Season 6 quotes

“Whoever says that money doesn’t matter doesn’t know the worst of conditions. But you shouldn’t think in terms of extremes, unless you find yourself there.”

“Never short Bitcoin during a FOMO, because you will get wrecked. You can short altcoins, because they will go down 90%, but Bitcoin will not.”

“For devices like hardware wallets, that makes sense to have a Bitcoin only firmware because you reduce the attack surface.”

“He just says he was jailed for nothing. He was jailed because, when the Ponzi scheme fell apart and people lost money, he said he would return the money. When you’re just giving money to people, you become a political figure.”

“I can agree that some art is lazy, but you shouldn’t disregard art just because it doesn’t take as much work as it used to.”

“We always have the hardest alcohol, and I like to joke about this, because we don’t really have a drug culture.”

“A protest makes sense when it’s against the government. When a protest is against the people, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Nobody thinks that LINK is legit, but they’re still trading it, because they make money from it.”

“If Bitcoin really becomes a world reserve currency, there will be people who were pretty early in Bitcoin… The dollar will have hyperinflation, and you’ll have some measure of wealth in Bitcoin.”

“At the same time, I suppose it’s a bit dangerous to have sidechains for everything and not as many base-layer transactions, because you need to establish a fee market.”

“I don’t want to do a Vitalik one. I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right. I just love Vitalik.”

“Not only lately, but in the past few years, it’s maybe the most common approach at this point: attacking high-net-worth individuals that you know have coins.”

“I don’t know, I have very low trust in Yahoo, but I do know you can make a Yahoo email account without a backup phone number.”

“You need to go ahead and make those changes, because a SIM swap attack is pretty much fatal for all your accounts.”

“At the end of the day, in some sort of long-term investigation, there is a record. If that person is involved in investigations, then I guess that’s bad news for you. You never know who’s on the other end.”

“Steering a project of that magnitude and complexity on the right track is nearly impossible. Everything from Casper to ETH 2.0, there’s just so much to it.”

“You’ve got to trust but verify, especially in this space, where you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I don’t want to say I’m a shitposter, because I’m not. I like to have serious conversations.”

“I don’t want to get much more into this because it would not be on topic.”

“I can’t speak for any other elections; I’m just not informed enough.”

“I don’t think that at any point in the next 100 years we’re going to get rid of government money: fiat money, or money backed by gold, or Bitcoin, or anything.”

“If you want to go into fiat money, then you just have to do normal KYC, the government will be okay with it, and it helps the government track the money.”

“Yet there are so many people who are skeptical about it, just because of the price volatility, or because they don’t understand how decentralization works.”

“It’s seen as the one being used by criminals, because even today, if you watch some TV shows, they talk about Bitcoin as some sort of dark money that only criminals use.”

“People don’t update their nodes when there’s a new version out there, because this isn’t Ethereum or something.”

“We don’t go into the subject of KYC, which is different, because you can actually separate the two. You can know where the money comes from without revealing who owns the wallet address.”

“It’s funny, because I think one of the biggest holders of Bitcoin is the Bulgarian government as well, which is kind of crazy.”

“I suppose people who are used to losing their money in banks would rather be cautious about a digital asset they own than lose their money through somebody else’s fault.”

“If they don’t have control over the money, their authority is going to diminish so badly that they’re going to lose their legitimacy in front of their citizens.”

“They just stuff cash in the mattress, because 10 or 15 years ago they experienced an economic depression, the banks closed, and they were left without any money.”

“In my mind, the fact that it becomes regulated and part of the establishment only means that the government can intervene, and it will only intervene in cases of severe, actual reasons.”

“That being said, if it’s built out correctly, it shouldn’t actually pose a problem to the financial solvency of Bitcoin, because I don’t see how it could.”

“They will only view it as an asset class, and they want their financial advisor to look at it.”

“That’s the reason I’m very happy that institutions are getting involved, because it’ll make other people more likely to interact with it at some level.”

“It’s always good to give a platform to people who bring fresh perspectives on what Bitcoin actually is, and don’t just rely on the arguments you can read in the books that everyone reads.”

“What I think a lot of people don’t realize is that there are two ways for the government to raise money.”

“There’s the risk of creating inflation in the market, because they can trade bitcoins that don’t really exist.”

“The second argument we make is that Bitcoin is not money; it does money. That potentially prevents regulations from being applied specifically to Bitcoin that aren’t applied to other networks, like the internet or social media.”

“We say it could be applied to these types of areas, but we don’t say that there’s absolutely no way you can require money transmission licensing for anything related to virtual currency.”

“If these articles were mostly about securities and tokens and how blockchain can be used across different industries, I suppose it’s only because the people financing the research were interested in that.”

“I would call myself a Bitcoin minimalist, but a full node maximalist.”

“For me, the Bitcoin full node was always at least as important as the Lightning client. I always wanted to be able to verify my own transactions as well, even when using a hardware wallet.”

