Season 5 quotes

“The Real Bitcoin version is for what we call ordinary people. We are catering this device to normal people who are not computer science experts or cryptography experts, people like my family members.”

“We made over twenty or thirty thousand coins, with a total value of around 8,000 BTC or more. Today there are tens of millions of dollars of BTC on those coins that have never been breached, never been stolen. So people trust this.”

“I have many friends who’ve screwed up using hardware wallets and custodial solutions, and they’ve lost bitcoins, either stolen or irrevocably lost because they can no longer retrieve the private keys. You don’t want a solution that’s so secure you lock yourself out.”

“We cannot have a one-size-fits-all solution for the whole world, because different people in the world have different technical capabilities.”

“There are many people who own Bitcoin but don’t store it themselves. They leave it on exchanges and custodial wallets, and that’s where it’s dangerous. I ran an exchange, so I know firsthand how hard it is.”

“I think the most important thing about Bitcoin right now is to make sure it continues to be decentralized, and the way to do that is to allow more people to run full nodes.”

“In the BSV camp we’ve seen crazy blocks of 100 megabytes. I think it’s more prudent to be conservative and to scale using the current methods on BTC.”

“The other blockchains are not full because they’re not very popular, whereas BTC is the real Bitcoin, and it’s very, very popular.”

“I got into Bitcoin nine or ten years ago, and what has been most valuable for me is the long-term investment. Once in a while I paid for breakfast or coffee with it, but in hindsight those payments were unnecessary. For normal people, I think the best use case for Bitcoin is as an investment.”

“The most important thing is to actually have the private keys for your own Bitcoin.”

“If you ever lose your bitcoins because they do something stupid, they’re going to reimburse you, but I don’t think they’re going to give you back bitcoins. They’re going to give you back US dollars. And we all know that US dollars are infinitely inflatable and bitcoins are scarce.”

“Verifiability is a really important thing that you cannot just ignore when you have people’s money in your wallet.”

“The 10-minute block time is important for the miners. You can do Bitcoin transactions from Mars somehow; it just takes ages to get them confirmed. But for Bitcoin mining, every minute that you are late is 10% lost, because you were working on an outdated chain.”

“With Liquid you trust a federation of block signers, and I don’t like that too much. I would have preferred they integrate Lightning payments before Liquid, but they make money with Liquid and they don’t make money with Lightning, I suppose.”

“You compete with people who maybe have money to launder, or who get their money from selling information. If you compete with them, counting only the fees you get, millisatoshis per transaction will not make you rich.”

“Somebody keeps a certain amount of money in a channel with me, so this is kind of a credit to me. I think we will see nodes charging interest on the money in those channels.”

“I compiled the Mycelium wallet myself and shared it with a million users, but it’s hard, because there’s still no verification happening. Verifiability doesn’t mean that anybody actually looks at the code.”

“For that to happen, I think we will need wallets to come up with bug bounties.”

“Coinbase is the biggest. Actually, it should not be obvious, but it is the biggest.”

“If you are a rookie, you want somebody else to do that.”

“Not only because it will be really fast to move money, but because it will be really great to have that.”

“I think it will be hard to run a Bitcoin or Lightning node if you don’t have a way to get a stable connection.”

“I don’t know, but I think they know my face. If I’m a target… I don’t feel like I’m a target.”

“I think I’m not that exposed yet, because I don’t see that many people in the mainstream talking about it.”

“I’m here. I don’t want to move anywhere. I think things can be done here, even in a crisis. A crisis is also a kind of opportunity.”

“With Samourai and Dojo, you don’t need a cold wallet, because the phone is the cold wallet.”

“You don’t have to wait a day, or 12 hours, to get the money.”

“I couldn’t do that anywhere else, and I couldn’t spread the word of the Bitcoin gospel, you know.”

“As you may imagine, we don’t have enough money to buy Bitcoin. Miners, maybe traders, that kind of people are a really small minority in the country.”

“I’m excited about Lightning, but I don’t think it will be the door for many other users. I think they will need to go down the rabbit hole to understand how it improves privacy.”

“Not everyone in Bitcoin has the same risk tolerance, or the same preference regarding privacy and anonymity. So the fact that you can have both, with different techniques, is really cool.”

