Hello there from sunny Los Angeles. How are you all? How was your weekend? I'm just off the back of Russell O'Kung's Bitcoin is event. And yeah, it was a great event for those who attended and all those I met, I think you can agree they did a really great job. And I also hosted a fireside chat with Russell, which I'm hoping to get released on the podcast very soon. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the mighty Kraken. The best place for you traders to buy and sell Bitcoin. Next up in my Libra series is an interview with Peter Todd and Jameson Lopp, where we review Libra's technicals. But before that, let's hear from my amazing sponsors. So first up today's show is brought to you by BlockFi. And I've just received my latest entrance payment, which is great. I love it. I love that my Bitcoin is working for me every month. And with BlockFi latest funding round, I'm really super confident for the future of the company. I'm happy to be invested with them. I'm happy to have part of my Bitcoin with them and an interest. With a BlockFi interest account, you can earn interest every month on your Bitcoin, Ether and GUSD. And also with BlockFi, you have access to crypto backed loans, where you can get a loan against your Bitcoin, Ether or Litecoin. And they've also got some amazing new stuff coming soon. So I'm going to be catching up with Zach finding out. But if you are interested in trying out any of these, I recommend you head over to BlockFi.com, which is B-L-O-C-K-F-I.com. So today's show is brought to you by The Mighty Kraken, the best place to buy and sell Bitcoin and the most comprehensive set of tools out there for you traders. I also just met up with Jesse. I called up with him to find out what's going on with Kraken. They've got some exciting new things coming. So I can't wait to tell you about that. We already know they've got the best security practices of any exchange. And for you traders out there, they've got so much. You've got Kraken.com, which is the best place to buy, sell and trade digital currencies. You can margin trade with up to 5X leverage. You've got access to futures and indices with the Kraken OTC desk. You can access large trades with private and personalized services and with CryptoWatch. You can trade on multiple exchanges from a single platform. You know, they're the best one out there. You know, you should be trading with Kraken. Come on, join me in supporting Kraken. Head over to Kraken.com, which is K-R-A-K-E-N.com. Okay. So onto my second episode in my Libra deep dive series. And after our broad overview on Libra, which I did with Bill Barheight, I've got a technical analysis show with two absolute heavyweights, Jameson Lopp, Peter Todd, where we get into detail on the tech side of things. The reason I wanted both Peter and Jameson on is they both wrote articles after Libra was announced. And while they had different views, they highlighted some also similar concerns and they were kind of similar in tone as well. So I thought I should get them all together, do the deep dive, let them break down the issue with the tech and both their articles also including the show notes. You might want to get a read of those. With these two as guests though, it's no surprise. It's a pretty massive show. We get into so much on the issues with validator nodes, scalability problems, Libra foundation politics, and if regular users outside of crypto will even care about Libra. Interesting questions. It's great conversation. You know, if you've got any feedback, you can email me on hello at whatbitcoindid.com. Also, just a couple of notes. I'm about to head off to SF. I'm about to go and catch a flight. I've got an important interview tomorrow, one I've been working on for about a year, which I can't wait to get out. Can't wait to release that. It also looks like I'm going to be heading out to Taiwan shortly to record a couple of shows for Defiance, which will now be launching at the start of October. Sorry about the delay for that. It's just been a lot more work getting it ready than I thought. I'm also going to be heading out to Riga for the Honey Badger Conference, which I will be emceeing. That's on September the 14th to September the 15th. I'll also be heading to Wyoming for Caitlyn Long's WoW Hackathon. That's September the 19th to 22nd. And after that, I'm going to be heading to Crypto Springs, which is 23rd to 25th in Palm Springs. September is going to be pretty busy. Lots going on. Hopefully I'll get to see some of you, catch up with you. It was great to catch up with some of you at Bitcoin. Really appreciate everyone coming up and telling me how much they enjoy the show. It means a lot. All right. I hope you enjoy this. Like I say, you got any questions, feel free to hit me up. Hi, Peter. Hi, Jameson. How are you both? Great. Couldn't be better. Awesome. So we're here to talk about Libra. But firstly, I don't know if you both saw, but England won the Cricket World Cup. It's kind of a big deal. Yes. England is my favorite team of all of the stick bat teams. Well, I'm having a beer. I quite like cups. All right. Anyway, we're going to talk about Libra. I've been through your article, Jameson, very useful. And Peter, I've been through yours. This is going to be more of a technical conversation, I expect. So I'll need my normal hand holding. But I think I kind of got my head around both of your kind of thoughts in it. We'll start with you, Jameson, first and then you, Peter. Initially, just to set us up, it would be interesting to know both of your initial reactions because we all heard about Libra for a long time in advance. Everyone had kind of assumptions of what it was going to be and how they were going to deliver it. But now we know a lot more about it. It'd be great to know what your kind of initial reactions were, Jameson. Initially, I was actually pleasantly surprised with regard to a few things, mainly that it seems like they do have some technically competent engineers who are working on it. But upon closer inspection of the various white papers they put out, it's clear that they still have quite a bit of work to do. And so there's still a lot of open questions. And that's part of the reason why people are still talking about it so much. I was very much unsurprised by the technology. And I'd kind of say I don't really think it's all that good either. But what really surprised me was the politics. I was expecting them to go and have a specifically US dollar backed coin or something like that to go challenge leaders of the world with new currency is, I think, crazy. Right. So you think they would have just been better off with a dollar pegged stable coin? Well, given that they're in such political trouble already, I think it's amazingly audacious to make this kind of statement. Right. And if they'd been with a dollar pegged stable coin, we've already got a few, they probably would have been in a much better position and maybe not hold in front of the Senate. I think it's on Tuesday, David Marcus is there. Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing you would that the only rational for it to be seen to do would be to go direct, you know, direct attention away from something else bad that you're doing, you know, not a very feasible thing to do when you're such a large company that's already hated by so many people. Especially conservatives. Yeah, and you know, Democrats as well, for kind of similar reasons in some ways just opposite sides of the coin. It seems to me like at least part of the reason why they may have gone with this basket based approach is that they want it to seem even more decentralized so that, you know, we're not completely centralizing our currency around one fiat currency, but rather we're going to try to make it as stable as possible to even prevent, you know, fluctuations that may happen in the major currencies. But like we said, that may very well backfire from a political standpoint. I would push back on calling such a basket decentralized too. You know, it's still centralized around a very small set of currencies. You know, the only way you call that decentralized is in the sort of language of geopolitics where nothing's really decentralized. It's always the political power. Do you think also it might have been more of a... I'm guessing this is going to be a global currency. Facebook is pretty much in every country in the world. That to have a dollar peg stable coin politically is not a great move in countries that maybe dislike the US quite a bit. And that by having its own currency, it kind of gets away from it feeling like a US currency and some kind of US dominance. I think, you know, even in that kind of