The podcast examines Bitcoin's ecosystem, from its integer-based system and governance challenges to digital identity risks and the potential collapse of MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy.
This episode of TFTC explores critical aspects of Bitcoin’s ecosystem, including governance, user misconceptions, identity systems, and potential risks. John Carvalho stresses the need to simplify Bitcoin’s integer-based system to mitigate confusion around denominations, while critiquing governance formalization as a threat to censorship resistance. He highlights the dangers of centralized digital identity systems and advocates for user-controlled solutions through PubKey’s decentralized identity approach. Carvalho envisions Bitcoin fostering parallel economies, emphasizing its value as a tool for resisting central authority and creating decentralized alternatives. The discussion also touches on MicroStrategy’s large Bitcoin holdings, raising concerns about potential government interference and its implications for Bitcoin's integration into traditional finance.
This podcast episode sheds light on Bitcoin’s evolving ecosystem, examining the delicate balance between innovation, governance, and resistance to centralization. From technical nuances in Bitcoin’s design to broader philosophical debates on identity and governance, Carvalho offers a compelling critique of the challenges and opportunities ahead. His vision for a parallel economy powered by Bitcoin reflects a commitment to autonomy and decentralization, laying the groundwork for an alternative future. As Bitcoin continues to grow, these discussions will remain pivotal in shaping its trajectory.
0:00 - Intro
0:40 - John's BIP
10:20 - Millisats
14:34 - Unchained
15:34 - Optimizing against govt controlled btc
22:34 - OP_VAULT and fork consensus
36:57 - Zaprite & SOTE
38:30 - Pubky
45:25 - Government digital ID
54:14 - Nostr's vs X vs Bluesky
1:00:04 - Why Nostr needs an ID solution
1:03:17 - Atomic Economy
1:08:12 - Tether
1:12:19 - Bitfinex stolen coins
1:14:17 - MSTR
1:21:24 - Core dev incentives
1:25:43 - John's hot take history
1:29:33 - Bluesky culture
1:33:19 - Giving people what they don't know they want
1:35:56 - Wrapup
(00:00) what's going to happen this time man who who's going to be our sacrifice this cycle the only focal point is Master you know maybe they'll just literally take it and they'll say no you can't do this Michael this is bull you think you're just gonna like game the system no give me that Bitcoin here's your money back go back to actually running a business you know if there were going to be one I would think probably the master shareholders would be you had a pretty unpopular one this week with your biip sir should we start there yeah I would
(00:27) say that's not really I didn't mean that to be why I'm here but I guess that's what people expect to hear and I haven't talked to I haven't been on any other podcast to talk about it bitcoin's dumping strategic Bitcoin reserve on the docket pets heads are falling off and we're back with John Calo it's been a while sir it's great to see you yes sir how you been been well tired whenever had Bitcoin me Mana conference last week I'm still a little jet lagged I I didn't follow it too closely it's like once I have my last conference
(01:03) for the year I like unplug and that's it what was your last was your last one Ria no plan B lagano yeah R was fun I forgot then memories flooding back yeah what's what's our panel called that we always end up together unpopular opinions something like that yeah yeah sometimes it's just mostly mostly popular opinions but yeah none of my opinions are popular you know you had a pretty unpopular one this week with your bips or should we start there or do you yeah I would say that's not really I didn't mean that to be why I'm
(01:43) here but I guess that's what people expect to here and I haven't talked I haven't been on any other podcast to talk about it I'm pretty sure we talked about it last time or something very similar in the past yeah we definitely covered the millets thing like millets don't exist it's all the same thing um about a year ago we you know after thinking about it we like to rethink ux a lot when we when we work on bitkit wallet which is our mobile app Bitcoin only with lightning in there uh with a self- custodial lightning mode inside and one of the
(02:16) things we realized is just that like SATs is actually kind of confusing for people um and we were trying to make an app that would you know ideally be for anyone and then when you get into the the more I would talk about like good morning tweets and these little like Bitcoin misconceptions and things the more I realized that the way that we treat the 21 million and these quote unquote decimal places has actually served to miseducate like the vast majority of bitcoiners on how Bitcoin even works most people don't even know
(02:48) what a bip is most people don't even know what my bip is trying to do and and are angry um so yeah I mean if you want I can overview some of these things or you can let me know any questions you have let's just overview it um why'd you write the bip what did you say in the bip for those who are unaware of it and what is the ultimate goal well I guess maybe I'll even start with what is a bit um because I think a lot of people don't even know what that what it really is um it's just a specification it's just basically text
(03:22) on a page that explain how to do something it's not a rule it's not a change to bitcoin it's not um it's not even a a standard like difference between in my opinion the difference between a standard and a spec is simply popularity it's just how many people use it um a spec doesn't have to become standard it just is a specification on how to accomplish those things so when something gets put into the bip repositories you know the area of GitHub that is currently managed by a few core developers who volunteer to manage it um
(03:56) it doesn't mean that like now it's official it doesn't mean people have to do it it doesn't mean anything really it just means now you can find that information in that place that's it um and so this bit many bips are much more technical they're more for code and things like this but a lot of bips are superficial um uh for example using seeds that's a bip that's not you know a Bitcoin rule it's not how the Bitcoin protocol Works actually has nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol it's just a way of storing data and so because it's
(04:28) a useful way of storing data for people that use Bitcoin it's a bip and so now people can refer to a standard way to create seed words and you know choose which words to which words to include and this kind of thing so there's like commonality across applications when they do implement it and so the bit but some bips um are even less technical they're just strictly about just explaining what to do and how to do it and how to think about certain aspects with Bitcoin user experience um my bip refers to an older similar bip from
(05:01) Jimmy song bip 176 which is just simply promoting the concept of bit bits which is the idea where some people think that we add even though we currently have a decimal place at eight places we would add another one at two places um and that one would kind of emulate dollar Precision right so you would have a whole thing at the third place and then two decimals kind of resembling how Fiat works the problem with all of this is none of this is how Bitcoin works there are no decimals it is an integer based system
(05:37) and actually the only way it could even defend there being a limit on how many units there are is to be an integer integer based system because otherwise you would have in infinite divisibility you would have essentially the pizza problem that Francis Copa imagined but she didn't but she didn't understand Bitcoin she didn't understand that it's not actually divisible there is no pizza problem there's just two point rough roughly 2.
