It's 11.59 at Radio Free America, and this is Uncle Sam with music and the truth until dawn.
Right now, I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone.
The chair is against the wall.
The chair is against the wall.
John has a long mustache.
John has a long mustache.
It's 12 o'clock, Americans, another day closer to victory.
And for all of you out there on or behind the lines, this is your song.
Bitcoin is immune from attack or almost completely.
With Bitcoin, you actually gain far more from using that computing power to generate Bitcoins.
Just in time for our disappearance.
Just in time for our disappearance.
We'll walk deeper into the belly of the beast.
It means I'm able to further limit reckless government spending.
I mean, I have so many ideas.
Some are simple, like take down traffic lights.
Welcome to The Crypto Show on 89.1 FM, the Logos Radio Network.
We're coming to you live from the real heart of the Resistance, the most dangerous studio on the planet.
At Defense Distributed, home of the Ghost Gunner and the Crypto D&D Studio, where we're printing and milling out freedom.
Undermining the banks and the man, but having some fun while we do it.
What do you want to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky.
Try to take over the world.
The Pinky and the Brain.
Yes, Pinky and the Brain.
One is a genius.
The other's insane.
A laboratory mice.
The Dean has his slice.
The Pinky and the Brain.
I have no idea what you want from me sometimes.
I communicate more clearly.
Welcome, everybody.
It is July 9th, 2017.
It's The Crypto Show.
Yes, we're back.
Can you believe it?
I know you've been waiting with bated breath to hear our wonderful voices.
It is Sunday, which means we're going to have the Crypto Compare.com weekly wrap up at the top of each segment.
But we'll wait until the next segment to get that started.
And it's a special show.
I probably say that every time, which means it renders every show unspecial if every show is special.
Well, you're kind of special.
That's a medical condition certified by my doctor, and there's none of your business.
It is not the business of our listeners.
Thank you very much, Danny.
Has he prescribed you any herbs for this?
Not herbs, but a bunch of blue and blue-tinged pills that make me feel loopy and weird.
Okay.
But I hear there are better alternatives out there.
Natural alternatives.
I'll look into it.
God, if you can hear that, that's my sleep apnea right there.
Anyway, enough about me and my numerous medical conditions.
We have a good show, though.
Let's consider this almost a sequel or follow-up to our...
Was it our last show?
If it wasn't our last show...
No, it was Show Before Last.
Show Before Last.
Thank you.
What would I do without Danny?
The show was Roger Ver talking about Craig Wright.
And of course, you probably know who Craig Wright is.
He is that Australian professor dude who once or more than once has claimed to be Satoshi
Nakamoto himself, alleged to have proven it.
Didn't really prove it.
No one's quite sure what any of it meant, but it didn't constitute proof.
So who knows?
Maybe he is.
Maybe he isn't.
Maybe he's like Homer and he's part of a circle of creators of Bitcoin.
It's not just one person.
Maybe he's just some math dude who wishes he had created Bitcoin and is jealous and
wants to pretend like he's the superhero that he always wanted to be.
Anyway, the point is, of course, Craig Wright, already quite famous in his own right, gained
a little more infamy at the Future of Bitcoin conference, giving a long speech in which,
sort of a heated speech for an Australian guy, kind of denouncing his critics and responding
to them.
And not just his critics, but responding to critics of, well, basically he was criticizing,
I should say, the core developers in SegWit.
And whether SegWit actually constituted scalability and making various mathematical and other
logical arguments that Bitcoin was scalable without it, and that it did not constitute
true scalability, among other things.
And it seemed like a very convincing speech.
I mean, well, at least to me and Danny, we're not the biggest technical experts by any means.
That's what we have the experts on, to tell us what the truth is.
I don't care what he was talking about.
I just like the way he said it.
I know, I did too.
I have to admit, whether he's right or wrong, he was very straightforward.
He was very in your face, kind of.
I mean, I don't wanna quite say he was rude.
I mean, I guess you can call that, cuz he would say piss off and stuff to people.
But he was getting the point across, and it's a very emotional thing.
I mean, it shouldn't be, cuz it's a technical issue, but then it should be, cuz it's a philosophical
issue as well, really.
A governance issue, various related, it's an economic issue, and even then it shouldn't
be emotional.
It's been emotional on both sides, it's been very political on both sides.
Really there's even arguably more than two sides, so it's not surprising the way he presented
it.
But as compelling as it was, it's not the end of it, the last word on the subject, because
there are people who have since come out criticizing his speech and his points and his responses
and disagreeing with many of the statements that he made.
I was pretty sure there were gonna be a couple of nerds hanging outside of the studio that
night to whoop our butts.
Wow, because we were, we had Roger Varan who had some really good things to say.
I was threatened by a few keyboard warriors.
And I said, here's my address, show up, punk.
I know, and here's the thing, I mean, not that I wanna pretend like we're journalists,
but we're presenting, it's like any part of truth seeking, Craig Wright's speech sounded
very credible even to laymen like us.
A lot of it, some of it's above our heads, some of it wasn't, or at least was close enough
that we got the gist of what he was saying and it sounded very logical.
But truth seeking, it's never any process of going back and forth.
And so, some people criticized us for having Roger Varan or for talking about Craig Wright,
for speaking positively of it.
Well, that's why for tonight, we have two guests who are gonna maybe critique it and
have different opinions.
And we're very excited, cuz I'm all about that, I'm all about hearing both sides.
I'm all about getting my own views challenged, because my views are rarely set in stone,
especially about something like Bitcoin that I know so little about, even after all these
years.
So that brings us finally, after my rambling to our guests, first one in studio, man, it's
like he never leaves.
I'm pretty sure he just lives here in the studio.
No, he's dead, what'd you do?
He wasn't trespassing, Brian Deary, aka Dancers of Bitcoin, how you doing?
I'm great.
Got to be here.
We're always happy to have you, no fries for me apparently this time, I'll forgive you.
He's the chief scientist over at Factum.
And if we have any time later, if there's any news, we'll maybe talk about Factum.
But I think we've got a big show discussing Craig Wright, and our other guest is Jameson
Lopp.
You can go to his Twitter, Lopp, L-O-P-P. He's a BitGo engineer, he's the creator of
Statoshi, stats, like statoshi.info, he's a CoinDesk contributor.
And he is here to bring us a different perspective.
And what we're gonna do is, Danny, I'll probably have questions here and there.
But I think I'm gonna let Brian take the lead on a lot of this because Brian has a lot of,
first of all, Brian brought clips from the Craig Wright speech, which makes it a lot
easier to be like, hey, so what's wrong with this, or what's right with this?
And also, he's got a bunch of other questions and a little historical lead up to Craig Wright
speech.
So we're excited about that.
But Jameson Lopp, welcome to the crypto show, thanks for your patience while I rambled on
that intro.
Are you there for us?
Yeah, thanks for the invitation, glad to be here.
It's a real pleasure, welcome to the show for the first time.
Before we get started, we have about four and a half minutes till the first break.
Before we get started, tell us a little bit more about yourself for our listeners, since
you are a first time guest.
Maybe not all our listeners are familiar with you.
Allow yourself to introduce yourself.
That was a terrible impression, by the way, but it would have been a funny joke.
But yeah, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and how you
got into crypto.
Sure, so I've been a software engineer for about 10 years now, was basically doing large
cloud scale data analysis for online marketing company for about 10 years.
But I got interested in Bitcoin, both from the philosophical and computer engineering
standpoint back around 2012.
And as I kept falling further and further down the rabbit hole, trying to understand
the technicals of the system, that's when I created the fork of Bitcoin Core, where
I added in a bunch of metrics collection.