“With the Casa node you’re not able to do that. It’s basically just a Lightning node. Of course it has Bitcoin Core as a base, but you can’t run your own Electrum client or anything else against it.”

“Thinking in layers is just too hard. I think it should be a one-click connect, that’s it. I’m sure we’re getting there; so many great people are working on that.”

“I wouldn’t say Lightning is stagnating; I think it’s maturing. People say Bitcoin is old tech, and I myself can no longer keep up with all the developments, but for users there’s not that much visible progress, because it just works how it’s supposed to, and a lot of optimization goes on under the hood.”

“Rusty of c-lightning was asked: what if we build Lightning and users just don’t come? To an extent, that’s my biggest fear for Bitcoin overall, but the fear gets lower and lower over time, because there’s so much adoption going on.”

“Jack built this Strike service that you can pay with Lightning without having Lightning; you just connect your debit card to it. For me, that’s a very compelling use case. Maybe in the end we don’t need to run our own Lightning full nodes at all.”

“I don’t really think there should be only one coin, because that would leave us without the option to do any experimentation. In the end, I don’t think that’s a route that could ever work out.”

“One thing that is important to keep in mind: you should never connect that SD card to your regular computer.”

“I see the future of the RaspiBolt more in the backend space: not a user-facing Lightning node, which I think is going to move to mobile anyway, but a stable Lightning backend with additional tools like watchtowers.”

“Just because I choose to reveal this form of identity, and choose to attribute some of these actions publicly to this identity, doesn’t mean that I don’t have other names.”

“This is the main reason why we thought that building it for Android and iOS is super, super difficult: we use Tor extensively.”

“He told me that, essentially, there are lots of security companies that promise to give you privacy and security.”

“I’m having this conversation right now on Qubes, in a disposable VM routed through Whonix, because I don’t trust whatever server is running here to know where I am.”

“What I would like to see is a privacy-maximalist Lightning Network node implementation, where every single design decision, every single trade-off, is optimized and prioritized for privacy above all else.”

“That is very, very good network-level privacy, meaning that your extended public key, all your addresses and your transaction history don’t get leaked to any trusted third-party server.”

“I actually don’t remember the last time I put my signature on a piece of paper, but I remember signing a contract just a couple of hours ago with a PGP key.”

“They had a show talking to Bitcoin privacy contributors called zkSNACKs, and then Adam asked to take the name for the company, because it’s just genius.”

“This input and output model is very fundamental to understanding Bitcoin privacy, at least with the tools we currently have, specifically Wasabi.”

“They seem to be quite cocky about what they have, and always say they have post-mixes and all of these advanced cryptographic features that grant you extra privacy.”

“All the concerns and conflicts you have with centralized blockchain projects, Tor has all of those, because there are people in a building working on Tor who are funded through centralized means, even government means.”

“Tor can actually be a very good instrument to escape censorship anywhere from Russia to China to Gulf countries that might be in the middle of warfare.”

“I have bad experiences on my family’s side with confiscation, with money inflation, and all sorts of abuses that happened across previous generations of my family.”

“Because Lightning reduces it to just the spending element of Bitcoin, and there’s not a lot to spend on, there aren’t a lot of users that provide an ecosystem to serve with an application.”

“That’s when you start considering Bitcoin: when you are in cases of severe inflation, and you look for alternatives that are permissionless, where some cartel cannot kidnap you and steal your dollars.”

“I think a lot about censorship resistance, not because I have something that can or should be censored, or because I’m that politically incorrect.”

“I think, in a way, Bitcoin isn’t ready, particularly because we don’t have enough on-chain capacity, so we need layer-two stuff to be ready.”

“It is disappointing in North America, because we’ve had it so good for so long that so much of that memory is lost, because, frankly, we have a functioning society with a somewhat robust democracy.”

“I know getting up to speed on Bitcoin is a lot for the listeners, but don’t get too excited that we’re going to end the government or build our citadels or whatever else.”

“It’s hard not to see that this state-agnostic money, which cannot be confiscated or censored, has some really great use cases and great value.”

“I’ve used Linux for the last 20 years, and I got into Bitcoin, I think, in 2010, because it was just an interesting project. Then I attended the first Bitcoin conference in Prague, and the second one, in London, organized by Amir Taaki.”

“It doesn’t necessarily revolve around Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is the kind of digital money that people use when they’re interested in acquiring sovereignty from the government.”

“I hate it when people point out that there are lots of bitcoins on Ethereum, because you cannot actually move bitcoins onto Ethereum.”

“Because otherwise many people would criticize the government for censorship, for example, or for non-democratic practices.”

“For many people, this conference is not only about the presentations, but about the physical meetings, because the HCPP congress is really unique in that way.”

“We cannot officially offer these coins and call them coins, because the Czech National Bank has a monopoly on using the word ‘coin.’”

