Title: S10 Special: Chris DeRose on Counterparty NFTs, Web 3 & Ladyboys
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Chris DeRose (Counterparty co-founder, former co-host of Bitcoin Uncensored; his third appearance on the show)
Published: 2022-01-11
Duration: 2:59:55
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2022-01-11_s10_special_chris_derose_on_nfts__web_3_and_ladyboys.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2022-01-11_s10_special_chris_derose_on_nfts__web_3_and_ladyboys.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against an independent local distil-small.en transcript and a full local small.en re-transcription with word timestamps (three-way word-level diffs), with 124 doubtful, dropped, truncated or looping stretches re-transcribed locally from short audio clips (about 44 with medium.en, the rest with small.en). Hallucinated lines in the base transcript were removed; the garbled sponsor blocks were replaced with the standard sponsor text. Speaker labels fixed using local speaker-embedding similarity scans and by hand (Vlad Costea, Chris DeRose; the pre-recorded sponsor reads are labeled Ad voiceover). Names and jargon checked against the title, the show notes and the web (Counterparty, Rare Pepes, Spells of Genesis WHEREBCYCARD (Mt. Gox card), Bitcoin Heads DEROSEHEAD/VLADHEAD/JOSHUAHEAD/NOPARAHEAD, Bitcoin Uncensored, Junseth, Satoshi Roundtable, Roger Ver, Bitcoin XT/Bitcoin Unlimited, SegWit, Bitcoin Core, Luke Dashjr, Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Paul Sztorc, Mircea Popescu, BitcoinErrorLog/John Carvalho, Saifedean Ammous, Nassim Taleb, Perianne Boring, Anthony Di Iorio, Ethereum/ConsenSys, Vitalik, futarchy, Elrond, L. Ron, EOS/Block.one, Justin Sun, OneCoin, BitConnect, Chainalysis, LocalBitcoins, Bisq, Cash App, BitGo, Twetch, Joshua Scigala, Max Hillebrand, nopara, J Scrilla, flakka, Piss Christ, Belle Delphine, Tai Lopez, Marjorie Taylor Greene, AOC, Don't Look Up, Elizabeth Holmes, Tontine Coffee House, CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gemini protocol, Vaultoro, Wasabi Wallet, Bitcoin Reserve). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music and the sung sponsor jingles are omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
================================================================================

[00:00:51] Chris DeRose: What's up, party people? This is Chris DeRose. Hi. You're supposed to say, oh, are you my co-host today or am I doing it? Here, let's try it again. What's up, party people? This is Chris DeRose and today on Bitcoin Takeover, we have a very special guest. We've got Vlad Costea. Vlad, welcome.

[00:01:15] Vlad Costea: You almost got that right, but for an American, that's a good pronunciation.

[00:01:20] Chris DeRose: Okay. Well, thank you. I try.

[00:01:22] Vlad Costea: I've actually had this conversation with John Carvalho, who I understand was the guy who held the camera while you were trying to break into the Satoshi Roundtable with Joshua. And he was trying very hard to pronounce Costea, like "ea", and he told me that there is no such sound in American English.

[00:01:46] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Well, we can call you Vlad C. It works. I just came back from South America where everybody was calling me "Crease, Crease." And it sounded, you know, crease is like how you fold a piece of paper. It just was offensive to my ear. So I just had people start calling me Miami. They just called me Miami and they pronounced that better. So I was Miami for most of that trip.

[00:02:08] Vlad Costea: So what did you do there?

[00:02:11] Chris DeRose: I mostly just checked things out. I'm so like tame these days. I like to read and work out. And in between reading and working out, I do some exploring, but nothing too crazy. I mean, there were some ins and outs. El Salvador is pretty cool, definitely from a Bitcoin perspective. And I saw some like anti-Bitcoin riots, which were kind of interesting. It was seeing some of the iconography there was a little bit strange. And then Guatemala was great. Can't say enough good things about Guatemala. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it there.

[00:02:54] Lake Atitlán in particular is just like a wonderful place to relax. And then I spent time in Mexico, which I could see myself living there. I was liking what I saw there a lot, but I don't know how much of a grasp I really have of the country. Because I was only there for like a month. But I liked it.

[00:03:15] Vlad Costea: I mean, I saw that picture of you with the sombrero and Mexican costume and the fake mustache. I think that fits you well.

[00:03:23] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that's why I look... They welcomed me there. I understand them. These are my people.

[00:03:31] Vlad Costea: Right. Actually, so I posted. No, I wasn't the one who posted it. I just tweeted about it. And I think someone else posted that picture with you and Joshua and the Mexican clothing trying to break into the Satoshi Roundtable. And Bruce Fenton actually replied. And he said something along the lines of it was even more ridiculous on his side trying to kick you out while you're looking like that. Because it was making him look even worse.

[00:04:03] Chris DeRose: It was a fun day. That's a really fun day. Old Bitcoin was a lot of fun.

[00:04:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I've actually read some articles from you on Bitcoinist and I feel like we are reversing roles. You're supposed to host this. But I read some articles on Bitcoinist about Bitcoin Uncensored episodes. And there was some sort of excitement, you know, when you are launching something new. And you were also like [unclear: hype-y] or I don't know how I should put it. But for example, there was one headline which read, is Chris DeRose a CIA agent?

[00:04:41] Chris DeRose: Yeah, still TBD. They don't know. It could be.

[00:04:45] Vlad Costea: There was some suspense there. But in the article, you actually mentioned, you know, you could be hired by either the core developers or by the CIA. Or I think there was a third one that you mentioned.

[00:04:57] Chris DeRose: I'm a double agent. I think that's where like the Hegelian synthesis is there on those arguments. I in fact work for both sides. I'm kind of like Bitcoin James Bond with my, you see my outfits and my suave clandestine costumes when I'm sneaking into places. I think that's what the story is. But who knows?

[00:05:18] Vlad Costea: There was also another one about Zcash being a scam. And in the same episode, you had a debate about the homosexuality of Andreas Antonopoulos. That's really good stuff. You can't really make that up.

[00:05:36] Chris DeRose: Yeah, there's so much about those days that I guess it doesn't really fly anymore. The space has changed. I like to think that people were smarter back then. Maybe that was part of it. You could actually entertain some of these ideas that wouldn't have to like lead to some kind of crazy internet outrage immediately.

[00:05:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there was also a lot less mainstream attention on what was going on. Like nowadays, people who have more than 50,000 followers tweet something and then they see that their tweets become news. And it's insane because they were most likely just shitposting.

[00:06:10] Chris DeRose: Right. A lot of that I think has to do with the nature of just the news cycle. There's just not that much news I guess that's salacious all the time. And so then people have to dig and look for hidden witches and these tweets get recharacterized by the news outlets. And then that starts the next wave of hysteria maybe. I don't know. I don't know. You're seeing some of how this works at your end here. But from what I saw in my time in the spotlight, it's a very different picture than what people I think understand it to be when they're just consuming the media.

[00:06:48] I don't even know what to think anymore though. I feel like just when things hit their limit, or at least you think they hit their limit, then the next round of crazy starts and you're just like, I guess we've learned nothing. Let's do it again. So be it.

[00:07:00] Vlad Costea: It's kind of insane. It's not called a cycle for nothing because it seems like everything repeats itself and you get the same kind of scams, you get the same kind of people who get in. You get Tai Lopez who comes in at the end of every cycle and comes in with some sort of crazy class about how you can make money trading crypto or whatever. It's insane. There is definitely a pattern. And this time you had Melania Trump of all people launching her new NFT.

[00:07:32] Chris DeRose: That was fantastic. I'm glad you brought her up. I strongly suspect that that's just some PR person that's probably like a friend of Parler or something and that she has no idea what the hell is being tweeted. But just because of the way relationships work, she may be compelled to stand by the thing that her PR agent said. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some hilarious sound bites that you could pull where she's at a party. She just throws out some definition of NFT that makes no sense and then simultaneously professes to believe in the revolution of NFTs.

[00:08:12] Something like that has got to be going on there. Maybe that's our version of just doing the same thing in the news cycle where the tweet is pulled apart.

[00:08:22] There's so much like emperor-has-no-clothes syndrome in the modern world where people just are hanging on by a thread. And then they make a tweet that demonstrates that they're hanging on by a thread in their cognition. I don't know. The internet is making us all crazy and schizophrenic.

[00:08:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And something... So basically, this is my surprise for you because I've done my research and I found this 2014 article from October 30th which is titled Counterparty and the Asset Revolution. It's a transcript from a conference presentation that you made and basically you're so ahead of your time. You're like seven, eight years ahead of what's going on today. And you compared Counterparty. So there's a lot of hope in this article. I'm not going to say that you're 100% right, but you compared Counterparty to the Tontine Coffee House, which became a few years later the New York Stock Exchange, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:09:31] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that's about right. I think that was actually the British exchange. Maybe it was New York. I think it was a British exchange. One of the exchanges. But yeah, it's kind of not that hard to be ahead sometimes in this space, but it's all about timing.

[00:09:53] It's frustrating to watch. You'll see this. You'll see people who are like behind the latest and greatest, but they end up getting tons of followers. So many of the people that arrive at Bitcoin in the latter years are these talking heads on TV, like Jim Cramer or something, who shows up and you're just like, why is this guy getting all the attention for being five years late to this idea? But that's what the TV does, and that's what the internet does, is it sort of takes these stragglers, unites them, and then usually sells them the thing that they're behind on, which is great for the early adopters, I guess.

[00:10:32] But it can be a little maddening, too, because if you're trying to lead the herd to where you know they're going to end up, they'll resent you for getting there first, for reasons unknown to me. Whatever. Counterparty's great. I was sitting in Honduras, some not-so-nice hotel in Honduras, and I was flipping through the channels, and on ESPN, I was watching Eli Manning, I think it was. It was some football player who was shilling NFTs of his Heisman Trophy or something, and I was just laughing out loud in this hotel, because I hadn't really seen the NFT thing hit, especially not that demographic, and it was just so funny to me that this guy was shilling Rare Pepes.

[00:11:22] He had no idea where that thing started. He had no idea what the joke was or what the irony was or what the meaning was. He just thought that it was a good time to sell NFTs of his trophies, and from my perspective at least, it was just like the punchline to a very long joke. That was a good day. Yeah, it was a very good day.

[00:11:44] Vlad Costea: Based on my observation so far, I think that the Pepe is going to end up just like Mickey Mouse.

[00:11:49] Chris DeRose: Fine by me.

[00:11:51] Vlad Costea: People are going to use it in every context ever for whatever purpose. It's not going to have any kind of identity of its own. Everyone can use it for whatever reason, and it's fine. At least it takes away all of that alt-right stigma or whatever.

[00:12:09] Chris DeRose: We used to have more collective myths in societies, and we kind of lost that with copyright law. The myths become owned by companies, and then they're licensed for use, which is weird. If we can empower our own myths, I think that's fantastic, and Pepe was always that. Pepe was always something along those lines, if you ask me, and 4chan is basically like the Disney of unlicensed myths or uncopyrighted myths or something like that. If you want to talk decentralization, it's really hard to beat the case for 4chan as a decentralized culturalization source, I think.

[00:12:50] It's interesting to me that you can't discuss 4chan in polite company. I think that's just the funniest thing because there are so many ideas that come straight from 4chan. You can find yourself in a polite circle, and people have to invent alternate histories and alternate myths so that they can discuss some idea, like NFTs being an exact example of that. In polite company, you cannot discuss how NFTs have originated in Pepe because of reasons that I don't really understand but apparently are polite, and so you have to watch fancy people go through all these contortions to mythologize their NFTs.

[00:13:28] It's very funny, very funny for me. Sometimes I have these jokes that I think are just the funniest jokes in the whole world, and I guess nobody else finds them funny but me, but something tells me there are other Bitcoiners that find them funny.

[00:13:38] Vlad Costea: I know exactly what you're saying. I find this whole NFT craze, on one hand, irrational. It's like NFTs are the new ICOs from a perspective. On the other hand, with NFTs, you have this, what you see is what you get kind of situation. You don't have a roadmap which promises that in the future, you're going to have this and that. You're buying a token which is represented by a mutable JPEG that can get changed at any point, but people treat this for whatever reason as if they bought legal rights to that image and nobody else can use it except for them, which is stupid.

[00:14:21] The whole legal system might just get paralyzed by people who have delusions about what the NFT is supposed to be, and I think it only takes two hours of research to figure this out. I've even recorded some episodes with people who did NFTs early on, and they are very clear about this whole concept that the token is the art. That's the point of it. It's like baseball cards for nerds. This was not supposed to go mainstream, but somehow it did.

[00:15:27] Ad voiceover: Vaultoro is the exchange where you deal with honest and hard money. There is no fiat on-ramp or off-ramp, and you get to diversify your Bitcoin portfolio into gold or silver when you sense that a bearish moment is coming. Also, you can instantly trade your gold for Bitcoin to buy the dip. And if you're into gold custody, Vaultoro can also send you the gold that you own directly from their insured Swiss vaulting facilities. Vaultoro was launched in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox hack, so since 2015, they have published monthly Glass Books to prove that they own all the gold reserves and all of their customers' money. Sign up today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. Keep in mind that this is not financial advice, and you are responsible for your own decisions.

[00:16:48] Wasabi Wallet is the perfect Bitcoin privacy wallet. It's free, it's open source, it's available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it offers groundbreaking Chaumian CoinJoins, [unclear: which makes your Bitcoin]. Even if you do not use the CoinJoin feature, you still benefit from a trustless experience with block filters, a hidden IP address via Tor, and easy management of your wallet outputs. After you deal with KYC exchanges like Coinbase, like Kraken, Binance, Gemini, or Bitfinex, you can remove the association between your identity and your Bitcoin address by performing a few rounds of CoinJoins.

[00:17:34] To find out more about the privacy benefits and limitations of CoinJoins, listen to Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 6, Episode 6 with Max Hillebrand. And if you want to give Wasabi a try, go to wasabiwallet.io and download the wallet for free. Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin privacy wallet for the Citadels.

[00:18:04] Bitcoin Reserve is Europe's destination for buying Bitcoin simply online. It's the first Bitcoin-only venue in Europe that allows serious beginners as well as professionals to make daily purchases larger than 1,000 euro per day from bank account or via credit card. Learn more about Bitcoin Reserve by heading to bitcoinreserve.com. Bitcoin Reserve, where Europe buys Bitcoin.

[00:18:42] Chris DeRose: A lot of this started with the modern art world in general. One way to tell the story is that elites and elite culture kind of degraded and or homogenized, take your pick, and ideas that were once only within the realm of the upper class trickled down and became emulated. In the case of NFTs, we can see a lot of examples in the art world. Most recently, the banana, this was here in South Beach, if you're not aware, a banana was duct taped to a wall and the first one was sold for $40,000, which was a steal because I think the later edition sold for six-figure sums.

[00:19:24] The art in question, I guess, was presented to the buyer in the form of a piece of paper that certified that they owned the banana with the duct tape. The banana with the duct tape was effectively performative and I think that it is a valid store of value as evidenced by recent transaction data. Now you have a case of respectable people who are contemporary cultural leaders engaging this activity and then it kind of authorizes that activity all the way down the hierarchy. Now you end up with the Rare Pepe Foundation who are effectively doing the same kind of thing.

[00:20:05] I have no problem with that. I think that's wonderful. But, like, that's maybe one way to tell the story, is that the elites have effectively lost their minds and authorized all of us to lose our minds and we just happen to be way better at losing our minds than people who are worth $10 million plus, when we are [unclear: not].

[00:20:26] Vlad Costea: It's also insane that, so you made a very good point about the elites losing their minds and basically us, the lower layers, emulating their behavior, as with NFTs you can actually see all of these practices of manipulating prices or inflating the value of something, just based on the fact that if someone, for example, let's say that you have this popular artist who sells his art for 10 Bitcoin apiece. Well, it means that his future works are going to start getting evaluated from that point, which is kind of insane.

