Now entering the Bitcoin Podcast Network.
Hey, guys, very, very special episode, episode one eighty four of the Bitcoin
Podcast flagship show of the Bitcoin Podcast dot network.
I'm your first host, Marcello, and I'm host number two D host number three,
Corey. Today we have Taylor back on the mic.
You want to say hello? Hey, everyone.
It's Taylor from my crypto now. Yeah.
Hey, you. Congratulations on this big move.
Yeah. Yeah.
And our first caller is coming from them.
Oh, God. So I guess without even pretending like nothing's happening, let's just jump into it.
So my crypto has created or or the team from my ether wallet sans a person or two has created a new business and moved to it called my crypto in order to continue doing the exact same thing and add a lot of other features,
a lot like in the future.
There seems to be some controversy on the process of this happening.
And so what?
Because it doesn't really matter because you don't need to trust either one of the services to use them.
They don't hold funds.
They're open source, transparent.
It's more like I see this from my perspective as a not part of this whole thing is that you just wanted to set things up so that you can grow faster.
That about yeah, one of the one of our main goals with this is just being able to have a company that's set up correctly, that is set up with long term goals in mind.
And, you know, one of the like we go back in time and, you know, you see the little my ether wallet LLC.
You know, you assume that like we had our shit together and we went through and we had a bunch of lawyers and we set up this LLC and everything set up properly.
Well, reality is, is that when we set up the LLC, this was in in mid 2016, the LLC was not set up with like, oh, this is going to be a huge company with a team of employees at some point.
LLC was literally set up with the singular purpose of getting that little EV cert that says my ether wallet LLC, and that's it.
Because at the time, it was like right after it was like right at the post Dow hard fork situation.
And, you know, we had seen our first fishers.
So while we knew that like, oh, we should probably have like some sort of company, I guess, because that's what you do when you have a business.
We never really thought about it as a business.
So we never really were like, oh, we really need a company.
We better get this this shit straight.
So, you know, that's the if you if you if you keep in mind the mentality of everyone that, you know, in the whole evolution of this project to this company, you know, a lot of the things that people assume we did correctly or we were doing with.
X, Y, Z intentions are simply like weren't there because we were just such a side project and so so new to the space.
And so, you know, we just wanted to build.
That's always what we wanted to do is just build.
So, you know, when we were kind of forced to grow up and forced to be like a quote unquote real company and we had people and contractors relying on us.
It's suddenly a situation where, you know, in the midst of everything else going on in the midst of, you know, the nodes going down and people being upset with us there in the midst of trying to scale up the team to deal with the support request in the midst of trying to scale the developer team in the midst of trying to figure out how, you know, I can sleep and hire people that will do their job so that I can sleep once in a while.
You know, at some point, you're like, hey, I wonder if that that the company that we set up for that EV Sir last year is the right thing.
And the answer was like, no, like.
Does it come as a surprise that so many people like, like, I see the craziness on Reddit and I think it stems from them not understanding the service like, oh, can I still use my transit wallet? Can I still use my like, how are they this deep into the game?
And they still kind of don't get how the portal works or the service works.
I mean, is that a little frustrating?
Oh, yeah, you can answer it.
Let's see, I think all the eight screens that my ether wallet puts in front of you as a learning experience to understand how this technology works and what you're actually doing.
Yeah, they are skipping through that shit.
Hardcore, they designed it in a way where it's not like an iTunes agreement where you're like reading that.
I mean, they have like it's all mostly pictures and it's just like, yeah, I think it goes to show you that people still don't give a shit.
They just click through to get to the thing that they want.
And then like, hey, how do I use this?
It's like, oh, I literally just went through a tutorial on how to use this.
And I know that just because I'm speaking from experience and I've been dancing with the Internet since I was like eight.
And even when I get an agreement on like terms and conditions, when I scroll to the bottom, if it doesn't let me accept, I don't go back through the terms and conditions and read them.
I figure out what are the conditions to not see this terms and conditions anymore.
Well, how much does a word armchair have to answer?
How much like how much is a controversy just from people who literally don't even use my Ether wallet or there's just an interesting question.
Like, I'm sure most people have touched it, like for people who don't know all of the other things that the my Ether wallet, my crypto team has done for the community in the past outside of my Ether wallet.
There's a lot of you know, and I basically I just blocked myself from Reddit yesterday because I was we have bigger things to focus on.
And the the, you know, the thing is, we knew it was we knew people were going to be upset no matter what, like people don't like change.
We didn't know what they were going to latch on to.
I also, you know, I'm fully aware that whenever you have a lack of transparency and like a lack of just like the cold hard facts in front of people that, you know, you especially read it is good at, you know, they can just like sense it.
It's like their sixth sense of sensing like you're hiding something and then they assume the worst and the pitchforks come out.
And unfortunately, as much as I want to just like tell everyone everything, you know, that's my nature.
There's some things in business that you simply can't talk about.
And that's that's, you know, as far as I can go with that.
And it sucks because I'm part of this community.
And by nature, I'm not one to keep my fucking mouth shut.
Like, this is not in my nature.
And I just, you know, when you guys posted like a follow up Q&A, was that to add more clarity?
Yeah, so we were getting a lot of like, you know, questions that I that some of them we were kind of expecting, but some of them we definitely were like, OK, we need to really go to the basics here, guys.
And so the FAQ was was trying to address that and and speak to some of the things that people are most confused about.
And I think one of the things that, you know, if you kind of sort deeper through and get past these, you know, all the top comments are very like polarizing.
If you if you get past those, people do have legitimate questions about what is going on and can I continue using the service?
And, you know, I I wish there is a way that we could have done this to avoid like this this picking teams thing that I'm seeing going on because it's just absurd.
Like, this is the block chain. This is the space.
FYI, there's not a ton of wallets out there, so we're going to just keep building and that's what we're going to do.
And whatever my ethol wallet does, they're going to do.
And hopefully that's going to give the people picking these products a better choice.
But it also means that, you know, it's very reasonable to expect that you use one wallet for one thing and use another for another thing.
And like that's currently that's how I like I still have missing.
I still use it. You know, that's what this is what this is what it's all about.
I kind of see this whole thing, I mean, if I if I try to put it in even the block chain terms is that when there is some type of disagreement.
And in the space and somebody wants to make a change or do something and the other person doesn't or a percentage of a community doesn't want that change, then.
They fork, they go separate ways and in this circumstance, based on the two entities that ended up, you have.
90% or more of the original entity on my crypto and the rest staying behind and continuing on on the project without without those changes.
And what I grew to appreciate and like enjoy about what was my ether wallet.
Is now my crypto, so that's the that's the team that's like that's the same team that I originally originally cared about and got behind.
So that seems to be the obvious choice and where I go from here, that doesn't necessarily mean that anything behind is is bad or not going to do anything.
I don't know, because I don't I just don't know those people behind the project.
Right. And everyone has different reasons for using a product, right?
Like we have people that use it because someone told them to.
And I think those are the people that are most vocal about this change.
And I think that it sums from just simply not liking change, because that's what the the amount of people that.
I mean, it just seems like they want to hate.
Like, yeah, like, I don't know, you guys have been on the internet, you know how it is, but it's like, oh, oh, God.
Yeah, there's there's no stop with the Internet once it gets started.
We fell and we almost fell into that until we had to we moonwalked out of it.
Remember, we got in a little Twitter beef with the podcast or something like that.
And then we just electric slide out of that.
