Season 15 quotes

“I think in the long run, Bitcoin wallets have a great opportunity to offer a more holistic user journey: acquiring your first Bitcoin, earning it, and then spending it.”

“The problem with that approach is that we have hundreds of users in different countries, on different computers, who would need to coordinate on signing the transaction together.”

“We also deal with fiat customers, and sometimes it’s really mind-blowingly shocking how fiat corrupts the mind in this regard.”

“I think in a free city powered by coinjoins and capitalism, freedom will be the standard option, and the cheapest one, of course.”

“That’s the beauty of Bitcoin: it allows the free market back into the real world, instead of leaving it as a historical footnote about some weird Austrian guys who wanted to tell us about free markets.”

“Something very cool about these payments is that you cannot really prove that the coins belong to the person who received the goods.”

“There are also a lot of services you can get on Shopinbit where information about who made the purchase is not necessarily required.”

“It will be possible in the future, but we can’t do it with the first iteration of the Buy Anything button.”

“We can handle thousands of users, even hundreds of thousands of users.”

“The coinjoin coordinator is currently a combination of a backend for the actual coinjoin coordination and things like Bitcoin block filters and the US dollar exchange rate.”

“The idea of a watchtower in general is someone who may act on your behalf when you are not connected to the network.”

“You don’t have to run a watchtower for anyone else; you can run your watchtower for yourself.”

“I don’t think the replacement cycling attack is as severe as some people think. It’s fundamental to how Lightning works, but we haven’t seen Lightning stop working since it was released.”

“The idea behind SimLN is: if you have a project, like a Lightning implementation or something built on top of Lightning, and you need to simulate activity on Lightning, it’s perfect for you.”

“What I’m trying to do is harden the peer-to-peer network for Bitcoin.”

“In the end, the robustness of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network improves the robustness of the whole node’s codebase.”

“In principle, the idea of privacy between exchanges is good, but exchanges have figured out a way to take advantage of the openness of the Bitcoin ledger.”

“We build it all in Rust, by the way, as it should be.”

“If we don’t offer something the end user wants, and that requires running your own node, there’s no real reason for them to do it.”

“It’s not something that end users use that much. Corporations may use it, but not the average Bitcoin user.”

“This is a better form of the dollar: one that isn’t dollars in the banks.”

“I started thinking about the idea of beginning to contribute to Bitcoin Core.”

“What they always tell you when you begin contributing is to do code reviews, because there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of pull requests that need to be merged.”

“The other implementations are not Bitcoin Core. They are Bitcoin nodes, and there are several of them.”

“The ideas that Bitcoin brought to the world are here to stay, forever.”

“The Argentinians who can save have always saved in US dollars, because it’s a stronger currency than ours.”

“Argentina has always had a lot of economic and currency problems.”

“Here in Argentina, there’s a big crypto community that’s not Bitcoin: a lot of Web3, Ethereum and so on.”

“It’s a starting point for people in the community, a way to try to convert them into bitcoiners.”

“I taught myself to program software when I was nine.”

“There’s more and more investment in privacy tech. That means investors have the feeling there’s actually a return they can get here.”

“People have a very bad understanding of what privacy is, but it’s not their fault, because that’s what they were told.”

“The easiest way to use the internet is to not have any privacy at all.”

“You move into a mode where you’re always hiding, and you’re not free if you have to hide all the time.”

“If we really want citizens to be respected by the government in a digital society, the government should have no data on the citizen.”

“All the money, all the effort, all the services the government provides should go towards privacy-friendly things.”

“We believe that privacy will be a key element of the decentralized world.”

“This is data that is not going to go away.”

“Bitcoin is a net positive for the environment, incentivizing the development and use of renewable energy, because that’s the most sustainable way to get electricity for mining.”

“I’m convinced this is the right path we need to take, and that we are playing a role in it.”

“For us to benefit fully from Bitcoin, to secure it more and to achieve everything Bitcoin can achieve, we need to be able to use Bitcoin without going through intermediaries.”

“I mostly use Sovryn myself to borrow against Bitcoin, so that I never have to sell Bitcoin.”

“We’re merge-mined with Bitcoin, but we don’t have 100% merge mining, so it’s not the same security.”

“Over time, the primary stablecoin on Sovryn is becoming a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin called the Sovryn Dollar.”

“Bitcoin orthodoxy, this whole laser-eyes maxi idea that the only thing you should do with Bitcoin is HODL it, is insane in my eyes.”

“We need to get out of this idea that Bitcoin is digital gold.”

“We need to build things like Bitcoin-backed stablecoins, because that’s how Bitcoin becomes money.”

“At its core, a constitution means that the majority cannot overturn its principles.”

“The other problem with multisig systems of this kind is censorship attacks.”

“It’s more secure than pretty much anything else that’s not on Bitcoin.”

“I don’t know what the next Bitcoin soft fork is going to be, but if I could vote, which I don’t because I’m not a Core developer, I would vote for CTV.”

“That’s the beauty of it: once you implement something, it has to be super elegant, but at the same time it has to solve a real problem the community agrees on.”

“I’m probably on the more critical side of ZK rollups for Bitcoin, given the challenges, since we’d need to fork an opcode into Bitcoin.”

“In the wake of the block size wars, extension blocks were frowned upon by Core developers.”

“Improvements to Mimblewimble have been proposed since then, to keep improving the privacy of the protocol.”

“In the short or mid term, they’re just freeloading on the security that others pay for. The block reward is diminishing, and it’s basically inflation that’s paying the miners right now.”

“I came to Bitcoin through my desire to find a better money than fiat, to find free-market money.”

“We should do everything we can to enable as many people as possible to truly self-custody their BTC.”

“You don’t have to add five new opcodes or five sidechains. You could add one, and it would make a lot of people happy.”

“You’ve saved all of that space in the blockchain, which means you can fit more transactions into a block.”

“If you have to make assumptions to create a truly decentralized bridge, then let’s try to find more realistic, practical, pragmatic and secure assumptions.”

“I think the biggest bet Satoshi made was that the halving cycles would be sustainable for the network, and that fees would make up for the diminishing coinbase reward.”

“Rootstock is basically a more secure version of Ethereum, secured by Bitcoin miners: more than 50% of them also merge-mine Rootstock.”

“A year later, Ethereum came along, and Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation contacted me to do the first security and design review of Ethereum.”

“I think it was very important to have a decentralized stablecoin on Rootstock.”

“Satoshi turned off his mining machines for a few minutes after mining a block, just to make sure others had the opportunity to mine blocks.”

“If someone never moves their funds, those funds will be in trouble, and I wonder what we should do with Satoshi’s addresses in that case.”

“I also wanted to add new properties, and one that wasn’t known at the time was dropout tolerance, which means any participant could drop out of the poker game.”

“I tried to make it as positive as possible, so future generations understand that if you are going to create Bitcoin, you need to maintain its security in the beginning.”

“I think we probably need to move to something quantum-safe.”

“This is the very first time something that can be considered a commodity, hash power, can be bought and sold on a global decentralized market, and actually delivered through decentralized infrastructure.”

“I think it’s important for Bitcoin to remain proof of work. It’s possibly the perfect marriage: a blockchain secured by proof of work, plus all the cryptographic breakthroughs used in Bitcoin.”

“Long-term security, and the centralization risks around the initial distributors of the token, are huge problems in the proof-of-stake model.”

“We quickly found out that we were outclassed in Bitcoin mining.”

“No one wanted to release a coin with the SHA-256 or Scrypt algorithm, because they would immediately get wrecked by the difficulty swings.”

“You have to get on the Ethereum network, buy a token and deploy a smart contract to be able to rent hash rate on the Bitcoin network.”

“At least they don’t have to worry about the hardware race.”

“The problem is that, at the end of the day, all these devices are more affordable to manufacture in China.”

“That’s what I believe Bitcoin’s all about, and that’s what we support at Lumerin.”

“The idea of pooled mining came about very, very quickly.”

“One person working on Bitcoin in a 700-employee company is not great.”

“Three people organizing a massive conference is just not really reasonable.”

“Bitcoin wasn’t built to be perfect, and it can’t be. The 51% limit is known and can’t be improved: as long as 51% of the miners are honest, we’re fine.”

