 Oh, I think we're live guys. What's up guys? We'll come back to another episode We got a repeat gets this time is the Jimmy song you guys know who he is. He's an entrepreneur Bitcoin programmer and one of the most Let's say prolific writers in this in the in the space because I don't know if you sleep, bro I sleep I sleep not very much, but I still sleep you still sleep. That's good to hear So it's been quite a I don't know how best way I can say this but Interesting roller coaster ride in the past month or so, you know, you had Bitcoin cash So Bitcoin bull thing and all these different camps are arguing you got all these minors doing different things But why don't you kind of give us your own perspective in the last couple of weeks of what happened? Well, uh, 2x was was scheduled to come on at a particular block It was supposed to be about 90 days after said would activate it as per the New York Agreement New York Agreement was something that you know the CEOs of various companies decided. Hey, we're gonna figure out a way around this whole scaling block you know Lockdown or whatever and and and they just said hey, we're gonna do both Segwit and Larger blocks and we're gonna do that. You know in this particular way The segwit part went through fine and Segwit is now on the network But when the 2x part came You know, there was a lot of resistance. There was a lot of people. There were a lot of people that wanted that were thinking Hey, this this doesn't make any sense and and there was even a futures market on Biffen X and a few other places And they indicated. Okay, at least the people that had the money did not like this fork and about 10 days ago, I think maybe 12 days ago something like that Mike Bell she Jihan Wu Peter Smith Eric Voorhees and a bunch of other people they they just sort of canceled the fork and That was seen as sort of like, okay. I guess I guess they're not gonna do it The story later on according to Jeff Garzik and the BTC one slack is There were they had miners lined up to mine the 2x hard fork But it turned out that they wouldn't mind it for very long They would only agree to mine for about 12 hours and then and then they wouldn't mine anymore Which which would obviously depress the 2x price and everything else But yeah, that that's kind of what happened I had I have an article from earlier today that went through sort of the bugs that people found the 2x hard fork software And it's it turned out like had they gone through with it it would have been a disaster So yeah, I saw that Jeff Garzik was tweeting something about that as well Yeah Yeah, so basically there was an off-buy one error that which Forced a hard fork to happen a block early and there was another error that caused the mining software to not actually Create the large block needed to fork it and yeah So, yeah, there are there are a few problems probably due to the lack of review and testing on that on that On that for that software, but yeah, that's basically what's happened and here we are So what's happening right now with because my the biggest dilemma in this space What I think is people are getting confused or people are getting angry as well So that a there's people getting confused newcomers that have no idea you have Bitcoin gold Bitcoin a classic Bitcoin You know cash and then from the angle of The mempool attacks so can you kind of touch base on that what was happening with that was speculatory like they speculate That's what happened, right? Yeah, so So Bitcoin cash had sort of a massive pump not this past weekend, but the weekend before so that would be about like 9 10 days ago it went from Something like 0.1 Bitcoin all the way up to something like 0.5 Bitcoin. So it was a massive pump. It went up Five times its price up 400% and that that changed the mining incentives significantly. So You know Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin use the same Mining equipment. It's the same proof-of-work algorithm So a lot of miners went over to Bitcoin cash and on top of that You know like a lot of mining equipment seems to have gone offline at some point like 30% of the mining hash power Just sort of disappeared. No one knows what happened to it There's some speculation that it's being shipped from China to somewhere else or whatever But a lot of mining equipment sort of disappeared you have Bitcoin cash going up So a lot of Bitcoin miners went over to Bitcoin cash and they were mining that so blocks were slow And you know, there's some speculation that on top of that there were all these like Transactions that were sent into the mempool to spam it So that that cost sort of like historically high fees on Bitcoin. So how would they spam it? So basically they'll do transactions. We're putting almost zero fees to to finish the transaction Well, so they could put zero fee transactions But almost like nobody accepts those and they're they're not even like considered really But they could put very low fee transactions in there even some higher fee ones and you know the idea being If you're a miner and you put a lot of spam transactions in everyone Who wants to get into a block will? Pay more than whatever your transactions are so and if you mind your own transaction with your own fee Then you're you're actually like breaking even on that you just have to waste a little bit of block space So they don't really mind that much And it caused like historically high prices. It was going to like a thousand Satoshi per byte Which is I mean like hundreds of dollars on a normal transaction So I so, you know, there there were some really high fees at one point. There was a block that had more Reward and fees than the mining reward. So mining reward is 12 and a half bitcoins per block There was one block that had like 13 Bitcoin and fees. So that miner made out like a bandit obviously like They got a lot of place out of it But but yeah, I like it was due to Bitcoin cash being you know high price some Mining equipment seems to be have taken up been taken out But I mean everything sort of equalized because Bitcoin cash had their hard fork which changed their difficulty Adjustment algorithm. So it's it's more in tune and it wasn't like enormously profitable to to mine Bitcoin cash instead of Bitcoin and you know, basically it equalized and this past weekend It was you could you could get in transactions for like 50 cents. No problem Yeah, and what's happening right now with this whole Bitcoin gold like what is that? Yeah, so Bitcoin gold was a hard fork and the one innovation that Bitcoin gold had Well, so it's a hard fork of Bitcoin It's basically utilizing the entire Bitcoin blockchain up to a certain block which they froze