Season 14 quotes

“I started working on a non-custodial, Lightning-like model to really optimize the UX for end users.”

“Liquidity is a business problem: you make money by providing the service, by providing liquidity. And a business problem is addressable, while a technical problem may not be.”

“Providing liquidity is a professional business. It should be taken care of by professionals.”

“We need on-chain privacy and off-chain privacy at the same time. I think they can coexist.”

“Assuming we had hypothetical opcodes like OP_CAT on Bitcoin, we could have Lightning-style instant settlement and instant finality assurances.”

“Lightning heavily relies on the base layer to operate. I don’t see how Lightning can onboard the whole planet.”

“I’m not a fan of the idea that Lightning will be used by the entire world in a custodial way, and I don’t like the fact that some people gave up on onboarding people non-custodially.”

“The number one reason people prefer custodial wallets is simply the superior UX: it just works. But if you make self-custody as seamless as custodial solutions, UX-wise, I think people will happily use it.”

“On Ark, you have both sender and receiver privacy, like a Chaumian mint.”

“The trade-off is offloading complexity to the service provider, which is okay, because service providers are always-online services.”

“OpenBazaar was for stuff you can buy on Amazon. What people really need is a way to convert money: a money marketplace, a peer-to-peer OTC marketplace. That solves a real problem.”

“You can’t have a free market without free payments. Bitcoin gives us the foundation, but until we get it out the door to the people on the street, it doesn’t matter. The way you do that is by making Bitcoin interoperable with all forms of existing money, which means fiat, the dirty word.”

“There are a lot of geniuses in this space. What makes this project special is that we’re actually building for real people who have a problem every day.”

“No one wants to be their own bank. When you think about it, money is something that should bring comfort: my money is safe there.”

“I partially disagree with the statement that nobody wants to be their own bank because it’s too frightening.”

“Lightning as it is is quite hard for unsophisticated users. I think we all accept that Wallet of Satoshi is probably the most successful Lightning wallet out there.”

“The initial release is all going to be based on Lightning, but people will be able to use their own Lightning wallet.”

“Bitcoin is bigger than all of that. We have this massive community of true believers that will always hold the line. Humanity doesn’t have that anywhere else.”

“People who make great content and don’t get compensated for it: that’s a problem.”

“If you guys don’t want to KYC and don’t care who each other are, it’s fine. No one has to show any form of ID.”

“We’re seeing the market get more mature: more and more people in the world want to do self-custody, and want to do it with hardware wallets.”

“Self-custody equals security multiplied by privacy multiplied by usability. Those are the three key pillars of self-custody.”

“We saw Wasabi as a strong partner because they have a lot of users. They provide liquidity for the coins, which is very important, because privacy is enhanced by the number of users joining the coinjoins.”

“It’s not going to be cheaper than the Model One, but it’s still an accessible entry point into the self-custody market.”

“It’s a huge market and a huge opportunity for us as a company to really explain why self-custody is important and why people should care.”

“Of course, we take security super seriously.”

“For the open-source chip, we will probably have to wait another two years.”

“We want to design products in a way that they’re easy to use and you don’t have to explain them.”

“There are always new threats and new things we can improve, of course.”

“Public speaking is not the best talent I have, but I’m trying, because I think it’s important for the company.”

“We’re a very significant percentage of the commercial activity on the Lightning Network as a whole. But it’s still a fact that 80 to 90% of Bitcoin users today are not using Lightning, and I wish it wasn’t so.”

“There’s an order of magnitude more people paying on-chain with zero confirmations than paying with Lightning. Again, I wish it wasn’t so; I’ve been pushing Lightning as hard as I can.”

“This is very important: Bitcoin blocks are unpredictable, even in normal times.”

“I don’t think it’s good or bad. The question is: people are using Bitcoin a certain way. Should we break it?”

“I don’t want to say we’re breaking it. I would say we are fixing a big problem.”

“File download sites have been supporting Bitcoin for years, and I’ve never seen any of them that allowed me to get a service for on-chain Bitcoin without a confirmation.”