“The idea of Breaking Bitcoin was that there were already a lot of Bitcoin conferences, but they were very much focused on shilling Bitcoin, not talking about Bitcoin.”

“These kinds of tweets are really good for making people think and argue deeply, so it’s good for Bitcoin.”

“I think people expect too much from these bull markets.”

“The interesting part about this situation is that Ledger is still the market leader.”

“The problem is that you’re basically sharing your private key with other people.”

“You cannot really predict the fees in the future.”

“Bitcoin Script is currently pretty much like assembly language for computers.”

“Bitcoin is such an interesting thing, because it’s almost like a new form of life that started to live.”

“Much of that shaped Bitcoin culture, and many of these narratives were taken up by young people who discovered this new form of money.”

“The point is that you can’t beat something original that grew organically and has an actual user base.”

“The Bitcoin standard is going to be the only way to go, I think.”

“It’s not decided what layer two is going to be, and maybe there will be multiple layer twos to make Bitcoin work.”

“Honestly, I think this is the beginning of a new renaissance.”

“That’s how governments have grown: because of their ability to print money, they can suck more money out of the economy than ever before in history.”

“As the competition grows, they may find that they have to adapt to survive.”

“You’re opening the floodgates to something you can’t even comprehend.”

“It’s not like there’s always a battle of ideas and the best ones win.”

“With all these additional characters, we had less and less screen time for Bitcoin and the main characters, and we wanted to get back more in the direction of a sitcom.”

“We need money to produce this, and Bitcoin companies are not stepping up.”

“We need a budget, we need money to pay people, because I don’t have the time to animate everything.”

“We need to be out there, interfacing with non-bitcoiners.”

“That’s never going to stop. People are always going to gamble.”

“There’s a side of me that’s always thinking about the worst-case scenario.”

“Maybe a couple hundred million people have Bitcoin, and maybe 10% of them are well educated about it, so five or ten million people. And maybe 10% of those would be into a cartoon about Bitcoin.”

“In Bitcoin & Friends, Bitcoin is like a living being.”

“Sometimes you can’t really use the Character Animator program to the effect you need.”

“We don’t want people to be distracted. They should really feel immersed in the story, and a big part of that is the animation.”

“Sometimes with Bitcoin, we pretend that people should have the same passion we have.”

“Maybe people just like the custodial side of the bank, and they are willing to trust it.”

“If we screw you over, our community’s trust in us is gone. Trust is one of the most important assets we build with our community.”

“People naturally don’t care about Bitcoin.”

“We’re very incentivized to build with Bitcoin, because it’s a matter of survival.”

“The point of this is to make the journey as easy as we can.”

“You have to put your money somewhere else just to survive.”

“We need to build trust with our users.”

“You can always disable the card if you have the app.”

“We deal with trust: there’s a trust market going on in society, even if we don’t want it.”

“First of all, Lightning cannot solve the main problem by itself, which is that each user needs at least one UTXO.”

“I’m not saying Bitcoin should ossify right now, but we should solve two-way pegs so they are as trust-minimized as possible, and then we can ossify the main layer.”

“The consensus mechanism I came up with is a Bitcoin-backed proof of stake: you stake Bitcoin on the Bitcoin main chain, and that makes you a validator of the sidechain.”

“It’s crucial that in my proposal the entire staking happens on the Bitcoin main chain, which is secure as long as Bitcoin’s proof of work is secure.”

“The most common criticism is that it adds a layer of human politics into the whole situation.”

“There would be just a single layer, the Lightning Network, connecting the main layer and all the sidechains with each other.”

“Sidechains are the best solution we have so far, because they offer all the censorship resistance.”

“We’re getting into a lot of different topics, because a sidechain is not the same as another sidechain.”

“Don’t just wait for something that may never come, or stay undecided for the rest of your life, because you’re going to get old and grumpy.”

“Already in 2021, I started building a GitHub repository with all kinds of exotic Bitcoin scripts and all the crazy things you can do with them.”

“They were trying to migrate their merchants to a fork of Bitcoin without telling them, basically onto some shitcoin. I was against this, and that’s why I started BTCPay Server.”

“I think probably 70% of people in Bitcoin didn’t give a shit anyway.”

“He also deserves credit for investing a lot of money in hiring developers.”

“There’s so much more stuff to do in Bitcoin.”

“Nothing should be done at the Bitcoin Core layer, for sure.”

“At the same time, we need to protect Bitcoin service providers from legal liability: if they go bust, they should not lose their merchants’ money.”

“They see a lot of potential and they’re willing to pay high fees, because you never know when this marketplace is going to blow up.”

“I never really believed in it, because making a full node is a lot of work.”

“At the time, they didn’t even have to disclose that they were part of the agreement or had an interest in the whole situation.”

“Right now we have something like 20 open-source contributors.”

“I helped relaunch the print edition of Bitcoin Magazine as editor-in-chief.”

“Over time, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to produce valid hashes, so if that’s how you create new money, you get inflation in the system, which is no good.”

“They didn’t have the decentralized consensus system that Bitcoin, of course, has.”

“That’s how we know we can trust the system: there are people who can actually check and verify this free and open-source software.”

“Even if Satoshi had stayed around, Bitcoin is decentralized: people run the software on their own computers, and they’ll upgrade or not.”

“It’s important that it is, because that’s how we know there won’t be more than 21 million coins, for example.”

“It’s interesting how you find these differences, but basically Bitcoin is a combination of all these proposals.”

“Hashcash is a very clear example of the chicken-and-egg problem: you don’t want to reject emails that don’t have enough Hashcash if no one is using Hashcash.”

“This is actually the only copy of my own book I have right now.”

“I do suspect that Satoshi is in the book. Other than under his pseudonym, I suspect that he’s also in the book under his real name.”

“The ones that do not pay the fee to miners are doomed. Miners must get the fee, and if they don’t, they will take it through vertical integration or conflict.”

“A covenant says: I will constrain myself. The money I receive to this address, the money I put into my wallet, I can only spend in a certain way.”

“It’s like shares of a Delaware C corporation, except it’s on the Bitcoin blockchain and it pays Bitcoin transaction fees.”

“The fact that SegWit2x proved miners couldn’t hard-fork Bitcoin has nothing to do with whether miners can soft-fork Bitcoin.”

“Miners can activate a soft fork unilaterally, and that’s what proves how harmless it is: the soft fork can activate and your node won’t even notice.”

“Money is something where you really need to coordinate with people.”

“In some cases, miners should ignore what people on GitHub think, just as sometimes the people on GitHub should ignore what miners think is important. We should all recognize that there’s a complex set of conflicts of interest.”

“No one will be able to stop me from redeeming them for L1 BTC if I wish.”

“There’s no set of people that are permanently in, and anyone could have bad luck and never find a block again.”

“Demand for Lightning is less than 5,000 coins, while there are 140,000 or 150,000 wrapped BTC. I think Lightning’s numbers are distorted upwards because of the way the narrative played out.”

“What you can’t do in Bitcoin Script is control where the coins are going.”

“There are all these things we’d like to be able to do with Bitcoin that we can’t without covenants.”

“An ordinary wallet that’s just spending and receiving coins is not going to use covenants in any creative way.”

“There are things you can do with OP_CAT that are not even necessarily related to covenants, whereas CTV is deliberately narrowly tailored to allow non-recursive covenants and not much else.”

“I’m sympathetic to that, but I really think we need covenants before that happens.”

“Technically speaking, if this all works by miners producing proofs and committing to stuff, there’s no need for the rest of the network to even care what miners are committing to.”

“I would probably campaign against it and say that if you want to change the transaction structure so dramatically, you should just do it in a hard fork.”

“There was all this fighting about how to activate it without a civil war, when nobody was actually against Taproot.” (at 35:01)”

“The only reason miners extend the chain is that they’re incentivized to by the rules of the network.”

“They have to sit in the staging area for a day, or a week, or however long you want.”

“So far, Bitcoin doesn’t have any valid rollups that actually work, because of the limitations of Bitcoin Script.”

“Citrea is a VM that can verify the ZK proof natively, without going through all the Bitcoin Script stuff.”

“We use Bitcoin as the native token. There’s no Citrea token or anything like that.”

“We’re implementing a proof-of-stake-like layer only for sequencing blocks. The source of truth for users will always be the zero-knowledge proofs in Bitcoin.”

