Season 17 quotes
450 quotes from 45 episodes. Type a name or a word to narrow the wall.
“I don’t like the idea of mindless tribalism and cheerleading, like Bitcoin is always great.”
“People don’t believe this, but I’m not really comfortable in crowds.”
“We only invested in a few, and I was never really a cheerleader for them.”
“It’d be trivial for a government to install a developer.”
“The incentives are aligned in such a way that nobody can make a difference.”
“Even with a fair-launched open source coin like Litecoin, it’s different, because there’s no Charlie Lee anymore.”
“The store of value comes from it being money, and the money being good.”
“Bitcoin Cash is definitely not a scam. It’s a fork, it has exactly the same principles as Bitcoin, and whether you think it’s a great idea or not is a different matter.”
“It would be really cool if El Salvador issued a dollar bill backed by Bitcoin.”
“If we go forward five years and Bitcoin has pretty much imploded, I think the reason would be that people just lost the idea of it being money.”
“I’ve never looked at Bitcoin as an investment.”
“There’s a lot of early pre-ASIC mining history, with stories of people modifying software and hardware to get an edge.”
“When Bitcoin launched there was no market for it, so there was zero expectation, even from the early miners, that it was going to be worth anything.”
“The toxic ideology teaches you that you should never look into anything else.”
“Security was the number one component of how we built the contract, to make sure we never lost any money.”
“There is no example of a pure barter economy ever existing in history.”
“To me, that’s fundamentally wrong compared to what Bitcoin is supposed to be.”
“We interviewed a bunch of pseudonymous people who had never really told their story before, which is super cool.”
“There’s now a community like never before, able to gain access to things.”
“I got involved in Bitcoin, as I think a lot of others have, because of this freedom of choice. You’re basically saying: I want to opt out of this system.”
“How would Zano become a scam? Only if I abandon it; then it will be a scam.”
“For serious multi-billion projects, we need to mitigate the risks and spread the private key ownership.”
“We never charge anyone for getting onto the whitelist.”
“I’m in principle not a huge fan of stablecoins.”
“This project may be better than us, but we will still be doing our thing.”
“They never actually interacted with anyone from the community, but they hate Zano.”
“Everything stays on the blockchain forever, so the privacy tools we use today will have to withstand the cryptography of the future.”
“The Monero community needs to start working on changing the narrative.”
“I don’t think the people who say they stay away from Zano because of the premine actually think this way. A lot of the same people support other projects with a premine, so it’s just a matter of finding an excuse.”
“This person and his team made elliptic curve cryptography fast enough to run on slow CPUs. It was a huge turning point, and I think CryptoNote was the first blockchain project to switch to this elliptic curve.”
“I don’t think any government or regulatory agency would enthusiastically support a protocol that lets anybody anywhere own something without pre-registering their identity. So it’s important to work on privacy and build the version of it that we should have.”
“That’s the only Saylor quote I know off the top of my head.”
“Most of the reason we never got to the expected million dollars per Bitcoin is that we were dealing with paper Bitcoin.”
“Institutions are among the people who want privacy the most, and whom privacy would benefit the most.”
“For Bitcoin and for proofs, it only matters whether you verify the proof right now. If I don’t have a quantum computer now and I produce a proof, I can’t acquire one later and go back in time to make a proof.”
“I don’t know what will happen, but we have to at least try.”
“With these garbled circuits, you can check the proof off-chain, and if it’s incorrect, you learn a secret that can be used to slash the person and stop the peg-out on-chain.”
“People use Monero to buy things, which is maybe the most important thing for a cryptocurrency.”
“They’re slow and require a trusted setup, but the advantage is that they are extremely small.”
“The great strength of Bitcoin is its consensus, and the security that rollups can derive from it.”
“Something is persistently wrong, and it is not fixed.”
“He’s trying to steer people away from the truth, because the truth is not good for him.”
“It’s impossible to know where to begin, but he tried to do this electricity metaphor.”
“As always with Bitcoin, we can never have big privacy. We can’t have a ZK-SNARK privacy L2, and we can’t have scaling for eight billion people.”
“It’s a completely fair question, and the reason is that you have different categories of users.”
“We can’t do the last 10x without help from real people, like the actual farmer in El Salvador.”
“Theymos’s actions actually helped Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin XT.”
“It was different in 2015 than it is today.”
“We need people to test, and we need people to find bugs.”
“This puts more attention on Lightning, and the fact that Lightning cannot accomplish this task forces people to look for alternatives.”
“The fact is, Zcash Orchard-to-Orchard provides really good privacy, and that’s it.”
“I know Monero people don’t like this option, but fine: if you don’t like it, use Monero.”
“It’ll be one of the few multi-coin wallets that actually has both layer one and Lightning.”
“People mining Monero really want to support the network and believe in the cause, because you’re not going to make money mining it.”
“Probably 80% of the purchases on Cake Pay are done through Monero.”
“It also takes some pressure off their shoulders.”
“Josh is an honorable person.”
“I want people to be able to pay me through traditional finance, but I get crypto.”
“People seem to like the idea of bringing privacy to DeFi. It does seem like privacy is getting big, and more people care about it.”
“They were late and they asked for extra money, which I did not want to give them.”