[00:21:05] It doesn't necessarily mean that the art itself, in terms of work, is worth that much money or that it tells anything meaningful to that point, but it's just the way of the market to evaluate art. It's something very subjective, which starts getting evaluated in a free market and you end up with these situations. But at the same time, I can only see some, I can also see some platforms that inflate NFT value to do some wash trading and in the process they also get some news headlines about some NFTs that sold for millions of dollars.

[00:21:47] And then people are going to get in and start publishing their own shitty art because they saw that a rock sold for a million bucks and they're going to be like, I can do something better than a rock, so why don't I stack two rocks on top of each other? And that should sell for two million, right? And they're going to start publishing, which means that they're going to start paying fees to that platform and they're going to bring more users to that platform. So someone's going to make a lot more money out of this practice and they only have to, you know, get a couple of these headlines and it doesn't necessarily have to be real.

[00:22:25] Like you can also buy the art yourself for that amount and you can inflate the price. Nobody's going to know. You can set up a different wallet, you can buy or you can put a bid at that certain level and all it takes is a greater fool to legitimize your scam.

[00:22:44] Chris DeRose: Yeah. You know, the backdrop for almost everything that's happened here too has been the wonkiness of the market after 2008, which I think we've lost sight of. But I think that that's probably a huge component in everything we're seeing in all markets. And in the case of like the art market, independent of NFTs, it's worth considering that much of modern art is, it's a little bit too strongly worded to say it's a form of money laundering, but it's something along those lines.

[00:23:19] There's a bearer instrument that is this piece of art, quote unquote, piece of art, and people who hold it don't have to follow all of the same regulatory functions that if they were transferring cash dollars, they would have to follow. So like that right there creates the need for people to mythologize because now we all have a shared, like if we are trying to route value between each other, maybe we're like wealthy people and we have this need, we are all incentivized now to believe each other's stories.

[00:23:52] Because if we do that, then we get to route money with impunity. And so that kind of becomes a sort of collective delusion, I think, there. So how to put it, they're going to perform the act of like mystification, or they're going to perform the act of adoration for any given piece of art if they know they're going to get paid to perform that act. And I think some of that culture is what caused the modern art world especially to start to go down this path, where it has ultimately ended up in a piece of duct tape and a banana being worth a six-figure sum, which has then led into, I think, the kind of stories that we can now tell at the lower class level under the auspices of, well, like the people who know what they're doing are believing these stories, so we can tell these stories and believe them too.

[00:24:49] It's a bit rough, but I think there's some of that going on. It's very funny. I mean, humans are like parrots in many ways. Typically, the upper classes will believe something and they'll create a bird call that's fairly unique, and then it gets to be emulated by others at that class. And then as the lower class is here, they begin to emulate it. And then the upper class has the need now to distance themselves to the lower classes so they work on new bird calls, and then the cycle repeats itself.

[00:25:20] So in some senses, that kind of might be what we're seeing with the NFT thing. I don't know. I just don't know.

[00:25:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, which is exactly why I'm going to create the DEROSEHEAD, which is part of the Bitcoin Heads collection. So far, I have the JOSHUAHEAD, which is the head of Joshua Scigala from Vaultoro. And I also have the NOPARAHEAD, which is the head of nopara from Wasabi Wallet. And I also have the VLADHEAD, which is my own head, which I put in a card. I'm also going to put your head in with a maximum supply of, let's say... So what's the maximum supply you're supposed to determine?

[00:25:58] Chris DeRose: Oh, that's a good question. Put me on the spot here. So I don't like doing math on air, but...

[00:26:04] Vlad Costea: Just pull a number out of your head.

[00:26:07] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to come up with a nice ceremonial number here. I'm going to say 21. Let's just... I mean, let's make it a nice even 21.

[00:26:15] Vlad Costea: Really? Only 21 cards?

[00:26:16] Chris DeRose: Well, there's only 21 million Bitcoin. So like, why not? Why not make it 21 cards?

[00:26:20] Vlad Costea: Well, you're going to get one of these and maybe the listeners can get one too. Like, let's say that I keep one. I give you one. I give three cards away to the first three listeners who do what?

[00:26:36] Chris DeRose: Well, I was going to say, yeah, if we have a need for more, let's just keep it a multiple of 21. But 21,000 seems way too high under any circumstances. So I would either have to be like 210, at most 2,100. But I think we would be doing a favor for everybody who would be receiving this if we kept it low. So 21 is ideal. Yeah, it's perfect. Okay. Okay, good.

[00:27:01] Vlad Costea: I'm going to send you a card. I'm going to keep one and I'm going to put the rest of them on auction or something and see how far this goes. I'm going to open a dispenser and Counterparty. What's the starting price?

[00:27:15] Chris DeRose: Ah, you know, I would be inclined to keep the starting price very low and to motivate the secondary market. Because if you make it too high, I think it disincentivizes people from getting in.

[00:27:30] Vlad Costea: So like, it's almost kind of a scam if you make it too high.

[00:27:35] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Well, you've got to set it up so that the initial receivers are primed to scam more so than you. You have to be like the benevolent... You have to be like the Satoshi figure. You have to be benevolent in handing over this Ponzi to the first round of bag holders.

[00:27:50] Vlad Costea: You know, this is not necessarily a Ponzi if it's just people trading a collectible. I'm not responsible by any means for whatever use cases this is going to have. So I'm just the one who creates it and gives it away for a very small and insignificant amount, which most likely covers the fees on-chain.

[00:28:15] Chris DeRose: Perfect.

[00:28:16] Vlad Costea: But after this, just do whatever you want with them.

[00:28:21] Chris DeRose: With all due respect, if you make little to no money off of this, then I think that's the best way to propel the value of these 21 cards because those people now are… How to put it? It's like the starving artist. They're investing in the starving artist maybe as opposed to the fat artist that's already happy. Rather than buy pop art, you're going to take a risk on this scheme.

[00:28:48] Vlad Costea: I mean, I'm not sure how well this is going to work if we just revealed all of the details behind it, but I'm still going to create it. I'm still going to send you a card. And the first three people who write me a message on Twitter and send me a GIF of… What do you like, Chris?

[00:29:09] Chris DeRose: Well, you've got to cover the fees.

[00:29:11] Vlad Costea: No. Yeah, I'm trying to select the winners here and they're supposed to send me a message with a GIF.

[00:29:17] Chris DeRose: Oh, like a non-compensation... I see. Just to validate the transaction.

[00:29:23] Vlad Costea: Like a GIF of something. What do you like?

[00:29:27] Chris DeRose: They should draw a picture of my face but without looking at me, just from memory. So it could be of any form whatsoever. I would say just something like an MS Paint is fine and they can accentuate it in any ways that they like. But it has to have a hat on it, that's for sure. And I think other than that, I take probably the first people to do that and send it in. I don't want these to be stunning works of art.

[00:29:56] I want them to be garish, ideally.

[00:29:59] Vlad Costea: Are you going to pick the winners?

[00:30:01] Chris DeRose: I can do that. But if I do that, understand that the better this looks, the less likely you are to win. It's going to have to be like the Sanic version of myself. It wouldn't have to be anything, you know.

[00:30:14] Vlad Costea: I mean, they're going to see the card, so they're going to know what you look like.

[00:30:19] Chris DeRose: Well, then if that's the case, then they're going to have to draw a picture of me, then, with an embarrassing outfit on. So they can take the head from the card, maybe, if they want to copy and paste it, and then they have to draw in the remainder of the clothing under my neckline in something that's embarrassing, and they have to be creative about it.

[00:30:48] Vlad Costea: I mean, I would have settled for sending me a GIF of cats, but if you want them to actually draw in MS Paint…

[00:30:55] Chris DeRose: They have to spend at least two and a half minutes on this project. Otherwise, I don't think they deserve the card. They have to put in a serious two and a half minute commitment into this project, and they have to draw me with something ridiculous on underneath. It doesn't have to be well depicted. You can just use MS Paint.

[00:31:13] Vlad Costea: They can just look at your history of conference presentations and find that one where you stripped.

[00:31:20] Chris DeRose: Exactly, yeah. They sure can. Okay, if it was up to me, that's what I would say. Just sending some pictures there below the neckline has to be accentuated in something gaudy and weird.

[00:31:32] Vlad Costea: I like it. Get creative, yeah. So three cards are going to be given away to the best drawings that are made in more than two and a half minutes. There's no way to verify that, but we can look at the amount of work that was put into them.

[00:31:47] Chris DeRose: I don't want to say it's the best. I want to say it's something that looks like it took about two and a half minutes. So, you know, I don't want some poor soul spending a bunch of time on this project. I want some poor soul spending two and a half minutes on this project, and if it looks like you put an hour into it, that might disqualify you. Not because it's undeserving, but because it's unfair to the rest of the people who only had two and a half minutes to spare.

[00:32:08] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I'm going to take these pictures, send them to you, and you're going to pick the winners. I'm not going to tell you who sent what. You just pick the winners.

[00:32:15] Chris DeRose: Yeah, no, definitely not. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Sounds reasonable.

[00:32:20] Vlad Costea: Sounds great to me. So there's going to be 21 cards. One is the one that I keep because that's the pre-mine and I'm a scammer. You're going to get one because you're the guest, so there's going to be 19.

[00:32:31] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that's fair.

[00:32:32] Vlad Costea: Three out of them... 16 of them are going to be auctioned for like, I don't know, 100 bits, which is 10,000 sats. Right now, that's like, what, $4?

[00:32:44] Chris DeRose: Sounds like a great promotion to me.

[00:32:47] Vlad Costea: I mean, it covers the on-chain fees. It's going to cover the transaction fees for every card.

[00:32:54] Chris DeRose: I think it's fair. If you scam people for, what, four times $80 in this space, I think that's perfectly fair. Obviously, it sounds like most of the money is going into the cost of running the scam, so I just can't think that it's anything anyone's going to take umbrage with. You're doing fine over here, as far as I can tell. That's perfectly reasonable.

[00:33:11] Vlad Costea: Yep, and I will never sell that card, just so you know.

[00:33:16] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I've got, I'm in the same boat. I've got my sister. My sister, of all people, came by, and over the holidays, she was like looking, this is the craziness of this whole space. My sister, who wants nothing to do with Bitcoin or blockchain, she's never been interested, she's like this fashion industry person, and she's caught wind of what NFTs are. She's asked what my NFTs are. I explained to her that I had some Rare Pepes, and she badgered me for the whole month of, why are you not selling your Rare Pepes?

[00:33:51] Look at how much money you can get for your Rare Pepes. I'm just like, I'm not selling them. This is like a family heirloom. I'm going to die with this. I'm going to leave this to my kids. That's what I'm going to do with these Rare Pepes. She just could not wrap her head around that. I thought that was wonderful. I thought it was just wonderful. I have this reputation now. She tells my family that I have this priceless collection of NFTs, which I think is just the funniest story.

[00:34:17] Vlad Costea: I also got a couple of cards that are worth like $1,000, and I got them for free. I thought it was insane, but at the same time, I see that they have some historic value. It goes back to this story that you tell to this myth that you create around something for it to acquire value. There is this card which someone sent to me. His name is, wait, why am I so bad with names today? But he sent me this card, and it's called WHEREBCYCARD or something like that.

[00:34:48] It's basically a Spells of Genesis depiction of that scene where the angry, I think he was Irish or something, it doesn't matter, the angry Mt. Gox customer got in front of the Japan, Tokyo building and asked Mark Karpelès, "Where's my money?" He was holding his cup of Starbucks latte or something. It's an iconic picture that was taken there on that day. Someone turned that into an actual Spells of Genesis representation of the scene, and that one is like worth $1,000.

[00:35:25] Chris DeRose: Well, it should. That was a significant day in Bitcoin history.

[00:35:31] Vlad Costea: So there's this dimension, you know, because most of the hype that went with this NFT space was just CryptoPunks, which is basically avatars of 8-bit depictions that were computer-generated and not [unclear: drawn] by hand. But there is this whole subset of assets that were created in 2015, 2016, 2017, and issued on Bitcoin. And they tell stories from Bitcoin history. And it's so nice to discover them and figure out, okay, this actually happened. And it's important for us to remember about this moment. Like you have the OG exchange scammer who exit scams with his customers' money.

[00:36:17] And right now, last I heard about the Mt. Gox situation, people started getting some fiat, but it's the fiat equivalent of the Bitcoin they had at the time, which is insane because someone's going to get to keep the Bitcoin. So in hindsight, this whole Mt. Gox situation was the best way to get a lot of Bitcoin and get away with it. You know, with a few lawsuits, you're ruining your life and your reputation, but you end up with more money than anyone can count.

[00:36:51] Chris DeRose: Yeah, that's a very common story in this space. And I think that all of this Ethereum NFT stuff is effectively like, I mean, this is my opinion, I've got a Counterparty history and a Bitcoin history, but it's just the Ethereum hype might as well just be like a dot com hype. It really to me, maybe I'll piss off some listeners. I don't care. It's just Ethereum doesn't really offer anything that was, in my mind, like decentralized or immutable or et cetera, et cetera. And it's also like late to the party.

[00:37:24] So you have like these, there's like the [unclear: straggler demographic] that is learning about Counterparty through a marketing machine that is not, in fact, the authentic source of this movement. And I don't know what's going to happen with NFTs. They could be worth $0 this time next year. But if they are worth a lot of money or any amount of money, I find it very hard to believe that providence won't win out. And I would imagine in that case that it would be all of the Rare Pepes that are like just the gold examples of what an NFT market can perform as.

[00:38:02] And so if the numbers don't show that yet, that's fine. But I find it hard to believe that they won't show that ultimately. Unless this is all just hype and then that's possible and then whatever. Like, it's fine, too.

[00:38:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So that's why I compared it to the ICOs from 2017, because people treat them as such like they are the new shitcoins. They are the new projects that anyone launches. And they're like, yeah, this is going to be the future. At the same time, there is this convergence with the gaming space. So you have these online games where you have skins, you have all sorts of weapons and assets that you use virtually. And maybe it's a good idea from a point of view to not have them stored on some sort of central server that's going to go down at some point.

[00:38:54] That's a certainty. As soon as the publisher or the developer of the video game shuts down the servers, all of these assets are gone and people spend a lot of money on them. So if there was a Counterparty token of them and all it took for you to use that weapon in a video game like in a server was to sign a message from your wallet to the game and do that association so that you can use your weapon. Maybe that people can start private servers or whatever, and that's going to exist forever.

[00:39:27] They're going to hold on to their assets and move them to whichever server they like. I can see that being a solid use case, which has some purpose actually. But I disagree with the valuation. It doesn't have to cost ridiculous amounts of money.

[00:39:47] Chris DeRose: I agree with that. I've always wanted that to come to fruition. I do think that it's not going to be possible in a lot of the AAA studios, although I know that they're dipping their foot in the water with mixed results. The thing is that copyright law is at odds with NFT goals, so it becomes perilous for anybody to offer an engine that accepts copyrighted materials, because now you're inviting international law into your game studio and it just becomes a mess and it doesn't really pay you much, but that being said, a lot of this stuff hearkens from the old open source traditions. So, you know, if you take like games like...

[00:40:40] Minecraft might as well be AAA at this point, but not in its roots, or if not Minecraft, like Dwarf Fortress or something. These sorts of endeavors, you would think, would be far more inclined to create intergame assets and a shared protocol for managing those assets. But I don't know, there's still some big problems. You still kind of need an institutional model to govern legitimacy and rarity. And I don't know that anybody has a solution to that. That's always been one of my big pet peeves in this space that nobody else seems to have the ability to care about, or at the very least not resent.

[00:41:21] And you can see that with what's happening with these other NFT markets, like we've discussed, I think it's fine if you want to offer the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection reversed. But in a model where you're trying to govern scarcity in a video game, that becomes a problem, because all of your market dynamics get weird for all of the players when you have certain assets that are just supposed to be controlled and throttled per the function of the game. And then you have somebody who creates a reversed version of it and it basically becomes a cheat code that makes it not fun for everybody.