It's a really easy way to get attention right in the world where everyone's voice is the same on the Internet.
The easiest way to get attention to your comment is to put a lot of emotionally charged language into it.
And it feels good to get that attention, especially if you need it.
My favorite comments, let's see.
Sorry, my favorite comments are the ones that are these really emotionally charged comments
about how I am an emotional woman and therefore I'm incapable of doing anything on this world correctly.
Well, that's that's clearly true. Women can't do anything.
And I'm like, I'm like, look at the language you're using.
You're like, look, look at your your comment.
I was like, you're emotional, too.
Like, let's be friends.
Isn't Reddit, though, such a fickle beast where you can hire the top commented
like you've recruited on Reddit before, then you have like these misogynistic,
confused people that are also like the worst.
But then you're also getting like great talent from it, too.
Such a weird, weird portal.
All of our top support people and our top devs actually, too, our top support people,
they didn't even really like necessarily apply to be support people.
They just, you know, they're doing awesome work and we found them.
And our top devs, like, you know, definitely came from Reddit.
And I've been on Reddit forever.
Honestly, I love right. I love the community. I love.
You're an Ethereum moderator, like our Ethereum moderator.
So it's clearly been around.
I'm not moderating right now.
They're doing a good job of, you know, we've been more on top of it lately.
I don't know if you've seen it, but, you know, all the mods are really busy people
with like things going on, and then we've been catching Slack on Reddit for not
moderating as much as people would like us to.
So people have been on top of it a lot more.
Then, of course, I come in and just, you know, stir the fucking pot
for a whole bunch of shit at them to moderate.
I had a funny conversation with one of our listeners on Twitter.
We were just like.
He's like, I don't understand what the whole my crypto thing is.
And I was like, yeah, it's really people not knowing what's going on.
And they're just mad that they don't know what's going on.
He is like, I don't get do I have my private keys?
And I was like, yeah, you have your private keys.
He's like, so what's the fucking problem?
And I was like, great question, man.
Great question.
So let's talk about what like the importance or the significance of the split.
And that's that's kind of changing the tone of this.
But like, what is now that it has happened and you've created the entity
that you that you wanted, what do you plan to do with it?
Yeah, what can you do now that you couldn't before?
So first off, we're just going to keep building, right?
Like, this is what we've been doing and this is what we're going to continue to do.
And there's a lot of different things that we've had in the works
and that, you know, we are working on still to this day,
like literally commits like I'm seeing them come in right now
because our developers are so freaking awesome.
And it's it's really that stability
and that knowing that no matter what the world throws at us,
no matter, you know, what shit situations we can get in
or what direction we want to take, that the company structure
and the way that we have things set up and the paperwork we have
and the engagement that the engagements that we have with employees,
all of that is just set up cleanly with a lawyer who actually like
wrote this stuff rather than, you know, kind of
doing things for an SSL, sort of like you don't have like a top notch lawyer
putting those those pieces of paper together.
You mean Internet legal documents are not are not like the best things to do
for large corporations?
Yeah, like as much as I love legal zoom, like if you're going to
if you're going to have a real business, like with with real livelihoods
of real people, like on the line, don't use legal zoom.
Oh, shit. Guys, we got we need to go.
Time to pivot. Time to pivot.
Does your lawyer give you mobile notifications
because we get mobile notifications with legal.
I guess that that
my lawyer has been on the video calls with us
for a number of nights this week, just like making sure that we're OK
and we need anything and, you know, we have questions and stuff.
So we got, you know, he's a he's a great, great guy.
And he's been really a phenomenal help in in sorting through all of this.
So I don't necessarily get mobile notifications from him.
You're missing out.
I read I read the FAQ that you that you recently put out in response to like
how to, I guess, help explain situations more.
And in that FAQ, there's a lot of things that I didn't know you had done or built
or are in the process of building, I guess, to make your infrastructure better.
Like what? And you said these will be open source as well.
What do you what do you see people using these things for?
So one of the biggest like challenges
that we've been facing is the the reality that a website
by nature is not the most secure thing on earth,
meaning that you have the website code, which can be, you know,
maliciously attacked or manipulated.
You have the infrastructure behind the code, which can be maliciously attacked.
You have the build processes for any apps that you do.
You have the build processes in this case for like the the like the local.
If you want to run run my crypto offline, you basically can download that zip file
that has all the files in it.
So you have all these different moving pieces
and all of these pieces, if you do something wrong,
can be manipulated and attacked and try to steal people's funds.
And so what we've been really working on is how do we ensure that
when we're ready for a release, when we're ready to either push something live
to these freaking loads of users, that one, we know the code is like the code
that we intend and two, that the person who's pushing that code,
their computer hasn't been compromised and three, that it's going to be
distributed throughout the web in a way that, you know, if we have like say
like a UI bug or like a typo or something, like it would be distributed
in a more slow rollout manner rather than like just dumping it on the world.
And so all of these things are going to protect, you know, the end user
because the end user doesn't isn't going to be checking whether or not,
you know, all of this infrastructure in place and whether random developer
over here's computer was compromised or not.
And so what these systems do is basically it's similar to like a multisig
wallet, right?
But you have that set up for like every step of the deploy process.
So you need multiple people.
You have checks and balances, you have automated checks, you have manual
checks, you have this process that you go through to ensure that like,
you know, no one thing going wrong actually results in a malicious build
of an app or like the website serving malicious code.
And that's really, really important to us, especially as we've grown.
And then we've also just been, you know, as we've been rewriting the code
base, which is all React and TypeScript, we've been really focused on
you know, what are the sort of developer tools or the things that are
missing in this ecosystem that, you know, could help.
And one of the things like TypeScript is amazing, but there's just not a
lot of some of the more basic libraries.
So we've built some things with TypeScript and how they, how the code
can interact with smart contracts better, you know, and these sorts of
things are not, they're not the most exciting things to the average user,
but they're exciting to us.
So, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot going on and not all of it
is just like feature updates on the website or whatever.
Yeah, I guess me personally, I'm more excited about the way that you
build my crypto because I build things too, and if I can take a piece of
it for myself because it's open source, it helps me do my job better.
And the fact that you're looking forward to a lot of these things
that you're doing is something that I'm excited about too, but in terms
of like thinking about the average user, you're right, they don't give
a shit.
They just want to get into whatever they're trying to do and access
their funds as fast as possible and as easy as possible and as secure
as possible.
And yeah, yeah.
So I'm curious to see, like, what do you guys think about this?
Yeah, so I'm curious to see like how this changes over time and what
like as a user and trying to do things, what I'm going to be able to
do later on down the line that I can't do now or like easier, whether
or not easier or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes we talk about the average user on this
show, like they are a bag of stupid.
Well, but I'm not going to say that they are, but it's a range of
people, right?
And especially as we look, make things easier and the space gets
bigger and the headlines happen and like money goes crazy and new
people come in, like there's always going to be brand new, naive
listeners who don't understand certain concepts that we take for
granted and think everyone understands.
That's always going to be a thing as adoption gets bigger and bigger
and bigger and bigger.
And I commend you guys for working on the security aspect and making
sure the user is okay because that's what you do when you're producing
something you think about all the failure modes and you assess them
and you correct them and you make it, you know, dummy proof so that
people can't break it because people are intending to but they're
just going to call it naive.
You called it stupid.
So are these people seeing all of the my crypto pop-ups reading it
and not understanding it or are they just zooming past it and not
understanding what they're getting into?