“There’s a lot of liquidity out there, and ultimately I’m still bullish long term on Bitcoin.”
“There was a lot of regulation concerning mining, but there was promising growth.”
“There weren’t many avenues for institutions to get exposure to Bitcoin as an asset class, but mining was one of them.”
“It was such a big deal in 2021 when China kicked out most of its miners.”
“People think it can’t go any higher, and then it has these parabolic runs.”
“The whole multiple-on-net-asset-value thing never made much sense to me.”
“The math in the actual filing says 126.”
“It was really horrible, but I guess it’s a lesson we had to learn on this journey.”
“Tokens like USDT started out on Bitcoin, on the Omni layer, and then went to Ethereum.”
“One of the more lucrative merge-mining offerings from mining pools is Litecoin and Dogecoin. As sad as that is, it’s very popular, because they both run scrypt as the hashing algorithm.”
“It’s not like it existed in a vacuum and no one ever said anything negative about it.”
“In a truly permissionless system, a miner shouldn’t have enough information to be able to prevent a transaction. Bitcoin does not have privacy, and that means permissionlessness is a social construct: the only reason Bitcoin remains permissionless is that there is a social contract around it.” (at 30:02)”
“My first tweets on Bitcoin were in 2013, and for about two years I was on the edge of my seat waiting for it to be stomped out.”
“It’s impossible for Bitcoin to be good money if the only way to transact is on-chain.”
“The rational choice is that people have to weigh up the privacy benefits of Monero against the stability and low-cost benefits of USDT on Tron.”
“The idea that they’re only going to transact in crypto is silly.”
“The Tether company can decide to censor addresses, but for as long as it works, people use it, and it’s not a scam.”
“He had the opportunity to say: Satoshi made a mistake by not having base-layer privacy, and we are changing that with Ethereum. He chose not to, and now, a decade later, trying to shoehorn privacy in is nearly impossible.”
“Until they successfully fork off the network, filters are actually a net negative, because your node caches a transaction when it receives it, so it doesn’t need to receive it again when it’s included in a block.”
“The technology exists, the cryptography is sound and it’s been vetted; it’s just that no one uses it.”
“He said, I’ve always wanted a car like that, and he was willing to accept Bitcoin.”
“They made a little bit of money themselves, but they never held on to their BTC.”
“Putting 0.00001 BTC on something is just confusing, and people don’t get it.”
“The state of the art in secure chips is very good, but the state of the art is always changing.”
“If you’re gifting this, we don’t want the private key to ever be externally known.”
“The concept goes back to Gavin Andresen in 2010, when someone asked him if you could have physical Bitcoin cash that passes from owner to owner.”
“We chose millibitcoin because when you look at a country’s banknotes, a fractional face value makes no sense.”
“Ethereum and Bitcoin look very different today, and they’re going to look even more different in the next 10 years.”
“On things like iPhones the likelihood of attack is fairly low, but there are browser-level attacks.”
“Bitcoin is very conservative, to the point where even the most conservative upgrades are regarded with suspicion.”
“Satoshi went through a similar process with WikiLeaks, when WikiLeaks listed Bitcoin as a way to donate.”
“Those bitcoins never moved from the address they arrived on. It’s known as the Mt. Gox hacker address, and it currently has a balance of 79,957 bitcoins.”
“Convincing the Bitcoin Cash community to return 80,000 BCH is basically the same story as with Bitcoin. It’s something they might consider if Bitcoin does it, but I don’t see it happening.”
“The idea was that the Bitcoin Foundation would be independent and finance the development of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was our main product, so it made sense for us to make sure it was properly maintained. I think the intentions were good.”
“If I had to do it again, I would do it again, but not the same way.” (at 12:51)”
“Some people think the hacker may have lost the keys, but the most likely case is that the hacker still has other funds and doesn’t need to move them.”
“When I joined, it was the middle of 2010, and MtGox was just appearing.”
“Even after the Bitcoin Foundation became irrelevant around 2016 or 2017, there were still people, up until 2020, putting their Bitcoin Foundation position on their resume.”
“If it succeeds, I’m going to sell all of my Bitcoin, to be honest.”
“We have a 32-bit version field in the blocks that is mostly unused.”
“When nobody’s filling the blocks, people find creative ways to fill them, because the block space is underpriced.”
“It’s a physical limitation: each individual subjectively decides where the value is, so you can’t migrate it.”
“The idea that we can keep Bitcoin safe by trusting a Bitcoin Core repo is not rational.”
“When Jamie Dimon says it’s a great time to buy something, it’s because he’s trying to sell it.”
“In other words, the best possible outcome for BIP 110 is a BIP 110 hard fork.”
“There will be a bunch of people selling their BIP 110 coins the first week, and nobody will talk about it a month later.”
“Nobody’s going to work on Bitcoin Core for free forever.”
“All Bitcoin Core can really do is arbitrarily decide some level of rough consensus among their peers.”
“We need to stop trying to make Bitcoin a scaled form of payment.”
“The problem is it’s not a real problem; the incentives aren’t actually there.”
“They never thought in a million years that would work, especially with someone who was not beholden to them in any way whatsoever.”