And then I visualized a lot of this stuff with dashboards on statoshi.info, just to
help myself and other people better understand what was going on inside of these Bitcoin
nodes.
And I think I accomplished my objectives there, and statoshi was cited by a number of protocol
engineers over the years to argue for changing protocol in this way or another way.
And as I continued just doing side projects over the years, eventually the ecosystem grew
to the point where I felt like I could do it full time and managed to secure a position
at BitGo and have basically been doing backend infrastructure service building there for
a little over two years now.
And we've been growing like crazy, and I've got a team of several guys under me, and we're
just continuing to hire more and more people, branching out from Bitcoin into really any
cryptocurrency at this point that people are willing to pay to secure and even getting
to the point that we're starting to engineer our own permission to blockchains for traditional
financial companies.
So recently did something with the Royal Mint and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and hoping
that that's just breaking ground for future blockchain-based systems.
Wow, it's very exciting and what a couple groups to be working with.
That's pretty impressive.
And Danny actually has a team of guys working under him, that's a different story.
But I went to statoshi.info and a pretty snazzy website.
And I just want to quickly lash on to something you said.
So you're saying that your metrics, your stat site has actually been influential in protocol
decisions, is that right?
Or at least a number of blogs and presentations.
So there have been presentations at scaling Bitcoin conferences that did make use of various
metrics that I've collected.
So I felt like that was just a win for me to see that some developers have been gaining
some insight from the metrics.
Great.
And have you noticed any, have you been able to determine whether Craig Wright has been
to statoshi.info?
I think I do have Google Analytics on there, but really don't dig into it too much.
Haven't checked to see if there's been much traffic from London or Australia recently.
Fair enough.
Brian Deary, look into that.
All right, well, excellent.
Well, again, James and Lopp, we're very happy to have you on.
We're kind of excited to hear maybe a different perspective on this whole matter.
Like I said, we kind of got all excited and giddy about Craig Wright and everything he
had to say.
But maybe we'll get excited and giddy about what you have to say and what Brian has to
say.
So we're looking forward to that.
We're coming to break here in less than a minute.
And I want to remind our listeners about our partners, Dash, of course, the other cryptocurrency.
I always want to say the other white cryptocurrency, like pork, that pork branding from back in
the 80s or 90s.
But then it probably is too sensitive for people these days.
Maybe if we add a swastika to it.
Let's not.
And anyway, Hill Country Home Improvements for All Your Roofing Needs, CryptoCompare.com
will come back with a CryptoCompare.com news bite.
And of course, Defense Distributed for letting us use their offices for our studios.
Come and take it, The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking, Forget It, at Local Book Retailers
and online.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back to the second segment of The Crypto Show, and let me throw out a CryptoCompare.com
news bite before we get back to our guests.
Delaware passes historic blockchain legislation.
The state of Delaware has passed amendments to the state law that make explicit the rights
of individuals to trade stocks via a blockchain.
With the bill passed almost unanimously, all that is needed for it to be enacted into law
is for the state governor, John Carney, great name, to sign the bill at the end of July
with an effective date of the 1st of August.
Chair of the corporate law section of the Delaware Bar Association, Matthew O'Toole,
said, quote, we look forward to helping Delaware corporations enjoy the benefits of this innovative
new amalgamation of law and technology, end quote.
That's CryptoCompare.com news bite.
One of our partners along with Dash, Hill Country Home Improvements, and Defense Distributed.
All right, let's get back to our guests.
Again, we have Jameson Lopp.
Check out his Twitter, L-O-P-P Lopp, and lots of links there from, lots of interesting tweets
as well with articles and some pithy comments.
Definitely we're checking out his Twitter.
And we'll begin with Brian Deary, though, who's gonna kinda take us into this whole
thing.
Brian, I don't know how you wanna start, but-
Well, let's play a clip where you do an intro and get it going.
There's a lot of history here that I don't think much of the listening audience who only
reads news articles and they're not following the day to day may have missed over the past
few months or years.
So I wanna talk about Craig, whether or not he's Satoshi or not to me is not very relevant.
We don't have enough evidence to judge at this point.
So-
What does your gut say?
We'll talk about that later.
Well, that's not relevant.
So I am wearing my Hong Kong scaling Bitcoin t-shirt that says, don't trust, verify.
And I'd like to make the case that Craig Wright is trolling us right now.
Trolling us.
I mean, I know what trolling means, we all know what trolling means, but is there a specific-
Fishing term.
Is there a specific shade of trolling or trolling with a purpose here?
Let me walk you through it.
Go ahead, go ahead.
Yeah.
So-
Chris needs to walk anyway.
So for years, Craig is writing and posting under his own name and his thoughts, he was
basically a nobody, his thoughts had to compete in the marketplace of ideas, just like the
rest of us.
In October 2015, Michelle Seven brought him onto a panel along with like Nick Szabo and
Craig was basically an unknown person at this point, but it was weird.
He was this disembodied head in the sky who was talking about Bitcoin and no one knew
who he was.
So this is kind of unusual, normally you have to have a good reason to Skype in, so Charlie
Shrem was under house arrest when he Skyped in to the Texas Bitcoin Conference.
So someone thought it was special enough for him to be there.
And do you have any, sorry, I don't want to get sidetracked, but do you have any speculation
as to why, if he was nobody, and it was very typical to bring a nobody on, why he was on
in the first place?
Well, I mean, he was publicly showing off some ideas that he had on Twitter and whatnot.
So you think just some people, it caught the eye of some people to be worthy of bringing
him on?
Okay, go ahead.
A few months later, Gizmodo and Wired in December 2015 published a piece based on some suspicious
documents and supposedly leaked emails that Craig was indeed Satoshi.
But that kind of petered out because there wasn't much evidence beyond that.
Five months later, though, there was a PR blitz by a company called N Chain.
And this was-
You never heard of them.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
These guys had the PR company to basically build them up and do all kinds of pictures
and fancy website and all kinds of stuff.
But at the end of the day, the result of the community investigation was that this guy
was a fraud.
All the evidence that he presented could have been faked.
And there was really nothing of substance there.
Does this include the point where he allegedly released proof, I forget, based on the Genesis
block, whatever?
Goldman Sachs pins $4,000 price target for Bitcoin.
Goldman Sachs analyst Sheba Jafari had a technical strategy, he's given a price target of $4,000
for Bitcoin, although they still believe it is in a corrective phase with a drop of 25%
on the cards.
Quote, from current levels, this is a minimum target that goes out to 3,212 if equal to
the length of wave one.
Jafari wrote, there's potential to extend as far as 3915, if 1.618 times the length
of wave one, that the golden ratio, I don't know, it just might take time to get there.
I like how they're just throwing out, he's throwing out random technical analysis numbers
that we're supposed to know what he's talking about anyway.
Interesting target from Goldman.
Well, let's get back, our guests, of course, James Lopp, Jameson Lopp, excuse me, and Brian
Geary, and Brian's giving us a big setup of the history leading up onto this point with
Craig Wright, who he is, what he's had to say, and getting to the speech, and interesting
stuff so far.
Brian, take it away, and we'll keep going.
Sure.
So we were talking about the O'Hagan article, the Satoshi affair, and this article began
like a spy novel.
So with Craig running from the police, hiding in a bathroom stall, all very entertaining.
And it was very sensational, but there were some insights from the article, so that the
author routinely felt that he made unnecessary fibs to embellish his own stories or whatever
else.
And so these were some indications also of him not being truthful about other stuff,
obviously.
Perhaps.