“With Liquid you have a lot more speed, but privacy is a huge plus, as far as I’m concerned. You can opt in to have a little bit less security and more privacy for a few payments, and then come back to the main chain to get your security back.”

“As a Bitcoin entrepreneur, your number one objective is to accumulate Bitcoin, and number two is to make your Bitcoin worth more. Contrary to popular belief, there is no magic algorithm, like the S2F ratio, that increases the price of Bitcoin over time. The halving doesn’t increase the price of Bitcoin.”

“I have no doubt that the price will rise after the halving, and it’s also going to be a coincidence. There’s nothing magical about the price of Bitcoin rising. People work hard to create a value proposition, which increases demand.”

“A lot of people who get their Bitcoin stolen get it stolen by the technical friends who helped them install their wallets. I’m not saying you shouldn’t secure your Bitcoin, but sometimes, when you go with hardcore security, you increase your chance of losing the Bitcoin.”

“Trezor is very safe, but if you’re a person like me, who is perhaps a bigger target, potentially even for state-level attackers, then the Coldcard is definitely a level above in terms of security. Regular people should go with whatever they feel is more user-friendly.”

“Bitcoiners teaming up in the physical world, buying land together, sharing the cost of private security, surveillance, fencing and walls: I think that’s the way to go, because there’s no magic solution to securing Bitcoin if you’re vulnerable to a physical attack.”

“The money that you don’t make by breaking your reputation is an investment in your reputation. People should really think a lot about investing in their reputation, because once you lose it, it’s pretty much gone forever. The internet never forgets.”

“The Blockstream guys were the ones that I saw had the best values and the best ethics.”

“The advantage of not having full anonymity is that you can have easy auditability.”

“Sometimes you don’t even find supplies. Sometimes you don’t even find food, right? Sometimes you don’t even find gas at the gas station.”

“Ultimately, this is run not only by computers, but also by people.”

“We like to say this word a lot, but you’re not really sovereign until you have the kind of money that you can use whenever you want for whatever purpose you want.”

“To me, Bitcoin Core is the constitution of Bitcoin, as other people have already called it. Running your own Bitcoin full node is the equivalent of becoming a real Bitcoin citizen.”

“To me, Bitcoin is not only a digital currency anymore. To me, it’s a continent.”

“Take the Lightning Network. There are some Lightning wallets, but the real experience of operating on top of the Lightning Network, you only have that if you have a Bitcoin full node.”

“Everybody was already mining in Caracas, but nobody was actually talking about Bitcoin full nodes.”

“It doesn’t matter who you are; it’s about what you have to say. Good ideas, innovation and brilliance are much more important than being famous.”

“You have lots of people in this space, and I’m not going to name any names, who are famous and have lots of followers, but they don’t have anything interesting to say.”

“I think all of us are a Pandora’s box. I think the most beautiful thing one can have in life is personal privacy.”

“Bitcoin is only missing privacy, but I don’t think it will ever be fully fungible, because every coin ever created has a cryptographic hash which demonstrates when it was created.”

“Now we can go back to what I was talking about: Bitcoin solved the decentralization problem, and it actually solved the privacy problem too.”

“This is PayJoin, but it’s not Pay-to-EndPoint, because you don’t show the QR code.”

“To be honest, I don’t know. Two weeks ago I started researching it; we actually hired a cryptographer.”

“The literature on electronic money identified two or three issues, and one of them is: how do you protect your privacy at the network level?”

“It is not as decentralized as you would like it to be, because you would like it to be as decentralized as Bitcoin.”

“The third one is: how do you build money that cannot be shut down? That’s what Bitcoin solved.”

“On mobile I would recommend Samourai on Android, because I don’t have many expectations of mobile wallets.”

“This broadened my horizon on what kinds of things are possible to include in Bitcoin privacy, which I could never have guessed before.”

“He only looked at wallets that are in the Android app store, so only mobile ones.”

“I visited all these early Bitcoin pioneers and the film was about money, what’s wrong with money, the history of money and then what is Bitcoin.”

“You have to be very careful, because this is not about some guy losing money trading, or getting stoned.”

“He has been one of the key figures, if you read Digital Gold, the famous book that’s a must-read for everyone, about the first four or five years of Bitcoin.”

“There’s a reason why he’s in the film, and it will become clear when you watch that scene, so don’t be put off by seeing his face in the trailer.”