“The only place where it’s lacking is marketing, but most of it is word of mouth, because the word is just getting around.”
“Absurd charges for a guy who never lost anyone’s money, who only helped people make money, and who used crypto for what it was meant to be used for.”
“We need our own systems and our own media platforms, so we don’t get censored off X or any of the platforms they control.”
“Nobody was put on trial for it; they could ride into the sunset only because they were more cautious with their language.”
“These are all people who should not be arrested and should not be in jail.”
“You never question, no matter what.”
“Trust has to be constant, because that makes people feel safe. That’s super important when you’re dealing with money, especially a new system of money.”
“Even if you got a billion dollars in funding, the chances of that happening are almost impossible.”
“If you’re not doing that, you can’t really call yourself a leader.”
“Better signing devices for all messages is probably the most important thing.”
“I have a ton of apps, but I don’t want to show which apps I have.”
“The difference is that now they also have software to prove their tech.”
“The pro-filter camp, the reactionary Bitcoin puritans, I don’t think they would be satisfied with anything.”
“That is a useful metric, but I don’t think it’s the important metric here.”
“Now it’s become more about feelings, and about how people think Bitcoin should act.”
“The business of building compute is the most important business of our generation.”
“There’s an increasingly disconnected group of developers inside Bitcoin Core, outside Bitcoin Core, and miners.”
“I think a lot of people are in denial that Bitcoin could be way more, and that there can be more things than Lightning.”
“Bitcoin maximalism takes the view that Bitcoin should dominate other cryptocurrencies.”
“Bitcoin’s global hashrate is one zettahash, which is 1,000 exahashes.”
“He was hoping that every Bitcoin user would install the software on a laptop or desktop and mine.”
“The China mining ban was very important for the evolution of Bitcoin, because all the Chinese companies suddenly had to talk to the rest of the world.”
“We always choose the good of Bitcoin, because we’re here for the long term; Bitcoin has to succeed.”
“Bitcoin is first. I think that’s in the DNA of the company.”
“We want educated discussions, searching for the truth, and then helping our miners decide what’s best for the future of Bitcoin.”
“2017 was really the shift from plug-in mining as a hobby to, okay, this is going to be a serious business.”
“There are still people who run their node and never use it.”
“When Satoshi discussed nodes in the white paper, he meant mining nodes, because he was thinking everyone running the software is also a miner.”
“Braiins, formerly Slush Pool, is maybe the most political of the mining pools.”
“ETH is a much better Bitcoin layer two than any existing one, because the first step is that you leave Bitcoin regardless.”
“We’ve never seen an asset on an individual blockchain exceed the value of the blockchain itself.”
“We’re creating demand for Bitcoin transactions, using the Bitcoin blockchain and building applications that provide value to Bitcoin.”
“Having the option to escape Bitcoin’s volatility while staying within the Bitcoin network is valuable.”
“There have always been a handful of attempts to do smart contracts on Bitcoin layer one, or at least close to it.”
“It was all based around the idea that nobody can stop this, and there is value in something that can’t be controlled.”
“The difference between Lightning, Ark or Liquid and drivechains is that drivechains pay transaction fees directly to the miners.”
“Nobody can do anything to stop any of this, because the code says you can’t.”
“The idea of Bitcoin in the white paper was not that everyone would just hoard this asset forever while it goes up.”
“I’ve been in Bitcoin since 2013, since I was a kid, and Bitcoin to me means freedom.”
“Our government’s attitude has been very clear since 2021: Bitcoin mining is completely banned.”
“I don’t see many new miners coming into the market. It’s more like upgrading: the machines are getting better, and the miners are improving their hardware.”
“We work very closely with the manufacturers, and if our price is not better than theirs, there is no reason for customers to buy from us.”
“For individual use, like home miners, I definitely think it will grow. With heat reuse, for example, it’s easy to set up, and the cost is very low.”
“I would say it will pretty much stay, or maybe go up slightly, but it will not explode.”
“Every heater in your home is more wasteful than a Bitcoin miner, because the miner also generates rewards while it heats.”
“If the manufacturers don’t release new miners to the market, the miners can’t buy them.”
“If you’re talking about large-scale projects, it will only be large-scale players.”
“For air-cooled, it’s the S21 XP and the S21 Pro, but it’s out of stock right now, and the S21 Plus is also out of stock.”
“We do see a lot of demand for this, but right now there is no stock.”
“I decided to play around, so I mined some bitcoin with Slush Pool. Not much bitcoin, and I was baking the family computer doing it.”
“Even if 1% of nodes, or a single node connected to a mining pool, relays it, the pool can pick it up if the fee is high enough.”
“I built a fake node, which I called a router, that implemented part of the Bitcoin wire protocol. I connected to as many nodes as I could and harmlessly relayed transactions, and the vast majority of the network was Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots.”
“It’s the only IT job I ever applied to, and I got it, so I have a 100% success rate when it comes to job applications.”
“There are a lot of ideas inside Bitcoin that are very bad, but we can’t know for certain because the market never assigned them a price.”
“We can filter some things out, but you will never filter everything.”
“The point of the Raspberry Pi should be that you validate your own transactions.”
“He started a mining pool that promised to filter out these transactions while also promising miners they’d make more money.”