“I’ve never actually run into a merchant on CoinGate that accepted zero-conf.”

“My desired outcome for Bitcoin is for many people to be using Bitcoin. It breaks my heart to see things that work reliably and well being broken for a noble cause, to stop an exploit that is not happening.”

“Wallets added the option to turn RBF off precisely because they were getting support calls from people.”

“It just hadn’t been mined for two weeks, and I hadn’t noticed because I use that wallet so rarely.”

“Our minds are usually five or ten years in the future, imagining people using the things we’re building. That’s partly the success of Nostr: Bitcoin developers are very used to thinking about a new fringe protocol as if it’s already widely used.”

“Anyone who builds a Lightning solution directly on top of a node is probably going to have a dozen vulnerabilities.”

“I want more ways for people to send value on Nostr, because Nostr isn’t Bitcoin, even though they go very well together.”

“The momentum in the Nostr ecosystem and in free and open-source projects is absolutely huge. That’s really where my interest lies.”

“I’m on neither side of that debate, really. I just think that whoever is using Bitcoin in the future will have interests different from ours right now.”

“I thought it was really interesting that lots of people were using Xcamtica, a cam website that used on-chain Bitcoin, not Lightning.”

“I need to work on this, because I keep instinctively rejecting the AI stuff and how important it will be with Bitcoin.”

“Maybe I’m not bullish enough, but I don’t think we’re going to do another 10x from here.”

“People give WordPress a lot of stick because it’s PHP or whatever.”

“We’re in the future, aren’t we? Bitcoiners are always building for the people who will be using these things five or ten years from now.”

“There’s a philosophical debate there: what is Bitcoin meant for? I would argue Bitcoin has had many identities.”

“Data has been encoded on the blockchain in one form or another since about 2010; it has always been possible.”

“We have been teaching people that Bitcoin is decentralized, permissionless and for enemies. But when someone uses Bitcoin in a way we don’t like, we come out and say: you’re not supposed to use Bitcoin like that.”

“Some people feel entitled to tell you how you can and cannot use Bitcoin.”

“Ultimately, it is a fee market. Some people are going to be left out, but this is how the system was designed, and there’s no way around it.”

“People have this idea that Bitcoin is for everyone. It’s more like Bitcoin is for anyone.”

“We’re stress-testing it. Honestly, if JPEGs are what breaks Bitcoin, not state actors, then the experiment has failed. I think Bitcoin is more resilient than that.”

“If you want to say that I’m attacking Bitcoin, I’ll wear that. Bitcoin needs a villain, and I’m happy to be the villain.”

“I don’t believe I’m attacking Bitcoin. I believe Stamps is a valid use case.”

“People are using Bitcoin, and we’ve brought in many people from other networks.”

“Bitcoin applications often need to be fast, because they have to parse the whole chain, and secure, because you don’t want to lose your sats or your privacy. Rust has properties that make this much easier.”

“Rust didn’t exist at the time. I believe that if Satoshi developed Bitcoin today, he would choose Rust, because it tries to achieve the speed of C and C++.”

“Coins with a very low hash rate, like Ethereum Classic, got double-spent. If Bitcoin had low fees all the time, we would probably have the same problem, maybe a bigger one, because Bitcoin is a juicier target.”

“In both cases you have multiple parties, and if they cooperate, they could steal. It’s pretty much similar security.”

“I don’t think we should increase the block size more, because it’s not really needed. We should focus more on optimizations: Lightning on Taproot, channel factories and other similar ideas.”

“I think people should be free to transact with anyone. I come from Slovakia, a country that was plagued by communist propaganda and a communist regime for about 40 years.”

“Communism destroyed so many lives here. They literally tortured people to death.”

“Besides smuggling information, there’s smuggling money, because free markets help people. Any way people could bypass the government under these regimes helped them tremendously, and with Bitcoin and privacy tech, we can help them even more.”

“First, it’s a UX issue, because the borrower has to do an additional step. Second, the borrower has to hold the keys all the time, and the key must not be compromised.”

“I have a proposal, which I haven’t published, to make channel factories more private, so that the members of a channel factory don’t know how much each other has.”

