S13 E3: Casey Rodarmor on Ordinals, Inscriptions & Bitcoin Culture

0:48Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad and I'm here today with John Carvalho, the BitcoinErrorLog, who's going to flip the bird and make me rage quit.

0:59Casey RodarmorWhat's up? Nice to be here. Yeah, we had a little technical difficulty, so this is the second time doing this interview. But yeah, I'm John Carvalho. I'm glad to be here. I work at Synonym building exciting layer 2 technology on Bitcoin.

1:15Vlad CosteaYeah, but seriously now, Casey, and we established that your last name is pronounced as, wait, I'm inclined to say Rod Armour, but it's Rodarmor, right?

1:27Casey RodarmorThat's right. Yeah, it's Rodarmor. Yeah, it's actually basically me and my immediate family and some people on the East Coast are the only people who have the last name Rodarmor. It is a very unusual last name. I think it's actually a misspelling of another more common last name originally derived from Rothermel, which means red sleeve in German.

1:54Vlad CosteaOkay, you still look a lot like John when you have your goatee. And I did see that on Hell Money podcast. And by the way, this is a crossover between shows. We get to shill our own podcast.

2:07Casey RodarmorThat's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This whole ordinals thing is just a long con to promote the Hell Money podcast. I've been doing that with my friend Erin for a while. And yeah, once we start getting some sponsorships on there, this past year and change I've been spending on hardcore open source Bitcoin development will all have been worth it.

2:30Vlad CosteaYeah, so I did watch that episode where you sold out without telling Erin, and you started reading an ad for Sparrow Wallet, and you got paid like what less than a penny. And I just want to tell you that Wasabi Wallet paid me a hundred bucks to say that this show is sponsored by Wasabi. Do you like Wasabi, Casey?

2:49Casey RodarmorI've never used it. I think it was I tried to use it. And it was actually somewhat like weird and challenging to use. I don't remember specifically what problems I ran into. But yeah, I think I sort of prefer JoinMarket because I think the model makes a little bit more sense. And I understand why Wasabi sort of prohibits certain coins from entering their CoinJoin rounds. They want to avoid reputational risk to their company. That's fine. You know, they should do them.

3:28But I'd prefer to use a CoinJoin service that took all comers.

3:35Vlad CosteaHow is that hard to use? This is super puzzling. Like you presented JoinMarket as the alternative, which is simpler for you?

3:42Casey RodarmorNo, JoinMarket is not simpler. In fact, the web UI is strictly worse, Jam, strictly worse than Wasabi. My quibble with Wasabi is I had some random issues that I'm sure if I had tried harder, I could fix. The other is, don't they not accept every UTXO that wants to enter a CoinJoin?

4:04Vlad CosteaI mean, if you're the Bitfinex hacker or whatever, they are going to not let you in. Right, because they cannot know who you are.

4:13Casey RodarmorSure. But yeah, like, so...

4:15Vlad CosteaI can see this being useful to identify if you have been tainted.

4:20Casey RodarmorSure. I mean, you know, they do them. I assume the reason they're doing this is to avoid reputational risk and...

4:25Vlad CosteaOr not go to jail.

4:26Casey RodarmorWhat's that?

4:28Vlad CosteaOr not go to jail, like the Tornado Cash guy. Yeah.

4:32Casey RodarmorSo that kind of reveals a weakness in any sort of CoinJoin that is run by a named entity that can be sent to jail. So, you know, hopefully we get a decentralized alternative like JoinMarket soon.

4:46Vlad CosteaOr you can fork Wasabi and run your own coordinator.

4:50Casey RodarmorAbsolutely. Yeah, that's a great option, too. Yeah.

4:53Vlad CosteaBecause I'm not sure if you have seen, but they have mega CoinJoins with 300 inputs, 400 outputs on a regular basis. Try to top that. Okay. Okay, so let's talk about the elephant in the room. And this is about...

5:08Casey RodarmorThe ordinal in the room, as it were.

5:12Vlad CosteaIt's no ordinary elephant.

5:15Casey RodarmorYeah, that's right. Yeah.

5:17Vlad CosteaIt's an ordinal elephant.