(06:03) 1 quadrillion units um and at some point in the past a kind of aesthetic decimal place was put into that position um another piece of trivia is where there's eight quote unquote places now they actually used to only be two um and six more were added very early on the Bitcoin days because uh I believe it was how funny how fny didn't think there would be enough precision and he was right right like we're obviously having significant value below two decimal places of Bitcoin right sorry I'm jumping around a little bit but there's a lot of nuance to all of
(06:36) this and how kind of circular kind of triangulate the idea which comes down to a lot of people think that you could add more decimal places if you wanted in other words you could have a Millsap it's not actually possible um a lot of people think that uh adding more decimal places or removing it somehow affects the quantity of Bitcoin it doesn't actually adding decimal places would be what would affect the quantity of Bitcoin because it's an integer system so you can only can actually multiply the units you can't divide them um and
(07:08) so that's the biggest aspect of the motivation for the bip simply to correct how we portray Bitcoin so people actually have a chance of understanding it properly the rest of the stuff is just kind of bonuses it's like yeah people are worried about unit bias so let's mention that you know this would overcome some of that you know unit bias um and and there are other some other little perks like that and nuances about it um in summary the reaction has been I would say the first day 5050 where people some people were were very
(07:40) interested and excited about it and some people were against it and giving reasonable feedback as to why the second day and since then it just got more and more toxic people just not even reading the bip not understanding what a bip is thinking I'm trying to kill Bitcoin or something thinking that if this passes they'll have to do it or that somehow this is like this should never pass they won't run this on their node just none of these things are accurate as to what's even happening it's just simply hey guys sometimes users get confused if
(08:10) they if you if you say SATs because they're think they think they're dealing in Bitcoin and when you say SATs they don't know that's an abbreviation for Satoshi and they don't even know who zoshi is sometimes and even worse you're you're treating it as if it's a different unit but it's actually the only unit um there are no other units in Bitcoin everything else is a denomination so BTC is a denom of Bitcoin units some people call Bitcoin units Satoshi but they're not decimals you know what I mean they're not fractions of a Bitcoin they're
(08:40) actually the only whole units in the system sorry for the rant hopefully that covers most of it no it does in terms of the bip being a specification is it more geared towards end users or developers building so they have better context when I would say since it's specs it's most like it's just as much for product Builders as developers or or in other words when you say developers it means more than protocol developers it means people building anything that relies on bitcoin a lot of bips are just simply that it's
(09:14) just how to implement Bitcoin in a way that is successful or customary or recommended which by the way seed wordss um Bitcoin core does not recommend so that's an example of a very popular bip that has been W that is basically a standard at this point but it's actually not recommended for use by the bip reviewers um because it's an incomplete solution it doesn't address various problems blah blah blah blah but yeah there's so much Nuance to the bips it's just best thinking of them as web pages with information on
(09:45) them yeah shout out to Amir Taki for creating the bip process the first ever bip and it's if I recall correctly inspired by Python's proposal process as well I recall I do recall Amir Taki being the inspiration for it I think Luke also carrying the torch for a while as well um Luke Dasher but yeah Amir orir has only recently started commenting on bitcoin again I don't know if he's coming back or just drawing attention to his own projects but yeah he's he's around yeah as it comes back to your bip I know I like
(10:25) sets I'm pretty sure you guys popularized it they know what I mean like SATs yeah that's there's nothing wrong with that I'm not saying that like SATs is Evil saying Satoshi is evil I'm just saying as a software thing we tested it like we we did it in the bit kit wallet we just have a Bitcoin symbol and then just the full units literally no one is confused it's just a nonissue to confuse people because people know that there's such a huge gap between eight places you could never make a mistake like you would never think I was
(10:56) sending you a million Bitcoin right but you might think I'm selling you a million you know base units um so there's just no confusion involved and as far as like SATs like I think that stay humble stack SATs is one of the few good Bitcoin memes um it's you know I have no issue with these things and I can't kill it and it's not my goal to kill it it's just simply to say if your goal is to make an application that is to be accessible to normal people or most people or any people that might be appropriate to the bip then here's how
(11:25) you could do it that's all yeah that's fast in to getting the so the user feedback or the observation you've had with oh some of it was so backwards man like people I have like literally one reply after another one saying it's too early to do this people will never approve it it's too early the next guy it's too late if you had if you had suggested this five years ago then it would be okay and and all of the arguments are like this just like people are mostly arguing from their discomfort or their emotion or
(11:55) their tribe and they're not even reading the bip in many many cases um but that doesn't mean I expect everybody to like approve it or support it all I want is for it to be fairly treated as a specification and includeed into the repository so other people like me in the future can refer to it that's it yeah it is uh the inter base clarification is important like in the unit base like there are these units in it I think yeah people obviously people think Mill people think lightning millat are real they and it all stems
(12:32) from this it all stems from this idea that there's 21 million in eight decimal places and that Satoshi are pieces of Bitcoins which is just not actually how any of it works and so people think that mil that msats are like an innovation of lightning but they're not they're just a credit system that some lightning devs arbitrarily decided would be interesting to include like there they didn't figure out how to split Satoshi they just included a credit system because they were speculating that people would want
(12:59) to trade on subsi levels which is which by the way I think will never be necessary it doesn't is anybody doing that right now uh arbitrarily like because lightning implementation support it actually removing it from your flow is not that easy and so for example you could if you base your fees on a percentage you could end up with half Satoshi amounts right or Subs Satoshi amounts because it's percentages and thus your your channel and your your your relationship with your counterparty is going to support that naturally now
(13:34) the risk here is obviously super duper low because msats are basically worthless but it's still wrong you know it's still a bad idea that people think that there will be msats even the idea that think we'll need them is kind of faulty and and not based in anything reality yeah I agree with that yeah the last time you came maybe it wasn't the last time or one of the times you came on before for and explain the msats that made a lot of sense as a credit system and trying to force it and the idea of msats people need to send an amount of
(14:10) money that low is sort of uh not materializing it's mostly just a pet peeve of mine man like I just I see bitcoiners making memes and they make the memes wrong and then they teach the people wrong and then I have to try to explain to them and they think I'm crazy and I'm like I don't want to live in a world where people think I'm crazy because I'm accurate you know and so here's how you can be accurate if you want to join me that's all sup freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at bit key bit key
(14:38) makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose it is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two3 multisig you have one key on the hardware wallet one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you this is an incredible Hardware device for your friends and family or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have have for a long time but haven't taken a step to self- custody cuz they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public Heir securing that seed phrase
(15:08) setting up a pin setting up a pass phrase again bit key makes it easy to use hard to lose it's the easiest zero to one step your first step to self- custody if you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off tell them to pick up a big key go to big keyworld use the key tftc 20 at checkout for 20% off your order that's bit keyworld code tfc2 what uh what are your thoughts on this strategic Reserve that's being floated right now are you bullish on America Now are you bullish on America I am bullish I am
(15:39) bullish on Trump and the Doge and you know all that stuff going on I am hopeful I am glad that it happened this way I'm glad to see a turnaround I'm glad to see Peak clown world has ended I hope that it's not replaced with some kind of other Ridiculousness but nonetheless it's much more promising than we've seen anywhere in the world landscape for at least five years um so it's it's it's really nice to see that as far as a strategic Reserve I just I literally just don't care like I just feel like chasing politicians is so lame watching Bitcoin
(16:13) bitcoiners like care about this stuff and and share their opinions and their predictions it's just so much laring to me I just feel like okay like if some politician can get some voters to make themselves more likable and whatever like I'm not surprised but Bitcoin is not for the White Market uh all white Market alignment is is going to be regrettable at some point um and I have no interest in trying to help the current government succeed at being you know having more resources and being more involved in Bitcoin it's just it's
(16:48) just not my interest it's just not why I'm here I I I make the things we make at synonym and the things that reason I care about Bitcoin is so we can do things without the government um so yeah I just I you have fun I don't even know if you're if you're part of the group I'm just saying whoever is interested leave me out of it have fun I don't care how what the outcome is honestly well let's dive into that like the the White Market versus Black Market or Market outside the government's perview how do you see this playing out
(17:20) um or what tools are necessary to enable people for the audience and for nuance I guess I'll Define White Market and black market a little bit it just means sanctioned and not sanctioned doesn't mean good or bad or evil or or or clean it just means stuff the government allows and stuff the government isn't involved with that's it um and so Bitcoin as a black market money as a as a market issued money in other words the people issued it and manage it not the government not a central organization um that makes it a black market money and
(17:51) its core utility is being a money that is not part of the system if you go and take that money and you put it in the system you're not accomplishing anything you're just you know participating in the old system you're not helping Bitcoin you're not helping bitcoiners you're just creating something that might have to unwind at some point um because ultimately the government is like antithetical to bitcoin and they're not going they're not aligned with Bitcoin and any amount of having Bitcoin in white markets you're just going to lose
(18:20) some or all of the qualities of Bitcoin to have it in that way market I'm trying to think because uh Bitcoin is money for enemies right many people perceive the government as an enemy me to an extent I don't think the government works in my best interest who knows what will happen with Trump but that's we'll pull on that thread later in this discussion because that's part of the reason where we initially decided to talk um some worries I saw around digital identity but when make like if Bitcoin is this pristine asset running on this