“The oldest ones were literally just sets of private and public keys.”
“Me, I’m fine with what Bitcoin does, but a lot of more cryptographically oriented people want to try out new things and bring them to Bitcoin.”
“Money is very few steps away from most highly maladaptive outcomes.”
“In my experience, Claude is the only model that actually told me I’m wrong.”
“It’s about practical security, because if you’re not aiming for practical security, you’ll never use the thing.”
“The point of the project is to guarantee that we can have stateless money.”
“The only reason I’m doing the proving is to get physicists to take the idea seriously.”
“Kaspa competes directly with Bitcoin, while Quai is trying to attract hashrate from Bitcoin over the long term.”
“The problem is, if my mom went in and tried to tap to make a Bitcoin payment, it wouldn’t work.”
“The point of Quai is to be a stablecoin alternative with cash-like privacy, at the speed of money and at global scale.”
“What ends up happening is that Quai kind of becomes the maintainer of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin doesn’t change.”
“We’ve made it so that the mining process is a Nash equilibrium, so no one is ever incentivized to withhold.”
“The problem is very much not solved and in my opinion, that’s one of the key problem that we need to solve.”
“If you mine a block and nobody accepts it, your chain is never going to get longer.”
“There was a limitation in Berkeley DB that disallowed some blocks because of its internal limits.”
“It’s not as secure as people think, and the only reason it works is that nobody tries to mess with it.”
“The Litecoin people say that too, even though merge mining with Dogecoin wrecked them, because Dogecoin became the dominant chain.”
“You cannot split the chain in three when you plan to split it in two.”
“You cannot operate a business with millions of dollars in infrastructure with people who can’t agree on anything.”
“Because of the difficulty adjustment, if it’s more profitable to mine BTC, people are going to remove hash from BCH and eCash and mine BTC instead, which makes BCH and eCash easier to mine.”
“Those people don’t have the level of professionalism required to steward a billion-dollar project.”
“The CashTokens stuff is a dead end, because the industry standard is ERC-20.”
“We should be building, as Amir puts it, rifles for our marines, and the modern-day equivalent of rifles is mass systems.”
“Lightning has been used to demoralize Bitcoiners and make them perpetually more accepting of custody.”
“Delaying the growth of something means it hits you harder when it comes back.”
“People’s values are always different, and you should take that into consideration.”
“We are living in the golden age of open source AI models that you can run locally.”
“The government is now attempting to redefine what privacy means, by separating anonymity from privacy, and pushing a user registry for everything.”
“You don’t beat people by acting like a common murderer; that’s a juvenile fantasy.”
“The only proposal that got accepted is the eCash one, which is privacy for custodial funds on Lightning.”
“The state does not represent its citizens. The state is an apparatus of power and control meant to support the domination of its ruling class over ordinary people, so we have to build tools to defend ordinary people.”
“The problem is that they’re not routing many transaction fees, so it’s not a good business model.”
“I don’t even pretend to be a great technologist. I just think BIP 300 is something that lets people who disagree over what the full node should do just get their way. That’s all it is.”
“Unlike Bitcoin Cash, I picked a completely different name. I think that’s much better for everyone. The name is eCash, and the project is on ecash.com.”
“Of course, we can always release a second one with a different block size.”
“A lot of people think, oh, what we need is just more treasury companies.”
“If they want to lobby for it on Bitcoin, they can keep demanding it from the core developers, or the miners might activate it.”
“The miners have never really done anything bad in all of Bitcoin’s history. You didn’t even have SHA-256 miners attacking Bitcoin SV, which everyone hated.”
“Just activating BIP 300 is not enough. The miners would have to understand how to use it and be excited about it, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, but fortunately for eCash.”
“The eCash client just thinks it’s the same chain history, so if you owned 7.123 coins in the BTC world, you own 7.123 in the eCash world.”
“I think it’s smart to keep the L1 the same as Bitcoin Core, because there are so many tiny details.”
“Most Lightning usage is custodial, and no one wants to have these channels open.”
“The simplest definition of what CTV does is that it scales Bitcoin in time as opposed to in space.”
“CTV is kind of inevitable. Rusty Russell, for example, said a couple of years ago: I now finally understand CTV, it’s brilliant.”
“There’s maybe a deeper element of: well, if I build on Bitcoin, maybe I can save Bitcoin.”
“It’s clear that we need more tools for builders.”
“I’m not exclusively shilling CTV. Whatever covenant thing people want to do, let’s make it happen. Let’s let people program Bitcoin.”
“If these branches split off and create their own altcoins, we can see what the free market thinks of them.”
“Of everything being worked on, Bitcoin has the most potential to do that.”
“When we just discuss hypotheticals and run on testnets, there’s no incentive for anyone to actually break it.”
“He just kept railing that covenants might make Bitcoin owned by the government.”
“Maybe I should just say it: we have done it correctly.”
“Before we talk about increasing the block size or the witness discount, we should try everything else first.”
“Personally, I don’t want to keep coming back to these conferences year after year and always just be talking about the same thing.”
“We don’t want to rush, but I don’t want to take forever either.”
“It allows people to move their property if they have the keys for it, but it also reduces the impact of theft.”