5:19Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So I've been working for the last about 12 months, I think, on a project that... So it started out because I've made a lot of generative art and like sort of programmer art. And NFTs never interested me. But when I saw that the generative art NFTs and often very cool generative art NFTs were starting to get a market on chains like Ethereum, I sort of became interested because I was like, okay, this doesn't seem like... Obviously, there's some scammy NFTs, but this doesn't seem like it's entirely a scam.

6:01And I could definitely make my own art and sell it. So that was I think 2019, maybe like 2019. And so I started looking into... No, sorry, late 2021. So I started looking into making NFTs on Ethereum. But ultimately, what I found just made me decide that I could not feel good about making and selling NFTs on Ethereum. So Ethereum has a very centralized development process where a relatively small number of people are able to push through frequent hard forking changes to the chain. And essentially, anybody who doesn't go along with those changes just gets forked off the network.

6:51Soft forks have different problems, but whatever. And so that along with some of the technical choices that they made that I think that were not the best, and then actually just some issues with the ERC-721 token standard made me decide that I could make NFTs on Ethereum, but I couldn't encourage people to buy them. And that would have been the entire point of making them. And so I basically decided, okay, I guess I have to figure out a way to make NFTs on Bitcoin. So I started noodling on it and going through a bunch of iterations in my head.

7:28And I came up with the scheme that now is called ordinals. So ordinals are a way of opting in to a view of the Bitcoin layer 1, where each Satoshi has a unique identity, and each Satoshi can be tracked. And the reason that I started with this kind of weird thing is that Bitcoin operates on the UTXO set model. And in the UTXO set model, coins and addresses and outputs and transactions and et cetera, they come and go. Outputs are created and destroyed. So in Ethereum, where you have the account model, you assign an NFT to an account and then that account is the holder of the NFT who can then transfer it.

8:12So I needed somewhere for the NFTs to live on Bitcoin. So I created ordinals, which actually I found out later had been proposed before. It's a very, very, very simple protocol. The whole thing fits on a T-shirt, essentially. And so then once I did that, then I started working on this index, this thing that became the ordinals.com block explorer, which you can actually run locally. And then I forget, maybe like seven months ago, six months ago, I started working on the NFT portion of it.

8:44And that is what became inscriptions. And the design I eventually settled on includes the inscription content in a Bitcoin transaction in what is called the witness. And that content is then assigned to a sat. And that sat then becomes this unique digital artifact. And because it's on sats and transfers in the normal way that Bitcoin transfers, you can send these things to a normal Bitcoin address. You can put them in a Bitcoin wallet. You can store them in Bitcoin wallet. It's a little bit dangerous if you try to send coins out of that wallet, if it's like a normal wallet and not the ord wallet.

9:23And it just fits in very nicely with Bitcoin. And then in January 20th, I released the mainnet release. And then things just blew up. And then here we are today. And I'm on a podcast when previously, like six months ago, I was in random people's DMs being like, hey, do you want to talk about ordinals? And everything was open source. It was all available. But now, yeah, the tables have turned. And now I'm like desperately trying to deal with all this inbound attention and figure out how to prioritize.

10:00So yeah, that's where I am right now.

10:03Vlad CosteaI remember a few months ago that somebody asked me about ordinals and I asked him, what about cardinals though?

10:10Casey RodarmorSo cardinals, I actually refer to UTXOs that contain sats that you don't care about. They're not rare and exotic and they're not inscribed. I refer to those UTXOs as cardinals. And in fact, cardinals shows up in the wallet error messages. So if you don't have enough funds to make an inscription, it will complain that you are out of cardinal UTXOs. So cardinal sats are sats you don't care about. And it's actually very apt because cardinal means numbers that have to do with the amount of something. So cardinal sats and UTXOs are sats and UTXOs where all you care about is the amount.

10:53And ordinal UTXOs and sats are UTXOs that contain inscriptions or sats that are inscribed or rare and exotic sats according to their like sat numbering scheme.

11:02Vlad CosteaI have been playing with Counterparty for longer than a year now. I found out about it pretty late and it seemed to be like this relic that got rediscovered in 2021.

11:16Casey RodarmorWell, I guess you're saying rediscovered in 2021 because that's when there was a lot of attention on NFTs. But Counterparty, I think, was launched in 2014, right?

