Season 12 quotes

“A lot of people don’t understand this: an Electrum server is a full Bitcoin node with some extras.”

“If you run your own Electrum server, you don’t expose your Bitcoin addresses to foreign servers. If you want privacy, nothing beats a full node.”

“This was a long time before Bitcoin. I would not say I had really interesting ideas, because Bitcoin was completely different from what I expected.”

“Ideologically, I don’t think I can agree with proof of stake. With proof of work, you can externalize resources from the outside: you can use fiat to buy a mining machine and make bitcoin without ever buying bitcoin. I think that’s a big advantage.”

“I was against the big blocks, as in Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, because of the division in the community at the time, and the way it was introduced.”

“I think we need to be conservative at the moment and not change that. But we should also keep our eyes open.”

“What excites me most is still Lightning. Lightning is not finished.”

“Maybe Bitcoin will never see a hard fork, because it’s too late.”

“The only thing that matters is whether you can check the proof, and how you check it.”

“They create complex things that they don’t really master, because they are too complex.”

“Open-source software is different from proprietary software. Proprietary software is controlled by a company.”

“I wrote the first implementation of stealth addresses and did a lot of research into privacy and anonymity in Bitcoin. That became my main interest, my main focus in Bitcoin.”

“I got into Bitcoin in late 2010. I did a lot of development on Bitcoin; I contributed billions of dollars’ worth of value to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But I never kept any bitcoins. All the money I had, I would reinvest.”

“Look at Bitcoin wallet developers or Bitcoin Core developers: they’re not billionaires. The people who got very wealthy off Bitcoin are the people who accumulated bitcoins or started businesses around it. That is a problem of misaligned incentives.”

“He’s now in prison for life. Bitcoin first got big because of the Silk Road. Anybody who says it would have gotten big anyway is lying.”

“In Bitcoin, any time somebody tried to propose something new, it was: no, Bitcoin’s perfect as it is.”

“I think the lack of interest in privacy has to do with economic incentives. If I work on a privacy wallet for Bitcoin, a lot of this stuff is very difficult.”

“There are the debates being had within the community about what Bitcoin is, how it works, and what you can do with it.”

“The only difference was that the scale, and the amount of money pouring in, had changed.”

“Whereas on our side, we were like: okay, it’s not a product. It’s a network, it’s a technology, it’s open-source software.”

“Their share of remittances amounts to $400 million per year, and that is money taken from the poorest of the poor, because rich people don’t need to send money home to their relatives.”

“It’s the second Bitcoin conference in Bitcoin country, the first sovereign nation that adopted Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which is quite a big thing.”

“How coincidental that a lot of media articles were released at the same time, declaring El Salvador a failed experiment because only one in five people are regularly using Bitcoin.”

“People say the government forces people to accept Bitcoin. Well, actually it doesn’t. There’s not a single reported case of coercion to accept Bitcoin that I can confirm.”

“The support for the current government is overwhelming, specifically among people who never saw any benefit from any government that came before this one. There was so much corruption in El Salvador.”

“People should be able to protect themselves from any government, regardless of how friendly or unfriendly it is. That is the point of Bitcoin: to be sovereign, to have your own money in a way the government cannot intervene in, confiscate or debase.”

“Obviously that’s not the only reason they’re adopting Bitcoin, but it’s the one reason they chose to put out there, to give the world as a reason for doing this.”

“With the advent of Lightning, now is the time for Stablesats. It offers a dollar account without a stablecoin, and it’s interoperable with any Bitcoin wallet out there.”

“I think it’s fair to say that it’s not recommended to use Chivo, even though it’s not horrible by now.”

“Some of them manage to pay with Lightning and sometimes they don’t, and then the amount is deducted from their balance. But that’s not really on our side.”

“Privacy is always a trade-off. One way to enhance your privacy, paradoxically, is how many different users there are.”

“I think I started this journey thinking that Bitcoin was an interesting addition to the financial markets.”