“It’s important that people have options, but we have to do the work to make certain those options are safe.”
“The Solana plan means their chain, with its very high throughput, will lose a lot of capacity.”
“There is a very important BIP called BIP 54, the Great Consensus Cleanup.”
“My thinking has evolved over time, and we should be laser-focused on the mission, which is to separate money from state.”
“One third is stored in your mobile phone’s secure enclave and cloud, and one third is stored behind two-factor on my servers.”
“I’m more optimistic about Solana and Bitcoin solving this problem in time than I am about Ethereum.”
“The only time we force you to do an update is during the initial setup.”
“One of my biggest gripes with Ledger’s new touchscreen e-ink devices is that there’s no haptics.”
“For a while, only Ledger was using Bluetooth, for connecting the Ledger Nano X.”
“I think there are some really interesting opportunities around integrating with different password managers, or even building your own. Bitcoin Q&A did that with our team as a proof of concept.”
“People think I’m paying you, but really you’re paying me.”
“Last time I was on the pod, we called it a personal security platform.”
“There is no cut that we take from products sold through the app store.”
“I don’t want to be mean, because everyone’s trying to some extent, but I have a drawer full of hardware wallets.”
“The other components will die and your RAM will still be working.”
“People who have never used one before don’t know which device to hold or what to do.”
“It scales quite well, because the blocks are so small that even nodes with low bandwidth can keep up.”
“Instant transactions and zero fees for payments are quite perfect.”
“For me, the problem with Bitcoin mining is that there are economies of scale.”
“We’ve moved from individual miners to small miners to medium-sized ones, and now the big miners are acquiring the medium-sized ones.”
“People still watch this, but the number of content creators is low.”
“For me, crypto should be used for payments, not just for investment.”
“Right now we have a bonus on Lightning deposits.”
“Venice is focused on UX, and their UX is amazing.”
“With Nano, one Nano is one vote, so you can say: I use my Nano to vote for NanoGPT’s node, and then we get more voting weight.”
“Maybe you can copy 90% of my style, but the 10% that makes me human is very hard to replace.”
“The only way it can possibly scale is what they eventually built: federations and Cashu mints.”
“Use them or receive them if you have to, but swap them for something that is actually yours and that nobody can take away.”
“Crypto is actually the best thing for poor people, because inflation is the most regressive tax.”
“BTC maxis are the ones who are humbled the least by the market.”
“He said: you guys are dumb, because big blocks are dumb. I’m like, is that your argument? Dude, Satoshi talked about bigger blocks.”
“This is the whole point of a decentralized community.”
“There was new hope in Bitcoin that Lightning was going to be the one true solution to scale.”
“In January 2023 we got Biden bailing out Silicon Valley Bank.”
“Avalanche isn’t the only way, whatever Amaury or other people have told you.”
“As many have said on this pod, the genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back in.”
“It has a lot to do with the way it was marketed, because these people can’t evaluate the cryptography.”
“The main difference between Railgun and other privacy options is making sure you can actually do what you want to do on Ethereum privately. The things I actually want privacy for are purchases, or taking particular positions.”
“The most valuable place for privacy to exist is right alongside the actual usage you want the privacy for.”
“Personally, I think the biggest privacy gain people can have online is just being more intentional about what they sign up for and what checkboxes they’re agreeing to.”
“There are a couple of interesting privacy features on Solana. I think even their token standard has a privacy feature built in; it’s just not enabled for many tokens yet.”
“I don’t think we’re in a bear market for privacy. Sure, there are going to be bull and bear markets as far as price goes, but I don’t really watch the price myself. My life is a lot more zen when I’m not hitting refresh.”
“If you just take a Zcash-like implementation and drop it onto the EVM, you can send and receive privately, but you’re going to miss out on all of the DeFi activity. At that point, why not just go use Zcash?”
“Anyone could theoretically get around it by creating their own coordinator.”
“These guys are happy to embrace the label that it’s money criminals can use.”
“Essentially, PPOI is just a filter that makes sure you’re not in a privacy set with stuff you don’t want to be in a privacy set with.”
“Our company’s focus is not on Zcash shielded assets. We’re focused on driving the adoption of ZEC.”
“It’s about what we bring to the world in terms of privacy and private money.”
“Cake Wallet has support for Zcash, and they have a really nice user experience.”
“It’s for grandmas and for people who care about privacy.”
“It’s normalizing the fact that privacy is used and desired by everyday people.”
“You can still enter the Orchard or Sapling pool, even if the coins came from some other transaction.”
“Of course, in that situation you can see on the open blockchain that it never happened.”
“Originally, there was a 2013 paper called Zerocoin, by a group of cryptographers who wanted to bring privacy to Bitcoin.”
“The plan from the beginning was to prove this technology and show that it’s good enough.”
“Nobody in the community was happy with the user experience they were getting.”
“We’re all Bitcoiners, and we understand each other, and we’ve made friends this way. So I do think Bitcoin can fix that sense of community.”
“If you want to spend or earn Bitcoin, having a community and people to do that with is way better than anything else.”
“I do think Bitcoiners should stop just HODLing. Get out, go earn it, go spend it.”
“The only people left were the Bitcoiners sitting at the table arguing.”