11:26Vlad CosteaYes, it was. And they burned 2,000 Bitcoins during the launch to issue the XCP token, which is required as gas. Basically, Counterparty is what...

11:36Casey RodarmorXCP is only required if you want to create a named asset on Counterparty. Everything else does not require XCP.

11:43Vlad CosteaI mean, you can also do sub assets. You can also pay dividends. It's actually a pretty cool design, which was made for bankers, basically, who wanted to trade basically commodities and trade stocks on the Bitcoin blockchain. That was the initial intention. They realized that it doesn't scale. They got in conflict with the core developers who limited the amount of OP_RETURN data that could be inserted into blocks. And they moved to Ethereum and other chains where they thought it would be a better idea, but it turned out to not scale and lead to huge fees and have that poor privacy model.

12:21I think Counterparty has so much better privacy because you can get multiple UTXOs from the same wallet. And you can also do some smart tricks which are specific to Bitcoin. And Ethereum is like this Orwellian nightmare where you can see what everyone else is doing. No obfuscation. I mean, there is Tornado Cash, but it's not as great as having privacy in Bitcoin.

12:46Casey RodarmorYeah, and the Bitcoin UTXO model is great. I leverage it heavily in the design of ordinals and the design of inscriptions. It'll let us do trustless atomic swaps between Bitcoin and inscriptions that are really nice, basically passing around PSBTs. And there are actually privacy features in ordinals already. So the wallet, when it creates an inscription, it could create a new output that just had the dust limit amount of sats, like the absolute minimum amount of sats. But we actually create new inscriptions on outputs that are worth 10,000 sats.

13:28And the reason is so that when we send an inscription in the future, there are additional sats that we can use to pay the fee. And we call that postage. And so with this 10,000 sats worth of postage, an inscription can be forwarded, can be sent on multiple times without having to merge in and thus dox another UTXO. So obviously, ordinals and inscriptions are a public system and you should not use them with wallets that contain your main stash. You should not use them if you want privacy.

14:02But we are trying to make this as private as we can. And what little privacy we can add, a lot of it comes from the UTXO set model.

14:15Vlad CosteaI think that your greatest merit, because this is basically colored coins with Taproot that you have designed in a more elegant way. As you said, it fits on a T-shirt. But your greatest merit, and right now I'm going to praise you because you lifted the veil on what Bitcoin Core developers were not able to find. Because this is like a side effect of Taproot. They eliminated the limit for OP_RETURN files.

14:43Casey RodarmorPlease continue. Sorry, go ahead.

14:44Vlad CosteaNow you can insert into the Bitcoin blockchain files of any size if you use Taproot transactions. Am I wrong with that?

14:53Casey RodarmorSo Taproot made it easier, but it was actually always possible. So you could have used... pre-OP_RETURN, you could have put it in outputs if you really wanted to. I don't actually think that... So the reason that OP_RETURN with large amounts of data was undesirable is because it enters the UTXO set and has to be pruned. But you could have made giant OP_RETURN transactions and sent them directly to miners. And actually one question I have for people who know the history of Counterparty is, well, if there was a lot of demand at that time for these large transactions with large amounts of data, why didn't you just bypass the mempool and send them to miners directly?

15:37Now, I'm not saying they should have done that, but they could have, and I'm curious why they didn't. But so it would have been possible then. You could have also done it in a very similar way with old school pay to script hash outputs. So again, you would have run into standardness limits, but there was no reason that you couldn't just broadcast that stuff directly to miners if you really wanted to. Then with SegWit, it would have gotten cheaper, a little bit easier, a little bit more flexible, but there were still some standardness rules in place.

16:09But at SegWit, that was the time when we got this witness discount. And then in Taproot, those standardness rules, the witness discount was retained, but those standardness rules were lifted. And so that's what I took advantage of when I designed inscriptions. And so in reality, this has been possible for a long time. I think that maybe nobody had really written the killer app that caused the demand that made things blow up. And if you look at the way that a lot of the Bitcoin Core developers and general developer community talks about this, this is not a surprise to many, many people.

16:51They knew that arbitrary data was possible. They knew that you could do this. And the reason I think that this didn't come up when talking about SegWit or Taproot is because whenever they were lifting limitations that enabled these sorts of things, they were not lifting them because they wanted to allow for any particular stance on storing arbitrary data. They lifted them too because these limits were put in place for reasons not related to preventing arbitrary data storage. And so when they were lifted, they were lifted for reasons not related to storing arbitrary data.

