Season 16 quotes
650 quotes from 65 episodes. Type a name or a word to narrow the wall.
“It’s part of why they said you’d never be able to get HTTP/2 done either.”
“I remember some people saying, no, you should never have any institutional custody.”
“If you’ve got a protocol that can be easily changed, then of course you can’t get that level of trust.” (at 23:23)”
“When it comes to small amounts of money, the need for something as perfect and incorruptible as Bitcoin becomes less.”
“If Satoshi existed today, I think he would be surprised by how quickly mining got centralized. I think that was an unanticipated thing.”
“Nobody was looking to make changes to the supply or anything like that.”
“Of course we can do better in 2025 than we did back then, given the machine horsepower we have.”
“Then another one called QUIC came along, which is a little bit better for being fast, but it has the same problem.”
“We never signed anything from the BitGo side because we didn’t think that was the right way to do it.”
“We talked about a number of threats for how people might take that value from you, but the value is absolutely there.”
“Because if you’re a roll-up and you’re putting your data on Bitcoin, then you can’t have data availability faults.”
“I don’t think everybody has always agreed on that as evidenced by the fact that Bitcoin has changed.”
“I would love to see an actual competitive market for scaling solutions, but right now nobody can actually build; we’re all waiting for covenants.”
“It has a certain amount of privacy, but it is also a federation and a side chain.”
“The idea that Bitcoin should never change is itself a change to what Bitcoin is.”
“An optimistically verified ZK rollup avoids the data availability safety issue of an optimistic rollup by only using the optimistic part to verify the proof.”
“Of course, the privacy is not as good as something like ring signatures or SNARKs or STARKs.”
“The mitigation that makes the most sense for Bitcoin is probably to have a shielded pool.”
“There is probably a centralized sequencer, and that is an element of centralization; it can be eliminated, but that also has trade-offs.”
“You can’t run it halfway and then see what it did.”
“In the early days, the only way you could get coins was from a faucet.”
“It could be six months or a year where the coin is going up in value and there’s no volume whatsoever at your exchange.”
“It is battle-tested because it’s Bitcoin at its base, with 2014 proof of stake that’s been upgraded to the latest Bitcoin.”
“I sent my friend 50 Bitcoin and it never got to his wallet, because it was so early that his computer hadn’t caught up with the blockchain.”
“If you threw away the keys, then you might as well not have it because you can’t access it, then you don’t own it anymore.”
“The value of Bitcoin grows when your friends start talking about it and buying it.”
“That means that you’re committing yourself to increasing the value of this by participating.”
“The early adopters came in and built it when there was nobody else.”
“We don’t need to register with FINRA because it truly is peer-to-peer and there is no success fee.”
“We want to extend that last mile to the normies that have never touched crypto.”
“Of course that Bitcoin transaction has to pay for the block space it takes up, just like any other transaction, and miners earn fees from that.”
“I was an advisor at the time, but I went full-time in April of 24.”
“The incentives of the system will lead people to expand Bitcoin’s capabilities and the number of users who can hold it, because that makes Bitcoin ultimately more valuable.”
“These are security features that professionals realized, through the evolution of the system, that we should have: we should make money slow.”
“It is the only trust-minimized bridge that operates at scale right now.”
“Money is a big part of government, whether because governments create money or because governments need money to fund their services.”
“The main difference between BitVM2 and BitVM1 is that BitVM2 enables permissionless challenging.”
“In the BitVMX model, the only people who can challenge an invalid computation or withdrawal request are participants in the original pre-signing ceremony.”
“Tornado Cash is probably the most widely known, but there’s also Aztec and Railgun that are also worth looking at.”
“You can’t have one tyrant stealing all the gold reserves without everyone else noticing.”
“I can go on a rant for an hour about this, but when he says digital gold, it’s not what people think it is.”
“The few times that I used Lightning, I couldn’t get enough liquidity, it failed, and in the end people say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s use this custodial Lightning wallet.’”
“When the Zerocoin flaw happened, it was actually cryptographic. There was a problem with the protocol, and it was exploited by a black hat who called himself Pink Panther.”
“That means China is the only place that you can get it really clean.”
“The first question to ask is: what is a privacy coin? We can say Monero is definitely a privacy coin, but is Grin a privacy coin if the transaction graph can be traced?”
“At the end of the day, that is good for privacy coins. If not for us, we would have lost one of the largest exchanges in the world, and many other exchanges just follow what Binance does.”
“I don’t think there’s a quantum computer now that’s really close, but I would say there’s a non-zero chance that in the next 10 years there will be one strong enough to break this.”
“Using something like Monero or even Firo, you’re buying yourself time for privacy, maybe 15 or 20 years of privacy, and after that, who knows?”
“You cannot just stand still and think that something will be good for the next 50 years.”
“You have to stay online, you can’t do multi-hop, and all of this.”
“I don’t remember what they are, but I do remember thinking Citrea is a scam.”
“I’ve never really thought about the different privacy implications.”
“It’s not just that Lightning doesn’t store that information. You actually don’t know what channel your recipient has with their counterparty, or what channel that money is going into.”
“It doesn’t do what it says on the tin, but it does do the reusable thing, which is nice.”
“You should look for good privacy, and therefore you should not use a custodian, because then you’re only getting recipient privacy.”
“Like with lightning, you also have to make sure you never make a mistake.”
“Storage is cheaper now for the same amount of money you would have spent on, say, a one-terabyte SSD back in 2017.”
“Lightning has better receiver privacy than Monero does.”
“‘Private channel’ is a misnomer, and someone should make a pull request and change it to ‘unannounced channel.’”
“The only people who know about your transaction are the people on the route.”
“I never thought, nor did I ever want, to have one ring to rule them all.”
“I never crossed paths with him, but he was a huge influence on me as an artist and as a child.”
“I support people who are honestly trying to improve Bitcoin, or any cryptographic protocol.”
“My generation, and generations before and after me, with a certain sense of value, would never say it if they knew it.”
“When I think Bitcoin’s price should go up, when everything tells me Bitcoin is worth more, the market goes down.”
“The Bitcoin Foundation was extremely dysfunctional, in the same way that the Bitcoin community is dysfunctional. I don’t think there’s really a Bitcoin community; there are probably hundreds of Bitcoin communities, and each one thinks it is the true one.”
“The Bitcoin Foundation essentially failed because of the inability of the board members to come together.”
“It’s maybe something I never really considered to be that big of a deal.”
“Jon Matonis was flying around to SWIFT, embassies and banker groups around the world. They weren’t selling Bitcoin at that point; they were trying to explain Bitcoin and how it worked.”
“You can’t blame people for being involved in this permissionless casino, because there’s nothing else for them to do.”
“Crypto is still not the best in user experience yet, but it’s getting there.”
“Even though it’s pseudonymous, in the sense that nobody immediately knows who you are when you create a new address, it’s very traceable.”
“There was a staking campaign at the beginning of the launch, but it’s no longer active.”
“Everybody says they want something, but nobody really wants to try to get to it.”
“I thought nobody would really like it, because of the belief that Mimblewimble is not private, but that’s not what happened.”
“In practice, I think Monero, ZK technology, and the Mimblewimble and Dandelion combination all give solid privacy results. ZK is best if you take it to the extreme, but first and foremost you have to consider OPSEC.”
“It’s all about the amounts, and being sure that no inflation happened.”
“The article talks about the real problem in the Mimblewimble protocol, and the problem is its traceability.”
“Mimblewimble was chosen as a very good compromise: good privacy with good scalability in terms of blockchain size.”
“The difference needs to balance out, because that’s how the validity of the blockchain is verified: everything sums to zero and there is no illegal inflation.”
“Usually five people is enough to find around 80% of the issues in a given flow.”
