Season 9 quotes

“It depends how far you want to extend the metaphor. Thinking in Bitcoin always means that you can’t spend it, or that you can’t contemplate selling your bitcoin for dollars.”

“Because libbitcoin is based on Bitcoin Core, and will always be a post-hoc construction based on Bitcoin Core, I don’t think it’s an example of decentralization.”

“It may be that the only reason you want decentralization is that you thought that’s what Bitcoin did, and what you really want is for Bitcoin to work, because that’s what makes you money.”

“It’s the Tether scam, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s not even a scam, because everyone’s making money on it right now.”

“There’s no science that can be applied to the trolley problem, and yet they’ll affirm that science offers solutions to many problems that are trolley problems. The word ‘science’ is the Schelling point around which they find community.”

“It’s not anyone’s fault exactly. Again, this is a social media thing: you can’t tell the difference between the map and the territory when it comes to decentralization.”

“A lot of the stuff we discuss in Bitcoin requires some notion of medium of exchange in order to make sense.”

“All of their opinions would be post-hoc constructions, as if logic were an objective truth-finding mission, which it isn’t.”

“I don’t think people realize that’s what’s happening, and I don’t think it’s even explainable to most people. But that’s how it seems to me.”

“It’s insane that I ended up discovering this pirate money. I like to call it pirate money sometimes.”

“There are always going to be legal limits on privacy, and it’s important that we understand that privacy isn’t just a matter of tech. It’s also a matter of law.”

“Both sides of the equation are important, because the tech by itself can’t do it, because of tech limitations.”

“I would never propose, and I will never support, a system as being this kind of solution to governance.”

“In my opinion, the hard fork model provides a better governance deal to nodes, because in the soft fork model you could be left behind.”

“Any privacy improvement is something we should take, but I don’t think Lightning is exactly a privacy solution. The space is still very young, and everything is still pretty primitive.”

“I don’t think Bitcoin should accept this idea that we’re not going to change the protocol to improve it in many ways, including privacy.”

“I think that’s reasonable, and I’m not so afraid of failure.”

“For me, any hard fork in Bitcoin is great, because I’m just not into the whole soft fork model.”

“I think people should do philosophy and exercise legal judgment, much more than they delegate their philosophical and legal growth to others. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t learn from the past.”

“If they’re playing an adversarial game, I could see these adversarial strategies happening. But if they’re playing the let’s-pump-Bitcoin game, it’s harder to see.”

“I was looking for years, and I didn’t think it was possible, because of the double-spend problem. But then I found it.”

“Most people are quite good people. Most people give to charity. Most people want schools, because they don’t want uneducated kids running around robbing their neighborhoods. Most people want hospitals.”

“The problem is that governments don’t want gold, because they can’t print it out of nowhere.”

“If I lose access to that smart contract, if I lose access to my keys… well, it does matter, because that would suck. I wouldn’t have access to my gold anymore.”

“Gold, on the other hand, is actually quite hard for governments to steal, because it’s so damn heavy.”

“The base chain doesn’t necessarily need to scale massively. What needs to happen is that Lightning needs to get more network effects.”

“The best thing to do is actually take over the government and announce that the gold in that vault, which never moves, is now your gold.”

“I can’t actually tell you what the difference is, because if I ask one agorist and then another agorist, they will tell me totally different things.”

“It’s also very stupid, because what’s your incentive to act rationally when you can game the system by spending all of your money?”

“Think about every single movie: it’s always private evil people. Look at every single James Bond villain.”

“Again, I don’t even know how to reply to it, because to me it’s so self-evidently wrong that I don’t even know how to react to it.”

“Some people find it a lot easier to just say, when an altcoin comes out, that all those people are inherently evil. That’s the toxic maximalist idea: that everything that’s not Bitcoin is a scam, and the only reason someone would create a blockchain is to harm people.”

“Any free-thinking person would probably want to shore up privacy anywhere, just for the sake of having it. Transaction privacy happens to be an extremely important kind, because politicians are easily swayed by money.”

“It’s very cheap to fix a problem, because you can find the problem in the code. You can find the exact line.”

“I recall Adam Back saying that what Satoshi actually fixed was inflation, as the design Nick Szabo had for bit gold included a type of inflation driven by the free market.”

“There’s a problem: it has to continue even after Bitcoin has replaced everything, because the purchasing power also needs to go up.”

“That’s an empty argument, because it means anything Satoshi did that was non-cypherpunk was just him trying to throw people off the track, but anything he did that was cypherpunk was because he really was a cypherpunk.”

“They’re in the cult and the simplified memes, and there’s too much peer pressure. They can’t turn back now. They can’t just say: guys, I think we should look at Monero, or at Zcash.”

