you take out Jihan I don't think there's enough business competence in BCH right now well there's a couple of exceptions actually hey don't jinx it now there are some exceptions and I would say the good the best people are in companies in general um in the Bitcoin space there's some OGs back and like a coinbase yeah no I absolutely agree when I when I feel very depressed I just look at some very competent players Roger and Jihan yeah they've invested they've backed that they have they have patience they must have some kind of plan they're not sharing it with me but that's okay but I can see from they've put their money where their mouth is so you know yes that's why I'm okay that's why I'm still positive about the success of BCH yes I that's I'm in the same circumstance so as much as there is a flavor of like democracy to libertarianism there's a kind of the extreme individualism we like to value the sanctity of the individual but I think unfortunately that blends into thinking that the individual is always competent right where it's like it's the it's the users that determine the value of the currency no it's not and the Bitcoin dynamics if miners decide that you can't use your currency nobody's going to value your currency it doesn't matter you cannot value majority hash rate into existence you can't do it you might think you can but you can't however it's also in the incentive of the competent entrepreneurs to provide the service of stable money that you value but fundamentally the consumer in that respect just by demanding something cannot bring it into existence as I've made an analogy before I said you know a man walks into a forest and he shouts at the trees I would like a television and there's no response and so he shouts louder consumer sovereignty damage I would like a television and go figure there's no television brought into existence despite the consumer demand for it okay so so the reason that's the case is because the way shit actually gets done in the real world is by producers competent entrepreneurs who are trying to predict the value that people will place on particular goods they bring it into existence and then the consumers have the luxury of going to the store and feeling like they have any control over what they're doing so that's a long way of saying when you phrase it as we're bringing power to people and away from governments I think that is not true in the long run or it's kind of indirectly true and here's what I mean it's governments are existentially threatened by bitcoin's existence in the long run but that does not mean that they that they won't be replaced so I think that miners are going to have so much power because just in economics the importance of money is the most important good pretty much I think they're going to be something like oligopolists or you're going you're going to have you're not going to have this purely individualistic like atomistic system in which power is effectively distributed and there's like no centralized areas of power I think what you're going to have is existing power structures which are god awful and like evil they're going to be destroyed and they're going to be replaced by ones that aren't perfect they might be better they might be along much more libertarian lines but I don't think the power is going all the way to the people but that's I don't want that either and I'm just looking up a post I made not too long ago I reposted something that Edward Snowden wrote on Reddit not too long ago let's see they have it three years ago here and I just want to read a couple of things at this because this was so so true to me so we the people will implement systems that provide for our means of not just enforcing our rights but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights in such time just skipping through it in such time we'll do remember that at the end of the day the law doesn't defend us we defend the law and when it becomes contrary to our morals we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it towards just ends so I'm just what I'm talking about is we want to force that there be so much influence from the people on government that government changes so it starts serving the people better than currently is the case so this extremism of banks are a scam and let's get rid of all government that is completely BS right it's completely BS because it took society I don't know how many thousands of years to get to the governments we have right now there's a lot of good in them we don't want to destroy everything yes we want to influence them so I have some thoughts on that I'm an anarchist I'm still right now an anarchist that might change in the future but the way that I'm libertarian and anarchist yeah yeah so I'm like an anarcho-capitalist okay right so the way that I see it is governance will not be replaced I am totally okay if the existing governments right now get destroyed and and I do think that's I think it's possible for them not to adjust I think the the level of inertia and and economic inefficiency of existing governments all around the globe is sufficient that they could be destroyed but in the process of them being destroyed I think they'll be replaced or the power is going to leak into the hands of what I hope to be more market driven participants so so I think that you know there's an old there's a there's like a an old question the anarcho-capitalist community from Murray Rothbard he said that yeah the mark of whether or not you're a real you know libertarian is if