It's both.
There's both users.
Me, I zoomed through because I already understood all the stuff.
I've been in crypto for a while.
Well, like me, I was like, hey, I was like, Aleas, I was like, what
happened?
And Corey's like, you should know this already.
Shame on you.
And I was like, you're right.
I wasn't going to say anything but mainly it was it was just my
anxiety on it all.
But it's a reasonable thing, right?
It's money, right?
Like this is where I keep my money money.
It's change.
It's everything that you don't want and you know, one of the
biggest questions like that I'm seeing right now is like literally
like why didn't you give us weeks and weeks of warnings?
Okay, guys, sorry, but we've been dealing with these phishing
attacks and these malicious attacks and these fake ICO addresses
for so long.
I'm not going to delay like I'm not going to extend the period
of change time as you know, like with an ICO.
This is what happens.
You do marketing.
You do marketing.
You do marketing.
You start the countdown clock.
You do more marketing.
You're tweeting one day left guys.
You ready?
You ready to invest you ready to do this and then about 12 hours
later the fishers come in and start throwing addresses at people
and you know all these, you know, naive investors just throw
the money right into the fishers hands.
So there was no good way to do this like we're not going to
pretend that this is like was flawlessly executed.
But I will say that weeks and weeks of announcements or
pre-announcements to the announcements like it would all
it would have done would would extend the period of confusion
and let the fishers and the malicious players in the space
get an even bigger toehold.
Yeah, I could say from being a part of a few of the anti-phishing
communities in Ethereum that y'all have put in an enormous
amount of effort to try and fight and combat all of the people
who are doing legitimate or like illegitimate scams and fishing
and trying to take advantage of the way to do this trying to
take advantage of the naive investors like the amount of man
hours that your team has put into trying to fix that is probably
one of the main reasons why I'm following you guys and I think
that's what's motivated you to do a lot of these things and so
I don't really care what decision you make because I've seen all
of the work that you've put in in the past that was not neat.
Like no one told you to do that.
No one's paying you to do that.
It's what you just took charge and did.
It's you know, like obviously I would personally probably
enjoy the last few days more if there was less hate on the
internet, but that said, you know, I think that I think holding
people accountable and I think that questioning decisions
like I don't necessarily want to discourage that right?
Like I don't necessarily want to be someone that people follow
blindly.
I don't think that that's healthy either and so, you know,
as much as like I just want to make the hatred go away right
now and the trolls and the not trolls and the concerned people
and the confused people and all that like at the end of the
day, I can't really discourage people from from questioning
our decisions, but I would you know ask that maybe they do
it a bit more respectfully because you know, it's it's tough
and and I'm not a perfect person and I've never claimed to
be a perfect person and I'm doing the absolute best that I
can and there's a lot of different moving pieces and the
reality is and this is something that it's taken me a long time
to realize and like only really being forced into this like
leadership position to really realize the amount of little
things and big things that influence every decision.
I make like are so immense that really I'm the only one that
has all that information so even the top team members that
are with me all day and do amazing amazing work like even
they don't have all the information and when you're talking
about it, you know the community it's like the assumptions
that they're making are they're making these assumptions
that X happened therefore Taylor did why therefore I feel
you know Z and the reality is like the world doesn't work
like that, you know, everything has so many different parts
so many different influencers. There's so many different things
that you can optimize for but we could have optimized for
like the biggest best marketing ever right for this for this
new brand like we could have optimized for that.
We didn't that was like not a priority like our priority
was like, okay.
We need to make sure that our automated fishing tools like
are freaking on the ball.
We need to make sure that we have a team that's going to be
around 24 7 for this to basically combat anything that's
malicious that happens or any toe hole that the fishers
bring it and then what that results in is that with everyone
so focused on and by the way, there was like fishing sites
were up like this like literally we had two butters and saw
that like immediately a fishing website like a my crypto
fishing website up within the hour of the original announcement
post. So that's what we're optimizing for and then with
everything else going on all of a sudden like we kind of like
turned back and we're like, okay, like what's read it look
like? Oh, no, this is not what I expected, you know, and
people are making comments and the thing is the comments are
valid.
They're like, oh, you're selectively choosing which comments
to answer.
Well sort of but also like I'm just hitting reddit pretty
randomly right now. Like I've got I think 340 messages like
I'm not selectively going through and like reading all
340 of them.
I am selectively scrolling to a random position and if it's
something that I can answer in the next two seconds before
some other shit flies out my face, I'll take the time to
answer it.
Yeah, I mean you had some solid points, you know, a lot of
people don't understand what running company entails and
how late how layered companies are and like you said, like
there's some people that don't get information some people
that do and when you're in your position you get all of the
information at all of the time and you've got to make all
of the decisions ultimately or at least delegate to somebody
who can make the decision appropriately and people don't
understand that they just want a product and like I think
there's like you can be a professional Rose giver, but
there's always going to be two types of people. There's going
to be the person you give him a rose and they're like why
only one why not two roses and there's going to be a person
you give him a rose and they say I don't even like roses.
I don't like the smell of roses and you're like motherfucker.
I'm giving out roses.
So it doesn't it where did you get that analogy?
That's yeah, I love it so much.
You don't try to please people you make a rose giver.
You could you could be a professional Rose giver and
there's those two people on the planet and you fucking ignore
them. It's like bitch.
You just got a free Rose and you're complaining or you just
got a free Rose and you don't you're complaining.
I don't have time for it.
I'm trying to make decisions and make things better and
you're just that person.
So trying to get better giving out roses, son.
Every single person that accepts this Rose and is like
thank you for this Rose.
I'm going to put it in my vase.
That's the person that you that's your target.
That's why I emailed Jordan to because I knew you guys were
just building and you guys weren't going to have time for
like little pieces of artwork.
So I was like, hey, can I help out and no he let me thank
you kind of you as well because you you messaged us and
I was like thinking and I was like, yeah, actually, there's
probably something that we're forgetting and then like I
don't even know three days four days later.
I was like, oh crap.
Like we don't have anything.
Why don't we let's let's take a let's take a break and go
to the Jameson Lopp interview and then we'll come back for
some more sweet my crypto talk.
Jameson Lopp.
So we've been excited to get this interview to you guys for
some time Jameson Lopp with BitGo Big Co is always doing
a bit of things and they're always on the go.
That was lame.
I shouldn't I shouldn't have said that.
But anyways, you guys should know Jameson Lopp.
If you don't and you're new to crypto you should Google
Jameson Lopp and look at his resources tab and by the time
you're done with that tab you will no longer be new to
crypto.
I promise you.
What else does he do Cory amazing beard grower cello you
got anything you want to add to this introduction?
Yeah, he's got a lot of Twitter followers.
So you better retweet this episode.
That's how marketing strategy you better retweet our content
do it.
Thanks for your time Jameson.
I wasn't in on this interview but next time super bright
guy who talked about lightning Network.
We talked about where this I enjoy the more technical
interviews in this one the log and I kind of ask whatever
kind of questions I wanted and he's got a very even if we
may not agree on some things, but he's very reasonable and
respective of his opinions and other people's opinions.
So I joined the conversation.
All right.
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All right today.
We are here with Jameson Lopp of BitGo.