“Rollups are incentive-aligned with Bitcoin itself, because almost 99% of the fees you pay to the rollup go to Bitcoin.”

“People think layer twos are rollups and sidechains, but sidechains are not layer twos.”

“Unless you can steal from L1, you cannot steal from my L2.”

“Bitcoin block space is pretty limited, so we need to use it efficiently.”

“We are not trying to bring Ethereum to Bitcoin.”

“BitVM is not that efficient in the beginning, at least, because it requires fixed, large deposit amounts.”

“Rollups are off-chain programs, or separate blockchains, whose state and state changes are proven to layer one.”

“What we want from a Bitcoin layer two is that it should have Bitcoin’s security.”

“We need to be able to send assets around at a greater scale, and we need access to stablecoins.”

“If I were to bootstrap my own network today, I would never get close to the security of Ethereum, because in practice it’s more secure than anything else except Bitcoin.”

“We haven’t proven that there’s demand for Bitcoin rollups. There’s proof that there is demand for Ethereum rollups, so let’s prove that there’s demand for Bitcoin rollups.”

“I don’t think BRC-20s or Ordinals solved the problem of programmability for Bitcoin.”

“That means there needs to be someone honest and online to make that challenge.”

“You can’t deny it if you look at the numbers: the adoption of stablecoin transfers, and how people actually interact with Web3.”

“We still need to solve the ecosystem’s liquidity problem.”

“Liquid is not inherently a Bitcoin layer two. Liquid is a federated system.”

“Any hardware wallet that uses a secure element cannot be fully open source, because the design of the secure element itself is not open source.”

“You should be completely transparent with users, and users need to have full knowledge to select the proper device.”

“The chip itself generates the Bitcoin public and private keys, and hides the private key inside the chip’s memory.”

“Since my private keys are stored inside the hardware wallet, the wallet file on the computer doesn’t have any sensitive information, except labels and public addresses.”

“The goal is more to onboard people to Bitcoin, to give them Bitcoin.”

“It’s really the hardware chip and the low-level OS running on it that are not open source.”

“Security is not fully black or fully white.”

“People will say that Trezor doesn’t have a secure element, and that Coldcard is not open source and too geeky.”

“You don’t have to have the Bitcoin logo on the card.”

“When you seal a Satodime, it creates one key pair: one public key and one private key. If you want another address, you have to create a new one.”

“I don’t know how to get drivechain activated, but I think it should be.”

“We should take this time to prepare for the future of commerce with Bitcoin, because otherwise Bitcoin won’t achieve the goal many people have for it, which is to replace state money.”

“The goal should constantly be to look for tools that are truly decentralized, and to work within their limitations to build stuff that’s useful.”

“Stratum V2 is more useful for miners who want to make their own blocks because they don’t think the mining pool is making the best ones.”

“That’s the joke, and it’s not even a joke: the Opendime is not open source.”

“The only thing miners can do is switch to another pool.”

“The actual truth is that miners have to activate the soft fork.”

“We need to focus on the future bitcoiners.”

“We just want a new Twitter that’s not owned by Elon Musk.”

“Don’t zap me. It’s not a great idea, because it uses the Lightning Network protocol. I think we need zaps using some other protocol, but zaps are pretty cool when they work.”

“A lot of the money that’s going into Bitcoin Core development is corporate money.”

“It just means there’s a cost associated with it, and it’s not the same thing. Credit will always exist alongside money, and it always has.”

“You can’t be involved with Bitcoin and not have a node.” (at 2:03:33)”

“I’ve probably spent half a million dollars of my own money to fund Bitcoin developers, and I’ve never taken any money, not even donations, for myself.”

“Satoshi’s prototype, which we used to refer to as bitcoind, seems to have been rebranded as Bitcoin Core. A little bit of a land grab there.”

“I sent Bitcoin to Satoshi when I was doing test cases early on.”

“It starts to sound an awful lot like the Bitcoin Foundation, where you’ve got corporate money that wants certain things done in Core development.”

“Man, Economy, and State is the only work by Rothbard that I would ever recommend.”

“You can’t just do that, because there’s a consensus rule that says they have to be in a certain order.”

“I think what he does is take each new version as it comes out from Core, and then apply his ongoing changes to it.”

“Probably the biggest thing is learning the degree of complexity and fragility of Lightning, especially for the use case people intend for it: end users running their own nodes.”

“One issue that I think bitcoiners don’t weigh heavily enough is how centralizing increasing fees are.”

“I think the culture is very twisted, and people are way too confident in their mental model of how Bitcoin works, how soft forks work and how Bitcoin Core works.”

“The Bitcoin that gets paid out as a transaction fee is going to get mined into a block and released into the free market.”

“There are people in the space who make a lot of money, and then they go quiet and never criticize anything again.”

“That doesn’t mean that I quit Lightning or that I think Lightning is bad. It just means that I have a much more realistic view of it.”

“You might see people drop off to other chains just because they can’t afford Bitcoin anymore.”

“I just want to be able to make transactions where I don’t have to deal with censorship.”

“You’re never really going to know how protected you are. Another aspect is that Bitcoin privacy is still difficult.”

“I’m very disappointed in Paul and Layer Two Labs. I think they’ve embarrassed themselves.”

“I think it’s generally important to encourage people to play with privacy tools and wallets.”

“There are all sorts of ways to contribute. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process is, I think, just a guide.”

“Independent of whether or not he was Satoshi Nakamoto, he seemed like a pretty good guy, a smart guy, and a positive contributor to the world at large.”

“I also co-founded Custodia Bank with Caitlin Long, to have a regulated bank for Bitcoin, for both dollars and Bitcoin.”

“The purpose of Webcash is not to compete against Bitcoin.”

“There are very important challenges that need to be solved.”

“The same ledger would be held on multiple servers, and you get to choose which one to connect to. That’s the only version of decentralization I can envision.”

“Bitcoin is very complicated, so Webcash might be a place to start before you transition to Bitcoin development.”

“You’re right that the early spirit of Bitcoin was very different from what it is now.”

“Thousands and thousands of developers read about technical proposals, Bitcoin Core updates, security issues, bug fixes, theoretical speculation and other things like that.”

“It can be used in combination with Lightning, for the part Lightning struggles with: the liquidity issue.”

“We predate Ordinals, but it seems there’s a use case there. Ordinals are not going away, and many of the Ordinals communities have reached out to us.”

“Nothing against Tor, but we can’t be so reliant on one protocol. Any single protocol is a DDoS attack waiting to happen.”

“I think we should allow things like drivechain and CTV to happen, and let the free market decide.”

“Sometimes people want the trust guarantees of the base layer, and don’t accept that a layer two is not going to be as trustworthy as the base layer.”

“I think more use cases we haven’t thought about are going to appear with high transaction fees.”

“In the new version, the Mercury server is completely blind, so you essentially get 100% privacy just by doing a single coin swap.”

“Even if the base layer is not going to change fundamentally, the user experience is going to be very different.”

“They are custodial: you have to trust someone not to steal from you.”

“That led us to our initial use case, a privacy system, because it works very well for privacy.”

“The block size was constrained, and it caused a horrible user experience: Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin, Microsoft stopped accepting Bitcoin, Expedia stopped accepting Bitcoin.”

“We have to agree that we need to onboard more people to Bitcoin and make it scale.”

“Bitcoin was never supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme. It was supposed to be a get-free-quick scheme.” (at 5:01)”

“We saw a lot of darknet e-commerce move from BTC to Monero because of the privacy.”

“The entire way for Blockstream to make money was for people to be unable to use Bitcoin directly on-chain because of the fees, and then use Lightning.”

“They literally named those conferences Scaling Bitcoin, but a more accurate name would have been Stalling Bitcoin.”

“A lot of people don’t realize how incredibly close the BTC ticker symbol and the Bitcoin name came to being what’s called Bitcoin Cash today.”

“You have to trust the issuer of the layer two.”

“One side engaged in a whole bunch of censorship and dirty, immoral tactics, which are all outlined in the book.”

“Today, for the most part, everybody on Bitcoin is just using a custodian.”

“It’s a beginner’s wallet, a user-friendly wallet for people who don’t want to think too much about the technical details of Bitcoin payments.”