“We don’t offer this custodial wallet anymore. We invite people to try out the Hub.”
“I always try to think: I really like this, how can I build something similar into our products?”
“I don’t always have time to do it for every feature we work on.”
“It’s a very good first step to try self-custodial Lightning.”
“It gives you additional benefits like a Lightning address, but you can also buy Bitcoin through your account.”
“Of course, you can’t spend Bitcoin everywhere in the whole country, but there are pockets, communities where you basically can.”
“Part of it is that layer one Bitcoin is just more expensive to use than Tron.”
“One way to do it is with confidential transactions, but we also have much better cryptography libraries than we did back in 2009 when Satoshi launched Bitcoin.”
“Even in towns where there’s no Bitcoin community, you’ll find merchants you can pay in Bitcoin.”
“Bitcoin is probably not what you want to be using in that situation.”
“Even that is not going to solve the problem, because the problem is a lack of real understanding of the stuff we talked about earlier.”
“Nobody in the white market who is unwilling to act without permission is part of the security model.”
“Relaying to miners is great, but ultimately the only reason anybody needs a transaction is because they’re mining.”
“The idea is that I can attest to being something or to having something.”
“The only scenario where this is possible is when your money goes out the door and it may or may not come back.”
“The reason it’s expensive is the use of a standard vector to implement the stack, which is contiguous memory.”
“We don’t force them to use just one. We never have, and we can’t.”
“You can develop a distributed website where the point is to establish trust and to digitize trust.”
“You can argue all you want about how often you saw it, but there is no security.”
“He goes to confession and says, I never paid the taxes on it.”
“I would never go into a store or a coffee shop and say, consider accepting this weird libertarian currency called Bitcoin.”
“The governor of Indiana says that Bitcoin is a good idea.”
“It’s like having one kind of money that works in both black market and white market transactions, and another type of money that only works in the white market.”
“It’s very difficult to know when money is given the wrong way.”
“People are aware that switching coins is expensive and undermines the whole project. This is why sidechains are the key: sidechains are competition among the L2s, and each L2 is its own blockchain.”
“How is the miner supposed to know what fee to collect unless they run a node of every possible system?”
“They think that winning the election means you get to free Ross.”
“You can’t onboard people to the Lightning Network without L1 bytes, and there are not enough of them.”
“Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin nodes have always been in more than one country.”
“The important thing to me about Bitcoin is challenging the money printer, first and foremost; privacy is important as well, of course.”
“I don’t think anyone still maintains that repository on SourceForge, but it’s interesting how this all started.”
“I had worked on Iris for a very long time, since 2019 or so, but on a different stack until 2022.”
“It wasn’t about making money; that changed maybe sometime in 2010, when my normal miner friends started flowing in.”
“Many of my friends were mining on GPUs as early as 2010, when the GPU miners came out.”
“Usually the orders were pretty small at BitcoinExchange.com, like someone buying for 20 euros.”
“I just wonder if Lightning providers like Wallet of Satoshi are going to be cancelled.”
“Bitcoin doesn’t automatically convert people into libertarians, as I’ve noticed. Many of my Bitcoin-mining friends are still social democrats.”
“Everything was centralized, so I was googling for something like a peer-to-peer currency, and then Bitcoin came up; it had just been published.” (at 9:15)”
“I continued it with the Bitcoin.org forums, and I gave away the Bitcoin.org domain.”
“A lot of big blockers went to Ethereum to build stuff just because it was fun, and because nobody told them not to do it.”
“There was some consensus in the group that this attempt was great, but we needed something better.”
“Four years ago, I was very convinced that Bitcoin was going to go to $100,000 during the bull market.”
“He said, you’ll never make it on my website, and blocked me.”
“It was about going back to Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.”
“The Tornado Cash case is the most interesting, because they charged the developers with money laundering that was done using the protocol, not by them.”
“There is no reason for them to be on the blockchain, but they did this just because they could and they made it so centralized that even some exchanges gave up on running nodes.”
“He has probably done more for the big block community than anyone else.”
“There was this narrative, especially being promoted in 2018, that BCH is the real Bitcoin.”
“This is the only option, because you’re not going to get SegWit2x.”
“Vitalik has said very publicly that the reason Ethereum exists as a separate blockchain is Counterparty. With Counterparty, we had built smart contracts on top of Bitcoin, and there was a lot of pushback at the time from the Bitcoin Core developers.”
“I’ve always been very in favor of collaboration, especially within the Bitcoin space and across altcoins.”
“I like Bitcoin a lot, and I think its function as digital gold is very important. Ethereum doesn’t have that; Ether is just gas for the smart contract system of Ethereum.”
“That’s 210,000 blocks, which means someone has to make the transactions on-chain.”
“The only outward manifestation of it is this scary notice on the token scanner.”
“The way to think about the Counterparty node software is that it’s just an extra module you run next to Bitcoin.”
“The biggest difference is that Counterparty is much more functional. It can do a lot more than Ordinals inscriptions, Runes or BRC-20.”
“What happened is that Mastercoin had raised a bunch of money in 2013 to develop the protocol.”
“When I left as lead maintainer, I guess really the end of 2014, early 2015, there was a trickle of development afterwards, but very little.”
“There is no Counterparty Classic. It’s just an old version of Counterparty.”
“Avalon is the third biggest one, but there are some US based companies that are starting to do it already.”
“In my opinion, a lot of Bitcoin miners run their facilities as a business, not as a support system for Bitcoin.”
“It’s not about surviving; it’s about growing even more.”
“Nobody is willing to pay 500 euros per month for electricity in order to support a project.”
“MiCA, and the travel rule especially, mean we cannot develop it as much as we would want.”
“Ethereum going to proof of stake messed up a lot of GPU miners. There were a lot of hobbyist miners on Ethereum.”
“We are fully regulated in Switzerland, which comes in handy for institutional miners, because we are compliant and audited.”
“We’re just the middleman, enabling the marketplace to live and letting miners direct hashrate wherever the money is.”
“Our Lightning node is definitely one of the oldest and the biggest, and we let all of our miners get payouts in Lightning, so even small miners can get paid.”
“We let down the GPU miners. If there were still GPU miners, there would be hobbyist miners, and I think there wouldn’t be such high regulation as we’re going to see in the next years.”
“We had a lot of issues with our Zcash wallet over the years, like difficulty keeping the wallet consistent so that it correctly tracks unspent coins.”
“Perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good enough. More people should make permissionless bridges or IOU systems to get Bitcoin on other chains, because right now we’re using Bitcoin issued on other chains by completely centralized entities.”
“During the block size wars, core developers had a more prominent role.”
“It’s also Bitcoin, but the thing is, people are still going to make shitcoins on the layer 2s on Bitcoin.”
“The stupidest people love shitcoins, the smartest people love shitcoins, and the people in the middle are the ones saying shitcoins are bad.”
“The last time I was running my own exchange, Justcoin.com, it was run out of Norway with a Norwegian bank account, and we had fiat there.”
“To my knowledge it has never been hacked, and it has a huge amount of liquidity in it.”
“I do think of myself as a Bitcoiner first. It’s a bit unfortunate that this use of Bitcoin has been pushed out to a fork of Ethereum.”
“I’ve never really been that familiar with Decred.”
“More innovation is fueled by the creation of shitcoins, which is such a bizarre funding mechanism.”
“The difference is that if Alby Hub’s relay goes down, you lose the connection to your wallet.”
“Artists can never be serious when there’s no free speech platform.”
“The most interesting time in Bitcoin is the bear market, because you just get rid of the noise.”
“The funny one for me is always when people say, we can’t make this change because there are unknowns.”
“Roger Ver went astray for a little bit and got that Adam Smith invisible-hand slap. The community said no, Bitcoin.com can’t control Bitcoin, and that’s when Bitcoin really proved its value: it couldn’t be co-opted.”