I would like to start off this interview by saying I
appreciate a lot of what a lot of the work you put into
trying to educate the masses on technical issues as well
as trying to get people introduced to this entire space
in a way that's not focused on trying to make money as fast
as possible but more along the lines of trying to make them
understand how this stuff works where it is like I believe
that the main skill people should be trying to do right
now is figure out how to become a developer and build things
using this technology so that as things proliferate they
they understand how to do things and build things and
make the world a better place as opposed to just making
money out of a nothing.
So yeah, I applaud you for that.
Thanks.
Let's start off by like introducing the people who don't
know who you are like how you got into the space what you
do and where you are now.
Sure.
Am I coming through?
Yep.
All right clear so as for myself.
I've been in the space since about fall of 2012 and I just
got interested in it from a computer science standpoint
and a bit on the philosophical standpoint and really to
your point, I think that we're still in the building phase
of this whole ecosystem, you know, it's nine years old at
least Bitcoin is nine years old at this point, but it's
from a like multi-generational perspective if we want this
to be a really long-lasting system, then this is the early
days.
There is a lot that is still left to be built and we're
still actually learning more about the system itself and
that's why one of my favorite pieces that I've written is
less technical and more philosophical and the thesis is
nobody understands Bitcoin and that's because it is this
thing that is constantly in flux and we're arguing about
what it actually is and I don't expect that to stabilize from
a number of different perspectives for many years to
come.
I don't expect the prices to stabilize for many years.
I don't expect the debates over where we're going with the
system to stabilize.
This is still a very early system and the people who are
involved with it are definitely early adopters and will have
a great deal of influence over the long-term direction.
Absolutely.
I think one of the reasons I follow you so closely is
because I find that you you're taking the time to do the
thinking in this space and a lot of people aren't and to
me is like a beacon of like, okay, here's someone who is
critically assessing this space like currently what it looks
like in the future and you know, just I guess it's just
me applauding, you know, I know you're doing heavy heavy
mental lifting on a day a daily basis that a lot of people
just just aren't so I just wanted to get that out of the
way.
It's like a personal I mean, there's also a lot of noise,
right?
I mean, there's a lot of people just yelling at each other
on social media 24-7 and it's really easy to get sucked into
those debates and at this point I just I have to filter a
lot of it out for my own sanity and so that I can be
somewhat productive.
Give us some tips how you filter it.
There's people listening right now.
They want to know they can they don't know how to filter
it.
So what do you what do you do?
Yeah, so, you know, this is one of the reasons why I've
kind of changed forums several times over the years.
I mean back in the early days the only place you could
really go to talk about Bitcoin was Bitcoin talk and very
quickly that just got overrun with scammers and spammers
and the signal to noise ratio is very low on there.
These days your reddit is one of the more popular platforms.
It has its pros and cons and I even wrote an article about
them of, you know, moderation versus censorship and you
know, that whole part of the debate that comes up a lot
and if you don't like, you know, the moderation of administrators
of any single forum, then your your only real recourse is
to go and use some sort of software that allows you to
moderate what you're seeing.
So that's one of the reasons that I'm a big fan of Twitter.
It really allows you to curate your feed and curate who
you're interacting with and you know, it is more work.
You're not just being spoon-fed content.
You have to go out and do a little work to find the high
signal to noise ratio accounts and it does allow you to,
you know, then selectively stop listening to people if
they're just filling your timeline up with useless arguments
or, you know, trolling of any sort.
So here's the problem.
Here's the problem that I find with that and in terms of
like a something that maybe the average person may have
an issue with is how do you stop from creating an echo
chamber in a place where you are solely in control of how
you curate the material that you see it you need to have
some type of dissension or at least but the problem is
you opened up that too much.
It just turns into a shit show.
So where's the happy medium because reddit is now basically
an echo chamber depending on what subreddits you you
subscribe to so you kind of have to then proliferate all
of them to get the viewpoint of the entire space and
moderate yourself Twitter you can kind of block wherever
you want to follow whoever you want and you get the
opinions of people that you care about or you at least
you trust and somewhat respect but you may end up pushing
yourself into like a small corner where you only see a
very narrow point of view.
So how do you like and as the space grows it then becomes
more and more difficult to follow what's going on in a
way that's that's like I know not so chilly if you will.
So like what do you do?
Yeah, I mean I think it is important to follow people
with different perspectives that you disagree with my main
criteria comes down not so much to whether or not you
agree or disagree but whether or not that person is willing
and able to engage in civil discourse by which I mean
having arguments that are not full of fallacies and attacks
and you know, they can be edgy but without getting too
personal and and you know starting to throw insults name
calling yelling of any sort and so, you know, you'll
you'll find that, you know, I do follow and interact with
people that I disagree with like Roger Vare or Vinnie
Lingham or Preston Byrne, you know, we have very different
perspectives on things but I find that in general those
guys, you know, I can have a nice back-and-forth conversation
with whereas other folks like when I try to interact with
like Craig Wright or whatever.
He won't answer my questions.
He'll throw a dozen other nonsensical questions back at
me and basically waste my time and and then and sometimes
you know, he'll go on the attack and try to you know,
call me out with various straw man arguments.
So there are some people that I respect more than others
and there are people I disagree with that.
I still respect because I understand that they have a
different perspective.
That's okay.
But as long as they're not trying to throw various
fallacies and mudslinging around then, you know, we can live
with each other.
Your your Twitter foo is strong.
That's what we'll say.
I think I just made that up.
I probably didn't nothing is original but so while we're
talking about disagreements the biggest disagreement in
Bitcoin's history has been this obvious the split that
occurred September last year Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin.
I think it's unfair.
I mean we started our show with the premise that adoption
is the only thing that matters and that's pretty much one
of the only things we care about when it gets down to all
the content we put out and that's unfair for it from an
adoption standpoint.
Like if I'm getting texts at 2 a.m.
for my sister-in-law, it's like hey, I think I just bought
thousands in Bitcoin Cash.
What's Bitcoin Cash and I'm like, oh shit.
So like how do you feel that rift is going to settle like
if you could speculate on that for a little bit, how do
you feel that rift is going to settle going into the next?
I don't know year year and a half.
Yeah, so, you know, there's a number of different reasons
why we ended up where we are today and you you have some
people who prioritize the user experience today with making
on-chain transactions and you know, keeping those low while
other people are prioritizing more long-term view of trying
to keep the cost of validating the whole history of the
blockchain low at the expense of higher on-chain transactions
and then building second layer and even third and fourth
layer networks on top of Bitcoin as a platform.
We also started to see some more interesting, I guess economic
viewpoints, which you can almost classify as like crypto Keynesians
versus crypto Austrians of talking about, you know, the velocity
of money and how important that is versus the importance of
people using it as a store of value and these of course are
mostly theories and people are just arguing and debating, you
know, which theory is going to be the best one, but the nice
thing is because you can fork Bitcoin now we essentially have
two experiments running in parallel and we get to see which
one of those actually ends up being better, I guess from a
market adoption standpoint.
So, you know, obviously I am more on the conservative keep
the block size small and do the more long-term harder engineering
plan and I've had a number of debates with with folks on the
opposite side, but the great thing is that I can't regardless
of how much I think that might be a bad idea.
I can't stop them from doing that just like they can't stop
me and other people who want Bitcoin to go in a certain
direction from, you know, running the rules that we agree
to so it is anarchy and and you know, free market capitalism
really in a pure form now the result of course can be a bit
chaotic because then you have the branding confusion going
on and so while there is a kind of technical battle that is
going to go on in the long term.
We've got this marketing war of words, you know, trying to
capture market share and and and attention from people in
order to get adoption.
