Season 11 quotes

“What I did was try to explain to people what BTCPay Server is, because they had no idea. Your software can be awesome and cool, but if people don’t understand it, or don’t have a good way to understand it visually…”

“I don’t think I need any more features, but it’s just an example of something outside of Bitcoin that did not get the proper funding.”

“I really like meeting people who use the software, and even just watching them try to use it and seeing how much they hate specific things.”

“If you optimize your life in a way, if you’re really passionate about open source, I guess you can make it work.”

“It should be built on long-term solutions. It should be open source.”

“It was kind of abandoned, I guess because they weren’t making any money off it, so they just left it as it is. It works.”

“Nicolas Dorier, for example: the reason he’s involved in all of these open-source Bitcoin projects is to be able to protect his own money.”

“If you’re a single developer developing something, there’s no interaction with people. Some people prefer not having interaction, and just putting their code out there.”

“If you don’t hear from us anymore and you’re watching this video, that is because he booked us a very cheap hotel in a very shady area.”

“The problem with open-source software is not going to go away. Even with Bitcoin software, you will often find projects that have been abandoned, because people need to move on. You can’t just work on the same solution for 20 or 30 years.”

“You could maybe try to extract the secret key, but again, the bitcoin is not in the device.”

“All the device has inside is fiat currency. If somebody steals it, they can steal the money inside the machine, but they cannot steal any of your bitcoin.”

“It’s a way to onboard people who have never used Bitcoin before. They just install an app that lets them use the Lightning Network immediately, and the apps are all compatible, because we use LNURL.”

“It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, but we don’t use them.”

“It’s much simpler, because you don’t need an operating system running; you just flash the firmware. We believe simplicity is more reliable.”

“With some of the devices we bought from other vendors, we don’t even know if they’re really ESP32s.”

“Many people were asking for this, because hobby projects and hackerspaces want an easier way to build their own, to onboard and educate their local communities about Bitcoin.”

“We think Turkey, because of the inflation problem it’s having, could be a place where our product can help.”

“We try to stay updated, but it’s very difficult, because legislation changes across countries.”

“You don’t really need to worry about a lot of the problems when you deal with ATMs and you’re moving around.”

“As Patrick said, we’re going to extend our team with a marketing person, and as soon as we have somebody, we’ll probably ramp up other platforms. But we don’t know yet.”

“We saw that Bitcoin adoption means businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment, and Lightning is the payment layer for Bitcoin. So we decided to use it.”

“There’s always a question right now: I’m using Bitcoin, but how do I handle it from an accounting perspective?”

“They don’t want to have an additional device running and have to maintain it.”

“Those are the two ways we will make money in the end.”

“You can use any Lightning wallet, because we’re using the Lightning invoice standard. The customer pays, and that’s it, basically.”

“Operating as a payment provider has many implications in each country, so it doesn’t really matter where you’re located.”

“That’s how we can sustain our business. And in the future, we’ll also work together with exchanges, so it’s easier to get into the whole space.”

“It will be very simple for business owners to manage their employees.”

“On the other side, it will be very simple to do the accounting.”

“If you keep printing more and more money, and there’s a lot of something, there’s no value. Bitcoin only has 21 million.”

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll retire if Bitcoin goes to $1,000,000.”

“In ten more years, what is $100? Nothing.”

“I’m here every day, I work every day, and I see a lot of people interested in crypto. Hundreds of people take pictures of the Bitcoin sign on the door every day.”

“It’s no problem. If something has a lot of rules, it’s not good.”

“We want to accept the Lightning Network, but the problem with Lightning is that it’s not good for the company’s accounting. Maybe in the future we can make it possible.”

“I don’t think it’s only about the price. It’s also about adoption.”

“A lot of people know about crypto. They’re just a little afraid, but a lot of people are interested, and I love to see it.”

“We started about a week ago, because it’s so complicated to make it possible to accept it as a payment.”

“A lot of people think it’s easy to accept it, but everything’s so complicated, because of the taxes.”