“The point of a free and open-source DIY hardware wallet is that you avoid the supply chain attack. So I always tell people: build the LNbits hardware wallet, but don’t buy it from our shop.”
“This is why Bitcoin is important because that is your money and you own it.”
“I kind of hate the narratives that Bitcoin is this, Bitcoin is that, and no true Bitcoiner would do this.”
“You’re using public key crypto in a way which is outside of using it for money, which means that your key management becomes different.”
“I let the renewal lapse for nostr.org and a domain troll got it. I managed to get it back years later.”
“The way I approach privacy is that it’s non-offensive.”
“Bitcoin is now at the point where it can openly stand in public and it’s clear to everyone that’s looking, that it’s better technology than fiat.”
“He keeps going down the wrong path, vilifying everyone who tells him to just stop because he’s wrong.”
“You can’t simultaneously LARP as a libertarian and say you can do whatever you want because you have free will.”
“The point is aligning with your individual truth and then manifesting it in the best possible way.”
“What I like to post and tweet is: no privacy, no freedom. With Bitcoin, whenever you send a transaction, everyone sees where it is going.”
“People should have the option. Even if they choose to be jerks publicly, they should have the option to hide some stuff.”
“I always saw privacy as a tool, but not as an offensive one. The way I use privacy is: how do I get the world to leave me alone?”
“Central banks and fiat money are actually quite impressive technology that, in my view, has helped civilization scale.”
“Privacy gets so much easier when the people who build the tools and protocols have considered privacy in the design. Wasabi is a great example: you just install it, receive, wait and spend.”
“Arguing about whether Craig Wright is Satoshi is kind of a distraction. You don’t need to believe that Craig Wright is Satoshi in order to learn from him.”
“Another thing about the Bitcoin Core ideology is the idea that everybody is supposed to be running a node.”
“With the dollar, liberals, conservatives and libertarians are all using the same money.”
“I would say the Austrian theory of money is that the value of money is like love.”
“Of course Tether isn’t the only thing happening on BTC, but it is a reason the price can be driven up.”
“The only security that you can have in real life is probabilistic.”
“The original idea of Bitcoin is that it is traceable so that criminals can be caught.”
“The soft fork means that the node software will continue to run and sync the chain without validating the new rules.”
“The theory of money is just something that’s presented as an illusion instead.”
“The whole part of the security of Bitcoin is that the miners are a service provider.”
“From an investor’s perspective, buying Bitcoin is the safest bet, because it’s the only project we know will still be around in 10, 20 or 30 years.”
“White markets, dark markets and gray markets obviously also exist in fiat land.”
“Our first two products require KYC, but other products will not. We’re already looking into Bitcoin-backed loans, working with other protocol developers, and that product will not need KYC.”
“I always take Revolut as an example, because in terms of user experience they really nailed it.”
“There are so many things people don’t know about how it works.”
“Starting in October, every bank in Europe will need to send and receive SEPA Instant transactions, and they will need to do it for free.”
“There will always be nefarious activities in the banking sector and in cash payments. It’s really about doing everything that you can.”
“There is no way for you to know with precision where the funds are coming from.”
“Chainalysis has a Lightning service, and others also have Lightning monitoring capabilities. How accurate they are is something nobody can really verify.”
“We build products whose UX is focused on self-custody, but at the same time we want to advance adoption.”
“On ZKsync you have something called a paymaster, which means someone else can sponsor the gas fee for your transactions.”
“If you have a Mac and an iPhone, they can be synced, but we are also introducing a couple of other recovery methods.”
“It shouldn’t be that a couple of thousand people know how to use Bitcoin and everyone else goes custodial. That’s not the point of Bitcoin. It should be globally accessible.”
“Binance at one point had very high fees for withdrawing your Bitcoin.”
“If we figure out that one thing is better than the other, the people who are really in line with Bitcoin philosophy will adapt to it.”
“We talked about which part we will open source first and how it will evolve over time.”
“It’s not just an app; you can think of many different things you can do with it.”
“The beauty of Citrea as a layer is that people can build their own Bitcoin-backed stablecoins.”
“Some of the ordinals people came and said, this is stupid, this is a bug.”
“For Bitcoin to stay true to its narrative, it needs to be self-custodial: people choose their own rules and know what they’re doing.”
“There have always been other protocols that overshadowed Counterparty, even recently.”
“I haven’t downloaded it to check it out, but I believe I heard that it was back out there and being used again.”
“For me, building has always been about doing stuff behind the scenes for Counterparty.”
“It used to be its own exchange, but now it got rebranded or redirected to TokenScan.”
“I’m doubtful that counterparty can evolve to become a layer2 scaling solution, but given enough time and money anything’s possible.”
“When Stamps first came out, I was really supportive of it. The prunable versus unprunable thing was a silly argument, but at least it would bring some relevance to Counterparty.”
“I created a site called tokenstamps.io in the first month or so, which indexed all stamps, not just what Mike in Space was calling Bitcoin Stamps.”
“There’s always going to be hardcore maxis who are like, I want all the data regardless.”
“In the current version of Counterparty, those are the only opinions that matter.”
“You might be setting up a bunch of dispensers, but as far as actual sales happening, there aren’t any.”
“Bitcoin exists to disintermediate, and a lot of people in the space have forgotten that, because increasing numbers of people are okay with custodians.”
“Bitcoin is a much more constrained environment in terms of scripting and execution than something like Ethereum is.”
“Right now there’s no realistic scaling solution for Bitcoin aside from custodial services, which defeats the purpose of Bitcoin.”
“If Bitcoin doesn’t scale to let everyone onboard with individual transactions, covenants let us batch all of their transactions together.”
“The steelman against hard forks is that, of course, you don’t want to force people to upgrade their software, because that’s a dangerous precedent.”
“Working in industry on a bunch of custodial systems, I discovered the use of vaults. Then I started asking: how could I use CTV to create this vault structure?”
“For me, privacy is a very important part of Bitcoin, but the most important thing about Bitcoin is preventing inflation and preventing censorship.”
“Vaults are really important for decentralized Bitcoin ownership, and I think the clock might be running out on that, not because people don’t want those things, but because ownership of coins is concentrating.”
“I think vaults are a not-well-understood means of scaling ownership in Bitcoin, and CTV is pretty much required for a vault construction.”
“I started off as a CAT critic, because it’s the dumbest way to do anything, in the same way that you can build a computer out of black and white pebbles if you have enough of them. But it does provide an escape hatch to do things like ZKP layers on top of Bitcoin.”
“If there are ways to go after that, we should, but I think that should happen at the layer of goods and services rather than at the layer of money, as much as possible.”
“It needs a strong technical core and not just a financial core, because with only a financial core, the tech gets perceived as something that should just be outsourced.”
“The efficiency of the EVM on the same hardware has increased by orders of magnitude.”
“If you look at the Ethereum page from 2014, it advertises some use cases which, ironically, ended up being the focal points of distinct bull markets.”
“In all of these different situations, privacy is a really key aspect of decentralization and censorship resistance.”
“Probably the only exception is the elliptic curve stuff, and that ended up being the bedrock of the Ethereum privacy ecosystem.”
“To me, the tribe should be first and foremost not about a particular asset, but about the underlying ideals. I hope that as Ethereum we can continue to convince all of you that we can be very effective stewards of those ideals, making sure that financial self-sovereignty and a free and open internet can continue to be a reality for people, even during a time when lots of people don’t want it to be.” (at 2:49:53)”
“People working on Ethereum tend to talk about it as the one chain, other than Bitcoin, that actually has a credible story of a high level of decentralization.”
“The other change is the Merkle Patricia tree being hexary instead of binary.”