[00:42:04] So I don't know what the solutions are to stuff like that, but that might be prematurely optimizing as well. You just have to let it happen and see.

[00:42:15] Vlad Costea: No, it's good to think ahead. I can understand this being a concern when you can bring your items from a different server to a new one and get a first mover advantage that others don't have. But if everyone has this, I can see some normalization and you can even disable the ability to import from a token that you hold on a different network. You can enable that on some servers and you can disable it on others. I think the killer app right now is with games like Fortnite, which is very popular and people spend ridiculous amounts of money on skins and they want to resell them.

[00:42:55] And there are some sort of secondary markets where you can resell these, but they are only as good as the company that operates the servers and they're going to be gone someday. There's also Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is very popular. There is also stuff like, what's it called, League of Legends, I think, which has some stuff like Dota, whatever. Obviously, there's a lot of Warcraft.

[00:43:29] Chris DeRose: Roblox deserves a lot of mention in there too. That's like a youth, 7-year-old demographic, but I happen to have 7-year-olds in my life, so I watch what they do there. They ask me all the time for Roblox money so they can buy in-game items. I don't really understand it.

[00:43:47] Vlad Costea: I have a cousin who's 13 and asked me for that.

[00:43:51] Chris DeRose: That's a little old for Roblox, I think. I'm not positive, but I think.

[00:43:55] Vlad Costea: I think you can build your own games or something.

[00:43:59] Chris DeRose: Yeah, so that does exist. I don't know much about it. I was looking into it and there's an IDE where you can create your own Roblox games. And it seems like the entirety of Roblox is that kind of market. I don't know. When I see Facebook trying to do the Meta thing, I'm very skeptical about it for a lot of reasons. I think it's way premature for that. And I also think that the goodwill that people once had for Facebook has just been eroded and now I don't know that they have the ability to create such a thing.

[00:44:29] But it's evident to me that this plays into something like that and there will be a want for this. Like an inter-game protocol for managing one's assets, collections, achievements, etc.

[00:44:45] Vlad Costea: It was actually that Meta announcement that made a lot of people get very bullish on NFTs all of a sudden.

[00:44:53] Chris DeRose: That makes sense. That seemed like it was a feedback loop. I couldn't tell if that was being announced because of the NFT mania. Or if the NFT mania was promoted by it. I assume it was a chicken and egg kind of thing. It's just a feedback loop.

[00:45:07] Vlad Costea: I think the NFT mania started before, but it accelerated and it made more sense to some people after they saw the Meta announcement. I don't have any kind of trust or faith in anything that Facebook does. And I don't see that. It's kind of stupid because I'm not ever going to use their platforms. Even if I hold the rarest of Pepe's, I'm not going to put it in a gallery on Meta. But whatever.

[00:45:36] Chris DeRose: I'm with you. I don't use any Facebook products anymore. I canceled all my accounts.

[00:45:42] Vlad Costea: They had this very interesting bait with the Oculus. You could buy it. You knew that it was owned by Facebook. They promised they would never push a Facebook account onto you and you could only register with your email on Oculus. Now they're changing it and they're like, yeah, so starting this date, you can only register with your Facebook account.

[00:46:05] Chris DeRose: I'm aware of that. I'm not surprised. I'm not one bit surprised.

[00:46:10] Vlad Costea: It's insane. And in my country, I'm not sure what it's like in the U.S., but in my country, Facebook is so big that politicians post their announcements on it. And I think the Constitutional Court actually decreed that Facebook is considered public space. So it can be, you know, you can punish people for posting stuff on Facebook. That's kind of the point of it. But not on Twitter.

[00:46:40] Chris DeRose: In America, I don't think Facebook is as strong in the demographics I hang out with. I don't know if it is as strong in general. I will say that traveling through Central America, I was shocked by how popular Facebook was. And WhatsApp, which is also a Facebook project. I knew WhatsApp was popular. Facebook itself was very popular. Like looking in Honduras, I just see these merchants that are at their stalls and they're sucked into their phones. That was very interesting. I wasn't surprised exactly. Something tells me there's some major societal force that's just starting off in some of these countries.

[00:47:21] And I'm not surprised that you're seeing that over there. Internationally, I think it's a stronger brand.

[00:47:29] Vlad Costea: I've always wanted to ask you, what's your take on the whole El Salvador situation?

[00:47:35] Chris DeRose: I don't know. My initial assumption was that this was a kind of ploy that if Bitcoin works, then great. But if not, it would be at least some kind of bargaining collateral for the country in loan renegotiations, presumably with what, like the International Monetary Fund or something. That was my guess. It's kind of just a guess. Now, there's a Hail Mary effect in the economy that seems to be focused on efforts like Bitcoin, also GameStop. But when you have people who don't seem like they have any hope of getting ahead, other than to try out these like Hail Mary passes, they're just maybe going to do that.

[00:48:24] And so now I wonder if maybe that's what's going on there, where they want to advance, they see that they could do this. I don't think it's like a bad strategy at all, from what I understand. I would be surprised if more countries don't do it. Because if America is not going to be regulating that market, and if we're just going to kind of like let this thing be, then it's very possibly going to be like an international Ponzi kind of effort that develops. Where all these countries start to just do the same thing you see individual investors doing.

[00:48:59] Some of them sticking around forever, some of them taking their money out of the pot. But it's completely rational to invest in a Ponzi. It's actually irrational not to invest in a Ponzi when it gets to be a certain size. That's when the problems usually start, because that's when you have effects like what you had in the Albanian Civil War, where you basically have to put your money into this fund, because otherwise, comparatively, you're going to be killed by inflation and other market forces. So it could be that they know that.

[00:49:32] Someone knows that in El Salvador, and has just decided we're going to be the progenitors here at the international level, and that's what they did. And we'll see. If other countries join, it's going to be spectacular. It's just going to be an amazing thing to watch. What that means for America, I don't know. But it's probably not good for America, ultimately, probably. I'm not really sure.

[00:49:56] Vlad Costea: So far, my perception of it. So the idea of what goes on sounds very good. But the whole concept of how it's being implemented makes me feel concerned, mostly because most people are using a government wallet. And the government says that it has reserves in Bitcoin, but the reserves are actually held in custody of BitGo, which is an American company. So their independence hangs on a thread, which is very US-owned and US-controlled. And, you know, they are only one executive order away from having all of that Bitcoin frozen.

[00:50:39] And they can be conditioned and everything looks to me as if this is like the perfect CIA experiment. Like they're trying to see how this is scaling, how this works on a very small territory with people who are open to change. Because if you look at the history of El Salvador in the 20th century, you're going to see that they had lots of revolutions. They had left-wing dictators, they had right-wing dictators, everything from guerrillas to communists, it was all there. They had a civil war.

[00:51:15] It's just almost as if they like change. And it makes sense to experiment with this with the people that like change. But it's kind of sad to see that they had this Chivo wallet, which was developed by an American company and it's custodial and the government has control over it. Most people use it for the lack of better understanding of how Bitcoin works. They use BTC, the token, but they don't use Bitcoin, the network. And that's what my biggest concern is.

[00:51:46] Chris DeRose: Well, I would suggest that is probably a performative adoption. When I went there, I didn't see any prices listed in Bitcoin. I didn't see many people, any people using Bitcoin. The ATMs were largely decorative. And in fact, what I did see more than anything were people protesting the Bitcoin. So there were like signs that were featuring like the monopoly man being roasted, like spit roasted over a fire with like Bitcoin logos in his eyes. And that seemed to be like perhaps like rallying demographic there. But I mean, so much of the space is like performative adoption and performative metrics.

[00:52:25] So, you know, I doubt from the start that there's an actual interest in converting the country over to Bitcoin. I think that what this is is just talking the talk of others who talk the talk so that they can put their weight behind the system and hopefully encourage others to join, which I think stands a good chance of happening. As far as being a CIA thing, you know, the conspiracies, it could be the conspiracies are unfalsifiable. So like it's, you know, they definitely exist. I can't like deny that some of these things are very evidently the case.

[00:53:08] It's just that it's it's hard to comment on them. But I have to say, like I go back and forth over like between conspiratorial thinking and just like don't don't attribute a conspiracy what can be attributed to sheer incompetence. And, you know, sometimes like I talk to people who deal with like government and the government in America, at least, I don't think there's a lot of organization right now. I think there's a lot of incompetence and the seemingly maligned actions that people might might like attribute to some kind of like greater conspiratorial thinking may just be sheer incompetence and the system failing.

[00:53:49] And so I would I would almost be inclined to say the same thing over there in El Salvador is also likely. But we'll find out maybe. People people typically get the government they deserve. That just seems like an Italian proverb, I think. And it just it just seems to be the case. So like in a lot of these countries, you know, America included, we stop being able to argue peacefully and we start getting spiteful. We we get like dysfunctional government because we can't agree with each other.

[00:54:19] And there are certainly conspiracies in there that form as a result of the incompetence. But in many cases, the bizarre actions we see are just schizophrenic at its core because the population is also schizophrenic in its goals. You know, that's what I think today. Like, I may change my mind next year when I see like evidence of some great conspiracy has come to come to bear. And then I'll change my mind. I'll be like, oh, no. OK, we're not schizophrenic. Exactly. It's just that the thought leaders are, in fact, setting us up to attack each other.

[00:54:51] And this is part of a big plot. So I don't know what to say about that. We just don't have the information.

[00:54:58] Vlad Costea: I mean, I'm the one who presents this conspiracy because according to my observation, their way of adopting is very compliant with all the policies and all of the regulations in the United States. And they're not actively trying to teach anyone how to be sovereign with a Bitcoin wallet. Plus, they hold their reserves of Bitcoins in custody of BitGo. So if you're trying to be financially independent and give a middle finger to the rest of the financial institutions and the big players in your region, why hold your reserves in custody in a country to which you're supposedly trying to or in a country that you no longer, you know, you're not trying to use its currency anymore?

[00:55:47] Or is that not the point? Because they also have the USD, which is their national fiat also.

[00:55:56] Chris DeRose: I think in my understanding of the politics of the modern world now, I give a lot of credence to the, quote, unquote, deep state, maybe not in the way that like the QAnon people would attribute it. But like in this particular case, how I see it is that you have a humongous amount of international banking agreements and banking arrangements that are effectively a form of control by the U.S. Government on its tributary countries, which seemingly includes almost all of South America and Central America. And so the president will perform the act of leadership for his voters and then he will decree some strategy.

[00:56:38] And then when it comes time to implement it, the bankers are constrained by America and what it is that anybody can do. And so as you tell me what's going on with all of these systems, that's my explanation for why we see that happening.

[00:56:57] There's a lot of performative politics at every level. We've been lied to for years on this stuff. We think we have control over things that we just don't. And the places that the controls exerted, it's very banal. It's just it's going to be in the form of like whether or not you can accept remittances from Americans if you don't follow these charter rules. And so then like the banks have a fiduciary duty to their depositors to basically not enact the president's orders. And and so then I don't know what anybody does, because like even the president in that case is going to have to blow up the entire monetary system and lose all his supporters.

[00:57:45] If they go down the path, it makes the most sense from like a Bitcoin like autonomy perspective. And that's why the laws exist is like the United States doesn't want these countries to be autonomous. They want them to be tributary states.

[00:57:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, makes sense. And if you read the Bitcoin magazine, which I sent to you, and you have a first edition one... In total, I published eight editions that have different covers and slight bug fixes. So yours is the first edition, has the most bugs. There are some typos there also, which I fixed.

[00:58:17] Chris DeRose: I haven't gone through it yet. It's sitting here. I'm looking forward to going through it. I just came back from out of town and then I've been slaving away on this property I bought that's a money pit. But then I got sick with Omicron. But here I am now.

[00:58:32] Vlad Costea: OK, so I was about to mention that there's an article there which basically starts from the assumption that if you want to be completely free as a nation in this world and be able to say no to all the others, you need to own nuclear missiles of sorts. If you have nukes, basically you are part of that very small number of states that can say no. And they're invited to every negotiation just because they have these missiles. So I took these states and I analyzed their situation to figure out to which extent they are likely to adopt Bitcoin.

[00:59:09] And according to my analysis, I think I have like eight states in there based on the performance of their fiat and their geopolitical situation. I came to the conclusion that Pakistan is the strongest case. I think India would have been, but they are too religious and too bound to their authorities. Whereas Pakistan has a slightly different situation. Plus they don't like the Indians and they would be more likely to do something different. Or maybe Russia. But with Russia, it's different that they're launching their CBDC. It's kind of messed up.

[00:59:50] Plus, it's very hard to control, like very large territory. It's a federation by design, but it's centralized by decision making.

[01:00:02] Chris DeRose: Well, I have to say, though, I think about currency as an extension of the military. It's kind of how I see currencies. And I know that that's an insufficient view for many reasons. But in this model where you have tons and tons and tons of shitcoins. Then somebody has to make their shitcoin useful. Because if you let the market choose, it does not seem to be that the market chooses exactly what you might expect. There's a lot of permutations on what it chooses. But in the case, this is effectively chartalism.

[01:00:46] It's a very unfortunate view that I have here. I did not want to end up here. But in this case of America, because we have a military, we can tell people that they owe income tax. And so now you've kind of bootstrapped the need for Bitcoin on an annual basis, or sorry, the shitcoin, the US dollar shitcoin, once a year or so. And that seems to kind of bootstrap it. Now, in the case of Pakistan having nukes, like that, the problems might then be that somebody has to pay for those nukes.

[01:01:17] And so now rather than using Bitcoin, you're going to have to create your own shitcoin. So that you can pay for your nukes. That might be another way of framing that problem. I actually think that one of the bigger ways to liberate yourself is probably removing copyright law. Nobody seems to care about this. This has been something I've cared about a long time. And it's a completely lost cause. But I actually think copyright law probably has more to do with a lot of the decisions we are forced to take than people recognize. But, you know, just a long discussion. And I think that's kind of a lost cause.

[01:02:04] Vlad Costea: Actually, this whole idea of a currency being as worthy as the army that backs it makes a lot of sense in the fiat situation, where you don't really have an underlying asset which backs the money, but you do have the military. And that's the strongest case for the US dollar. That's why it's going to remain supreme for a while. For the simple reason that the United States of America has the strongest army, has the biggest military spending. And not just from a terrestrial point of view, but also in space.

[01:02:41] It has the largest amount of satellites for both broadcast and espionage. So, yeah. That's why the United States of America, even if its economy fails, people are going to be coerced into using the dollar. And they can basically do something about inflation by extending the USD markets. By making more countries adopt the dollar. Which means that there's going to be this Cantillon effect, which starts from the Federal Reserve, goes to the US bankers, goes to the American worker, and then goes to some third world countries. And then goes to some third world people who are going to use the dollar to buy their groceries.

[01:03:22] So that's a way for your inflation to be less wild and tame it. By basically finding a greater fool to use your currency. And you can do that by virtue of your army.

[01:03:40] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Now, I would say that the view that I espoused is definitely insufficient. And I'm not exactly sure how, but I know that it is. I can tell it is, at the very least, because we have things like gold that appear without a standing army. And in other environments, like in jail, you maybe have cigarettes or whatever. So it's not the whole story, for sure. I wonder a lot, too, about the legitimacy of the state currency after a point. If you end up with a situation where 1% of the population has all of the money, then, you know, military or otherwise, it's just people are going to resort to something else.

[01:04:24] Because it becomes a matter of embarrassment for everybody, I guess. I don't know. There's edges to that description. And Bitcoin clearly found them. I think a lot of the Bitcoin demand was probably fueled by resentment over 2008 monetary policies. So I don't know that you could even have Bitcoin succeed in a model where that didn't precede the times.

[01:04:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's kind of insane. Because if someone showed up to the president of the Romanian central bank, it's actually governor, not president, but whatever. If someone showed up there, someone from the US, and said, how about you change your national currency to the US dollar? They would most likely say yes and find lots of good reasons for this. Because it's the world reserve currency, because it has a large network effect, because it's more stable, even if it has wild inflation, it's more stable than the Romanian national currency.