there was a button to press and you press it and all existing governments disappear would you press it and his response is like yeah you would press it to be that you've mashed it you know as soon as possible and get rid of all of them I'm not sure I necessarily feel that way part of me does feel that way but part of me thinks that the system that might emerge could be cool for like a really small number of competent anarchists like who are comfortable defending themselves on their property but for the rest of the world I think the chaos that would ensue would probably be a net negative so much so actually and just really I do have to go shortly but I had an interview with Phil Wilson who I think is a very interesting person in the bitcoin space and we were talking about some of the long-term the long-term vision of where proof of work leads and he said some interesting ideas about look you know the way you take over the world is not by taking over the world at present that doesn't work the way you take over the world is you take over the world of the future so bitcoin could be a way for the the next group of elite government replacements to to gain power and I think that is a very likely scenario to have happen is in the long run governments will be replaced by more economically competent and then what then when you're there you might you know ideally you'd have a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people in control of the hash rates that would be ideal what if you have ten people in control of all the hash rate and then it becomes nine because they take one out and then it becomes eight and eventually you have one guy in control of all the hash rate what kind of world do you have then potentially a very scary one and this is another possibility that I just think about a lot of people overlook you have to look at the implications of long-term proof of work and the proof of stake too because some people think oh well proof of work doesn't doesn't work it'll be too centralizable just transition to proof of state okay well the way from my understanding that proof of stake works is you need a certain amount of coins essentially to add blocks to the blockchain so what happens when you have the wealthy powerful nation-states decide to invest 10 billion dollars and buying up a particular amount of the UTXO set it's so much easier to get the coins than to get the hash rate that's I think so as well so so the proof proof of work is that's it's violence and and and there's a certain amount of like it's it's such a raw it's a raw thing it's brute force it literally is brute force yeah that's why it's a great that's why it's a great system yeah so so the idea that okay I would say this in conclusion um the idea that we are going to fully overturn existing power structures and somehow get around the the power that comes from being wealthy in the world I just don't think it's the case I think you're going to have a new generation of wealthy people and they're going to be able to game whatever cool crypto anarchist system anybody comes up with rich people and powerful people are going to be able to game it yeah you disconnected again for a sec or it was me I don't know I was could you say that last sentence again yes I think that in the long run it doesn't matter how neat the crypto anarchist system is that's developed rich and powerful people are going to be able to game it in the long run I think that's just the way the world works I don't like that but I think that's the way the world works wouldn't be like if this thing is going to go global you'll see an enormous a massive redistribution of wealth yeah like in the scenario that we are thinking about that we believe in is where basically you have this tipping point where fiat starts becoming worthless yeah and everybody wants to save their value by going in bitcoin yeah uh like right now that wouldn't work because you have a million coins but when you have one right and then um you know and so like you know if if somebody like Jihan really believes in that and maybe he believes in himself that he can get like I mean I don't know this is something I sometimes tell myself uh I want to believe in myself it's not I'm not going with a coin because I find the coin valuable the coin becomes valuable because I'm working towards making it valuable with a little bit of a different mindset right if I'm gonna put my ideas or whatever I can do towards making this thing successful I don't necessarily have to you know like you know with the with the bitcoin cash the value comes from there being so many people that believe in this idea that I find the most valuable all coming together working towards that that's where the value for me it comes from yeah yeah I think there's some truth to that um I would say again in the conversation I had with Phil part of the idea at the way he's thinking long term is the wealth redistribution that might happen yeah is of historic levels unprecedented levels and it's going to result in like more technically minded people and geeks gaining a whole lot of power in the world which is an interesting dynamic you imagine the world in which more geeky people that's what I've been saying yeah hackers will be the new gods that's what I've been saying yeah kind of yeah and for better or worse you know and the richest people in the world without anybody even knowing about it yeah yeah but on that very happy note um I do have to go I have greatly enjoyed our conversation yeah me as well so I'm like I always