“I’m fundamentally positive about technology, because it’s a new shuffle of the cards: you change the setup, and there’s a new chance for people.”

“I think it’s just a temporary phenomenon. There was a lot of influx in the latest boom market, a lot of money that went into Bitcoin because people were looking for another risk-on asset.”

“Governments can still do fiat money on a Bitcoin layer, so technically this can be perpetuated for the rest of humankind’s existence. There’s this saying that a new fool is born every day.”

“They look at bitcoiners as a kind of tribe or movement. They don’t like Bitcoin because they don’t like bitcoiners; they see all the flaws.”

“I thought: no, that’s not the potential of money. Money is for exchange and cooperation between strangers, people who don’t always have the same values. I still believe that.”

“They think they have a moral obligation to call out people they perceive as immoral, because they think Bitcoin offers moral improvement to society.”

“We unfortunately have to replace trust, because trust has been abused, and trust can’t be trusted anymore.”

“Of course, everyone else is in a cult but you. Everyone else is superstitious but you.”

“After a while, people get bored and say: okay, I know what I’m going to hear at this event.”

“I’m not glad when the price goes to 60 because we won, and I’m not sad when it goes to 3 because we lost. It’s a long play, so I don’t care.”

“Most people jump into Bitcoin not because of a deep understanding of Bitcoin, but because of the price.”

“People come in because of what they’re interested in. Most people are interested in money, in getting money quick. But once they’re in, they get the opportunity to learn the real thing.”

“Hotels in Argentina were getting paid in Bitcoin and selling it locally, to avoid the corralito, to be able to get dollars in cash and not through the banks.”

“When Bitcoin crashed in 2014, many were dropping Bitcoin from their names. Keeping the word Bitcoin in the name and the brand was a decision.”

“They do connect with banks, and we don’t like banks, but they do connect with banks.”

“I still think scaling is a matter of time, unless you think things will never scale.”

“The high-level discussions, the kind of people, the English: it’s more for people from abroad than for the locals.”

“They just wanted to ride the hype train: this is in fashion, this is trendy, jump on the train while the bull market lasts.”

“Right now, since there’s no saving, people operate on lending, on credit.”

“I don’t think anyone is saying it’s easy, or that we’ll just make everything great and then there will be no more drug abuse problems.”

“When it comes to playing the game, when you’re on the board, keeping a neutral space where no one gets harmed is very important.”

“I think the problem is that as soon as you have a line, the line can be pushed.”

“If we can’t count how many bitcoin there are, we don’t know how many bitcoin there are.”

“Privacy is probably one of the most important things we need to maintain in order to actually be self-sovereign people. If we don’t have privacy, we can’t have control over our lives.”

“In a fair system, either everyone can or no one can, and I don’t see any reasonable way that everyone can.”

“I don’t believe in equality of outcome; I don’t think everyone should have the same result. But I think everyone should have equality of opportunity. The same rules should apply to you as to me, as to Michael Saylor.”

“We do have serious drug abuse problems in a lot of countries, and I don’t think we can blame the drugs as much as the environment we’re creating for these people.”

“I don’t think you can have a nation without a centralized government, and I find that to be the problematic thing to begin with.”

“Peter Todd was the first who understood why Bitcoin is on a blockchain at all. The reason is that money is the smart contract across all people.”

“Bitcoin is a very good, very advanced thing, and the blockchain in Bitcoin is quite useful. But I would like people to start thinking that, in fact, the blockchain is not what makes Bitcoin strong.”

“Peter Todd contributed a lot to the early development of the ideas behind the Lightning Network, and the idea is pretty much the same. However, Lightning still relies on global consensus.”

“It’s a contract, but not yet a smart one, and it actually doesn’t require a blockchain.”

“I came to Bitcoin in 2013, and we started a Ukrainian Bitcoin foundation. We were telling the government: Bitcoin is cool, but let’s extract the blockchain from Bitcoin and do government registries and the rest of the bullshit, which is much worse than ICOs and shitcoins. But I really believed in that.”