on like October 23rd or something like that and and basically they they just They they changed the proof of work to something called Equihash, which is something that Z cash uses and They they changed a few other parameters But basically it's more or less like Bitcoin except it's it's supposed to attacks minor centralization But the main innovation in Bitcoin gold is not necessarily the proof of work change That's been done before but they did a mid blockchain pre-mine So they took they after they froze the block they they mined 8,000 blocks only by themselves so 8,000 times 12 and a half block reward that That turns out to be a hundred thousand Bitcoin gold coins that they that they kept entirely to themselves to fund further Development and so on and they released a blockchain I guess like last week sometime and and what's been happening is, you know There are there aren't that there was one wallet that was like now had malware in it So some people lost money, but basically if you had Bitcoin Before October 23rd You have the equivalent amount of Bitcoin gold, which is worth around the hundred twenty dollars I believe per Bitcoin gold, but not that many places traded though You know like I imagine more will just because it's easier to list the coin It's about as easy to list the coin on an exchange than to like pay out people which you need to do as You know somebody that's taken possession and you know, you need to give everybody their coins because of fiduciary duty and Does Bitcoin gold have replay protection? Yeah, it has a strong replay protection. So you don't need to worry too much This is why only a few wallets supported 2x originally wasn't supposed or they their plan was Not offering replay protection that way every wallet could be compatible with it But it also confuses it because you don't know which blockchain to listen to so You know, I Yeah, it turns out that pretty much every fork going forward will probably have some some form of strong replay protection Which means that your Bitcoin gold transaction is not valid on Bitcoin and your Bitcoin transaction is not valid on Bitcoin gold So moving on you just wrote that piece for Keynesian in Austrian economics You want to kind of dive into that you're like take on it. Yeah, sure. Sure. So if you think about Bitcoin 2x and Bitcoin cash to some degree as well And you know, Roger there and Jihan Wu and all of these businesses that signed the New York agreement They kind of want a lot of transactions to happen, right? they make their money when there are you know deposits for their exchange when people are transacting when people are buying stuff or You know, you know withdrawing bitcoins or whatever. That's how they make their money and And when when you have a one megabyte block size limit that limits the throughput the the velocity of money as an economist would say And and and that was kind of a problem for them They didn't like that and it imposes higher and higher costs and if you look at the Bitcoin blockchain You know, most of the transactions are actually coming from these businesses, right? Like Coinbase Has a ton of transactions blockchain has a ton of transactions. Zappo has a ton of transactions I mean, I I've I've heard that Zappo for example will oftentimes take up like 20 or 30 percent of every block Wow, because you know, they they do that blockchain that info I've been told at times they they fill up 50 to 70 percent I mean, it depends on what time of day or whatever And you know when their customers utilize it, but you know, these businesses take up most of these blocks So for them the blockchain is a public resource But they they really needed to their they're sort of arguing for wider roads at the cost of everybody else And that and that's sort of a Keynesian sort of view That's that's the velocity of money sort of wanting everyone to consume more and more so they would have more of You know, they would get more business essentially and and if you think about it, this is kind of how our You know our government and big business when they like combine and like set policy This is usually the policy that they come up with is okay Let's just get people to consume more and more and you know Like you know, regulations are around. Okay. Well, you can't use that baby seat anymore because it's only good for seven years You know, like you you have to go and buy a new one You know, like it's it's all based on consumption and that that's the sort of policies that you tend up Having to make um Bitcoin is unique because you had some holders that actually fought back and that's that that's those were the people that wanted to keep the one megabyte size limit and they were more concerned with security and Changing it from one megabyte to two megabytes Might sound good in theory, but there there are lots of security trade-offs Specifically if you went with the 2x hard fork, you would have a different development team You would have a development team led by Jeff Garzik and and as I pointed out in today's article yeah, there are bugs in that software and those bugs could potentially mean that you lose money and Security is extremely important if you're a holder, right? Like that's that's why you're using it. So you have you're using it as a store about you So security is paramount over everything medium of exchange matters because you do need to eventually cash out But it's like number 15 or 16 on the list There's a lot of other things that are much more important to you like durability fungibility security and all these other things So it was and I would put that as sort of like the Austrian view and I labeled those two Two camps as crypto Keynesians versus crypto Austrians One is much more concerned with consumption and and sort of velocity of money The other is more concerned with savings and make sure making sure that everything is secure So moving forward based on all this craziness that we've been through in the last month or two What's your predict predictions for the future? Well, yeah a great question The first thing I would say is there gonna be a lot more hard forks. There's already talk of something called Bitcoin silver That's you know, there's not that much detail But somebody announced that it's probably gonna happen and it's probably gonna be worth something So paper is coming out trying to make free money pretty much Yeah, pretty I mean it's not not unlike ICOs at the beginning of this year, right? Like you know, there was so much momentum around those people were just like Making obviously Ponzi like ICOs and they got away with it Um, and and this is gonna happen with with hard forks. You have Bitcoin silver You have something called