[01:05:28] And they would be like, yes, please do this. Where do I sign up?

[01:05:33] Chris DeRose: Although it might be a function of the US military as opposed to the Romanian military, too. I don't really know. It is. But there's a matter of faith that people have based on your power, seemingly.

[01:05:46] Vlad Costea: Romania was also the first country in the world to accept Donald Trump's proposal to give out 2% of the GDP to NATO military spending.

[01:05:56] Chris DeRose: No, I didn't know that.

[01:05:57] Vlad Costea: So this was big for us. The Romanian president was invited to the White House and presented as an example to the rest of the world, like, you know, this guy has agreed to pay 2% to NATO. Why don't the other states of Europe? And Germany was the most, I don't know how I should put it, they were very against it.

[01:06:21] They never liked the idea. And that never happened. But we are still paying 2% of the GDP to NATO because we signed it.

[01:06:30] Chris DeRose: Oh, okay. Well, thank you. Thank you.

[01:06:34] Vlad Costea: Plus, there's something else that NATO and the US Army do. Like, you have these F-16 airplanes that are used in military. And let's say that the US Army uses them for 10 years and then sells them for a cost which is very close to the production cost to some other country, let's say Norway. And then Norway sells them to Romania for the same price. And for maintenance and for all of these costs, which concern parts and fuel and whatever, and expert consultancy, how to use it and training for your pilots and whatever, you're going to have to use American workforce and American product.

[01:07:20] So this is a very good example of what can happen with the US dollar.

[01:07:29] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, when I travel, US dollar is seemingly the most respected currency still. Certainly, like Central and South America, I had very few problems cashing in and using dollars. Bitcoin has not had the same level of respect anywhere outside the internet.

[01:07:51] Vlad Costea: So I mean, there are some... I think you should travel to Eastern Europe or something because in Ukraine or something, you're going to find these currency exchange desks where maybe they don't list Bitcoin. But if you tell them that you have it, they're going to be like, oh, yeah, I want that. Sell it to me.

[01:08:12] So they get it and they understand why it has any kind of value. There are very bad fiat currencies around the world. I'm not sure if you saw what happened with the Turkish lira last month.

[01:08:23] Chris DeRose: Oh, yeah. And I've been watching that. Yeah. With a lot of excitement. I mean, maybe that's yeah. Sorry for any Turkish people out there, but it's just that's a spectacular event to watch. You know, it's not going to be a pretty one. It's a train wreck.

[01:08:39] Vlad Costea: It's kind of insane to think about it. Like you take your wage on the first of the month and in a week it's like 40 percent less. So if you hadn't spent it, then you most likely are a fool for holding it. And then you're going to have the army and the police force going into supermarkets to check if the prices have risen to verify to which extent they adjusted to inflation. And you're going to call out the business owners who did adjust to inflation and call them enemies of the state.

[01:09:16] Chris DeRose: That's how it goes. I mean, those business owners will close up shop commensurately. And then the economic damage will will be magnified even further. These these feedback loops on the way down are pretty extreme sometimes. Once the once that fire starts, it just, you know, it catches the whole building and then it goes down with it. So, you know, that's pretty typical behavior when this kind of stuff happens. Like, you know, I mean, that's a case where you have a lot of desperate people in power.

[01:09:51] And they they really can't do much but make a show of things. And they're probably going to lose their authority very soon.

[01:10:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah, which is unfortunate to some extent. I mean, it's fortunate for the people at large and it's for the better maybe. But to have these kind of dramatic situations, there is a lot of loss and there's a lot of hurt that's going to happen for all of the opportunities that will arise.

[01:10:20] Chris DeRose: I don't know what the story is there. The majority of people there are great people who don't deserve blame, but I would assume there's a lot of shared blame. We're all doing stuff that we know at times we're getting away with that is fine at the micro level, but then once everybody starts doing it, then we're in a really tough situation. That's kind of what's going on even in the art world where people are selling banana peels for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's perfectly fine. There's no victims at the individual level, but over time, if that mentality grows and grows, then you're going to see deterioration in society as a result.

[01:11:00] I see tons of that and nobody knows what to do about it. At least I don't know what to do about it because I'm not the kind of person who's going to be the only one following the rules if nobody else is following the rules. But then you end up with a race to the bottom. I don't know. A great leader can come by theoretically and fix that, but I don't know enough about Turkey's history to have any idea whether or not that's possible for them. But that would be my guess is that a number of them were probably starting down this path, then it caught on, and now you end up here.

[01:12:09] Ad voiceover: Vaultoro is the exchange where you deal with honest and hard money. There is no fiat on-ramp or off-ramp, and you get to diversify your Bitcoin portfolio into gold or silver when you sense that a bearish moment is coming. Also, you can instantly trade your gold for Bitcoin to buy the dip. And if you're into gold custody, Vaultoro can also send you the gold that you own directly from their insured Swiss vaulting facilities. Vaultoro was launched in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox hack, so since 2015, they have published monthly Glass Books to prove that they own all the gold reserves and all of their customers' money. Sign up today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. Keep in mind that this is not financial advice, and you are responsible for your own decisions.

[01:13:31] Wasabi Wallet is the perfect Bitcoin privacy wallet. It's free, it's open source, it's available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it offers groundbreaking Chaumian CoinJoins, [unclear: which makes your Bitcoin]. Even if you do not use the CoinJoin feature, you still benefit from a trustless experience with block filters, a hidden IP address via Tor, and easy management of your wallet outputs. After you deal with KYC exchanges like Coinbase, like Kraken, Binance, Gemini, or Bitfinex, you can remove the association between your identity and your Bitcoin address by performing a few rounds of CoinJoins.

[01:14:16] To find out more about the privacy benefits and limitations of CoinJoins, listen to Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 6, Episode 6 with Max Hillebrand. And if you want to give Wasabi a try, go to wasabiwallet.io and download the wallet for free. Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin privacy wallet for the Citadels.

[01:14:45] Bitcoin Reserve is Europe's destination for buying Bitcoin simply online. It's the first Bitcoin-only venue in Europe that allows serious beginners as well as professionals to make daily purchases larger than 1,000 euro per day from bank account or via credit card. Learn more about Bitcoin Reserve by heading to bitcoinreserve.com. Bitcoin Reserve, where Europe buys Bitcoin.

[01:15:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And speaking of ending up here, I should ask you the questions that you got from fans of yours who wanted to learn what you're up to lately. So the first one comes from J Scrilla, and he wants to know if you figured out a way to smoke a Bitcoin and if Monero is easier to break into a blunt. And what is the bath salts of the blockchain?

[01:15:53] Chris DeRose: Well, that's great. Well, Monero is definitely easier to smoke. I have to say, like, you know, the dark net markets have seemingly been very receptive to Monero and perhaps even less so to Bitcoin over time. As such, it's much easier to smoke a Monero than it is a Bitcoin, I think. And I absolutely love Monero. I mean, I don't know that it's going to perform. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it's just made completely illegal. But it's a great product. It's a great community. And I tend to care more about what's happening in Monero these days than anything else.

[01:16:40] In terms of the flakka of the blockchain world, I don't know, DeFi is getting pretty close to that. I would say DeFi maybe. Wait, what's flakka? Flakka was like this... Is that what he suggested? I thought I heard him say flakka. Flakka is like a South Florida... Okay, same thing. Flakka is bath salts in South Florida. Or was. You can look this up. This was like a thing for a while. When bath salts came here, they called it flakka.

[01:17:15] Vlad Costea: Okay. Sounds very exotic.

[01:17:17] Chris DeRose: Yeah, sure was.

[01:17:19] Vlad Costea: Okay, so I have a different question from Buzz Lightyear who wants to know if you think that the Earth is flat.

[01:17:33] Chris DeRose: I absolutely do at this point. I've decided this is a longer discussion. But I've decided that the right answer to the Earth's geometry question is that Earth is flat. And I think that there's much greater coalition building potential with that answer than the alternate answer that the Earth is round. Therefore, I'm a proponent of the flat Earth. I fully agree that the true answer to the Earth's geometry question is that the Earth is round. However, the truth is insufficient to propriety in the modern world. So I'm going to go with the Earth is flat as the quote-unquote right answer.

[01:18:12] That is the performative answer that I would stick to.

[01:18:16] Vlad Costea: I don't think I want to argue against that.

[01:18:21] Chris DeRose: Galileo was a bad man. And he was wrong. And I think that we all forgot that lesson. So we need to remember it.

[01:18:32] Vlad Costea: So Jason John wants your thoughts on the woman who was selling jars of her own farts, got injured on the job and has transitioned to selling them as NFTs.

[01:18:44] Chris DeRose: I just did see that. I don't know that I have additional commentary. I thought it was hilarious.

[01:18:55] Some of that, I think, is... That's another example of how the elites kind of went down this path. There's like Piss Christ, I think, is the progenitor of this. Or there is an artist who literally shit in a can in the 50s and sold it for a lot of money. So, yeah, I think it's great to see the lower classes engaging in this. I think it's just a phenomenal development and I support her. And I think that's a wise career move. I hope it works out for her.

[01:19:24] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if you remember from a couple of years ago, there was this... I'm not sure what I should label her as. She was like a streamer and a model and she ended up becoming a porn star. It's like the perfect cycle. But her name is Belle Delphine and she got famous because she was selling bathwater. So she was taking a bath and putting her bathwater into jars. And some people actually bought that and cooked meals with it or drank it.

[01:19:56] Chris DeRose: What?

[01:19:57] Vlad Costea: All right. Yeah, people are strange.

[01:19:59] Chris DeRose: Well, when dogs sniff each other's butts, that's kind of the same theory, I think, that some of these people who buy this stuff on the internet, they just want to sniff her butt. That's what's going on there.

[01:20:11] Vlad Costea: There's this simp culture, which I'm not sure if you saw evolve. You spend time on 4chan so you probably know.

[01:20:17] Chris DeRose: I know, yes, I don't know what the latest evolvement is here, but I do know what a simp is. Yes, I'm aware that these people exist. It's fine, but it's a little strange to me. I'm not a simp.

[01:20:31] Vlad Costea: This has been normalized. There are websites where simps can spend their money and get some attention and feel safe and among their fellow simps.

[01:20:42] Chris DeRose: That's the story of the internet. It used to be that you would have these people in your community that were just crazy, and they either dropped the craziness after a while because nobody else was crazy like them, or they got labeled by the town for being crazy, and then they were just left to their own. But now with the internet, it's like, oh, there's a bajillion people like me because you can network with all the other crazies, and then you create a community where you then start to demonize the people who aren't crazy, and that's basically how we ended up with every echo chamber on the internet in some degree or another.

[01:21:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and speaking of an echo chamber, there's [unclear: Vake], who told me that he has a collection of all the episodes of Bitcoin Uncensored.

[01:21:22] Chris DeRose: Awesome. Good for him.

[01:21:24] Vlad Costea: He's one of the collectors, also Paul Sztorc also told me to say hello to you. So [unclear: Vake] wants to know, one, if you're wearing cheap pants.

[01:21:35] Chris DeRose: Yes, I wear shorts almost exclusively. I have like one pair of jeans in my life right now.

[01:21:41] Vlad Costea: Number two, how is the ladyboy scene lately?

[01:21:45] Chris DeRose: I don't know. There aren't many in Central America. It's not that kind of country. I wish I did. Although I did see today, this is just the best development. Where did I see? One of my buddies sent me a headline. I think it was like the Stanford ladyboy and like the Harvard ladyboy had a swimming match. Let me see. Hold on. I'm screwing this up. Oh yeah, the Yale ladyboy swimmer lost to the Penn State ladyboy swimmer in the women's league of swimming. Yeah, that's like the newest.

[01:22:20] The ladyboys of the Ivy league are like fantastic development. That's where all the ladyboy action appears to be. And seemingly swimming is where I think they're competing the most, which I think is fantastic. I'm actually loving this for so many reasons. And in particular that this is like a prestigious thing you can do now. This again is a case of the elites being elites. They're changing their genders and they're engaging in the women's swimming leagues. And this is the funny part. Mostly, as best I can tell, the reason this is happening is because people didn't like a comment that Donald Trump made in like 2008.

[01:22:58] So they decided they would do this instead. It's like the equal and opposite response to that comment. They're going to ruin women's sports in this specific way. And if you disagree, obviously you're misogynist, which is just wonderful to me.

[01:23:10] Vlad Costea: I mean, I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump has trouble sleeping at night knowing that people change their sexual organs just because he made a comment.

[01:23:23] Chris DeRose: I don't even know what to say anymore about the [unclear: comment policing]. But my suspicion is that he... I don't know. He lives down a county away from me over here. I was taking my niece and nephew over to their other cousin's house. And I was realizing as we were passing by that that's where the president of the United States lives. Off to a right here, Palm Beach.

[01:23:52] Vlad Costea: It's kind of insane to think about it, that you just live a couple of blocks away from the POTUS or the former one. But I guess they hold that title for life.

[01:24:05] Chris DeRose: Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't particularly buy the election results, so I'm just going to keep on referring to him as the president. And if that pisses people off, I'm OK with that, too.

[01:24:14] Vlad Costea: I mean, I guess people are going to be OK with the comments you made about Ethereum, but with that one, I'm going to lose about half of the audience. Whatever.

[01:24:26] Chris DeRose: That's fine. I think we just have two presidents going forward. We just have the fake president and the real president. And if you like the blue guy, then the red one's fake. And if you like the red one, the blue one's fake. And we can all just agree that we have two presidents. One's real, one's fake. And then as far as which one's real or fake, it doesn't really matter because the bankers seem to control everything anyway. So like they can just sit around, make decrees. That's what makes people happy.

[01:24:51] Vlad Costea: Now, I came to this conclusion that, you know, Biden was so against the vaccine and was like, no, it's a bad idea. No, it needs to undergo proper FDA procedures and testing. No, this was rushed to market just so this president who is still in office can legitimize his whatever and claim that this was his victory. And after he got in office, basically, he was like, yeah, this is fine. Take it. And now you cannot work without it. Now you cannot go outside and do stuff without it.

[01:25:25] You cannot go into a restaurant and whatever. At least the United States is a federation which still retains some, you know, federal, not federal, government, like state government level autonomy.

[01:25:42] Chris DeRose: Yeah. You know, you're not in the States. It's crazy to me. I was like in Louisiana a few months ago. I passed on through and like you have to show your vaccine card there to like get service, like you do your papers please thing. And I didn't do that. I said, no, this is not for me. I'm not doing this. And I got the hell out of there. And then I got like friends that are in New York that say it's the same thing over there. It's just very evidently political start to finish.

[01:26:12] I don't really believe in much of this pandemic stuff at this point, other than some kind of like opportunism for politicians to control people, you know. The government's clearly functioning mostly, but the wokeness in the military is concerning. I don't know what happens there after a point. I also see like Florida is starting its own militia, I guess, which is fine. I think that's great. We need that. It'll be interesting to see if other states start doing that and where that goes. I don't know. I would like to see us do like a Brexit kind of thing where we just like red or blue states and maybe red or blue counties.

[01:26:56] And you just have red laws, blue laws, and we just try that out. And I recognize there's a million reasons why that's going to cause problems. But if everyone just like plays stupid, which is kind of what we've been doing thus far, then like individuals on the road who are like navigating the bureaucracy that makes no sense, are just going to have to resort to their own devices to get anything done. And we try that out for a while and see. I think that's kind of where we're going to end up happening anyways.

[01:27:22] It's already kind of where we're at. So like, you know, like for me as an American, like when I go through the airport, for example, like I've had all of the airports are a fucking drag right now. Because there's like, at least in the case of Florida, there's like Florida state laws, there's federal laws, there's international laws, all of which are like incongruent with each other. Nobody really knows like the pecking order. And typically, like the airlines going to just pick whatever's like the most onerous and least free interpretation.