scenario, it would still be better off for them to position this as a payment solution. You know, let's say maybe multiple different currencies. And equally, you know, the US, like I think the only parties there that really matter that much are the US and maybe Europe. Other countries are just too small for them to not be able to steamroll them. I think there are a number of questions around, you know, how these end users are going to denominate the value. You know, are they going to get to choose? Like I prefer to keep my value displayed to me in one certain fiat currency, but on the back end, it's actually this complex basket. And, you know, what are the ramifications of that, especially from like regulatory and tax standpoint? It seems like the sort of hand wavy answer right now is that, oh, they're going to be regulated endpoints that are going to handle a lot of that. But then, of course, they're also touting the protocol itself as being open for anyone to build on. So, you know, what happens if we end up having less regulated endpoints and will there be a flagrant, I guess, violation of a lot of regulations simply because people will be using it without worrying about tax rules or other regulations? I mean, that's kind of been Facebook's MO since it launched whenever it was 12 years ago. I can't actually remember, but their MO has always been to flagrantly disregard laws, especially with regards to privacy, and then go for their growth, go for expansion and almost pull back afterwards. I mean, their privacy to begin with is terrible. It's improved in some ways. My expectation with this is they will do something similar. But it seems like because they're so big now that actually they can't get away with that, that the regulators realize how powerful they are. And actually, they're going to have to follow certain regulations almost from launch. So I actually strongly disagree with that take. And the reason why is because privacy laws, you know, from what I know, tend not to cover anything Facebook ever did until more recently. You know, the way to better describe that it is, is it was very unregulated, that there was nothing actually stopping companies from Facebook existing, because people are opting in to providing all this information to this company, and there just wasn't regulation around this. I think the better example there is actually Uber, which very much was actually acting illegally in many places, maybe a little less than some people would like to portray it as. But certainly in a lot of places, they were flagrantly violating laws. And, you know, interesting, of course, Uber is part of the Libra consortium, apparently. So, you know, that may say something, but I don't think the comparison to Facebook is apt. Interesting. All right, well, we'll work through some of your both your points. My general take from both is slightly different. Peter, you seem to have gone originally down the route of there seems to be, it's quite disingenuous, the white paper and some of their proposals and some outright lies. Whereas Jameson, you focused a lot more on the complexity of what they're doing and some of their unanswered problems. But I'm going to start with you, Peter, I'm going to start with just a tweet you put out. I think this is a quote from their white paper, but you put the Libra blockchain is a decentralized programmable database designed to support a low volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world. And your comment underneath is that is a lie. Yes, specifically the saying that, you know, fiat currency backed system is decentralized is right there on Facebook a lot. You know, that it just is not possible to back a decentralized system by a fiat, you know, quote unquote, physical asset. It's, you know, you just can't do it. So the moment you go put those, you know, two statements together your line, and on top of that, the actual technical architecture of it is also not decentralized. What they're proposing is a federated system where a fixed set of entities could control the system. You know, I'm sorry, but you just can't call it decentralized. And I'll point out sort of sort of more meta point that the reason why I made those comments rather than say taking the tone that others have taken is it's a lot easier to go point out what people are lying because often it's just so blatant in this industry. You know, I didn't want to go and sit down and, you know, spend a couple hours writing article. I wrote what was easiest to go do because I had other things to do that day. And it was just a point of the obvious lies. There's also a fair amount of marketing taking place here, especially like even just use of the word blockchain, even when they admit that, you know, the fundamental structure of the database is not a blockchain, though there is a blockchain that gets used in there amongst some of the validator nodes. But they're using a lot of these terms that have cropped up over the past few years. And in some of them, they're using them in a sort of aspirational sense and others, you know, like the decentralization term. It's been so overused at this point that it's hard to even say, you know, what is centralization or decentralization because people are using it in a variety of different ways. And I mean, you could you could probably make an argument that a federation of three or four nodes is, quote unquote, decentralized. But even just the fact that you're making an argument like that is kind of a waste of time in my opinion. Well, it seems to me they've gotten onto two different angles here. The use of something like cryptocurrency seems to be something that would appeal more to users of Facebook who've maybe heard of cryptocurrencies. They've never really used them, but they know it's a different type of currency. And they've gotten onto things like decentralized and blockchain perhaps to appeal more to the industry side of people, you know, potentially developers, providers, anyone or exchanges who might work with Libra. It seems to me that's maybe what they've done there, but they certainly are marketing terms. I don't like people kind of trying to push back on these ideas that you have centralized decentralized have fairly rigid meanings. And I think what the lesson we learned there is simply we have an industry that's just full of scammers and people who are dishonest, you know, just because a million people go and claim vigorously that the sky is red, not blue doesn't mean the color changes. And it's only until you get to a point where the very meaning of red is different. And, you know, you are actively changing the use of that term everywhere that that kind of, you know, that kind of logic makes sense. And I don't think we're there with decentralized or centralized. I think they have fairly clear meanings that are, you know, used in a way historically, as well as recently. And what we have to go point out is an industry is what Facebook's willing to lie about this. They've been willing to lie about plenty of other things. This shouldn't really be surprising that a dishonest company will go hire researchers who are dishonest and go and publish dishonest webpapers. And that's just the way this stuff works. And by not pushing back on that every single time, you allow people to get away with these things. Do you have a preference for who manages money if you had to choose between Facebook and the government? Well, I'd say neither. But in most places, the government. Okay, interesting. Well, I think perhaps part of the problem here is that, you know, they're intentionally using some of these loaded terms like centralization and decentralization instead of specifically talking about, you know, what is the threat model? What is your actual level of security against certain actors within the ecosystem, basically subverting your own action? You know, if we're really talking about this federation of private companies, you know, how many of them need to collude against you to make the utility of the system a lot lower for you? So have either of you actually looked at the threat model? Because one of the things I did consider with these companies who are the node operators is that they have a lot to lose by acting dishonestly, a lot more say than a government does. Like, what happens with the government if they act dishonestly, we all just kind of suffer because we're used to it. But with a company, you can actually vote with your feet. And, you know, scandals aren't great for companies. I think the problem with that is what dishonesty means can vary a lot. I think a company to say just directly steal your money with no legal reason whatsoever is I think