“There is a contingent of Ethereum culture that’s very strongly pushing for decentralization, privacy and censorship resistance.”
“From 2010 to 2019, the only way to do it was to use an off-chain facility, which means a centralized exchange.”
“My problem with these hangers-on, these fleas on the body of Bitcoin, is that they’re primarily marketers clinging on to a trend.”
“If you look at Lightning and atomic swaps on Lightning, they never touch the blockchain.”
“It’s just the narrative of never selling your Bitcoin and never using it for anything other than speculation.”
“It will never be open source and never be exposed to the outside world.”
“You can never secure them, because they’re trusted third parties and magnets for hackers, as we saw with what the Lazarus Group did recently.”
“The problem with conferences is that everyone meets 500 people.”
“The fact that we were the number five product in the financial sector on Product Hunt in 2020 is warming.”
“The one risk that remains is that you may have a period of illiquidity, but that’s nothing compared to the alternative.”
“We’ve changed a lot with the AI element of this, which is something most people don’t associate with us.”
“This happened back in either late 2016 or late 2017.”
“I do wish that Bitcoin becomes what it aims to be.”
“These people would have found Bitcoin even without Free Talk Live mentioning it in 2010.”
“I don’t think it’s morally wrong to give them liquidity so they can empower themselves and engage in trade.”
“I’m not saying this guy is a prophet, but he did mention that there’s no difference in lifestyle between having $20 million and having $200 million.”
“Obviously, Bitcoin’s changed quite a bit since 2011 when we were talking about it.”
“I told my partner: it’s not just alpaca socks, VPN services and girls going Bitcoin. It’s real money.”
“We received tips at bitcoin.freetalklive.com. Many people wanted to say thank you for introducing them to Bitcoin, and they sent us little transactions, one or five bitcoins at the time.”
“There’s no way I would let my family sleep in the same building where private keys were kept, because anything awful could happen if people found out.”
“I don’t think money needs to be private, but it is better if it is, because there will always be a place in the marketplace for private money.”
“Right now, the most liquid layer two for Bitcoin is actually Ethereum, with wrapped Bitcoin.”
“Most people think we’re going to have these BitVM-style bridges.”
“It’s something you currently cannot do on Bitcoin without a lot of code.”
“Maybe because I like being the underdog, I felt very uncomfortable when it was all ‘Bitcoin is winning.’”
“Of course they can do that, but nobody’s going to want to work with them again.”
“For Robin and Liam, the end goal is perfect-privacy Bitcoin payments, and just to have that, they had to invent ideas like BitVM. ZK rollups are kind of a byproduct.”
“If people want to use stablecoins and these are Bitcoin-backed stablecoins, then all the demand to hold them is channeled directly into Bitcoin.”
“The technical term we should be using is validity proof rather than zero-knowledge proof.”
“I’m not sure that privacy per se is what’s under threat. It’s political speech in favor of privacy.”
“You’re going to have large factions of people who are not necessarily ideologically aligned with our perception of what Bitcoin is.”
“Many miners and the mining community have actually been using very sustainable and renewable sources of electricity.”
“Bitcoin mining is still pretty new; ASIC mining is not that mature. Ever since the first ASIC was released, we’ve seen great improvements in efficiency because of better chips and better designs.”
“Most people don’t understand the role Bitcoin miners play in stabilizing the grid and supporting demand response programs.”
“Anything that requires Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin Core to change is usually quite controversial.”
“From what our clients show us, a lot of Bitcoin mining already runs on renewable energy, in the Nordic countries and even in Texas.”
“Partly because there’s always economy of scale, but also because of where your power is.”
“Having interrelations with Bitcoin is very helpful.”
“Part of the reason why proof of stake is so popular is that it rewards holders: they lock up their tokens and delegate them to infrastructure providers to validate.”
“The idea has been around for a very long time, but to actually implement it you need social coordination among different players.”
“They’re not just that; they’re also potentially investors in that work.”
“The most important thing is that we need to improve each other and lift each other up.”
“Those people were just making analogies to Ethereum or to some smart contract running on Ethereum.”
“The problem was the wallets: the end-user wallets that have to scan transactions looking for incoming payments to their user.”
“Privacy is not a niche thing. Every business that transacts needs privacy for competitive reasons, every consumer expects privacy in their normal life, and governments need privacy. So Zcash could be the mainstream.”
“The idea is that this happens before any transaction can become part of a final block.”
“The only way the compute node could send or receive information is through the DVD writer, slash reader device.”
“The only way you can get privacy is by holding your money at rest in the shielded pool.”
“I’m not Satoshi. I wish. I tried to be Satoshi for two years at DigiCash, trying to figure out how to make Chaumian DigiCash decentralized.” (at 1:21:01)”
“Burned Zcash counts as unissued Zcash, so the long-term curve of Zcash issuance still approaches 21 million asymptotically, in the exact same way that original Zcash did and the exact same way that Bitcoin did.”
“I don’t think people using transparent addresses detracts from your privacy when you use Zcash. The Zcash anonymity set on chain is already big enough for all practical purposes.”
“At the time, the whole censorship thing got really weird; I never expected that to happen.”
“The UTXO model is superior to what Ethereum has, from a privacy point of view and from a scaling point of view.”
“It’s not only about money, central banking and fiat currency, but all these interesting aspects of technology and computer science.”
“They thought: we can’t get infinitely big blocks, so we should just take one-megabyte blocks. I think that was a really bad answer, because two-megabyte blocks would have been better than one-megabyte blocks.”
“In the real world, there is a bit of risk with zero-conf.”
“The hope was that BCH would become Bitcoin. Core people were really mad, saying we were trying to take the name of Bitcoin, but that was intentional, because both forked from the same blockchain.”
“Most people using SPV wallets, and maybe one in every hundred super-keen people like me running their own nodes, is a win for Bitcoin. What is a loss for Bitcoin is everyone using Coinbase Wallet or some other centralized service.”
“The fact that it’s somewhat non-custodial is beside the point; they’re still in the business of transmitting money for a fee.”
“Whereas BTC people, they said, well, everything that is not our coin is a scam and a shitcoin.”
“If you put $50 in a channel but the fee is $200, you can’t even exit your channel.”
“Although we can’t do it on Bitcoin, let’s build a virtual layer where we can execute all the crazy visions that we have for Bitcoin.”
“Getting people back into the grassroots movement of why we do Bitcoin, how we do Bitcoin is so important.”
“It’s almost unachievable on Bitcoin, at least by all the means currently available.”
“Breeze did a great job pushing nodeless Lightning support for wallet developers. You can see a lot of people finally getting back to trying to integrate Bitcoin into their solutions.”
“I will probably never use that, because all I want to do is keep my BTC in cold storage.”
“The only thing I can do is build tools that offer a nicer experience and a novel way to use Bitcoin.”
“The only thing that is keeping you from staying off-chain for forever is the VTXO expiry.”
“The only way she can receive money across borders, when her parents are outside the mainstream banking system, is to use Tether.”
“You can’t really sell this whole freedom perspective to everyone. Only a subset of people actually care.”
“You can’t just push a specific agenda and say, yeah, this will do it.”
“It is a subcategory of a group that encompasses a lot more than people think.”
“I would never give metadata protection a 10, because that instills false confidence that people aren’t passively collecting stuff about you.”
“If each block balloons up to one terabyte because there are just that many transactions, then nobody can run a node.”
“If the privacy research for Bitcoin isn’t started and done soon, it might never get done.”
“It’s not using anything we haven’t seen before, which is always a good sign.”
“People don’t quote the source anymore, but they do claim that Satoshi mined 1 million Bitcoin.”
“The stronger the tool is, the more powerful it is in general, and we don’t always get to choose.”
“Privacy in Monero is probabilistic, which means your transaction is one of many.”