(19:04) peer-to-peer distributed protocol would like would it make sense that governments would adopt it too at some point I don't know what pristine asset means that sounds like a podcaster term no offense but um hey you were a podcaster at one point to let's not forget yeah and I will be again most likely but not hopefully you understand what I'm saying like it's it's a it's a term that emerges from the culture not from some sort of scientific analysis or anything like this it's it's just a meme um and so sorry what was the last thing you
(19:40) said wouldn't it make like the game theory wouldn't if Bitcoin oh the game is a good mdy a better budy Game Theory this is another meme nobody's using any game theory in Bitcoin like game theory is like a mathematical process for you know showing proofs for probabilities of situations when you have all the information like it's it's useless term in most most conversations the incentives the incentives better way to put it you know I'm not a so aren't the incentives such that so pristine pristine money incentives Game Theory uh look anybody
(20:21) can use Bitcoin right not everybody can use Bitcoin another topic but anybody could use it uh me saying I have no interest in the government or that White Market Bitcoin is untenable is not to be conflated with thus we must disallow the government from using Bitcoin and try to stop them from using it and be mad when they use it no it's just saying that in the grand scheme of things in in how Bitcoin works and where it sits in the world if you actually are trying to optimize for anything to do with its existence you wouldn't care so much
(20:52) about trying to optimize its place with governments you would care more about protecting it from that situation um and so if a government having you know government's getting into this uh yeah I guess it's fun if you want to like prot you know fantasize about a future where China is you know trying to get more mining power than the US and trying to get more Bitcoin than the US and Russia's trying to do the same thing and everybody's trying to like out gain each other that's just not how the world Works in my opinion like it just you're
(21:21) creating this fantasy where only people care about the thing that only you care about and you you the audience you know whoever bitcoiners like there's so much Nuance to the economy and there's so many outlets for liquidity and for you know investment and for trade it's just never going to be only a Bitcoin situation and so I don't one side wants to worry about you know Bitcoin might undermine the dollar or Bitcoin the government undermine Bitcoin look that's the that's the thing I care about I don't care about undermining the dollar
(21:53) or whether we should stop that or prevent that or any of these things it's all [ __ ] like these people are you know way above our pay grade they don't care anything about what we're talking about we have no influence on it we have no way to predict it or understand it so let's just try to focus on you know having a Bitcoin economy or a Bitcoin world that we can opt out of all these things and that's what that's what we do with synonym with our Atomic economy concept it's just this idea that we can make a parallel society that people
(22:23) could opt into if they don't find a place in the Legacy Society yeah now you said something there you don't care wish you care more about the government undermining Bitcoin than Bitcoin undermining the dollar which have you been following James o Burn's commentary at all yeah it's embarrassing honestly why because all he wants is his toys and he's just going to keep you know making fun of people and crying at people and making excuses and and spinning narratives until somebody gives him the toy that he wants he's not his
(23:00) incentives are not for bitcoiners so for context here James um roab bip op Vault um which would provide the network if merged in a very narrow use case for a very popular Topic in the Bitcoin developer World these daysen I have a I take issue with that framing popular with who yeah well some Bitcoin developers I'm I'm not in any rush to to get Covenant in um I do think James's recent commentary has been interesting I guess the the way to frame this part of discussion would be like do you think Bitcoin needs anything like a
(23:42) covenant or a substantial uh upgrade in the future and if so would the government getting in um potentially muddy the ability to do that at some point would you ever Outsource your decision to me you know what I mean if I said yeah I think we do need it then would you say well if John thinks we need it then it's true would you ever do that no but I would do you think I would ever do it do you think I would ever do it for you no but I respect you think I would ever do it for James I'm I'm trying to get to a point so in other
(24:16) words people who make decisions for themselves don't use other people to make decisions right and so the only thing you need to ask yourself in regards to a fork is whether you need it right there you don't have to spec at on whether you think we could solve utxo sharing or whether you think this will solve scaling or any of these things you just have to ask yourself do I think this will solve problems for me I don't think covenants is going to solve any problems for me I don't think it's going to solve any problems like any any
(24:45) notable problems for my users uh of our products I think that you know 5 10 if if we had covenants tomorrow five 10 five to 10 years from now there would be some stable use cases that you would see appear in some wallets that would be it you would not see some dramatic ability for people to all use Bitcoin and transact on chain you know as much as everybody would love to you will not see true scale basically the idea that utxo sharing even solves scaling is unproven right now I I feel like we we have been running a test to an experiment
(25:20) basically to see if lightning can prove that we can scale with Utch are sharing and I think mostly all we proved with lightning so far is that we can do high frequency transactions between peers uh I don't think we've proven utxo scaling because it's when when fees went really high people were scared to close channels scared to buy channels um it's when when fees are saturated it becomes dangerous to use layers there's all kinds of weird tradeoffs that make it express much more you know diminished than we thought it would um and then
(25:51) there's also future problems that could come with lightning with scaling as far as sourcing liquidity you know uh things like this so I think think that uh just the concept of pretending that anybody knows what's best for Bitcoin is the Folly here nobody knows what's best James doesn't know what's best covenants lovers don't know what's best and even if they did they would as evidenced by my attempt to get people to just really move a decimal place and get them to even read the bit or understand any aspect of what I was trying to do I
(26:23) think that's very clear evidence that you have no hope of getting users to consent to Covenant or a soft Fork right so all you're really doing is you're saying I really strong like James is saying I really strongly believe that there should be a clearer political process for me to do what's best for Bitcoin that's what he's asking for and I don't think he's deserves that reputation I think very few people deserve that reputation basically the same people that would be trusted to be maintainers probably the only people
(26:52) that should be taken seriously in this regard um and even them they can be just as risky so sorry for all the rambling but it's just I just feel like the idea the way people look at this is just so off you know yeah now I mean the whole emergence of ordinals and scriptions that whole thing has forced me over the last couple years to pause and think about particularly on Rabbit Hole recap how we talk about any sof for proposal cuz I learned we were talking about taper pretty adamant about it and uh quickly came apparent that I had no
(27:31) idea what the ramifications were or all the ramifications were I wasn't against tap rot when it happened but I stayed out of it because I just couldn't think of anything that it did for me you know what I mean like I like like back then people kept saying oh people won't know that you're that you're making lightning channels that's the cool thing I like oh that sounds cool I don't mind that cool but I didn't like run a tap r activation or whatever and I didn't put it in my profile and do all these things to make
(27:57) it happen because it just felt like tapro just slipped in out of apathy like nobody particularly needed it nobody particularly hated it and it just kind of snuck in there um that's risky you know that that things like that can happen and I'm I'm glad that it's not happening but it did make me kind of perk up and be like um I should pay attention and that was around the time that Jeremy started aggressively promoting CTV he was actually trying to get it into the Tapo activation I remember and he was pissing off cord
(28:24) devs back then and that was like 2022 or something um I don't I don't remember what the year was but you get the idea um yeah I I I think that you can't change Bitcoin without oppressing people without politically overbearing them and so changing Bitcoin needs to be something that comes from the market if we want to make changes to bitcoin they should be presented with data with experiments probably need to put it on a shitcoin first like the standards just need to be so much higher than anybody's willing to admit
(28:55) yeah are there any changes that would like right now no um if so the the ordinal thing didn't bother me honestly um I think that it was I think it was nice to see the ex people are gonna think I'm crazy but like it was nice to see an example where somebody was using Bitcoin in a way that people didn't like and people were trying to stop them and they couldn't right like that's I think that's awesome like I I loved seeing people act fix the filter retards acting like they could do anything about it people trying to like all like the sky
(29:30) is falling and all this [ __ ] and it's like guys they paid the fee that's what we do to stop spam there's no conversation here if you want if you don't like what they're doing and you then figure out how they're doing it and figure out a way to change Bitcoin to stop it but you can't just like the men Pool isn't going to stop them the men Pool isn't even enforced and they're just going to make private men pools if you try you're just gonna every time you try to like control the men poool you're going to make the men poool worse which
(29:55) has been proving true you know a few times in the past few years um yeah sorry ranting yeah no yeah I completely agree and uh well I'm not going to go out and buy any ordinals or inscribe anything to the chain CU I just I just I just think the Aesthetics are bad I don't see the value in it there's nothing my concern is that like what's going to happen if the blocks get too full for too long we're always going to identify the type of transaction we like the least and be mad at them is that what's going to happen
(30:27) like in other way so let's say like Bankers start filling all the blocks because they're making ETF movements or whatever we and no more people can't afford it we're all going to start hitting the banks now right and it's that's what I think with that that's what happened with ordinals it was just they're taking my block space and I don't like them well get used to it because you're never going to be like in full agreeance of how people are using it with Bitcoin and you can't stop them from using it as an abstraction because
(30:54) that's all it is there's no value in there it's just an anchor yeah yeah the whole ketching over that and it's like funny looking who knows maybe there'll be a reemergence of inscription activity in L2 season 2 whatever runes ordinals whatever probably at the top you know seems like there's always like a little shitcoin wave at the top after the after Bitcoin tops people start cycling and so yeah I won't be surprised if they're already actually strategically literally intentionally preparing to have like a second wave at