very unlikely. But I also think it's not necessarily that likely for even Bitcoin miners to want to do that because legal risks are too great. But to do things that only seem a little dishonest, such as stealing your money on some trumped up government reason that everyone knows is false. Well, I mean, that seems very likely. Why would you want to go up against a government there? There's also I think the issue being that we don't fully understand how the dynamics of this Libra Association are going to turn out because I think there's going to be inevitably a lot of politics and the fact that this thing is not operational and it's probably not going to be operational for another year or so. We don't really know what I guess the bylaws or other processes of this Libra Association are going to be. As far as I'm aware, none of that is public. But I guess at the end of the day, if there is a sufficient level of voting by members in the association, they could theoretically change the protocol, the network, the whole operation of the system at a whim. It's important to point out that at a technical level, what they're designing is not at all. And indeed, there's been some statements made that make it sound like the actual blockchain data itself, they're not going to make publicly available. It'll be hidden away in these so-called validator nodes. And all you'll get is essentially a signed statement saying, well, yeah, we claim that this is true, but we're actually going to prove it to you. I've had at least one of the Libra folks say that, and once again, this is a sort of hand wavy, far future thing, but I've been told that the goal is to make it possible for someone to download and validate the actual blockchain. But it sounds like that is not even technically possible at the moment. And who knows when or if it will be. And I'd say it's also obviously not feasible if Libra catches on because the amount of data you're talking about is going to be such a huge amount. You're not going to be able to do this by just walking up to them and asking. You're going to have to go negotiate some agreement and pay some costs and so on. This is not going to be a cheap data structure that will distribute widely. I think one of the other differences is that I doubt people are going to be holding serious amounts of money in Libra like maybe you would do in bitcoins. There's a serious risk to people losing a significant amount of their wealth, certainly early adopters or people who've invested heavily in bitcoin. If something was to happen there, if there was some way of confiscating money or stealing money from the system or something dishonest could happen. I see Libra more as a tool that people will perhaps load a few dollars in as and when they need it. But I can't myself see people loading thousands and thousands of dollars into it. So whilst there's risk, it feels like there'll be less of a risk. You don't think that Libra coin might become bigger than tether as a bitcoin fiat onramp? Yeah, I guess so. But then if I was a serious trader wanting to use a stablecoin as a bitcoin onramp, I would rather use tether or GUSD or something else than Libra coin. But it's a fair point. Would you really though? Aren't all of those operating under similar types of setups where basically the administrators of the stablecoin can burn your coins without your authority? Of course. But I think I feel like Facebook is, I don't know, it just feels less part of the bitcoin ecosystem. It feels like it's more of a, it just feels like it will be under more regulations. It feels like it will be kind of tied to the government. I can imagine them having certain arrangements with the government after their Senate testimony hearings, which I don't think the likes of tether have. But you might be right, but I don't know, it just feels different to me. One big difference between tether and Libra is that, at least in the near run, in theory you can actually audit what tether is doing. In Libra, the way that they seem to be going is that no one outside of the Libra coalition will actually know what's happening on the Libra blockchain. In tether, it's all public. I mean, this is why you get all kinds of various tether tracking, Twitter accounts and websites and so on, watching like a hawk every time they go issue some coins. Yeah, that five billion or so issuance recently and the subsequent burning was definitely fun. Yeah. Yeah, what was that about? From what I could see, someone made a typo in doing something a little weird to move tether between different chains and then everyone kind of jumped on it. I think it was Poloniex came out and said that they screwed up doing a chain swap, I guess. But it's important to note that Poloniex said that they screwed up in something that they were doing with the assistance of tether, which sounds like it was actually tether making the transactions and they were just being nice and taking responsibility for the screw up. It's quite interesting. I was sat down recently with Brad Stevens from Blockchain Capital and he had an interesting take on Libra being a win-win for Bitcoin. He said that if it is, if it does go ahead, it will be a great introduction to cryptocurrencies, probably lead people more to Bitcoin. But if it doesn't actually launch, if for some reason they can't launch it, the government start banning it, the regulations are too tight, it's another win for Bitcoin because it got regulated away, whereas you can't regulate away Bitcoin, so it kind of proves the Bitcoin use case. I think it depends on how it gets regulators away. I mean, the worst case would be that they go set up a bunch of focus groups and so on in the various bureaucracies that then are out of a job because Libra stops and they want to continue having something to work on. But at the very least, hopefully, it'll keep the administration focused on Libra and their actions and at least keep them a little bit less focused on Bitcoin, even though I think we all agree that if they did try to put pressure on there, that it's not really possible to kill Bitcoin. But regulators can certainly still cause a lot of grief for enterprises that are operating in the Bitcoin ecosystem. I would push back on this idea that you definitely can't go kill Bitcoin. If regulators really wanted to, they do have some options, such as, for instance, banning the manufacture of ASICs or forcefully inserting backdoors in them. There are some fundamental issues with the coin security model that have vulnerabilities in ways that other solutions don't. And so far, it looks like those vulnerabilities aren't really a big issue. I mean, it's a very, very, very major geopolitical risk to go start telling ASIC manufacturers, hey, you can't go build these chips. That's a real point of contention among militaries around the world. How do you get access to this? How free is this? And so on. But it is a possible route. Much the same way as that answering the internet fully is a possible route. Are these things likely to happen? No. But we should be careful about our language and how we go talk about this, what we think is possible or not. So maybe Libra is actually causing problems for Bitcoin. It's bringing too many eyes onto it right now. I honestly don't know one way or the other. I think they're both possible. And it's tough to make definitive statements about that. All right. Well, before we get into the technical stuff, there's just one other thing I wanted to refer to. I think you both read the article. I know you tweeted out, Peter. It was the Eric Wall article. The problem with Libra is that it's part of Facebook's broader surveillance capitalism strategy. Do you have worries about that as well? I think it's inevitable that Facebook will go use this as part of surveillance capitalism. The credit card companies and banks and so on already want to do this as well. Probably the most positive thing that could come out of this is by tying such an obviously bad actor to financial surveillance, with any luck we'll get some political pushback on financial surveillance in general. It's good when an entity like Facebook, everyone realizes it's evil, so to speak, goes and surveils you financially, or at least has proposals to do so. Because then some of the laws can then get used to fight the existing bad actors, such as Visa and MasterCard. There's another issue there as well for the US government to consider that, is if they do regulate Libra away, they're kind of handing something to the Chinese with WePay, or something like WeChat. I've had it a couple of times recently, I don't know if you have, but I've actually had people ask me if I would pay them using