“I want this to work. I want to be wrong. And if I’m wrong, I will gladly admit that I’m wrong.”

“He wanted to have the lowest inflation tax, because currency competition means that people don’t want to use the inflating currency.”

“If you can’t make money, it’s never going to get built, because nobody will work for free forever.”

“If Raspberry Pis ever become in short supply, or their supply chains become compromised and can no longer be trusted, then embassyOS is useless, because currently it can only run on a Pi.”

“These are people who believe in ‘don’t trust, verify,’ believe in individual sovereignty over their computing, and are willing to put in some time and energy to do it.”

“The only reason the centralized way won the day and came to dominate this planet is that it afforded better business models.”

“Not necessarily the move-fast-and-break-things philosophy, because we’re dealing with sensitive technology here: if it fails, you could actually lose data or lose money.”

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that with Embassy, you can install LND or Core Lightning without installing Bitcoin, and tell it to connect to a full Bitcoin node elsewhere.”

“Private means you can transact with the peer you’re connected to, but nobody else on the network can see it.”

“These two things can run side by side, and you’re not actually running two Bitcoin nodes, which could be very heavy on a home network.”

“He said: I think what you’re building is important and necessary, and I want to fund it. And if you end up making me a bunch of money, great.”

“Rather than virtue signaling that something should not exist, which is a waste of energy, you could be building something and let them be wrong. But calling out scams, I think that’s a good cause.”

“This is always interesting, because a lot of people say workers have freedom of movement: they can just take their labor and go somewhere else.”

“He was using the government-endorsed wallet, but it’s Bitcoin, so he could have used any wallet to pay. That’s massively more efficient.”

“You can’t use it, because it doesn’t exist, and it can’t exist, because we haven’t got drivechains.”

“That simple concept of split payments: you can’t do it with Visa, because you can’t do it for small payments, for a few pennies.”

“I think there’s lots of good that comes from it, but I do agree that, ideally, ideologically, people find it on their own and just use it organically.”

“If your gran needs to pay a phone bill, you can send her that money over Bitcoin Lightning, and she gets it instantly.”

“I love the first-principles argument, because it’s almost as if I’m arguing against those first principles, but I’m not. Obviously: don’t kill, don’t steal.”

“Having that dialectic and reaching a synthesis of ideas is how society progresses. In real life, you can have very rewarding conversations with people who think the complete opposite.”

“I don’t think taxes are the answer. I think the system is buggy, and I think there’s a much better future where none of us pay tax.”

“It’s a leftist tradition, because people on the left believed in liberty, equality, fraternity. For people to be liberated, there needs to be an element of equality among all people, or else you can’t have liberty.”

“The fact that privacy is opt-in also contributed to a situation where most users think they have privacy, but they actually don’t.”

“People are not nearly as excited as they should be about the Lightning Network, because it’s a fantastic piece of technology: you can do actual Bitcoin transactions without having to be on the blockchain. It’s just mind-boggling.”

“Bitcoin’s early history is important, of course, but the system itself is more important than the people behind it.”

“My father, for instance, always had the attitude: I’m not going to leave anything for the kids, because it will all get taxed away anyway.”

“The stock-to-flow model: I don’t believe in that. But then again, I don’t believe in any models that try to predict the future price of anything, because I think they’re all deeply flawed by nature.”

“If it’s also on the Lightning Network, then it has some extra privacy, because the rest of the network doesn’t know where it comes from or where it goes.”

“In hindsight, the only way we could construct a tool to enable libertarianism was with completely voluntary communism.”

“That was very important in the history of the network, because it proved that miners are not in control. They were only given control.”

“I find Bitcoin so hopeful, because now the state can’t grave-rob you.”

“I enjoy almost every conversation I have with another bitcoiner, because it’s always inspiring.”

“The more I learned about Bitcoin, the more I understood the importance of decentralization and the beauty of Bitcoin’s architecture. Bitcoin is the most secure and solid public blockchain.”

“We suspended its development because we can easily use open-source node software, since we developed a software-only product.”

“However, since the government is printing large amounts of Japanese yen, much earlier than the US government did, Bitcoin may have value as an inflation hedge and a store of value in the future.”

“This is radically different, in the sense that if you’re not responsible with your own money, you can lose it forever, and nobody else can recover it for you.”

“However, I want them to understand that only full nodes allow them to verify transactions in a P2P environment, without servers and without a trust point anywhere.”

“I don’t think Bitcoin’s essentials are well understood in Japan. Many Japanese think it’s a speculative tool. However, in my opinion, Bitcoin works as a store of value.”