[01:27:51] And so I guess that'll be fine for a while. It's causing like fistfights in the airports, which is fine by me, actually. I like that when I travel. I want to see more of that. It's entertaining. You know, it's better than CNN on their fucking bullshit on TV. I'd rather see some people just like, yeah, slugging each other. So I don't, yeah, I like that, I think is what I like to see. It's just more pandemonium in general. I think it's probably good for people. Because like, part of the problem we have is that there's no, like people generally don't even know what opportunity cost is at this point.

[01:28:29] So like people will just like make like sweeping decisions without any assessment of what the cost is. So if the cost ends up being that you have to like watch a fistfight in the airport more often, then I think people start to realize that there's like such a thing as opportunity cost and then maybe that'll temper people's ambitions. Also, it's just fun. I don't care who you are, like you're going to watch that. You're going to enjoy watching that. You're going to like pretend like you don't enjoy it and you're going to like communicate how great it was by how outraged you are.

[01:28:57] But in reality, I know you liked it because you're going to sit there and you're going to watch it.

[01:29:02] Vlad Costea: I don't recall you being so cynical when we last spoke.

[01:29:08] Chris DeRose: Well, going through the airport will make you very cynical, I have to tell you. It's not a fun experience. The last time I went, oh my god, I don't even know where to begin. But it was like I had to get all these tests done last minute because papers were reinterpreted in weird ways. And then I had to pay exit taxes. And they didn't take credit cards, no, they didn't take cash, so I had to use a credit card and had to run around the terminal for hours getting all my paperwork in line just to leave the country.

[01:29:36] And then when I arrived in Florida, then everything got searched. I always get searched.

[01:29:45] Like you have like the mask weirdness in the Florida airports where like, sometimes you have to wear them, sometimes you don't, but nobody knows who enforces them. And then there's going to be like some Karen that gives you like dirty looks. And it's just, it's just that it makes you very cynical. Because there's no like spirit. There's no goal. Nobody knows what we're doing. There's no like uniting message. There's just varying degrees of like, who did this to me? You did this to me. People are just going around looking to figure out who the hell did this to them.

[01:30:21] It's very cynical.

[01:30:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I was gonna ask you something else. So let's get back to the topic of Bitcoin for a minute. And I saw that I'm not I don't recall exactly the number. So today I have been bad with both names and numbers. But there was an episode of Bitcoin Uncensored close to the 50th. And you had a debate with Roger Ver. And he was very much a proponent of Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin XT. He was trying to basically spread fear about the fact that the one megabyte block size limit is not enough.

[01:31:00] He was trying to spread all of this propaganda about, you know, needing to scale urgently. Mostly, this was from his perspective as a business owner and a business operator who wanted to do more stuff and expected the scalability to follow his expectations as a business person. But not necessarily some technical, you know, bottlenecks that can occur to a network in order to remain decentralized or to be efficient with data transmission from one node to the other. So what was your argument back then? And how come you did not really retain this argument in time?

[01:31:42] Chris DeRose: I think so... When you end up in like the public space, you you have coalition concerns, and then you have business concerns. Yeah, I mean, you and not that I had this in that interview, exactly. But like, anybody who's trying to advocate for like public policy is going to have this problem. Wherein you have a group of like poor people who are ostensibly who you who you represent, and they're gonna have an interest. And then you have like business people who are going to have an interest.

[01:32:18] And then you have like bad faith permeating throughout that entirety of the stack. So you have like, varying other demographics of interest holders, who are just poisoning the well of sanity and like reason making so that they they can achieve power in that information gap. So when it comes to I don't remember the full stance of that. I mean, I was in favor of keeping the block size small. I still probably am, even though I think that... Yeah, I think that the block size debate probably had way more to do with who's leading the project than it had to do with the block size. So that's kind of how I think of it now. And in that sense, I do not trust a lot of what we're doing at the Bitcoin Core. They're not like bad people, they're not misleading the community exactly. But the problem is that there's no accountability, there's no transparency, and they themselves are just going to be unable to assess what the community needs.

[01:33:24] And so what will happen is you'll see a complete total standstill, which is effectively what we have. And then I guess that's fine, like if that's what we want, this is what Bitcoin is going to be. But there's a cost to that. And it very well could be said that the cost of that is the proliferation of like Ethereum and all of the projects with it. But you know, that's not the worst thing. I don't know. I mean, for me, like one of the big hypocrisies and like discomforting truths in Bitcoin is that we have quasi-dictatorship of some kind.

[01:34:02] There's some authority, let's say, that makes decisions. And then the Bitcoiners all go around reminding everybody that nobody's in charge. And it just becomes like a master-slave movement that's like a little bit hypocritical and it's kind of hard to justify after a point. And I think that that becomes a problem for businesses. And businesses who would want or need to be able to amplify their concerns over the concerns of Bitcoiners don't feel that they can do that. And so then they're going to probably invest their time in like another project.

[01:34:38] And we've probably seen that. So I don't know that that's a big roundabout, but that's kind of how I see like the whole block size debate now.

[01:34:47] And you know, if you look at like the ways in which HTTP has succeeded, I would argue that it's through an institutional model, through the IETF, through like the meeting and transparency of stakeholders in ratifying protocols of interoperability. Bitcoin is not going to do that. And I don't think Bitcoin is going to be the better for that. And I think probably what will end up happening is what would probably had to happen no matter what. But, you know, sad to see. But that, you know, Visa and MasterCard and all the credit card companies will just call their products blockchain and nothing will change other than now you're using the Visa blockchain, which is identical to the non-blockchain version of Visa.

[01:35:30] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So your point right now is that we're going to have the exact same masters, but with a different technology.

[01:35:36] Chris DeRose: Not even a different technology, different rhetoric. It'll be the exact same technology, just different rhetoric, I think. And much of the innovation of blockchain is rhetorical. Because Bitcoin has 79 protons in its nucleus, it can't be regulated by the SEC. So like that's not the only innovation there, but that is a innovation, I guess. I don't know. Some of that too gets into like the weirdness of the modern economy where like we recategorize business models that are effectively externality producing ventures and we recharacterize them in like virtue terms so that they're now legal.

[01:36:16] And then we proceed to create externalities under like this new narrative and then call that a business. There's a lot of examples of that. I'm OK with that. It's just a little weird. I wonder how sustainable that is ultimately. You know, at some point, like the lower classes are going to figure that out and they may not care.

[01:36:37] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so as I recall during your 2016 interview with Roger Ver, you're firmly for small blocks or at least for not increasing the block size, because I guess small blocks can also get into a different conversation, which Luke Dashjr spearheads and he wants smaller blocks by soft fork. So basically to have three hundred and thirty three kilobyte blocks as opposed to one megabyte because he believes it's important to do that, to build a fee market. But anyway, you were against this idea. But later on, like two years later, I recall that you were hanging out with the [unclear: Queen Spice] people and you also had an account on what's it called, Twetch or something like that.

[01:37:24] So basically you're trying to publicly make acts of rebellion against what you perceived as the other camp, which you were resenting.

[01:37:34] Chris DeRose: Well, here's what I would say is that the other camp is like better people. It's a better community in my mind. Like, it's just the bitterness of like the core community adherence was just like very off-putting. And I get it, you know, it's just the kind of people I think that are going to probably like follow that leadership are going to have like really high disgust sensitivity and are going to probably like fall into a more authoritarian, sympathetic rationalizations. So yeah, I don't know that I don't know that I am in favor of increasing the block size, but I can say that I like the bigger block community a lot more.

[01:38:36] And if you go traveling and hang out with people, you're probably going to find that they're like just more fun to hang out with. And so, I mean, this is another thing about money. Like it may be that the money is the function of the military, but it's also like a community. So, you know, the degree to which people will want to interoperate after a point is in fact controlled by that community attitude, which, you know, at some level that's why like Discover is not popular is because like the visa community ended up being a better community.

[01:39:07] And some of this too gets into like I guess this axiomization of dialect. Like when you get into communities and then like you start to like understand each other, you create axioms in your beliefs. So like you may like store value and you may like payment mechanism. However, over time those become opposite ends of a spectrum and then you start to mediate values between those opposite ends. And that's a function, I think, of dialect more so than anything else, even if it's not a function of the actual like blockchain playfield.

[01:39:46] So that's I think belongs in there somewhere.

[01:39:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, something else which I deducted from your actions. This is just an assumption based on where you started and where you ended in your last days of Twitter, maybe. So basically, I thought that you were in favor or you're hanging out with the big blockers because you wanted also Counterparty to work. You started as someone who was very involved in Counterparty in 2014 and. That one was abandoned along the way because it was not really scaling. It was becoming expensive to make transactions. It was not very practical for its intended purpose of putting commodities and stocks on the Bitcoin blockchain.

[01:40:32] But for some reason, it's making a comeback right now as just a place to trade art tokens, which are supposed to be expensive. So people are fine with longer transaction times and paying higher fees.

[01:40:48] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I think it's kind of a feature for NFTs. The more expensive it is, the less spam you're going to have and the higher quality NFT you're going to have on the blockchain. So I don't know what the exact right size is for the Bitcoin blockchain, but I do think that the poison of that debate was a matter of leadership. And it just happened to be that the only thing we could discuss was the block size. What we were really referring to was the authoritarianism of leadership or the, you know, the obstinance of the leadership.

[01:41:27] It's very opaque. The Bitcoin leadership, like there's a bunch of people who want to say there's no leaders in Bitcoin still, I guess. I don't entertain that. It's just kind of absurd to me. And so like the block size, I think, is just incidental to that question. How do we want Bitcoin to be led? Which I think, you know, Roger Ver, I mean, I don't think I agreed with his opinion on the block size, but I think I agree with the spirit of the blockers, which is that there should be more community involvement.

[01:41:55] Like particularly coming out of like 2008, seeing what happens when you have these opaque institutions that run your money. And then now for Bitcoin to kind of end up, it's a little bit tragic for Bitcoin to kind of end up in that same path. And maybe that's just the way it's always going to have to be. But that wasn't the spirit that brought a lot of people here.

[01:42:15] Vlad Costea: You know, it's kind of difficult to maintain the Bitcoin project and take care of the code. And you can argue that the big block community has nicer parties or whatever. They're nicer, but they don't have a Pieter Wuille. They don't have a Greg Maxwell. They don't have anyone who is even close to this level of technical understanding of what's going on. So to some extent, so let's say that they are the leaders and you're presenting this whole argument around the fact that the core developers are the leaders of the Bitcoin project.

[01:42:50] And I can agree to some extent, but they don't have the largest amount of coins. So that's an element that makes this decentralized that they cannot... OK, so I'm not sure what's going on there, but it sounded as if...

[01:43:06] Chris DeRose: Yeah, sorry, someone's in the room here using compressed air.

[01:43:11] Vlad Costea: Yeah, compressed air. That's what it sounds like. Anyway, so these people who are the leaders don't have the largest amounts of currency. And also, you can use some of their own software, which is open source against their latest proposals. You can say, I'm not going to update to what you want me to. I'm just going to use this old one. And this invalidates their whole work. It's almost as if I think it's kind of equivalent to a non-mining node invalidating the block that a miner just [unclear: mined] because it did not respect the rules.

[01:43:48] So it's kind of like that. So you do have figures that are kind of leaders of the community, but at the same time, you have checks and balances against them so you can take them down with [unclear: greater ease than] other projects and definitely easier than politicians.

[01:44:07] Chris DeRose: I would suggest the checks and balances are an assumption. I don't know that that's some matter that was articulated somewhere. If I wanted to read more about what the checks and balances are, how would I read a non post hoc rationalization of that? Because I think what all you would find are post hoc rationalizations for the status quo.

[01:44:33] Vlad Costea: I mean, that's fair. This was not in the white paper. So there is a lot that we figured out along the way. So it is post hoc. But practically, you can do that. You can refuse to update your node. And a lot of people can refuse to update their nodes. So that invalidates all of their efforts.

[01:44:54] Chris DeRose: Well, but that's, I think, analogous to saying to vote with your feet, which is perfectly fine. I mean, that is, in fact, the conclusion that I think has borne out. But I don't think that is any matter of input. I think that's just like you're free to not participate if you don't like what the leader tells you. And that's OK. The other side of it, too, I mean, to Bitcoin Core's credit, is there probably is no better way of doing it. That may just be the answer.

[01:45:28] Because I don't know how you run votes. I don't know if you did run votes, how you would disqualify bad faith actors and the utterly incompetent. You also have time preference that needs to be accounted for. People who want immediate gains versus sustainability. And the list goes on and on. And there are zero solutions to all of those problems. Now, I would say, though, that the rhetoric we've deployed, if all that's the case, so be it. But the rhetoric, I think, should probably reflect what it is we have.

[01:46:05] Because otherwise, what's going to end up happening is someone's going to just take, I mean, at some point, the federal government is just going to take all of our rhetoric and just redefine it on us because we didn't think ahead. And they will also agree that there's no leaders as they take over the blockchain. It would just be that stupid. Because we didn't think ahead. There's going to be people crying about it. And it's just going to be, what can you do? We have no leaders, then the federal government doesn't control Bitcoin.

[01:46:38] And yeah, sure, the GitHub repo is owned by them. And of course, you don't have to upgrade to the latest version. But all the exchanges will. And this is the consequence of your rhetorical inadequacy.

[01:46:50] Vlad Costea: That's debatable. The exchanges are cautious. So historically speaking, if you look at the exchanges to see how fast they adopted something like SegWit, there were some of the last ones.

[01:47:02] Chris DeRose: Now when it comes to KYC, at least in America, exchanges are the first ones to adopt new KYC in America. So what I would expect to happen, ultimately, if this thing continues, is you would have a SEC Bitcoin distribution, or you would have an SEC blacklist or something that does KYC, AML reporting, etc. And the exchanges would just be told that in order to receive deposits, they have to switch to that mechanism, which they already do. They just do it on a non-official version of Bitcoin.

[01:47:40] They just run Chainalysis software and that type of thing.

[01:47:46] Vlad Costea: I mean, yeah, but there is a huge world outside of the US. And all it takes is one free country to enable all kinds of blocks to be mined and all kinds of transactions to be broadcast. And you're going to do it for that one. The fact that, you know, technically it works, but you're going to be in trouble due to some sort of Orwellian mechanism that's observing what you're up to. That's a different discussion. But technically, you can keep the network decentralized and there's very little that you can do to it.

[01:48:19] Chris DeRose: Well, you say that all it takes is one, except that I would submit the case of El Salvador, which is doing exactly what I would allege here would be done, which is that the banks will, rather than sacrifice their ability to operate with ACH or Swift, they would instead perform KYC AML validations on their Bitcoin system.

[01:48:47] A lot of the control internationally is in the currency. The way the military works is through the currency, mostly. That's the first line of defense. So even if the whole country wants to go in a direction, it does appear as if there's some shadow layer of government that probably works through the banks that prevents them from making certain changes along the lines that you might be advocating here. Because the money is how we empower actors. So the United States government figured that out a long time ago.

[01:49:21] And they make sure that if you want to use the dollar, you're not going to be creating plutonium with your money. And so that's kind of how that concern ends up going. A lot of this, too, is just like we grew too big. So the liquidity now is all in like everybody would all like the plebs came. They don't want to use LocalBitcoins. They're not going to go outside the money system. They're going to go right to like their smartphone. They're going to they're going to log in with like their Google ID.

[01:49:52] They're going to tie it to their Wells Fargo account. And then they're going to operate through all of the approved mechanisms for transmitting money. So it really just kind of like removes their ability to operate independently, as best I can tell.

[01:50:07] Vlad Costea: I mean, I would not generalize. I know people who use Bisq.

[01:50:12] Chris DeRose: Oh, I'm sure I'm sure you do. But what percentage of liquidity are those people? And like we can't know like that. Let that be an open question maybe.

[01:50:51] Ad voiceover: Vaultoro is the exchange where you deal with honest and hard money. There is no fiat on-ramp or off-ramp, and you get to diversify your Bitcoin portfolio into gold or silver when you sense that a bearish moment is coming. Also, you can instantly trade your gold for Bitcoin to buy the dip. And if you're into gold custody, Vaultoro can also send you the gold that you own directly from their insured Swiss vaulting facilities. Vaultoro was launched in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox hack, so since 2015, they have published monthly Glass Books to prove that they own all the gold reserves and all of their customers' money. Sign up today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. Keep in mind that this is not financial advice, and you are responsible for your own decisions.

