Remembering Donald McIntyre: S1 E1 Remaster, on Bitcoin, Tim May, Nick Szabo and the History of Money

Donald McIntyre passed away in 2025, and the space lost one of its most unlikely polymaths. Born in Costa Rica, raised in Argentina, and later a United States citizen, he spent years in mainstream finance at UBS Securities and Morgan Stanley, raised venture capital from the likes of SoftBank and Carlos Slim for his fintech companies, and then walked away from all of it to embrace the cypherpunk ethos. He founded Etherplan, worked with Nick Szabo on blockchain-based cash flow products, and became the most articulate advocate Ethereum Classic ever had. He was also, not incidentally, the very first guest on Bitcoin Takeover podcast.

We recorded S1 E1 in January 2019, one month after Tim May died and only days after Ethereum Classic suffered the 51% attack that dominates the final stretch of the conversation. The episode came out in the first week of February 2019, ran two hours and nine minutes, and set the genetic code for everything this show became: cypherpunk history, the anthropology of money, and Nick Szabo’s writing treated with the seriousness of scripture.

Donald confessed he had to read each Szabo article about 30 times, and insisted that one article equals six months of university courses. Seventeen seasons later, the show notes on the original episode page still describe it as the single closest experience to having the Bit gold inventor himself on the show. That remains true.

I was 26, insecure about my English, and terrified that two non-native speakers would fail to produce the word “unconfiscatable.” We managed. What follows is a look back at what that first conversation actually contained, because it contained a lot.

Was Bitcoin inevitable?

Donald’s answer was the first indication that this would not be a normal interview. Instead of talking about 2008 or the cypherpunk mailing list, he went back 3.5 million years. Humans spent most of their evolutionary history in small groups and families, and only in the last ten thousand years, after the last ice age, did we assemble into villages, city-states, nations, and empires. Top-down government and top-down money are, on that timescale, brand new.

Our brains are still calibrated for the previous stage, which is why life in metropolitan areas of 20 or 30 million people produces a permanent low-grade cognitive dissonance. Bitcoin itself may not have been inevitable, he argued, but the discomfort was. The cypherpunks, starting with David Chaum in the 80s and continuing with Tim May, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney, simply rationalized that discomfort and set out to build online environments where the individual comes first and the structures above get blurred instead.

Trust minimization and social scalability

The centerpiece of the first hour was Szabo’s concept of social scalability, which Donald called a paradox: for a system to be usable by the most people possible, it needs less human participation in its operation. Institutions run by limited human brains can only cope by excluding everybody and letting people in one by one, manually, after they prove they are good customers. That is the American banking system, and it is why tens of millions remain unbanked even in rich countries, while in much of Latin America the unbanked are the majority. A network of nodes with unbreakable rules has no such bottleneck. The less social intervention, the more socially scalable.

From there: trusted third parties are security holes, everything we do on Zoom, Amazon, or Alexa passes through a central server, and we live in a dual world where a decade-old paradigm of self-custodied property coexists with the old one in which institutions hold everything and grant us access to what is ours. Donald’s conclusion aged well: for the masses to migrate, it is not enough that Bitcoin exists. Trusted third parties also have to keep proving themselves untrustworthy, through breaches, hacks, and dishonesty, until the lesson sticks.

Not your keys, and the high performance fallacy

The “not your keys, not your coins” sermon delivered here in 2019 needs no update. Donald added two flourishes that stuck with me. First, the marketing of strength: JP Morgan spent 120 years showing off its New York building because our small brains read architecture as solvency, even though the building is worth a rounding error against the trillions in deposits.

Second, what he called the fallacy of high performance: PayPal’s instant gratification is a bribe. Security through proof of work means deliberate inefficiency, and a decentralized system will never beat Amazon’s servers on speed. Any chain promising a billion transactions per second with no energy cost and full security is doing what Parallel Industries called decentralization theater. His verdict was blunt: either you are ignorant, or you are a scammer.

Who adopts first?