Or being trolling him, I'm sorry.
Perhaps.
And there's another thing that struck a chord with me.
The quote is, Craig said, that'll annoy the buggery out of a few people.
Meaning that this was something that he often said as if annoying people was an art.
Okay, interesting.
And this was in a conversation about the naming of the Satoshi character after Pikachu's
chum in Pokemon.
Not to be confused with the Piyahoo, who's a pretty darn good developer, in fact, and
who moonlights as our Bitcoin moderator.
Well, it may be worth noting that Craig was asked the question why Satoshi Nakamoto shows
that name.
And he gave a very different answer in Arnham, and it had something to do, if I recall correctly,
with someone who was in his life when he was a young child.
And I don't know, it was a kind of odd story, and I think that was the first time he'd ever
said anything like that.
Yeah, it was like an uncle or maybe a stepdad or something like that.
It was a male.
Was it a poor dad?
No, it may have been.
Yeah, it was Robert Kiyosaki.
And so, sorry, but real quick, Jameson, are you saying it was simply a very unusual explanation,
or are you saying it contradicted an explanation given previously by Satoshi?
So I'd like to say that was for the, the Pikachu was for the first name.
The second name, Nakamoto, he talked about in this article, this Satoshi affair.
And it was about some ancient author in Japan that he was talking about.
So both are true.
Okay, interesting.
Well, perhaps, we don't know.
We don't know.
We'll keep going.
Okay.
And we will get to some questions from Jameson just to make that clear, just get this build
up going.
So the piece ended in detailing a messy breakup of Craig and his business partners.
And then we get into the recent history.
In May of this year, someone claiming to be Craig shows up on a public Slack channel.
I was kind of hoping at the time it was some sort of a hoax that since the ideas that were
coming out of here were so out of left field.
But there was one interesting quote from this person claiming to be Craig, I'll read it.
So if you need to do what I say as I am Satoshi and not because of the idea that I am presenting,
but the nature of my identity, then you are all lost.
If you cannot think for yourself, then all this was for nothing.
If you judge based on an identity alone on a perceived authority, then you are all sheeple
and to serve all you get.
Sounds like Craig, right?
At least kind of similar to the way he talked in the speech, but that doesn't mean anything.
But anyway.
So to me, this is kind of him telling everyone, don't take what I say on face.
It will listen to what I say rather than who I am.
And also he said at Arnim, he said, I am here to kill Satoshi Nakamoto.
Interesting go on.
Interesting.
That was just sort of off the cuff remark when people were asking or they were implying,
when you wrote the white paper in 2008 or whatever, and he said, I won't address that.
But some people got it right and the people that got it right were the ones who said that
I'm here to kill Satoshi Nakamoto.
So what do you think that means?
I mean, I feel like, and I could be wrong from his speech, he was trying to get back
to what Satoshi wanted and not just the original protocol, but the original full philosophy
and intent of Satoshi.
So how does that jive with also supposedly stating he wanted to kill Satoshi or what
is it?
What do you think?
Well, I mean, there were a number of conflicting things that I thought came up in the speech
and it was hard to catch them the first time when I was actually there.
But upon closer review, I noticed several times he said something to the effect of there
will be no kings, no rulers in this system.
But then he also said several times, we need leadership in this system and I couldn't quite
figure out how those two things are supposed to work together.
Yeah, I mean, it's difficult, is he simply talking imprecisely and inadvertently seeming
to contradict himself?
Or is he specifically dropping these, I guess, antonyms or contradictory phrasings on purpose?
Yeah, is this like part of the troll?
See, and that's where it's so confusing is it's hard to know where he's coming from.
But I guess that's the point one way or another.
I don't know.
Anyway, I guess go ahead, Brian, a little bit more.
So later that day after the slack thing, Ian Grigg, who we remember as one of the four
people who were publicly backing Satoshi at the time, he goes on to say, calling Team
Satoshi the scum of the security coding pen testing world, among other things.
He goes on to say, I'll end this post with thanks to the rest of the team, the ones named
like the late Dave Kleiman, and those not yet named.
One other who also died said to report, I wouldn't introduce them to my sisters or sons,
but what they achieved was spectacular.
Okay, so what does that mean, the person's a poor moral character, but they were great
technical achiever, I don't know.
Okay.
Jameson, did you read this?
Do you want to comment on it?
Yeah, I read it a long time ago.
All right.
Well, just, yeah, I mean, a lot of mysterious stuff here, interesting, but well, and you
know, some of this we're just going to have to just leave it on the side for a while.
We get to more central things, but this interesting, like this rabbit hole type stuff like Jameson
uses on his Twitter about Bitcoin, so.
So we'll move on then.
So later, John Matonis posted that he was joining the recently renamed Enchain company.
It was earlier called Encrypt, but we actually talked about this on the crypto show when
it happened a couple months ago.
And this kind of made this slack diatribe seem less like a hoax.
And then maybe a month or so ago, CoinDesk published an article supposedly written by
Craig Wright, which seemed to be based on some pretty flawed assumptions about SegWit.
And it was denounced by Charlie Lee, Andreas Antonopoulos, and many others.
Charlie Lee is the Litecoin guy, right?
Yeah, Litecoin guy.
So he seemed to not understand SegWit is based on what he wrote in this article, is what
you're saying.
Or that the article is based on flawed assumptions.
Okay, I see where that could be different, I see what you're saying.
Such that it was written in a way to-
To persuade, like sort of propagandistically, maybe?
Perhaps.
Okay.
You're referring to the article by Jimmy Nguyen, right?
The like legal aspect of the segregated signatures stuff?
And there's another one, too.
That one came out a few weeks later.
Okay.
And I actually looked for the original Craig Wright article, and it looked like it had
been pulled down, or maybe I'm misremembering or something.
We've got a little more than 30 seconds till break.
Okay.
Say a little bit more, and then let's try to get all this done in the next few minutes
after the break.
I was hoping that all this weirdness was a business trick by the spurned partners.
And until Craig walked out on the speech a week or so ago.
Okay, so that brings us up to date?
Pretty much.
Wow, interesting.
That's a good summary, and some interesting stuff in that summary to really make us champ
at the bit about what Craig Wright's intentions are here, which are still mysterious.
But we'll talk with James to get his take on all this, plus some other stuff.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back, guys, to the crypto show.
Let's hold off on a CryptoCompare.com news bite real quick till the next segment.
Let's get deep into this.
So Brian Diering has got us up to date with the Craig Wright speech and some important
history up until that point.
So let's get started.
Let's review some clips and or some points from the speech or anything relevant and have
James to respond because there's a lot to talk about here.
It's interesting stuff.
So go ahead.
Jameson and I actually we knew each other from North Carolina.
North Carolina is a great place for Bitcoiners to leave.
So Blue Matt Corallo and Jeff Garzak, Robbie Dermody, even though he came back, and myself.
Jameson is still hanging on there in North Carolina.
So we were talking off air about the Peter Risen speech.
Now I don't have a clip queued up for that, but Jameson, do you want to comment a little
bit on that?
Do you remember?
Well, I mean, the gist of the argument is that say what coins are not bitcoins.
And if I recall correctly, he was making some arguments whereby in certain what I consider
to be contrived scenarios, there would be incentives for miners to essentially disable
the segwit validation and treat them instead as anyone can spend transactions.
Now it would be possible for this to happen, but one of the major assumptions that I believe
was being made for this argument was that mining nodes are the only nodes.
If we were in a system where there were no fully validating economic nodes that would
reject the arbitrary dismissal and deactivation of segregated witness validation and trying
to spend them as anyone can spend, then yeah, I guess yes, it could happen if we were in
that situation, but we're not.