WeChat. Well, I think it depends on how they regulate it away. Maybe the best thing that would happen is that they regulate away not only Libra, but also WeChat, WePay, and so on. Obviously they're not going to make it go away in China, but they can at least stop it from infiltrating the Western world, which you are beginning to see happen. In Australia, for example, you do see WeChat and WePay and so on logos at stores. Anything to add, Jameson? I think that it benefits governments to have the ability to control the companies that are controlling the movement of money. So really what I was trying to think more about is, well, you can't get rid of all of them. What are you going to do? Are you going to have the central banks build systems like this and make everybody use those? I don't really see that happening. So it seems like it would be easier for governments to allow, whether it's the traditional companies to continue operating the same or to work with these new consortiums of companies to try to get back doors and surveil as much of the flows of money as possible. Actually, in Canada, there is effort at the central bank to implement something that at least at a technical level would be somewhat similar to Libra's blockchain, but with R3Qurda to essentially create a digital currency that the banks could end up using to represent movements of Canadian dollars. And to see that then push into the retail sector, I actually don't think it's very unlikely. I think the main reason why that's not happening quickly and some countries not happening at all is more pushback from banks. I think I could definitely see situations where the governments are interested in having that happen. Well, we need to track and stop the terrorists. Well, I'm more just thinking like banks already provide that ability to government. So to go and take the next step of disintermediating a lot of the banks from the government's purpose of providing bank accounts doesn't seem that unlikely to me. And it may actually be a tool to make politically getting rid of cash easier, because then you can go make the claim, well, all right, everyone has a right to a bank account, which of course they won't. It's we'll pick and choose who can actually access banking services. But it's a politically more palatable solution to getting rid of cash than saying, oh, by the way, all these private companies now can hold you hostage. Next up, I talked to Peter and Jameson more about Libra's technical challenges. But before that I do have a message from my amazing sponsors. 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And let's just look at some of the technicals because you've both covered this, especially you Jameson in quite a bit of detail. Both of you actually identified that there will be a scalability issue here. What are the main issues with scaling that you see Jameson and then if you can tell me your side Peter? Well I mean they're still doing all of these transactions quote unquote on chain aka you know in a database that you know the transactions have to be broadcast around all the nodes in the Federation and at least have to be temporarily batched up into blocks so that the validator nodes can come to a consensus about what the different state changes are in the system. So you know you're going to be using a fair amount of bandwidth and disk I.O. and of course disk storage because you're you're sending all of this data around to everybody who's operating on the network. So you know they were fairly I guess conservative with what they they put the minimum specs for a node in the white paper which still seemed feasible for like a regular human to potentially run a node on the network. I think going for you know single core and few gigs of RAM and a few terabytes of disk space so they were however saying you know that's probably only going to be able to do like a thousand or so transactions per second and of course they also seem to only really be worrying about you know keeping up with the current state of the network there as far as I recall was no real talk about requirements of of sinking and validating the entire state of changes from the beginning of time because I believe the assumption is that any new node or validator that joins the network will just you know find a recent point in ledger history and validate the signatures on that from the other nodes on the network and say okay we can just start from here and assume that everything up to that point was correct because it's a fairly trusted federation of node entities. Yeah I would agree with all that and additionally I'd add that certain very low level cryptographic mechanisms that they're using right now are actually even worse than Bitcoin in terms of scalability because they don't actually batch transactions into blocks right now and they don't currently you know have a mechanism from what I've seen where it could actually properly that generate state changes in parallel. So you know a concrete example of that is if you have a hundred different people spending their money in theory you should be able to distribute those transactions from those hundred different people across multiple different computers and multiple different cores and the low level cryptography that they're currently talking about with the way they're Merkle tree of transactions works doesn't actually let you do that because every transaction operates on a single state change and you know these are not unfixable problems but I think it goes to show that they're you know just not taking any of this stuff seriously and not trying to build a scalable system you know from day one and I'll bet you the reason why they're doing this is they don't actually have long-term plans to decentralize Libra or do anything like that you know if you have this unscalable centralized system that's good enough and it makes things a lot easier and that's totally okay if you expect you to have say you know 10 different people in control of the entire chain and this of course doesn't even begin to get into all of the questions around the smart contracting system and you know how that's going to work from a like quote-unquote gas standpoint. Yeah I've seen in corporate clients of mine it's tendency to just you know reuse Ethereum tech over and over again because it exists it's relatively well understood may not be very good but who cares I mean this is effectively a tech demo and I think the smart contracts part of it is mostly something they're kind of just adding on to give you know a something for the technical people to go do and be hopefully divert some attention from the real political issues around Libra. Have they not reached out to you Peter and asked you to consult on the project? Heck no actually I don't actually know anyone who has claimed that they're working on it other than people you know listed by name so that it may be something where they kind of went around to academics and tech people who they knew would be okay with their political ambitions. Yeah I actually I do know someone who's working on it though I won't name them since I don't have permission to do that but I do believe from my understanding that you know they went around to a number of the quote-unquote blockchain companies in the space and basically what Peter was saying is they were looking for the folks who would be at least somewhat amenable to working on a project like this but still had some general idea of how the tech in this space works. All right well we'll come to the smart contract stuff shortly one of the things I wanted to ask you about Jameson is that one of the parts of the white paper says over time membership eligibility will shift to become completely open and based on the members holdings of Libra so firstly you said that's like proof of stake when you talk about the members holdings of Libra are you talking about any user or you talking about the validators? As far as I can tell this was specifically referring to Libra association members which ought to be synonymous with validator node operators. Okay and then you said this is similar to ETH proof of stake but that also has its own problems that haven't been solved what are the main issues with proof of stake that haven't yet been solved? Well the longest running issue is kind of the nothing at stake problem though that might be somewhat additionally complicated with Libra due to the fact that these Libra coins are also backed by fiat and other assets that are being managed by the members of the association but even beyond that there's kind of a question of well how would the Libra association balance it if you know one member started to hold you know an