“I don’t want to custody hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of people’s Bitcoin, because it makes me a target, and it’s extra responsibility to keep the server online and not get hacked.”

“One of the things that separates us from other Bitcoin Lightning wallets is that we have the lowest fees.”

“A bull market will help, because when fees go up, people will look to keep their costs low and start exploring these other layers.”

“Wallet of Satoshi voluntarily pulled out of the US, just after Binance had come under scrutiny by US regulators.”

“I have two Core Lightning nodes and one LND node.”

“This isn’t a wallet to put your life savings into, or anything more than you’re comfortable losing.”

“I’m doing it to the point I’m comfortable with, and that comfort has been growing over the years.”

“I have a VPS that I use to proxy all the traffic to my actual server, so it doesn’t reveal my server’s real IP address.”

“I do have to manage the channels a bit.”

“Bitcoin Unlimited was in favor of a dynamic block size, letting the free market basically decide what the block size would be for the next block.”

“Drivechain is very interesting. Like big blocks, it’s been painted in a bad light, but it’s something people should look into.”

“I can come back, run my Bitcoin node, catch up with the chain and be in consensus with everybody.”

“I think that was the biggest issue that emerged with the fork, and probably the reason it didn’t get much traction.”

“It scales some specific use cases, but it’s not a general-purpose scaling solution.”

“You can’t verify the supply, and you also have no censorship resistance, because you have to trust the custodian of the funds.”

“You want to spend the one that is inflating and keep the one that is not inflating.”

“They use the 21 million cap, which is not described in the white paper.”

“There is value in a system that is never going to change.”

“There was a group of people that didn’t really have a name, and those three groups never really liked each other.”

“There’s no Bitcoin mentioned, but I believe it’s great fiction that aligns very well with Bitcoin values.”

“There’s no Bitcoin in it, but there is an exploration of money, value-for-value and free markets.”

“Everyone’s waiting for the premiere of a documentary about Bitcoin mining, which hopefully demystifies the biggest FUD in Bitcoin today.”

“It’s about Bitcoin art and the Bitcoin ethos, without hammering it into the audience’s head.”

“I wouldn’t have expected that after 15 years of Bitcoin we would have plenty of films based on fictional stories. It starts with YouTubers.”

“It was a way of showing Satoshi Nakamoto in our days, reacting to events in his own privacy.”

“This year it’s not just documentaries, and it’s not just films about Bitcoin. The event is Bitcoin-only, but the films are not.”

“The European Halving Party is the Bitcoin Film Festival: we screen films, run film workshops, pitch upcoming movies, show trailers, and hold interviews and Q&A panels.”

“This edition of the Bitcoin Film Fest is the halving edition.”

“We need to have some digital shares, which may be enabled by Taproot Assets.”

“Lightning, or second-layer solutions in general, is going to be the future of how Bitcoin, and even Litecoin, scales.”

“In the future, Lightning and other second-layer solutions will take on more of the transaction load from Bitcoin on-chain.”

“There will always be people who want low-fee on-chain transactions.”

“The financial privacy of being able to spend coins without people seeing how many coins you have and how many you spend is very important for real, good money.”

“Bitcoin is the best form of money that human civilization has ever encountered.” (at 21:10)”

“For Lightning, if people are using it to buy stuff, it’s okay for it to be slightly more centralized than Bitcoin.”

“It needs to be much simpler, so that people don’t have to worry about opening and closing channels.”

“People use Litecoin over Bitcoin mainly because of the speed of transactions, or the perceived speed, and the low fees.”

“The saying that Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin’s gold is still true today, just as when they first launched. I see people using Litecoin and Bitcoin for different kinds of transactions.”

“We added MWEB to Litecoin recently, which improves Litecoin’s privacy and fungibility versus what Bitcoin has. Because Litecoin is a smaller network, we can be more nimble.”

“This is not the time for us to retire slowly into the night. We really have to take a stand here, and everyone has to understand what’s actually happening.”

“I just want to get to the point where we actually have freedom money.”

“We all have to build these super complex L2s on Bitcoin right now to be able to get back freedom money.”

“We started this whole journey about freedom money to help the people who really need the help.”

“If Bitcoin gives up its potential as a medium of exchange, the price will be in serious jeopardy, because it will be at the mercy of the people who run fiat.”

“If we don’t want to trust actors in the Bitcoin network, miners in this case, and would rather trust courts of law, then the security of the system falls back on the nation state.”

“I’m going to make sure that money gets to the people who can build the best solutions to actually deliver us freedom money.”

“I’m calling out the truth as I see it, bro. It’s gotten me canceled from two conferences; I’m pissing people off.”

“They have this one idea about what Bitcoin is and what Bitcoin should be.”

“It made us glorify this impotent little rock that is not going to help anyone except those who are already rich.”

“I define a central bank digital currency as a digital form of fiat currency that can be programmed, monitored and censored by a government or financial institution.”

“The idea that central banks are interested in transparency and permissionlessness is out of line with the history of central banking.”

“People say it’s just code, it’s just open source, as if people develop code for free and others audit open-source code for free, with no compensation and no motivation.”

“I think we’re seeing an intentional, controlled demolition of the fiat system, designed to push everyone onto CBDCs.”

“The only way to stop this is to essentially defund the government by getting out of fiat.”

“If we don’t get enough people doing this, then by default fiat will become CBDC. This is about numbers. Right now, I think crypto is a hobby.”

“We need to get as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, into self-custody of crypto, gold and silver. Time is not on our side.”

“You need to be able to exist outside of the existing system, or it isn’t useful at all.”

“You won’t have to go to Coinbase custody, and you won’t have to hand your keys to a company like Casa.”

“There’s a lot of value in the dimension of Bitcoin where a transaction is censorship-resistant by virtue of decentralization.”

“The only way the conversation keeps moving is if fees get so high that solving this problem becomes a necessity.”

“I get to have private discussions with the key critical developers in Lightning and in Bitcoin.”

“They made Tron relevant with their stablecoin, by allowing it to be the scaling layer for this digital dollar.”

“It’s a pretty hard case to make that memecoins on Bitcoin are more scandalous or immoral than buying and selling drugs online with Bitcoin.”

“When people isolate themselves from the broader Bitcoin community to talk only to people who agree with them, they’ll find it’s a counterproductive strategy.”

“If 95% of the world can’t afford to use Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way because the fees are astronomical, that’s a problem.”

“The reality is that this was always the way Bitcoin worked.”

“Every time a conference happens, I lose at least a year of my life. But I feel like it’s never been more important to have a platform for all the ideas of Bitcoin.”

“That’s the reason Bitcoin is a viable alternative to people’s local currency: it allows them to route around it, into a system not controlled by their local politicians.”

“The same people who now admit CTV isn’t that bad are attempting to character-assassinate the next person, or to control what gets activated next.”

“Lightning still has a place in Bitcoin, but it’s not the only solution for scaling it.”

“You want to keep the base layer decentralized. If no one can run a node to support Bitcoin or Litecoin, then it won’t be decentralized.”

“SegWit on Litecoin was supported by 99% of users, and by me, the creator of Litecoin, so for miners to go against the community that way would have been tough.”

“I’ve said this all along: financial privacy is a human right. You should be able to spend your money without everyone knowing how much money you have or who you sent money to.”

“The only way I could possibly be Satoshi is if I have multiple personality disorder and my current personality doesn’t know that my other personality is Satoshi.”

“The major developers of Litecoin are Bitcoin developers. I like to joke that Bitcoin developers are working on Litecoin even if they don’t want to.”

“It’s a sliding scale: there’s no perfect fungibility and no perfect privacy.”

“One of the features of Bitcoin is that you can send coins without the recipient being online, and without needing to communicate with the recipient.”

“That’s happened with a few privacy coins before: there’s a bug in the implementation, and someone is able to print coins out of thin air.”

“Hiding the amounts takes you most of the way there for privacy.”

“It’s like a quick API: they send us a few sats, and they get locked in against a dollar price. That’s very convenient.”

“There’s no reason why they couldn’t live on Bitcoin itself, or on layers that are Bitcoin-aligned.”

“It’s a business model that actually makes this business sustainable, because the Lightning user base is not big.”

“That’s one of the reasons we wanted to launch: it doesn’t require anyone to leave Bitcoin.”

“I don’t consider our project a stablecoin. It’s a synthetic dollar.”