17:33So I think everybody is just noticing, but for everybody who's really been paying attention, this has been possible for a long time and it is no surprise.

17:45Vlad CosteaOkay, so I got a quote from Luke Dashjr right now.

17:49Casey RodarmorYeah, so I'm just going to say, I'm going to tell you right away, I can't respond to anything that Luke says. Luke uses language in a very particular way that makes, I think he often has points, but it makes interpreting what he says and responding to them very hard because he simply has different definitions of words than other people. And so when he says things, unless you use those very particular definitions, you can't really productively have a conversation with him. So I just won't be able to respond to that.

18:21Vlad CosteaBut he did say that the protocol doesn't allow data storage.

18:26Casey RodarmorSure. Yeah. Yeah, Luke Jr. did say that.

18:29Vlad CosteaAnd then he said, no, he is lying and tricking the code. What does that mean?

18:35Casey RodarmorYou know, getting into Luke's head is very hard. I respect Luke deeply as a Bitcoin developer. And in fact, when he said that somebody should write a patch to filter this stuff out of the mempool, I responded with the specific sort of pattern that inscriptions use so that he could write a patch. If anybody wants to run that patch, I recommend that they do so. You can find it on an inscription on ordinals.com. Unfortunately, it's buried under a lot of inscriptions, but that code has now been inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, so nobody should have trouble finding it and applying it to their own Bitcoin Core node.

19:15But yeah, I mean, I guess he doesn't like it.

19:19Vlad CosteaWhat you mentioned about the patch is also something that happened after ordinals took off. Because right now, people are saying that they're pruning or they're filtering stuff from their node because they don't want goatse or whatever to be on their node. Multiple.

19:35Casey RodarmorThere's been, I think, three so far.

19:37Vlad CosteaThey're not fully validating. But if you ask them, they're going to say that they're running full nodes. And we are running into this very Ethereum issue where people are going to pretend that they're running a full node when in fact they're not fully validating.

19:51And when you tell them that they're not fully validating, they're going to say no, it's just that I don't have an archival node. And it's pretty ironic.

20:01Casey RodarmorWhat are you saying is not a full node?

20:04Vlad CosteaSo basically, if you're filtering any type of transactions or any type of...

20:08Casey RodarmorI mean, you're like a full node. The contents of the mempool are not related to consensus. And a full node is a node which fully validates the consensus rules. So whether or not you see certain mempool transactions seems orthogonal to the issue of whether you're running a full node.

20:29Vlad CosteaYeah, but you're not storing them.

20:32Casey RodarmorI mean, when they get in a block, you store them.

20:36Vlad CosteaI mean, you can choose not to store certain blocks, right?

20:39Casey RodarmorNo. I mean, I don't think that's what anybody is talking about. I mean, I guess they would...

20:44Vlad CosteaI mean, you can choose not to activate SegWit, which means that your node is not going to validate SegWit blocks.

20:50Casey RodarmorSo I mean, are people running pre-SegWit nodes or nodes that have SegWit turned off?

20:57Vlad CosteaI mean, officially he died, but have you heard of Mircea Popescu?

21:02Casey RodarmorOh, is that like Chupacabra or something?

21:07Vlad CosteaHe had his own, the Bitcoin.Foundation client. Basically, he was mocking Gavin and whatever. He was running his own code. That's what I'm saying.

21:18Casey RodarmorI mean, the Bitcoin, it's a free network. People can run whatever they want, you know. If a small minority of people are running weird code, I guess that's on them.

21:30Vlad CosteaOkay. So what you're saying is that by applying your patch, what happens more specifically? Because they're still storing what they don't like.

21:37Casey RodarmorNo, so yeah. So this particular patch that I'm referring to is a patch that filters inscriptions from the mempool, from a node's mempool. And so it won't accept these transactions before they've gotten into a block. Nodes gossip Bitcoin transactions around the network. So everybody knows what the pending transactions are. And so the transactions can ultimately make it into a block. And this, you know, nodes, Bitcoin has sort of two layers. It has consensus, which is like the validity rules for what makes a valid transaction and what makes a valid block.