[01:52:13] Wasabi Wallet is the perfect Bitcoin privacy wallet. It's free, it's open source, it's available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it offers groundbreaking Chaumian CoinJoins, [unclear: which makes your Bitcoin]. Even if you do not use the CoinJoin feature, you still benefit from a trustless experience with block filters, a hidden IP address via Tor, and easy management of your wallet outputs. After you deal with KYC exchanges like Coinbase, like Kraken, Binance, Gemini, or Bitfinex, you can remove the association between your identity and your Bitcoin address by performing a few rounds of CoinJoins.

[01:52:57] To find out more about the privacy benefits and limitations of CoinJoins, listen to Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 6, Episode 6 with Max Hillebrand. And if you want to give Wasabi a try, go to wasabiwallet.io and download the wallet for free. Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin privacy wallet for the Citadels.

[01:53:27] Bitcoin Reserve is Europe's destination for buying Bitcoin simply online. It's the first Bitcoin-only venue in Europe that allows serious beginners as well as professionals to make daily purchases larger than 1,000 euro per day from bank account or via credit card. Learn more about Bitcoin Reserve by heading to bitcoinreserve.com. Bitcoin Reserve, where Europe buys Bitcoin.

[01:54:06] Vlad Costea: That's fair. And I also have a criticism for podcasters who say that their privacy, bless you, privacy friendly or whatever, and they promote good practices, but they shill Cash App or Coinbase or Kraken or all of these exchanges that are KYC. And there's nothing Bitcoin-y or cypherpunk about them. They're no different from banks. I would argue that they're worse than banks, too, in many regards and whatever.

[01:54:35] Chris DeRose: The spirit you have is mostly dying. I hate to tell you. Like, it's not entirely dead and there's a lot of OGs out there that still have it. But you look at the percentage of people in this space now, it's like the Wall Street Bets guys and like, you know, old ladies and like people who couldn't give a crap about any ideological purpose. They just want number go up and and like they will understand enough to like mimic the spirit, maybe, which is like why you see people shilling Cash App even like like obviously they get paid and that's like they need money and that's that's the big reason.

[01:55:09] But like also, like they will perform the act of decentralization. And if, you know, some people believe it, which is often the case, that's great. And if some people don't, then that wasn't their target demographic.

[01:55:23] I mean, there's a lot of performativity in all spaces at this point.

[01:55:26] Vlad Costea: You know, part of the reason why I'm doing this podcast is that I'm trying to keep the spirit alive and bring on people who perpetuate it and remind us why we are here and what the flaws are. I am aware of so many podcasts out there that do nothing but repeat whatever they heard from someone that I know you like. And that's Saifedean. And they read his book and they basically quote from it, but with different words and different phrase structures. And they say whatever they read on Twitter and they take that for granted.

[01:56:06] But at the same time, you know, this used to be so much more than this.

[01:56:11] Chris DeRose: Yeah, so that's the gold simulacrum at work, I think. Those people understand Bitcoin as gold. They read Saifedean's liturgy on that matter. And so anything that strays from the gold paradigm is bad and wrong and disgusting. Those people have a very low disgust tolerance, is my guess. And that's a shame because a lot of the momentum at first was like the cypherpunk thing that was not exactly gold, like that was part of it. But it wasn't exactly that. It was more of like a Blade Runner kind of aesthetic, maybe, than, you know, King Midas or something.

[01:56:56] And those people are fine, I guess. They park money in. But all of these postures and all these aesthetics are just performative, ultimately. So these people aren't actually engaging in the exchange of goods and services much, is my suspicion, which that is not as helpful to us at this point. I mean, towards the interest of the community that was the big blockers, those guys were doing that. And right now, we've got liquidity. But one thing that can happen is if there's a market panic, and especially if Tether's cut off, the liquidity becomes an issue and you'll see a lot of chains drop off as the liquidities evaporate.

[01:57:47] And there's just effectively nothing at that point. So it could happen to Monero, it could happen to Bitcoin, I don't know. I like the darknet for that sort of fundamental value layer in the stack that provides the liquidity. If Bitcoin has it, then great. One of my concerns for Bitcoin being so prominent is it's going to be very easily regulated, and perhaps the first one regulated. And I heard this anecdotally over the years that one of the reasons why a lot of the non-Bitcoin blockchain started exploding was because Bitcoin received the brunt of regulation in developing countries, because those regulatory regimes had no cognizance of anything but Bitcoin.

[01:58:27] So your Ethereum transfers would go through unimpeded while your Bitcoin was subject to bank scrutiny. So that's at least a concern.

[01:58:39] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that sounds like an adaptation of whatever their local laws were. But it's really interesting what's going on. I have no idea where it's heading from here, but I'm trying my best to explain to people that Bitcoin is not digital gold, or it's not just digital gold. It's nice to think in these narratives, and it's easy for people to have that aha moment. Like, okay, this is like a store of value. But it can be used as a store of value. It doesn't mean that it is.

[01:59:12] It's internet money. It's code. You can use it for lots of purposes. Part of the reason why I have fun with this Counterparty stuff is that I can prove to people that you can have fun with Bitcoin. It doesn't have to be monetary. It's just having fun. I'm sending you this token which has a JPEG that's associated with it. It's something different from a monetary transaction, right? I'm paying a transaction fee for it, but at the same time I'm exercising my free speech to send you a token that's called the DEROSEHEAD, which by the way is going to be issued in a limited supply of 21.

[01:59:51] So I very much like this idea of Bitcoin being free speech money.

[01:59:59] Chris DeRose: You know, I totally agree with that, and I like that, and I commend you for keeping the spirit alive. It's a lot of work, and it's great that you're doing that.

[02:00:06] Vlad Costea: I mean, Saifedean is going to call me a degenerate for even... Suggesting that this can be done with your Bitcoin. It's supposed to be treated like gold. But fortunately, it's a, you know, permissionless. That's a word that they made up for this. It's a permissionless system. I don't require his acceptance or permission or anyone else's for that matter. As long as I respect the consensus rules, as long as I pay my fee to the miners, which by the way, the HODLers are not, that's fine.

[02:00:39] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I mean, I like Saifedean, I've met him, I don't know, he's a nice person, a lot of his platform, it's mostly the disgust that is like, off the chain with him. And that's fine, because there's a demographic that wants that, like, there's a lot of people who are like, very disgusted. And they want to find other people that are disgusted to share the disgust with. So he, I think found that demographic and that's his.

[02:01:03] Vlad Costea: I found out, I think last year, that Saifedean was in the same chat room or troll box, as it was called back in the day, as BitcoinErrorLog, and they learned from Mircea Popescu, who is the Romanian who supposedly died last year. So they received kind of the same kind of education from the same lunatic who understood that Bitcoin can be much more than what it was perceived as. So basically, Saifedean supposedly has taken most of his lessons from Mircea Popescu on the Bitcoin side. And there's also Nassim Taleb, with all of the meat and deadlifting and whatever.

[02:01:49] Chris DeRose: Wait, did you say that name again? Are you talking about Mircea? I've always pronounced it "Mircha."

[02:01:53] Vlad Costea: Oh, Mircea, yeah. It sounds like "merchant" when you say Mircha. Yeah, Mircha, if you want to call him like that.

[02:02:01] Chris DeRose: Yeah, no. So I'm a big fan of his and I was not active in his community, but I talked to him online a few times. And yeah, he did die. He died in Costa Rica when I was pretty close to him three months ago, assuming he died. And I've been to the beach where he was surfing at it. Those waves were ridiculous there, which is why I didn't go in the water at that time. And I was surprised and saddened by his death. I'm also that's interesting.

[02:02:27] I knew that BitcoinErrorLog [unclear: did], and he went back. I'm surprised that Saifedean did. Although maybe I shouldn't be.

[02:02:34] Vlad Costea: Well, if you buy Saifedean's book, which you apparently haven't, or maybe you have.

[02:02:39] Chris DeRose: Oh, I have a signed copy.

[02:02:41] Vlad Costea: Okay, so if you look at the thank you notes, you're gonna find Mircea. That's what you call him. You're gonna find him mentioned there.

[02:02:50] Chris DeRose: Okay, good to know. I think I got my memorabilia pile here. That book is a... I mean, it's a mythology. It's a gold mythology, but with the Bitcoin. You can see how people take their mythological canons into the space and then they project them. So it could be the ICO/IPO mythology. But now there's this sort of like venture capitalism Web 3 thing going on.

[02:03:20] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah, I want to talk with you about that. So yeah, go on.

[02:03:25] Chris DeRose: No, it's just people are like... Because Bitcoin doesn't really have any organization and because I think the nature of the internet is just to amplify what people want to hear.

[02:03:37] People come with their canon of theology and then for people who have certain psychological traits that are receptive to that theology, it grows. And those traits are often principally greed, but disgust, greed. There is a kind of justice thing that I never really got. I don't know if that's really a psychological profile, but whatever you would call that early Ethereum crowd where they were gonna solve... It's that VC theology. I think if you haven't seen Don't Look Up, the VC from Don't Look Up has this sort of aura.

[02:04:19] And that was kind of what I remember from Ethereum in its early days. It was like that Elizabeth Holmes style mythological canon.

[02:04:31] Vlad Costea: I did see Don't Look Up, the movie, but what does that have to do with Elizabeth Holmes?

[02:04:38] Chris DeRose: There was a period, and there may still be, but I think this era is over, where the aloof leader who was either... I think Elizabeth Holmes would be kind of like, she knows all these things, but she can't maybe... She's better than us, but she can have this nice approach to discussing things, that sort of same body language that you saw from the CEO in Don't Look Up. And they're a benevolent person, and we have a faith in technology, and we have faith in this leader in technology to deliver world peace and happiness.

[02:05:16] That sort of style, I would suggest, was part of the early Ethereum style, where they were gonna create a futarchy, and it was this sort of faith in technology, which is very different than the style of the gold bugs, which were probably, if anything, a death cult sort of approach, where the end is nigh, and we would have to buy the Bitcoin for the reconstruction in the ashes.

[02:05:49] So I would suggest that that communal approach was present in the space at one point. I think we're about done with that, if only because the lampooning and the scandals have hit a point where the incredulous can no longer maintain their incredulity.

[02:06:08] Vlad Costea: Yeah, this is actually interesting, now that you mention it. And you know what else the Ethereum people have done? They no longer run full archival nodes, so some of the earliest blocks have been lost, some of the earliest smart contracts, which is very convenient in the situation in which they're trying to hide their pre-mine. They're trying to pretend that it never happened. So the fact that these early blocks got lost, I mean, this is kind of the perfect crime, right?

[02:06:40] Chris DeRose: They'll probably succeed in that. Yeah, they'll probably succeed. Some of this too is, when you have a cult, this happens a lot, when you have a cult, and then the cult predicts that the end of the world is gonna be in a week, and then a week comes, and the end of the world doesn't happen, and then you would think that that would disqualify the cult from existing, and the people would be like, oh, this was just a scam, and I'll walk away. But that's not what happens. What happens usually is one or two people leave, and then the remaining people no longer have the balanced opinion of those one or two people, and they just become even more certain that their cult is real, and they just reinvent a myth that unifies them, and it'll be like a recasting of the old myth, and then they'll just kind of drop the inconvenient parts.

[02:07:31] I mean, you see that a lot in blockchain, where the people who did not come along for the new ride leave, and then the remainder people are usually dumber and more confident, and now you don't have that voice of reason anymore, or what was an almost voice of reason. So you see a lot of old Ethereum guys that I don't really see around anymore. I don't know, maybe they are. Like Anthony Di Iorio maybe being an easy example. I'm surprised the ConsenSys guys are still there. If they are, I wouldn't even know.

[02:08:07] There's a point where you can't deal with it anymore. These people are just maniacs, and they're not going to like you anyways, and you made enough money, you might as well just cut your ties.

[02:08:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's what Anthony Di Iorio did, but he cited concerns about his own safety. [unclear: He said, I'm mad.]

[02:08:28] Chris DeRose: I believe that. I believe that. I've got to say, maybe that's bullshit, but I believe that. Anybody who's been in this space for any period of time is going to end up with death threats. They're not real, but they're disturbing. It's kind of like terrorism. And the other thing too, in Anthony Di Iorio's case, he's got a bajillion dollars. Why is he going to sacrifice? Why would he spend an hour on a community that's mildly unpleasant when he can spend that hour shopping someplace nice or snowboarding or reading? That's what happens.

[02:09:16] Vlad Costea: And you mentioned something about the Ethereum kind of spirit, which you also saw in Don't Look Up becoming propagated in the whole blockchain industry. And I've just made air quotes or what you call them, quote unquote. Anyway, also death threats. I've dealt with that in 2021 when I discovered that there was this Ethereum clone. I think this is the fairest way to describe it. So there is this Ethereum clone, which was created by a bunch of Romanians, and they are calling it Elrond. So they used something from Lord of the Rings, Elrond being one of the high elves.

[02:10:00] Chris DeRose: Also a Scientology creator. I was thinking Scientology, L. Ron.

[02:10:05] Vlad Costea: Oh, so there is Elrond with a D at the end. I'm not sure if it's not Elrond, but I suppose Scientology people might be into this because during my investigation, I also discovered that the founders are part of some sort of cult. Like they are Christians, but not quite Protestants. They're like Jehovah's Witness or something very close to that. Not quite Jehovah's Witness, but something similar. So they actually are part of a structure, a religious structure that functions as a cult.

[02:10:43] And they instructed all of their followers. To tell all nonbelievers that if they claim that Elrond is a scam, then they must also think that the Earth is flat because obviously they're anti-science and they're stupid and they cannot tell science when it comes to them and it changes their lives. And the guy goes on television, goes on national television and podcasts and goes to all major influencers and uses Bitcoin memes, uses Ethereum memes. Like all of these narratives and mythologies that you described, but to a new audience that was not exposed to this.

[02:11:24] And they buy into it and they're like, yes. And what he does very well is to trigger this nationalist or patriotic feeling in people. And they're going to be like, so if this guy is trying to invent the Bitcoin that runs a thousand times faster, let's support him because we want the future of money to start from Romania. Why not start it from our country? We're going to be the wealthiest nation in the world, right? Because we are the ones that made this up. And it's going to, in my opinion, so I've received death threats for saying stuff like this. I think it's going to end up just like OneCoin, just like BitConnect and all the others.

[02:12:02] Chris DeRose: Exactly like that. Yeah.

[02:12:03] Vlad Costea: He has some backing from exchanges, like he was listed on Binance and he started it as some sort of proof of stake, state of the art, whatever, which wasn't hacked for the simple reason that it's so centralized that they operate all the nodes. So all of their users are basically just operating on the company's nodes. It's a company. How the hell can you claim that any of this is decentralized? But so far it worked just because nobody really understands how this works. And as it turns out, I thought I was late at the party if I joined in 2017.

[02:12:40] As it turns out, I'm very early because most people are so unaware of this that I end up becoming the voice of reason to people who have no idea how it works and how they should understand it.

[02:12:55] Chris DeRose: And it's probably good for you, but it's probably a thankless job.

[02:12:58] Vlad Costea: It is.

[02:12:59] Chris DeRose: Right.

[02:13:00] Vlad Costea: So after I did receive the death threats, I went to my lawyer. We discussed, I presented him all of the evidence which I gathered. I have, you know, incriminate... incriminatory. Is that a word? I have evidence that incriminates very specific people, DMs and conversations on telegram channels that they for some reason kept public. And all I had to do was just search through it and save the entire history of conversations. So I have everything. I have all the evidence. I had it there. I could just put them on the spot and get them, you know, go to the police.