“The transaction size is like 20 times the size of a normal Bitcoin transaction.”

“I thought Confidential Transactions basically brought 90% of fungibility. It’s good enough for most people, as long as you’re not showing everyone the money you’re sending.”

“I am not Satoshi Nakamoto, unless I have multiple personality disorder and one of my personalities is Satoshi. But as far as I know, I’m not.”

“I don’t expect Bitcoin to implement MWEB, because it’s just a big change.”

“If there’s only one cryptocurrency out there, then it can be attacked and killed.”

“In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if it took six months versus two years.”

“If they created rules around it and miners don’t like it, they’ll move somewhere else.”

“It still doesn’t change the fact that all transaction amounts and all transaction recipients are visible on the public ledger.”

“The jury’s still out on whether we need fungibility and privacy on layer one.”

“The only gotcha is that you don’t want any of the A’s, B’s or C’s to be negative.”

“For fungibility, we need some degree of privacy. I don’t think the future of money should involve a system where you can see how much money your neighbor has, and vice versa.”

“Big money might not be in favor of privacy. Also, I think the more Bitcoin becomes money, the harder it’s going to be to change.”

“I kind of like these unregulated companies selling a service that no one understands.”

“We’ve always taken a position to just build with the way Bitcoin is right now.”

“I think sending on Lightning is pretty private, because it’s onion-routed. For receiving, I feel it becomes less private. Ultimately, Lightning privacy will be dictated by the size of the network.”

“I’m not going to claim to be an expert on Lightning privacy.”

“We’ve got to make sure Bitcoin is being used as money.”

“You never know what the requirements are going to become tomorrow.”

“We want the same privacy as PayPal, or as using a bank account.”

“Then there was Michael Saylor, who said: never sell your bitcoin, just borrow dollars against it.”

“I don’t get it, but usually it’s like that. There’s an old saying that nobody’s a prophet in their own country.”

“Hackers Congress always takes place on the first weekend of October, every year.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a Trojan horse, because I guess there’s no master plan behind Bitcoin.”

“It can mean any oppressive organization: some church, or, I don’t like the term, organized crime.”

“We were forcing people to pay with Bitcoin, which they didn’t have, but they got delicious coffee for it, one of the best in Prague.”

“A few years ago, we were lost when someone came up with the idea of a private blockchain. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not your keys, not your bitcoin, of course. But I think it’s similar with fiat money: you don’t need to know how money works to use it. Almost nobody knows how a credit card works, or the encryption behind a transaction.”

“Many people think that we are a rich organization, or rich people, because we joined the party in the beginning.”

“People who got in very early were so pro-privacy, so pro-private property.”

“They don’t have the knowledge, but within three minutes they can have their own Bitcoin wallet with some sats in it, have a great, delicious coffee, and pay for it with Bitcoin.”

“Because otherwise they wouldn’t learn like anything at all and they will just get all the information from mainstream media which is full of like total nonsense.”

“Because this is relevant in terms of understanding who’s the target audience and whether or not it’s worth bothering to translate educational resources.”

“Because we find out like we can have our differences and our little fights on Twitter.”

“Even if somebody can understand English and use this English in their work, they don’t really like to read books in English.”

“I guess I should pitch them my magazine because it’s open source anyway so they can just take the graphics and put their text on top of it.”

“I helped with some of them and I don’t even though I don’t contribute anymore.”

“There’s also Tropic Square, which develops the security chips that are going to be a hundred percent open source and auditable.”

“They might as well miss translated and make me say stuff I didn’t, as long as it’s educational, I don’t care.”

“We don’t have our own words for like email or like the newer technical terms.”

“We don’t have our separate distinctive words for blockchain, there were attempts to come up with them.”

“Like I said in the beginning, one of the key goals of open source is not repeating everything again, and not reinventing the wheel.”

“Bitcoin is also improving at a very conservative rate but it still is improving.”

“I’d call it a walled garden, a golden cage. Ultimately, Bitcoin is about freedom, and we want to provide people this freedom.”