So that's when things can start to get a bit more dirty my
issue with a lot of this stuff is it's it's difficult to parse
what is technically sound versus the marketing that's behind
what is said is technically sound because there's a lot of
things that are claiming to one fix all of the problems
associated with the with with the big networks that don't
have any type of transactional volume associated with them.
So you'd never know whether or not they could fix those
issues, but yet they claim to in theory and and people will
believe them because they are not they don't have the
background to validate those those like those claims and
there's no way for to stop that type of thing.
And so you have what has become a proliferation of people
saying that they're fixing all the problems without fixing
any of the problems or having or they may have a novel
approach, but it may be, you know, fundamentally flawed
and once you start giving it scale and we're not really
going to see you need that stuff play out until people
throw money at these things which will eventually fail and
it's it's kind of scary to see like with the kind of thing
about what the future is going to be like because there's
going to be a lot of really really really like crash and
burns that happen from these things that have like in my
opinion novel concepts and ideas that really can't be
vetted until they have a lot of traffic.
Yeah, there's well, there's a lot of scams in the space
some of which are intentional and some of which are
unintentional because the the folks who are, you know
perpetuating the claims aren't actually sure whether or
not they're going to be able to pull them off and then
you know, we do have I think plenty of good faith efforts
of folks who are convinced that they're going to be able
to deliver on stuff, but it's still a very high risk
environment simply because people are trying to build
systems that have never existed before and you can
theorize about them, but it's not until they get out in
the wild and are really in an adversarial environment
where they're being attacked on a constant basis and
there's real money on the line to incentivize
sophisticated attackers.
It's it's not until you get to that point that you can
actually be more sure about the ability of these systems
to do what they're claiming.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is kind of like there's some
simple rules that exist and one of the simple rules
that I followed is like it's usually the team that's
quiet and working is the one that's actually doing
something.
You know, like it wasn't like Zuckerberg was on like
CNBC back when he was making Facebook in his dorm
room saying how it's going to take over the world and
he's going to have for good 4 billion users coming to
use his social media platform.
He was just like I'm just going to make some cool
stuff and just make it, you know, so if I could give
a tip of how I do my decision-making when it comes
to the best projects to follow the best people to
follow in the space the listeners is just like the
people that aren't making a lot of noise and then you
go see they're doing real work.
Those those are the people to follow.
I want to I want to try and like maybe I don't know
if I'm going to back this up or go against what
you're saying, but like technology is only like a
tool to use to enable use cases that don't exist.
And if the technology like people who are behind the
scenes working are trying to make something work so
they can offer a product is if they don't have a
product or something that actually that's actually
useful to whether it be developers or end users then
they don't have anything and they can't make money
in the long run and so like that's it's there's a
lot of people who are working that fail that you
don't hear about but the ones that you do hear
about are the ones that enable somebody to do
something and it's I don't know whether or not the
people who are working really hard at least in the
space right now are going to be able to make a
product later on down the line and it's hard to
parse like which ones can like I so like what do you
like what you've you've spent a lot of time with
your head down working on the actual problems.
Where are you seeing things that are actually
working slash making steps in the right direction
so that in the end the people can actually do
something that they couldn't do before or do
something they could in a better way.
Yes, so there's actually so many systems that are
out there right now, especially with all of these
utility tokens and whatnot that I don't think
anybody humanly has enough time to evaluate them
all but I generally am sticking to the most
popular ones the most valuable ones and from
that standpoint, you know Bitcoin right now
fairly simple and straightforward mainly used
as a simple store of value and medium of exchange
because it's it's simpler in functionality.
It's also simpler.
I think to scale it up, you know, we have people
working on Lightning Network for some I want to
say nearly three years now and Lightning Network
is insanely complicated but it would be a lot more
complicated if Bitcoin was trying to do a lot more
than just be, you know, simple money and payments.
So I am very interested to see what's going to
happen long term with the various like smart
contract systems that are, you know, an order of
magnitude more complicated on their base layer
because I think it's going to be that much more
complicated to scale them up to become global
systems. But as for the actual use cases, one of
the biggest problems that I'm seeing these days,
especially in the smart contracts token space is
a lot of people coming up with an idea and the
idea would work just fine, you know, as a standalone
web app and then they're like, oh, but we're going
to tokenize it.
So you have to get a token in order to use it.
And so basically the way that I've described that
to a number of people is well, you're basically
creating like Chuck-E-Cheese tokens, right?
The functionality for a lot of these things is not
actually really fundamentally need a
distributed decentralized token.
You're just trying to, you know, hop onto the hype
train and cash in with an ICO so that people can
use what is essentially a crippled version of money
that only works for your specific piece of software.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of projects in that space or
working operating in that space.
That's for sure.
That's for sure.
Go ahead, Corey.
Yeah, that was good.
Go ahead.
I'm listening.
So I like keeping things simple and you know, we
still haven't really made the perfect form of
money yet.
I think there's still a lot more to be done just
for simple store of value and and transfer of value.
And that's why the projects that I am interested
in tend to be more of the like cypher punk privacy
focused stuff.
So, you know, Monero and Zcash are interesting,
but I'm really excited about Grin and Memble Wemble
and the possibility that they might be able to
bring like real scalability and real fungability
to just a digital money system.
So we actually had a great we hosted a great episode
of a podcast that we're friends with on the show
about Memble Wemble.
That was a fantastic interview with Andrew.
You haven't checked that out.
I'd recommend it but I'm like I'm more of the
lines like I because this space is so new and
nascent.
I'm in the camp that wants generality.
I like the idea of not narrowing the focus on
what is capable of the system and allowing the
people to build on top of it.
If you get the fundamentals right, then you can
scale the system based on a few fundamental laws
that are very general and not narrowing what you
do, which I feel Bitcoin maybe artificially did
when it made its stack language and granted it's
done really well, but it's narrowed.
It's it's kind of future and what it can possibly
be in money.
Don't get me wrong is a really good use case.
And so it's a network that can survive and flourish
for a very long time.
But I just like the idea of like general purpose
utility and then allowing other people to come up
with ideas on how to use it.
You think it you think that they may be Ethereum
in this case has narrowed its has has widened its
scope too much to make it impossible to scale using
the technology.
Yes, so there's there's a couple different ways to
look at it.
And I do believe that, you know, we want to have a
general purpose.
I guess you would call it authoritative record
without authority.
So from a computer science standpoint, I see a lot
of these systems as databases and they just happen
to be new types of databases that have very
specific rules around how you can change the data
in the database.
And of course, it's append only so you can only
really add data, but you are making changes that
result in a new state of the database.
So for for Bitcoin that new state is unspent
transaction outputs.
Then for Ethereum, the new state is a lot more
complicated where it could be a simple value
transfer from one account to another or it could
be much more complex value transfer that is going
through arbitrarily complex logic that's being
calculated by every node on the network.
And so the the two I guess primary perspectives
of looking at these systems is the Bitcoin
perspective.
I think you're going to see long-term you're going
to see smart contracts and more complex functionality,
but you're not going to see that calculation actually
happen at the consensus layer.
You're going to see it happen on other layers and
then they are going to sort of aggregate their
proofs and put, you know, the minimum viable required
amount of data into the blockchain itself that can
then prove that some computation happened elsewhere.
And I think that's more scalable in the long-term
rather than doing all of the computation and proving
and storing the data into the blockchain itself.
Is that like a reverence to Merkle-wise abstract
transactories or is that?
