Season 2 quotes

“I just don’t see it. There may be consolidation, where the most important networks become more important, but I think there’s just going to be more and more entropy.”

“The freedom of speech, the freedom to transact as you wish, the freedom to hold assets.”

“It’s fascinating how people coming from so many different backgrounds can find usefulness and purpose in a decentralized currency that is not controlled by any nation state.”

“I saw a graph on Twitter today comparing the security spend of Bitcoin, the cost of deploying the hash rate that secures the network, with the budget of the US military, on a log scale.”

“That’s a hard realization: you have the money to pay for something, and nobody wants your money, even though it’s still a currency.”

“I don’t want to say too much now, because I don’t want to give out all of my thoughts and secrets before I’ve put the talk together.”

“There was no real use for them, because nobody built the product they were meant to be building. They were raising the money to then go off and build the thing.”

“I think both sides of the argument can have an element of truth in them, but only because things are relative.”

“This is a fork of the code, not a fork of the balances on the ledger of the blockchain.”

“They did try to make a cashless society, but they failed, because there are people in society who can’t, won’t, or don’t have access to the technology to use electronic payments.”

“Coinomi isn’t open source, and some other wallets are also not open source. If your wallet is not open source, don’t use it, whatever the reason.”

“Tell the developers of that wallet that you only use open-source wallets, and move to an open-source wallet until they comply, because it’s just not secure.”

“If people don’t take any care about privacy hygiene right now, then it’s actually worse than sending an open telegram, because it’s not just the carrier who can read your letters.”

“It’s more likely that you’ll find money laundering in Fortnite than in many of these cryptocurrencies. People will use whatever is available to them for money laundering.”

“I heard Peter Todd mention once that cash is important, because if exchanges get hostile to privacy, you will want to use cash to get Bitcoin.”

“The reason I think end users should run full nodes is not voluntary. It’s not about volunteering your bandwidth.”

“I don’t care if it’s easier or prettier. Don’t do it to yourself, because you’re basically trusting someone else. And why would you give those people your trust? Do you know them?”

“The only reason the Bitcoin supply can’t be inflated is that the community protects it like nothing else.” (at 9:46)”

“I think we owe it to ourselves, to humanity, to our children and our families, to keep this alive, because we can use it as an alternative if things go wrong.”

“It’s not because of Bitcoin. They do it because that’s the line of work they chose for themselves, and they make it work.”

“The brilliant thing is how it works, how it was designed, so that it can’t be broken by anyone.”

“Nowadays nobody thinks about it, because people think about applications, about websites, about the use cases of this technology, and nobody cares how it was implemented.”

“Money is another side of power. If you take money away from the people who traditionally have the power, they have to actually work for the money, otherwise they will lose it.”

“I think the currency shouldn’t have a premine.”

“Bitcoin is the closest to being decentralized, because of many factors: the foundation, the team, the concentration of development and mining. Bitcoin is much better than any other.”

“I think we need more than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really good for holding, for saving. Maybe we’re going to have some sidechain or payment channel on top of Bitcoin as a privacy layer, or maybe Bitcoin will adopt some privacy itself.”

“In terms of community, it’s not Bitcoin people; it’s closer to Ethereum people, because it’s not about money, it’s about smart contracts, about decentralized applications. But from a technology perspective, it’s closer to Bitcoin’s vision.”

“I don’t think Blockstream, even though they are a leading development company, controls or can change the direction of Bitcoin development.”

“While some companies make a lot of money and bring in a lot of investors, they don’t put enough into development.”

“We’re also thinking about a stablecoin, not sure which one yet, because I believe a stablecoin is important as well.”

“It’s not deflationary; it’s decreasing inflation. The inflation is there, it just decreases with time, and at some point it stops. So it’s actually a fixed-supply money system, and since we never had a fixed-supply money system before, we don’t exactly know how it’s going to play out.”

“There is no right inflation, so you can never objectively determine what the right inflation should be. The moment you start asking that question, you open yourself to a political debate where you can never reach consensus.”

“Somebody said that Bitcoin is this weird thing that doesn’t work in theory, it only works in practice. Because of this nature of Bitcoin, we cannot predict what it will do.”

“The problem is that if you want to import hardware, it’s just so costly that most people can’t afford it, because of the currency conversion.”

“We should not be willing to forfeit this very basic, fundamental narrative, because that’s what makes Bitcoin tick.”

“That was the drive that put me on this quest of understanding Bitcoin. I immediately made the link, because it’s related to my very old question of why central planning of community structures cannot work.”

“I don’t think they will succeed in being very meaningful or socially transformative, because they were looking at a solution for which a problem doesn’t exist.”

“Bitcoin incentivizes you to take responsibility for your privacy. That is the lifestyle lesson Bitcoin teaches you when you try to hold your own private key.”

“There are people in Bitcoin who have this mentality of never liquidating their Bitcoin, because they can do the exact same thing Indians are doing with their gold: passing wealth from generation to generation without ever needing to convert it into another form of money.”