So you can come up with any number of really weird edge case future possibilities, but
I'm really only worried about the state of the network as it is right now.
So because there are nodes that aren't miners, you're saying that is just a really unlikely
possibility?
Right.
So if we had unlimited block sizes and basically priced out the vast majority of people from
running fully validating nodes to the point that only the really rich mining pools were
running Bitcoin nodes, then yes, it would be a lot easier for them to cartelize and
start arbitrarily changing the protocol at their own whim because the rest of the ecosystem
would no longer have the power to reject their blocks.
Okay.
Good.
Good clarification.
Interesting.
So basically, it's kind of irrelevant, this scenario.
I mean, like you said, it's highly contrived, very unlikely, but I think it was important
to be addressed because the seeming implication or not even were explicit statement of what
he was saying was sounded very scary.
So I think that's important that we get that dismissed or resolved rather.
Anyway, Brian, go on.
How accurate are his claims that SegWit would be easy to hack?
Well, I mean, it depends on specifically what you're talking about.
Most of the time when you hear people saying that SegWit is this anyone can spend problem,
there's a few issues with that, mainly the real world scenarios of A, P2SH, which was
deployed years ago and is BitGo's primary business model was deployed in the same manner
and thus could be rolled back and deactivated in the same manner if miners managed to recreate,
reorganize the chain back to before the point at which it was activated.
This really comes down to an economic argument and I had several tweets a few weeks ago where
I did the math on it and it would cost so many hundreds of millions, if not billions
of dollars worth of capital, hardware and electricity to do that for P2SH that you then
just start to do the math of how long would we need to wait after activation for there
to be sufficient capital protecting or energy essentially protecting the activation.
And that's already happened in Litecoin, I think a month or two ago and would cost tens
of millions of dollars to reorg at this point.
So even the fact that there are millions of dollars of Litecoins that are encumbered in
segwit outputs, there's not sufficient economic incentive for miners to try to screw up the
chain that badly.
And it would be the same thing with Bitcoin.
If it's true, he could probably just prove that with Litecoin now, right?
Right.
I mean, this is theoretically possible if you have enough capital that you're willing
to invest into it.
But I would pose to you that anyone who invests sufficient capital to reorganize the chain
to that magnitude will essentially destroy the value of the chain and any tokens or coins
that they manage to send to their own addresses would then have basically no value.
And so they'd basically be burning a whole lot of money and shooting themselves in the
foot.
So it doesn't make economic sense.
Well, unless their goal is to destroy the system, irrespective of direct economic incentives,
but still you're right.
I mean, that would definitely exclude most major motivations for doing so and would be
very expensive and hard to pull off regardless.
So-
Anyone could destroy any of these systems by gaining 51% or more hash power and then
just continually reorging every new block to be an empty block so that no transactions
ever get confirmed.
That's just a major security perspective of all these systems.
Well, yeah, and there's no perfect system without a weakness, I mean, or vulnerability.
Interesting.
Well, okay.
Well, what else we got, Brian?
So here's one that I found especially delightful.
So he was talking about carrots and not being able to use bi-directional payment channels.
Let me play the quote.
This works.
Honestly, start thinking.
These whole utopian ideas of how you spend money are wrong.
Economic fundamentals matter.
Lightning doesn't work because no one spends that way.
I do not go over to Waitrose or whatever your store is anywhere and ask them to take a bag
of carrots and give me money.
That's the bi-directional models.
They don't work.
Austrian chipmunk, I guess.
So to me, it seems like we use the bi-directional model in bank accounts today where people,
my company routes money to my account and then when I need to spend it, the money gets
routed to the merchant.
Would you care to elaborate on this quote, Jameson?
I thought that this was an incorrect usage of the term bi-directional model.
This sounds more like an issue of the double coincidence of wants.
So if you're trying to exchange one thing for another, I mean, that's why we have money
as a medium of exchange, right?
So when we're creating payment channels on these systems, we're doing them Bitcoin to
Bitcoin and it's whatever you're transferring the value of the payment channel for is actually
outside of the channel.
It's not part of the channel, so I didn't really see how that applied to what he was
saying.
Interesting.
Brian, do you have any comment yourself on your interpretation of it?
Yeah, so this goes back to Mike Hearn's initial 2012 speech about being able to buy something
from a provider where you basically open up a channel with one transaction and then you
slowly meter the money from one side to the other and that's one way payment channel.
But bi-directional channels basically just require someone locking up some capital.
But it's actually an instant transaction as opposed to a 10 minute transaction or something
like that.
And why is that?
Because the capital is locked.
Does that have to do with the capital being locked up?
Yeah.
Is that sort of instantly available or how does that work?
Yeah, it's more like capital being locked up in your wallet.
So it would be like- What's in your wallet?
Having a savings account versus having something in your wallet where you can pay instantly,
but-
Well, so how is that relevant or what was he trying to get at with that?
There's no way to have someone push money back to you and refill your wallet is basically
what I heard.
And why is that important to the whole discussion?
Because you need to fill your wallet in order to keep buying things.
And that's kind of one of the assumptions that you'll be able to have someone route
money back to you.
Well, I think if you look at one of the slides that he shows where he's like showing this
graph of the quote unquote lightning network, he really has it displayed as what I would
call like a series of hubs connected to smaller hubs that are branching out almost as a tree
type pattern.
And I could understand making an argument like that when you essentially have all of
these leaves on the edge of the tree that only have one payment channel connecting them
to another hub, connecting them to another hub.
But from the research that I did into lightning network about a year ago, basically concluded
that the most likely network topology for something like this is going to be a scale
free model, which is going to have clusters of larger nodes.
But the entire point of lightning network is that each node is going to be connected
to multiple other nodes.
So then you will be able to refill your wallet from other channels and route money through
them rather than having to just go through a few hubs.
So I think that it will be a lot more robust than a lot of people are anticipating.
Okay, so basically, Craig was making the argument that the lightning network would be weak and
sort of insufficient, but you're disputing that it's going to be more robust than he
says.
Well, we're not going to know until it's actually up and running.
I think it's kind of silly to argue about potential future scenarios.
But from the people who are actually building the lightning protocol and all of the discussions
I had with them, this is their theory, but they're also willing to admit that we're going
to have to observe the network as it starts to get bootstrapped and then possibly make
course corrections as we observe the way that it's being built up.
Interesting.
I didn't realize this was such an empirical question.
I mean, obviously, it's very theoretical right now.
I'm surprised, though, that it requires more empirical data to confirm.
But that's interesting.
I guess eventually maybe we'll find out.
We're talking with Jameson Lopp, Brian Deary.
We'll be right back after this break, stay tuned.
Coinbase adds 1 million users in a month.
Coinbase has seen staggering growth over the past month, having added over a million users.
Despite the flash crash, service issues and subsequent bailout have affected users.
Strong growth is still unabated.
Adam White, Vice President of GDAC said, quote, our long-term ambition, however, is to be
a leader among all exchange platforms.
And we are committed to serving as the most trusted provider to the world's largest institutions
and professional traders in law enforcement.
I added the law enforcement part.
We are confident that all trades this week were executed properly, however, some customers
did not receive the quality of service we strive to provide.
We want to do better, that customer being in the NSA.
Just kidding.
Sorry, I can't help but make fun of Coinbase.
Wow, that's a low price.
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Where is it?
There's four bottles of liquor in the fridge about what Dash is.
I didn't notice that.
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And we thank Permaclone for taking Dash and Bitcoin.