Bitcoin 2m which is supposed to be kind of like 2x Except they're gonna change proof of work add strong replay protection add a few other things Maybe even change block. I think Bitcoin silver is the one that changes the block times, right? Like to something like one minute instead of ten minutes. There's something else called Bitcoin cash plus Which which is hilarious, but that's gonna be on January 2nd something like that Yeah, and you know that that's just the ones I know but I'm sure there are more that are in store and the thing is like they can Like all coins were really popular around 2013 2014. There were a lot of them being launched They're kind of like ICOs were earlier this year and Bitcoin hard forks are going to be the new new thing Going forward and the reason why people do them is because it looks like free money, right? Like you create this and It's great on both sides, right? It's great for the people that are creating it because they Like Bitcoin the Bitcoin goal guys you can like sort of do a mid block pre-mine for ICOs It's you know, I get to create money out of thin air For all coins I get some create money out of thin air and for buyers It looks like hey, okay I get I get this stuff for free and it's gonna go up and you know, I get to make all this money So, you know those tend to be a bubble. I mean all coins stop I mean, there's still all coins being launched But it's nowhere near like in its heyday where you were you know There were like five or ten coins launching like every day kind of like the heyday of ICOs Was maybe a couple months ago. It feels like it's on its downslope already, but you know Yeah, I mean there were like five ICOs launching every day Well that that point has yet to be hit for hard for it's and you know, they're they're gonna be a lot of hard force coming and it's It's but also these hard forks They're quite dependent like for example people who keep their crypto and ledger or trezor or whatever or wallets They're a hinge ent on these wallet companies actually provide them the accessibility that Yeah, yeah, and and part of the problem is that you can totally externalize the cost of Development to everybody else, right? It's it's these wallet developers that are kind of suffering and paying the negative externalities And you know, this is part of the attractiveness of a hard fork is that you don't have to do all the work yourself Other people are gonna be forced to do it and because exchanges have a fiduciary duty to provide these coins to their users Well, you know, they're they're gonna have to support it in some to some degree And so they can hack the fiduciary duty to get at least some attention from exchanges because they're forced to and Because you know, they have they already have fair distribution This is an enormous problem for pretty much every all coin and ICO out there is how do you get fair distribution? And there have been like like really unfair distributions all throughout the life of all of these coins I mean like you look at something like ripple They just created them all and then just sort of started doling them out And there's still like a huge reserve of ripples that exists that haven't been released to the public And you know, there there've been other Mechanisms like airdrops, you know, I mean bite balls obviously doing something similar like that but this is essentially an airdrop to all Bitcoin holders and and that that's how people are kind of looking at it, but Yeah, it's it's it's a it's a negative externality that everyone has to pay And it's mostly developers that end up having to pay so it looks like free money, but really It's it's a dilution of everything Well, I mean, it's it's developer time that that's that's that's causing all it's the monetization of developer time Like all of these things altcoins ICOs Hardforks everything it's monetization of developer time and it's it's sort of like the future expectation that these developers will continue developing on it that the price reflects and it's it's a bit unfortunate that that's You know externalize the Bitcoin developers, but that's you know until we find a good solution to this problem And you know, we have exchanges that'd be centralized Let me propose you this so since we're seeing this in the Bitcoin ecosystem right now Can we also say this a probability in the Ethereum ecosystem or like coin ecosystem in the future? Yeah, possibly I mean you can do the analogy I would make is this you can do ICOs on Ethereum classic, but not many people do you can do ICOs on EOS Not many people do you can do ICOs on neo and all these other ones like they it's possible to do them But most people choose Ethereum why? Well, because that's the platform everyone else has done ICOs and it's it's seen as less risky So you could do it on you could hard fork Ethereum you could hard fork You know ripple you could hard fork whatever But you're probably not going to as a hard forker because you're gonna make the most money as a greedy hard fork creator By hard forking Bitcoin. So that's that's probably what's going to happen Interesting well, it's always a pleasure Jimmy. I love having you on and hearing your insights I know you've been having your workshops for Bitcoin coders. Is that still going on? Yeah, absolutely. So programming blockchain.com. That's the website that I have set up for it Thank you Amir by the way Amir has been sort of my marketing strategist for the last night, but basically I've been teaching normal developers to become Bitcoin developers and And you know, it's a two-day in-person live seminar and I firehose you with information I've been told that and actually know that it's at least the semester's worth of like information in two days and it's you know, you you Code your own Bitcoin library and you know, you you have to you know In the middle of the second day sort of a highlight is you you have to create a test net transaction from scratch using your own library And and when when students, you know, like finally send their test that transaction. They're like, yes I finally get it. You know, this is what's happening. But yeah, I have more of them coming up I have the Austin one December 6th and 7th. I have a Charlotte one January 22nd 20 No, 16 17 London January 22nd 23rd Amsterdam January 26 27 But yeah, there's there's four of them There will probably be more if you're interested and sort of having it in other places Please contact me my email is at that at the bottom of programming blockchain.com. So Yeah, you send me a proposal and and we'll we'll see what can happen beautiful Jimmy always a pleasure guys Go check out the workshop and I'll see you guys soon. Cheers Bye