inordinate amount of the assets you know this is kind of where we go back to one of my earlier questions which is like how are the the politics and the bylaws and you know the other internal functions of the association going to work because they could very easily have major ramifications on how the technical aspects of the system work. Right. I'd point out that from a tech level this notion that anyone with Libra could participate in the consensus needs far better technology than what they're proposing and the simple reality is if it doesn't scale you're not really going to be able to feasibly run nodes if Libra actually catches on in a big way and if you can't do that you're not participating in the consensus simple as that. Well they could very easily just do what people are doing already which is farming out their stake to other people to like basically do pools of stake right so they're not going to run nodes just like a bunch of people who are hashing on Bitcoin don't run nodes they just let somebody else take care of that problem. Which I'd point out as sort of a terminology thing I wouldn't say that you know someone in that position is really participating in the consensus when they have no real way to run a node. In much the same way they've argued before that people with hashing power are not truly mining Bitcoin unless they have the ability to run a node at least double check what's actually happening. Yeah it's I think for a lot of those people and entities it's really more of just an investment than an actual interest in participating in the ongoing evolution of the ecosystem. No one's going to be able to become a validator unless they're authorized anyway it's not like Bitcoin where anyone can join this it's you'll have to be authorized anyway. Well you know from a sort of tech economic point of view that's definitely a true statement because as long as it's backed by real and you know by some real thing the people who are actually in control of the actual assets that leapers backed by they're going to have to have some kind of legal agreement which says well basically if you validators do something sufficiently crazy we're just going to get more of your blockchain and figure out some other way to figure out what ownership of the assets we hold to trust actually means. And this is kind of the crux of the issue and the vagueness of some of the descriptions of how the system may work in the future is because I recall the white paper refers to that issue and says that they're exploring I think it was quote unquote like market based options to try to get away from having just a handful of entities that are going to be maintaining that basket of goods but I mean I'm not an economist but I have no idea how that would work it seems very high in the sky I'm not aware of like any system in operation does anything like that. A long term business plan to deal with this basket of goods might be to go make it go away you know you could imagine a system where eventually they decouple the leaver currency from having an asset backing bias and then when they do that they get an opportunity to make a ton of money by selling off the assets. Right so it's not backed by anything but then they're just like the government and able to print leaver at will. Exactly and just like the government when they you know when they go do that you make a ton of money because now you have a whole bunch of assets that you can get rid of. Wow okay well that's kind of scary also potentially some of the vague statements are to allow them to get to a point where they are live is a system that's operational and whether or not it is you know decentralized centralized it won't really matter because it's not like the majority of the users of Libra are going to be like Bitcoin users who kind of do a lot of research they find out how Bitcoin works they find out that you know they go down the rabbit hole with the majority of Libra users are going to be standard Facebook users WhatsApp users who use it because it the UX is great for them to buy something or you know they they're just not going to care about these things that you care you guys care about that you write about. I think it's maybe too early to speculate what we will actually use Libra for all we know what might actually happen is a whole you know a whole bunch of brand new money transfer systems pop up that are using Libra on a back end you know they go say that they want to have Libra bring finance to you know the entire world but for all we know that maybe you know complete complete misrepresentation what they're actually their actual business plans are. And who knows I mean I fully expect that a like hyper Bitcoin eyes world would be one in which the vast majority of people don't know how Bitcoin works or even care much like the vast majority of people don't know how any of the current monetary system work they just want to use it. Yeah but there's enough people like you Jameson you Peter and other people involved in Bitcoin keeping it honest in the background keeping it as decentralized as possible whereas with Libra because it's corporate owned it doesn't have that same kind of culture and group of people who care that all they will care about is Facebook and Calibra itself. But let's suppose for sake of arguments that somehow you know even a hundred percent of the people who owned Libra in the world care deeply but decentralization even in that scenario because Libra is fundamentally controlled by a central set of entities those people wouldn't matter. You know nothing they did could change the fact that Libra was centralized other than sell their Libra and exit at which point you know that initial condition is no longer true and it's still centralized. Also it'd be interesting to see if people actually care for Libra you know if they want to use it. Yeah one of the difficult things with Bitcoin and spending it is you know you do have to do that transaction in your head you know what's the conversion you know what am I actually spending here and I know it's likely that the Libra wallet will have you know if it shows you how much Libra you've got it's going to do the conversion to your local currency but if say they integrate this with Instagram and you're looking at a photo and you have the opportunity to buy from it firstly are they going to force people to accept Libra because if they do they might well almost certainly will have a lower conversion rate if they don't offer say PayPal and credit cards alongside it and will people actually want to use it. Well one thing they can do is make the you know make the basket of currencies totally fixed and then in the UI because you know because it's fixed essentially hope that this that the changes aren't too much and get away with ultimately lying to people by just making the UI localized so that you go see some dollar value. Now I expect you might get away with that for a bit at which point unless you know like Bitcoin wallets tend to go show your amount of Bitcoin or you know your say yeah currency equivalent like US dollars and so on and I personally usually have my Bitcoin wallet showing how many of the currency I care about you know I have dollars worth and you can get away with that in Bitcoin wallets because it's so well known for its users that Bitcoin is a separate asset. I expect if Libra did that to avoid the UI problems that you're talking about they would get a lot of pushback. So to me this suggests either they haven't thought this through very fully or they really genuinely want to push an entirely new currency and I think that it raises a lot of questions about what their actual business plans are. I mean the big problem at the moment is dropping users on the Facebook network. You know their model is I don't know what probably 90 95 percent advertising model. I think they lost something like 22 percent of users something crazy some crazy number maybe 12 percent or 22 percent of users in the US. They've got to do something otherwise they're in big trouble and moving into money seems like like an option for them. Okay so let's move on to the smart contracts part you've written about this Jameson they're going to be using their own programming language called move. Have you had a look at this do you know much about it. It seems to me that again that's another thing that's pretty vague and you I think you said that your expectation is it's going to be quite restricted what you can do with it to begin with. Yeah I mean I tried to look into it and I couldn't really find much information and I seem to recall that I think it was Elaine who tried to like write a smart contract and did not have a very