Season 1 quotes

“Systems such as money, either gold coins or fiat money imposed by governments, are pretty new. We still have brains evolved for the previous stage, not for these huge nations and cities that we live in now.”

“In terms of property and privacy, we have completely delegated to these third parties because of a false sense of security. With Bitcoin, as long as we have our private key, it is definitely ours.”

“Nick Szabo is a brilliant person, not only because of what he has written, but because of the way he thinks. Within the cypherpunks, I think he must have been a very unique member.”

“I tell Nick that I have to read his articles like 30 times, because there’s so much information in each paragraph. One of Nick Szabo’s articles is like six months of university courses.”

“Nick came to the conclusion that money was a trust minimization device. There was a link between money and trusted third parties: money is a device to reduce trust.”

“We evolved to use money as a conflict minimization device. The reason I go to a store and give them money instead of stealing is that it’s much less costly, for me and for the store owner, than stealing from each other all the time.”

“I think that Bitcoin is first about anthropology, biology, conflict minimization, economic behavior, evolution and game theory. It’s all those things first.”

“Tim May was very rational, and whenever he had to be skeptical, he was skeptical. It was like having a fatherly figure who is never satisfied with what you do, so you keep trying to be better all the time.”

“I don’t think the whole world, eight or nine billion people in 50 years, is going to build all its systems on top of only one blockchain like Bitcoin. I think people are going to diversify.”

“The 21 million monetary policy is a political decision. Maybe in ten or forty years, miners that are very powerful will say: ‘Now the block reward is only half a bitcoin per block, and I don’t like that. I want more money.’”

“I don’t know that they ever had much impact on Bitcoin adoption or Bitcoin education, or helped Bitcoin in any significant way. I also don’t think they hurt it in a significant way.”

“They wanted to be the people the news would call when they needed a quote about Bitcoin, because Bitcoin can’t really represent itself. But nobody in the Bitcoin Foundation was actually very good at representing Bitcoin.”

“People gave the Bitcoin Foundation a lot of bitcoin, and the price appreciated over the next few years, so people felt a little burned. They wished they had just held onto their bitcoin, and the foundation never really amounted to much that they thought was useful.”

“Bitcoin won’t become a global phenomenon because people realize overnight that they need sound money. We always need the help of people who are knowledgeable and can actually create useful stuff, even if it’s a few articles or translations for wallets.”

“I think a lot of people, if you really ask them, will have similar stories about how they had to let their bitcoin go for one reason or another: their own ignorance, trying to think they can trade, or expenses, or life happening.”

“Bitcoins want to be free, and everybody wants to take them from you. HODLing is a hard lesson to learn. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to teach it, but in practice it’s much more difficult than people realize.”

“As a bitcoiner, you don’t care whether they’re doing well as a business. All you really care about is whether they’re helping Bitcoin. And sure, they’re helping Bitcoin.”

“I don’t think he’ll come back to Bitcoin, because the coin is too expensive now, and he can’t get the same percentage of the pie that he once had. Every single time he bets against Bitcoin and fights Bitcoin, it becomes harder for him to have as many bitcoins as he used to.”

“This is how shitcoiners and ICOs trick people: the product might be privacy-focused and efficient, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the other side of the business model.”

“I would rather it didn’t happen in a moment, because I think the world needs to acclimate to the disruption Bitcoin is going to cause. I would rather see it happen in pockets, in countries that have really bad money or really bad access to banking.”

“You might think of it as a sort of liberty arbitrage. As Bitcoin continues to mature, it will flow to the areas where it’s needed most, and the oppression that people are experiencing because of their corrupt political and monetary regimes will be lifted.”

“From monetary freedom spring all other forms of freedom. I think freedom of speech and the freedom of money are the two foundational rights that exist in the world. Once you have those locked down, pretty much every other freedom is guaranteed.”

“Bitcoin represents an enormous amount of hope for people living in oppressive regimes, or even in moderately free regimes like the United States that still have poignant rights violations.”