“We don’t always get to choose who is and isn’t a user of our stuff.”
“Stack Wallet is the only one that supports Spark right now.”
“Whether it’s physical security or the security of a code base, the idea that something is 100% secure and that this can be guaranteed is false.”
“On the open source side, hypothetically anybody should be able to verify it.”
“Right now we are the Zcash security ecosystem lead, and in that role we get to look at multiple projects related to Zcash and its ecosystem.”
“The only privacy was that only you and the person receiving the data knew the exact FTP address, but someone else could get in the middle.”
“There’s no phone number required, like you need with some tools.”
“We can’t put the shards back together, and we can’t decrypt them.”
“One thing I would like to see more of in the industry is the next level of security: the approach to audits and how we handle security.”
“I haven’t read that report in years, but it would be really interesting to look back at it.”
“You have to give some personal information to make the payments, but we use zero-knowledge.”
“I don’t have the answer right now, but I will definitely pose that question to the team afterwards.”
“Because the only limit to growth is creativity, ideas, and we haven’t seen any limit on that front.”
“Billions went to this pharmaceutical company for toxic products that nobody wants or needs and that have no medical benefit whatsoever.”
“Bitcoin is compared to gold; it’s said to be digital gold.”
“Who’s going to set interest rates, some people will ask.”
“This was used as a reason to introduce CBDCs; the Bank of England came out with it already in March 2020.”
“What people don’t realize, in this world dominated by narratives of austerity, is that we can all have abundance.”
“People don’t realize this because of all the talk about bad news, higher taxes, more expensive things and less net income or pension.”
“Over time, the terms of trade of commodity exporters must go down, and they do.”
“This is only partly true: when was the federal income tax introduced? When the Fed was created.”
“What does happen is redistribution, because fundamentally, at its core, government policy is always a transfer policy.”
“Always use a new address whenever you’re receiving new payments.”
“As somebody who is highly invested in Bitcoin, I’m invested in nothing else.”
“A single post-quantum cryptography algorithm would make BitVM people’s lives easier, and it would make RGB fully quantum resistant.”
“The actual post-quantum signature and public key pair will be something like four to eight thousand bytes, and that’s everything you need to spend.”
“What’s really difficult for Bitcoiners to appreciate is that quantum computing isn’t sovereign computing.”
“Something else that’s interesting to me is shielded client-side validation, by Robin Linus and Jonas Nick.”
“We do know that we need to fix certain things in Bitcoin at certain times.”
“A commit-reveal scheme does protect against short-exposure attacks, which would be the big problem if there were sufficiently advanced quantum computers.”
“What we do see is that we’re being repeatedly warned by the American government that there is a need to prepare.”
“We will need a soft fork to prepare against the vulnerability of what are called short exposure attacks.”
“At the end of the day, it means that a third party will decide what you build, when you build it and how you build it.”
“Proof of stake has its own issues; the overhead is higher.”
“Proof of work is also the most robust consensus algorithm today to ensure decentralization.”
“As a proof-of-work chain, there are a lot of opportunities for DEXs to work in synergy with the protocol layer and bring utility to it.”
“My favorite is the desktop wallet, but it’s definitely not for the everyday user.”
“As of today, that’s the only dApp the core team has built; everything else has been built by third parties.”
“The feedback has always been overwhelmingly positive that this is an extremely easy language, easy environment, very intuitive.”
“I’ve never had anyone look into Alephium and not like what they saw.”
“You can never really be ASIC-proof. You’re ASIC-resistant but never proof, and maintaining that resistance is costly; it’s something you have to keep up over time.”
“I’ve never met a software developer who only knew one language and one framework, and that’s it.”
“Everything had a fixed script that they’d already vetted, deployed and standardized.”
“A couple of people on the Bitcointalk forums started really looking at Bitcoin script.”
“It was limited in a bunch of ways in 2010 in a fairly ad hoc way with the goal of eliminating all these classes of bugs.”
“I’m really grateful they took the plunge and did this, because we had to use it and learn, but it was terrible.”
“It’s definitely possible, but it’s going to be so much harder than it was to build on Ethereum.”
“The most expensive opcode you can do in Bitcoin is a SHA-256 without an optimized CPU.”
“Miniscript is not a change to anything on the consensus layer; it’s a change in the way you think about Bitcoin script.”
“The way you do fee bumping is child-pays-for-parent, which is often the right way to go, but it can be complicated.”
“You can add and subtract, but you can’t multiply or divide them.”
“You can produce a formal proof that it’s impossible to satisfy the program without a signature from a specific co-signer.”
“I’ve been open in saying that back then I expected Lightning, within a year or two, to be 95% of all transactions with internet money. That obviously hasn’t happened.”
“The centralized option can always do everything the decentralized option can do, but not vice versa.”
“In the first year or so, Monero and Lightning were neck and neck, but I think it’s majority Lightning now, as we’ve really gained traction in that community.”
“I don’t know if we’re making it stronger, but I would agree that in that regard we’re not really replacing things.”
“Monero is a buzzword in regulatory circles.”
“If you talk about empowering people to do things with money online that they couldn’t otherwise do, that’s privacy and censorship resistance.”
“It’s a perception. It’s not about what actually gives you privacy; it’s about how ignorant regulatory bodies see these things. When they hear the word Monero, they associate it with the dark web.”
“It’s not that any one particular chain has outcompeted Bitcoin; Bitcoin can still be the biggest one.”
“Subscriptions are super lame, and we should be getting away from them.”
“Whenever somebody buys Bitcoin, somebody else sells Bitcoin.”
“Fundamentally, I got into Bitcoin because I like the idea of sound money and the libertarian concept of separating money from the state.”
“To say that there’s privacy in Bitcoin simply by running your own node is disingenuous, and dangerous in terms of letting people think things about the system that aren’t true. You need a very high degree of OPSEC and diligence to even approach privacy.”
“People don’t go to a node because they can’t trust the node.”
“If somebody put a one-Bitcoin fee on a transaction, as a miner I would want to hold on to it until I won a block, not share it through the network.”
“When we talk about scaling, state is the long end of the tail.”
“The drivechain can see Bitcoin, but if you have a reverted state in the drivechain, Bitcoin doesn’t care.”
“If I was Satoshi, even if I had access to those keys, I would have burned them a long, long time ago, because he would have recognized that those keys being in existence anywhere was a huge threat to Bitcoin.”
“The problem is you can’t implement it, because to implement it you have to change the protocol.”
“We never associate your IP address, as it’s mixed in not only with all the chain traffic but with all the messaging traffic.”
“In Quai, the hierarchy of merge-mined chains is always reciprocally validated, meaning Prime validates everything in this hierarchy.”
“Block.one sold a bunch of EOS tokens and put the money in Bitcoin, but EOS token holders have no claim on that Bitcoin.”
“Bitcoin’s incentives are strong enough to carry it through, regardless of how it shakes out.”
“If the Ethereum Foundation or ConsenSys started stacking a lot of Bitcoin, you as an Ether holder have no claim on that Bitcoin. None.”
“In my view, the only long-term advantage a company has over an individual is that it can access cheap credit.”
“Bitcoin is separated from crypto in the minds of the market, the media, regulators and asset managers.”
“Before Bitcoin, market cycles took maybe a generation; people would see a huge bull market and a massive bear market maybe once in 60 years.”
“Neither do any of the others, not Fold, Strike, River or Unchained; everybody’s using OTC desks and matching orders as they come in.”
“Metaplanet is maybe second, with around 20,000 coins, among what I’d call true leveraged Bitcoin equities.”
“You can do that with Bitcoin today over Lightning, and lots of people do, without reporting their transactions, and nobody’s going to come after them.”
“You can’t go attacking every scam all over the world all the time.”