good experience trying to do that. And it's just because it's so early I think the only things that they've really written and made available are just simple trends that transfer like transaction functions right now. I don't think it's really possible to do anything interesting on the platform. And Peter your worry is that the smart contracts in Libra will have similar failings to smart contracts in ETH and actually it's better in a UTXO model. Well I mean I think the bigger question actually is will you actually be able to use the smart contracts at all and from the sounds of it at least for the foreseeable future they're not going to allow people to write their own ones you know there will be a fixed set of contracts that you're allowed to use and nothing else. And in general assuming that even you know assuming that were changed the UTXO model would definitely be much more successful at writing smart contracts that actually work. But I'd also point out that of the smart contracts that you actually needed with a little bit of clever crypto you don't need much more than just signing and it's amazing how how much you can go do with some clever ECDSA math you know Ted Strider he's done a lot of work on this and it may be the case that they don't actually need any of these complex languages to do the vast majority of what people want smart contracts for. So you what you're thinking that might be like predefined functions. Yeah Facebook has made statements along the lines that you won't actually be able to write your own code. Interesting I mean I guess they want a system that other people will build upon to grow the network. Yeah it's kind of interesting. What do you think the expectation is Jameson with the smart contracts is is this just to allow people to create wallets maybe to create more complex e-commerce environments. What do you think? It wasn't really clear how far they wanted to go with it other than the fact that it did seem clear to me that they want to support a variety of assets. Now does that mean that they want any developer or at least any authorized developer to create their own or be able to create their own digital asset on this platform maybe. It's hard to say how widely used they want the platform to be outside of the Libra coin and I guess it kind of goes back to an earlier point that I think Peter made about you know some of this extra stuff may just be diversionary tactics. So what you think that they might allow you to create almost like colored coins on Libra. Well because the white paper specifically states that the Libra coin itself is not a native asset it is in fact like defined using the smart contracting language as the first of supposedly many assets. Interesting so I guess I guess they could be considering what like NFTs or in-game tokens. Or even localized stablecoins. Yeah I mean it could end up being something like Blockstream Liquid where there's tons of different stuff although and I'll say this is true for Blockstream Liquid as well the idea of putting all these things on one single chain doesn't really make that much sense. My explanation for why they talked about smart contract functionality was probably you know the nicest explanation is just a marketing thing where they knew if they didn't include it they'd be made fun of by a whole part of the community so they had no choice. Okay interesting. Okay let's talk about the KYC AML side of things and you know again going back to Eric Wall's article it seems like they're attempting to push the KYC AML onto wallet providers and exchanges exploiting a loophole in that. What do you think is going on here because I think it was in Eric's article he put a screenshot from Libra and law enforcement where exchanges and wallets will need to follow applicable laws and regulations do you believe this is just them trying to exploit a regulatory loophole or do you think there's anything in this in that because they're trying to create a globally distributed cryptocurrency that trying to create something that covers every regulation in every local market is actually quite difficult. I mean it would be insane to try to do AML KYC stuff at the protocol level so I think they at least realized that. Now the bigger question I think becomes how tightly controlled is the access to developers or to other entities to create wallets and other software that may be subject to those type of regulations you know how possible would it be for an entity to create like a rogue wallet or rogue application that did not abide by any of the laws of whatever jurisdiction it was operating in. So we've seen statements from them like really pushing back on the notion of having any privacy on the core chain itself and one way to interpret these statements would be to say that they're so they know what they're doing is going to be up against government and law enforcement around the world who would rather have full control over this and they're taking the next best option which is to make a system that there's no privacy yes in theory you have a period of freedom to do things and if I were in a position to say creating a multi jurisdictional currency I would probably punt on the issue of control back to the local jurisdictions where wallets would you know conceivably be enforced and so on and then reduce my exposure so to speak to regulatory action by just making everything public you know does this actually give the regulators what they want to know but it may be a reasonable compromise you know and the accounts based model rather than the UTXO based model might be part of this because accounts fit better to this notion of having zero privacy accounts like Ethereum has significantly less privacy than Bitcoin in practice because people use it through accounts so everything is absolutely tied to one single account I think it says in the white paper the Libra protocol does not link accounts to real-world identity Jameson you pointed out that you think this sounds good but you also said does that mean that developers could build privacy tools on top of Libra I mean my expectation that it's unlikely but what do you think all right I mean you know there are people at least in the Ethereum space who have built you know hierarchical deterministic wallets or who have built mixing contracts and whatever and so theoretically if the the smart contracting language move was was good enough and allowed extremely arbitrarily complex types of interactions like that then developers could write similar privacy enhancing functionality you know would it even be possible to do like you know zk snark type of stuff I think some people have messed around with that with the theorem that's that's why I think the the openness of the platform to developers is going to be a big question because you know that whatever they open up somebody is going to try to exploit it and try to to improve the system to actually make it more usable see I strongly disagree with the argument there because I don't think you need any more openness than people are able to do transactions without permission you don't need smart contracting to get very good privacy on these kinds of systems I mean at minimum a couple mixers is good enough to seriously cause problems to law enforcement it just is not difficult to get privacy it'd be nice if for instance you could run zk snarks on these things but it's not a requirement at all it's more than enough to simply have people get access to the coin and I suspect it might be further strategy around communication you know to say all these big things about how they want to be legally compliant one that you have no intention to yet simultaneously because getting information out of this blockchain is going to be so easy you can still make money off advertising and selling people's personal data and so on so from their point of view there's got a lot of bases covered can you envisage a scenario say where a hard wallet provider supports libra and if I you know was to buy let's say a ledger and Jameson you were to buy a ledger that isn't tied to anything and I was able to transfer libra to it that I would then be able to transfer it to you anonymously well the question is can someone have that wallet at all without getting permission from the libra federation you know that's your fundamental question if the answer to that is yes then someone can go build a mixer and similar technologies and then we can go have proper privacy if the answer to that is no none of that's possible and so far I don't really know what the answer to that will be but I do know is that they have in their technical docs they talked about having authorization just to connect to