“However, I can’t recommend it so far, because of the cost of electricity and the effort to build and maintain it.”

“The current version of Nayuta Core does not have a full node option, because we are concentrating on non-custodial streaming payments.”

“In this sense, Japan is a country of moderate inflation, and people highly trust the government compared to other countries globally.”

“This means the freedom of choice and the ability to call it out are essential in a free society.”

“This is a weird scenario for us who love Bitcoin, and who think merchants should obviously accept Bitcoin. I’ve been yelling from the mountaintops that merchants should do that for many years now.”

“We’re talking about the hardest, most inflation-resistant monetary asset we’ve ever seen, with Bitcoin. It’s fucking beautiful. So there is a positive incentive for using Bitcoin and for being early in Bitcoin.”

“Nix-bitcoin is something on top of NixOS. It uses NixOS to run servers that speak Bitcoin software.”

“They cannot possibly ban mining if it’s being used by a large number of people, because it’s hard, and the bans will not scale.”

“Each of your actions has causal consequences that are unavoidable to you.”

“You don’t need the government to step in and say: this is going to be an official currency, and everyone must use it.”

“I think Bitcoin goes against the idea of government and control. If anything, you’re going to have minimal government with Bitcoin.”

“I don’t think you can actually get bored. The options and applications are only limited by the imagination.”

“It makes sense to continue to take the good ideas of people, while discarding their bad ideas.”

“Just because you have the freedom to choose doesn’t mean you’re free of responsibilities.”

“I think I bought all of them, like 36 books or more by now, maybe 38 or 39. Not all about Bitcoin, but on subjects related to Bitcoin.”

“Central banks are printing money to keep inflation between 1% and 3%, because they don’t want your house to be worth less than your mortgage.”

“I think it’s an important book for everyone, so French people should have access to it. So I’ve stopped reading, and now I’m translating books instead. I think it’s a better use of my time right now.”

“Reading those advanced books first is not really efficient. I don’t remember everything I read in Mastering Bitcoin, because I wasn’t at the level needed to understand all those concepts at the time.”

“I would begin with something like my book, because I explain what money is, what fiat money is, and how Bitcoin works.”

“Then I read What Has Government Done to Our Money?, because I wanted to know more about how fiat works. It’s described in The Bitcoin Standard, but only as an introduction.”

“Something under 50 pages, with the three most important subjects: what money is, what the characteristics of money are, and what the roles of money are.”

“He wrote a Bitcoin book, but there’s not a lot of Bitcoin in it. There’s a mention of Bitcoin at the end, but it’s not a Bitcoin book.”

“One thing I always say to people: when you read, you have to look up every word you don’t understand.”

“My only gripe is when a book is not accessible enough. But that’s not the real problem, because there are people who aren’t noobs who are interested in Bitcoin.”

“The further I dig into Bitcoin and the community, the more I appreciate a, some might say brutal or even toxic, honesty. I think we are the vanguard of a very, very important cultural and technological revolution, and that requires fidelity to principle.”

“I’ve been in Bitcoin since about 2014, always holding and always believing that Bitcoin was going to be the money of the future in some capacity, but like many, I got sort of pulled into the shitcoin world. Coming out of it is when I really turned into a full-on Bitcoin maximalist.”

“That’s very common for a lot of bitcoiners: they were either Austrian types or cypherpunks, and those two are very related in many ways. That’s the big difference versus Ethereum and a lot of these other altcoin projects, where people just come in because they’ve seen the price go up.”

“I think the majority of the investment money that would have moved into gold over the last decade has gone into Bitcoin instead, especially for people in their mid-40s and under.”

“The fact that Bitcoin is a bearer asset, and that it’s relatively easy to actually transfer it, means that we’re not going to run into the same problems. There might be some attempts, some chicanery, but I don’t think there’s going to be success there, assuming bitcoiners demand physical settlement.”

“We need to know history. We need to see that this is a potential attack vector and make sure that we don’t allow the community to fall for it. But ultimately, I’m not worried about that. I think we’ll be okay.”

“It was Jameson Lopp, and he had a long list of reasons why he’s not a big fan of Shamir’s secret sharing. I’ve considered Shamir, but I’ve never used that approach, probably because of Lopp’s article, to be honest.”

“If people understand the why of Bitcoin, we think the rest will happen pretty naturally for them as they get into it.”

“I pretty much wake up every day and just think: what can I do to get more involved in Bitcoin, to promote this technology, help secure it, and make it the money of the future? That’s what I care about.”

“I found out last night that the Bitcoin.org website was hacked, with an attempt to phish people’s Bitcoin through a ‘send us Bitcoin and we’ll send you double back’ scam.”