“I don’t consider Tether to be a Bitcoin stablecoin. I feel like Runes enables an actual Bitcoin-native stablecoin, a token that actually sits on Bitcoin, as opposed to the Omni Layer.”

“The payments are not as reliable as they were a couple of years ago.”

“We are building a product that doesn’t really need Lightning to be successful.”

“You just have to find other business models.”

“It builds a neutral position in a futures market, which basically means you are not exposed to the price of Bitcoin.”

“The vision is that integrity should never be assumed. It should always be demonstrated publicly for all to verify.” (at 44:09)”

“This may open the door to layer twos and all kinds of self-custodial bridges on Bitcoin, which I think would be a good thing.”

“Beyond general Bitcoin conservatism, there’s the fact that using SNARKs based on a toxic-waste setup is very much not in line with what Bitcoin is about.”

“As someone outside of Bitcoin, I think the conservatism has gone just a little bit too far.”

“By now, there’s consensus that the approach we’ve been advocating is actually the best way to solve the problem, and it will also be the first to solve it.”

“StarkWare started with a product, a decentralized layer two called Starknet, which uses STARK proofs to scale Ethereum.”

“The only thing preventing this from being done for real is the engineering to build a system dedicated to Bitcoin.”

“You don’t have to worry about whether there will be a quantum computer out there, or whether some breakthrough in factoring numbers will emerge.”

“There are some aspects that we provably know you cannot improve on.”

“Instead of going through all the blocks from Genesis and verifying each transaction, you will download a proof that’s less than one megabyte long, and you will verify it in less than a second.”

“I see two possible ways you could attack Bitcoin using a quantum computer, and one of them is the mining attack.”

“Quantum computers are not a solution to everything. The people raising funds want everyone to think quantum computers can do everything better: discover drugs, break Bitcoin, all sorts of things.”

“A quantum computer can’t really solve a hash function significantly faster than a regular computer.”

“If you had a reliable quantum memory to store your quantum states, you could make a reliable quantum computer with just two reliable qubits.”

“You can’t just know someone’s address and send them coins.”

“It’s even commercially available: you can buy a Bitcoin node built on a Raspberry Pi with an SSD.”

“I haven’t tried Beam, but I believe it should be possible to just send to a Beam address.”

“You can just replace the node that’s down with the grinnode.live node, and you should be able to sync your wallet.”

“I ran this experiment last week with a Grin++ node, the C++ implementation, and I was able to sync a full node in 90 minutes.”

“I don’t see the reason why it wouldn’t be possible.”

“The JPEG is just a representation of what the token is supposed to mean, and that should be discussed more often.”

“We did look at BRC-20 tokens, and ideally it should have been done on Bitcoin.”

“You need a Bitcoin wallet, and I think the best one for Counterparty right now is FreeWallet.”

“It’s always been a labor of love to be a Bitcoin artist, and a lot of artists have been driven out of Bitcoin.”

“We had to find computers that had never been connected to the internet and didn’t have modems in them.”

“A lot of big bitcoiners were involved with other projects back in the early days.”

“We always said that Bitcoin should survive in the long term.”

“It doesn’t have to be stored by everyone’s node forever.”

“Bitcoin art is designed to, hopefully, embody all the ideals of Bitcoin.”

“Some people like physical pieces and the guarantees, some people like the NFTs. It really varies depending on the collector.”

“There’s this idea that Bitcoin can’t change, when my experience of Bitcoin is that it’s actually always changing.”

“We don’t have to wait 15 years for the next one, because we have so many more smart people coming to look at the problem.”

“I think a new monoculture will be born out of those two cultures.”

“It’s above my pay grade, but I encourage people to read Eric’s book. We need more people with different ideas about the Bitcoin industry.”

“It’s like those scientific advances where somebody proves that something that was impossible is now possible.”

“It’s also funny that the forces aligning with these ideas and movements are not always consistent.”

“I can’t tell you whether an idea is purely true, or better than some other idea.”

“Amir Taaki is a hugely important person from that period. Early Bitcoin was essentially this: Satoshi left, and then Gavin and Amir sort of warred for the soul of Bitcoin.”

“You have to understand that they are not mining according to the best incentives.”

“Trump won’t care that we don’t think the crypto industry is good.”

“A lot of miners probably don’t want to be questionable custodians of sidechain funds.”

“There are Lightning developers who like OP_CAT, people from StarkWare who like OP_CAT, and lots of Bitcoin developers working on BitVM, Lightning, or inscriptions who like it too.”

“For a while, Lightning was generally sold as the end-user payment solution.”

“What I’ve said to that team a couple of times is: you’ve got to realize that last year, inscriptions paid over a quarter of a billion dollars in mining fees.”

“It’s something that shows you that Bitcoin is not fungible.”

“The only way to keep that from happening is to reject blocks that include these transactions.”

“Bitcoin miners need to be able to sell their coins into the deepest pool of liquidity they can.”

“Lightning settlement between counterparties that need to settle frequently makes a ton of sense to me.”

“You’re not going to have the problem of bootstrapping wallets, liquidity and miners that you would have if you made your own fork.”

“We don’t have to worry about whether there’s enough liquidity in the right direction between my wallet and your wallet.”

“That’s the only thing we can do if we are involved in Bitcoin. Everything else remains for the free market to decide, because you can’t really force things.”

“The only reason nobody has tried to exploit it is that either nobody knows about it, or nobody cares about it at this point.”

“The mint can always exit-scam and run away with your money.”

“I am not scared of anyone, even if they are a Bitcoin Core contributor or a very influential person. I’ve contributed to Bitcoin Core for a few years, so I’ve seen the politics that go on internally.”

“The sidechains that exist right now are federated, but we need better sidechains, using drivechain, that won’t be considered custodial.”

“Drivechains are already possible with a lot of the covenant proposals that people have been trying to get activated on Bitcoin for a few years.”

“Such research is always useful, and we can’t say that it’s completely irrelevant for Bitcoin.”

“Node software is only used to verify your transactions and get some privacy.”

“I completely agree, but unfortunately there are some things we cannot control.”

“This whole node conversation is very political: people say they have a vote because they run a node.”

“That is not a solution to scaling in which users control their own keys.”

“The point is, they hired him and then ignored half of what he said. They did not actually fully implement the protocol.”

“The whole point of going off-chain is to not have to use block space, because it is stupidly inefficient and stupidly unscalable.”

“Even Samourai users who never ran their own full node would still have perfect privacy, and not be leaking any balance info to someone else’s server.”

“They’ve completely ignored PeerSwap from Blockstream and CLN, which is literally a distributed protocol for coordinating swaps in and out of Lightning.”

“Ideologically, I’m a fan of scaling Bitcoin in a way that lets everyone hold their own keys.”

“My understanding is that all of them, except Citrea, have basically just created an Ethereum token.”

“Not only do the users not care enough to run the software they’re gambling on, but the developers don’t even care enough to run it.”

“The main problem with BitVM is that it’s very expensive. But if rich people do it and then sell their sidechain tokens to regular people, that should work.”

“That’s one of the most critical pieces of making these massive multi-denomination coinjoins work safely and really maximize privacy.”

“You have to understand how Bitcoin works: consensus is very messy, and it takes a lot of time.”

“What I found is that the only connection between all these people that are mentioned in this Bitcoin magazine article is that they are all from Argentina.”

“The only way to actually be a good router is to have a server that runs on clearnet with broadband speed.”

“One of the goals of Rootstock is to have the best possible decentralized bridge. The plan was always to have a temporary federation first.”

“We have to do better in every respect.”

“Those bridges need to bring a lot of information from the sidechain into Bitcoin Script as program input.”

“For me, Bitcoin was always a technology for the people.”

“If people can see a very trust-minimized way of doing smart contracts on Bitcoin, I think they will be more prone to accept OP_CAT, because they can see the benefits and the new use cases.”

“There’s probably never going to be an established process, because as soon as you establish a process, people can try to hijack it.”

“Unfortunately, there used to be this meme that Bitcoin is for everyone, and there’s an asterisk there.”

“You can’t look at the price and tell me it failed.”

“The net effect on this entire space is that the waters get polluted, because everyone correctly assumes that telling the truth is not going to benefit them.”

“The priority in the US is to preserve individual freedom and reject collectivism.”

