Season 13 quotes

“Fedimint and e-cash mints can solve a lot of different problems for different people. When I began working on it, it was mostly about privacy for me.”

“It uses trust relationships to solve the inheritance problem or the backup problem, because many people aren’t really able to securely back up their Bitcoin seeds. In short, it solves scalability, privacy and custody.”

“It could give a win-win experience: you have privacy by default, you don’t have to take any extra steps, and you have incredibly inexpensive, intuitive payments, because Lightning is baked into the Fedimint protocol.”

“Although self-custody is much less complex in Bitcoin, there’s still a technical level that people feel uncomfortable with, because of years of being educated in how to have a relationship with money.”

“Hopefully, over time, through education, we can make people more comfortable with the idea of self-custody.”

“If there was a federation where the guardians don’t really trust each other, that might actually be a good option.”

“We think it’s important not to just assume people can figure these things out, or point them towards a number of books.”

“Bitcoin today is at, or almost at, the point where, as a suite of solutions, we can help most people in most circumstances. It’s just that the information is not readily available and surfaced.”

“If they only manage to confiscate four out of seven, they cannot move any money. The police cannot take the money, but neither can you.”

“Maybe you’ve got quite a large amount, full stop. Then you should consider self-custody, because it now makes financial sense for you to do it.”

“Andreas Antonopoulos was the Bitcoin guy to listen to, back in my time at least, and he said many times: don’t invest your money into Bitcoin, invest your skills into Bitcoin.”

“My very first moment of thinking ‘there is a privacy problem here’ was when I was trying to buy or sell some Bitcoin at a Bitcoin ATM.”

“You do have people like Michael Saylor who are not fans of Bitcoin privacy, and quote-unquote educators like Dan Held who tell you that adding privacy to Bitcoin is a bad idea because of accounting issues. It’s not like zero-knowledge proofs don’t exist.”

“The privacy war is not between bitcoiners. The privacy war is between bitcoiners and no-coiners.”

“Some units of Bitcoin end up differentiated from the others, and it’s a bit comical. I even tell people: if this makes you angry and you want to get rid of it, you should just add privacy to Bitcoin.”

“Anonymous accounts often bring the worst out of people. But if you create a social network without anonymous accounts, you get Facebook, and that’s not great either.”

“If we are very smart with the amounts, we don’t have to fully mask them with the cryptographic magic of confidential transactions.”

“We don’t want to pay to IP addresses, that’s not very private, so let’s just call it an endpoint.”

“Most of the traffic will have to move away from the Bitcoin blockchain, so the only things happening on-chain will be the large transactions: the whales, the institutions, the companies with very large amounts.”

“Gregory Maxwell is the father of Bitcoin privacy.”

“A lot of these schemes are secure until somebody really puts some energy into trying to break them, or until something weird happens that nobody suspected.”

“He believes that you can’t necessarily just reason your way from first principles into universal truths about things like economics.”

“Ultimately, the reason I did this is that I’m a bitcoiner who believes in the mission of Bitcoin as a currency, as money.”

“Your friends, the people you know, the people you trust, the people you like: that’s way more important than any online disagreement.”

“Bitcoin’s money use case is really important, but it only resonates with a small number of people. If we can make Bitcoin do more things, and more interesting things, then we can make Bitcoin resonate with more and more people.” (at 1:47:42)”

“I’ve stopped describing myself as a Bitcoin maximalist.”

“Politically, I wish there was more competition between governments. I’m very interested in people starting new countries, and creating zones of freedom they can operate in, whether that’s economic or political freedom.”

“I don’t think fiat currency ever goes away. The point where we win economically is when nation states are so fenced in by Bitcoin that if they make weird rules, people just avoid them and use Lightning, and if they print a lot of money, everybody just buys more Bitcoin with it.”

“The analogy I always use is restaurants: you have absolute freedom over which restaurant you go to, but you don’t have any say over the menu or the prices.”

“I agree with the Mises people on a lot of things, but when you really dig into the specifics, I probably disagree.”

“Even though there is competition from Amazon and all the other marketplaces all over the planet, there is no country that doesn’t have its own marketplace.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to always rely on exchanging your coins on regular KYC-regulated exchanges in the long term.”