“The width of the DAG represents the latency of the network. If the DAG is 10 blocks wide, you know that roughly 10 blocks are created in every network round trip.”
“If you increase the block rate, at a certain point the DAG has too much information and you hit a bottleneck, currently around 32 or 42 blocks per second.”
“The problem is that trust-based systems are more brittle.”
“I’m not saying Kaspa will never undergo modifications, but there needs to be a very good reason and a very large supermajority consensus in the network.”
“Even in the context of a DAG, it’s useful to think of some chain around which the ordering is solidified and converges. This chain is not chosen according to the longest chain rule.”
“Core research and development will need to absorb this complexity by defining fee and gas regulation mechanisms.”
“On our upgrade and hard fork policy, which is not set in stone, we are closer to Bitcoin, but not very close.”
“When people set up email, they expect to be able to reset their password.”
“A tokenized version of Bitcoin is not such a big threat.”
“Sabotaging other blocks is the core primitive of selfish mining.”
“Just to be clear, I am a fan of Lightning. But I think Lightning was marketed as something it was never easily going to be.”
“If we think it’s a good idea to have popular implementations of Bitcoin outside of Bitcoin Core, that’s a really interesting debate that should be discussed.”
“It means the miners are not acting on the best financial incentives.”
“There is this idea that Bitcoin failed to scale quickly for user experience.”
“Once you figure out that Bitcoin is a good idea, it gets interesting.”
“I’m not convinced there’s going to be a hard fork yet. A lot of the people who are pretty opposed to Core are also really opposed to people like Roger Ver and Bitcoin Cash.”
“There’s no whale lounge area that only some people can get into.”
“You should always assume Bitcoin is a terrible idea and prove otherwise, by coming to TABConf.”
“Another recurring project would be Warnet. Last year we attacked a bunch of Bitcoin Core versions.”
“My theory of why people like Paul critique Lightning so hard is that it becomes a distraction, and then something like drivechains doesn’t get more adoption, acceptance and energy behind it.”
“I know a lot of people don’t like Zano, especially in the Monero community.”
“Arbitrum, Base and some others are coming to Cake this year; it’s on our roadmap for 2025.”
“There’s no other logic to the ordering: Monero is first, Bitcoin is second, Ethereum is third.”
“The sync process is a little slower, but the Monero community is okay with that as long as they get the privacy.”
“All of the ones we’re supporting should survive, because they all have a place.”
“My dad worked really hard, but I split off from him in 2005 and went out on my own.”
“I usually point out that Monero was made as a response to Bitcoin, saying Bitcoin is not fungible.”
“We run a node for people to connect to, but for advanced users the fix is to never connect to our node.”
“BRD wallet was huge, and then Coinbase.”
“The only time we might see an email from you is if you use Cake Pay, for the debit and gift cards.”
“The risk for Bitcoin is mostly on the tech front: becoming obsolete and not fixing the things we know have to be fixed, like the security budget, privacy and quantum resistance.”
“If it were the case, it would be dramatic for Ethereum, and I would never accept it.”
“Even at the base layer, Bitcoin needs privacy, because miners should not be able to discriminate based on the origin of the coins.”
“It’s a very big difference compared to Bitcoin, where there’s this one thing we all agree we will never touch.”
“The risk on Bitcoin is more on the tech front, and the risk on Ethereum is on the social layer. You can always fix broken tech, but a broken social layer is forever.”
“The fact that we have this distribution of the monetary supply means that there is no central issuer.”
“We do see some grassroots adoption on a smaller scale, in circular economies in places like Costa Rica, El Salvador and Africa.”
“I was always into Bitcoin, and I consider myself a Bitcoiner. Even many years ago, I was describing myself as a Bitcoin and Ethereum maximalist.”
“We are missing some pieces to do exactly the same on Bitcoin, mostly because we cannot efficiently verify STARK proofs directly on-chain with Bitcoin script.”
“Something that lets rollups and layer twos settle efficiently on Bitcoin would improve Bitcoin’s scalability.”
“Crypto is the only industry that takes mental science and sells it directly to Twitter.”
“The only way to force miners, the mercenaries, to be on your side is to make them buy hardware that’s useless for anything else.”
“If you measure your state right now, there is a 50% chance that you will find a nonce.”
“Moreover, there is no hard limit on how much the difficulty can change.”
“The point is not just to convey information, but to give it to people in a way that’s interesting and engaging.”
“When I comment on this, it’s because this thing affects me personally.”
“I read Thomas Hobbes at 17, and it’s the foundation of the way I think about the economy, money and the social contract.”
“I always like to say that throughput should be increased as much as reasonable, not as much as possible.”
“There was no mobility: you were born into a family and you had to stay there.”
“The people who decide where the money goes don’t have the expertise to understand where it would produce the best outcome.”
“I keep what I’m going to spend on bills on my Coinbase Visa card, and I move all the rest of my Bitcoin into a wallet where I hold the keys.”
“I would never trust him to protect the American people’s wants, needs and desires.”
“It never really developed into what I would consider privacy, other than the fact that you could route it through Tor natively in the wallet.”
“Soon after that, I left Canada and never really came back to wrestle in Canada.”
“The only thing government has to enforce that malum prohibitum law against Roger Ver is the barrel of the government’s guns.”
“We take that 40-hour work week, tokenize its value into US dollars, and then the bankers turn on the printing press.”
“That slap in the face from government is what sparked my deep interest in the relationship between government, banks and the people.”
“There’s always an excuse as to why the crime against humanity called taxation is a necessity.”
“They have no case if you can’t prove Roger Ver is obligated to obey their malum prohibitum law called tax law.”
“We’re setting our kids up to live lives that we would never choose to live ourselves.”
“For me, Bitcoin is an entrepreneurial activity.”
“With coinjoins, we don’t need to change the Bitcoin protocol to fix privacy. We just need to fix wallet implementations to support an additional protocol.”
“I was never the CEO of Wasabi, because Wasabi is just a GitHub repo. We had a company called zkSNACKs to run a coordinator and pay for research and development.”
“Money is there to decrease the uneasiness we perceive.”
“The idea is to not do it on the same day or the same week, or have a pattern that obviously gives it away.”
“There are multiple coinjoin coordinators available, and interestingly, they use Nostr to announce themselves to the network. Nostr is a really good discovery layer.”
“Nobody was telling them, I don’t like this and I’m not going to run it on my node.”
“Private keys are not so great for sensitive information, because key material can leak, especially in a Nostr setting where it’s exposed to users.”
“Where you spend your money is a very powerful action you can take.”
“If we had a clear protocol that defines what a valid Bitcoin block ultimately is, that’s how we would get to consensus.”
“Some things should change more quickly and some more slowly, but the idea that Bitcoin is perfect and will never be disrupted is patently false.”
“I don’t know why nobody did this before, but we call it a check phrase.”
“It’s not impossible, but it has to be done in a way that keeps the faith in Bitcoin and also protects it.”
“We are already dealing with a lot of paper Bitcoin on the market.”
“It was something you did because you wanted to, and you did it in the only way that actually makes sense.”
“Mining is not going to happen on a quantum computer; it’s just not practical.”
“There are no words, and yet there you are, and you wake up in the morning reborn like Osiris.”
“In 2008 I told him, I think this QE thing is just printing money.”
“We’re not on that timeline, thanks to Satoshi, but the game is not over yet.”
“You have to go linear all the way through it, because there’s no structure.”
“People were saying you can’t possibly outperform Bitcoin.”
“If custody is centralized, every single time you play, you’re going to lose.”
“Nobody wants to admit that we live in a capitalist society, and people listen to those who have money or know how to make it.”
“Maybe it’s a fraud, but at the end of the day it has value.”