“On the blockchain, there are as many different addresses as there are people in the same instance of the mix, so at that level an external observer can’t tell there’s a DMix in place.”

“Exchanges are entities that benefit a lot from privacy. They have a lot of liquidity, and they don’t want their competitors to know how much they own and what they’re doing with their coins.”

“You can’t have the best privacy, because privacy has three parts: amount hiding, unlinkability and untraceability.”

“Privacy is a multi-dimensional problem, and it’s difficult to say something has more or less privacy if we treat privacy as a whole.”

“Ring signatures have some problems too, which is why it’s difficult to compare privacy between Monero and Bitcoin.”

“We know Rust is more secure on many levels, so at least the backend will be written in Rust, and it will be attached to Bitcoin Core.”

“Criticism is much needed, especially on the usability or the cryptographic part. I don’t believe in security through obscurity; I think nobody believes in that anymore.”

“If you’re the only one in town using Schnorr signatures, you’re identifiable.”

“Bitcoin is not very fungible, and one way to make it more fungible is to use a mix.”

“At the beginning, we’ll go with a solution where people can just click a button and do a remix with people they know.”

“A lot of people misunderstand the timeline of Casa: in 2018, we actually launched with our multisig self-custody product.”

“The idea was Casa as a full-stack self-sovereignty service, and I think we did successfully make it a lot easier for people to run Bitcoin and Lightning nodes, especially back then.”

“Running nodes, especially Lightning, with all the complexities around channel management, can be overwhelming for people. We were trying to bring our ethos of improving usability to Bitcoin tooling.”

“In the early days, there was Bitcoin and then there were just altcoins. For the first few years, all of the altcoins were literal copy-paste clones of the Bitcoin repository, just tweaking a parameter or two.”

“This is a space of permissionless innovation, and people are going to demand functionality that probably shouldn’t be on Bitcoin, and that’s okay. If you don’t want that stuff on Bitcoin, it seems kind of silly to yell at people for doing it on other networks.”

“I try not to be the enemy, but it’s pretty much inevitable: whenever a large enough number of people pay attention to you, someone will find reasons to declare you an enemy.”

“As I was leaving, BitGo had already spent a year or two ramping up on the legal side to also offer full custody services.”

“Gamers were blaming Bitcoin, which was stupid, because nobody mines Bitcoin with GPUs anymore.”

“I have a multifaceted approach to Bitcoin privacy, depending on my needs.”

“There are so many different kinds of staking out there, and staking is not always the same type of thing.”

“Bitcoiners have this view that in the future, Bitcoin will be the only thing there is.”

“I don’t think it’s fair, but he can hold that as his own opinion. The idea is that each individual person should be pushing the envelope.”

“People doing sensitive, subversive or political things, like privacy activists, should maybe only use the privacy sidechain, and not something with a public ledger.”

“Most people actually obey the rules as long as one important condition is met: they don’t look around and see other people breaking the rules.”

“It does the same thing Bitcoin Cash did: everyone who upgraded ends up on their own network, which is not good, because you always have a lot of indifferent people.”

“Greg Maxwell really knew everything about Ethereum in 2014. Today, the elite Bitcoin intelligentsia purposefully avoid looking at Ethereum, so we’re flying completely blind: you don’t know if someone has a really great idea somewhere, because you’re not looking.”

“I think Mark Twain or someone said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting on its shoes.”

“Alex B is determined to destroy my reputation. I don’t think he’s succeeding.”

“No one is honestly benefiting from it being distorted, especially because it’s a hash: you can’t change it a little bit.”

“Since Bitcoin would be the only vessel that can receive that value, it will all end up as BTC.”

“People will run a native app on their phone or desktop and pair it with a BTCPay Server hosted by somebody else, so ambassadors can help people accept Bitcoin without becoming custodial Lightning providers.”

“Before, people were trusting the central server for everything. We could have rugged everyone. That’s the problem we want to remove.”

“Baltic Honeybadger is a community gathering, a family gathering, that we’ve been doing since 2017.”