“They should spend a bunch of money on lawyers to get a license, and then maybe make a thousand bucks a month from Bitcoin payments.”
“I love Bitcoin, I love the community, and the best friends I’ve made in the last years of my life are people I talk to every day and only met because of it.”
“It’s like Dazed and Confused with Matthew McConaughey: there were the popular kids, and then the rest.”
“There are so many people who love Bitcoin but aren’t actually Bitcoiners, because for me being a Bitcoiner means using it.”
“I wore jeans and a hoodie, and she said, nobody dresses like that.”
“I’ve never been happier to be part of it, because I feel the energy.”
“I strongly recommend that nobody use this practice; it’s for demonstration purposes only.”
“I’m also buying stuff that makes me happy, and buying Bitcoin is one of the things that actually makes me happy.”
“The collateral logic happens on Bitcoin itself, so every time you’re engaging with Firefish, you can be sure your bitcoin stays on the Bitcoin blockchain.”
“Once you filter this, the government is going to come in and say: hey, I see you’re filtering transactions, so filter these too.”
“Firefish allows my parents to fund loans. They can’t operate Bitcoin and don’t have a Bitcoin wallet at all, but they can still fund loans backed by Bitcoin collateral.”
“The risk is that the person doesn’t pay back, but if they don’t, you actually get the collateral.”
“There are more use cases being built elsewhere in places where nobody cares about Bitcoin.”
“There is no way you can bargain and say I don’t want to follow this rule.”
“They don’t pay for it, but they’re complaining about something that is not theirs.”
“As a lender, you already have a transaction fully signed by everybody, but with a time lock on it.”
“There’s the artistic part, the emotional part, and then there’s the scientific part. The scientific part is in the research on the website; if you want to understand it, you have everything you need.”
“They started from very good privacy that did not scale, and refined it to the point where it scales better and works better.”
“The only time the extra announce counter resets is when the node resets.”
“The jokes are always so extreme.”
“I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it often feels like that.”
“The only time there’s no weird big time gap between blocks is in the exact period when two nodes were mining.”
“The strategy is to trigger you somehow, because it’s the only way they’re going to get attention.”
“I don’t think Bitcoin is ever complete.”
“I gathered everything about what was happening and how Hal was talking with Satoshi, and then I found the debug.log file from Hal’s node and looked at it.”
“I always felt so inferior, because everything I liked was through a screen.”
“In US terms we’re a 501©(4), which means we’re a nonprofit, but donations aren’t tax-deductible.”
“I never met Chuck Hammill; I think he’s been dead for some years, and I don’t know anything else he did.”
“A lot of the ideas he had are still underexploited.”
“There are people who assume Bitcoin is valuable just because it costs this much to produce.”
“I have to confess I’ve never really read through most of the Bitcoin code, because I hate C++.”
“I did not understand that private fiat currencies were a feasible thing at all.”
“It may have been as much as $4,000 or $5,000 in the dollars of the time, which was a lot of money.”
“I would not be surprised if that money is coming from Russia or China.”
“I created the cryptography mailing list because the Cypherpunks list was too noisy, and I wanted a place for people to discuss cryptographic communication protocols and ways to improve security.”
“It never seemed like it was doing anything that I particularly wanted.”
“Last I talked to him, he’s still very interested in Dash, but he’s focusing on other things.”
“Maybe it has something to do with the Solana VC era, where everyone has these massive VC allocations.”
“Charlie Shrem came out in 2017 and told the Dash community: I’m going to get a Dash-branded debit card that you can load with Dash. He put in a treasury proposal like anyone else, and he got funded for this card.”
“Darkcoin is pretty cool and hardcore, but Darkcoin would be for me, or for the cypherpunk people. Dash is much more useful for the world, so it’s better that Dash is Dash.”
“Evolution is out, and it’s much bigger and crazier in scope than the original vision.”
“Some people say BitShares was technically first, but BitShares is no longer really functioning, so Dash is probably the oldest DAO at this point.”
“I don’t think Zcash is going to implement shielded tokens for at least a year, and maybe never.”
“Over the years it’s been about 95% Dash usage for me, because for paying for stuff there’s been nothing quite as close.”
“Eventually someone from the Dash Core team threatened legal action, and he immediately sent the money back.”
“In the very early days Dash was forked from Litecoin, but it was later rebased on Bitcoin, because Litecoin development had been abandoned.”
“Straight to self-custody, no network fees, half a percent.”
“The only two horses in the race for leveraged Bitcoin equities in the US are Strive and Strategy.”
“All the bitcoin purchased through Swan goes into self-custody, which means we’ve paid the network withdrawal fees on every single withdrawal ever done from Swan.”
“There’s no way that all nine people technically in charge of this at each of those companies actually understand the issues.”
“They will try to control the narrative, which means they’ll be able to pump and dump.”
“Swan was a big part of that, and I was part of that.”
“They’re trying to get people to hear what they already like to hear, but also get something new on top of it.”
“Their Bitcoin videos way outperform the native Bitcoin creators.”
“You can go along the whole custody spectrum with Swan: sovereign self-custody, collaborative self-custody with Swan Vault, or delegated custody with Swan Safe while you learn.”