jump all over the place I find it hard to like keep structured to what we were we're talking about do you have that interview with Phil Wilson do you have it online somewhere I do yes no this is the infamous seven hour interviews that I dropped with all right yeah yeah yeah that's all that's too long for me I mean I want to watch it but seven hours man oh it's crazy now I know so there's a few reasons for that I won't go into well one quick thing okay one quick like uh we're both in this group I think we're we're we're we're where Phil Wilson is now we're new Satoshi or something like that yeah I left yeah I left that group okay yeah I find it interesting which the people that are in there um was I going to say uh do you think he had anything to do do you believe he had anything to do with Satoshi yeah so in the in the interview the idea is well part part of the reason is I hope that other people I think eventually people will come through that interview and start editing out parts they find interesting I just don't have the time to do it right now and I probably won't actually um but in the long run I think people will because they're going to find Phil an interesting character but in the beginning I kind of explained my position um where I put it since talking to him and having more conversations um I would my current position is that I think Phil has information from the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto that doesn't necessarily mean he don't we all have that no I mean the only thing we know about Satoshi is the what he wrote about like it's that you just need a little bit of creativity to go beyond that like I don't know I could tell I have an origin story in my head that I completely made up I could tell it could tell it to you someday I'd probably be very interesting it would make sense and have a little things that people can check and and and yeah but I'm not going to try to fool people with it and just be like well this is a fantasy story when I dream about being Satoshi this is the story I made up in my head yeah no that's actually I feel the same way about Phil Wilson and my question to you is if you take CSW and Phil Wilson when they're talking about Bitcoin who's talking rational about it I'd say Phil Wilson is talking a lot more rational about okay well so that so Phil's so I'd say Phil's an interesting guy um so he Phil actually if you listen to him does not claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto right he is self-aware enough to know that without proof that doesn't get very far and then he's released an origins he's cronty right and he released his origin story and basically saying CSW and he was like they were all involved like he wrote this whole origin story right he claims that he has this insider knowledge that he knows what happened and who Satoshi was I wouldn't put it that way you could you could put it that way I wouldn't put it that way here's what I'd say the origin I haven't read it so I don't know the whole like I have only seen a tiny bit of it but I wasn't very interested in yet another origin story I wasn't either in fact um I I saw it when it came out a few years ago and I thought now this is nonsense so I didn't understand I I sped read which I tend to do and when you speed read you overlook important information when I read it the first time I thought it was somebody like there were quotes this person said this this person said that there's no way somebody's going to remember these quotes that's hogwash then I don't exactly know what happened which caused me I think maybe one of my friends had talked to scrawny and I'm not exactly sure but I reread it and I at the beginning he says this is this is not actually what happened this is my way of telling a story to reconstruct what happened because the memories are fairly fuzzy for various reasons but I lose you again it's not your connection yeah it's all right I might be my connection and my things are going on must be my connection okay so in the beginning he says this is not what happened this is just my way of telling the story yes um and suddenly I went oh okay well this is this is interesting so so here's my summarization from my perspective um there are certain things that you learn about how the world works when solving problems that other people haven't been able to solve and I have a little bit of inside knowledge on this because some of my work in philosophy has actually been able to solve things that other people haven't been able to solve there are particular patterns of thinking and and conclusions that you draw about other people's ways of thinking that phil has so he actually correctly identifies some of the thought process that would go into creating something like bitcoin doesn't mean that he is but he has is Satoshi but he understands some things that nobody else would say okay so to give an example of of an insight that that would be a reason why Satoshi designed something like how it is because it came out of a way of thinking and he is talking about that way of thinking well it's it so it's a we could we could have a whole conversation about about this but so one technical example would be his discussion of a timestamp server versus a chronostamp server and uh in the this is it's breaking up again yeah breaking up again yeah okay uh say again so there's so there's many examples one so one technical one is his difference between a timestamp server and a chronostamp server so he explains how timestamping servers can't work