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He was right about Instagram.
But what did he say?
He said, if you're wanting to get connected to the cannabis industry-
Oh, that's the way to do it.
Yeah.
I've been referencing that to you, because that'll be important for us going forward.
It already did, and it already has.
Excellent.
Because a lot of our focus is going to be crypto cannabis, the merger of the two worlds.
But let's get back to just crypto now.
Brian, where were we heading with this?
Sure, yeah.
So we've got another quote from the speech talking about 500,000 or 50,000 transactions
per-
500,000 transactions per second, actually.
Let's listen to the quote.
That's your scalability.
Doing multi-threading and putting things off to see on fighters.
Any idea how many sig ops we can achieve now?
Anyone?
500,000 per second.
That's scale.
You're a genius.
You can't remember this crap?
Oh, I don't know if I'd go that far.
500,000 per second.
How many sig ops?
Sorry.
At least we didn't have to listen very long.
So yeah, go ahead.
So this 500,000 sig ops, which in a normal Bitcoin transaction, that's two, maybe three
sig ops, basic signatures being checked, so inputs.
So that's what, 200,000 transactions per second.
It's a high number.
Sorry, this is at correct rates or-
But I mean, if we're looking at, we have seven now, and if it doubles with the 2X on segwit
plus whatever, what are we getting?
14, maybe 21 per second.
Wouldn't 500,000 be better?
Yes, and no.
So, Jameson, why don't you enlighten us?
Well, it all comes down to CONOP, the cost of node operation.
And so, while this is certainly an impressive figure, using custom hardware to, I guess,
fully parallelize the validation of signature operations, and I can't dispute whether or
not that number is accurate, it very well may be.
I mean, if you're running $20,000 hardware, I would hope you would get something like
that.
But there's so many more costs to accepting and validating transactions in blocks.
That's basically talking about CPU costs, which as far as I know is not really the main
bottleneck these days.
Really your bottlenecks are going to be more in the bandwidth and possibly the disk I.O.
So there are other variables at play where you would want to see how all of these things
end up changing based on using this high-end hardware.
So I view it sort of as a different thing.
So in engineering, you always have tradeoffs, so you can get one thing but you have to give
up another thing.
It's a point Craig Wright even made at one point as a general statement, but anyway.
And so what you'd be giving up when you have this level of a transaction rate is now normal
people can't validate.
You can't keep up, you can't see if these rules that Jameson was talking about before
where you don't know if SegWit has been violated or any of these other rules or pay-to-script
hash or one of these other things have been violated if you don't run your own software.
And so, where to go here, there are many directions that we can go, but to me, this is having
such a big hardware computer needed to run Bitcoin means that you need to have a large
institution to support this level of transactions.
So he talked about potentially getting to the point where even if we were only banks
were running it, then we'd have 20,000 banks running nodes and that would be potentially
more distributed and decentralized than we are right now.
But another argument that I'm seeing quite often is that if Bitcoin is scaled to this
proportion, it will become so valuable that anyone who's currently invested in the system
will be so rich that they will be able to afford to run a fully validating node even
though it will be relatively expensive to what it costs today.
But I don't know, it kind of makes me feel uneasy, this idea of almost creating aristocracy
of like the current Bitcoin holders, pricing out all of the future Bitcoin holders from
having self sovereignty.
So I see what you're saying, so at least in these two scenarios, it's either banking institutions
that are gonna become aristocratic by their very nature, if only for regulatory reasons
or because of the accumulated capital needed to run them, or it's gonna be only the early
adopters of Bitcoin who are gonna be able to do this.
And so that excludes everyone else, which is still the vast majority of people.
So it's not gonna be very distributed either way.
This may dovetail in with some of the original thinking that Satoshi had written about.
So he talks about how, quote, as the network grows beyond a certain point.
Pretty much, pretty much, yeah.
As the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists
with server farms or specialized hardware.
Server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the land connects
with that one node.
It seems pretty clear that Satoshi, when he was writing about this, or at least this particular
quote was very much in the big blocker camp, seeing this future.
Well, another common issue is that back then, when they talked about nodes, they often meant
mining nodes because there was no real separation of specialization of duties.
So when you ran a node, that generally meant that you were generating the blocks and mining.
So how does that make it different here then as far as the implications for what Satoshi
was saying?
Well, that's a good question.
So one of the things that kind of came up a few months ago was this redefinition of
the current idea of what the term node meant.
Now, this is probably not unfounded because node is an ambiguous term in and of itself.
And so part of the reimagining was node turns from something that validates the blockchain
to something that is mining the blockchain.
And so it would be one of these large server farms would be a node and not something that
you run yourself to see if all the rules were being followed.
Okay, so not like the wallet node that you might have on your computer as an individual,
but these big server farms.
I mean, I definitely agree the ambiguity of terms does get confusing and even for people
who know a lot of what they're talking about, I think they get accidentally wrapped up in
that confusion.
Well, let me ask you too though, is it simply possible that the nature of Bitcoin or any
potential system like this is that you're going to have some sort of aristocratization
if you will, as Jameson put it.
I mean, it's kind of like to me, for instance, like in the auto industry, obviously auto
industry is heavily regulated and that leads to sort of oligopolistic tendencies in the
market.
But at the same time, because of the high amounts of capital and specialized technological
knowledge needed for creating cars, even in a completely free market, you're probably
going to have relatively few players operating in that market and it's still a very competitive
free market.
It's just by the nature of the market, you're not going to have a million different firms.
Does that make sense?
I mean, this is kind of a poor analogy admittedly, because it doesn't address the technical issues
of Bitcoin.
But I mean, is it really so bad if we did have 20,000 banks or only the initial wealthy
investors in Bitcoin running things?
I mean, yes, ideally it would be more democratic, but I mean, how bad, I mean, is it really
that scary though?
Or what do you guys think?
I mean, it really comes down to an ideological argument and so at that point, you can't necessarily
win.
It's not hard science fact based.
I believe that this line of thinking seems to be fairly valid, that I could definitely
envision a huge Bitcoin network that is far too expensive for the average person to validate,
but that would be global and mainstream and have a great deal of value simply from the
amount of value stored in it and value of the transactions that are being sent over
it.
And it's just, I guess to put it away, that a lot of the protocol developers say, I don't
find it as interesting a system.
I don't find it something that I would be as interested in participating in and trying
to help grow.
That's an interesting way to put it and you're right.
It's not a scientific determination here, but sort of a philosophical one, but you're
right.
As far as interest is concerned, I mean, I would certainly be interested in a more democratized
system than that.
So anyway, we'll see, but let's not get too sidetracked.
Sorry, Brian, go ahead.
I've got some interesting comments on that.
So basically, we've got two groups here.
We've got the small blockers and the big blockers.
So the small blockers emphasize- Can we just call them the Bluts and the Crips?
Pretty much, yeah.
So this is basically one side emphasizes egalitarianism and the other emphasizes big power.
So small blockers seek to empower the Bitcoin user.
So that's the people in a political system.
So someone who can run the road node and validate and have private-
The proletariat and those things, yeah.
And then you've got big blockers who want to empower the powerful.
So this is big miners, big businesses, and this is sort of analogous to traditional politics
where like with the Democrat-Republican split.
So ostensibly, one side argues for the common man, like the unions and whatnot.
And the other side promotes big business, and both sides have their merits.
They both have their trade-offs and their worldview, and we will meet somewhere in the
middle.
Yeah.
Well, and as an interesting comparison, I kind of agree with it.
Of course, in economics, in an unhampered market, there's no inherent conflict between
big business and the average consumer or average person.