“If you have the wherewithal to ask yourself why this piece of paper is worth anything, you’re left with easily a hundred times more questions than any answer you can produce.”

“I don’t think there’s any large discipline that Bitcoin doesn’t intersect with in some way, which is one very important reason why so many people remain interested in Bitcoin for so long.”

“Your money is only as good as the community of people willing to accept it from you. Money exists within the confines of a certain community, and it is accepted by all the participants in that community.”

“Bitcoin definitely creates community, because money creates communities. Money relies on trust.”

“Whether you’ve been in Bitcoin since October 31st, 2008 or January 1st, 2019, there’s always a lot to learn. No one should take themselves too seriously, and everyone should remember that there’s a lot they don’t understand.”

“There’s a strong case to be made for why governments should adopt Bitcoin, and we see oppressive regimes capitalizing on that incentive, like Maduro infamously confiscating Bitcoin miners’ hardware and repurposing it for his government’s mining.”

“Money tries to confer four fundamental freedoms: to buy whatever you want, from whomever you want, whenever you want, and to accept or reject the conditions of the transaction. Zero fiat currencies can claim all four. With Bitcoin, all four boxes are checked.”

“Here in Pakistan there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation about cryptocurrency. Many people just think it’s a scam because of whatever small version of the story they heard from someone else.”

“There’s an education problem here. Not much money from the national budget gets spent on education, so public schooling is terrible. If you want a somewhat decent education, you’re going to have to pay for it.”

“One of the problems is tax evasion, and the inability to monitor how much money people might be earning, because there is no proper tax collection system out here. You need resources to set up a good administrative office that can perform those functions.”

“Nobody can say for certain, but I don’t think all transactions are going to be transparent, simply because there’s a market for privacy coins. It’s also about supply and demand.”

“I think that’s very unlikely. Nobody really wants to do it, because that would break at least the illusion that we have right now of an international free market.”

“Last year we saw much smaller-cap coins like Bitcoin Diamond get hit with these attacks, so when we’re talking about adoption and security, we definitely want a network that’s not going to be vulnerable to attacks.”

“I don’t think anything is completely bad all the time. With Bitcoin, some transactions might be slower, and because transactions are final there is no disputing them, which can be looked at as good and bad. There’s nothing perfect.”

“If I’m going to be a Bitcoin maximalist, I shouldn’t be out there talking negatively about every other project. I think everyone should keep an open mind. I don’t like to believe in absolute thinking.”

“I’m working with people who are not in Pakistan. My brain is being drained away from this country and used by places outside of it. That’s what this brain drain hypothesis is about.”

“What we got from Satoshi was the Bitcoin white paper and a Bitcoin client, and then a community took over and started improving the protocol and the software. In the end, we don’t really care too much about who Satoshi was.”

“I think it’s important to distinguish Bitcoin from the rest of them, unless the others have specific use cases, like privacy.”

“I fully believe some people will go through their whole lives using Bitcoin and never holding a private key. Some won’t even be interested in the technology; they’ll just trade speculatively. What’s important is that you can always run your own node and transact yourself. That option will always be there.”

“The beauty of the system is that people try to tie in their politics and their philosophies, when really everyone in Bitcoin acts for themselves. Some people think this is a bad thing, but it makes it very, very difficult to change the protocol.”

“I’ve cut out a lot of people who talk about tokens and cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin and privacy coins, and I find it makes my feed a lot better.”

“I think we should still be treating Bitcoin as an experiment. The financial system was headed down a bad path, and I think Bitcoin, more so than other cryptocurrencies, has the best chance of replacing fiat currency.”

“It was Hal Finney who said that if something tops Bitcoin, you’re never going to have any faith in that as money, because anything could come along and do it again.”

“Hyperbitcoinization is definitely possible. I think it’s going to take a while, and then the financial system takes a sudden shock, and that’s when it will happen.”

“I think Bitcoin is a lot more in line with natural law: privacy, freedom of association. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“I think it’s very important that money is decentralized.”