“Fiat currencies are just relics of a violent past. You can just spend your Bitcoin, because it’s money. People will finally come to the point where, when they say money, they mean Bitcoin, and no exchange is necessary anymore.”

“When the majority of my income was paid in Bitcoin, I spent Bitcoin a lot more than when it was predominantly in fiat, because it was just easier for me to spend in Bitcoin.”

“With PayPal, you actually finance people who think they can decide who’s allowed to receive money or not. That’s the absolute counterexample of what Bitcoin should stand for.”

“As more people trade privacy for convenience, we get more centralized middlemen who are rent-seeking. It goes against the Bitcoin ethos, and we might not like it, but that’s the reality.”

“I just try to get people some extra privacy and help them live their Bitcoin life as fiat-free as possible. That’s what we at Shopinbit do.”

“As a Bitcoin business, you need to work for your reputation. If you think you can just waltz into the Bitcoin economy, slap on the Bitcoin branding and get 10 BTC out of it, you’re in for a world of pain.”

“The other thing is privacy: some people don’t like to provide their address to third parties.”

“The way we book travel right now, if you have a problem on your flight, you can’t just talk to the airline directly.”

“All layer twos have a layer of privacy. Lightning is certainly more private than going on-chain.”

“I know people that use Liquid for privacy, because of confidential transactions.”

“When we built Mercury wallet, it wasn’t necessarily meant to be a privacy wallet.”

“On the back end, we decided to work with Core Lightning because it’s got a modular architecture with plugins, so we can build statechain and Lightning functionality as a set of plugins.”

“People were doing this years ago with bare multisig. I don’t think it’s a big deal; I think it’s kind of funny. Bitcoin is a permissionless system, and smart devs are always going to find ways to put data on it that we don’t want.”

“Those of us in the community building layer-two systems need to create services that use that block space.”

“The only other thing we maintain at the moment is something called Mainstay, which is a kind of proof-of-publication service.”

“I think the future of Bitcoin privacy is going to be somewhere in the Lightning space. I see statechains as anabolic steroids for Lightning.”

“Lightning has great momentum, but there are still a lot of challenges there, and I think statechains are going to be something that helps.”

“With swaps, we actually have nothing to do with it: the system is blinded, so we don’t know who’s swapping or when they’re swapping.”

“Pierre knows many people from the Bitcoin movie industry, and we see that this industry actually exists and is growing. So we decided to organize the Bitcoin Film Fest, March 24th to 26th, in Warsaw.”

“One thing that happens with Bitcoin documentaries is that a lot of them end up talking about the same stuff. In my first film, The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin, I explain how Bitcoin works.”

“It’s also a matter of how things can be explained. There are new ways of presenting things that can work better for different people.”

“I’m being very self-critical in this as well, but I think the maturity of Bitcoin films is reaching the point where way more creativity can be added.”

“Let’s not close our minds on Bitcoin documentaries. We are waiting for a great series about who Satoshi was, a Cryptotopia about Bitcoin’s future, maybe a science-fiction story where a Bitcoin-like thing is involved.”

“There were a few attempts to organize cryptocurrency or blockchain film festivals, but I don’t think any of them survived to this date.”

“Poland is still one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union. People are slowly going to get more and more into crypto, of course, but we’re pushing for Bitcoin only.”

“Don’t try to focus too much on stuff that’s already out there and may have been explained better.”

“This Machine Greens shows how Bitcoin is actually making our planet greener and the energy industry more ecological.”

“There might also be some artistic work, maybe actors playing something related to Bitcoin.”

“Bitcoin mining monetizes energy. If I have an extra megawatt, I plug in Bitcoin miners: it’s the most direct way to turn energy into money. Most other ways are much more convoluted; you have to put a textile mill or a car in between.”

“If we’re able to produce more energy, people who have never had electricity or running water will potentially have access to what we consider basic human necessities.”

“Coal isn’t that cheap compared to other sources. By our estimates, Bitcoin mining is most likely done with something like 60% renewable energy.”