(31:26) the top you know no it was a lot of screaming and and ketching over something that turned out not to be as big of a problem another issue with all this is it becomes very difficult for a person to separate what would be an attacker from somebody who's naive or egomaniacal like you c a victim can't tell the difference right about whether it's malice or whether it's a mistake so like when I see like James behaving this way I just I just start thinking like why is he so aggressive like why does I mean I know he put time
(31:59) into it but like why why is he Burning Bridges with people why is he being aggressive about it like there's not an urgency the fees aren't astronomical um like it's just a feature it's a fun thing that people want to be able to use I'm guessing there some aspect of the of these people's careers tied to this with like Jeremy and you know maybe their Grant flows I don't know what it is but it's like it's totally inappropriate to the situation and so I have to wonder like are are these people actually attackers
(32:31) like are they hired by JP Morgan or the CIA or how would I ever know the difference you know yeah I can see that and we'll say James is a good friend I'm sure we're all sure you guys are cordial as well don't don't don't tarnish your own reputation be careful who you line with the uh how would you yeah like I guess what the for opva particularly the way James presents it is you can create conditions that would make something like an exchange unhackable so i' guess you'd need the exchanges to really demand it and then
(33:11) get broader Bitcoin users to accept that it may be something that is good well that maybe that that's probably where his motivation is his his whoever's paying him probably would like to differentiate as a provider and say when you use our service you can't we can't be hacked and you know we have a different grade of service so maybe that's what it is it's a product motivation the sound of that I have no issue with but the process here is is totally unacceptable yeah do you think the process I mean that's I talk to any core de developer
(33:43) these days they think the process is not as straightforward as maybe it should be do we need a something like a it's just always literally governance it's like you're just literally saying you want more you want more strict clearer governance and politics in Bitcoin and the more you formalize politics and governance in Bitcoin the more censorable it becomes so do you want do you want that trade-off I don't want that trade-off I'd rather have James crying for 20 years than have that tradeoff do you thinkific is a
(34:16) possibility like from here on no I think that's a that's another meme um osificante Bitcoin right like there's not some way to predict that future or ensure that future um yeah I I think that acific is just probably when nobody's using Bitcoin anymore um otherwise it's just a temporary State we're always in consensus right like we already have consensus right now we we found it everybody agrees and what when when covenants people make proposals they're out of consensus they're saying they want to change Bitcoin they want they want a different
(34:56) Bitcoin um and you have to users have to assess whether they even care whether they need that risk and this is all speculation it's not like this data it's not like there's examples um it's just totally totally speculative yeah yeah I don't I don't think I need cence right now um personally well if you did you would be having problems right like it's just it's it's just imaginary yes it would be cool if Bitcoin could do things that more Engineers could impress people with but that's not why we're here yeah it
(35:31) does make you wonder that like I imagine it's coming from a perceived or a look into the future and proce no it's totally personally incentive driven this is not coming from benevolence there's no way they are not signaling benevolence in any shape or form okay I don't see that do you see that I mean yeah I'll get the benefit of Doubt and see but there's so much aggression to to a personal purpose like he's overstating like Burning Bridges with his peers overstating things like this is not a nobody has a vendetta for
(36:14) benevolence yeah I feel for a lot of the core devs that been at it for a while but like you mentioned you got to get like imagine if I was yelling at people for not accepting my bip like I was like C Dives are holding back my bip they they don't want people to understand how Bitcoin works you know what I mean nobody nobody's going to buy Bitcoin because of unit bias and this is a huge problem the price has crashed to under 100K and it's all you know what I mean like I could just be dramatic too but I'm not I'm I'm gonna complain when
(36:43) people don't read it and don't understand it but I'm not gonna like force people or act like they're bad because they don't agree with me this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at salt of the earth you got to be hydrating Freaks and while you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that I've ever come into contact with uh Pink Himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade going to drink sa.com that's
(37:16) drinks.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15% off I'm telling you get on it freaks you're going to love this stuff how things been epic it's in that's why we're here here to talk um really about man cuz I so we are 21 people now um it's the first time we've had like kind of like feeling like the full team like all all all roles filled um we basically about a year ago we um decided to re architect slash tags um for those of your audience who may have heard of that this was our uh peer-to-peer web project before Pub Key
(38:01) um and Pub Key is our current one spelled pu KY uh the difference is basically that we were using the hypercore stack the whole punch stuff um and it was just way overkill for what our actual requirements were once we you know did some iterating on what we were doing and realized that what our actual requirements were to like make this Atomic economy thing the whole lazy replication of penon logs in a purely peer-to-peer sense was not actually compatible with what we were trying to do we were trying to figure out a way
(38:36) for people to safely gather as many people as possible basically we want we want to make using servers safe we don't want to make using servers obsolete um and that was a big change and then also looking at the learning from uh the trends and you know plateaus of Noster also learning from same likewise with blue sky and seeing that gives us a lot of advantage to kind of observe and adjust and so I think that what we did was basically find what we thought was the ideal design from among our own research and among watching what our
(39:10) peers were doing um and basically spent a year making Pub Key and so pubkey core is the is all open source right now and it's the kind of protocol aspect stuff for doing our schemes and then pubkey app is a app that kind of access interface for all of these features which is currently uh testing privately in the team and we'll release that in q1 um I guess maybe that's a little bit of a summary of pubkey also with bitkit um we were in beta for a while came out of beta in June um and release the app into the app stores uh that was a long
(39:49) haul trying to get LDK working in the app um and not owning the whole stack like having to depend on other teams and things like this is a much different situation than people realize and it's a lot of work um but we finally got the app pretty stable um and that's also powered by a LSP called block tank that helps people buy channels and things like this and you know route their payments effectively um and the reason why we connected recently is because you had made that tweet where you said that something around along the lines of
(40:19) Noster and web five uh fixing identity and I needed to like nitpick your your language because technically as I said in my reply Noster doesn't really try to solve identity so much as use keys to sign data which it's it's it's still identity but it's not an identity solution right in other words you can use it as an identity but the result is that you have to almost have it be a disposable identity because that key gets put into every application and you have no way to like you have no censorship resistant way trustless way
(40:52) to change your key if you lose your key or this kind of thing it it you just end up having to use the web you are already using it in order to use those keys um and so with Pub Key what we do is we invented this thing called a public key domain so basically you can use your public key as a domain name literally and so we made a DNS server that supports this and we take your key and instead of signing all your data every time you do something all you sign is your DNS record so you take your key you you put a bunch of different end points
(41:28) you say oh here's where you can find my web server here's where you can find my tweets here's where you can find my payment end points whatever you want just like regular DNS um and you sign that and then you take that data and you put it in what's called Mainline DHT Mainline DHT is basically the largest most decentralized Network on the internet right now it's depending on how you measure and which you know Protocols are supported by the nodes you've got somewhere between two and 20 million nodes in the network
(41:58) um the the the variance is because of again supporting different specs of what they act which kind of data they actually share the nodes that we rely on the minimum of them is roughly two million of them and so we take this data we put it in there and what that achieves is now instead of having I can owning your domain being able to censor your domain take it away from you whatever you have your key as your domain and you have these millions of nodes that are storing just a small amount of data and you can go look up
(42:28) your key in those nodes and they'll tell you where to find the data that you're looking for so what this does is when you are using say a server you're say you're using pubkey app and we decide to censor you and what people have to understand is the host decides the rules so when you use hosting then you will you you will be censored because legally you hosts are required to censor you and so to to some degrees not all not not to a subjective degree but to you know for illegal data like things like uh you know underage porn and things like this
(43:03) um so since we know that censorship is an inevitability and we know that people will always have a utility to gathering in one place creating an exchange a Marketplace a Marketplace of ideas social media whatever it may be then we know the situation we have to fixes what happens when somebody is censored and what is the best that we can do for them for them be able to basically hot swap their service providers for ones that won't censor them or hot swap for hosting it themselves and that's what Pub Key and this whole system does is it
(43:37) says okay even if somebody censors you what happens is you just take your key you update your records in the DHT you up update your DNS and you say okay don't go there for my data anymore go here and that and here can be a different provider or self-hosting and so we're just trying to make it totally safe to basically Port Port yourself to any server or host yourself without losing anything and without even disruption from you know your followers or anything that this because immediately the application isn't going
(44:08) to look in that place for the data anymore it's going to route through DNS to the new the new location hopefully that all makes sense yeah no I was actually rocking that and I think it's important too to add context why I sent that tweet out so I was at Bitcoin mana and then I hung around for a day at in Abu Dhabi they had the Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi Finance week uh event and it was all trafi and it was their blockchain day and I saw I just I walked into the actual conference for two talks one was binance's new CEO
(44:46) Jeremy Lair announcing the partnership of circle and binance which is and then the second panel was uh the CEO of chain analysis um I think the head Dev at Avalanche and a couple other people you on that second sounds painful yeah it was well that's why I sent the Tweet out like on the second panel there like the chain analysis guy was really leaning into like governmen issued digital IDs that can run on these blockchains and it like set a shiver of uh yeah I agree with your sentiment I'm remembering now their