“When I exit that scene, I say something like: well, if you don’t think Bitcoin is challenging the concept of money, you haven’t been paying attention.”

“There is also some value in trying to be Visa, even though I don’t really see the point, at this moment in time, of replacing such a centralized service.”

“You can see it’s biased, but it’s also proportional to reality, because you don’t find many people who were involved in the Bitcoin project in the early days who support Bitcoin Cash.”

“There’s a quote from Andreas, which I don’t think made the final edit, where he said it’s a little too early, and we don’t really know.”

“That’s technically not quite correct, because only one fifth of the key is stored there, and the other four fifths are on four different continents.”

“What he told me is that money means something different if you’re in Venezuela right now than if you’re sitting in Germany.”

“If the presumption is that the internet becomes a bunch of independent networks, and not an internet, then by definition these networks are isolated, they’re not syncing, and you have different coins.”

“We don’t have problems like running out of memory and having to start dumping valid data because you’re getting low on memory, so we don’t have to track memory usage.”

“Value is subjective. You can’t know who’s going to place more value on which side of that problem, but at least you know what the problem is.”

“I’ve thought about writing other books, but I just never sit down and do it, because it sounds like drudgery.”

“I don’t use them because, I don’t know, I’m just too lazy.”

“In other words, it doesn’t matter how big the file gets; the cost of looking something up in the file remains constant, which is ideal when you’re looking at code complexity.”

“You can do the same thing with words, but words don’t look as formal, and people don’t get the same feeling if they don’t really understand what they’re doing.”

“Bitcoin is also stable in that, when its usage gets high enough, its cost of use becomes prohibitive, which means that as usage increases, less gets used instead of more getting mined.”

“They would tell you it had bank-level security, the same level of security as a bank, and it wasn’t even close.”

“That’s advertising bank-level security: every card has a different secret, so you’re only risking what you’re able to spend with that one card.”

“It would only be payments that require censorship resistance or a degree of privacy.”

“If something goes wrong, they can always make a call to the bank and explain that something went wrong and they want the chargeback or something.”

“Hopefully more people wake up to the fact that it’s the underlying money in these systems that’s part of the problem, and also the censorship that will occur.”

“Of course in Wales we’ve got Welsh, our own language as well. I don’t speak Welsh, actually.”

“I don’t want to, because it would be a breach of my privacy to be walking around selling Bitcoin.”

“It was more like security through obscurity: nobody was attacking the network with billions of dollars’ worth of resources, because it wasn’t that large a target at the time.”

“I’ve become disillusioned with the idea of politics over the years, I think, which is why I think Bitcoin is good.”

“Then you have companies that come out and say: you don’t have to learn how to download Bitcoin onto your computer and install it, because that’s very complicated.”

“People use Facebook without much concern at all about privacy, but I think at some point it will become a more pressing issue, as people start to realize.”

“A channel was closing because the fee rate went up, and I was making sure that you had enough fees to close the channel.”

“For example, when I want to know everything about Tulip Trust, I can do a query on Tulip Trust that gives me all the material on Tulip Trust.”

“That means he always answers in a direct, straightforward way, to just one part of the question. Then you have to keep asking him the same question in different words.”

“This means there are whales that never sell, and they can manipulate the price, pump it and dump it, and play this game for the longest time to make money.”

“A tax fraud scheme being called out, fleeing the country… and he just can’t stop. He’s a narcissistic personality, and he just can’t stop leeching on people, on investors, on tax authorities.”

“He said: I cannot do podcasts with you now. I would love to do it, but I cannot, because I’m in a lawsuit with the guy myself.”

“The big block discussion wasn’t really interesting yet at that moment, because we’re talking 2015-2016, and in June 2015 Craig sold his intellectual property.”

“I have a clip of him on stage where he even admitted that he’s never invited, and that he pays for sponsorship, because nChain hardly has any money itself.”

“Whenever I can, I always mention it, because it’s such a small example of how the guy works and why his story is not correct.”

“There are a lot of those, I call them bullshit stories, that I don’t see going anywhere, like talking about a state attack or a proposed state attack.”

“I’m trying to guard the fences so that those dangerous people don’t fully enter the backyard of Bitcoin, while the Bitcoin train moves forward from the front yard.”