“Swan was always architected to be: buy the Bitcoin and take it into self-custody.”
“Elon, the smartest and richest guy in the world, has never had any real interest in Bitcoin.”
“My biggest concern for Bitcoin is that there’s a lot of hand-waving over what happens when the block rewards run out. Everyone thinks we still have years to go. No, actually we don’t.”
“It does require hard forks and network upgrades, which means a couple of hours of disruption.”
“If it goes up it doesn’t bother me, if it goes down it doesn’t bother me; the volatility is always there.”
“The liquidity for gold was diminished because one of the participants left the system.”
“Decentralizing the decision-makers in Core is what makes Bitcoin decentralized.”
“Layer three is really Lightning, which makes it even more wonky.”
“This is what we fought about from 2015 to 2017, and Lightning has been in the works for 10 or 11 years.”
“When you migrate from one pool to the other, you cannot withdraw more coins than officially exist.”
“First of all, let me make it very clear: I don’t think Satoshi was one person.”
“I refuse to see the DAG as the main contribution. A DAG is not an invention or some novel idea; it’s just a data structure. You can use a DAG in a stupid, vacuous manner, or you can use it in a sophisticated manner.”
“The fact that people have trust connections does not mean we should introduce trust into the backbone of society’s settlement layer.”
“GHOST gave inspiration to Vitalik, and I think also to Vlad Zamfir, at the time. GHOST didn’t end up being implemented in Ethereum; they ended up implementing a version of Inclusive, which was our first formalization.”
“The only equilibrium is one where we’re all worse off, no one’s cooperating, and everyone loses.”
“Their preferences are not aggregated efficiently, and there’s no mechanism for moving together from here to there.”
“Like a turtle, we carry all of our protection measures on our back, but that doesn’t prevent us from doing 10 or 100 blocks per second.”
“If the network breaks apart, the protocol does not necessarily know that it broke.”
“There’s an expectation that the most technical people will provide the best use cases, but I see it differently. People need to understand what it can do, and you can and should rely on other people’s good ideas.”
“The antithesis of the isolated individual is not the collectivist. It’s the connected individual, what Hayek calls the enthusiastic individualist.”
“In contrast to the prisoner’s dilemma, in this game coordination is possible.”
“You get to practice, but there’s also something that should theoretically have all the real-world value.”
“By default there’s no replay protection, but if you do a certain thing, you split the coins off permanently.”
“It wouldn’t clarify it totally, but it would give us a very accurate glimpse.”
“Merely testing the software to see if it works is a very small percentage of all the things that need to be tested.”
“A lot of people would not be comfortable typing their Bitcoin private key into something.”
“Everyone will benefit from having more information about where the launch is going to land.”
“It’s not a problem, because the L1 is exactly the same as Bitcoin Core.”
“We basically wanted to let people practice a few times before the real launch, because what we have to offer is pretty transformative.”
“If you have the private key, you’re the real owner of the coins, and if you don’t, someone else is.”
“We don’t have 50% hash rate support right now, but really no soft fork does. Only two have activated in the last 10 years, and none since 2021. We knew we didn’t have 51% hash rate support, so we did this hard fork.”
“Another really interesting thing about Lightning compared to Bitcoin is that every transaction is different.”
“We need to stay in consensus, because we need to know who owns what, and there’s no other way to solve it.”
“People have different preferences, but there’s a gravitational well that sucks it into a handful of options.”
“Covenants do increase complexity at the level of consensus, by definition, because you’re adding more to consensus.”
“Everyone likes to focus on money, but money is just a means of facilitating trade.”
“Instead of having a set date where everyone upgrades, everyone is going to upgrade on their own schedule.”
“If a critical mass of the population has it, then not everyone actually needs it.”
“The metric to pay attention to is the amount of value transacted, not the amount of bitcoin locked up in Lightning channels.”
“You want to scale the security of your setup as the value goes up, and a lot of times scaling security requires scaling complexity. Every once in a while we make a breakthrough in security or UX that gives us more security for less complexity.”
“You’re probably more secure walking on the main street than on the back streets, because more people watching means more security. In cybersecurity, too, the software that is most battle-tested and has the most incentives to break is usually the safest.”
“I don’t know that anybody is better for it, and that’s almost always the consequence of a court case.”
“An honest person should be an active operator of their node, in my opinion.”
“He’s really the only guy who worked in Bitcoin who had hyperscaler experience.”
“The reason for BSV existing is that in 2015, big blockers started saying: there’s something really wrong going on with these Core people, and we think we should restore Satoshi’s vision.”
“If you believe everything should be on Bitcoin but Bitcoin should keep a one-megabyte block size limit, then drivechains make sense.”
“I don’t know if he’s Satoshi, but we should let his ideas be the thing that inspires us, whether he is or not.”
“I went with BSV because that was the roadmap of Bitcoin I cared about, so Craig has always been tangential to the story for me.”
“I don’t think Bitcoin was Hal’s brainchild. Some people just say Hal was Satoshi; I don’t think that’s the case.”
“I’m lucky: I’ve never mishandled my Bitcoin keys and lost my bitcoin. But there are a lot of people I know who did.”
“I’ve built businesses in BSV because I want to see the work carried through, and I really care about it. I’m not going to become a Bitcoin Casher.”