“The network is interoperable: if you’re running a Lightning node and somebody else is running one, you should be able to open a channel, regardless of whether it’s a huge node or a small one. That’s the most important part.”

“When fees go up, people start closing channels. It’s natural for things to form this way. Roger Ver was right: we did end up with a hub-and-spoke model. And that’s okay, as long as you can circumvent censorship.”

“We had payments of 500 or 600 euros going through Lightning without any problems, which is really impressive, because in 2019 a payment of over 20 euros would always fail.”

“It doesn’t feel like a conference. It really feels like you’re within a circle of friends.”

“If you remember us trying to pay with Lightning wallets back then, it always caused some amount of stress.”

“We’re sticking to our mission of helping people accept Bitcoin payments, but if users want to use other projects, we can let them enter those ecosystems easily.”

“You don’t have a Lightning node on your phone, so we’re going to take that approach and add it natively to an application on the device, which is going to be running LDK.”

“Even in the Bitcoin community, some very hardcore bitcoiners don’t use Lightning. They think Lightning is not perfect and not reliable.”

“If you want to do it without KYC, it’s better to do it with the Bitcoin people you know. They can exchange Bitcoin for you, and it’s all private.”

“Don’t put all your money into one thing. Less technical users, who don’t like holding Bitcoin in their own wallet, may need a spot Bitcoin ETF.”

“Lightning is not necessary, but it’s good to explore, because it’s a second layer that makes transaction fees cheaper. If you have a very small amount of Bitcoin, it’s good to keep it on Lightning.”

“Licensed crypto exchanges in Hong Kong mostly exchange fiat money on their trading platforms, so the Bitcoin scene here is less affected by the US.”

“Hong Kong has to have its own Bitcoin or crypto ecosystem, so that it can attract investors and people.”

“Freedom of speech and the freedom to express your opinion are very important for everyone, especially for people who love Bitcoin, because they value the freedom Bitcoin gives them.”

“Other than political freedom, you have freedom of speech and the freedom of property ownership, including Bitcoin. The free flow of information is very important.”

“Bitcoin mining is the way to connect to green energy.”

“Although electricity isn’t very expensive in Hong Kong, the electricity company has no plan to offer wholesale electricity to large-scale Bitcoin miners.”

“Miners have invested an enormous amount of money. They are very serious people, and they want Bitcoin to succeed.”

“The way I see it, we want users and we want popularity. When Mt. Gox was hacked, everyone thought Bitcoin was hacked; people always think Bitcoin was hacked.”

“I understand the desire to scam-bust: you like Bitcoin, then you see these other projects with none of the depth Bitcoin had, and you don’t like them getting money.”

“I think all of that is just cope. They secretly wish it was on Bitcoin, or that Ethereum had never been invented.”

“‘Miners can steal’ is by far the worst argument, because miners can steal from the Lightning Network more easily than they can from a drivechain.”

“The large blockers today are the custodial Lightning people and the compliance people, which is kind of ironic, because they would never believe that they are.”

“Between the two of them, throwing computers at the problem is just so much cheaper.”

“The point is that the actual Bitcoin system is not aware of the side system.”

“The problem is that miners are under no obligation to follow any kind of logic like this.”

“The problem is that we all want different things, and that will never stop being true.”

“We never had a decentralized, open platform with native payments integrated. Payments always had to be closed, on the same platform; they couldn’t be open and interoperable. That was always missing until Nostr.”

“People don’t wake up in the morning and say: I want some sound money in my life. A lot of people come to Bitcoin because number go up.”

“Now we know people like zaps, and it’s exciting. The question is how we make it easier, so that more wallets support it and more of it is self-custodial.”

“This has been a big discussion: you can’t fully make that work unless the other side is online all the time to receive the payment.”

“Generally, I think having options is great, and it’s important.”

“Ultimately, I think Lightning should be integrated directly into the operating system, just like we integrated it into the browser.”

“Projects closer to the user, at the application layer, are a really good way to get started with Lightning development.”

“As with any open-source project, there are so many ways to contribute, and some are super simple contributions that everybody can make if they’re interested.”