in bitcoin and people were trying to use trying to make timestamping so in fact even that lingo timestamping server is still the way that people think about some of the some of the phenomena taking place in bitcoin like like for example just the resolution is the resolution is not super fine and it changes but it also the idea that so in what order do blocks get added to the blockchain and there was an idea that that actual time like you know right now it says 429 like that bit of information gets added to the blockchain and then what follows it is 430 that's a normal way of thinking about chronological progression right but that doesn't happen because sometimes the timestamps in blocks the i mean it's causality that's in the blocks that's what it is it's just a causality because well hang on hang on so i know that's not what happens so this is why i think his way of thinking about is very interesting he what he's trying to document is part of the the faulty ways of reasoning to explain why bitcoin wasn't created is because people had overlooked this they're looking they're looking they're thinking things the wrong way so he he came up with he calls the the chronostamp server the chronological ordering of things what's actually not the time that matters what matters is ultimately the order this is a this is a very interesting little different way of thinking about a way if you could if you didn't have the concept of a blockchain that you're so familiar with and you're the one trying to create it it's subtle little things like that but why is that a special insight because like bitcoin works as a time-stemming service because you have this chronology and if you have these things chronological and you can link them to some real event that happened then it just establish some causality and if you if you take that over a long enough times time-stand if you're you know your granularity of it becomes big enough over weeks of or or a couple days or a week then you can say with a certain amount of certainty that this happened back then yeah sure i'm i i would recommend just reading reading the article i'm just trying to give an example of if it's the case you're trying to build a blockchain concept with the idea of having actual times being a necessary part of it that fails you can't do it because people who can game the system and there's going to be disagreement about what time it actually is but if you were to construct satoshi really what word does it say satoshi was trying to do that so so if it's the case that phil okay is part of the mind of satoshi nakamoto the the when you talk to him the point in writing the article is not to say hey look at the answer to shi nakamoto it's an attempt to document the thought process involved okay in creating bitcoin technology as one would do if one actually made this technology and you don't necessarily care about being seen as the creator the thing that is actually important is to explain to the world the way of solving the problem so so he goes through many many different ways of thinking about bitcoin and why the why other people were not able to think of it in this particular way and why thinking about it in this particular way solves the problem he gives another analogy which is really interesting about um blockchain has been like a strip of triangles um and there's a way it's part of his background is in like video graphics and there's a way in which triangles create a strip in a particular fashion where it's a really nice analogy to how blockchains work how you can have one structure build on the next structure build on the next structure by incorporating two of the vertices of the previous structure and you can't actually change one of the earlier triangles about fundamentally changing the order of the whole thing which is this is the analogy to like if you have a hash of the previous block in the next block that implies you can't you like that's a necessary feature is that in order to build on part two part three part four you have to have the hash of the of the previous block so it's analogies like that which demonstrate a type of uh inside yeah it's an insight in a way of thinking about bitcoin technology that one would expect the creator of the system to have and it's why do you think he is still like why do you like what if you meet three or four more people that are able to also have these insights just based on their own understanding of bitcoin not necessarily them being part of the creation of it sure sure that's it so because you can work backwards you can figure a whole bunch of stuff out that way you think you can i don't know if that's actually true there's so but it only makes sense to you because you understand the insight so it doesn't necessarily mean that Satoshi really felt this way about it you'd have no idea but it makes logical sense because you have this insight and it explains certain things so so as i said i think that phil has information that satoshi had now there's a whole ton of other there's a very very long piece the bitcoin origin story um there's a whole ton of other information there the reason i personally find a many parts of the story persuasive is because in the process of making advancements in philosophy big advancements there are very simple thought processes that are overlooked by the people in the industry so for example he talks about why academics could never have solved the relevant problems to get bitcoin while they're all barking up the wrong trees that make fundamental errors