[02:13:38] And I think the most they could get was six months in jail for this kind of stuff. But I had names. I had IP addresses because they tried to hack my accounts and stuff. But my lawyer just said, don't don't do it because it's not worth it. As the legal framework is so so skeptical to any kind of, you know, new technology stuff that they're not going to take it seriously. And there's always the risk that when you undergo legal procedures against somebody and they know that they might be going to jail.

[02:14:15] But it's going to take like two years for them to get prosecuted. It's likely that they're going to get violent and get even worse. And you might have to change, you know, to move somewhere else. You might have to change your identity. You might have to do all of this stuff, which, you know, is against your best interest. So I had to drop it. It was I had to walk on my pride. I had to say no. OK, I spent a whole week doing research on this for nothing other than just satisfying my curiosity.

[02:14:49] I have everything, but I cannot use it and I'm not gonna. But it sucks. You know...

[02:14:55] Chris DeRose: I commend you. I mean, I think that was a fine use of your time. But yeah, I mean, you're not going to have anything to show for it.

[02:15:03] Vlad Costea: The problem is that you have all of these scams all over the world. I think you did a tremendous job just exposing some of them. That interview that you did with the lady who is leading the blockchain advocacy group. I don't recall what it was.

[02:15:18] Chris DeRose: Oh, Perianne Boring. Yeah.

[02:15:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Yeah. That was just brilliant.

[02:15:24] Chris DeRose: Thank you. Yeah, it was a popular episode.

[02:15:26] Vlad Costea: It is. It still is.

[02:15:28] Chris DeRose: But I think she... I think she actually won. Like, you know, you can see how I mean, this is why I think the Earth is flat. Because, like, you're going to attract more people with nonsense than with truth at this point. Like, we've just inverted whatever system it was that kept that from happening. And it is, in fact, rational to invest in the Ponzi if you have an expectation that that Ponzi will grow. So, like, you know, I don't know what we can say about that.

[02:15:59] It's just it's a hard it's a bitter pill, really.

[02:16:06] Vlad Costea: It sucks. But at the same time, you know, if you believe in free markets, which we don't really have, but you've got to believe that they exist. You just let them be and expect people to get educated at some point.

[02:16:22] Chris DeRose: I just think that's an antiquated idea. It's not that they don't exist or I don't like the appeal. It's just that we have in the modern world, like some very inverted structures that I put copyright at the center of a lot of this stuff. But, you know, like scarcity production is bizarre in the modern world. Like, we really produce a lot of scarcity, I would suggest. And scarcity is produced mostly in the form of advertising, which, like, is beamed to you on some daily basis and reminds you that you need things that you don't have.

[02:16:57] And that's like the majority of economic activity, even like, you know, you got to have clothes and you got to have the right kind of shampoos and things and on and on. And once you're in an environment like that, it makes it very hard for, like, the old economic theory to really apply in my mind. Or, like, you could then, you know, offer people goods that are based on, like, non-fabricated scarcity, like actual goods. And I blame copyright too because, like, you know, people don't want soap anymore.

[02:17:32] They want, like, a specific kind of soap. And in my mind, like, in a free market, you would be able to manufacture that kind of soap. So, like, if people want Dove soap, you should be able to manufacture Dove soap, even if you're not the Dove brand. And because we can't do that's one of the reasons why we see, like, these markets centralizing in weird ways. Because people are being programmed not to want soap anymore, but to want, you know, Dove, which is, you know, effectively like a master.

[02:18:03] You know, like, this is like the soap master that you will obey. And so then, like, just that persuasive power in the screens and in TV, I think, really makes it hard to have a free market. Unless you disconnect, which seemingly people don't want to do.

[02:18:21] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I feel like this segues somewhat into Web 3, which is a very funny term. Someone actually messaged me yesterday and he was like, what kind of wallet do you use for Web 3? And I was like, Web 3 doesn't even exist, buddy. Like, you have web one, which is static. You have web two, which has social media, or at least this comment section, which allows people to interact. But we don't know what Web 3 is yet. It's just, you know, people putting the marketing term on something they came up with and they have a financial stake in.

[02:19:02] Chris DeRose: Yeah, I mean, what web three looks like to me is like, people on the Internet are all looking for, like, something meaningful, like some meaningful token, like a word token that they can exchange. That will compel action or compel behavior. And you see these things fly, you know. Web 2.0 was one such compulsion that created a herd of people following it. It was based on a lot more than what I see in web three. Web three seems fairly vacuous to me. I'm not particularly convinced that there's any meat there.

[02:19:37] But, you know, it seems to be attracting some group of people who think that they can sell it to somebody else, if not only to themselves. And so we'll see. You know, if they could find a great, you know, a well of fools somewhere, then that will fly in the same way that, like, tokens and ICOs did. But I don't know that that demographic is there.

[02:19:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so in my understanding, Web 3 was going to be a decentralized Internet, something that goes back to the philosophy of the first version of the Internet, of the World Wide Web, which was supposed to have people host their own content and have their own server next to their computer. At the time when this was launched, it could not scale because there were not enough computers in the world and it made much more sense to have it hosted somewhere else. But now you can do most of your email and most of your personal website or blog hosting and most of, you know, basic tasks that you do on the Internet on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive, which is like 100 bucks.

[02:20:43] And all you have to do is keep them online when you want people to access them. And that's it. We can actually accomplish this with the phones we have in our pockets if we put too much thought into it.

[02:20:55] Chris DeRose: If that's the appeal, that's all fine and good. But I just don't see that actually happening.

[02:21:05] Everyone's performing the act of decentralization, because that's what people want to see, that's what they want to buy, or that's what they think will sell. And so that's why I think the meat isn't there. I also think that we're creating, perversely, we're creating scarcity where none exists, too, in this Web 3.0 thing. So like, while I very much like the idea of Rare Pepes and the NFT potential is like worth something, when it gets to the point that like you're charging for every JPEG to be downloaded, and now you're trying to position that as an alternative to like a free...

[02:21:49] A free model of the Internet, I just don't think people are going to pay for the decentralization there. I think what's going to happen is they're just going to continue to use the free Internet. And I don't even know that I accept it as decentralized either, because like, all these guys are Ethereum people. And I just kind of resent that whole notion of decentralization there in Ethereum. It just doesn't look like that to me.

[02:22:15] Vlad Costea: Let me ask you something which is more personal, because you were there when Ethereum launched. And did you perceive it as something that's inferior to Counterparty?

[02:22:32] Chris DeRose: That's a good question. I think I would tell you the answer is yes. I think primarily I rejected the multiple blockchain idea. There was a time when one blockchain was desirable and meaningful and we would just aggregate all of the energy into this one system.

[02:22:56] Alternate blockchains were effectively forks, and I actually think that is true, that compete against Bitcoin. I think that was my initial hackles were raised for that reason. And then I just from there, I resented the commercial structure of it, whereas Bitcoin was structured in a way that it was this sort of like mythical thing from a ghost on the Internet. Ethereum was just overtly a company. And so I think that was like the inferior part. In my mind, that would just get regulated. But even if it didn't get regulated, it wouldn't be true to any idea of decentralization.

[02:23:41] And don't forget, too, with decentralization, like a lot of the ideas of decentralization really kind of came from BitTorrent in the earliest incarnations. And BitTorrent is something where you don't pay for it. It was just free. And it was very anti-corporate. And so now you have corporations coming in, offering decentralization sort of antithetical to the idea in my mind. So I think that was kind of how I was seeing that then.

[02:24:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah, obviously, you're not going to accomplish decentralization with companies. You accomplish it with protocols, which get developed. But there's something tragic and ironic and funny at the same time about BitTorrent is that the company behind it was bought by Justin Sun, who created Tron. I mean, he did not create it. Most likely he paid someone to do it because I don't see him successfully forking Ethereum and writing the white paper. But he is like the leading figure or used to be because he was very present and very vocal.

[02:24:50] And then after he started arguments against or he stirred the pot with the Chinese Communist Party, he became more silent. He doesn't do much these days.

[02:25:06] Chris DeRose: Well, so he purchased BitTorrent, the company. But BitTorrent, the protocol is, as I understand it, completely incidental. So there is a BitTorrent.org, I believe, that organizes BEPs. This, I think, is actually kind of how Luke Dashjr was originally starting to organize Bitcoin Core in a more communal way at one point. In any case, the organization of the BitTorrent protocol does have a non-commercial side. So it's a complicated issue. It's not easy. But I know that that thing happened. I mean, the money in this space has made it impossible to innovate.

[02:25:55] You cannot innovate in the field of decentralization at this point because of all of the money grabbing going on. It makes way more sense for you to perform the act of decentralization. And this has permeated through the entirety of the space, so much so that you see even BitTorrent, the company, then became a Justin Sun acquisition. I mean, I wrote a letter to the SEC that I was criticized for, and it was probably maligned, but my concern was and still is that decentralization is done until the mania stops because there's a negative incentive for you to decentralize now.

[02:26:42] Vlad Costea: I think that's a good concern to have.

[02:26:45] Chris DeRose: There used to be a lot more innovation being done in decentralization before all the token nonsense. There really was. There was a lot being done. And all that stopped when the VCs came and overfunded the space. And the individual investors started doing that as well. So now, no respectable developer is even going to want to get involved because they legitimately have reason to believe that their efforts will be maligned as soon as somebody offers enough money, which will happen.

[02:27:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you know, sometimes I think about this whole situation where if you succeed to make a lot of money, you will most likely be able to buy the politicians and all the political forces that are corruptible. And that's why, for example, Ripple, and more specifically the XRP token, which was pre-mined, it was sold by a company to their partners, and it was by all means and all definitions of the term a security, still gets away with it. And I'm pretty sure that in the case of Ethereum, they have the foundation, which is based in Switzerland.

[02:28:03] They have all of this structure and all of these developers who can allow them or enable them to mimic decentralization. And they're going to get away with it just because they're so good at it. And my biggest concern about projects like Ethereum is that they're going to end up convincing governments to invest into them. So they're going to become an integral part of our daily life and our daily technology use, because they are able to convince governments into... So I'm not sure if it's the case with the USA, but it must be.

[02:28:40] We even have a Ministry of Digitalization, which means that you're supposed to put everything on the internet and modernize it and whatever. And all it takes is one Vitalik type of guy to go to the government and convince all of the people who have no idea how this works that it's a good idea to put everything on the blockchain, and it comes with this cost, but it's going to bring these benefits. And they're going to do it just because they have this budget, they have this money to spend, and they're going to play this huge stage act in which they pretend that they improved something when they didn't really.

[02:29:20] But they spent some money doing it, they made a slight change. It doesn't matter what the people think, we have made a step towards becoming modern.

[02:29:32] Yeah, I mean...

[02:29:33] Chris DeRose: One of the big problems with wealth inequality is basically this, you know, there's no... You lose your representation in government because, you know, if Jeff Bezos wants something, it has like, you know, something grinds his gears, he makes a phone call, and then that whatever that is disappears. When you and I have that same concern, there's no number you call and nobody cares. And it's easy, to a point, to justify, you know, if there's a few people in the economy, maybe who are like titans of industry, but there's a point when that gets so out of whack that everybody starts to...

[02:30:13] The coalition against the wealthy, you know, starts to form, and legitimately so because they have no representational power. I mean, that's at the core of I think, a lot of the political issues here in America, right now, is that like, we have these people that are called our representatives, that you'll never see, they'll never ask any questions about what you want, they'll never explain what their party position is in any clear terms. And, you know, meanwhile, these very same people, when, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, has some bugaboo will immediately represent his interest, even though that guy doesn't even live in their district.

[02:30:51] And I like Mark Zuckerberg, but like, these things happen at the level of procurement and all throughout government as I think the wealth inequality grows. So we can expect more of that. I mean, I've seen for years even in America, like the software procurement systems have been 100% Microsoft. And it's, it's sad, because like, there's much better software than Microsoft Office, like OpenOffice, LibreOffice is fantastic. I love it. I don't, I would not want to use Microsoft Word. Google Docs is pretty decent, also. But like, you're going to see in the federal government that they're always going to choose Microsoft.

[02:31:33] And, you know, my assumption is that Microsoft pays for that. And so that kind of just everyone ends up losing, you know, the population gets worse software because they have to interoperate with government. And government gets, you know, buggy software that's like, you know, harvest everybody's like social security numbers and send them off to like shady foreign agencies all the time, because it's insecure, and on and on. And, you know, a lot, a lot of the shame in this space is that we let our greed completely destroy our solidarity.

[02:32:04] And so now we have no solidarity, we have no bargaining power. And yeah, like, it's just gonna be the case that, you know, shitcoin of the day is going to be better represented in government than maybe what it is that most people want.

[02:32:21] Vlad Costea: I wouldn't go that far, because, you know, shitcoins always take the plunge during bear markets. We haven't talked during this cycle about EOS, for example, which was the biggest of ICOs. And people forget so easily how big it was, and what it successfully accomplished in the end was that Block.one was able to acquire a huge amount of Bitcoin. And that was maybe the whole point of the EOS project. It was not meant to work. It was just meant to make them rich enough to buy a lot of Bitcoin and hold it in the Block.one reserve.

[02:32:59] And what you said about free open source software is actually very true, but very few people want to hear about it. And Microsoft has successfully pushed this... how should I put it? It's more than propaganda. So when I was in high school, there was this certificate, which is called ECDL, which is the European certificate for computer use. So basically, they're trying to make something like a driver's license to use a computer. But you don't need to use a computer, but you needed to get a job using a computer.

[02:33:35] And they were trying to shove it down our throats, like you need this, because otherwise, you're not going to get it. You know, you're going to get employed as a PC operator, as if any of us would end up doing that. But, you know, nobody really cares about that. It's all about what you can do and what you can prove in a matter of a few minutes. So it's kind of stupid, but just a way for them to legitimize the scam. And when you do get that certificate, it's only for Microsoft products.

[02:33:59] It's for Windows, it's for Office Suite products. So it's for Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I think also Access, but I think it's for Windows. I don't think that's part of the suit or suite, what do you call it anymore? Sweet. So it's this global scam that's going on. We also had a national scandal with politicians that enabled Microsoft licenses to be bought without any kind of public debate. They just went along like it's some sort of inertia. They signed that, yeah, we should acquire more licenses. So it's insane.

[02:34:41] And unfortunately, when we have this technology, which has the potential to change just a teeny bit, a tiny bit of that, we fuck up just because, you know, there are financial incentives and sometimes you get paid better to just allow the powers in place to just remain in place to not change anything. You're going to mimic the change, but you're not going to change anything.

[02:35:12] Yeah. I think I need a drink. Like, it's gloomy, isn't it?

[02:35:22] Chris DeRose: Well, I'd put it this way. I mean, like people need to go through like a progression where they start to realize this. This is where I see hope. It's the Internet. We're all comparing notes, right? Like on the Internet. And there's varying stages of like the demoralization that will happen online. People have like an easy solution to a complex problem. They come, they shop it around, they get their ass handed to them, they go back to the drawing board, they then like adopt some other ideology and like the process will continue.

[02:35:53] But it seems like everyone's just kind of losing their ideologies layer by layer. I suspect this is why you see like the black bloc protests like we saw in 2020 in varying towns. And like the news will report that black bloc is being like, you know, like Democrat or something or like, you know, I don't know what, you know, anti oppositional. But in reality, it's probably just people who've been sufficiently demoralized to where you at the end of that process, you have a group of people who are happy to join in any bandwagon as long as it has a critical mass.

[02:36:23] And I think that that led into Black Lives Matter, where like, people were just pissed off about being in lockdown. And then they hit, they saw a, you know, ostensible goal that unites like some class solidarity. So they went and they like participated in Black Lives Matter. They probably didn't give a shit about black people. But what they did give a shit about was that they had to be in their homes for the last however many months and somebody was going to get like revenge. And so I think like online, you know, as people start to kind of see through all the bullshit lies and myths that we've been given, eventually, they're going to be increasingly apt to compromise, but like not compromising the way you would think like in a perverse form of compromise, where like, if you're not with us, you're against us.