“The core concept of a cult is that it has one basic ethical statement, and because Bitcoin does have one, I don’t think you can argue that it’s not a cult. The statement is: nobody should have the power to manipulate the money supply.”

“I used to be a centrist. I twice voted for the ruling government, but then I felt like they betrayed my trust.”

“There’s nothing behind the money that’s backing its value. The government is just printing it out endlessly.”

“I think Bitcoin is a very strange phenomenon that you only find maybe once in a generation, once in a few hundred years.”

“I think that sometimes it’s required in a democracy to have a shake-up of the system, just so you discover what works and what doesn’t.”

“Even if four or five million bitcoins are lost, we still have enough Bitcoin to run the entire planet’s economy, because one Bitcoin can be broken down into a hundred million satoshis.”

“Now that people know how they can avoid inflation, they are much more reluctant to fund government projects that are not useful for them. Humans are creatures who seek maximum utility in things.”

“He’s 65 years old and he had like 10 bitcoins, and then my whole theory kind of collapsed. There must be a lot of people in Hungary with Bitcoin that we don’t really know about.”

“I was in Croatia and asked all the waitresses I was interacting with if they had heard about Bitcoin. All of them had heard about it. This was really crazy.”

“It’s a big problem, because it transformed people’s thinking, and even today we see the fallout of it.”

“I do think there’s probably some institutional conspiracy trying to enforce changes on Bitcoin. With the fees, for example, people are being pushed to pay higher fees when they send transactions.”

“You’re essentially punishing the population because you don’t agree with their leadership. And not only that, their leadership doesn’t even have a chance to succeed when they don’t have access to a financial system.”

“Just because you’re using something like Monero doesn’t mean that you have privacy, because it depends on how you use that cryptocurrency.”

“I’m all for peace, and you should not kill civilians just because you don’t like somebody’s government.”

“These ideas, unfortunately, appeal to newcomers and to a lot of noobs, because they don’t understand the security model.”

“Sanctions are unfair, if you ask me. We should allow markets to be free, and we should not put people in a situation of poverty just because we don’t like their leaders.”

“Many newcomers just have no idea what they’re buying. They don’t know the game that’s being played, and they don’t know the problems that are being solved.”

“There’s this idea that you have to keep these words on a piece of paper, and that you can only make so many copies before they get into the wrong hands.”

“The problem was essentially that people were trying to force it to be used for something it naturally doesn’t scale for, and it doesn’t scale for a number of reasons.”

“This idea that you keep learning about an asset that is not issued by any government and cannot be censored can be very divisive and intimidating.”

“For a long time I didn’t really understand the really important factors about Bitcoin: monetary sovereignty, personal sovereignty, personal responsibility, low time preference.”

“People don’t realize that Bitcoin Twitter, or crypto Twitter, really is an echo chamber, just like NFL Twitter.”

“I basically bought every top all the way down, until Bitcoin was right around 6,000. In the middle of 2018 I took my money out and said: okay, it’s not working. I’m putting more money in, I’m losing my money, and I’m not gaining any Bitcoin value.”

“I started to educate myself more about Bitcoin, and Bitcoin only. I started to remove some of those TA and shitcoin charlatans from my Twitter.”

“I suspect there are a lot of other people who will fall into that trap. You see the price of Bitcoin going up, you get onto Twitter, and you see a mass of people basically trying to take your Bitcoin.”

“If we’re trying to get mainstream adoption and get more people to understand how to use a hardware wallet, there are barriers to scalability. How do we onboard half a million new bitcoiners? We have to develop connections with the on-ramps that already exist.”

“Even buying a cup of coffee with Bitcoin doesn’t seem feasible, because it’s just much easier to use USD.”

“Some of those Bitcoin-only companies, the ones true to the North Star, really have a lot on their shoulders for the adoption and education of Bitcoin outside the current channels we have, like Twitter and Telegram.”

“The toxicity is just like anything else. Some people love those people and some people hate them, but we need them, because there are a lot of people who say a bunch of nonsense, and a lot of us are passive and would just let it go.”

“Is Bitcoin Twitter a safe space? It’s not, but they’re absolutely necessary. End-all-be-all, we truly believe that Bitcoin is the only one that will be left.”

“If you want to get into Bitcoin, finding something that’s Bitcoin-only, with no exchange or trading platform, is best, because otherwise you’ll get sucked into the gambling aspect: how do I take my 0.1 Bitcoin and make it one whole Bitcoin?”

“This proposal never really made it, mostly because Bitcoin Core developers didn’t want to break compatibility with wallets using this very bad security model.”

“If you just use a smartphone, you can use a model like Eclair’s, but then you can only send money, not receive it.”

“If they can coordinate easily, that means they are a giant attack surface, because then the government knows that this group of developers is easy to coordinate.” (at 29:47)”

“‘If you don’t like it, don’t use it, but we will implement it in Core anyway, because it’s open source.’ That’s not an argument.”

“Systemically, it’s less dangerous to trust one specific company than to trust a generic hashrate majority, even if it’s easier to censor locally.”