In fact, there's a lot of harmony, and in fact, in an unhampered market, you have the
sovereignty of the consumer.
Of course, I'm not saying that the unhampered market scenario necessarily applies to Bitcoin
or may ever forever apply to Bitcoin, but perhaps if you do have these big power players
and there's enough of them and it's competitive enough, they may end up serving little people
in the end through market forces, even if they technically hold the sort of capital
power.
So I don't know, we'll see.
That's a very important issue, but it's going to take time for us to see that, I guess.
Any other thoughts or comments on this, guys?
Or should we move on to the next?
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Welcome back, guys, let me throw out a CryptoCompare.com news bite real quick before we get back to
our discussion.
Bitwage launches UK services, Bitwage, who focus on the international payroll market,
is expanding.
I like how they have mismatching verbal agreement here.
Bitwage, who focuses on the international payroll market, is expanding but entering
the UK market.
Workers in the UK can choose to accept their wages through settlement options.
Bitwage founder Jonathan Chester wrote, quote, for workers in the UK, this now means you're
able to have more diversity in how you would like to receive your wages.
You can split your wages at any percentage between many different bank accounts and digital
wallets.
Pretty interesting.
All right, let's get back to our discussion.
Where were we?
Yeah, one of the things that Craig was talking about was Turing completeness at the speech.
And let me play the article.
So, Turing completeness, I've had a lot about this one.
Guess what?
You're all wrong.
It is.
So, why, and I address this to Jameson, too, why is Turing
You bleeped out the good part.
What happened?
We're on the FM.
Oh, good call.
I'm sorry.
Who would it be responsible, Brian?
Why is
Unlike you, he showed up early.
Ooh, ouch.
At least they got here basically on time.
What is Turing completeness and why is it relevant?
And is Craig Wright right about it being Turing complete?
Jameson?
Sure.
So, in computer science terms, we say that a system is Turing complete if it can be used
to do any sort of arbitrary computation.
You probably heard quite often that Ethereum is, quote-unquote, Turing complete.
There's a whole idea being that you have this full-fledged programming language that
you can use that compiles down into code that gets executed and can do any sort of complex
operations that you can imagine.
So, Bitcoin has alwaysà
Sorry to interrupt.
Is this the same as the universal Turing machine, the sort of theoretical, basic computational
device that could handle any theoretical computation?
Is it related to that orà?
Yeah, that's one of the most basic forms, basically just using a single piece of tape,
if you will, and being able to roll back and forth doing logic on that one stream of data.
Now, of course, we have much more complex ways of creating these Turing complete scripts.
So, but some computational devices or programs aren't capable of doing every single kind
of computation then, or is that what it is?
Okay.
So, yeah, Bitcoin has always, as far as I'm aware, been considered not Turing complete
because its scripting language is based upon a language called FORTH, but it's actually
heavily stripped down, and as Craig actually mentioned in his talk, like a lot of the different
op codes have been removed over the years for various security reasons.
And so, Bitcoin's scripting language is very, very minimal.
You can't do a whole lot with it, but that is by design.
It's intentional so that it's a lot more secure.
Basically the more complex that people can write the code to execute, the more potential
attack vectors there are for someone to try to exploit.
And so, there are actually a number of incidents with Ethereum last year where various attack
vectors were exploited that essentially brought the entire network to a grinding halt until
they made some changes to the protocol to fix them.
Okay, so that's kind of a general universal axiom, if you will, in like computing.
The more complex the system is, the more potential vulnerabilities, I guess, right?
So they tried to limit that to make Bitcoin as secure as possible, is what you're saying.
Yeah, the quip that you hear a lot is that complexity is the enemy of security.
Okay, I think I've heard that, yeah.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so basically, Craig is making this claim that Bitcoin is a two-PDA system, and this
is the point at which I'm then over my head, and I didn't study this particular type of
stuff when I was in school, and even if I had, I probably would have forgotten it.
But my understanding from talking to other people, and especially talking to Ryan X.
Charles, who he's telling me that his co-founder actually is writing a paper that proves that
Bitcoin's scripting language is Turing-complete or two-PDA.
It sounds like it's kind of like a close approximation, or like the result is that, yes, you can do
arbitrary complexity, but I think that this is just, it's more of an academic thing.
I don't think that it means that Bitcoin is going to suddenly be able to do everything
that Ethereum can do from a practical standpoint.
However, I started thinking about this more recently and watching Craig's talk again,
and saw him speaking about running this experiment on Bitcoin over the years where he was actually
running what he called, I believe, to be an evolutionary script.
That was this, quote unquote, two-PDA Turing-complete script, and he said it died.
He said it died because the fees became too high and it could no longer pay for itself.
And as I thought about this more, I realized that if this claim is correct, and you can
essentially encode any arbitrary complex computation onto Bitcoin's blockchain using the existing
scripting language, then I suspect it would be incredibly inefficient and that it would
require a ton of on-chain transactions.
And so if you had some sort of business model or use case where you wanted to do this, you
would really want an unlimited block size with basically zero transaction fees so that
your scripts could continue to run.
So that was one possible aha moment of maybe this is an actual explanation for why some
of this might actually be true.
So you're saying that if it is effectively Turing-complete and you can add any of this
complexity to the protocol, it would require an unlimited block size, you said, essentially,
and it would require a lot of transactions in a block to do it.
Sorry, restate that or?
Yeah, well, because I think that each step of the computer program would require another
transaction or other transaction outputs.
And so it would be a very clunky process, like in comparison to Ethereum, where you
can have a single transaction that executes a very complex script.
I believe that with Bitcoin, it would have to be a lot of transactions that execute very
simple scripts to get the same type of result.
I see what you're saying.
So let me ask you this then, what's the implication of that?
Who would want it to operate that way?
Would there be parties who were incentivized to have it operate that way?
And is this why some people want an unlimited block size or is that totally off?
Well, I mean, I guess so, you know, someone asked Craig, what do you think of Ethereum?
And his response was, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist.
Thank you.
That's all he had to say about it.
And so I suspect that if you want Bitcoin to subsume all other cryptocurrencies and
all of their functionality, then you would want to be able to have enough block space,
enough bandwidth, enough resources that you could go ahead and do things inefficiently
and it didn't really matter.
And that you could replicate the more complex, more efficient functionality of other block
chains in a less efficient manner simply because you had so much resources, it doesn't matter.
You mentioned things that Ethereum can do that Bitcoin can't.
I can think of one thing that Bitcoin can do that Ethereum can't, maybe crash to ten
cents if someone dies within Bitcoin.
We haven't seen too many flash crashes in Bitcoin, but I think it certainly could happen.
Bitcoin is probably one of the most liquid crypto markets, but they're all still just
a drop in the bucket compared to traditional financial markets.
Is there anyone in Bitcoin that could possibly die that would make it crash to ten cents,
like the brief death of Vitalik?
I doubt it, but there are probably people who could die who then have wills that execute
and dump a lot of their coins.
But they would actually use Ethereum smart contracts.
Possibly.
Which would then make Ethereum crash.
Whoa.
Well, we have 30 seconds to break.
So I want to address this real quickly on the other side.
So basically what it sounds like is people who say that all other altcoins are irrelevant
because anything they can do can be attached to the Bitcoin protocol.
That's technically true, but also not really true because it would be really inefficient.
So let's talk about that if that's true or not on the other side when we come back with
Jameson Lopp and Brian Deary, say that for our next guest.
Welcome back, guys, on the Crypto Show, it's our second to last segment.