[02:37:09] And we believe in nothing. And then you end up with a bunch of black bloc people. So I don't know what happens if that hits critical mass. Like, it's not particularly great, in some senses, but at least we don't have to like suffer, like, suffer the fools that are, you know, constantly telling us nonsense all the time. Like, I can't stand network television at this point, because it's, it's just like this alternate reality that these people have like a third grade, you know, dictation level. And they're clearly like, everything's super happy all the time.

[02:37:39] I mean, this was kind of like part of the don't look up movie, which is true. And in like, these programs, all that's really happening is we're losing our freedom, like we're all agreeing to be idiots, and to promote idiocy. And in so doing, like, we no longer have autonomy. And so I don't if like the internet propels enough of that understanding, we might see some change. And so that's kind of my hope, but it's, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna be, it's not, it's not the kind of coalition you want, just, it's a sort of desperate coalition, I guess.

[02:38:22] I mean, at the end of the day, no one's gonna do anything. That's the thing online, like, Bitcoiners, you know, they're gonna block you. Okay, fine, [unclear: with some of that cheese]. You know, they're gonna like, you know, send you some death threats. Okay, fine. That's, that's another thing. But until people are willing to do anything, they, it's just gonna not change. And so I mean, part of the reason why I think the politics are even as weird as they are, is because if you have that realization, then your incentive now is just to keep poisoning the well, which is one of the reasons why I think we have like the transgenderism thing on the rise is because like people know you're not going to do anything about it.

[02:38:58] So they're just going to keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it in order to increase their resentment supply, which you know, then feeds back into the loop. So we'll see if that's what things end up happening. If that heads towards like some matter of like, reckoning, where we like fire everybody in government, and we start from scratch, then I think that's a good thing.

[02:39:23] But I like what I see happening. I like what I see. Marjorie Taylor Greene, I like seeing what I'm seeing there. Like she may be completely incompetent. And she may be crazy. But what I like is that she is seemingly like not a team player. And in Congress. And so I like that. If you have more people who just show up to Congress, who detract from meetings and keep things from getting done, that is probably representing the lower and middle classes very well. Because as best I can tell, Congress only represents the elites.

[02:39:57] You know, like, the closer you are to Harvard, that's how representative you are. [unclear: Especially, best I can tell, in government]. You know, that's fine. But it's not what most people are going to want.

[02:40:09] Vlad Costea: Right. So I looked her up. I had no idea who she was. But on the Wikipedia pages, also known by her initials, MTG. So Marjorie Taylor Greene is an American politician, businesswoman and far right conspiracy theorist. Yeah.

[02:40:25] Chris DeRose: I even like AOC for the same reason I like Marjorie Taylor Greene herself. They're like equal and opposite. So like, if you can, if you can just fill the government with people who are equal and opposite enough to where absolutely nothing happens whatsoever, then we might you might actually see representation happen. I you know, because we can't agree we can't agree to be represented on anything else, other than maybe agreeing that we're not being represented. So if we can get that far, then let's see what happens. So that's my optimism weirdly.

[02:41:03] Vlad Costea: Okay, I was hoping to get something more optimistic for the closing note of the show.

[02:41:12] Chris DeRose: Well, I mean, you know...

[02:41:13] Vlad Costea: Bitcoin fixes this, right?

[02:41:16] Chris DeRose: It might, you know, it might. It's it all depends on the regulations, as always. One of the things that is, you know, also, like a backdrop in all of this is that like, I suspect that one of the reasons we don't have more regulation of the ICO nonsense is because the political parties aren't in agreement. So it almost may be like this may be that like the good thing here is that like, you have this, like, this sort of blockchain equivalent of AOC and Marjorie. And they're like, just going into like the SEC, preventing complete action.

[02:41:50] And then like halting any sort of Bitcoin regulation. Like maybe that's one way of looking at I have no idea. I have no idea. These are interesting times.

[02:42:00] Vlad Costea: It's definitely unprecedented on so many fronts from financial the financial system with the inflation. I mean, you can go back and date it to the Roman days and say that this is like the fall of the Roman Empire. But there's so much like the scale is a lot bigger. There's so much at stake. I feel like the fall of the Roman Empire is exaggerated in terms of impact, because there was so much of the world which was not really hurt by the demise. But if the United States has any sort of financial issues, it drags the rest of the world.

[02:42:40] Most of the financial capital flows in New York. And if someone fucks up in that part of the world, we're gonna end up in the kind of situation that we had in 2008, when nobody really knew what was going on and why we are suddenly in this situation after we were actually in this part of the world, we before 2008, we had the first actual financial boom, people were having a higher living standard, and it just went away. For reasons that no politician could actually explain.

[02:43:11] They were like, yeah, so we're gonna cut 25% of your income, and we're gonna raise taxes. That was their way of... they called it austerity. And it was their way of taming what was coming, which I think it was patriotic to some extent to try to save it because you could be nihilistic and say, no, let's just go into debt. Borrow more money. At the end of the day, nothing makes sense. Money doesn't make sense. Let's just borrow more money. Print more of it if we can't.

[02:43:50] Chris DeRose: That seems to be the path that America's on right now. And I, you know, that's actually good news for Bitcoiners. Just devalue the dollar, I guess.

[02:44:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's also... I guess it can be a good closing note. Because I did think about this because the price of Bitcoin maybe to you, it doesn't make a difference if it's 60k or 40k. You got in when it was like, what? $300 or something?

[02:44:17] Chris DeRose: Eight bucks.

[02:44:18] Vlad Costea: Eight bucks. Yeah. But you still have one Bitcoin, which is... always have one, always will have one.

[02:44:27] Chris DeRose: Exactly.

[02:44:27] Vlad Costea: So where I was going with this is that, okay, we dropped like 40% from the top. And most people are basically capitulating. Capitulating? How do you say that? Capitulating, capitulating... That it's the first time when I actually express it verbally. I did write it before. So people are exiting the market. And is it because we failed as Bitcoin advocates, and we did not succeed in explaining to them why this has any sort of value and why this exists?

[02:45:06] Or is it because the governments were better than expected at taming inflation? Maybe that our expectations of the financial demise of the world and the collapse were exaggerated? Or maybe that we just suck at explaining to people why this matters?

[02:45:27] Chris DeRose: I think the social media companies pegged our greed to a T and pegged our insecurities to a T and they just remote controlled us to to fight with each other, which is what we wanted. And in the process, we just demoralized ourselves. And we were just kind of like, we grew too fast. We didn't have leadership. Not having leadership is where we really screwed up. And that's where we failed, I think. And you know, people don't want to hear it because they were here because someone told them no leaders is why we're here.

[02:46:07] But, you know, we've succeeded. Bitcoin succeeded by like every fucking measure. It's just that like, it wasn't what we wanted, maybe in some senses, you know, like, here you are. Bitcoin succeeded along with like every other fucking shitcoin and like angry people everywhere. I don't know. It's hard for me. I mean, it's hard for me. At this point, I have like nothing but like good things to say about everything that Bitcoin and blockchain was, you know, it's been good to me. So it's hard for me to be critical at this point.

[02:46:38] I just, you know, it's like my attitude is like, there's a new generation, they know better than me, let them go. Let them teach me. And, you know, so far, I know that I've learned a lot from that. But I hope that's it.

[02:46:54] Vlad Costea: I have a lot to learn from OGs. Like I try to stick around just people who have stories to tell about 2009, 2010, when this was nothing, it was just as valuable as dust, or dirt or whatever. And they stuck around and they found some meaning in this just because they discovered some qualities that they did not have in any kind of monetary system. And they also saw the virtue of having something which has no public or active leader, because that's a big issue, right? And so far, it was not successfully replicated.

[02:47:37] I've also read your arguments, and I've listened to them on Bitcoin Uncensored, the first mover advantage is a huge part of the whole value proposition. And that's sure, that may probably be why it will never be replicated. So I don't think we have a second chance if we fuck this up. It's just done. We're gonna end up with Ethereum kind of projects. But people who say yeah, so we're gonna create this and how about we put 10% for the marketing and 20% for ourselves because we were geniuses and we came up with this.

[02:48:16] And you can trade on the 10% that remains after we sell to the early investors and exchanges.

[02:48:26] Chris DeRose: I think we've got more than one chance at this. Let's see, I think we need a major retraction. I mean, the best internet work was done after the dotcom boom ended. That's when the internet really started to produce its bounty. So, you know, we had a few boom and busts here in this space, but we haven't had the kind of bust where like everybody said that this is definitely over. I would be very excited if I heard that, I think, but I had to see what the world looks like then, you know, if the exchanges are no longer operating, and you can't find anybody on LocalBitcoins, then I guess that would be bad.

[02:49:00] But, you know, if they were still hanging on a little bit, we'll see.

[02:49:08] Vlad Costea: And if there's any good news for you, the one who's listening, it's that you can get one of the free cards of the 21 that will exist. So all you have to do is draw a picture in MS paint, or if you're not using Windows or Microsoft products, it can be whatever drawing software you prefer. Just put a body to that head and send it to me on Twitter. And I'm going to send it back to Chris and he gets to choose his favorite five. And then you get a free card.

[02:49:40] Everyone else, the remaining 16 people will have to buy it from a dispenser for 100 bits, which is 10,000 [unclear: bitcents] or satoshis, however you choose to name your denomination. And that's it. That's how you propagate a scam, basically. Awesome. So we ended up talking about scammers and scamming ourselves in the end. It has come full circle.

[02:50:08] Chris DeRose: Yeah, typical day of Bitcoin.

[02:50:11] Vlad Costea: I love this. And we went on for almost three hours. We have to end this, but I still want to talk with you about some other time, obviously, about, you know, soft forks that have been proposed. There's this core developer who's trying to push his proposal very aggressively, like have more opcodes. And the other core developers are like, yeah, so this is not a good idea. Maybe we should test it more. The users also don't get why this has any purpose. But it's still an interesting, even if this is not a state attack, which it may be, we never know.

[02:50:49] It's still an interesting scenario to observe how someone who has enough resources to advocate all the time on social media and go to all conferences and explain why this is important, can push a code into Bitcoin. Because a soft fork is not mandatory in the beginning, but it's going to become mandatory at some point in the future when everyone is going to upgrade to that client. That's why it's called soft. It doesn't happen all of a sudden. It's not like you'll upgrade your software or else you're going to be left out.

[02:51:25] It's going to happen in a few years. So if we're not cautious about the software that's going to run, we might just destroy the project one way or the other. Not saying that this is going to destroy it, but it's just the way that new proposals get accepted. Obviously, there's a system in place that has worked for a number of years, but now there are more developers, they have more expectations. Maybe it can be frustrating if you spend too much time promoting something. I'm surprised that Paul Sztorc, who has been an advocate of drivechains, never gave up.

[02:52:04] I have a lot of respect for his persistence. But at the same time, he's smart enough to understand that it makes no sense to do it anywhere else. If it doesn't happen in his lifetime that he pushes drivechains, at least he will have succeeded in promoting some sort of idea of what Bitcoin maximalism should be about. It's not about saying everything that's not Bitcoin is a scam, so stay away. It's about looking into stuff that's interesting and building it as a layer on Bitcoin. And he proposed a way of doing it.

[02:52:41] It may not be the best or the smartest or the most successful way yet, but it's still a good one. And so far, I haven't seen a better proposal to integrate something like a fungibility sidechain, which he did. So basically, he can create the sidechain which runs a fork of Zcash, which is going to use Bitcoin, and you put it in that sidechain and the Bitcoins that you take out are going to be fungible because their traces are erased. It's something that you may be able to do with CoinJoins, but it's a different way that's still helpful.

[02:53:15] The more, the better, I guess. If we're not going to have privacy by default, you need to make the currency fungible or else you're going to end up in a situation where you only have a small percentage of the supply that gets accepted. And that may just be the one that's on exchanges. And they are the ultimate actors who vet your coins and say, this is good, this is not. You're welcome and you're not. So this is where I'm at these days. This is what concerns me.

[02:53:47] And I would very much like to have a conversation with you on this [unclear: at length] some other time when you can.

[02:53:55] Chris DeRose: All right. Well, you know how to reach me. We'll have to make another date. Thanks for having me on, Vlad.

[02:54:00] Vlad Costea: No, thank you for doing this. It's been like three hours. We can never have a short conversation, but I love it.

[02:54:09] Chris DeRose: I had a wonderful time as well.

[02:54:12] Vlad Costea: So how can people still reach you these days? Because it seems like there is a lot of interest in this.

[02:54:18] Chris DeRose: I try not to be that accessible. I'm happy being inaccessible, but I'm not that hard. I mean, [unclear: chris@chrisderose.com]. You can email me, leave it there. I've like removed myself from so much social media trying not to be nearly as present. And it saves me more time to concentrate and work on my own projects, which I like doing.

[02:54:38] Vlad Costea: Yeah. You also mentioned the last time that you were going to talk about some Internet protocol, which we never got to. So maybe that's an opportunity for some other time. Gemini or something. Yeah. But not the exchange.

[02:54:53] Chris DeRose: Not the exchange. People can. I mean, that's if you're looking for something decentralized. I mean, that's the kind of the it's one of the better decentralization projects I think I've seen in a while. And, you know, it's [unclear: minimum height to enter]. It's going to be it's probably the way it's going to have to be.

[02:55:10] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah. And the guy who sent me the WHEREBCYCARD, which depicts that Mt. Gox scene, his name is [unclear: Infinity]. So by the end of the episode, I could remember names. So [unclear: Infinity], thank you for sending me that card. It's worth a thousand dollars. I will never sell it myself. I'll just keep it, you know, for fun. So, yeah, thank you for listening. And you can do your outro, Chris, because you're the one who did the intro.

[02:55:39] Chris DeRose: Let's see. The outros were always, I think, [unclear: Junseth's]... Thanks. Thank you for listening. St. Catherine, pray for us. I think that was the outro.

[02:55:50] Vlad Costea: That's a good one. But you did not mention the party people.

[02:55:55] Chris DeRose: I don't think we do party. Peace out, party people. That's what it was. There we go. Peace out, party people.

[02:56:01] Vlad Costea: It feels like it came full circle. So thank you.

[02:56:05] Chris DeRose: All right, fine. Later, buddy.

[02:56:39] Ad voiceover: Vaultoro is the exchange where you deal with honest and hard money. There is no fiat on-ramp or off-ramp, and you get to diversify your Bitcoin portfolio into gold or silver when you sense that a bearish moment is coming. Also, you can instantly trade your gold for Bitcoin to buy the dip. And if you're into gold custody, Vaultoro can also send you the gold that you own directly from their insured Swiss vaulting facilities. Vaultoro was launched in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox hack, so since 2015, they have published monthly Glass Books to prove that they own all the gold reserves and all of their customers' money. Sign up today by going to vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover. Keep in mind that this is not financial advice, and you are responsible for your own decisions.

[02:58:01] Wasabi Wallet is the perfect Bitcoin privacy wallet. It's free, it's open source, it's available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it offers groundbreaking Chaumian CoinJoins, [unclear: which makes your Bitcoin]. Even if you do not use the CoinJoin feature, you still benefit from a trustless experience with block filters, a hidden IP address via Tor, and easy management of your wallet outputs. After you deal with KYC exchanges like Coinbase, like Kraken, Binance, Gemini, or Bitfinex, you can remove the association between your identity and your Bitcoin address by performing a few rounds of CoinJoins.

[02:58:45] To find out more about the privacy benefits and limitations of CoinJoins, listen to Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 6, Episode 6 with Max Hillebrand. And if you want to give Wasabi a try, go to wasabiwallet.io and download the wallet for free. Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin privacy wallet for the Citadels.

[02:59:15] Bitcoin Reserve is Europe's destination for buying Bitcoin simply online. It's the first Bitcoin-only venue in Europe that allows serious beginners as well as professionals to make daily purchases larger than 1,000 euro per day from bank account or via credit card. Learn more about Bitcoin Reserve by heading to bitcoinreserve.com. Bitcoin Reserve, where Europe buys Bitcoin.