I made my usual argument that hyperbitcoinization should start where the need is greatest: Venezuela, Palestine, the unbanked. Donald pushed back with the jet set analogy. In the 1950s only the rich could fly, and that is precisely why I can fly Denver to New Orleans for 90 dollars today. Costly technologies bootstrap through wealthy early adopters, then scale down to everyone else.

Add the Lindy effect on top (every year Bitcoin survives without a security breach convinces more of the world) and the pattern is not illogical, just unfair-looking. He also made an observation I still think about: unlike the internet, where the protocol was free and only startups captured value, Bitcoin’s token is intrinsic to the protocol. The price must go up for security to go up. The geeks and cypherpunks got in before the bankers this time, and some of them never even cared about the money.

Money as a biological invention

This is the part of the episode people still mention to me. Donald’s method was pure Szabo: do not start from the technology, start from human history, ethnography, and biology, and ask why money, property, and agreements matter in the first place. From Shelling Out: The Origins of Money he took the Yurok shell money, the wampum belts, the Inca woven cloth, and the flint points, then combined them with the brain’s roughly 150-person trust limit to reach Szabo’s conclusion: money is a trust minimization device, a bridge between groups that share neither genes nor trust. Then he went further than Szabo, and said so openly, because as a self-described amateur he is free to speculate where a scientist is not.

His speculation: money might be millions of years old. The crude Lomekwi tools of 3.3 million years ago were purely functional, but the Acheulean hand axes of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, are beautiful, standardized, produced in specialized workshops far from the raw material, and archaeologists find them in stashes of up to 200 pieces, stacked together in places with no bones and no signs of use. Donald reads those stashes as vaults: objects valued beyond their function, stored like gold or bitcoin, and occasionally spent into circulation.

Somewhere in deep time, Alice had meat, Bob had a stone tool, neither trusted the other, and the tool settled the debt immediately. That, plus Darwin, plus Dawkins’ reciprocal altruism, plus John Maynard Smith’s evolutionary game theory, gave him the full synthesis: fighting is costly, so evolution produced conflict minimization devices like territory and first possession. Private property and money are the human versions. Bitcoin replicates three million years of this behavior in code, which is why, in his words, Bitcoin is first about anthropology, biology, and game theory, and only second about engineering.

Tim May, Wei Dai, and the cypherpunk lineage

Tim May had died the previous month, and Donald, who had interacted with him for three years, delivered an impromptu eulogy. May owned no bitcoin, grumbled that the space was turning into a new PayPal, and told an interviewer he preferred rocks and gold because he had no personal use for borderless transfer. Donald read this as the father figure who is never satisfied, the skeptic whose refusal to applaud sends everyone back to work harder.

He pointed listeners to May’s long-form interview with JW Weatherman and his tenth-anniversary piece for CoinDesk, both of which say exactly what May had been saying privately. On David Chaum he was respectful but disappointed: Elixxir’s promise of full privacy, full scalability, full security, and 100 million transactions per second tripped every wire from the earlier discussion. The moment Donald hears all three promises in one sentence, he stops paying attention. I countered with the observation that we should never underestimate the elders, which remains good advice.

The roll call matters historically: Satoshi formally credited Bit gold, Hal Finney’s RPOW, Adam Back’s Hashcash, and Wei Dai’s b-money, and Donald compared the Szabo-Satoshi overlap to Newton and Leibniz, with Szabo getting the worse deal yet remaining remarkably supportive. And when I asked which cypherpunk projects succeeded outside Bitcoin, the list came quickly: Tor, WikiLeaks, peer-to-peer file sharing, BitTorrent. Napster and Megaupload died precisely because a central party could be raided. His summary of the whole philosophy deserves quoting: in a community protected by cryptography, violence is not absent because it was stopped, but because it is not useful. Breaking the math costs more than whatever you could steal. The wall is the conflict minimization device.

Ethereum Classic, and the attack that was days old

The final third is a time capsule. Donald admitted, with a candor rare in this industry, that he had spent years using the world computer buzzwords and inflating things, first because he was still learning, then because simplification sells. He described the DAO fork as a huge fight in which he was a very little minority, staying on the Ethereum side until 2018 when Coinbase listed ETC and he moved for good.