“E-waste is a real criticism of Bitcoin mining, though the mining machines have started lasting a lot longer.”

“I do understand when people say we should reduce the block size, but I think the economic value the Bitcoin chain would gain outweighs the cost.”

“Nobody intended for inscriptions specifically to be a thing.”

“Getting through the summer of 2020 was dire. In March, April and May of 2020, I was worried for crypto, but I was also worried for the world.”

“There’s a new wave of people looking into what Bitcoin can do, and they figure out that it’s more economical, and makes more sense from a security point of view, to do it on Bitcoin.”

“We’re starting to see that the US having very strong property rights is one of the reasons why people are coming to the US.”

“More than five machines starts to become difficult, because your home’s infrastructure most likely doesn’t have the capacity for that. Five machines take 20 kilowatts.”

“My day job was in IT security, and it had nothing to do with Bitcoin. I was running the server stuff for myself and for others to use.”

“It was somehow connected to the price: the price was going higher, there was more Bitcoin activity, and I said: you should do it now, you should quit.”

“I can tell you a thousand times that I’m not selling the data and I don’t keep long log files.”

“You can’t prove that the version running on the servers is actually the version on GitHub. That has something to do with reproducible builds.”

“Fee estimation is basically figuring out what’s coming in the future, and without a time machine, that’s not possible.”

“If you just want to run a node, maybe not. But if you want to learn something, I think it’s an awesome starting point.”

“If somebody asks me how to start with Lightning, I don’t say you need to set up your own node. There are non-custodial Lightning wallets that you can use on your phone.”

“It could be the same on Bitcoin as with email: a few major providers that many people use, like Gmail, and then privacy-focused providers.”

“People spend two or three years of their life writing something so they can receive emails without having to trust somebody else.”

“I’m not saying everyone needs to set up their own node, but it seems that a huge number of people are running one already.”

“We kept adding features and got busy. We’re not a factory, and we needed more people for development, so we gradually grew from three or four people to just over 60 people today.”

“A Bitcoin ATM makes sense, because getting money in and out of exchanges is usually more difficult in countries where the banking system isn’t as efficient. For a long time, there will be demand for them.”

“Fiat cash is important, but it also means the banking system is lacking. Lots of people send money back to their home country, and instead of being forced to use an expensive service like Western Union, they can opt to buy Bitcoin.”

“In some US states, selling Bitcoin through an ATM requires you to register as a money transmitter, with all those regulations. In others, you can sell Bitcoin from your own wallet using your ATM.”

“It always happens on a Friday. We’re working nonstop, and we’re still looking at the damage caused by this attack.”

“There is always a node somewhere near you when you’re using Bitcoin, but for practical reasons it might not be in the ATM itself.”

“A Lightning node should be always online and always available, so it’s better to run your Lightning nodes from your own data center.”

“We were one of the first ATM manufacturers to support Lightning on the ATMs.”

“Bitcoin will never get a lot of demand if it scares people. We need to work towards explaining it and making it easy for people to get into Bitcoin; otherwise, it’s just a toy for nerds.”

“If you can find a company that will do cash transport for you, that usually means you can focus on growing the business.”

“I just want Lightning to grow more, because that means it’ll be even harder to stop.”

“Most users should probably use a Lightning wallet on their phone, a private Lightning node, instead of being a routing node in the network.”

“Bitcoin was never perfect; you cannot write software that is perfect. Its design, with proof of work and the blockchain, is sound and correct, but it did not fix all the problems from the beginning.”

“I think we should still pursue soft forks and upgrades to Bitcoin.”

“When Satoshi put out Bitcoin, it was not perfect, because it couldn’t be. Satoshi primarily focused on fixing the double-spending problem.”

“I think this is also Satoshi’s fault, because he’s the one who described mining in the white paper as finding gold.”

“Back in 2014, the general opinion was that if altcoins had something of value, Bitcoin should soft-fork it in as well.”

“Zero-conf transactions are dead now. We shouldn’t pretend they work; in the long run, we need to move to Lightning, because then you have final confirmation.”

“It’s aligned with the Bitcoin maximalism that I hold: I think it’s better that people use Bitcoin and pay transaction fees to the miners than use some kind of shitcoin instead.”