“Of course, somebody will come along and do a scam using that technology.”

“I wouldn’t say he likes Lightning Labs. They made LND, and he runs it, but the fact that he’s using the software is not an expression of his preferences.”

“The only thing that matters is whether there’s market demand for censorship-resistant solutions, not just money.”

“The same applies to RGB: if there’s no demand for censorship resistance, there won’t be demand for censorship-resistant money either.”

“I need a censorship-resistant system where I can express more complex things than just Bitcoin as money. I’m not satisfied with just having Bitcoin as money. I need contracts, I need shares of companies.”

“The place where you put signatures in a Bitcoin transaction is called the witness data. So all of that data, those 998 signatures, went into the witness data.”

“Not every Core Lightning node was affected. Anyone running a block source that used the btcd library was impacted, but most people who run Core Lightning use bitcoind, and bitcoind processed all these transactions correctly.”

“I don’t think it’s what Tor recommends, because you do leak your home IP address a little bit.”

“I really like telling the story about the difference between macaroons and runes, because I think it’s kind of funny.”

“We’ve got this totally new thing called Commando.”

“Maybe five percent of the entire Lightning Network that we know of runs Core Lightning.”

“If you find a bug, you should tell people. I think that’s probably the right way to do things when you find bugs.”

“It was on Tor, and at first my reaction was: okay, this just means I’m not very well connected.”

“If you don’t have the current state, that’s a problem. If you don’t have any state, that’s also a problem, because your peer can publish any state, probably the one where they have the most money.”

“It’s really hard to connect to anyone who’s on a home network, where you don’t have a fixed IPv4 address. Lightning node connections are supposed to be very long-lived.”

“As I always like to say: not your node, not your rules.”

“We shouldn’t put it in a few people’s hands and let them take this freedom away from us. So I think it’s very important to keep systems like full nodes open source.”

“If you’re running something like Bitcoin and Lightning, you really need a small computer, even a small server, because you want to keep it on all the time.”

“Another really important direction the Bitcoin community needs to go in is open hardware. Not only should we be running open software, we should be running that open software on open hardware.”

“On the RaspiBlitz, the software is open source, but the hardware is not.”

“Only four or five mobile Bitcoin wallets are both reproducible and open source.”

“You have to be really picky about the libraries you use, otherwise you’ll end up non-reproducible. Nix is the ultimate scrutiny: if you try to build something in Nix and it doesn’t work, usually it’s because it’s not reproducible.”

“It’s just an average RISC-V chip, whose advantage is that you can verify that it’s open source.”

“Niks in Dutch means nothing, so I’m the nothing man.”

“That’s the idea of the hack days: you have a project, you show it to people, you let people use it, and then you improve it. This is how we grow.”

“It’s only in the sense of adding something very tiny, like CheckLockTimeVerify. The only thing the BIP300 script checks is this one tiny little hash.”

“I can’t believe it went on for as long as it did.”

“I think the meaning of ‘Bitcoin maximalist’ has shifted a little bit. It used to mean that Bitcoin is almost certainly going to win, and there’s no need for anything else.”

“The whole sidechains idea is that we could capture all the good ideas. Otherwise people are in a dilemma, because someone really believes in their idea, whether it’s ring signatures or Turing completeness.”

“If you say nothing except Bitcoin should exist, and everything else is a shitcoin, you should also accept the fact that people are going to move away and build their own shitcoins.”

“In the ICO world and the NFT world, the smooth operators move in to just straight up take people’s money. Many of them are horrible people.”

“Peter Todd believes it’s very bad if some miners have a way of making money that other miners do not. But that’s the entire history of mining.”

“What the regular Lightning person believes is very different from what Matt Corallo or Christian Decker believes.”

“I think plenty of people have written a decent Bitcoin book. I don’t know which Bitcoin book is my favorite, but I own quite a few now.”

“There’s a kind of embedded consensus that gets you a parallel blockchain.”