Yeah, that's that's one possibility, but also you
could just be doing, you know, side chains.
So like the rootstock for example is I think going
to be a good example of actually having like the
Ethereum virtual machine available and being able
to do all of the complex logic.
But then the actual consensus like that's not going
to be changing Bitcoin itself.
You're just going to be cryptographically pegging to
the Bitcoin chain and I did have an article a few
years ago where I really wrote about these systems
as trust anchors.
And so the idea that you just you need some sort of
authoritative record that you can anchor onto and
you don't have to do all your complex logic inside
of that system.
You can just use it basically as like a timestamped
authoritative record and then you can create your own
systems that do whatever you want and doesn't bother
anybody else who's using Bitcoin or whatever other
blockchain and then just be putting your data sparingly
as you need into the blockchain itself, which you
can then reference later.
Yeah, I don't really need my transaction of buying
a donut to go into an immutable record that's
recorded for the history of all time.
There's certain applications where I need to prove
that something happened or like an entire company
needs to check some itself against an immutable record
to prove that everything that's happened with a
certain timeframe has been has been real and provable
and everything doesn't necessarily need to go into
a completely trustless scenario.
So building systems that work around the what I like
to call them like trust scenarios or trust constraints
kind of dictates how you build a system and I feel
like that's the proper way to scale and you're seeing
like a few a few networks try and do this in my
opinion Ethereum is one of the ones because they're
trying to offload a lot of the computation onto
like layer 2 and layer 3 networks with plasma chains
and things like that and Bitcoin proper is trying
to do the exact same thing by making the Lightning
Network Merkle as abstraction text trees side
change things like that where they use what you've
what you've said is the Bitcoin blockchain is a
trust anchor a settlement layer of ultimate trust
but like how long do you think where these things
will be like actually being used because it's really
early and none of the actual layer 2 technology
works with any level of trust like which is that's
why it's so funny that I have a lot of people coming
to me with their ideas of you know tokenized whatever
and my my first retort if it's not a retort of like
you know, you're creating a Chuck E Cheese token
which is just you know restricted utility my second
retort is well, you know, you've got this grand
business plan of you know being able to get millions
of users and lots of adoption and create a valuable
system but you're building it on top of Ethereum
with an ERC 20 token that's going to you know have
actual cost behind using it as the gas price on the
Ethereum network goes up as you know, there's more
contention for block space on there.
I mean it's the same problem.
You know every blockchain has this fundamental
scaling problem that if they become popular they
start to create fee markets and there's contention
over this scarce resource.
So if blockchain is a database that is this
common public good then we have to worry about you
know tragedy of the commons if we don't start
charging people if we don't let there be some sort
of economic incentive for people to use the scarce
resource in an efficient way, you know for valuable
things and you know because there's no authority
over their systems.
You can't have a gatekeeper or a filter who says oh
this is spam and that's not spam.
You just have to let the economics work themselves
out but then that results in disenfranchising a lot
of people who think that you know, they should get
a free lunch on these systems.
I think that I think what people want and not what
I think what people need is a feeling of security
and what they don't realize is that scaling isn't
pretty like people think scale is supposed to be
just pretty dream where everybody just magically
starts using things the way that we all see in our
head.
But if you think about other things that scaled
like like the automobile first it started with red
flags and we were like, ah damn like a hundred
people are dying a week.
This is a bad idea.
Let's go to signs and then four-way stop four-way
intersections were great with just a stop sign for
a long time.
But then people were like not obeying those rules
either.
They were like, you know, screw the stop sign.
I'm taking off and so we were like, all right, let's
level this up a little bit.
What about like hanging lights?
What if we just hang some lights up?
So even people further behind the stop sign can
see that they need to stop to like it'll be great.
And then that works.
You know, people want this this sense of security
like scaling is just going to be beautiful.
But I don't think it works that way.
It works that way with any technology and and right
now they're just they're searching for that.
Well, Andreas Andreas said that the whole he has a
he said it a couple times but his whole thing was
the failing to scale gracefully and any at any
point when you have a certain amount of potential
use in a network people will try their damnedest
to shove whatever use case they have into that
space and it's going to fill up the network and
the moment you make you put out that fire and you
increase the capacity of that network you enable
new use cases or the use cases that we're trying
to get in and it immediately fills up with the
people who couldn't do things beforehand.
We're going to do it then and then that then
doesn't scale appropriately.
But you've increased the you've increased the
capacity people can do new things.
They can't do these the other things and slowly
but surely you just continuously put out fires
and increase capacity on what's capable of the
network and there's always going to be people
bitching because it doesn't do what they want it
to do but you're still providing more and more
and more service as you increase the capacity of
the network like the internet started sucked.
You couldn't do a lot of things but slowly but
surely we made technological innovations
engineers solve problems.
We increase the infrastructure to allow people
to do things better and faster and now we can
you can have VR over the damn internet.
It's slowly but surely things will get better
but it's slowly but surely that took what 40 years.
It's just imagine what would it what would have
happened if a bunch of those early internet
adopters who were upset and bitching about not
being able to do things forked off and created
their own version of the internet, you know,
where where would that have led over the decades?
You know, would we have multiple incompatible
internets at this point?
It's interesting to think of, you know,
parallels, there's so many parallels between these
different networks, communication network
and one is an economic network.
But I think that, you know, functionally they're
going to evolve in similar ways.
Just double up on this crazy ass tribe of humans
that lived under a different internet for decades.
Like what the hell have you all been up to?
That'd be hilarious.
That's a book in the making alias if you're listening.
So I guess I have a question specifically to the
lightning network and that is are there any myths
that you see that you'd like to squash here about
what the lightning network can and can't do at its
current in its current state?
Yeah, I mean, it gets pretty complicated because
the lightning network is going to offer different
functionality, different security model.
It just it works very differently from Bitcoin.
So, you know, one of the bigger things that people
have been arguing about is like how centralized
will the lightning network be?
And I wrote an article two years ago on Coindesk
that was like a speculative, you know,
this is all the challenges we're going to have to
deal with and one of the main things that I talked
about was the topology of the network.
And so you have a bunch of people who are constantly
saying, oh, it's going to be a hub and spoke network
and all the big hubs are going to be AML,
KYC, you know, banking providers.
And so Bitcoin is basically going to get overtaken
by the banks and you're not going to be able to use
it without being fully identified and censorship
resistance and fungibility will go away.
But that's not how this works.
This works.
But, you know, and then I try to use a parallel
of the Internet itself of how Bitcoin and the
blockchain are basically like layer zero of the
Internet, the Ethernet layer, which is this
broadcast to everyone type protocol.
And the way that the engineers ended up making
the Internet more scalable is they built layers
on top of it.
They were doing routing TCP IP, which allows you
to, you know, only send data between a minimum
number of nodes to get to its destination.
And that's really the exact same concept that is
being used for Lightning Network to make it much
more efficient.
So we're only sending data to a few parties on
the network.
Now, you hear people start to argue and say,
well, you're basically creating ISPs and those
ISPs are going to control like the high bandwidth
or AKA high capital channels on the network.
And that could be true except for a stark
difference in that it's incredibly challenging to
start your own ISP and requires a ton of capital
and you have to jump through a lot of hoops from
a legal and regulatory standpoint.
But to create a new Lightning node to, you know,
further decentralize the network topology just
requires a little bit of technical skill and a
little bit of Bitcoin to fund those nodes.