His pitch for what ETC adds to Bitcoin was crisp: identical principles (proof of work, fixed supply, immutability), plus Turing completeness on the base layer. Lightning he called amazing; Liquid and RSK he dismissed as glorified trusted third parties because both need a federation of companies holding the keys.

Then the news, raw at the time: the 51% attack had started on January 5th, the community was alerted by Pierre Rochard on the 6th, Coinbase published its full report on the 7th, an attacker had rented hashpower, executed 15 double spends, and walked away with roughly 220,000 ETC. The interim recommendation was 2,500 to 5,000 confirmations. Donald’s honesty about it is striking in hindsight: principles and design are not enough, the network must grow until the attack cost is prohibitive. His ten-year target of $5,000 per ETC has not materialized and the market has not been kind to it, though the deadline is technically still running.

One prediction did land, at least for a while: when Ethereum abandoned proof of work in 2022, much of that hashpower flowed to Ethereum Classic, exactly as he said it would. The rest of his ETH commentary (the ProgPoW dalliance, the issuance cut from 3 to 2 per block, the expectation that the Parity funds would eventually be reimbursed, the argument that the DAO created a precedent that can always be invoked again) reads like a summary of every critique this site has published since, including my DAO fork comic strip. ETCDEV’s side of that era is preserved in my later interview with Igor Artamonov, and the broader season one context in the first 109 episodes retrospective.

Donald’s critique of Bitcoin

The ending surprised many listeners at the time: the Szabo disciple turned his method on Bitcoin itself. Two threats, both social. First, the 21 million cap is not enforced by proof of work; it is a political agreement among nodes, and in forty years powerful miners whose revenue has halved away might lobby, bribe, and threaten their way to a higher block reward. Second, merge mining and drivechains would concentrate Bitcoin’s miners into what he called super miners, securing trillions across sidechains and becoming the new Google and Apple, gatekeepers who decide which innovations get mined.

He named Paul Sztorc of Truth Coin as the man pushing drivechains, complained affectionately that Paul only likes to talk to scientists, and then, in a moment that became show lore, recommended me a must-have guest it would take eight seasons to book. History duly delivered: the BIP 300 debate is now one of the liveliest in Bitcoin, and LayerTwo Labs, Paul’s company, sponsors this very podcast. Donald would have had opinions, and I would have paid to hear them.

As we wrapped up, I asked whether I had any chance of interviewing Nick Szabo. Donald offered his email on the spot and suggested the questions: Bit gold’s two-layer design, so close to what Lightning became. The interview never happened, and Szabo remains the white whale of this show. The last exchange was a pun: the conversation had been enlightening, which makes us, in the end, marketing animals for the Lightning Network. Then goodbye, and the podcast had officially begun.

In memoriam

Some episodes are content; this one is a foundation stone. Donald gave a two-hour masterclass to a kid with a brand new microphone, split the episode’s donation address 50/50 without being asked, complimented my research on air when I badly needed the confidence, and set the intellectual standard every guest since has been measured against. He kept writing, podcasting, and fighting for Ethereum Classic until the end. When I spoke at the Proof of Work Summit in Prague in 2023, this conversation was the one I credited on stage. Rest in peace, Donald. The amateur did fine.

Listen to Donald McIntyre on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, RSS & revisit the original episode page with the full transcript!

Time stamps:

00:02:45 – Introduction: who is Donald McIntyre

00:04:49 – Was Bitcoin inevitable?

00:06:29 – 10,000 years of top-down structures vs 3.5 million years of evolution

00:08:27 – Cypherpunks: Chaum, Tim May, Nick Szabo

00:09:43 – The ancient desire for unconfiscatable money

00:11:55 – Bitcoin as a bottom-up system

00:12:39 – Living in a dual world: banks vs private keys

00:15:02 – Trusted third parties are security holes

00:16:40 – Nick Szabo’s social scalability explained

00:18:27 – Why banking excludes: the unbanked in the US and Latin America

00:20:14 – Privacy, intelligence agencies & the false sense of security

00:21:13 – Is Bitcoin enough to make people demand decentralization?