“Nobody wanted to deal with the fact that if I send Bitcoin from my wallet to somebody, the software should know that I spent it.”
“Inside the trading pit there’s no Bitcoin running and there’s no Byzantine generals problem.”
“The only way to get your public key is from a Bitcoin transaction on-chain.”
“It was Bitcoin only, Bitcoin only, and all of a sudden it was Bitcoin plus Lightning.”
“The whole idea of Bitcoin is that we all agree we’re trying to solve peer-to-peer electronic cash.”
“What’s important when you’re trading is that you’re not getting manipulated and you have confidence in the venue.”
“That’s why I tried to shut the company down myself, but in a very controlled manner where everyone would get their money.”
“I never used to think I was smart, but then I looked around and saw how dumb everyone is.”
“All these peer-to-peers went down: LocalBitcoins went down. CZ tried to buy Paxful. I refused, because I wasn’t just in it for the money.”
“SivKit was built on Bitcoin, Lightning, Bitcoin script and all of that.”
“I’m willing to bet those 3,000 Bitcoin are not there anymore at all, because we used BitGo as a custodian.”
“We should be leading in the way we want our government to lead.”
“Setting the right example is one of my values, and one of the main values at NoOnes is that everyone eats.”
“They don’t answer the emails; nobody answers.”
“I’m all about serving God first, brother: the truth and nothing but the truth.”
“I just want a home where everyone can trade and do what they need to do.”
“I never really contributed seriously to Bitcoin’s development in any real depth.”
“The idea with Halo was: how do we make recursive proofs without a trusted setup?”
“People say the drug dealers are accepting XMR, so it must be the most private thing. But that’s not the only risk calculation a criminal is making.”
“What matters is the privacy users get in their wallet; whether the protocol is private or semi-private ultimately doesn’t matter.”
“Personally, I would never have been optimistic about incorporating Zerocoin and Zerocash into Bitcoin.”
“You have to be paranoid to defend yourself against assaults on your privacy in every sense.”
“I just have to overcompensate for it and think about this stuff all the time.”
“The layers below will compromise the layers above, and especially with privacy, you cannot undo the damage of leaking information.”
“Proof of stake will possibly help a lot with certain bottlenecks in our protocol, like time to finality.”
“The privacy in Zcash doesn’t depend on a trusted setup, and it never did.”
“We will come to a point where Bitcoin either decides it wants to please the new people who joined after 2020 and reinforce cynical memes, or it wants to become something used by eight billion people.”
“I’m very curious what people think would have happened to Polymarket if Kamala had won.”
“If we ignore the black market and the gray market, we ignore cash, we ignore privacy, we ignore the user.”
“Nobody said I was 100% wrong. What people would say was stuff like, ‘Well, Lightning wasn’t what we thought, but maybe it’ll be an interoperability layer.’ I replied to everything; I did a solid 50-minute battle against the whole room.”
“People should read my Derangements of Bitcoin post if they want to learn how I disagree with the rest.”
“The headers are only 4.4 megabytes per year, which is very small, even back in January 2009.”
“Privacy is inherently social: you need to mix.”
“There’s no reason Bitcoin Core couldn’t merge that at some point, because it’s trivial.”
“That’s the reason to have a small block size, small headers and slow block times for the L1.”
“Not all 8 billion people can start their own altcoin; that defeats the whole point.”
“I don’t like the phrase ‘privacy coin.’ I think these are just cryptocurrencies, and some implement privacy better than others.”
“They made them believe that their nodes are almighty and that Bitcoin is somehow like a democracy, which is untrue.”
“I never got paid for it; I did it as voluntary work for the community.”
“I’m not going to say you can’t do it, but we need to have some perspective here.”
“He’s built up this cult of personality.”
“Nobody said this about Sirius, who owned the Bitcoin.org domain and was one of the first contributors to Bitcoin.”
“In the Bitcoin design you have UTXOs, and Wasabi and Samourai were leveraging that.”
“Proof-of-work mining can be attacked; we’ve gone through this recently with Monero, and Bitcoin mining absolutely can be attacked by selfish mining.”
“Darknet markets are fascinating, because these are markets where people don’t want to use cryptocurrency, but they have to.”
“You can point out the issues, but you can’t deny that they improved over the years.”
“Liquidity is dropping because the Lightning Network is becoming more efficient and channels are being used more efficiently.”
“Babylon’s idea is to stake BTC and use Bitcoin as a security layer for other applications and chains.”
“The more nodes we have in the Lightning Network, the more throughput the overall network has.”
“Bitcoin is not a proof-of-stake blockchain; you need to mine blocks to receive new bitcoins. The Lightning Network is the only infrastructure where you can earn BTC on provided liquidity without price risk.”
“Users don’t have an opportunity cost for this yield, because they keep their BTC in liquid form.”
“If more of these come to Lightning or any Bitcoin layer, they won’t come in a freer way that’s exempt from censorship.”
“You can make instant swaps between BTC and a version of Bitcoin on another chain, charge small fees, and carry no economic risk, because all your assets are in BTC.”
“We cannot switch from a US-dollar-centric world to a Bitcoin-centric world overnight.”
“We don’t know what countries they’re from, but usually it’s European states and also some Asian countries.”
“We are only able to open and close channels; we aren’t able to withdraw from the node.”
“If you’re trying to get millisecond confirmations, that’s never going to happen with Zcash.”
“Bitcoin is the only trillion-dollar asset in crypto right now.”
“Ethereum people would characterize Solana as a nihilistically centralized version of Ethereum that tries to scale everything on layer one.”
“One of my favorite memes: if Bitcoin is digital gold, Zcash is digital Switzerland.”
“Nobody’s using the XRP token, except a bunch of guys who think it’s going to $589, which used to be the meme.”
“I’ve angel-funded five privacy projects on Solana, ranging from MPC to privacy-exclusive wallets.”
“If I’m talking to an engineer or an internet geek, I say Bitcoin is HTTP and Zcash is HTTPS.”
“I thought it was extremely stupid that they became tribal against Zcash, because Zcash going up actually helped all privacy projects in the sector. Monero went up too.”
“When I came to Solana, people thought I was some Solana elite.”
“I found Solana and Ethereum more interesting because that’s what I naturally gravitate towards, but I think we neglected a certain part of crypto, which is privacy.”
“It’s so new that no one’s built any of this stuff out for it yet.”
“We don’t have to be subject to any one person’s idea of what money is, what should work, or who should be able to participate.”
“I write them, put them out, and then just leave them, and no one does anything with them.”
“I suspect that any design that requires you to put non-financial data on Bitcoin is probably a spam protocol.”
“All I know is what’s in the name: it uses some form of zero-knowledge proof.”
“I can create a private key, send money to it, and then give you that private key.”
“A lot of developers to this day say there are no use cases for CTV.”
“That’s a success, because statechains have been possible on Bitcoin since 2017 and no one used them until now.”
“We can both bet on this match, or on what the price of Bitcoin will be next week.”
“You can’t set up a Bitcoin address ahead of time that encodes the script, because you don’t know who your counterparty is.”
“It’s the first ever auditable secure element.”
“Adding another secure element cannot decrease the security; it can only increase it. The question is whether it increases it by 1%, 20% or 50%.”
“The new default is 20 words, based on SLIP-39, so you can later add more shares with the multi-share backup.”
“There are parts of TROPIC01 that are not fully open source, because the company would need way more money to make it fully open source. In short, the digital parts are open source.”
“The Bluetooth connection between the device and the phone is encrypted, and there’s another pairing inside the Bluetooth channel, which is our own: another layer of encryption.”
“This is a very new field, but you can see how the discussion and the advancements are made in the open.”
“It’s not just something to make you feel good; there’s an actual check happening after you establish the connection.”