22:15And policy rules, which are... each node is free to choose, right? So every node agrees, must agree on consensus, otherwise risking a chain split or a fork or whatever. But they don't have to agree on policy. And one particular piece of node policy is which transactions you accept into your mempool before they've made into a block and which transactions you relay to other nodes before they've made it into a block. And so this patch concerns itself with not accepting inscription transactions for relay and not accepting them into your mempool and not broadcasting them to other nodes.

22:57So it's purely a node by node policy issue. And, you know, if enough nodes ran this patch, it would be harder to get inscriptions mined. But it doesn't affect policy and whether a node is a full node is kind of orthogonal to its own policy.

23:20Vlad CosteaSo I'm going to start with a statement and then I'm going to lead into a question. But before that, do you know what this is?

23:27Casey RodarmorIs that like a vape or something? No. Is it a butt plug?

23:32Vlad CosteaNo, I mean, it can be if you want.

23:35Casey RodarmorIf you're feeling optimistic, you know, is it like something to store a seed? Yeah. Oh, so it's Cryptosteel. Wait, hold it back. It's blurry. Like hold it closer to your face. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Sick.

23:49Vlad CosteaYeah. So they're sponsoring the show. I just wanted to give them a shout out.

23:52Casey RodarmorIt's actually very, like, it's convenient that it could be a butt plug because if you're going, you know, across the border and you want to take your coins, then let's go. They should actually make the end a little tapered. They should make it. That definitely, that won't work. That card, unless you're really a pro, like that card won't work. But like, make the container tapered and then we can get talking.

24:16Vlad CosteaYeah. And also this one can be bent and is harder to break than this one. There's a test by Jameson Lopp who does this every year. And this one performed a lot better than the other ones. So if you use code BTCTKVR, you get 10% off on your first purchase. Anyway, what you also did was lift the veil on people who say that Bitcoin is permissionless. And they pose as libertarians who tell you that Bitcoin is for enemies and all of these narratives that anyone can use Bitcoin however they want, as long as they pay the fee.

24:53And now they're like, no, we should just kick them out. I saw Pierre Rochard saying that. I saw Jimmy Song calling you a bad actor.

25:02Casey RodarmorYeah, this is something that I sort of agree with. I mean, I think it revealed that a lot of people, well, they've said all this stuff about decentralization. And then the moment somebody uses the network in a way which is fully incentive compatible and which is not an attack and which in some ways can actually make running a full node easier. They got upset about it. I think these people will eventually come around. I don't know if they'll ever like inscriptions, but I think they'll come to realize that they're harmless.

25:38And they'll come to realize that...

25:41Vlad CosteaHarmless? People in third world countries are having difficulties transacting or whatever. So this is the Roger Ver actually, because Roger Ver was saying the exact same five years ago.

25:53Casey RodarmorSo if we enable witness pruning, which is the easiest way to enable that would be on current full nodes, pruned full nodes that also have a setting called assume valid set. So pruned nodes, after they verify a transaction, they delete it. And nodes with assume valid, below a certain block height, they don't verify the signatures on transactions below the assume valid block height. So if we enable witness pruning, what that would mean for these particular nodes is that below the assume valid height, pruning nodes would not download witness data for old transactions.

26:36So because inscriptions put the contents in witness data, this means that the more of a block is taken up by witness data. The faster that these nodes would be able to sync the chain because they would have to download less from the network. So because if you are resource limited, you're very likely to be running a pruned node. And if a JPEG is buried deep enough in the chain, you simply won't download it to begin with. This could in fact make it easier to run a full node in a in a country where you are a resource constrained node operator, not harder.

27:20Vlad CosteaYeah, but what about the fees? The babies are dying, man.

27:24Casey RodarmorYeah, I know. I mean, I want to save the babies as much as anybody else. But Bitcoin is a shared global public resource. And the reality is, is that the more we use it, the higher the fees are going to go. And I am not a big blocker. I was very much not a big blocker back in the day and back in 2017 when I was asking people why didn't we have SegWit yet. And I'm very much not a big blocker now. I do not advocate raising the block size limit.