libra federation at all so that might be their tool to really lock this down where you'll have to for instance fill up some form to even talk to the federation nodes and submit transactions I just don't know I definitely think that there has been a few statements saying that it should be possible for you know peer-to-peer transfers to happen inside the network between wallets that don't have AML KYC on them but of course that's not going to be possible until there are wallets other than Calibra because we know that Calibra as a wallet is going to be doing AML KYC well I put nuance on that statement it's not it's not a question of whether you know there are wallets it's a question of what does the tech actually implement currently what they've actually implemented appears to be a system where you have to get permission to even submit a transaction you know will that be true in the future I don't know but you know what they've actually implemented has that property now there could be a world where there's tons of different wallets around and tons people can write them but you still don't have permissions to submit transactions until you fill out some government form to provide your ID you know just because someone turned the wallet doesn't mean that the credentials to actually connect the libra federation are freely available okay okay well let's uh let's talk about gas I've always felt like gas and transaction fees is kind of a poor ux as somebody who has been a ux designer not knowing the fees you're going to be paying for a transaction you wrote about the gas side of things Jameson I'll take the quote from the white paper that many parts of the core logic of the blockchain are defined using move including the deduction of gas fees to avoid circularity the vm disables the meter and a gas during the execution of these core components now your statement was that this is pretty dangerous anything that disables the metering of gas could you know potentially be exploited as some sort of you know runaway infinite loop type situation a sort of denial of service attack that causes the nodes to lock up for a long time we have seen you know similar issues well at least in aetherium there were issues because of miss pricing of gas for a while so there's also questions around you know how are the different operations going to be priced within the system I mean it's going to be a difficult thing for users to get their head around because most people are used to traditional payment mechanisms of any you know if you consider visa or master cars fees as gas that's something that's passed on to the retailer and it's not something that the user themselves ever has to think about but in the world of cryptocurrencies has been flipped it's been flipped that user has to think about this and I've always kind of felt that it's poor UX do you think they're going to flip this onto the users or do you think they will follow the kind of traditional payment rails where it's flipped onto the person accepting well I was I was less concerned about that as I was just with the general security of the system and you know how susceptible it is to edge cases people who are you know trying to make these nodes fall over but it did sound like the the whole issue of the fees and how the dynamics of like fluctuating gas prices would work sounded very similar to the way aetherium has worked and and there were actually some conflicting statements between the like protocol white paper and the Calibro white paper for example where the protocol white paper were saying you know there will probably be times at which we have to automatically adjust the fee market to make it expensive for people to spam the network but then on the other hand the Calibra wallet team seems like they're prioritizing trying to make it as cheap as possible for people to use the network so it'll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out over the long term if this system becomes operational and becomes widely used it's kind of a weird scenario though if it ends up becoming something's used primarily for e-commerce across the Facebook ecosystem because you're not really going to want to discourage payments in Canada you know interact payments wind up charging the person making them and no one seems to care that much are they fixed yeah well i think but tends to be usually like five cents per transaction for most people's type of accounts some of them will go have a bunch free and then go pay out of your monthly fee for your bank account i mean that part of the ui i don't think it's actually a big big issue i think the bigger issue is just when the price changes unexpectedly and in a centralized system that's not that hard to prevent because you just get enough pasty to save off any foreseeable attack well we have something similar with booking flights in the uk it's primarily there if you use a debit card you don't have a fee but they will pass a fee on to you if you use a credit card but it's usually a fixed price and it's quoted so here's your price by and by debit card here's your price by and by credit card and you know okay if i pay by credit card i've got to pay an extra two pound three pound whatever it is but remember in uh in an account space system the price is fixed for transaction for the type of account that your wallet is using so every transaction you make will have a fixed amount of gas that it needs to use that's a fixed price in terms of labor you know with the one exception being that if they go and raise the price of gas to try to go save off an attack which i don't think in a centralized system is all that likely because they'll just get enough capacity that that would be a very rare emergency occurrence and getting enough capacity is easy enough sure take an amount where the amount of money an attacker would have to spend to spam you is efficiently high that there's better ways they could go and attack you you know i mean paypal doesn't really seem to have this issue and they probably solve it by taking some very large amounts transaction per second and finding the servers to handle that and so this may very well become another question of how the association itself operates you know if they do find themselves to be bursting at the seams with so much demand that they can't keep up then i expect it'll probably become a political thing where the organizations that are involved have to decide you know what they're willing to pay to operate these validator nodes remember that internet already has this issue with internet routing because the way the routing protocols work is you have to have a copy of the whole routing table if you want to be a core internet routing node and periodically we've had cases where the number of routes goes up in a whole bunch of internet routing hardware becomes obsolete because it simply cannot you know maintain all the rights and memory of ones and the internet as a whole seems to have handled with too much politics so i suspect from an external observer we're not going to notice much internally people may very well get kicked out of the association for failure to spend enough money but you know for external users they probably won't they probably won't notice any real good changes so the interesting thing is that you know if i try to summarize what we've discussed is that this is highly complex and they're facing a number of challenges and a number of technical problems that other cryptocurrencies and blockchains have tried to solve that haven't that it's actually there's a lot of risks in this with them you know in launching this there probably was for what they're actually trying to achieve there's probably much simpler ways of them doing this well if you asked me to go and make a centralized blockchain run by federation so that you could go and make a new type of asset back digital currency the architecture i've taken is actually not that far from leaver especially if i was under a time constraint you know if you told me to go do that in say six months i'd probably pick some off the shelf you know ethereum or something similar software and just you know just reuse it but just kind of what they you know what they've done so to speak i think you'd do a lot better if you actually care about scalability but you know to me this type of architecture doesn't seem that crazy and it's easy to imagine how it would have come about given how you know big corporations work and how teams work and so on so i'm actually not a lot surprised because the centralized system they can always upgrade it later you know they don't have to stick with what they had on day one they can always change things later especially