So we've got plenty of time for some interesting questions from Brian Deary, the answer to
bitcoins for our other guests, Jameson Lopp, but I had a quick question for him.
Well, basically, and I could be totally off base here, but it sounds like what you're
saying, Bitcoin is designed such that you could do these maybe Turing complete arbitrary
complex computations on Bitcoin, but it would take so many executions through validations
of simpler code in a very clunky, inefficient way to get it done, whereas Ethereum, you
could do just one big complex computation or whatever in one go to do it.
So I guess my question is, for people who say that altcoins are ultimately irrelevant
because anything can be added to the Bitcoin protocol, is that really not so true?
Because to do that, it would be very difficult to add that functionality in some cases, or
once added, it would be very inefficient, and you might as well have that functionality
on an altcoin because of the different software infrastructure.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I mean, I think that altcoins definitely have their place, and there's a reason why
they exist.
And you can make these arguments about whether or not Bitcoin would eventually subsume awesome
functionality.
As far as I'm aware, it has not yet sucked up any functionality that was originally created
and innovated on any altcoin, and that could be for any number of reasons, but especially
a lot of them would probably require non-backwards compatible changes, which in many cases is
just going to be a no-go for most of the protocol developers.
But I would say that with regard to the whole Turing complete thing, even Vitalik Buterin
has said that Turing completeness is a red herring, and I believe he's got a point there.
Vitalik has this whole thing about rich statefulness, but I really think about Bitcoin as more of
a trust anchor and where you don't necessarily have to do your computation on the blockchain.
What you care about is putting data into the blockchain, using it as this immutable record,
and then providing proof that you have done computation somewhere that can then be duplicated
by other people to show that they get the same result, the same data that is in the
blockchain.
So that's more of something that I think you'll see happening with side chains and root stock,
where I think there are more efficient ways to go about doing these universal computer
systems.
Okay, that's a very unexpected, but very good answer.
That makes a lot of sense.
Okay.
Excellent.
So I've got a couple of points for that.
The first one is, Ethereum, they talk about the statefulness, and Bitcoin doesn't really
have a state.
There's some thoughts and some talk about adding something called commitments.
So right now, when someone gives you Bitcoins, you can do whatever you want with them, if
you can spend them.
When commitments get added, if they ever do, which is a new thing that is...
We're still waiting on the block size.
Right.
This will basically allow state, a permanent state, to happen in Bitcoin.
Can you elaborate on that real quick, just briefly?
So basically, what this would mean is, I can give you Bitcoins, but you are only able to
spend them in a certain way.
And so one of the certain ways would be, you have to spend it to another script of a similar
style or something like that.
So there would be stipulations.
Exactly.
To involve, basically.
Okay.
And so this method of stipulations doesn't exist in Bitcoin as it stands.
And that would be a way to have Bitcoin actually have a state like Vitalik is talking about.
And another thing, too, is talking about, like, Factum, different blockchains are optimized
for different things.
So Factum is optimized for data and downloading only a narrow portion of the entire data system,
where Ethereum is optimized for smart contracts and whatnot.
But Ethereum is running into scalability things, too.
I mean, going back to the red herring, there are these ICOs coming out, which are running
into the gas limit, which is functionally equivalent to the block size limit in Bitcoin.
And the gas limit is what Ethereum has.
And remind me on that again.
So in Bitcoin, you basically just execute the commands one right after the other until
you run out of room.
But in Ethereum, you have loops, and you basically count how many times you've executed until
you run out of computation.
And you can only do that so much per block, and they're very similar.
So you can either only do so much computation, but it's measured in size versus so much computation
measured in time, I guess.
Okay, interesting.
Okay, and then any other comments to add on this issue, or should we go on to the next
question?
I think we can move on.
Okay, what else do you have for us?
So Jameson, you're getting a lot of flak for just having a picture of yourself with Craig
on Twitter.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yeah, I've gotten flak from all sides of the scaling debate for several years now.
And I guess you could say I've been on both sides of the debate, and I probably still
am.
I mean, people want to classify me as a small blocker or a big blocker, so that they have
someone to hate or someone to be a scapegoat or someone just to yell at.
And for some reason, there are some people who just get really upset whenever you associate
with people that they consider to be the enemy or not have Bitcoin's best interest at heart.
Or of course, in this case, a lot of people consider Craig to be an outright fraudster
and scammer, and maybe he is.
But the way that I see it is Bitcoin is this very diverse ecosystem of voluntary participants,
and I want to understand all of them, because the only way that I can continue to increase
my understanding of Bitcoin, which I think I'm never going to be able to complete, is
to try to put myself in the shoes of as many diverse participants in the ecosystem.
And so you know what, I met with Craig and we spoke for a good half hour, and it was
a pretty pleasant chat.
He did not have the same demeanor as he had on stage.
And after the conference in Arnhem, I went up to Amsterdam for a week and went to a number
of different Bitcoin startups, and I had a meeting with Jihan Wu, which I thought was
very informative, really gave me some great insights as to his perspective of Bitcoin.
And I have no qualms about interacting with these people.
I don't think that it corrupts or taints my perspective, or it may hurt my reputation
with some people in the community, but they can just deal with it.
Is there any correlation between this kind of toxic vitriol that comes from the small
block side and the Napoleon complex?
I don't know, I see vitriol coming from every side.
And I think it's just more of a personality issue of some people getting too consumed
by rage and frustration, and this is a very frustrating system.
And I spoke about that in my talk, where Bitcoin is this thing, this amorphous idea, and it
is an ideology.
And essentially, we're trying to use science to build an automatic enforcement of our ideology.
And that is in the form of the full nodes that is validating the entire system.
And so I think it's inevitable that you have some conflicts, and that you have some people
who are on the defensive, and they consider that certain changes to be quote unquote attacks
upon their perspective of what Bitcoin is.
But none of us have the authority to say what Bitcoin actually is.
We can only say what we want it to be, and then try to come to a consensus that is like
the, I guess, least common denominator of what we all want it to be.
And that's why we've had this huge ongoing debate for many years, which I believe is
never going to end.
I don't think that there will ever be an end to the debate about what Bitcoin is.
We're always going to be trying to continue to improve it, and there's always going to
be some conflicts about which path we should take to do that.
Yeah, you're talking about your speech, it was a really good speech, I actually listened
to it today.
And I listened to it on Let's Talk Bitcoin, on the Bitcoin game with Rob Mitchell.
So if you guys want to hear Jameson's speech that was kind of a rebuttal to what Craig
said, go to Let's Talk Bitcoin and check that out.
And I've got some thoughts on that.
We have 20 seconds left, so.
So let's come back to it after the break.
Okay, excellent.
Well, we're coming to break for our last segment, Very Wise Words by Jameson.
I couldn't agree more about getting differing perspectives, and that's okay, doesn't make
you an enemy of anybody.
We'll be right back, stay tuned.
So our final segment with Jameson Lopp and Brian Deary.
Just want to add, as I was saying, coming to break, I really like Jameson's perspective.
People get too heated about disagreements.
There was something on his Twitter I really liked too.
He basically said, just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they're irrational.
And it's irrational of you to try to impose your own idea of rationality on them.
Doesn't mean we can't argue with each other and debate and try to persuade, but just because
someone disagrees with you or talks open-mindedly to someone who disagrees with you, doesn't
mean they're in the enemy camp, doesn't mean they have nefarious motives.
And possibly it means that they're open-minded and want to get different perspectives and
maybe it's not black and white, and maybe you're wrong on some things.
Anyway, I do appreciate that about Jameson.
Not just me, a smart guy with some cool perspectives on all these issues we've brought up, but
having a really good perspective on the whole philosophical underpinnings of Bitcoin.