(45:20) sentiment was basically we got to figure this out before they do yeah right I've always had that sentiment I totally agree because there's a dystopian kind of way to look at all this where you think okay well what if John really does make the absolute best way to do public Keys as identities and then the government just us uses that like the the problem here is that what we we we've encountered is an inevitability that the government will use digital identity um and so the only hope we have at this point is to
(45:53) basically show people that you can use digital identity in a way that doesn't involve the government whatsoever and it works just fine and then when the government starts to be overbearing we have that to compare it to we can say well but I already do it like this why are you making me do it but also give up all my privacy you know like and this kind of thing so that's my hope is that on is that we can somehow Stave off this inevitability of both the government requiring uh digital identity and requiring digital identity to use the
(46:22) internet which is what come after that um and so what we have to do is be able to show people people that there are ways to connect to the internet without that that there are ways to represent yourself digitally that do not require government ID and present this kind of alternative Society because it's going to be the only way that only hope we have yeah I don't I don't want to get too hippie dippy about it but I literally had like a existential philosophical crisis where like identity I I am me I know me I have a conscience
(46:51) I talk to myself I think I have a soul it's mine like nobody can take this from me and like the once we get into the realm it already exists today like Social Security numbers and stuff like that but like really for some reason maybe I'm overreacting but like it just felt very dystopian the way these people were talking about it on stage it's dystopian because so much of our life is digital now when so much of your life is digital and you rely so much on your digital connections the idea that the government could not control your access
(47:19) to that is extremely dystopian it's extremely scary um I I think that you know unless we have some sort of major turnaround with the culture of government like maybe Trump starts a romantic Revolution that the world you know speaks of for 100 years probably not um and so and there's going to be probably even within our lifetime a day where the government tells you that you need to be using a digital ID to connect to the internet and that's really really scary that's you know I hope that by then not only have we fig figured out
(47:50) digital identity without them that we' figured out like totally user accessible Mesh networking and things like this because we have to always be these steps ahead of them you know yeah and I think it's like the way they talk about it too they're going to like they were saying they're going to issue you a digital identity and that's when it comes down going back to the hippie yeah it's like no the government shouldn't issue your identity it is your identity you should create the private public hey pair that represents your
(48:24) identity I don't know how interesting it is but there is new here like you have to be careful not to conflate Identity with like access or permissioning um for things that do have rights in other words if I'm going to let you be on my server I can require any any level of identity I want right or I just say don't you can't use my server that's a scary part of how government can be involved reputation is a separate one like when when we talk about identity we're more talking about reputation than we are about government
(48:57) access to things you know in an official way it's not an ID card right it's not an access thing it's more of just what how you anchor your real world reputation to your behaviors online um and so some people will use a sock puppet account for example because they don't want to attach the reputation of their behavior to their real identity um and that will thus devalue their value because they're not attaching there's not actual skin in the game right they're going to be they're going to behave differently they're going to be
(49:29) valued differently by people but if you use your real identity you can develop real reputation and real trust and that's extremely valuable so there's a lot of nuance here where building a reputation is valuable and it is worth something and it's normal and trusting people is normal what we want to be focusing on is giving people the best tools possible to figure out who to trust who to give permission to who to give access to who to connect with who to do business with Etc we want the self-regulating capability we don't need
(50:00) the government getting in the way of the market and that's all they're really going to be capable of doing so this is the Nuance here giving people the tools to build the reputation and decide who they associate with in the digital world versus the government issuing it and making those decisions for you in a top down fashion yeah like a big aspect of what we're doing the pub key app not the protocol level stuff but the app level stuff is we are also handling how we do algorithms differently and so instead of
(50:31) just trying to figure out like like for example Noster has things where people will pick different algorithms and people conserve a different algorithm that's obvious stuff Blue Sky Has it we could do stuff like this in our our platform as well but what's more interesting is what we're doing we're establishing what we're calling a semantic social graph so there an actual graph database created by indexers that takes posts and profiles of basically keys in the in the the the things that those keys create whether they be files
(51:01) articles blogs podcasts doesn't matter um all types of different files ultimately um and allows people to attach semantic tags to them sort of like hashtags and this is partly you know a Remnant from things we wanted to do with Slash tags and why we called it slash tags back then um we ended up not being able to secure that name because it's generic term so we couldn't trademark it and so we had to change it um that's another reason why we ended up with a different with pubkey um but the idea there is like you are the algorithm
(51:30) you and the people that you actually follow or who you whose opinions you care about have the ability to now curate data in any abstraction you want and you can now instead of searching instead of getting a feed of like what we think you should see you know what my company thinks you should see you get a feed of what you decide that you want to see and it's a very Rel it's relative to basically your web of trust so basically you know you have like your circle of friends that the closest to you and then you have their friends and you have the
(51:57) friends friends so these are like distances away and so you can now filter your streams through these web abress distances across semantic abstractions as well so this gives you like this whole graph database that is highly highly relative to where now you can take a perspective on the data so it's like saying show me the graph from this perspective show me the graph from that perspective weight things differently it's it's like you control the algorithm and you decide which other people's algorithms to include on a granular level instead of a
(52:31) kind of whole feed level if that makes sense yeah I it is so I mentioned Noster web f it is a match B basically we're want to match data and match people it's a matching system in the abstract so it's like people you you heard like web five wanted to make a deex well we're making a deex too but in the abstract we're saying the atomic economy is just like the ability to connect anybody over any abstraction across any network so they can deal with each other however they want to without requiring a middleman to
(53:03) give them permission yeah [Music] so I also say that too include Noster obviously I'm on Noster following very closely like it um web five had I had a conversation with Daniel um from that project a few weeks ago so they were top of mine I guess I would throw herbit into this mix too to an extent and not Pub Key um in your mind across all these projects like blue sky you can add now too like what what is the path to like Mass adoption or how do how do these things succeed in your in your mind do they can they play together um
(53:46) will they run in parallel is it good to have all of them competing are they competing um it's a lot of questions uh let me let me figure out a way to kind of circumnavigate this um so I think that we're all trying to solve problems for people and you know sometimes some of us get distracted with thinking our interests are actual problems when they're not like for example like most people on Noster aren't censored right and most of the people that are censored probably would get censored anywhere because they're
(54:22) behaving like douchebags or whatever then there's this like subset of people that are censored and shouldn't be and this kind of thing so like when you talk about censorship resistance for social media you're really talking about maybe you know 100,00 people in the world that actually you're you're solving a problem for and even then you might not be because the people they're trying to reach might not be in your platform and so you're kind of just theoretically solving problems for the in in the interim what so like if you think about
(54:51) like what are the problems like why are people using these things today I think people use an oser because it's like public Bitcoin chat I think people use blue sky because it's public leftist chat um public de you know Democrat chat it's it seems to be where people are splitting across cultural values much more than they're splitting across utilities truth social this was kind of made in in in in reaction in Rumble made in reaction to censorship but they can censor just as much as Twitter can right like it's just they censor differently
(55:24) so what we've learned is there's a competition now for platforms that will censor only what's legally required right so that's kind of the Nuance here is if you only censor what's legally required now you have you're differentiating from Twitter or Facebook or these other things and so you have a utility now you see Blue Sky they're specializing in extra censorship they want to make a very cure rated very safe place for the people that you know agree with what's safe there and so you can see again this is all very much related
(55:57) around you know cultures and and censorship around things that are not that culture um so where do what to answer some of your questions where do I think this will end up um I don't think all of these things will be talked about in 10 years I think some of them will not be talked about anymore I think some of them will still exist and I think they will coexist um if you wanted to try to get Mass adoption for any of these things well the solution is simple you have to actually just basically do everything that Twitter is doing a
(56:27) little bit differently and a little bit better um but at their scale like you're never going to have a hope of getting people to move to Twitter unless you throw tens of millions maybe billions of dollars at trying to get gravity for your platform and and otherwise now this is the most interesting part for all of us what we're actually trying to do is figure out if by designing systems the way we're designing them if we can provide users with new powers that they didn't have before if they can do things they couldn't do on Twitter even if Elon
(56:58) added the feature they you know what I mean like for example like crowd the crowd making the algorithm like they could in pubkey app like that's not something you're GNA find in Twitter matter of fact uh Elon was just hating on hashtags yesterday inste telling people to stop using them and so he has no intention of putting power into the user's hands for deciding what they see he's trying to become perfect at showing them them what he thinks they want to see um and so that's a different path I know I'm rambling a bit but the way I
(57:29) see it is as far as Pub Key is the only one I can speak for directly I am just trying to see if we can actually take this design and give people Powers they didn't have before for example if you get kicked off of you know a platform now you don't have to lose your followers or your feeds or anything you can as long as you're using Pub compatible applications um if you want to you know experiment with being the algorithm instead of being a slave to one now you can do that in puy app and there are other ways that we're just