“You don’t have bolívars anymore, because your bolívars are just worthless because of inflation.”

“For fundamental, security-critical activities, it’s kind of good that we don’t have a super easy UX yet, because we don’t want people to be incentivized to shoot themselves in the foot.”

“Many UX experiments were dangerous, from a game-theoretical point of view, to support with on-chain Bitcoin, because people were going to lose a lot of money.”

“You cannot do that in Bitcoin, because it’s against the Bitcoin ethos, but it’s also against the best interest of peer review and security review.”

“Of course, Wasabi is not really one of them, because in Wasabi you can put a significant amount of money into a Chaumian CoinJoin.”

“People come in wanting to make money, and then hopefully they learn that it’s about sound money. It’s not about making money; it’s really just about sound money for everybody.”

“I’m basically not making money with it. I’m trying to get people to give these little pigs to people they know who want to start saving in Bitcoin. And at the same time, it’s a different meme than the black market.”

“I don’t think we’ll figure it out using our existing democratic government. I think that is the most inefficient system in the world. I’d rather have a noble king, even though that’s hard to find.”

“What is Yang trying to do when he’s offering people $1,000? He’s trying to buy votes.”

“The narrative right now is that people are going into Ethereum as opposed to Bitcoin because we are so toxic and so mean to each other. That’s just a way to attack. They’ve got to put us down; they’ve got to discourage new users.”

“There were only about four or five months in the lifecycle of Bitcoin when it was a good time for miners to sell their coins. Other than that, they should have held on to them.”

“Keep fiat if you need the money to spend, and only put in Bitcoin what you’re willing to hoard, because you’re saving for your future. You don’t want to put so much in that you’ll be tempted to sell.”

“I did it because I really wanted to understand the economics of Bitcoin and how this whole mining thing worked. When I figured it out at the end of December, the price of Bitcoin was at like $4,000, so my numbers were horrible.”

“I can’t believe that anybody would take BSV seriously. Craig Wright has the mining operations and some skin in the game, and that’s why people trust him so much. I don’t think a lot of people believe he’s Satoshi, but they can profit off of him.”

“You can’t always be right. I look at people like Tone Vays making up all sorts of crazy theories about the price.”

“We want to onboard everyone who is interested and show them the ways of freedom. That’s what Bitcoin really symbolizes to me: freedom.”

“It’s not centralized, and all of that is super important to me. I like the idea that no one can come and say at gunpoint that you owe them, or that you can’t leave this arbitrary border.”

“The reason I’m into this is that I like to think we are being put into a position where those in power can no longer collect taxes from us by default.”

“People need to remember that Bitcoin’s first-mover advantage is super important. The network built over those ten years is pretty tough to stop. It’s important not to get too wrapped up in just one aspect, like whether it’s scalable; these things can be worked out with sidechains and layers.”

“If the developers got greedy and decided to implement some kind of code which inflates the supply, an inflation bug, then that would be the end of it.”

“Some people in Venezuela have already become bitcoiners by necessity. I’m sure a lot of people there have started learning the importance of sound money, and at one point they were probably more socialist themselves.”

“This is our great chance to cooperate with the world. Sometimes there’s a language barrier, but they’re interested in freedom and we’re interested in freedom. I think the decentralization of money will lead to the decentralization of community.”

“I’m not saying everyone in Bitcoin is a libertarian, but there’s definitely a high percentage. I think Bitcoin is a very nice proof of concept for ideas that have existed for a long time.”

“This has never been about me gaining any sort of fame. I enjoy trying to educate people.”

“There’s really no way for us to verify it until the next bull run, when everyone starts buying again and trying to transact.”

“They’re still coming up with amazing things, like the Lightning Network. If you really think about it, it’s a really awesome innovation, an innovative way to solve a problem that was always going to rear its head.”

“I think Bitcoin is a good investment, and that’s why I’ve chosen to put more of my net worth into it than anybody reasonably should.”

“You’re not getting exchange listing articles about Bitcoin, like ‘just got listed on Coinbase Pro, here comes the bump.’ Bitcoin has matured past that point.”

“One, I don’t think the CIA is advanced enough to think of something that cool. Two, I think of it as an experiment that’s more important for the rest of the world, because the United States as a whole is going to be the last one to adopt it, with the dollar being the global reserve currency.”

“It’s going to be that way for a while. It’s a really bright and awesome future to think about, but scary at the same time.”

“Anytime there’s a new feature on Bitcoin it’s great, but Bitcoin does have to be conservative by nature. It just does.”

“Do I think that Bitcoin will always be the king? I have no idea. Just like I’m not willing to say the US dollar will always be the king fiat currency, I wouldn’t be willing to say that.”

“Bitcoin is important because you need to have an option. You need to be able to put this in your own hands.”

“It’s not that the ideas are wrong. It’s not a terrible thing to have people being equal and sharing resources, but it doesn’t work like that. We’re not all the same.”

“I don’t think there is any way for this type of communist revolution to occur, because we have our personal interests.”