I think it's refreshing.
Anyway, let's get back.
What else you got for us, Brian?
So yeah, to follow up on Jameson, this is my notes that the scaling war will never end.
Bitcoin is an unbreakable cartel where the economic majority, the people who are deciding
what goods and services are exchanged for Bitcoin are the ones who set production quotas.
And very much like most cartel agreements and like with the oil there, you're always
going to have people, different interests and conflicting interests prioritized, having
different trade-offs, but let's get back to Craig.
So in the picture that we were talking about, he was wearing some headphones.
Is he a crypto show fan?
Was he listening?
Was he listening right now?
What are you talking about?
Wearing headphones.
What does that do to that?
Basically he had these little headphone things that where he could walk around and listen
to podcasts without-
Well, how do you know it was us?
I don't know.
That's what I'm asking.
No one listens to-
Oh, how sweet of you, Brian.
That's sweet.
It must have been.
He had to be listening to the crypto show.
I bet it inspired his whole speech just to get the ball rolling on this whole debate.
Not that we necessarily side with him where he sides with us, but he understands how concerned
we are about this whole issue.
If I wasn't from Kentucky and didn't have 3000 cousins, we wouldn't have any listeners.
Exactly.
But thank you, Brian.
As a note to future historians, yes, I understand the irony happening here.
I'm not actually from Kentucky.
Right.
So Jameson, did he have a security detail?
Was he just walking around like some guy?
He didn't have anyone attached to him at the HIF.
Now we did have security at the conference and that has been something that I've noticed
really ramped up over the past year or so is that the conferences that are smaller and
have more, I guess, high-profile individuals attending them, we have been seeing more security
at them and I guess that's just an inevitability, especially if you're seeing what would essentially
be a huge concentration of wealth appear together in such a small space that I've had conversations
with people where I've kind of wondered, you know, why haven't we seen more high-profile
security incidents happen against people in this space?
And I think one of the best answers that I've heard so far is that Bitcoin is simply not
anonymous enough and possibly not liquid enough.
But even if you did manage to extort a wealthy Bitcoiner and then you got their Bitcoins,
what are you going to do with, you know, $50 million worth of Bitcoins?
You're going to cash it out into your bank?
You're going to buy a mansion somewhere?
I mean, I don't see how you'd be able to really get away with it at this point.
That was kind of his point with, here's payments and this is Bitcoin, the little pixel.
So Craig does work out and so does Vitalik's father, who's exceptionally ripped.
I'd love to see a fight between Craig and Vitalik's dad.
It sounds a little too erotic for me.
Vitalik's dad is ripped, you said?
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Really?
What happened to Vitalik?
No offense.
I don't know.
Well, let's get away.
So much time left.
What else do you have for us?
When his agony clears up, you'll find out.
Well, as far as security goes, Andreas three years ago had some security things and he
had a security detail following him around.
I actually ran into him in the bathroom at the conference and his security was outside
and he looked up and his facial expressions were like, are you here to get me?
But no, his expressions were like, holy crap, someone hired a really bad hit man, this guy.
Yeah.
All right, let's get some real punch in this last couple of questions.
Okay.
So there were a few more quotes.
So there was something that really confused me about ECDSA, irreversible transactions.
We could talk about that.
Or Luke doesn't want corporations.
I mean, this kind of goes back to- The word on the street is, Craig is Luke's
father.
Oh.
And here is the thing that they're lying to you about.
They're playable from people like Luke and everyone at Core.
What they really want to destroy is corporate companies.
That's what they fear.
So does this make any sense, Jameson?
A little bit.
I know that at least Adam Back has had a few tweets recently where he talks about the corporatization
of the internet and trying to avoid corporatization of the Bitcoin protocol.
And I mean, I think this just once again comes down to the ideology.
It's enterprise Bitcoin versus cypherpunk Bitcoin.
And perhaps this is an irreconcilable difference that will necessitate some sort of split.
But I think that if enterprise Bitcoin can have enough patience, then we can give enterprise
Bitcoin the transaction volume and low fees that they want.
But it's going to be frustrating.
It's tough for me because I work for an enterprise Bitcoin company and even within our own company,
we have philosophical disagreements about the best path forward for Bitcoin.
So there is no one true solution.
Yeah, I think in a way it's good not to have consensus.
We need different perspectives from everybody, enterprise, cypherpunk or otherwise.
And I don't know, there might be middle ground to be established.
I don't think there's necessarily any conflict.
I mean, not in every respect, of course, but I think there can be commonality.
So I don't know.
We'll see.
Any other things, Brian?
There was another one that really caught my attention, but it kind of confused me.
Here's one.
Here's the thing I was talking about.
This quadratic scaling issue is added to Bitcoin.
It is added.
Follow the code base.
It is easy to fix.
This seems like the quadratic scaling problem.
This is not a function of transactions.
This is a function of the initial design of Bitcoin.
What did this mean to you?
This didn't make sense to me.
I wasn't entirely sure what he meant by added to Bitcoin.
He didn't go into the details there, but he did say several implementations to fix this.
And he didn't say specifically how.
He showed a code snippet that didn't make much sense without much context.
But my assumption was that he is referring to parallel validation, and this is something
I believe Bitcoin Unlimited did last year, and some people have been hyping it.
You hear Craig talk about multi-threading quite often, and so I assume that this is
really what he's talking about.
Any of these changes, or you can make software changes, but the parallel validation, what
it really allows you to do is then throw more hardware at the problem, and that seems to
be the fundamental idea behind in-chain or radical on-chain scaling, is that all we need
to do is make the software such that we can throw more hardware at the problem, and that
will be our scaling.
And that it doesn't quite jive with me from spending many years doing large-scale cluster
cloud computing, where when I think of scaling, I think horizontal scale to the point that
it does not actually cost you much in terms of resources to increase the throughput of
a system.
So throwing more hardware at a problem is vertical scaling, which is like a huge no-no,
at least in terms of what I was doing for eight years of my life.
So I guess that's one of the reasons why it fundamentally irks me.
All right, interesting, we've got a little more than two minutes, final question, Brian?
I'm out of questions.
Well, then Jameson, and by the way, it's been a pleasure, Jameson Lopp, thank you for being
on our show, check out LoppLPP at Twitter.
Any final thoughts for us before we go off the air?
It's been weird.
My journey through Bitcoin, it really started with the libertarian philosophy and a little
bit of technical stuff, and then got deeper and deeper into technical.
And I'm no protocol developer, I don't claim to be a core developer or anything like that,
I'm really more of an application and infrastructure developer, but over the past year, it seems
I've gone even from the technical stuff to more of a philosophical perspective on Bitcoin.
It's like I've gotten to the point where the technology is not nearly as interesting as
I guess the people that comprise the system itself.
And the technology is just sort of an afterthought of us and what we build after we figure out
what the human meat space consensus is.
So the system continues to be just incredibly fascinating to me and consumes a huge part
of my life, which may be for the better or the worse, but I think that regardless of
what happens, regardless of the contention and the vitriol, and even if there is some
sort of permanent split in the community, that it's a system that is going to continue
to fascinate me and I'm going to continue to be a part of it, regardless of what the
rest of the community decides to do.
Well said, glad to hear it, Jameson Lopp, again, we appreciate it, we'd love to have
you back on.
Anything you want to plug in the next 20 seconds?
My only thing to plug is for people to chill out and to think about what you're saying
and that when you lash out at your fellow Bitcoiners, you're not just hurting your
targets, you're really hurting us all indirectly, so please, please.