in the way that they're approaching the problem he talks about some of the dynamics in the social community your point is he's saying valuable things about there's some value in there in his insights yes there are definitely some value in the insights but what i'm specifically saying is there is an incredibly persuasive perspective that he writes from that i actually believe is the perspective of satoshi as a mini-satoshi here there are other ways that one could have access to that information especially if one has access to let's say emails that are exchanged between the developers of bitcoin it might be possible that somebody stumbled across an archive of stumbled across an archive of something like this and then created a story after the fact that's also very possible there are many i don't i don't think satoshi ever was trying to keep certain discussions secret that he had with developers i don't think there was any hidden insights that satoshi didn't share i think that's completely completely incorrect i think in fact i think the vast majority so here's the other part here's one of the pieces of the puzzle people who are experts in a particular field tend to be incredibly dogmatic and incredibly defensive and their the creation of bitcoin makes a bunch of mathematicians and computer scientists look like idiots thousands because they weren't able to solve the problem and a confidently concluded therefore the problem couldn't be solved satoshi was never very defensive no no i just moved on no i know that's what i'm saying is i don't that's interesting i'm not calling satoshi an expert i think expert in quotation marks that self-described experts formal people who have academic training this type people who work in this space for a long time they are going to have every psychological self-interest not to conclude that a man just solved a problem that you were convinced was unsolvable yeah no i i agree with that i just wanted to make this the remark that from satoshi's writings he was not and from the fact he remained anonymous this was not a person that was like oh yeah and this is this is what this is one big part of the bitcoin mystery this is like what person doesn't want credit for an invention like this like do you know do you know do you okay do you know any invention in the world that we don't know of who invented it like imagine if we didn't know who invented the rocket or just like if these things go so global and nobody knows who invented it like i mean satoshi satoshi knew what he was building if you if you listen to believe that but if you listen to the story right as we've talked about this is a project that has massive implications on nation states right this might be it so so it may have if you've listened to his particular story he said because he might have been the creator of the system it was a black project from the beginning so he had every incentive to cover up all of his traces because it's very possible that he i mean it definitely would be the case that if it were proven that he was satoshi nakamoto um he would have a target on his back in more ways than one so he wasn't right so that's part of the reason why you would want to be anonymous and there's other reasons too yeah but that's exactly why it was so self-defeating for csw to to come out and claim that is satoshi like would you want to have your family kidnapped yeah and as soon as soon as the wrong guy starts believing you have a million bitcoins you have a huge issue there with everybody i don't think it's clear at all that craig's approach well so okay this is the last thing i can say okay i'm sorry it's all right this is a good conversation and i actually have to talk to somebody publicly about my thoughts on phil so this is good um a huge piece of the puzzle which is put into place for me with phil's story is the explanation of craig right um and the reason craig right is a problem to explain is because of gavin andreason uh john mottonis and ian gritt and and some others too who claim that he's signed important um things in front of them if it weren't the case that there were legit people in this space who believed that craig right was satoshi nakamoto i think we could confidently dismiss him but given that we can't do that uh he needs an explanation and phil's story is the perfect explanation in fact he's an amazing bamba he's an amazing bamboozler that's how i feel about it so but put it this way it may be that he has what is said it yourself that we're a little naive in this space so i think somebody like gavin andreason it's just a little too naive it's possible i mean it's definitely possible um but it's there's another possibility here which is that craig has what it takes to bring a project like this into existence it takes a little bit of craziness and if you want an explanation for how some things that he says are quite good and quite insightful um and even he might have some fundamental information that other people are just not coming around to like like the computation like the computation you're right say what computation of what the computational ability of the bitcoin system what can what can bitcoin actually do right this is a question so do you feel like he he's doing good things with bitcoin as vidan oh that's a whole different thing i don't i don't have enough time to talk about that i really am very torn about sv very very torn um but to answer to complete this he craig strikes me as somebody who like 50 percent of what he says is complete utter horse shit uh