“The culture war really is not the best thing.”

“Honestly, I just wanted to have a conversation with him, and tell him where I think he was wrong and where I think he was right.”

“I think the custodians are going to be companies like Google and Facebook.”

“In the next election cycle, I think we’re going to see David Bailey, the owner of Bitcoin Magazine, run for president.”

“Mining pools are very deferential to their customers, the miners.”

“There is some freedom in the fact that each state has some autonomy.”

“The only investments really in there are cash and the S&P 500.”

“You never had to trust the coordinator to be sure that your money is safe.”

“If we make something people have to trust, it must be really good. And even so, people in Bitcoin don’t really want to trust this stuff.”

“Now we have something like 10 coordinators and three wallets, and it is an open protocol.”

“There are people who think like us and want to bring privacy to Bitcoin.”

“We are designing Wasabi in a way that even if a government runs a coordinator, it can learn nothing about you. So, welcome, governments who want to run Wasabi coordinators.”

“WabiSabi is, I believe, the best-working privacy solution for Bitcoin right now.”

“I was following nopara’s work on Wasabi before it was called Wasabi. I was there when he renamed the repository Wasabi Wallet. And it matters, because without privacy, none of Bitcoin’s properties are real.”

“These privacy-preserving tools are good, and someone has to build them.”

“Even running a coordinator is not free; it costs money. And these coordinators are like the backup.”

“It’s not a problem anymore, as far as I know, but with your coins you can do whatever you want.”

“ZK proofs don’t help that much because they still can’t make your transactions confirm quickly. Lightning is what you need to actually do an instant confirmation.”

“The problem we have for Bitcoin is that there aren’t clear incentives for decentralized entities to keep the coins secure.”

“There isn’t a long term way that this can be blocked.”

“You can compress many things into one, but you’re still left with a certain amount of metadata per transaction that can’t be compressed away, and that data adds up.”

“The nature of lightning is that you do not actually need very many nodes and very many channels.”

“The only decent argument against Lightning was that it would take transaction fees away from miners.”

“Monero has enough usage that once they add this, every coin could have come from everywhere. That’ll be quite a nice privacy improvement.”

“We just have to go live with those things and either hope those mistakes don’t bite us in the ass or fix them.”

“It’s really a miner voting proposal, where we assume miners will vote on which chains are actually valid and which aren’t.”

“After all, what drives the price of a currency is not people doing payments, but who is holding it.”

“A promise of usage that cannot be delivered is not utility.”

“The current capacity of Bitcoin is not enough just to support lightning.”

“Bitcoin is not going to get an infinite amount of chances to spoil the gift of its first move or advantage.”

“What a blockchain should do is serve as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a platform for decentralized applications.”

“Is that like you put Bitcoin into this special bracket where you can’t compare it to other chains.”

“There is no third party that can tell you cannot make this transaction.”

“The point is I’m contradicting what a lot of Bitcoin is saying.”

“There are a bunch of people who got there because of the censorship resistant social media aspect.”

“Someone would move them as a way to prove that they can crack the cryptography, and that the system is not secure.”

“To really know whether a project is a failure, we need to know what its goal is.”

“They promote the narrative that we’ll never have to go on L1, while Lightning is much harder to use, and to stay on.”

“I think there’s more wrapped Bitcoin than there is Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.”

“Many privacy based currencies require wallets that effectively need to stream the blockchain through an app such as edge or client side wallet and have to decrypt the transactions.”

“Privacy coins are very hard for us to add to edge.”

“The people that care about privacy are folded into that anonymity set amongst all of the people that don’t.”

“They can’t negotiate and go where the electricity is cheap.”

“The problem is you need to have multiple hops.”

“The fourth layer is IP address privacy and that’s using things like VPNs and tours or combination of the two of them.”

“These are the three key technologies that are used in all of the true privacy coins.”

“I think the big challenge is that Bitcoin is just so hardened and not interested in changing its layer one protocol.”

“The full potential of Sovryn has always been limited by the technology we can build on.”

“It’s creating for us a system which isn’t controlled by anyone and cannot be censored by anyone.”

“The way scalability needs to work is not by stuffing more and more things into layer one.”

“That is not a stable system on which you can build global consensus.”

“This is such a more powerful form of privacy that we can get with mixers or any of the systems that we have now.”

“There’s a huge amount of potential scalability in Bitcoin, but it’s not going to come from increasing the block size, and it doesn’t require soft forks.”

“The whole point of Bitcoin is self-sovereignty, and that’s achieved through self-custody.”

“In my view, one of the most poisonous ideas in Bitcoin is that we should only ever use BTC.”

“The actual ZK is not verified by Bitcoin miners.”

“Miners will be able to earn fees from all the additional activity, not just from simple peer-to-peer transactions, and that will dramatically change the economics of Bitcoin mining.”

“The only way that I see that you could break ordinal use and especially inscriptions is by heavily restricting either the censorship resistance or the scripting capabilities.”

“There is definitely things that you can do to improve your overall privacy.”

“There is always enough demand for all of the block space to be sold off.”

“Multi-sigs are going to look indistinguishable from normal transactions and therefore there’s going to be more privacy on the base layer.”

“The block space market has shifted quite a bit in the last year. Inscriptions, Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 nonsense have temporarily increased mining revenue a lot.”

“If we all own the Bitcoin network together and we all decide what it should be in the future, we also have to be constantly vigilant about what people are doing.”

“Very clearly we can’t just write software once and then use it for the next 20 years.”

“If you want something out of Bitcoin, maybe try to understand that other people also want something out of Bitcoin.”

“I’m not saying that it’s impossible to build heuristics and intelligence to assess whether a payment is likely to be reliable or not even while it’s unconfirmed.”

“It’s just we have to deal with what we have on our plate.”

“You couldn’t scale to hundreds of millions or billions of names on Bitcoin at that time.”

“Coming from my work with ICANN and the traditional domain system: it doesn’t scale if everything sits under one top-level domain.”

“The fact that we don’t have that on Bitcoin only gives these projects more legitimacy to say yes, but Bitcoin can’t do this.”

“Everyone’s social security number is already leaked on some darknet right now.”

“.cat is a top-level domain for Catalonia, and their offices were raided by the Spanish government because some websites were posting anti-government content. Domains were taken down, and the CTO was arrested for sedition.”

“What that means is that when domain names expired, there’s a lot of competition to get these domain names if they’re valuable.”

“You can prove that you’re the owner of that name.”

“Money is really important to decentralize, but one other thing that’s really important is naming.”

“Some of those people have said to me that this is the only thing built on Bitcoin that they see has value.”

“Bitcoin itself can really use this for a lot of different reasons for security.”

“The problem really is that nobody’s really tackled scaling lightning.”

“There’s a handful of people who actually work on this, and nobody cares about it, because Lightning is good enough when we have low fees.”

“I want ten times as many extensions as we have now, and more people finding it easy to build extensions.”

“We need to do the other 95% of the work in order to make it easier for people to run this thing.”

“The reason we have this convoluted and complicated Lightning channel thing is that we’re removing the trusted third party.”

“I think some things need to be fixed in Bitcoin first, such as the centralization of miners.”

“You need to make sure the foundations make sense, or all this wonderful work you’re doing could be made redundant if the assumptions in the foundations turn out to be wrong.”

“I have to correct you a little bit: I didn’t do all those things.”

“We don’t tackle scaling Lightning Network properly until on chain fees are critical and they’re high.”

“None of those are from LNbits; they’re just from me.”

“That’s what it’s always been and it’s never changed.”

“They don’t want people to become martyrs.”

“No one’s going to push for Bitcoin the way Monero people push for Monero.”

“To me, Bitcoin was all about the idea that money was now in your possession.”

“The Bitcoin market and community don’t want a leader.”

“It’s not that we won’t figure out how to scale the right way.”

“There’s always a race for the cheapest amount of energy.”

“A lot of people are just one- or two-time transactors.”

“When he realized he couldn’t be the leader of Bitcoin Cash, he forked it into Bitcoin SV, and a lot of people believed he was Satoshi and were conned by him.”

“They care about UX, and in Bitcoin, sometimes UX is not a priority.”

“The culture has changed to the point where everyone wants Bitcoin to be ossified.”

“You can’t mix it without forfeiting privacy, either from the past or in the future.”

