Season 10 quotes

“That’s right it’s actually the first Bitcoin meetup I think that was ever created. I can’t take the credit for having created it.”

“It had a lot more capabilities than just simply transferring money around.”

“In this case, it was actually a Bitcoin side chain, the Elements platform, which I also worked on, I was responsible for.”

“We call these things affinity scams because they create a completely separate monetary system rather than building on top of or extending the existing system.”

“What Lightning and Bitcoin layer 2s like Liquid, RSK and drivechains do, as you mentioned, is let Bitcoin be the base settlement layer.”

“There is no reason for every counterparty in the Lightning Network to be aware of every single message that is being sent back and forth.”

“One of the many criticisms that I level at Ethereum as well is just the complete and utter lack of privacy or even privacy awareness among the developer community.”

“Bitcoin is definitely not perfect in its current form. It’s certainly the most perfect money that exists, but it is not perfect.”

“People leave Bitcoin development because someone doesn’t believe in what they’re doing, or just outright doesn’t like it, and it is a huge burden. So anything we can do to support and encourage people to become Bitcoin Core developers, we’ve got to do it.”

“200,000 or more bitcoin has been wrapped onto the Ethereum chain in order to participate in DeFi. That’s dangerous.”

“The way people got Counterparty tokens was to burn bitcoin: an initial burn offering. I think it was even called that.”

“Without Telegram Messenger, and the culture of Telegram Messenger, I think we wouldn’t be where we are today with NFTs at all.”

“You just need a bit of bitcoin. It’s just a Bitcoin transaction.”

“I would encourage people to just watch the movie Feels Good Man. I think it gives a good perspective on the whole Rare Pepe thing.”

“We need to keep it on Bitcoin. It’s not like anyone can do anything for it to not be on Bitcoin because it’s there forever on everyone’s node.”

“I think Counterparty is underrated. It’s overlooked, and it flies under the radar most of the time.”

“There was definitely a rivalry of sorts between early Counterparty and Ethereum.”

“I’m going to write this paper about how NFTs do not solve the same problem Bitcoin does.”

“Lightning kind of takes fees off Bitcoin. At least with lightning though, you still have to open and close the channel.”

“I think what happened is that a lot of the people I call jihadi maximalists traded a shitcoin one time, lost money, and then became jihadi bitcoiners.”

“I’ve been kind of doing, I would say, Bitcoin and gaming since around 2013.”

“We didn’t call them NFTs, but we started to experiment with tokens in gaming.”

“I co-founded a startup called Zebedee where we’re actually focusing on Lightning Network payments in gaming.”

“What if we could have a character, a game character, that have the same properties as a Bitcoin, meaning decentralized, giving ownership to the user.”

“That’s where I started Spells of Genesis, in 2015.”

“It was before Ethereum’s mainnet even launched, and it was the first gaming item on-chain.”

“I was probably the earliest adopter, the first person to issue a token on Counterparty, in 2014.”

“Later in 2014 I met Shaban in Japan, and he explained to me the concept of tokenizing game assets on the Bitcoin blockchain with Counterparty.”

“Now I’m actually working on mostly Lightning Network related projects.”

“We stay on Bitcoin because we have a fan base, we have markets, we have people who are attached to Bitcoin and Bitcoin only.”

“As far as I’m concerned, Bitcoin is both digital gold and should be an internet currency.”

“Why shouldn’t we trade Bitcoin for art, and why shouldn’t art be denominated in Bitcoin?”

“I think most NFTs kind of look like tulip manias to me.”

“I like Rare Pepes in particular, because they were created before any of these things had value, before the word NFT was even really popularized.”

“Bitcoin was created before you knew or even had a reasonable expectation that this thing could become worth something.”

“Bitcoin shares that kind of, dare I say, immaculate conception.”

“The experience of buying and trading assets on top of Counterparty is really rough.”

“Literally both wallets that I own, Rare Pepe Wallet and Freewallet, are not BIP39-compliant.”

“That means you can’t import that seed into Electrum, for example, which is a very robust wallet.”

“NFTs are very elusive. They’re a new asset class. How many people understood Bitcoin when Bitcoin came out? Nobody. Most people don’t understand Bitcoin today.”

“The coordinator knows your inputs because you register your inputs all together.”

“In WabiSabi, with the credential system, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

“I think Satoshi was not so wrong. The thing is that now we are interacting with entities that collect information.”

“Now all the previous restrictions are gone, and we can finally create coinjoins with arbitrary outputs. That is basically the big difference.”

“My wallet can send the credential to your wallet.”

“There will be never another Bitcoin.”

“I think people are using it more, and they want more privacy on-chain.”

“If you want to buy something, you have to sell your bitcoins for fiat money. I think that will not last forever.”

“People don’t know what money is, how money is created, what it represents, why some money is worth more than other money, why Venezuela’s money is worthless.”

“Another thing that’s also very important, and is possible now with WabiSabi, is that before, with ZeroLink, it didn’t matter how you implemented ZeroLink.”

“We don’t hold any Bitcoin whatsoever of users, whether it be an institution or where it be an individual.”

“We withdraw every single transaction to their own hosted wallets.”

“This is part of our desire to ensure that everybody retains the financial autonomy over their particular investment.”

“We’re trying to build a bridge between the legacy ecosystem, legacy economy, and the new economy, the Bitcoin economy.”

“We have clients coming in asking particularly the question for storage, hey, can you guys recommend a hardware wallet.”

“One of the things that we are going to release in beta very soon is the ability for users to purchase Bitcoin sent directly to their wallets.”

“I worked at Airbitz for a bit, and I understood how wallet technology worked.”