“As a developer, you don’t need to sign up for an account with some acquirer or card payment processor.”

“Once you download it, there is no connection to any server.”

“My motivation for making PGP open source was not the usual reason people make their software open source.”

“I never had any ideas about doing cryptocurrencies; that wasn’t my focus. I was just focused on privacy technologies. My biggest interest after PGP was secure telephony.”

“Many years have passed, and I’m kind of disappointed to see so much criminality in the environment around Bitcoin, and thousands of cryptocurrencies.”

“David Chaum likes to patent his ideas. His blinded signatures and e-cash ideas that preceded Bitcoin were clever, but they never got much traction in the marketplace, because they were encumbered by patents.”

“I put my attention on personal communication protocols, to have privacy and encryption both for email and for telephony.”

“I think Bitcoin is a very clever protocol, and I have enormous respect for the guy who invented it.” (at 27:43)”

“Think about the terrible tragedy of people losing their Bitcoin wallets because they forgot their keys or passphrase, like that guy in the UK who lost millions of dollars in a landfill because it was on a disk drive.”

“I would like to do more, but I don’t think I’m going to be doing a cryptocurrency.”

“Microsoft had a project called Penny Black, named after the first postage stamp, issued in England almost two centuries ago.”

“While we’re waiting for that to happen, we should have end-to-end encryption, for national security reasons.”

“We always need both sides of this trade: super bullish people, and people who are not super bullish to take the other side. If you only talk to hardcore bitcoiners, they’re always super bullish.”

“We definitely have a culture issue, if not multiple. We don’t welcome any other token on Bitcoin.”

“People say you should never use Bitcoin for trading, but trading is a very important part of this economy. If you don’t have trading on Bitcoin, it’s going to happen somewhere else, because people want to trade.”

“If you never spend any Bitcoin, it just means you have too much fiat, which means you’re short Bitcoin. You’re not bullish enough.”

“With this approach, you can buy $100 worth of the stablecoin. You’re on Bitcoin, you’re on Lightning, you can transact on Lightning, and when the time is right, you exchange part of the stablecoin into Bitcoin.”

“At least it encourages you to do something with your life, as opposed to just sitting on your bag and waiting for a price target that may never come.”

“The price movement is just a side effect. The cypherpunks weren’t really interested in free-market money; they just wanted to make payments, for example to someone running a remailer for privacy.”

“Building on Bitcoin is really hard, and it takes a long time. And everyone has the traction problem: whenever you build something, you have to get people to use it. Better to build something people want.”

“It’s a synthetic stablecoin without a token: there’s no token you send around, so you don’t have to trust anyone.”

“I don’t think HODLing is a big issue, because at some point you will have to use your Bitcoin.”

“The reasons for promoting Bitcoin in Argentina are the same as in Bolivia, Ecuador or any other country in the Americas: we believe Bitcoin is a revolution, and everyone has the right and the need to understand it.”

“Using Bitcoin shouldn’t be something you follow just because of power. You do things because you need them.”

“We don’t care about any government. We only care about Bitcoin being free, no matter what people say or what governments say.”

“It’s not that Bitcoin is a revolution, or that blockchain is a revolution. We need a revolution to defend Bitcoin’s pillars and philosophy, and the freedom of people.”

“I think there’s no better place to be this year than Argentina if you’re in the Bitcoin space. It’s where you can see why Bitcoin exists.”

“Media is entertainment. It’s not information.”

“The FUD about Bitcoin only handling six transactions per second is not realistic, because we have Lightning.”

“My plan is to onboard the next billion people, and it’s so useful for the average person to be more educated about Bitcoin.”

“It’s the only way to survive, because you can’t buy dollars at a regular market price.”

“It’s really fun, because every single year, for the last six events, I’ve said this is my last year.”

“People want to be their own bank more than they want to be their own web server.”

“You have to think of ecash as a separate thing that found its reason to exist in Bitcoin. Ecash itself is a cryptographic primitive: a blind signature.”

“That doesn’t count as Bitcoin adoption to me, because I see Bitcoin as being the money use case.”