(57:57) going to try to show here are things you can't do in other platforms that they would never let you do or give you the powers to do and hopefully some of those things are very interesting to people and we get some gravity ourselves and then maybe we compete with the majors that way someday but this is a very uphill battle right because mostly people just want convenience they want stuff for free they want stuff that's fast they want stuff that's convenient and they want Network effect and so bootstrapping is a huge issue as well
(58:26) yeah massive massive issue and in your mind thought we all thought Noster won right like two years ago was like Wow Jack's talking about it elon's Banning it by mistake you know it was like and then all of a sudden there was like a million users or whatever it was and then Blue Sky came and they got 20 million and we're like oh okay like there's there's Nuance here because now they both exist and now we want to exist and others are going to want to as well and so what's how are we going to differentiate are we going to
(58:55) differentiate crost cultures across features what yeah well I that was what I was going to get on the feature side because that's what having observed Noster I've been on Noster since July of 22 so over two years now and see the development there and how much better it is when it was back then when I first got on it it was extremely impressive and I think it's pretty clear over in Noster that like the social media use case is only the tip of the iceberg if you talk to people like million from Primal and others like what we're
(59:29) beginning to see what things like Nostra wal connect and these data vending machines that connect you with AI agents um social media a lot of this stuff is just web stuff though a lot of this stuff is not necessarily like using pki or public key identity and and leveraging it it's just recreating the things that we already have in other places to some degree um I'm not I don't want to like [ __ ] talk but like this this this is a tricky thing with people who aren't involved in peer-to-peer web stuff this it's it's like the shitcoin
(1:00:01) world like I could impress you by lying to you by saying various things that we made that already exist in other places that aren't actually novel um but I I just don't think that that's going to help anyone you know um and so like when you talk about like let me put this way if Noster wants to realize being more than a social media thing they they they will not be able to ignore that they don't have an identity system um they will have to actually address that issue and so far they don't want to do anything that breaks the current
(1:00:32) protocol and so even though you can probably get Noster guys to admit that what we're doing with public key domains would be an improvement on Noster in other words if they switched to that method for Discovery they would solve a lot of their problems and be able to actually sincerely say the sentence you just said where it's the tip of the iceberg and we can connect across many applications from many use cases it's not as true when you have disposable private keys I mean disposable keys in general um and you have to always have a
(1:01:02) trusted place to kind of find somebody it's a DNS is key to what you guys are doing ity I I I definitely think so and the thing is what we're doing like what we're doing with pubkey is like yes the pubkey core stuff is what as I explained but the py app stuff is separate what I mean by that is Noster could literally adopt only how we're doing the DNS stuff and they could keep the rest of the stuff the same it would be a breaking change but they could do that but because we don't have to do that and somebody has to demonstrate the stack
(1:01:38) when we're building our servers which we call home servers instead of relays and when we're designing our stack we throw away the parts of Noster that we think aren't needed now that we have this capability whereas Noster doesn't want to throw anything away they're just looking for a way to keep things intact so they have some kind of technical debt there essentially that's kind of got their hands tied and they end up making these kind of justifying Arguments for this instead of uh embracing the problem so let's pull this into like the
(1:02:14) atomic economy concept like how how will pubkey digital identity plug into this and then blend into Bitcoin as well so overview for Atomic economy is simply you know the mission statement of uh synonym is that we want to provide people an alternative to Big Tech big Banks and big States and so that means you know Bitcoin and lightning have a lot of the big Bank stuff covered but you know maybe further down the line we would get more into credit related things like you've heard me talk about in the past with gift tokens or you know
(1:02:50) other forms of credit we have some ideas about how to establish credit scheme credit mechanisms or credit systems that do not use blockchains um we can talk about that later if you want but we're going to build a proof of concept next year for that but the idea being that okay so we have ideas about how to replace Legacy finance and I won't get into them because your whole audience knows most of them whether it be ecash Bitcoin uh lightning any of the things that you're you know excited about and following some combination of those
(1:03:21) right and then for um big Tech that's the pub key stack right so we're saying no longer do you need to trust these walled Gardens you have a credible exit with with our the way we're doing our Pub key keys um and we're going to be building you know applications and servers that people can exit from in a safe way and choose alternative providers so now we're kind of challenging big Tech and then finally with big state this is partially The Pub Key stuff and then the semantic graph stuff basically a little bit longer term
(1:03:55) my goal is to get into ideas for basically having self-regulating systems so now that you have these Keys as anchors for both files you know uh posts and for for keys for people you can now start creating these substrates of mechanisms for people to be able to have you know if this person does the wrong thing then this action automatically happens like these deterministic outcomes and you could have these one term I've been using is spontaneous governance where people where people match across the things they agree on
(1:04:29) instead of the things they disagree on and so where you have you know this tagging system for example in pubkey app if you wanted to match and find all the people that you know are tagged by your friends as bitcoiners you could do that and you can now create a network out of that system and that when you do that you can make things deterministically happen basically digitizing and programming trust into digital systems so this way you have self-regulation you have reputational consequences that are all digital so it's just finding a way to do
(1:05:01) everything except violence in a digital system um because that's the only physical thing that's part of the economy is violence is always a part of the economy and you can't digitize it um you could certainly have digital things that resulted in violent outcomes like drone assassinations and such but this is getting to weirdo fantasy stuff um I'm just just simply talking about bitcoiners thought hyper Biz would fix the world but they never gave anybody a picture of what the world looks like once we delete those things like big
(1:05:34) Banks big Tech and big states do serve a purpose there's some minimal reason they exist and if we minimize them or delete them or mitigate them somehow it's because we've replaced that elsewhere right so I'm just trying to say here is my vision for one way at least one way that you have a total economic Loop where you have like a Bitcoin wallet that supports multiple payment methods you have applications that you can now buy things in that wallet peer-to-peer from people and that's the that's the the longer term goal with pubkey app is
(1:06:06) that by the end of next year will people will be able to digitally monetize anything they want to peer-to-peer without a third party involvement and so that's you're only trusting uh servers just literally for resources to provide your data to others um so yeah that's the kind of atom economy idea is just to say let's take these three concepts and make an alternative digital economy that people can opt into and that we can all develop together over time going back to Abu Dhabi Finance week and the speed at which the governments seem to
(1:06:40) be uh keen on bringing the digital identity I mean we've seen laws where in Australia UK I don't think any laws particularly about digital identity but um pretty strict censorship laws and obviously here in the US Post Patriot Act um digital surveillance has increased significantly and is pervasive at this point that's that's what I wonder like time what I'm trying to get at here is like timeline of like how fast do these systems need to be built out and somewhat widely adopted before it's too late because the
(1:07:15) government seem pretty M we can't control how fast we can build them we also can't even control how much resources people want to fund to be to build them you know what I mean so it's like yeah we could talk about it and we could hype it and try to get people interested in doing it but ultimately the market will drive how much you know investment goes into the space luckily you know our company is owned by tether and they're funding us to do this and you know we've been working on creating this Atomic economy like this first
(1:07:43) version of the full loop you might say um it'll be five years in a few months um and tether has been funding that and not only that but they approved a budget for me last week to hire eight more people so we'll be roughly 30 people by the end of next year all just doing research to build this totally speculative alternative economy um and that I think is you know a vote of confidence for me for my team for the for the idea um but it's only provided at the you know benefit or or the success of tether um there's nobody else
(1:08:19) F even web five got the web five application stuff web five the the TBD stuff they got most of their funding pulled um and then Noster is mostly funded by like Jack and open SATs and smaller things like this like this could all disappear so quickly with just a change in in the in the tide you know like it's we're lucky to have you know these people investing in these things we're lucky that Jack spawned off blue sky before he left even though I think that that project's going to be a disappointment because just the culture
(1:08:55) essentially yeah no it's ironic that tether's funing you considering they're uh the middle of many theories that they're trying to usher in the government controlled cbdc future which digital ID I don't think that's true I think that people are saying that just don't know Paulo um granted Paulo is not the only one making decisions uh there's other people that own tether but I I don't have special information for you I don't really talk too much to them about their own strategies and stuff but I'll say that like Paulo is actually a good person he
(1:09:28) actually like we talked about benevolence earlier I do think his goal is benevolence um I do think that him funding you know approving funding for us for ho punch for RGB projects for so many things is because they're they're throwing they're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks but they're all things that they're just trying to like optimistically and idealistically help society and I think that's amazing you know I do as well I've only had Pao on the show Once and I got the impression that he's extremely genuine
(1:10:02) and you look at what tether's doing with a lot of their proceeds mainly buying Bitcoin and funding projects like yours and um I find the the whole and even more crazy stuff like they're they're investing in a they're like just on another planet now like they're investing in Ai and in in server farms and all kinds of things so like they're they're just on another level now yeah it is crazy to see how far they've come like like to the point where they're like a I remember hanging out with Phil Potter in you know in live chat on