“They say: we’re going to overthrow the governments, and we’re going to replace your fiat money with this digital cryptographic currency called Bitcoin.”

“People hear a lot of opinions on how to live autonomously in relation to the government, and how to use tools that empower themselves in relation to their government.”

“We don’t believe in voting or elections. We think we should care about like-minded people, and help these people achieve a lot of personal and economic freedom. That’s the meaning of a parallel society.”

“He was here physically every year, but this year it’s impossible for American citizens to travel to Europe without a special government permit.”

“I’m not really actively working on Bitcoin Core. I’m only working on a subproject of Bitcoin Core, namely the cryptographic library.”

“If people say that Bitcoin is slowing down in development, I think that’s true, and that’s a good thing, but it only concerns the base layer. Everything else moves very quickly, at least from my perspective.”

“I view Bitcoin and altcoins as qualitatively different things. One is censorship resistant, and the other things try to do something else and perhaps don’t try to be money. Interesting experimentation, for sure, but these things are not really comparable.”

“Right now you have Alice’s and Bob’s public keys in the chain, which shows the world that this is a multisig setup, and that’s bad. With the switch to Schnorr signatures, they get a combined key which looks like a normal key and a combined signature which looks like a normal signature.”

“Taproot lets you spend the coin without showing the rest of the policy to the world. That gives us smaller transactions, which are cheaper, but it also makes Bitcoin more fungible, because we only have to show a small part of the policy.”

“I think the most important thing is passion, and the second thing is luck, because you need to find someone who funds you for the things you’re passionate about. There are quite a few people passionate about Bitcoin, and there’s only so much funding.”

“What I contributed to Bitcoin Core was not great code; it was peer review and analysis. There’s much more interesting stuff on my blog than anything I directly wrote in Bitcoin Core. I think too many people see getting merged into Core as some kind of achievement, a validation.”

“I can’t say that about much of the stuff I’ve done. I hope OpenTimestamps works, but it doesn’t have the same gratification as buying a beer.”

“The goal of BDK is basically to make a library that can support potentially any kind of wallet, with generalized spending policies.”

“Go find something within the entire ecosystem. Don’t just focus on getting into Bitcoin Core.”

“You’re the only pseudo-philosophical person I’ve ever enjoyed talking to. I typically hate talking to philosopher types, because they always want to talk about bullshit, but I always enjoy our conversations.”

“I think somewhere down the line something went wrong with him, because he was so optimistic, and he actually understood Bitcoin a lot better than most people.”

“I suppose a lot of people disregard what inflation actually means and how it impacts the price of goods and services.”

“The reason why I think it may be a mistake to think that way now isn’t that you’re wrong. It’s that it’s not important right now. It will be important later, when there are many more use cases and many more types of people using the Lightning Network.”

“Take what I’ve been saying about centralization being kind of OK on Lightning, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand: the routing actually never gets that complex.”

“The fact that it doesn’t happen, I think that’s a miracle. And the fact that we think we can reinvent society just based on sound money, I think that’s silly.”

“I’m going to take all these other routes, and I’m going to rebalance the whole entire network, just because the direct route doesn’t have liquidity.”

“I think bitcoiners need to get smarter and more creative, and they need to stop thinking that Bitcoin is here just to get them rich through some asymmetric information they think they have. I think the digital gold narrative has played a role in this mindset.”

“I’m going to be wrong in some senses, because eventually the network will be super huge, and maybe somebody wants to send really large payments in an unusual direction.”

“I definitely support Lightning, and I definitely think it will be used by a lot of people. But it’s not the same thing as putting it on people to say: you need to run a Lightning node.”

“That will only happen if industrial-scale mining becomes unprofitable, and holders are going to mine just because they understand it’s important to support the security of the system.”

“It’s a strange one: the more fiat that’s printed, the people who first get their hands on the freshly printed fiat get to keep the entire value of that fiat and spend it.”

“I’ve always liked Peter Todd, because he never cared what people thought. He goes out there and tries to break stuff all the time, and he was always very unpopular because he would point out flaws.”

“It always gets brushed under the carpet. The thing with Bitcoin is that you can’t brush it under; you can see it on the blockchain. So where the hell has all that money gone?”

“The only thing they can do, if something goes wrong, is go through the data, figure out where it went wrong, and find them.”

“You can only really regulate by educating the consumer, because the consumer has been so protected from risk for so many years that they’re falling for any old scam.”

“I wanted something else for my savings, so I started jumping into gold and silver. But try going to a gold and silver event and paying in gold and silver: it’s impossible. It’s super hard.”

“A lot of the reason why people in that era were into Bitcoin was the sort of extreme passion for freedom.”

“I’m glad people never gave up on the double-spend problem, because it seemed unsolvable, and that was why we didn’t have Bitcoin earlier. But all of a sudden, there was the solution.”

“Craig disqualifies himself as being Satoshi, just because he would never collaborate on anything.”