“It’s not very convenient from this point of view. There are surveillance cameras, so if they want to see who bought or withdrew money, they have the recording.”

“I really don’t think fiat currencies will disappear. I can’t predict what will happen in 2040 or in 60 years, but I can tell you that fiat currencies won’t just disappear. In my opinion, this is one of the main problems with the promoters of altcoins.”

“More and more people around the world will realize that Bitcoin is indeed freedom. You are free to support someone who writes against your government, and no one is going to censor your money, because you own your money.”

“People ask: what if governments forbid Bitcoin? They are already doing it. It’s forbidden to own Bitcoin in Venezuela, but you can see that people there are really using Bitcoin.”

“If I want to send you money because you are doing a great podcast, I should be able to send it to support you. If PayPal doesn’t like your work and cuts you off, we should have solutions to overcome those problems.”

“People don’t ask why, and the reason is simple: when you keep printing money, it devalues. It’s as simple as that. It’s not rocket science.”

“You cannot pay all of that debt, because if you paid all the debt, your currency would go to zero. It just can’t work.”

“The common denominator is this: people delegate too much of their lives to other people’s power. Bitcoin is going to change this, also because it’s inevitable. Otherwise you’ll see it happening again and again.”

“There was a picture online showing that in Venezuela you’d be better off using paper money than toilet paper, because the toilet paper wouldn’t last as long.”

“It’s not that we are destroying the fiat system. It’s that system that is destroying our future. We need Bitcoin.”

“I think Bitcoin is going to be the transfer of value of the future, all over the world. It will coexist with digital fiat currencies, but Bitcoin will be the standard.”

“That’s an example where my political philosophy actually has real-world ramifications: where it translates into curtailments of freedom of speech.”

“People make what I think is a fallacious argument: if Bitcoin is used by group X, then Bitcoin itself has those leanings. That’s very problematic, and it’s an even easier case to make about Bitcoin, which isn’t even a person. It’s an inanimate thing. People can use Bitcoin the way they want to use it.”

“I’m interested in whether the ICO bull run, that crazy period of 2017-18, was a net bad thing for the space, because it brought a lot of people in, but at the same time it burnt a lot of people.”

“I think the Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin incident has actually exposed a lot of people to Bitcoin who probably hadn’t heard of it, because they have huge followings.”

“The FCA has three categorizations: exchange tokens, security tokens and utility tokens. As I recall, none of them is actually a currency.”

“I think it’s important to have people like him in the space, because I’m very keen on diversity of thought.”

“That’s where I see platforms like Gab, even if they give voice to extreme far-right views, having an important role to play, because they don’t police anything.”

“The point of freedom of speech, at least the way I read John Stuart Mill and others, is that no one decides it, and the dangers inherent in that are outweighed by the dangers of authoritarian policing of speech.”

“I think the reason it started that way is that those people were the first wave to be forced off all the platforms. But if, as many suspect, platforms like Twitter and Facebook get worse, you will see it become much broader.”

“It was fascinating to hear from someone who has been thinking about this for a very long time. David Chaum is unsatisfied with the way the current crop of crypto assets is not fulfilling that role, although he didn’t explicitly say that Bitcoin couldn’t.”

“You can buy pretty much anything you want with Bitcoin, which I think is really cool, but adoption isn’t quite there yet as far as transacting in person. I think that’s going to improve over the next year or two with the Lightning Network.”

“The Silk Road was one of Bitcoin’s earliest, largest use cases. That’s not the case anymore, but many years ago, in 2013 and 2014, it was definitely where the majority of economic activity around Bitcoin seemed to be happening.”

“One of the reasons Bitcoin became so popular for buying and selling isn’t so much the tech. It’s that if you want access to any good investment with a high rate of return, and of course high risk, you need to be an accredited investor.”

“I think regulation is eventually going to crush that, but at the end of it we’ll still have a decentralized, highly distributed, permissionless money that anybody can use anywhere in the world, without fear of censorship or of it being taken away from you.”