(1:10:32) Mumble you know trading listen talking to Traders on bitfinex and you know I remember uh Philip Potter being like when ethereum was giving him a headache he's like I should never listed this [ __ ] coin like that's like bitfinex went from like being hacked multiple times in its past and recovering to like just being hanging out with the trader boys and chats to being like tether and the biggest company in I don't know [ __ ] world man as far as like crypto goes I think literally the most profitable company per employee that's
(1:11:05) ever existed oh definitely I I would not be surprised at all tether is not big it's not a lot of people although they're adding a lot lately so I don't know what their size is now this may um this may ruffle some feathers with all the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve people that are bullish on it I'm bullish on it I'll be frank with them like I think it's a good thing for America but uh I think bitfinex should get their Bitcoin back like there's big talk about just like taking the the confiscated Bitcoin and turning that into strategic Reserve
(1:11:36) like Bitcoin was stolen from bitfinex wrongly it was discovered by the US government like a is that whatever that I I as far as I haven't talked to Paul about that in a long time but if I remember the last time it came up there it's it's a it's a ongoing process in other words they have they're having to go through all kinds of Hoops to try to get their Bitcoin and I don't think there's anything to you know anything you or I could say or or do or influence in that regard and yeah but I do think that confiscating things from people
(1:12:07) that weren't taken you know from illegal crimes in other words how could you ever confiscate bitfinex's Bitcoin that doesn't make any sense right like so it's just I think it's just bureaucracy and maybe not even having a proper way to give them their Bitcoin back yeah yeah that just spec like the government be clear and government's defense they haven't articulated um that they're going to do it do anything one way or the other um but I've been a long champion of that um for the last couple years since I I don't even think it was
(1:12:38) roselan but since they um recovered the Bitcoin I find it I find it hard to believe that it was rokan I just think it's impressive that they actually did it you know that they actually recovered they actually for people that granted there are people who kind of panicked and sold and things like this on the day where the binex happened and they were damaged permanently but for anyone that actually held out and participated in their share program and their Leo program and all that stuff like everybody made out just fine if they
(1:13:06) trusted them um so they they did their best to recover and I think that's that's commendable yeah it is uh it's such a fascinating industry like you're saying from a Mumble chat to where it is now what's going to happen this time man who who's going to be our sacrifice this cycle there's no the only well the only the only focal point is Master you know that's the I don't know of anything else going on I don't follow shitcoin world I don't know if they have some kind of big Ponzi Brewing or what um it doesn't seem
(1:13:36) like we're going to get any type of huge blowout with ordinals or any of that area so where's the sa maybe we won't get a sacrifice but you know if there were going to be one I would think probably the master shareholders would be the people yeah they're the biggest target at the moment I think I mean there are it is insane how much Bitcoin they're buying um well it could just be like you know the premium Gets Zapped in one day or something you know what I mean when we finally top maybe the maybe the market actually knows and they they zap the
(1:14:11) premium in one day and people get wiped out and crying and losing all their savings or something like this you know but I I don't follow it closely enough to be predict I don't know closely enough the design of the loans and things to know when things could go bad like for example I average has got to be going up a lot his cost basis and I imagine if we hit his cost basis there tension there um something has to give from what I like I've paid like I'm not um some master I'm like not in the uh irresponsibly long
(1:14:45) master um X group and I'm not like a master shareholder but like following the Dynamics I think there is a lot of fud around it it seems definitely is risky to an extent but I don't think it's as risky I think the way he's structuring the credit and particularly the duration gives him a lot of breathing room to it's just hard to predict like for example like Trump just came out of nowhere saying oh I'm gonna do this whole tariff thing and that's how he's going to handle some of his strategies um he's come he came out in
(1:15:19) favor of the long shoreman and being anti- automation for the ports like Trump could take a that to to the public may seem logical but to master shareholders or you know sailor might not and because they're a publicly held company and because you know the government is going to be able to filter any of that money any way they want to any way they can justify and so for some reason Trump decides to take a stance of something like we cannot have corporations trying to exploit exploit and undermine the value of the dollar
(1:15:54) and the master strategy is something that if more corporations did could become tragic and you know harm many people so anybody that's doing this kind of this scheme is going to automatically have a 50% tax on unrealized gains and this is the the way they roll out the first test on unrealized gains is just for somebody that they can Target like this doing a weird thing and that something like that could happen you know like it could just be all of a sudden now every oh you thought you you you played the system well yeah played
(1:16:25) this system but we're going to take half you know like it's you never know just turn off the buy button my uh I to be clear I think micro strategies I do think there's a possibility that they've tapped into a hack of credit markets and I think that's most likely the case but uh my outlandish they obviously have the question is whether that hat could be plugged that's all yeah I think it could my more outlandish micro strategy theory is that they are building the Strategic Reserve um but uh that is a well I I
(1:17:06) think I made a meme actually with the butterfly guy and he's he's holding up the master logo and he says is this a strategic Reserve because yeah that's that's the fear right is that maybe they won't do what I just described in tax it maybe they'll just literally take it and they'll say no you can't do this Michael this is [ __ ] you think you're just GNA like game the system no give me that Bitcoin here's your money back go back to actually running a business you know like you never know what they're going
(1:17:30) to do that that could be painted in all kinds of horrible oppressive government thing ways so it's unlikely but I can't imagine every permutation of what the government or or the market could design to relieve the pressure of Sailor hack yeah yeah maybe maybe they just let him go maybe it keeps going up forever who knows it's going up forever La told Maybe you know you know what he wants what he needs I'm guessing is to achieve like escape velocity he needs it to be like where he bought so much Bitcoin before the the big players did that like
(1:18:08) we're just at a whole new price level and he just has nothing to worry about ever anymore about any of this you know what I mean where it's like oh now the floor is 250k his average is at 75k and all the corporations are buying and now it's like a million dollar Bitcoin and he's just that guy who did that move that everybody talks about for 100 years I hope that's what happens for him I I don't have any ill will to people trying to you know figure out the angles on the system at least as long as they're not harming anybody um but yeah
(1:18:41) I I mean I have no issue with Michael sailor making me bloody Rich if that's what he can figure out doing you know it's just I'm not going to like become part of the movement or start compromising my own you know interests and perspectives on things just to support that yeah no it's fast it's just fun to watch play out and again like I said earlier it's crazy to see where we are today from you getting Roger ver or you flipping him off and uh extradited him avoiding being extradited now that's yeah it's crazy and I think that's another thing like to
(1:19:20) reflect like I remember watching your live streams back on Exotica um and that was not tooo long ago in the grand scheme of things like eight years ago whatever 20 2017 I mean yeah I'm pretty sure that Roger V was stream live on Exotica too look what's happened in seven years and project that forward and that's why it's important that we have people like you working on these Sovereign tools that give people the ability topped out of the state oppression and use Bitcoin correctly understand it I hope it's important I don't know I haven't proven
(1:19:57) it's important yet but uh I I feel like it's important to at least make new mistakes and build things that other people haven't done um and I and I very much think that our team has been focused on doing that on making sure that the designs that we've chosen in the past that we've chosen for our road map are things that other people aren't doing and we need to figure out if they're worth doing yeah what's your biggest worry for Bitcoin right now or worri about mining pool centralization whatever about fpps No my
(1:20:27) only concern is core devs honestly um I don't think that the I don't think Bitcoin core is evil I don't want to fire Bitcoin core I just think that I don't know I work with Engineers I work with designers I know what people what it means for people to like have babies like when a project is their baby and when their bias is they figure out ways to convey their biases as if they're not and they just end up in this kind of trap where they think that they're doing something that is benevolent or for everybody else's sake but underneath
(1:20:57) it's really just for their own sake um and and cevs are not any different than other humans in that regard if if anything they're they're a little bit worse because they're engineers and they have this this they're compelled to demonstrate their prowess they must demonstrate their ability everybody like wants a new challenge right like when when you're good at things and you know this this is saying like if uh if you're the smartest guy in the room you're in the wrong room right like you always want to be improving learning
(1:21:28) demonstrating what you've learned and proving to other people that you've achieved these things and you can't do that if you don't ship code you know if you're an engineer that code has to go into the app it has to go into the users's hands they have to do the thing or everything you did is just AAR it's just worthless and that's very frustrating for a core developer making things that they have no guarantee of getting into the user's hands particularly speculative things like soft forks and such and bips like I it's totally unhealthy to go into
(1:21:58) a be situation like with an expectation of success your your only expectation is I think that I have a unique experience in the world where if I gather my ideas and I put them in one place they could be valuable to others someday so they don't have to waste the same time that I did learning these things and they can skip ahead that has to be your attitude if that's not your attitude then you're just going to live in disappointment and unfortunately many of the cevs are like they have incentives too they have
(1:22:25) grants they have reputation among their peers it's a kind of an academic situation um so like they they have a lot of incentives they have a lot of things they're juggling with and struggling with to want Bitcoin to be the way they want it to be and and put their mark on it somehow and it's not even things that have to be evil or spooky or or SP you know government influence just simply human incentive to uh take pride in your work is really all it is and demonstrate your work demonstrate your ability you know and so
(1:22:57) that that's my fear is that the whole like we started the conversation with this whole idea that like covenants is like a lot of people like it this whole idea that like it's needed at all this whole idea that utxo actually scale Bitcoin like there's so much of this that we've kind of elevated to a level of just hot air that just really should be much more you know down to earth and just talked about in a much more pragmatic way and a much less certain way yeah yeah it is uh besid you're saying that the just thinking about what I said