“The problem is that all the experiments that came before failed because there was no incentive to keep running.”

“It doesn’t matter what privacy tools you build on top of it, because you’re giving away your information at a lower level.”

“That’s why there is no one address that has one million Bitcoin.”

“Samourai would charge you 100,000 sats, currently worth about $60, to send your own coins to your own addresses, and you pay your own mining fees on top of that.”

“Something I’m even more passionate about than Bitcoin privacy is the Bitcoin mempool: getting across the idea that it’s a free market.”

“You get slightly cheaper transactions, but this is not really practical and it doesn’t add realistic privacy.”

“If you’re just a guy running a coordinator on your own node, these little sats add up a lot.”

“Wasabi’s transaction speed-up is a good example of good UX: it abstracts everything away from the user.”

“There are entire projects that focus exclusively on privacy. The reason they do that is because privacy is a major aspect of sovereignty.”

“That means that you need to take personal responsibility for your defense and for your countermeasures.”

“The only people who can do that are people with huge amounts of money.”

“The good part is that the server side is not custodial.”

“I think this year has been horrible for privacy and self-custody in Bitcoin.”

“The only fees you’re going to pay are those fees for actually moving from one wallet to another.”

“The only way you can mine is if you have ASICs.”

“It was more of a political decision than it was something against privacy in general.”

“The force you have to compete with is people constantly trying to rig those fairer games.”

“I’m proposing that we make a system where the system is not here to extract rent.”

“The ECB is not accountable to any government in Europe or to any democratically elected assembly.”

“Their thinking is: there are digital currencies out there like Bitcoin, so we central planners are now forced to react and play the same game.”

“Let’s take away that power from ordinary people so that it can’t be used by ordinary people for the benefit of ordinary people.”

“It’s one where we have more freedom and we’re less controlled and less monitored.”

“We need to stage demonstrations in front of central banks, against central bank digital currencies.”

“We need to be able to create small local banks.”

“The FDIC is a very strange bank regulator, because it routinely closes down healthy small banks.”

“This is a bank run by people who don’t know banking.”

“We all need to actively engage and make our opposition known.”

“We need to stop that trend: create more local banks, support local banks, and make sure they’re not merged away.”

“The idea didn’t come from scaling Bitcoin in terms of throughput, but from scaling Bitcoin in terms of features.”

“It never took off, because there were a lot of problems with its payment mechanism.”

“Today, there are around 70 or 80 projects that claim to be a Bitcoin L2.”

“You still have censorship resistance with the same level of Bitcoin.”

“That computer can’t steal money, because there’s a ZK proof protecting all the money.”

“We are the only one that has released a fully featured testnet.”

“Our rollup isn’t built specifically for payments.”

“The EVM is a great tool, because there’s a huge amount of developer documentation, videos, guides and hackathons, so people can learn it and start building Bitcoin applications.”

“It’s not just for payments; it covers vital use cases that we believe Bitcoin needs.”

“A sidechain can never be enough, even with the drivechain proposal accepted, because you always have a trust assumption in some party other than Bitcoin consensus.”

“The Bitcoin community needs to make sure that any soft fork is not too chaotic, because there’s just too much value at stake.”

“You can’t really improve throughput with more soft forks. You would have to increase the block size to increase the throughput.”

“Because since it is so much cheaper to validate CSV transactions essentially you just have to hash them. You don’t need to verify any signatures or whatever.”

“The advantage is that you don’t have to pay Bitcoin fee to be in a transaction with your 64 bytes.”

“Maybe not our protocol in particular, but I think that approach is the best one we know for scaling blockchains.”

“It’s about optimizing the system for users’ current needs, to make Bitcoin global money.”

“This is some initial research that you actually have to do before you can even start implementing the protocol.”

“You can’t break these with quantum computers, because you would need to figure out the public key from the hash, and that is pretty much impossible.”

“In shielded client-side validation, there are no big zero-knowledge proofs on the blockchain. Only the receiver needs to verify them, so the blockchain is entirely unaffected by large proofs.”

“I really admire the beauty of proof-of-work consensus. I don’t think proof of stake is in the same category of things.”

“I think the worst-case scenario is that they get activated and nobody uses them.”

“It’s a peg-in and then the MWEB transaction pegs out, all in one transaction, and you don’t even see the link from the peg-in to the peg-out.”

“Having people who really want to do these things, and a community that sees a real benefit in them, is the most important thing, not just adding technology for its own sake.”

“We had lost a lot of the big names that were early supporters and well known in the Bitcoin world.”

“I’m hoping that people don’t have to think heavily about which coin they’re using or which one they’re storing in.”

“We didn’t have enough usage to get any of the serious privacy benefits.”

“That could always be changed, but that causes another mess too.”

“Very unlikely, but there’s always a risk when you’re messing with consensus code.”

“I’m not a marketing guy, but I don’t care for the idea.”

“At some point, you actually have to implement something.”

“You can’t put them together like in Bitcoin where you have one input and multiple outputs. You need to have one input and one output at all times.”

“The Russian Business Network thing is an absolutely stupid conspiracy that people keep bringing up. None of the people who were building Bytecoin and the CryptoNote protocol had anything to do with it.”

“You have to keep your computer running and doing its job to get rewarded. That’s the only way it works.”

“For that reason, you cannot send coins that is not get confirmed. You have to wait until the change got confirmed.”

“The myths that I want to break and I believe the privacy is something that is needed for average regular people.”

“This is not a hard rule and it could be changed at any moment.”

“There’s a weird thing about privacy because privacy is like a tiny piece for the mainstream crypto people don’t know or care about.”

“We decided that we have to Build something that people will use for transaction We are probably not the one who should the build money itself.”

“I was actually trying to convince the Monero developers and community to switch to proof of stake at some point.”

“I’m also involved in a project called Confidential Layer, which would allow private assets on a privacy chain, bridged from chains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.”

“You don’t have access to funds unless the expiration arrive and even when it arrives you cannot be the only one but the cosigner.”

“Whether a hardware wallet has a secure element or not is an important distinction. If it doesn’t have one, you should consider it a signing device.”

“The words are carefully chosen so that you cannot confuse.”

“That’s the danger with all these proprietary devices that you cannot verify if they are doing whatever they pretend to be doing.”

“I’m not even like fully sure it will completely solve the problem because like you need to inject some money into research and development and for now.”

“The first one is having your own note because you need to be connected to the network yourself and not trusting some third party or intermediary.”

“There are a bunch of OGs out there who never use a hardware wallet; they just use their full node and the Bitcoin Core software.”

“The money is probably already gone, because they have access to the seed.”

“I have to admit like in some way they are right to be like quite restrictive on these.”

“It looks like a multisig and you need to recover one key.”

“The proposal is not a full-up move to proof of stake.”

“Others just figure out that mining is not exactly the best way for them to go forward.”

“The Zcash team has been relentless about proofs of security through all of our upgrades. There is a formal proof of security for the Halo 2 protocol.”

“This is one of the things when I talk about having an economy needing to be based on privacy.”

“The innovations have come from within Zcash, and it’s not like we’ve stopped. There’s so much happening across the Zcash ecosystem.”

“You’ve got to have privacy and unlinkability from one transaction to the next for us to actually have cash for the internet.”

“With Zcash shielded assets, things can move the other direction: you can have Bitcoin that gets bridged to Zcash and stored in the shielded pool.”

“People trying to just use the shielded pool as a pass-through don’t actually gain benefits of privacy.”

“A misconception about Zcash is that transparent addresses existed so it could get listed on exchanges and be fine with regulators.”

“Bitcoin is the best surveillance coin ever invented. You get more privacy transacting with your bank than you do transacting with Bitcoin.”

“It’s just that it’s an issue that is not purely a Bitcoin issue.”

“I think there’s a lot of corporate adoption of Bitcoin as a treasury asset, and nation-state adoption is just starting to happen. I think we get to a million-dollar Bitcoin within the next four years, by the end of the Trump administration.”

“It makes sense for us like the capital of freedom in the world.”

“It’s very hard to make the case that miners won’t be profitable. When Bitcoin’s market capitalization was a million bucks, miners were profitable.”

“Eric is really trying to lean in to how the Trump organization and the Trump business can embrace this technology.”