“Recently we started to think about the third axis we want to expand into, and that’s privacy. So we’re forming this triangle of usability, security and privacy, and we want to cover all three bases.”

“That’s one of the reasons why we introduced Tor in Trezor Suite. There’s a one-click button.”

“For Bitcoin to be good money, it needs to be fungible. That’s one of the properties it needs to have, and privacy is a way to get there.”

“They’re more similar to RFCs, requests for comments.”

“There’s an estimate that the whole Bitcoin market is somewhere between 100 and 200 million people.”

“We recognize the need of having some kind of privacy protection in our software stack.”

“What you want is something that’s out there, has been around for a long time, is open source, and has huge incentives to get attacked.”

“It’s a philosophical question: sure, we want Bitcoin to take over the world. But does that require the entire population of the world to become bitcoiners who hang out at conferences and on Bitcoin Twitter?”

“Even among bitcoiners, Lightning is still used day to day by a small, single-digit percentage. So I think the most valuable thing we can do for Lightning is just get more people to use it.”

“It’s fine to have values and say these things are good, but I don’t think we should be moralizing, because deep down, Bitcoin is do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want money.”

“We think there’s a lot of future in the Lightning stuff, but in the present, people are using other things. It’s important to be mindful of metrics and traffic, and of where the real activity is.”

“I firmly believe that in order for Bitcoin to be useful, even as a store of value, it needs to be freedom money.”

“The definition of exciting technology is that it doesn’t really work yet. And we’re in the business of making really reliable stuff.”

“In the Bitcoin community, you can be a great Bitcoiner and never have a Bitcoin wallet.”

“We need to remember Bitcoin as a tool for freedom, and freedom means you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.”

“Like there’s a lot of people in the Bitcoin community who don’t use Bitcoin to make transactions on a regular basis.”

“Most people are going to be users of the tools, and don’t particularly care about it.”

“The only reason you get called a Bitcoin Core developer is that people start calling you a Bitcoin Core developer. That was actually quite funny early on: journalists would say it, and it wasn’t really clear what they were basing it on.”

“I’m sorry, these projects will always be niche, because they just don’t scale.”

“The idea of Lightning will certainly outlive Bitcoin, because it’s a fundamental principle of computer science. The discovery of Lightning was finding one of the ways to do double-spend prevention.”

“Monero is quite attractive to dark markets because Monero’s privacy is enforced. It’s much harder to make a mistake with Monero, because you have to do transactions with privacy to use Monero at all.”

“There are certain properties of inflation in a cryptocurrency that make this type of taxation easy to implement.”

“1.7% of your bitcoins every year going off to pay for security is like a tax, and people don’t like taxes. Unfortunately, in Bitcoin, people become extremely religious about this stuff.”

“As it happens, in this particular case, taxation is very easy to implement as inflation.”

“Similarly, with Lightning, we could have a world where more people use Lightning with their own wallets, and then you get very good privacy.”

“That’s far better privacy than any on chain thing that you could get on Bitcoin.”

“You cannot make Lightning not have at least somewhat better privacy than on-chain Bitcoin, because Lightning inherently cannot broadcast your transactions to the rest of the world, for scale.”

“The state consists of our consent to be governed.”

“The downside of government is very, very bloody, and it should only be used as a last resort, when there’s no other tool that could possibly work.”

“I was always taught that this is what we’re all about: never, ever sacrifice freedom.”

“It says: these are the things the state can’t do, because they recognized that the state is a very dangerous and deadly force.”

“It’s like CBDCs, which I’m glad to hear you mention, because a lot of people don’t realize how dangerous they are.”

“I do go so far as to say that I consider fiat evil, and I don’t take that word lightly. Bitcoin is an alternative to fiat. Bitcoin is sound money.”

“Nobody could do a 2016 style white paper and raise $100 million in 30 minutes right now.”

“Really, one of the only ways to do that is through advertising.”

“Bitcoin is under threat. It’s a mistake to say: oh, don’t worry about it, Bitcoin will be fine.”

“I don’t think we need a central bank. Just let people decide what money is.”