“In JoinBox, the idea is that you connect to it, and it has text-based menus to do things, instead of typing commands.”

“It’s a never-ending fight over privacy in Bitcoin, between those who seek the maximum amount of privacy and those who try to break it.”

“I think full nodes have become more popular again, with projects like RaspiBlitz and Umbrel, and that’s one of the reasons why JoinMarket has become more popular again.”

“If we’re talking about that, then the Lightning Network makes the most sense, because of instant settlement of transactions.”

“I think we should always work on improving on-chain privacy. But I’m always thinking less about potential soft forks and hard forks, and more about seeing what we can do right now.”

“What changed my mind in a big way was the Canadian truckers’ protest. The government closed their bank accounts, and the bank accounts of people who donated money to them. And then some people started taking Bitcoin donations.”

“Maybe we should look more into that, and how to improve privacy there too.”

“On Lightning, your transaction doesn’t get broadcast to the entire network, and not every Lightning node stores your transaction. That’s the privacy improvement compared to the Bitcoin blockchain.”

“Then you are basically giving up your privacy to the servers, to the Samourai guys.”

“There’s the JAM project, a web-based user interface, which also looks good.”

“At the moment, we don’t really have anything analogous for service providers.”

“Because there’s a certain amount of market dynamics within the way that mixed nodes themselves are selected.”

“Because yeah, otherwise people would maybe be waiting, a lot longer if we try to ship it in the kind of end state that we want it to be in.”

“The reason it needs a token is that it’s incentivized. We want people to actually get paid for running these bits of infrastructure.”

“It’s incredible to see that there are 6,000 Tor nodes that people look after just out of altruism. But we wanted the people running all of these nodes and services to get paid for doing it.”

“The mixnet is a layer zero. It’s a network-level anonymity solution, a protocol, so it’s agnostic to everything else.”

“You’re providing a piece of privacy infrastructure. Maybe it’s life or death for someone, but you’re also providing privacy to the rest of the world, which is something we desperately need.”

“In the privacy space and in the crypto space, people are more used to paying a certain amount to do a particular thing, so I don’t think it’ll be too hard to sell people on the idea when the mixnet becomes pay-to-use.”

“You can argue that the censorship resistance issue exists only because the adoption rate is low.”

“It just always uses the Nym network layer, and you never have to think about paying. That’s one end of the spectrum.”

“It’s the biggest Bitcoin-only European conference, because we tried to stick to the roots and speak only about Bitcoin. There’s literally less than 1% bullshit, like shitcoins and all that stuff.”

“These people don’t come just for the drinks or for good company. They’re interested in meeting new people and learning more. That’s probably the main thing that distinguishes Baltic Honeybadger from other conferences.”

“Somehow one hour of the content is missing, because YouTube said we violated their policy.”

“For outsiders, this is probably kind of a red flag: hey, they’re going to a Bitcoin conference, Bitcoin is pretty expensive, these people are probably very wealthy. So you need to protect everyone.”

“Security is very important for Bitcoin, not only online but also offline, obviously.”

“It’s in Riga. I don’t think Riga has the biggest Bitcoin community in the world, and yet it’s the place that unites bitcoiners from multiple continents.”

“It’s the perfect place to meet the Americans you otherwise don’t really see outside of Twitter.”

“I really think human rights is a very important thing, and it aligns well with Bitcoin.”

“What I effectively want to achieve is for every bank in the world to understand what non-custody is and how Bitcoin works, and to basically start working on a Bitcoin standard.”

“That just raised the bar for Honeybadger. The next year, people weren’t even questioning whether they should come, and it was much easier to bring amazing speakers to Riga.”

“A lot of Bitcoin influencers tell you never to spend your bitcoin: spend with your credit card and only accumulate bitcoin. But in the case of VPNs, that changes the whole situation, because if you pay for privacy with your credit card, you’re not going to get any more privacy.”

“Nobody had talked about it in terms of privacy and information security.”