“There are a lot of things that will improve, because software is rarely finished. Software always evolves.”

“Of course it’s a challenge to get 10,000 people in one place for a Bitcoin event.”

“Who are these people? It’s the whole spectrum: students, regular people from the streets, people who like privacy, people who like freedom, and a lot of beginners.”

“In the last month before the conference, it’s full time. It’s a job only for crazy people, because you don’t get much rest.”

“Bitcoiners are usually not really impressed by numbers. They say: okay, 10,000 people, but who’s coming?”

“When you see it with your own eyes, you get the conviction that it’s a real thing, and you stack sats much harder than if you just watch YouTube videos.”

“I believe it’s time for bitcoiners to step out of their comfort zone and actually start working for Bitcoin, not just be users.”

“The cheapest ticket is only nine euros, so it’s very affordable. That’s one of the reasons we believe we can get so many people: most retail newcomers don’t have the conviction yet to pay much more.”

“This event is freedom- and liberty-focused, and I would say it’s like 30, 35, maybe 40% girls here. It’s a really good vibe.”

“He was trying so hard to convince me to move to Paraguay.”

“If you’re serious about Bitcoin, you’re looking for a job, you’re a developer, or you just want to meet important and interesting people in the ecosystem and have time and space to chat with them, it’s probably best to buy the industry ticket.”

“Even 10 years ago, especially in Poland, there was this view that freedom-oriented people are just young boys, and there’s no one else there. I’m very glad that it’s slowly changing.”

“Diversity of lives, appearances and genders helps us reach more people.”

“Of course we have our boyfriends or girlfriends as well, but it doesn’t mean that we are here because of them.”

“We’re bringing speakers from Ukraine, because one of the ideas is to show how Bitcoin could be used in Ukraine after the war to gain more economic freedom.”

“When you don’t have proper role models, or a big representation of other women from different countries, it’s necessary to communicate the ideas of freedom that Bitcoin gives to beginners.”

“Hawala works like this: you give money to a trusted person in one country, that person sends a message to someone in the country where your family lives, and your family picks up the money.”

“Talking about Bitcoin really will help us get out of a financial system that is messing with our savings. I don’t own any Bitcoin yet, but it’s certainly in the back of my head for when I start to accumulate more assets.”

“At some point, we shouldn’t need Bitcoin film festivals, just like we don’t have fiat currency film festivals or gold film festivals, because we already know what to do with them and how they work.”

“My last Bitcoin conference, I actually went as a girlfriend: my boyfriend was presenting a talk, and he won best talk.”

“The reason I decided to bring LOLA to Poland was that I felt alone in the movement.”

“Most of our effort went into the first two batches of Avalons, in December 2012 and, I think, June 2013.”

“It was maybe a year, or half a year, from GPUs to FPGAs. People started working on FPGAs so fast.”

“We went from hobbyists mining in their apartments to guys going to power plants to get better deals on electricity.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to put it on the Bitcoin blockchain directly, maybe with Ordinals, but even that doesn’t really scale.”

“I was always more polite than toxic. Maybe I should be toxic sometimes.”

“It’s definitely disruptive, and it should be like that. The more things we have to attract people, the more adoption we get, and adoption is always healthy.”

“Every company can create its own virtual currency in a game, control it and sell it themselves.”

“Gamers want to build their own profile in a game and be able to take it out of that game, without anybody being able to take it away.”

“I think one event won’t be enough; a couple of events in the financial world will be needed, some meltdowns.”

“In the early days, of course, we were solo mining.”

“It’s really super important to always maintain a one-to-one ratio.”

“We do it by allowing users to redeem their LN-BTC for real Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain at any time.”

“The fact that people bridge their bitcoins into Ethereum or other chains means that they seek capital efficiency.”

“I know that more hardcore bitcoiners think self-custody is the only way, but we see other people use such solutions, so we found a way to bring this Bitcoin to the Lightning Network and increase liquidity.”

“In our venture studio, we believe the Lightning Network is the next global thing. It’s meant for payments.”