(1:23:36) about like it's big conversation right now there's a lot of people out there screaming so like seems it really isn't though it's like it's like it's like 10 people that even care and then 10 more people that they're harassing about it and then you know a few 100 people watching closely and then a few thousand people that are even aware it's happening that's it it's it's super super tiny it is not real it's not a real movement it's not a real anything the only thing that makes it seem real is that the bip for people
(1:24:10) that know understand it the code that for people that can audit it seems to make sense and seems to work that's the only legitimacy here is that they actually made a thing they to some degree can demonstrate it and it can be it's reviewable but all the other stuff is just wild claims yeah yeah this has been fascinating I always love catching up with you we got to do it more often um anything else we should touch on before we wrap up here um I don't know I'm sure there's other stuff going on but yeah I I guess I'll just summarize and see if think
(1:24:48) something comes out but you know we've been working hard on synonym stuff and we are a bit coin only company we are I'm certainly not trying to kill Bitcoin I think that the idea is absurd you know if people are triggered by my bip how dare I say oh Bitcoin magazine called me uh what was it shortsighted that my bit was shortsighted it's like man like I don't know how long do you have to be here to not be shortsighted like how how how long do you have to wait to make a real bip before people can take you seriously
(1:25:22) it's just such nonsense I know 2.1 quadrillion Bitcoin out there freaks yep 2.1 quadrillion units call them what you want call them Bitcoin call them satosi I don't actually care that much I just think that people that make applications might do a little bit better for their users if they try this approach how dare you how dare you I'm going to have to now that we have ai I'm like thinking oh I could probably go and compile all of my good morning tweets and turn it into like a long form like book or something or some series of
(1:26:00) Articles and actually have like a cohesive view on all of my takes on bitcoin that actually I can share with other people so they can understand where I'm coming from because while people think I do this for engagement I don't um I'm not controversial for engagement as a matter of fact the engagement mostly leads to me muting and blocking more people um I'm I'm not trying to get some of Engagement I'm trying to actually be useful um and trying to share these share my experiences and observations with the world because I do think I have
(1:26:33) a a very unique perspective on things from my experience here between the time that I've been here the projects I've worked on the battles I've been through you know the people I've met the products I've built this is just all real experience and it's not it's it's not just like a core Dev it's not just an engineer trying to speculate on code it's like real world working with users learning from them I I I don't think the bip is crazy I don't think that what we're doing with synonym is crazy either as far as our Atomic economy Vision it's
(1:27:06) just big it's just very speculative um I'm just rambling now sorry no I was going to cosign it as somebody as an individual who learned a lot from you in the early years and continues to learn I appreciate your perspective and you putting it out there because I do think it's important patience and taking me seriously the conversation does get lame out there Bitcoin Twitter I think Alex who I'm actually recording with tomorrow morning I said this a couple times in the last few weeks but like Bitcoin Twitter is like dead it's not what it
(1:27:38) was back in 2014 to 2019 eror blame Noster I don't think you can do you can't really do Bitcoin Twitter without also doing Noster now right like you have to kind of be in both places and Noster isn't the same for some coiners like I don't feel comfortable on noer like I I try to you know I only just started using it maybe a month or two ago just as research mostly to compare it to pubkey app but or compare the other like Primal and all these different apps to see what with the state of things was but like when I'm
(1:28:12) there like none of the content is for me none of the topics are for me it's all like a lot of Noster circle jerking like we're so great Noster is the future kind of just like with bit coin and so it's like Bitcoin Noster and I just don't find that to be a signal you know uh maybe for new people it's great I don't know but for me it's just it feels like I'm in the wrong place when I'm hanging out there and it's even worse on Blue Sky when I go on blue sky I'm like whoa I am definitely in the wrong place these
(1:28:40) are not my people I've never been on Blue Sky I man you have to try it you have to try it it's it's amazing you're not GNA believe it it's like walking into caliville and like walking into weville it's like you wouldn't believe it it's like literally like the first things you'll see in the feed are going to be like ridiculously hateful things about Trump and it's just I don't know it's just a whole alternate reality really yeah that's that's the the sense I've been picking up on it having heard other people talk about it I don't know
(1:29:16) it's worth like actually being aware too of like seeing the culture in action like you'll see like there's a lot of like posts from the people that are enthusiasts about the Tech as well at least maybe for me because I followed some or whatever I don't know if it's that way in general but you'll see even like the nature of their conversations is another reality like they're talking about ways to like censor properly and you know create safe spaces and these kinds of things and you know being they want to be really really hateful to
(1:29:45) people that disagree with them and it's just it's it's an unhealthy it feels very unhealthy to me very toxic situation but they probably think that I'm toxic for saying that they maybe even feel very safe there and very happy but it's not for me yeah I wonder if we observing the world just fracturing into these digital subculture not that these digital subcultures didn't already exist obviously we've had things like 4chan and on the other end of the spectrum for for many years but I don't know this is probably why I portray pubkey as trying
(1:30:19) to match people because like say for example like what if Noster is just the Noster tag right that's all it really is it's just a category of people and a topic like you could really in in a very significant way you could almost say that's what Noster is it's the Bitcoin Noster topic chat room right in in a in a in a large way at least functionally and you could do similar with blue sky for leftist things like this like what if now in pugy app all I do is I have leftist lgbtq uh woke uh Trump uh we have all these
(1:30:58) things as semantics and we are tagging people with these semantics and tagging their posts with these semantics now Noster is just looking at the Noster tag you know what I mean now looking at now blue sky is just looking at the Blue Sky tag or the set of tags that represents the behaviors that you like in Blue Sky and so that's one of the differences with pubc app is I'm trying to say I don't know what's best for people I don't know what the best algorithm is for you I don't know who you should be friends with all but I but I do know how
(1:31:29) social graphs work I do know how like webs of trust work and how semantics work and I do I'm pretty sure that if we create this system for you you can connect with anybody on any level you need to and you don't need multiple platforms to do that so that's maybe one way we're different differentiating is saying well let people figure out how to connect with each other themselves um because that way we can figure out how they actually want to connect instead of telling them like oh use Noster it's the future it's you know it's it's
(1:31:59) uncensorable which it's totally censorable um every relay should be censoring and if they're not careful they can get in a lot of trouble if they don't um anyway rant over yeah well I guess is this from a ux perspective I guess not made me think of like Steve Jobs in his quote or maybe it was Henry Ford they would have had like the at the end of the the gist of the ideas that if you ask people what they event they event like people don't know what they want like do you have to present them with to some degree yeah those are both two
(1:32:38) different quotes but they're related uh I think if I remember correctly yeah I I feel pretty strongly that way um sometimes on the team you know I'll get someone on the team saying you know I just I think you're totally wrong about tags for example about semantic taging about social graphing I just think that's it's a non feature I had somebody on the team tell me um and it's just like I you don't understand the feature you know what I mean I have total faith in the feature and I can explain it and I've explained to others and they
(1:33:08) understand it and you're just going to have to trust me you know what I mean like this is something where I don't think that users are going to fully understand what it is until we put it in their hands if I asked the user hey would you prefer if Twitter worked this way they'll say maybe no I no yes but that's not how you you have to actually take the time to create the whole user experience and surrounding user experience to give that idea an honest chance because people you can't just show people one feature you have to show
(1:33:38) them I I learned this from working at Exotica like and working on that platform I thought oh yeah of course you know uh of course chat you know girls want to be able to be private and have Bitcoin and not be censored it's a huge problem for them they're they use all these Shady payment processes blah blah blah blah but what I learned was yeah that's true but as soon as you start offering people a video platform they have very high expectations about the feature set because they've been using video platforms that have been built for
(1:34:08) 20 years adding features every you know every month adding features for 20 years and now they go they come to your platform and you don't have this one feature they use every day and if you don't add that feature in the next week or two they're gone and so you have to create a certain stature of a project to actually bootstrap you can't just go out there and like that a lot of Engineers and a lot of Silicon Valley types will say you just got to ship ship ship ship iterate iterate ship ship ship but there's another strategy I believe in
(1:34:38) which is actually completing a whole thought and then shipping it because sometimes the whole thought is much more intricate and complicated and requires a support system to even understand it correctly yeah hell yeah I love it John this has been great where um well we'll link to everything we'll link to you synony synonym.
(1:35:00) to right um yeah Bitcoin error log handle wherever you want to look for me on social medias and then uh Pub key. apppp if you want to see a little sneak preview of the app Pub key.org if you want to look at the code and you know build something with it and we also have been doing we just had one today uh public monthly Dev call so if anybody wants we we demo what we've you know worked on in the past month and newest features and things like this and help people like learn what they can build with it as well so if you want to run
(1:35:31) your own public key domain and try that out any of the stuff it's all open source it's Pub Key without the e correct correct pu KY yeah go check it out John thank you for doing this a uh thank you a response to a tweet about digital identity talked turned into a conversation about uh core development soft for fors Covenant identity ux it was great you got breath happy too happy to say uh happy to comment on anything I actually have any experience with and otherwise I will make a disclaimer that I don't um but
(1:36:09) yeah I don't have experience with the the Strategic Reserve stuff I just haven't been following it closely even the master stuff so I dis claim to your audience if they don't like something I said about any of that I am speaking ignorantly I'm not going to pretend to be an expert thank you for the disclaimer we'll do it again at some point in the future peace and love freaks all right thank you sir