00:23:23 – Asia’s interest in Ethereum Classic & immutability

00:24:51 – Mt. Gox, breaches & untrustworthy third parties

00:25:57 – Not your keys, not your coins

00:27:28 – JP Morgan’s building & the marketing of strength

00:28:45 – The instant gratification bribe

00:29:58 – The tradeoff: security means inefficiency

00:31:27 – The high performance fallacy

00:32:26 – Decentralization theater & scammers

00:33:48 – Hyperbitcoinization: elites first or the people who need it?

00:36:26 – The jet set analogy: how technologies bootstrap

00:40:54 – The Lindy effect

00:41:47 – The geeks got in before the bankers

00:43:25 – The token as intrinsic to the protocol

00:46:27 – Bitcoin as a biological invention

00:47:02 – How Nick Szabo thinks (and why he went to law school)

00:48:38 – Shelling Out: the origins of money

00:51:20 – The 150-person brain & money as a bridge between strangers

00:52:39 – Dawkins & reciprocal altruism

00:53:52 – Stone tools, subjective value & the first trade

00:56:15 – Reading Szabo 30 times: one article = six months of university

01:00:52 – Lomekwi, Oldowan & Acheulean: Donald’s stone tool theory

01:03:42 – Stashes of hand axes as prehistoric vaults

01:04:58 – Is money millions of years old?

01:07:51 – Darwin, Dawkins & John Maynard Smith

01:08:31 – The logic of animal conflict

01:10:53 – Territory, asymmetry & conflict minimization

01:12:08 – Money as a conflict minimization device

01:12:36 – Bitcoin’s game theory & the Byzantine generals problem

01:15:32 – Chimpanzees, bipedalism & why our brains grew

01:17:19 – Bitcoin carnivores

01:17:40 – Szabo & Satoshi: the Newton-Leibniz parallel

01:19:23 – Satoshi’s credits: bit gold, RPOW, Hashcash, b-money

01:19:59 – The mystery of Wei Dai

01:20:54 – Remembering Tim May

01:21:53 – The JW Weatherman interview & the CoinDesk piece

01:23:40 – Tim May as the father figure who was never satisfied

01:24:39 – Why not David Chaum? The Elixxir disappointment

01:26:35 – Never underestimate the elders

01:28:08 – What the cypherpunks built: Tor, WikiLeaks, BitTorrent

01:30:17 – Napster, Megaupload & the raid in New Zealand

01:30:30 – Cryptography as a wall: violence made useless

01:34:10 – The shifting Ethereum narrative

01:35:27 – World computer: a marketing confession

01:38:11 – The spectrum from marketers to scammers

01:39:59 – The DAO fork fight & leaving for Ethereum Classic

01:40:44 – What Ethereum Classic adds to Bitcoin

01:41:17 – Liquid & RSK: glorified trusted third parties

01:41:57 – Turing completeness on the base layer

01:43:48 – The future: four or five networks

01:44:26 – ETC’s monetary policy: 210 to 230 million

01:46:19 – The 51% attack that happened that week

01:47:48 – 220,000 ETC, 15 double spends & 5,000 confirmations

01:49:15 – The $5,000 ETC thesis

01:50:37 – What happens when Ethereum moves to proof of stake

01:51:37 – ProgPoW, the issuance cut & doing everything wrong

01:52:16 – The Nick Johnson poll on reversing double spends

01:52:54 – The Parity bailout & the precedent of the DAO

01:54:53 – Bitcoin: soft forks, Schnorr & the SHA-256 exception

01:57:09 – Governments will never voluntarily give up fiat

01:59:14 – Donald’s criticisms of Bitcoin

02:00:02 – The 21 million cap as a political decision

02:01:13 – The miner lobby scenario, 40 years from now

02:02:09 – Merge mining, drivechains & the super miners

02:02:14 – Miners as the future Google and Apple

02:04:46 – Paul Sztorc, Truth Coin & the guest suggestion

02:05:40 – “Do you think I have a chance with Nick Szabo?”

02:06:31 – The selfish joy of podcasting

02:09:51 – Enlightening, a Lightning pun & goodbye