“There’s no clear guideline about how you should onboard your users to the Lightning Network as an exchange owner. Whereas with Liquid, it’s a lot simpler.”

“You really need to do your due diligence; you need to have technical experts on board to make Lightning function smoothly in the back end.”

“If Bitcoin goes up in price at the end of every quarter, what they need to do is match their risk.”

“The argument that we need to destroy privacy in order to protect the public just falls flat from my point of view.”

“Money is a token of delayed reciprocal altruism.”

“The best privacy is having the least amount of information on the blockchain. So that is entirely aligned with scaling.”

“A UTXO is more than just a coin.”

“Lightning demonstrates that this is possible.”

“If we can remove the stigma from claiming privacy, if we can reduce the costs, if we can improve the user experience and make things more simple, then we will have privacy and we will have fungibility and we don’t need any consensus changes.”

“By deciding to opt into privacy overtly, you’re making a statement.”

“You’re saying on the blockchain, I deserve privacy and I’m claiming it.”

“You need privacy from the rest of the world and you need privacy from whoever sends you money, and you need privacy from whoever you’re sending money.”

“Bitcoin is inherently kind of flawed, as we discussed earlier: if you use it in a particular way, there might be consequences for your privacy.”

“What if a company like Chainalysis can monitor Bitcoin full nodes effectively?”

“In 2015, Chainalysis was running a sophisticated kind of Sybil attack on Bitcoin, running a lot of full nodes.”

“The vision is that you can run these nodes a bit like you run lightning nodes, like a kind of slow, more anonymous version of lightning, and you can actually make some financial profit for providing privacy to other internet users.”

“I think Lightning is not the magical solution to all of Bitcoin’s problems, but for fast micropayments that don’t require much privacy, yeah, it’s a great solution.”

“I’m actually a big fan of sidechain designs like Liquid, where you have a private sidechain to the main Bitcoin chain.”

“I don’t think Signal is backdoored.”

“I think Telegram is mainly popular because it has large groups.”

“Everyone just got really obsessed with Tor. But why not? Now that we have the time and the money, let’s revisit mixnets.”

“Your ISP can record every single transaction you do, without your knowledge.”

“It’s important that individuals really think this through, and never consider any kind of government to be a permanent ally of either Bitcoin or privacy.”

“The Counterparty coin itself is more of a problem, but compared to Omni, for example, or even Ether, it’s way, way better, because at least they did the proof-of-burn thing instead of just doing a scammy ICO.”

“Sound money is something that, in my opinion, could change society, economics and even geopolitics in a radical way.”

“All this blockchain hype, all this crypto hype, is 100% dependent on Bitcoin continuing to exist and spread.”

“If you do a scam which is not an affinity scam, you will have to claim something completely false.”

“You don’t change the base protocol, you don’t put it in danger, you don’t accept compromises.”

“Truth is by definition sustainable.”

“It’s low time preference at the end.”

“I think that being very passionate about Bitcoin, I tolerate more the scams that are completely unrelated to Bitcoin.”

“They would not exist if Bitcoin didn’t exist and function.”

“It was a layer on top of Bitcoin, completely legit.”

“Maybe I saw Rare Pepe about five minutes before Joe did.”

“I bought one, and I immediately thought: man, I just scammed myself. This is corny and stupid.”

“Joe quickly joined and built the wallet and really without Joe, this whole thing wouldn’t happen.”

“I had been in the Counterparty community basically since it was released, at the beginning of 2014.”

“Everyone calls them tokens now, but they’re Counterparty assets.”

“I registered that as a joke.”

“Clearly you’re not buying a JPEG. You’re buying a token that has a JPEG which shows you what it looks like.”

“Shawn and I were both at the conference in Miami in June.”

“I think roadmaps try to make up for poor art.”

“It’s been up and running for seven years, it’ll be eight years in January, and Rare Pepes have been around for over five years at this point. The uptime is incredible.”

“I’m definitely more into the music and art side of stuff.”

“I’m also a Bitcoin maximalist. I believe Bitcoin is the chain that will live forever. It’s the best, it’s the greatest.”

“When I show them XCP and Bitcoin stuff, their minds just get fried.”

“I’m very big on asset ownership.”

“I really believe that with the Rare Pepe provenance of my tokens from 2016 and ’17, you can create brands out of that, which I’ve been doing with DJ Pepe, for sure.”

“Asset ownership is a thing on XCP that you don’t find on Ethereum, as far as I know.”

“I heard he lost access to his Counterparty wallets and can no longer access his stuff.”

“The simple answer is: you use Arweave.”

“You can just upload a song.”

“Let the market decide. What’s the problem with putting a Bitcoin logo on it? It’s art. It makes you think.”

“We don’t know what Web3 is yet. People just put a marketing term on something they came up with and have a financial stake in.”

“NFTs are an exact example of that: in polite company, you cannot discuss how NFTs originated with Pepe, for reasons I don’t really understand, but apparently it’s polite.”

“The Ethereum hype might as well just be a dot-com hype, to me. Maybe I’ll piss off some listeners. I don’t know that I care.”

“That could be worth $0 this time next year. But if they are worth a lot of money, or any amount of money, I find it very hard to believe the provenance won’t win out.”

“Part of the reason to have fun with this Counterparty stuff is that I can prove to people that you can have fun with Bitcoin. It doesn’t have to be monetary.”

“I very much like this idea of being free speech money.”

“The more expensive it is, the less spam you’re going to have, and the higher quality NFTs you’re going to have on the blockchain.”

“I do think the poison of that debate was a matter of leadership.”

“Ethereum was just overtly a company, and I think that was the inferior part. In my mind, that would just get regulated.”

“Bitcoin doesn’t really have any organization, and I think the nature of the internet is just to amplify what people want to hear.”