“If you’re a stacker who does one Bitcoin transaction per month just to save, then Bitcoin can probably scale to a very large number of people already today.”

“I’m very optimistic about these changes, because they tackle real problems that we already observe.”

“Ethereum was the experiment, and Bitcoin is going to be the base layer that integrates some of that functionality.”

“I only slightly disagree with Lisa: it’s true that we don’t know the shape of the solution, but we know what the problem is.”

“Can you run the Lightning node in your phone wallet if you can’t run an LSP? Sometimes the infrastructure is closed while the wallet is open source.”

“You can say they’re 100% degens and they’re never going to use Bitcoin properly, whatever that means.”

“Bitcoin is the only currency they can use in many situations.”

“People usually look at Bitcoin as a store of value or a payment system, because it has very good attributes for both. We’re bringing a new use case into the game.”

“We are not advocating fiat in any sense; quite the contrary. It may make sense for a lot of people to create liabilities in fiat, to be effectively short fiat.”

“It’s very important to understand that Firefish is not the provider of the loan.”

“We had cases where people wanted to invest in startups. They had an important portion of their assets in Bitcoin, and they never wanted to sell, because they believed Bitcoin would appreciate.”

“When you borrow fiat, you benefit from the erosion of the fiat currency’s purchasing power. I think it might be a wise decision for many of us.”

“We have people around us who don’t own Bitcoin and never touched anything crypto, but they provide liquidity for these loans because they understood how Bitcoin works.”

“The code is open source because it’s part of our security proposition.”

“You can take fiat without selling your Bitcoin, so you don’t have to pay capital gains tax.”

“Not all bitcoiners appreciate that they’re sitting on an asset that has more value than just its capital appreciation.”

“Use your Bitcoin as collateral, get the money, and pay it back with interest, which is usually lower than the inflation rate, or the capital appreciation.”

“The joke that it’s Tinder for bitcoiners is quite accurate, with one difference: on Vexl, you can trade only with people from your social circle.”

“You usually settle the trade via bank transfer, and you can never know who you’re connected with, or where this person got their funds from.”

“Vexl basically serves as a social network. In your social circle, there are probably people who want to buy or sell Bitcoin; you just never meet. We solve that discovery problem.”

“It’s a kind of paradox: the European Union is kind of helping us, because they ordered Apple to allow sideloading.”

“You can either buy Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin, nothing else. There will never be a dropdown where you can choose other shitcoins.”

“How did it become normal to hand over bills, passports and all this personal data to people you’ve never met, who then have complete power over it?”

“Peer-to-peer and no KYC is the only way you can use Bitcoin with all the benefits it brings.”

“We didn’t expect that hostility from a corporation that was once a proponent of privacy and security.”

“The fact that we are normalizing these practices makes me so sad. I just can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“As I explained, Vexl is not global but local, and that’s not a bug.”

“Elections are a very important type of information that people need certainty and transparency on. But this can be used for other public documents too: intellectual property, the justice system, freedom of information requests, digital evidence.”

“It wasn’t just the technology itself, but the validation that the Bitcoin community, and regular people who know something about Bitcoin, gave to it. People trust Bitcoin’s primitives: you can’t reverse transactions.”

“The response from the Bitcoin community has been great. It’s incredible how interested bitcoiners are in this.”

“Timestamps are a boring thing that people don’t think about when they think about money. But I think it proved that Bitcoin can be used in an official manner by a government.”

“If there’s no law for it, people don’t want to touch it. Not because they think it’s for criminals, but because they’re concerned about the consequences.”

“I don’t want to be mean about the whole situation in El Salvador, but I wasn’t a fan, specifically because of the way it was introduced.”

“I think searching for the truth is going to be one of the biggest challenges for people.”

“I think timestamping, combined with PGP and digital signatures, will be the way for a person to certify what the truth is.”

“If you think about it, in 10 years I don’t think we’ll be able to tell the difference between an AI-generated image or text and a real one.”

“It’s always a choice of the lesser evil; you never get to choose who you want.”