“I think it’s actually been very good for Bitcoin, because it removed a lot of nefarious people from Bitcoin.”

“SegWit2x was a good idea on paper, but not in actuality. Not only was it not needed, because SegWit itself already provided nearly double the transaction capacity, it should also have been resisted because it was a consensus change to the way Bitcoin works.”

“Bitcoin is first and foremost a digital replacement for gold, or for money and value storage in general. It’s also the world’s most decentralized timestamp server.”

“I disagree with contentious hard forks in general. You should just start a new network with your own genesis block, instead of taking a different blockchain, copying the account balances and watching it.”

“People are really bad at settling on just one thing. We don’t seem to have just one of any type of thing, so the idea that we would settle on just one global money is also very unlikely.”

“The level of privacy that some privacy coins give you, Bitcoin is probably never going to be able to achieve without either using layer 2 networks or a hard fork.”

“On the one hand, Bitcoin is this amazing thing that doesn’t need governments and supersedes governments. It’s bigger than government, and the idea is that you don’t need government approval.”

“That is why Bitcoin is so strong and so important, and you don’t want to mess anything up. I forget who said it, maybe Pierre Rochard or Saifedean, but Bitcoin is not a one-year project. It’s not even a ten-year project.”

“Privacy is going to be something that some big governments push back against, and they might work together to do that, but I think we have to stay strong and defend our privacy.”

“There are two futures that I think are distinctly possible: one in which Bitcoin unites the world, and one in which Bitcoin gets mass adoption, but not exactly how people think it will. In places where there’s freedom, it will do what we think it will.”

“A lot of very smart people have analyzed Bitcoin and think that, just by virtue of how it works, it is essentially unstoppable. Why would the NSA have created something they couldn’t rein in? I don’t think there’s a backdoor hiding in Bitcoin.”

“With the way Zcash works, privacy is opt-in, so you kind of lose the privacy, because no one’s using it.”

“In the same way that people don’t understand what money is and what money should be, they don’t understand privacy. A lot of people in the United States would say: if you’re not doing anything wrong, who cares if the government is watching? That’s a bad way of thinking, because when you lose your privacy, you lose your freedom.”

“I hate to make this analogy, but he broke the paradigm almost like Bitcoin. Trump breaks the idea of what we think a politician should be, and Bitcoin breaks the idea of what money should be. Trump is just obviously much worse than Bitcoin.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to ban Bitcoin at this point. We’ve reached the point where it just won’t happen. Possible, yes, but very unlikely. Governments will constantly say it’s a bad idea and that you should not put your money in it.”

“Privacy is a fundamental human right. We cannot be free without privacy.”

“I do not understand this position of maximalism. From my perspective, it’s like ignoring the fact that there is no power of one in the world, and there should be no rule of one, because that’s despotism, and it’s also not natural.”

“I love Bitcoin. I will always fight and build and work on Bitcoin.”

“There’s no oneness in nature. You have a gazillion different types of flowers and bees, right? That doesn’t mean that all the other bees are bad and wrong.”

“Any kind of extremism is just bad. I don’t like it.”

“I think all of these will exist, and it’s fine, but it will all be centered around one specific ledger.”

“My focus is 99% on Bitcoin.”

“I think these cheaper altcoins are actually educational. They’re great for people who get into cryptocurrencies and learn how to use a wallet, and that’s useful for the Bitcoin supply, as no coins get lost by newbies.”

“Even in crypto, I want to have arbitrage opportunities. If one day something supersedes Bitcoin and has the qualities I’m looking for, I want to be able to easily get into the new coin and start using it. Why not?”

“I’m totally fine with all these BCash and BSV and whatever other alts there may be. Let’s not waste our time fighting like small kids. You have your truth, go follow your truth.”

“I think we lost a lot of precious time and brains in the SegWit times. It’s important to explain things, but we can still be civil and polite and say: okay, I don’t agree with you, but that’s fine. We don’t have to agree about everything.”