“Bank regulation shouldn’t be outsourced to some central planner who doesn’t care and is not accountable to voters.”
“The banks would lose all their deposits, and that’s how you shut down the banking system, until there’s only one bank: the central bank.”
“Bitcoin doesn’t have any large stakeholder with an interest in giving it leadership.”
“There is no limit to human ingenuity, and therefore no limit to economic growth.”
“We don’t need a single central currency.”
“It’s probably not a bad idea to also have written records, in case there’s an EMP and all the electronics are down.”
“Even in the war against Russia, the ultimate target is China, because it did what Germany did.”
“Because the cryptocurrency market is tied to Bitcoin every cycle, the interests of the cypherpunks get tied to it too.”
“That’s the principle we need to enshrine in our laws and in the constitution.”
“They want to be the only banks in town.”
“Zcash is probably technically superior to Monero right now, until Monero does its full-chain membership proofs. Then they’re probably neck and neck.”
“Even today people have a hard time getting their head around the fact that it’s decentralized and you can’t change it.”
“A passphrase is such a simple security feature to add to your seed.”
“It’s not 100% complete, but it’s still much better than it was before.”
“I’m starting to see some communication between Monero accounts and Zcash accounts on Twitter, so that’s been kind of good.”
“There’s always going to be something that tries to improve on something else.”
“Tari might have been a good fit for this.”
“This node’s been down for two months and nobody said anything? That means nobody is using it.”
“There’s a vote going on in the Zcash community about whether the official wallet should prompt you to shield.”
“If somebody’s not accepting shielded Zcash or Monero, I would hope they’d at least accept Bitcoin, and you can go from Monero or Zcash or whatever coin you prefer to Bitcoin.”
“The minority side was typical cypherpunk: the whole point of a blockchain is to have an immutable database. If the money got stolen, well, tough, just suck it up.”
“They say it should be money, but on the other hand they reduce the block size.”
“There were two of them, actually: one called EthereumFair and one called EthereumPoW. EthereumPoW was really promoted by Chandler Guo, one of the major Chinese miners.”
“I had a project where I revived an old fork of Ethereum, back to Homestead as of 2016. I rented GPUs and mined that old fork.”
“A lot of these cypherpunks were on the side of Ethereum Classic, trying to make it work. For a long time there was also funding given to Ethereum Classic, because there was a long-term bet that this fork would take the miners once ETH switched to proof of stake.”
“It’s very counterintuitive, but this is the one that became successful out of the whole crop.”
“It’s like saying Bitcoin is just going to sit there and be an asset.”
“You can argue about what it should be, but obviously something has to happen.”
“It’s inconceivable that nobody knew about this DAO thing.”
“You needed something else that had smart contracts and enabled tokens.”
“We’ve been in the space since 2013, so we built a number of services on top.”
“The only reason it worked is because everybody agreed on the one true implementation of Omni.”
“People sometimes forget that Bitcoin is still a bit of an experiment.”
“You can always find more gold, and it inflates at a predictable rate according to the mining.”
“The market should decide whether those services are good or bad.”
“You have to hold assets, not cash, because cash is purely going down.”
“The promises Bitcoin made are what led people to invest in Bitcoin.”
“We’ve always had a set of folks at BitGo who are Bitcoin-specific, and they don’t want to work on other stuff.”
“There will always be an opportunity for something better down the road, and some people might want to hold out for it.”
“BitGo has both self-custody and custody because we think maintaining that self-sovereign option is critical. I think Satoshi was most likely a libertarian.”
“It still has the beautiful foundations of how Bitcoin was designed.”
“I think a privacy coin is what will actually become the biggest coin. That’s what I think.”
“Altcoins may just outshine Bitcoin a lot more during a bull market.”
“There’s no censorship possible: you’re able to send it and you don’t need approval from a bank.”
“Even after getting the interest, you cannot even save for a house that way.”
“That’s the first time I worked with him a little, and we invested together in some Bitcoin Cash.”
“When I came back from Nashville, I realized that privacy is going to get huge.”
“Without meaning to be funny, people think he’s this autistic genius or something.”
“It cannot escape the reality that you need users.”
“Nobody’s talking about Ethereum and how great an investment that was.”
“I’d also seen the original talk and had been following the project for a long time, but then I really got my hands dirty.”
“Monero miners were encouraged to also secure this chain in order to get the token.”
“You’re going to have a sidechain for every use case Bitcoin wanted to add at some point but never did.”
“Part of what makes Tari special is that it’s actually difficult to 51% attack, because of a combination of the architecture plus this indirect connection to Monero. I think that’s to the community’s benefit.”
“If a mining pool says, we’re pure Monero and we’re not going to support the Tari merge mine, I would say there’ll be other pools that will support it.”
“It’d be great not to have a house that steals your money all the time, but a fairer casino design.”
“There are primitives that we need to have.”
“A few days ago I opened Tari Universe and didn’t realize I was mining while it was running. By the time I went back to turn it off, I already had one Tari waiting for me, after only a few minutes on a laptop.”
“The goal should not be to centralize all decision-making within the council.”
“It’s really exciting to be part of an open source community that can leverage those tools.”