So like I am intending to use my Bitcoin capital
and my technical skills to run as many Lightning
nodes as I deem necessary to help keep the network
more decentralized.
Like if I have to run a dozen Lightning nodes
that I set up, you know, around the world and
monitor, I will be happy to do that.
If that is something that is, you know, necessary
because the exchanges or other big providers are
the only ones running highly connected nodes,
but I'm not sure that that's even going to be
necessary, you know, just from looking at the
organic growth that has been happening on the
network already.
I think there's a lot of people who are very
excited about this technology and that may be
a better indicator of its long-term success than
the, you know, arguing back and forth over
whether or not it will be successful.
You know, if there's enough people that are willing
to devote their time and money and other resources
to continue to improve protocol or network or
whatever, then it's got a lot of momentum behind
it and it's not going to die.
I think, like I really get behind what you just
said there and I think what kind of furthers the
differentiation between what the ISP analogy is
the trustless nature of Lightning Network, the
automation in which it works.
It's like right now, like the way the networks
currently work is we are offloading transactions
based on the network's inability to scale to
trusted third parties, like think about what
Coinbase does.
I would prefer to send someone Bitcoin on Coinbase
because it's free and instant if I'm just doing
normal transactions because it's free and
instant, but what I'm doing is I'm offloading the
trust and responsibility of Coinbase to handle
that money, which we've proved isn't necessary
if the technology exists to not do it and what
Lightning Network does is allows Coinbase to run
a massive Lightning node, which enables them to
then trustlessly move coins from person to person
or entity to entity or throughout the network so
that I don't longer have to trust Coinbase to
handle that money.
I can just go through them to hop and the network
itself is optimized to minimize both the time
it takes to get my message to someone else and
the money it takes to do that.
So if Coinbase is charging a lot of money to
route that message, I'm going to go around it
based on all the nodes that are around it.
And it's just going to equalize the entire
playing field because there's an economic
incentive to run a Lightning Network node if
someone's charging too much because you're going
to get people to route through you if you
charge less.
And like I feel like that's kind of like, yeah,
it may be easier to participate to go through
these nodes, but if they're charging too much,
you just go around them and that's done
automatically and trustlessly.
And I don't think people quite understand that
because it's a difficult thing to understand.
Yeah, man.
That's hella difficult to understand.
Basically explained routing but for money.
Yeah, it's not easy.
But like who do you trust?
Right?
Like it's like no one's shilling that like
that's not like no one's going around making
money off that because no one's paying someone
to say that.
And there's no ICO.
Yeah, there's no ICO.
Unless you consider Bitcoin as the ICO.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's a matter of time, right?
That's a matter of time.
It's a matter of providing that use case
where it's like you keep saying these things,
but I'm using it and I don't have these problems.
So whatever you're saying is garbage.
It's just we're not quite there yet because
unfortunately these engineering problems are
not so easy because they've never been done
before and I think it's just going to take time
and you'll see people like the noise the signal
to noise ratio will just get better as the
technology gets better.
But unfortunately it takes us a while to do
things in a way that's scientific and provable
so that we're not going to lose people's money
because when you make a new technology dealing
with value transfer, you don't want to fuck that
up.
And so you have to do it in a good way and
that that's not you can't do that haphazardly.
Well, and it's kind of weird because you know,
I mentioned there are different perspectives
like sort of crypto Keynesians Chris crypto
Austrians, but I've even seen in some cases.
It's almost like crypto Luddites of the people
who are like look Bitcoin works the way that
it's, you know set up by Satoshi, you know,
you make an on-chain transaction and you don't
have to be online to receive the money.
You can come back later and check it and it's
very simple for programmers to be able to
to create software that you know listens and is
able to validate these transactions.
But now you want to make everything 10 times
more complicated and people aren't going to
want to use it and understand it and the
developers aren't going to want to work on top
of it.
And so you have some people who are like the
old way is the tried and trued method and and
we should just keep doing that and just you
know, make everything bigger and faster rather
than trying to you know, you hear the sort of
technical debts as an argument which you know,
people are arguing against complexity which
from from one standpoint, you know, there is
the the keep it simple stupid way of going
about engineering things like you don't want
to make anything more complex than it needs
to be.
So there's a lot of interesting trade-offs
there that have resulted in some people wanting
to you know, keep Bitcoin simple stupid.
But of course that just means they're willing
to make other trade-offs that are not going
to work out.
I think that last group of people you just
defined are the easiest to ignore nowadays
because it's like you think Henry Ford would
be upset that we've gone from Model T to
Lambo.
I think he'd be pretty if he were alive.
He would be amazed that we built on the
automobile that much like the automobiles my
favorite analogy.
So I go to to go to but you know, he'd be
happy and thrilled that we built upon it that
much and we're not still riding around in his
shitty Model T great for history books and
pictures, but that's a shitty car.
I've seen in person.
I sat in one so you know, those people are
easy to ignore.
Well, let's let's look at let's use the same
analogy.
Everyone likes to use is how the internet
scaled.
It's it's a layered technology and the same
people who are complaining about keep it
simple stupid for Bitcoin are the same ones
who are using 14 node.js apps to like do
everyday activities in their lives.
Like do you think all of the stuff that makes
your life easy now isn't built off some type
of framework that's built on top of seven
different other layered stacks that enables
to actually get down to the ethernet layer?
Yeah, I mean that's the thing it is adding
more complexity, but you have to simultaneously
abstract away that complexity, you know
under the hoods.
That's what the the the usability problem
with with adding these extra layers is that
you need to need to just like slap a nice
simple API on top of it for the developers.
You need to slap a nice slick UI on top of
it for the regular users so they can just
push a button and the money goes to where
they expect it to.
Well, that's hopefully we get there.
I think we will and like what we I think
philosophically speaking what we call money
now is going to drastically change as these
things become more and more easier to use.
The concept of money to my children is going
to be vastly different than the concept
of money to me as I grew up and it's
it's hard.
I think like when I imagine what children
grew up like the world children grew up in
versus what I grew up in and how they view
the world and what becomes like normal to them.
I think money is going to be this thing
that they see that's very different.
Whereas like what we like the children now
they've always had the internet so information
and the access to information is very
different to them because it's something
that's always been there and for them
it's just going to be like well like one
central money like one money to like to
to you exchange in for everything else is
going to be a very very very strange thing
them.
Like what do you mean you just use one
money or like you just you get one money
for the work that you do or like you go
to a job for one single money and use
that for everything that's like that's
kind of neat to me to try and look forward
into the future and see like what is the
what is the world going to look like or
like what's going to be what are my
children going to look at me and go like
what the hell are you talking about dad
stop being weird.
What if you were to try and do that based
on your perspective of this technology
and where you think it's going what's
going to be weird to the children who
grew up in this world that's impossible
to predict that now my parents looking
at me weird because I make fun of them
because they have cable.
It's like why are you watching cable TV?
What's wrong with you?
Why are you watching television?
What's wrong with you?
Like what the hell do you mean?
Why am I watching television?
This was the shit when I was growing up.
So yeah, I don't know.
I mean the world is going to keep getting
weirder because it's going to keep
fracturing like everyone is going to be
able to have their their own smaller
and smaller like niches and subsets of
groups of people with similar interests
that are working on things together.
And I mean, that's how you end up with
like crypto kitties, right?
It's like I like cats and I like
blockchains and let's create a, you
know, provably unique cats on the
blockchain and you never know what's
there.