there's like 25 percent that probably pretty good and there's like 10 percent that's like ooh that's really really deep and if that were actually correct that would imply a level of knowledge about bitcoin that nobody else has ah but now i have an explanation for why that's the case craig can actually be both part of satoshi nakamoto have the some keys of satoshi nakamoto and be technically fraudulent now what have you ever heard about an amplified d-dose attack yeah an amplified d-dose attack is you send a tiny tiny bit of data to one service and you redirect it to your targets but it gets amplified yeah so sometimes you have 50 like if you can turn one bite into 50 or 100 bytes you amplify your attack and craig does exactly the same thing with just with your mind no he talks with very very very smart people and he makes them do his thinking for them no they start thinking about these things and like maybe maybe he means it this way oh wow then it's very insightful that's at least that's how i feel that's some percentage of it so how do you explain his claim that bitcoin is effectively turn complete which is a very different thing than saying bitcoin is turn complete to say that bit so all of the relevant calculations that powerpoint is effectively turn complete yeah well i mean the concept of turn completeness is kind of silly what is that what's the what's the what's the context why why does it matter because like here's why it matters because forever up until i don't know when that talk he had with nixabo happened 2015 that's the first up until 2015 the experts in the space were communicating that smart contracts of x complexity were not possible on bitcoin because of the scripting language that's what they were saying so he and you still have to make a bridge if you want to sure you can make the scripting language loop but you have to put something on top of it to make the scripting language at the time everybody was saying this is the stupidest idea ever this is definitely wrong all the experts agree you can't do it because scripting language doesn't loop itself you can't do all of these calculations this is silly and it turns out that for the reasons he well for the reasons he described he was correct now he says it the wrong way he says a bunch of silly ways but there are going to be even if yeah even if you could do these calculations in such a way that they're totally not efficient and they're completely useless what does it matter it matters because it's a signal to the rest of the people observing the space that here's somebody saying incorrect information that is mocked by the rest of the entire industry it turns out to be right i don't think that's a coincidence maybe the people are the other people are saying well i mean sure technically speaking you can do that but you don't get any benefits out of it that's not what they were saying well i mean this is a change at the store that's what i would be saying like somebody like nick zabo i don't understand how he writes all those brilliant things about money and stuff and then he goes with btc and a low block site which makes which makes no sense unless you want to have a settlement system again but then you're going backwards in time then you first you're reinventing gold and now you're inventing the paper i use that you used to and the gold doesn't move that's not going forward that's going backwards in time to the to the old system i agree with you i think nick zabo i look my perspective on he likes gold a lot apparently he if he would have invented i mean didn't he invent something that he called bit gold instead of no i understand he didn't invent it he just wrote a he wrote a little a couple of things about it all right he wants he like they like gold they want gold again right so so so my perspective on experts in general is that they are fundamentally mistaken about the basics of their own field there's a reason for this it's because discovering the basics of one's field is incredibly hard and it takes a great deal of philosophical analysis so phil's story is a explanation is it is a story of how the person that is not seeking the fame worked with a megalomaniac to create a system that the experts could not have brought into existence and i think that's very compelling but i must i'm happy to talk about this later but i i some more time yes i'm okay then my next video i want to talk a little bit about if you're going to talk about phil wilson yeah i make a deal with you i want to talk a little bit about john nash in ideal money okay because i have some some interesting things about john nash that i want to share as well some interesting ideas about him yes as well yeah so i'll i'll start reading the sconti story then and i'll watch some of your video great and if you look a little bit into john nash then maybe we'd have some very interesting stuff to talk about all right all right sounds good it's a pleasure speaking but i want to say one more thing my the whole i didn't want to get i want to i really don't want to go into these topics anymore like this i i think they're very self-defeating maybe in a way they're very interesting it's very uh attracting to people it gets has a grip on your mind that is so strong yeah but it's like self-defeating it keeps you in place it doesn't really move your forwards maybe i mean well we'll just have to leave it there but that we'll pick up there for another time all right thanks a lot uh steve for your time and have a nice day yes you as well thank you bye bye