in a centralized system where clients are validating i mean at the extreme like they upgraded all the tech back end they could even run a separate fake libra validation chain so to speak that created fake data structures that looked like they were part you know looks like they were like client proofs essentially even though they were completely invalid to support older clients and trick them into accepting transactions i mean this is what you can do in systems where clients don't validate so i'm actually not seeing too many show-stopping technical issues there you know especially given they could fix them i think that in general we agree that the the system at least as it is described to be operating right now is functional you know it can quote unquote work the the bigger questions are these lofty goals the the ambitions they have to try to solve a lot of problems that no one else has solved before well i mean i'd go as far to say the the notion that they're going to make libra decentralized requires them to go do something which is indistinguishable from scan you know which is to go and make it no longer asset backed like to go put that in day one just is really dishonest so there's no no getting around that i don't think any of us really and truly expected that libra coin would be a decentralized permissionless system really no it's there's just no reason for them to do that yeah i my expectation is that it's a marketing term whether that's a marketing term to i don't know people who already operate and work within the cryptocurrency space or whether it is uh i don't know i don't know i i expect it's just some kind of virtue signaling to i wouldn't i wouldn't say you people like you because you guys will tear it apart but to the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem well if i recall correctly i i think that i've seen the the timeline as something like five years after launch to try to reach some of those lofty goals of proof of stake and like improving the basket market mechanism or whatever that would be and you know five years is a very long time so it's it's almost one of those things that you hear a lot of like the ico's of 2017 talking about you know we've got our like five-year road map and this is where we're going to go so you will will will this system even be functional and operating five years from now is a big question much less like are they going to be able to to solve some of these crazy problems that that seem highly unlikely well that's very much the ethereum memo that these lofty problems that they've had is always a few years away essentially keep some kind of blind faith while people put up with and accept things which aren't which aren't really great so i guess they're just kind of like you say they're just following what everybody else does it would be fascinating to hear some conversations those talk with theory and developers and other leaders have been having with their lawyers about what an earth to say the public given that yeah they don't really have clear ideas of where they're going to go next all right is there before we start to close out is there anything else that stood out for you that you'd want to discuss here now and raise nothing comes to mind to me i think we covered it pretty well and i think that that's that's about it i mean that there's a lot of open questions and that's why there i think a lot of potential past that this could go down and i've i've talked to some of the people who are working on the project and they they do seem you know quite genuine in their aspirations you know only time will tell exactly how lofty these goals really are like how much are they actually going to be able to achieve i think that the biggest disappointment was how vague a lot of the stuff in the white papers are and how early it was released and it does seem like the reason for that was probably more political of just trying to get something out there in the public to to let politicians and regulators argue about for a while whereas the rest of us especially like the technical folks are more just sitting here scratching our heads trying to fill in the the gaps it is interesting the strength of the pushback you know you look at how there's a bill apparently in what the u.s. senate or u.s. congress to go and ban companies you know tech companies with revenues of about 25 billion or more from being able to participate in finance at all you know being able to issue these coins at all i mean it's quite remarkable just how strong that actually is people would go and start pushing around bills like that well they fear losing control well you know if you fear losing control sometimes the better thing to do is not advertise to opponents that you fear that yeah yeah i mean if i was to try and summarize this conversation it feels like to me peter that your main view is to stop lying stop being so disingenuous stop conning people because we've experienced so much this already with other scammers in the space and for you jameson it's slightly different that you seem to be more on the can we have some more information can we have some clarity because without this we don't really know what you're up to is that a fair summary well you know if this is a scam then on the bright side it seems like you know the only folks that are really going to get scammed are the folks that are buying into the libra association with their 10 million dollar fees right yeah i guess so and also as much as i'm critical of them for dishonesty if they advertise libra honesty you know honestly i really wouldn't care that much you know if you want to honestly create a centralized corporate coin that's backed by a bunch of us dollars so what go ahead i mean sounds like a more reputable version of tether and i have no issues with tether other than the facts here probably when it's losing your money because those assets are likely to get seized but you know that's a risk you're willing to take go for it have fun would you use libra i wouldn't uh trust i wouldn't trust it for very much money i wouldn't trust it for more than i could afford to lose but hey if it works for my payment needs i would probably use it once in a while if there was an a non-aml kyc wallet then i might find a use for it but i'm definitely not going to be signing up for any new services that require that yeah well that's exactly what i expect from you jameson without without a doubt okay well listen look i don't need you guys to close up and tell people how to get hold of you you've both been on the show before i'll share that out anyway jameson you had a couple of people catch you up you're now back in the lead that's your fourth appearance so appreciate you coming on also appreciate you coming on peter and uh yeah hope to catch up with you both soon thank you thanks for having me all right that's the second show in the libra series how was that what did you think what did you think of what jameson and peter had to say they are bitcoin heavyweight so it's really cool to get their perspective on it and i knew coming into this interview they were both very skeptical about the project but they do have slightly different views on it peter seems more worried that facebook is misleading people with their intentions and they've acted dishonestly whereas jameson is worried about that facebook needs to provide us with more information and a greater clarity obviously around kyc aml which is obviously going to be a big sticking point there with jameson while i think they both expect libra to either fail or at least fall short of its bold roadmap i don't think either of them has fully written off the project just yet i haven't myself and you know it's so interesting speaking to people about libra because there are so many different views from those who hate it to those who think it's really positive it really does split people anyway listen i hope you enjoy this interview make sure you check out the next one i'm going to be covering the regulatory challenges that libra faces with jake chavinsky and preston bern another great show got any questions about it do hit me up also if you do want to support the show there's a whole bunch of things you can do whether it's listening to the ads or leaving me a review it all really helps it's all up on my website just head over to what bitcoin did dot com click on the support section that will explain everything right i've got to get on a plane i've got to head off to sf going to be going out for dinner with a few people tonight and then recording this super cool interview tomorrow so got any questions feel free to reach out to me my email address is hello of what bitcoin did.com