“Number one is better security, but of course people need to verify that for themselves; they probably don’t trust us on that.”
“We’re not shipping yet, but we are going to start soon, maybe even sooner than we originally planned.”
“We compete on a free market.”
“I started my research in this industry as a Plasma researcher in 2018. The Plasma idea is basically a stateless idea.”
“Bitcoin is supposed to be resilient and accessible to everyone, while Ethereum is supposed to push research and new technology.”
“Everyone mining from home is how we are actually going to decentralize this.”
“Zcash has been big for Ethereum, because ZK rollups were built on the research that Zcash did. Tornado Cash and Railgun also use some of its ZK-SNARK libraries.”
“I think Bitcoin is a money network. It’s a computer network, first of all, which issues a currency.”
“It will never reach the same level of scalability as stateless designs like Intmax, RGB or the Lightning Network.”
“It’s something made to scare people, but at the same time it’s not real.”
“Bitcoin is so important because of its conception, which was unlike anything else and is very hard to replicate.”
“The point is to get people to mine and to have power in numbers, not just a few farms around the world.”
“Before Ethereum, there were cryptographers talking about Bitcoin, but after Ethereum, most of the people who came to crypto came through Ethereum.”
“My first interaction with DPR: he wasn’t called DPR back then. He was called Silk Road Admin.”
“They’re expensive, and especially when mining is profitable, they’re even harder to get and more expensive.”
“I wasn’t going to volunteer that information to them, because I was afraid of them taking it.”
“I said, if you really want to learn about Bitcoin, mine it.”
“That’s what Bitcoin really is: private keys and public keys.”
“Let us decide what money is, rather than a government.”
“Mining was never very profitable at the time; in hindsight, people say maybe I should have kept my computer on to mine some Bitcoin in 2009.”
“The worst part is that people forget so easily about something that happened just a few years ago.”
“At the beginning, I had no faith in Bitcoin. I thought the government was running an operation and using this Bitcoin thing as a tool to get our information.”
“When we would transfer, it was always 30, 40 or 50 Bitcoin. Anything less than one Bitcoin, we considered dust.”
“Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin; Bitcoin Core is just a piece of software.”
“A key part of the larger-block philosophy was that the block size limit should be above the level of underlying demand, so there’s surplus capacity.”
“Craig Wright inadvertently had a huge positive impact for the small blockers in the block size war.”
“It’s not redeemable for energy: it takes energy to make it, but you can’t get the energy back.”
“Of course, they didn’t have to check anything, because they never actually had any Bitcoin in reserve.”
“We don’t talk enough about the free-market mechanism for reducing spam: more on-chain activity, until it becomes very expensive to post JPEGs.”
“The more demand there is for people to spend Bitcoin, the more successful Bitcoin is, in my view.”
“There are a lot of misconceptions, both about how Bitcoin works and about what Bitcoin is.”
“If miners are out there competing and working hard to get these fees and confirm transactions, Bitcoin is more censorship-resistant as well.”
“A lot of these people read about the block size war and thought it was this big battle, and they saw the underdog win that war.”
“I’m very happy to be on record, as early as 2011, stating that Bitcoin is not anonymous, back when people didn’t understand the difference.”
“Just by looking at the raw data, you would say this is obviously just a premine scam.”
“Money is too important to leave any one person or group of people in control of it, and we don’t want to have that role.”
“We should remove the trust assumption and require custodians to produce proofs of integral computation.”
“The only one that comes to mind is proving the correct evaluation of the hash function.”
“A bridge to Bitcoin is going to be difficult unless we have BIP 300 plus something else.”
“The problem with Grin is that it’s so fair that nobody feels any incentive to join it.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Lightning is the most underrated technology since Bitcoin.”
“Smart contracts on Neptune Cash are really just programs tied to the particular UTXOs involved in the transaction.”
“You cannot initiate transactions on a Raspberry Pi, but you can run a verifying node, no problem.”
“When people compare HTTP and HTTPS: Bitcoin is HTTP and Zcash is HTTPS.”
“Give it another chance, because I dismissed it a long time ago and never went back to check what happened since.”
“My preferred scenario is that Bitcoin adopts those things and we fix Bitcoin, making it private, quantum-resistant and scalable.”
“It was never about giving up on peer-to-peer electronic cash and embracing digital gold.”
“People became complacent and said, well, this is what Bitcoin is for: savings.”
“In my opinion the issues are privacy, scaling in general, and the security budget.”
“Freedom tech is the best hope we have to fight, and we need privacy.”
“The Zcash community should not push Zcash as a direct rival to Bitcoin.”
“The problem is Kaspa is too focused on selling itself as a better Bitcoin.”
“You can always fork code, but you cannot fork more than a decade of people teaching freedom and sovereignty.”
“What is a Bitcoin treasury company, really? It’s building a balance sheet of Bitcoin and then monetizing the Bitcoin. That’s effectively what a bank does, so I think we’re building Bitcoin banks.”
“That conference was about 12,000 people, and the biggest conference we had done before that was 2,000.”
“There’s no actual way to measure when the quantum computer becomes the threat, or which specific characteristics matter.”
“I think there’s a strong case to be made for Bitcoin treasury companies to self-custody.”
“We’ve reached a size as a movement where we can’t be stopped.”
“A Bitcoin treasury company is actually a very punk rock thing, because we are seizing control of the mechanisms of power and thrusting Bitcoin upon the world.”
“People don’t know this, but I helped buy the Bitcoin Twitch account like five years ago.”
“Nakamoto uses Bitcoin all the time, and I think Bitcoin treasury companies are going to use Bitcoin as money.”
“We put a lot of politicians on stage and people hated us for it, but we got them to say nice things about Bitcoin, which was something new.”
“Any token that has legitimate organic users and has survived multiple cycles of massive price declines and recoveries has separated itself into a higher-quality tier.”
“Smart contracts here follow the Bitcoin model: it’s still UTXO, and a contract is basically a program that locks the coins. It’s pretty much like Bitcoin, but the approach is different.”
“In the Ergo ecosystem we have the idea of a merge-mined sidechain with Bitcoin, so both Bitcoin and Ergo miners would get tokens, with trustless peg contracts.”
“The state should not make regulations telling us what should exist and what is legit; the market will find its way.”
“I was at the initial presentations of Lightning back in 2015 in San Francisco.”
“If you can’t pay for it, you’re going to get a second-class experience that relies on banks and custodians.”
“The one uncertainty in Bitcoin’s design is whether people will pay enough transaction fees to make up for the diminishing mining revenue.”
“There is no free lunch: miners are always buying new tokens with electricity.”
“It’s like Bitcoin NG, or maybe even a DAG, though there’s no real DAG here.”
“Ethereum had hundreds of thousands of miners, from one or two GPUs on a balcony to huge mining farms in China with 100,000 GPUs.”
“There’s a Rosen Bridge on Ergo, now connecting Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain.”
“A covenant is a promise in Bitcoin script that you cannot break. In that sense, no covenant opcode is really a covenant, because you can create a script that doesn’t enforce anything.”
“The way I think Bitcoin should be developed, and the things I disagree on, those are my greatest contributions.”
“Inflation is not going to affect you, but you are going to have to hold it for at least four years.”
“It’s very hard to undo suboptimal regulation; they always seem to add more laws and never decrease them.”
“In the end, he started a huge cultural revolution by executing a plan flawlessly and becoming a legend.”
“There is no cap on how much of it can be sold to people who are not willing to take self-custody on-chain.”
“There is no way to really have a cryptographic proof of something not existing.”
“If they make more money mining Bitcoin Cash, they’re going to switch hashrate proportionally until the opportunity is gone.”
“They can’t talk to any human, because there is no human support.”
“This is an inherent property of small-block Bitcoin: nobody can make that guarantee.”