“Interestingly, as a VPN service provider, I always start by saying that a VPN might not be the best choice for you.”

“Most people evaluate VPN services on features, speed and price first. I think they shouldn’t. I think they should evaluate them based on trust.”

“With convenience versus security and privacy, there is no free lunch.”

“We’ve been accepting Lightning for a long time. We’re quite excited by different developments in the Bitcoin space, specifically around privacy.”

“That’s the other part of the problem I mentioned with the UK, and the US, and why I wouldn’t use a US-based provider.”

“There’s always a threat model. There’s always some actor you must trust in order to have privacy against the others.”

“When you make a payment on the Lightning Network, you don’t inform the entire network about your transaction, and they don’t have to store it forever.”

“This is the part of the equation that we cannot change, or get out of.”

“I don’t believe in Google ads, Instagram ads, Facebook ads or anything like that.”

“I’ve seen university professors, politicians, really smart people get scammed so easily, you cannot imagine.”

“Nobody should know exactly how much you have. That’s why I always say: we speak about Bitcoin, but not about our bitcoin.”

“The reason Bitcoin will dominate the world is that it gives people freedom.”

“Most people do not live in a circular Bitcoin economy, so they need a way to convert the bitcoin they earn into their local currency.”

“It’s difficult to predict macroeconomic changes, because you never know how long a damaged system can drag on.”

“As Bitcoin goes up, the people who adopt it will profit, so wealth will shift to the first people, and the first countries, that really adopt it.”

“All of our staff, and myself, are hardcore bitcoiners. We’re freedom-loving, privacy-loving people, and we understand the negative implications of privacy restrictions.”

“That’s why we bitcoiners are sometimes perceived as a bit annoying: once you’ve got it, you can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Having people make decisions is always the weak point of any system, because people are not perfect, as we know.”

“Bitcoiners think different, right? So you should want to listen to different things. Bob Dylan is different: his lyrics will make you think, make you question things, and paint wonderful scenes.”

“Usually you get artists who write love songs when they’re in their 20s and 30s.”

“Bringing It All Back Home was the transition from acoustic folk to electric rock.”

“He was doing this before everyone else did it, and nobody taught him how to be Bob Dylan.”

“I never really thought about that in terms of rappers, but Dylan always considered himself a poet first and foremost.”

“Bringing It All Back Home is a great hybrid, because there’s still a lot of acoustic, mellow stuff on there. And the lyrics are always a 10 out of 10.”

“Some people claim that everyone who covers a Bob Dylan song does a better job, because they supposedly sing it better.”

“Man, it’s too bad you can’t play this stuff on YouTube without it getting taken down.”

“My God, if you’ve never listened to this record, you have to listen to it today, tonight. Put it on in the background.”

“Some of those later songs I never liked, but the alternate versions of those songs are great, man.”

“I’m quite hopeful about the usage of coinjoin technology as a whole.”

“I don’t know if I’ll learn about it, because ultimately they could just start using it without telling us much.”

“I don’t see a big reason for it, mainly because it decreases your success rate.”

“Will it give you substantial privacy benefits against the average adversary? Probably not, because there are many privacy leaks in Lightning that have to be addressed. But ultimately it’s going to be an essential building block for a future Lightning wallet that has privacy as its ultimate design goal.”

“Not a single party has that much bitcoin lying around, I think. There’s probably a bunch of people using this with varying amounts of money, which sums up to quite a lot.”

“I think there’s huge demand from users of Bitcoin software to do so in a secure and privacy-preserving way, and what we have here is, I think, the most compelling and most efficient solution for that.”

“Mutiny is probably a great example of a new Lightning wallet that’s very privacy-focused.”

“It’s an extremely complex problem to build a really well-done, privacy-focused wallet.”

“I’m always happy to talk about Bitcoin, and Bitcoin privacy.”

“That’s what fungibility is about: making each coin equal to any other, each unspent transaction output, each UTXO, equal to every other UTXO.”