“Those who have the money write the laws, and Bitcoin is the money. Those who have the Bitcoin are the ones who will be writing the laws.”

“I definitely think we should have Trump there to introduce it. That would be a pretty bold move from Trump: promise made, promise kept.”

“Most people get into Bitcoin because the price goes up.”

“He actually understands that Bitcoin mining is a vehicle through which we can achieve energy abundance and massive investment into energy infrastructure.”

“Getting a government or a political party to embrace or adopt Bitcoin has no effect on Bitcoin itself.”

“I’ve tried never to get tribalistic with a single project. I love Bitcoin because it decentralized money, I love Ethereum because it gave us smart contracts, and I love Morpheus because it’s decentralized AI.”

“If you believe Bitcoin is money, you need things to buy with money. I want decentralized storage. I want decentralized AI.”

“Programmable money is the perfect fit for digital intelligence. These smart agents aren’t going to have a bank account.”

“Stablecoins started on Bitcoin, at the protocol level, then spread to Ethereum and all these other chains. I think the largest volumes now are on Solana.”

“I’ve realized I finally come to the point where you can’t build a bridge back to the legacy world or at least it’s extremely difficult.”

“I continue to ask myself like what’s the next thing in the tech stack that we need to build in order to further human freedom.”

“You have to think about it in relative terms.”

“A smart agent, an AI connected to smart contracts, can actually take actions for me. That’s the big difference.”

“Together we have decentralized GPUs, decentralized models and decentralized smart agents, ultimately owned by an individual.”

“Of everything since Bitcoin, Ethereum has struck me as the most philosophically aligned with how things should get built: a broad, neutral platform that everyone can use.”

“It gives you the ability to hold some sort of persistent logic on the Bitcoin chain, which sometimes has been called contracts.”

“What we have today is something that works and it’s super expensive.”

“It’s not about the covenants themselves; it’s about what you can build with the covenants.”

“If we could, we would have built on Bitcoin a long time ago.”

“Those are particularly things that can improve the life of Bitcoiners today.”

“I can’t live with a claim that says, we don’t know what exactly it will bring because you will never know what exactly it will bring.”

“The difference is that the rules of how can you claim your coins and how can you transfer them are being executed elsewhere outside of the system, but in a way that nobody could cheat.”

“The claim is that if you will be able to hold persistent logic on Bitcoin, you could improve scale, you could improve privacy in various ways.”

“If the cost today is 50 million, maybe it can bring the cost down to five million or two million or even two sub one million costs.”

“It’s very important that everyone verifies integrity for themselves. STARKs give you the ability to verify the integrity of many, many things in just one operation.”

“The future is not set in stone, or at least it might not be, if we haven’t ossified already.”

“There’s also going to be a controversial discussion about what we do with all the Bitcoin sitting in quantum-vulnerable UTXOs.” (at 57:06)”

“You don’t have to keep the information about your wallet in that flash memory.”

“I’m generally bearish on privacy everywhere, because so few people care about it. Most privacy tools rely on network effects, so the fact that so few people use them is almost self-defeating.”

“Nobody who’s buying those is actually doing self-custody.”

“You can always scale via making more trade-offs and allowing certain attributes of the network to degrade.”

“I have a number of projects running in parallel, and they’re not even all crypto or privacy-related.”

“Developers are so pessimistic about even being able to soft-fork in a new opcode that could add powerful functionality.”

“‘Not your keys, not your coins’ also means ‘your keys, your coins.’ If we allow quantum attackers to steal people’s money, that breaks the first one. And if we freeze people’s money, that’s a violation of sovereignty.”

“It’s so difficult to create a permissionless second layer on top of Bitcoin that what we’re seeing most often is second layers that are fully custodial.”

“Me and Alejandro from Kraken are the only people not involved in the organization who have been at every single LABITCONF.”

“My savings is the one that nobody knows that’s going to save my ass and one day I’m going to save my life. We still need to work a lot on that one.”

“Don’t forget to hold your own keys and practice very good privacy with your Bitcoin because you never know what’s going to happen.”

“It’s possible, but you need to learn first.”

“I’m focused on Liquid. Liquid is a second layer of Bitcoin, and it’s a nice way to do privacy there.”

“The bank just realized that the user also holds the private key, so there’s no deposit at the Brazilian central bank.”

“There is a lot of things that need to change on liquid to for us to be able to register the information.”

“Starting in January, we have approval from the Brazilian central bank to run a test with two digital banks, first with USDT, and then probably with Bitcoin the same year.”

“You have to be in good shape to defend your Bitcoin.”

“I lost a few bitcoins with them, I think 10, because I left them on the platform. But I learned.”

“If no one stores the data, the data is not there on the blockchain.”

“The Bitcoin core priority is not improve the software as rapidly as possible.”

“It ultimately won’t work because the transaction fees and those altitudes are not piped down to the liner. They cannot compete with an L2 that does such a bit 300.”

“The fact that we have a more of an awareness of how it actually works is not necessarily like a curse.”

“There’s no difference between the price going to zero and no one using it at all.”

“They never will happen because the headers already have the miners have to do all the proof of work on the headers.”

“All these people are making a huge mistake, because when the miners care more about fees than the block reward, the endgame will be merge-mined L2s that pay transaction fees to the miners.” (at 1:09:54)”

“The crazy thing about that is the software space is so competitive that it means that there may be more opportunities to make huge amount of money off betting against these people.”

“The people who talk about Lightning have never used it. These are people who tweet about it.”

“No offense to them, but the miners find all this stuff totally baffling, and they have very low incentives to even look into it.”

“That’s one of the reasons why ledger has to put them through this review process because they need to make sure the app is not malicious.”

“It’s one it’s a great example is to how destructive the outgoing Biden administration has been to the privacy side of the Bitcoin or crypto space.”

“The device is just as slow as it always was a little less frustrating to use because the screen is bigger and it’s such now.”

“One is foundation is still and has always been as I described it a Bitcoin centric company.”

“The only thing you’re getting with the five is you’re getting a secure element now.”

“The market as it exists is a little too small; maybe you could do more than just the node and get into a node and home server combo.”

“It makes it feel like it’s just one account because the premixed post mixed management is always very difficult from a UI perspective.”

“We might be the only ones in the entire industry with a feature called developer pubkey.”

“It can’t do anything because it’s just passing encrypted blobs and everything has to be signed.”

“The problem is there’s no hardware wallet that offers frosts.”

“You have to try and fail, and try and fail.”

“Proof-of-Proof is an alternative to merge mining that relies on Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant properties.”

“One of the things that made me sad about Bitcoin maximalism is that people take it to an extreme, really dumping on developers who just want to try something new and interesting.” (at 48:06)”

“That’s how Bitcoin is going to scale up as well.”

“Once you tunnel Bitcoin onto Hemi, you have a token on the Hemi blockchain that’s a claim or receipt for that Bitcoin. You can put it in a lending market and borrow US dollars against it.”

“I have to pay money in order to receive money.”

“As far as I’m aware, Hemi is the only one that’s Bitcoin and Ethereum brought together using Bitcoin as security.”

“Blockchains, Bitcoin in particular and Ethereum even more so, are not anti-privacy, but they don’t default to privacy.”

“Maybe I’m a decentralization maximalist.”

“I would say that the primary trade-offs are that if you’re purely in the Bitcoin world, you are moving to a different blockchain.”

“That is not a fucking decentralized project when you don’t have leaders.”

“Bitcoin exists, and it’s going to exist for a long time. That’s fine. But I don’t think it’s the future of cryptocurrency.”

“We should stop calling it Bitcoin maximalism. We should call it Bitcoin lifestyleism, like lifestyle anarchism.”

“This is how you get people to never agree on anything.”

“What’s interesting in Bitcoin is these L2s. If Bitcoin gets ZK-rollup support, it would become a programmable layer where everybody can create their own completely secure systems.”

“The philosophy of no one is that everyone eats.”

“It started with Dark Wallet. When I came back from Syria, people said I should make Dark Wallet again, and I said coinjoin is not secure anymore, so I don’t trust it.”

“The advantage of a native token is that there’s a way for your community to participate in the upside.”

“We in Switzerland are offering a safe haven for privacy.”

“If the market decides, then that’s a Bitcoin I think has a future, because that’s a free-market Bitcoin.”