“I’m very excited about the Taro and RGB protocols that will bring other assets to the Lightning Network, because I’m not sure that many retail people will treat Bitcoin as a payment method in the near future.”

“Even if Lightning fees surpass on-chain fees, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. The Lightning Network allows you to make millions of payments, which the Bitcoin base chain never will.”

“The Lightning Network was architected to be a payment network, and Tron and Ethereum were not.”

“I’m still a strong supporter of privacy. If information about what you’re paying for is stored somewhere, it’s easy for the government to go there and see what you’re doing.”

“With Lightning, it’s a different story: everybody in the Bitcoin ecosystem believes Lightning is the right way to scale.”

“This is going to be a bit controversial, but I don’t think the payment network of the future is necessarily going to run on home-hosted Raspberry Pis over Tor.”

“Tor is great, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient way for big routing nodes.”

“The network is not always slow, but sometimes it’s that slow. If you can’t reliably say this will take less than three seconds every time, it’s not really a solution people will use.”

“When more economic activity moves into Lightning, the way people connect their nodes will be significantly different, because it won’t make sense for everyone to be connected to the same 10 routing nodes.”

“Everybody has their own story about what Bitcoin means to them. I don’t think we need to orange-pill everyone to the extreme of following it as a religion. Bitcoin can be many things to many people.”

“The Lightning Network is essentially a payment rail for the entire world. For mass adoption, not everybody wants to take a deep dive for the next two years to learn everything about money.”

“We need to focus a lot on user experience and onboarding, and make Lightning as simple as possible to use. And, as another potentially controversial opinion, I don’t think everybody really needs to run their own node.”

“If you just open channels but they’re not routing anything, you’re basically taking on risk for no reward.”

“I also bought a UPS, because I know that constant power to your node is very important for uptime.”

“I can only imagine people getting into awkward situations with their baristas because of some guy in Romania running his node on Tor.”

“We’re hoping to see more non-custodial Lightning wallets enabling Lightning addresses.”

“As critical and fundamental as the technical layer of Bitcoin is, we think it’s the next layers, namely the social layer of Bitcoin, that will lead to hyperbitcoinization.”

“One illustrator from Nigeria created an incredible book called Bitcoin Kids and managed to export it all over Africa, to help educate children about what Bitcoin is.”

“Bitcoin for Fairness by Anita Posch raised around 0.8 Bitcoin. She’s doing incredible work, traveling around Africa to spread the word about Bitcoin.”

“Speaking of the cultural layer of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Trading Cards is providing Pokémon-like collectibles about Bitcoin.”

“I wish it was easier to subscribe. It would be really cool if people could subscribe to a project from the browser.”

“If you want to provide value in Bitcoin, just bring your passions and your skills together, and also think about what’s needed out there.”

“It’s easy to post a tweet and get people excited. But then you have to follow up and remind people: you like this idea, would you like to put your money where your mouth is?”

“The money gets locked up in a contract and only gets sent if the goal is achieved. That’s something we’re looking into.”

“We really are big believers, and one of our mottos is: play a part in world-changing ideas.”

“Hero of Bitcoin is a nostalgic game about an average guy who gets orange-pilled and joins the fight on the front lines for Bitcoin.”

“It’s not just about pumping our own bags, or about changing the money. It’s also about changing the culture. You can’t have better money without better culture.”

“Whenever you visit an inn, there’s a random chance a Bitcoin podcast will play, and that’s the way you heal in the game. You heal by listening to Bitcoin podcasts.”

“Honestly, when you play it on a desktop or a phone, it doesn’t feel the same as playing it on original hardware.”

“I try to make sure the controls are really similar, because it’s such a familiar game and that’s what people expect when they play on these sorts of platforms.”

“Being a one-person developer, I can’t put too many things in the game.”

“Expect a single dev working on it in his spare time; I have a job. But I think people who love the ’90s and love Bitcoin will love this game.”

“I’m trying to keep them in a positive light, because I don’t want anyone to sue me. But there will be people, such as people from the IMF, that you will recognize.”

“I’ve tested it with some of the people I turned into characters on Twitter, and people seem to get the characters right.”

“The only place you can get the demo is my Geyser page.”