We got one is, you know, these these
mashups of interests and ideas will
proliferate and continue to get weirder
and weirder and we're not going to be
able to keep up with it all.
And I think you already see evidence
of that when you put a tablet or a
phone in front of a toddler and they
just start going at it and you know,
you just hope that they don't end up
like clearing your bank account out
while they're in there.
Yeah, that's the scary side that my
two-year-old niece can operate an
iPad Pro better than my 62 year old
dad.
It is crazy to see but I'm like, wow,
things are going to be moving real
fast real soon.
So all right, you got anything else
we wrapping it up.
We're not we're not there yet, but I
think that's a good way to wrap this
interview up.
Jameson is there anything that we
didn't ask you that you'd like to say
or that we should have?
No, I mean, you know, my main thing
about this space is that it is this
ultimate freedom that we're all trying
to strive for and everybody has their
own view of how we're going to get
there eventually.
But the the anarchy that we're trying
to bring to the world can be pretty
messy and difficult to convince
people that it's all worth it.
But I think that's the way it is.
It's worth it, but it's it's not going
to be a utopia.
I think a lot of people are under
this false impression that that those
of us who are contributing to these
systems think that we're going to fix
all of the world's problems and
there's still going to be problems
and strife and conflict.
But you know, we're really just going
to the root of of you know, the
specific problem of money, but even
more specifically of trust and in
trying to redefine like how we
actually come to trust people and
entities and and decide like
whether or not we really need to
trust them.
So it's going to fundamentally
change a lot of things about the
world, just like the internet has
fundamentally changed pretty much
every industry in the world.
And it's it's hard to even speculate
as to how you know, all these
different industries and just
people's lives are going to change
in the coming decades.
So it's exciting and you know, I'm
glad to be a part of trying to
help build that out wherever it
goes.
But I'm happy to to try to bring
my understanding to the rest of
people who may be more pessimistic
about you know, some of the more
nefarious things they go on in
the system.
I think that overall it's going
to be a positive benefit for
humanity, just like every new
tool has been people are going to
misuse it.
But in general, most people I
believe are good and are going to
use tools for the benefit of
everyone.
So I got two questions for you.
The first is a toughie.
It is in 10 words or less.
Can you describe Bitcoin a
trustworthy system of record?
No one control.
I got six.
What do you got Cory?
Yep, six.
Cory is you got six.
Okay, well done, sir.
All right.
Congratulations.
Everyone fails then.
You have one nothing but but
it's a fun question that we like
to ask trying Dr.
Seuss this stuff a little bit.
The second question it's got to
be it's going to be shameless
and I feel bad.
I'm saying this like I looking
on your podcast list on lop.net
and just we're nowhere to be
found on there.
I don't know.
We may have slipped through the
crack.
I don't understand.
What are what are the
qualifications to make this list
is there is there some sort of
list that we can make sure
we're checking off to make sure
yeah, so well, there's two
things one, you know, I created
that years ago and have slowly
been adding to it.
But you know, it's open source
and anybody can submit a pull
request to try to make changes.
Well, generally, you know,
people will open a pull request
and it'll be, you know, some
site that I've never heard of
before and then I have to go
look at it and try and figure
out if it's trustworthy or or
they're just trying to scam
people and you know want to get
on my my site to appear to be
more reputable.
But anybody can open a pull
request.
All right, figure out how I
guess I'm doing that tonight.
Yeah, I think I mean, we're
pretty I speak for myself.
I think we I think we're
reputable.
We do we do we do good work
here.
So well, James, thank you for
stopping by.
It's been a long time we tried
to get you on the show for you
guys listening.
Check out lop.net.
Trust me.
It is just a wealth of
information.
Every single person that I
on-ramp the second thing I do
after on-ramping them is send
them to lop.net because it's
basically like a hey, if you
don't know you can go to 0 to
60 real fast on lop.net, you
know, so just to give you an
inkling everything on lop.net
slash Bitcoin dot HTML.
If you click on the Bitcoin
resources tab, everything is
just put for put there for you
getting started online courses
documentaries, the history of
Bitcoin video presentations,
news sites, podcasts, high
quality blogs.
It's all curated there.
So you can go read and learn
all that you want and there's
no excuse to not know things
when this this kind of resource
exists. So that's all I got.
All right, James.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Hope to have you back sometime.
You're welcome anytime to come
on and shoot shit.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That was the interview with
Jameson engineer extraordinaire.
Hope you enjoyed that.
And we're back here with Taylor
from my crypto and we're just
going to wrap things up a bit
because this episode is getting
long. Yeah, it turns out that
interview with Jameson was long.
I forgot that we went for a
while. So you guys nerded out
for a while.
I'm sure your car ride to your
home from work is getting over
and you don't want to sit in
your car longer to listen to us.
So we'll let you go.
Taylor, you want to do anything
you want to add or talk about
or say what's up or shout out
to thank the Reddit community.
I mean, I will say that to all
the people that have, you know,
emailed us or DM does or are
being supportive on Reddit or
even being, you know, are
questioning things on Reddit,
but not doing it with just like
the hatred and the passionate
language.
Like I will say thank you to
those people.
You know, we were fully aware
that we're going to have to
prove ourselves and that's fine
because we're going to keep on
building.
We're going to keep on doing
what we do best and we're going
to keep on doing what we can to
make this space better and the
space safer and that's what
we're here for and that's what
we were born to do.
So, you know, if you don't trust
us right now, if you don't
trust anyone right now, okay,
like that's probably a good
thing because this is the
blockchain.
Yeah, I'm kind of curious like
personally, I'm curious to see
what happens with my ether
wallet and what the new team
and the decisions that they
make do to change the way my
ether wallet works or just
maintains the same.
So it's still a fantastic
product just the way it is
right now.
And I'm curious to see if that
changes at all.
Yeah, and the thing is that
I've said this a lot like we've
been living in a world where we
have very little competition
like very very little
competition and especially for
some of our features like, you
know, supporting all the RC20
tokens.
We have such little
competition. So, you know, if
my ether wallet decides like go
down like a unique path or just
like keep on building like
that's going to be probably one
of the most exciting things
simply because that's going to
give us this competition.
It's going to kick us in the
ass.
It's going to kick us to be
better.
It's going to kick us to be the
best, you know versions of
ourselves.
And this is, you know, it's
been a learning experience.
It's going to continue being a
learning experience and
we're going to continue doing
the best things we can and you
know, like welcome to the party
guys.
Sweet.
Once today, once again, the
crypto space is is an
interesting cutthroat place to
be and it's like it's kind of
like, you know, it's it's
permissionless and that you get
to do whatever you want.
You can't really stop people
from doing what they want and
so you get to kind of watch
that unfold in real time.
Yeah, and it moves so fast and
there's so much drama, you
know, what more could you ask
for?
I could do it.
Well, you can catch Taylor at
a Taylor and team at the
largest Ethereum hackathon
conference in the U.S.
at Ethereum Denver next week
and Corey will be giving a talk
on the social implications of
blockchain infrastructure at
the Bitcoin Super Conference
going out at the same time.
So you'll be in Denver will be
in Dallas.
That's where you can catch us
mycrypto.com this podcast is
on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher,
all that good stuff.
And that's all I got.
Anything else?
Nope.
You want to follow me?
You can follow me on at core
petty c o r p e t t y.
I don't tweet that much.
So I'm probably not that
interesting.
But Taylor is going to be at
mycrypto.