27:50That is for smarter people than me to discuss. But yeah, it's a shared global resource. And that's always been the model of Bitcoin that the fees, you know, people bid what they value. People bid to get into blocks and they should bid however much they value the transaction getting into a block. And so that means that we already have this queue system and it is a very good system of prioritizing who gets transactions into a block. And this doesn't change this. And also, like, a lot of these people who are very upset are people who are real believers in the hyper Bitcoinization narrative, which I kind of believe in.

28:31I think we're going to get there. But, you know, in a hyper Bitcoinized world, fee rates are going to be very, very high. You're going to have to bid a lot to get into blocks. And so nothing has really changed in our expectation of how this system is going to function. And also another note is that a very large inscription transaction, you know, yeah, it gets this witness discount, but it's still like massive. It's still this like bloated piece of shit. You know, you want to get like a 400 kilobyte JPEG into the blockchain.

29:00You know, you still have to like even if you're just displacing non-discounted transactions, you're going to have to pay the same fee rate as 100 kilobytes of like Normie Bitcoin transactions. And so to pay even a slightly high fee rate, you're going to have to pay extremely high absolute fees to displace these Normie Bitcoin transactions. So, yeah, nothing's changed. Bitcoin is operating as normally. The incentives of the system are working and that you should probably get used to people using Bitcoin for things that you don't get and you just don't care about or are weird and don't make sense to you as it gets more adoption.

29:46Like I've said this before, but like disliking inscriptions is like disliking Pokémon cards and then going up to a bunch of kids playing with Pokémon cards and telling them they're dumb and that Pokémon cards are dumb and they shouldn't like them. And like maybe you've got a point, maybe Pokémon is stupid, but that's just a dumb counterproductive thing to do. And like everybody has like better things to do with their time.

30:06Vlad CosteaYeah, and 20 years later, look at Pokémon cards, first edition, see what happened to them.

30:13Casey RodarmorI got a shout out, somebody made like a Pepe inscription where they kind of based it on this like Yu-Gi-Oh, these like five Yu-Gi-Oh cards, where there's like an arm and another arm and the two legs and it's like the forbidden one. And they made like a multi-inscription forbidden Pepe. It was, it's sick. So the memes are already very strong. I encourage everybody to go to ordinals.com and check out the inscriptions. There's kind of, it's crazy. There's already like a community or multiple communities of people like teaching each other how to do this.

30:47The other thing that people need to keep in mind is like any technology has costs and benefits, and there is no technology which is purely good or that solves every problem. Everything is going to come with trade-offs. So there have been, I think this is not understating it. I think there have been hundreds of people who are syncing full nodes right now, who never would have synced a full node because they want to make inscriptions. Like just the fact that this, and that's intentional, like this is a psyop to get the Rare Pepe degens to run Bitcoin Core full nodes, like 100%.

31:25And I very intentionally not worked on or thought very hard about a light client or mobile wallet or anything like that. I want this to be a full node first community. And I think, you know, we as Bitcoiners have been banging the drums for years and years and years to get people to run full nodes. And then now that a lot of people are running full nodes, like these like serious adults are like my JPEGs. Well, okay, maybe you don't like the JPEGs. Maybe even they will make some transactions more expensive.

31:54But like, is it worth it that there's like thousands of zoomers on the internet running Bitcoin full nodes because it's like fun and for the lulz and like learning how it works and like playing with a wallet and like degening and addressing and it's, it's good, man. It's great.

32:10Vlad CosteaOkay, but I still have to ask two questions which derive from this. First of all, would you consider for the JPEG format, for example, to include some sort of algorithm which compresses the image to reduce the amount of block space that's being used and also the fees?

32:28Casey RodarmorOh, would that be good?

32:29Vlad CosteaWould you consider adding that?

32:32Casey RodarmorOh, sure. So the problem is that JPEG is already a compressed format. So if you take a JPEG and you run it through a standard compression algorithm, it does not compress very much at all. You might even get a larger file. So you can't actually compress a JPEG, but there are lots of, so I would recommend that people look at WebP, which is a more modern image format and which I believe gets a better compression ratio. You could also look at AVIF, but that is not enabled yet because it doesn't have good enough browser support.

33:04Yeah, and I'm trying to figure out, I mean, the four megabyte block, like nobody needs a four megabyte JPEG. Nobody needs to zoom in on the wizard's butt cheek and see the heart tattoo there. So the four megabyte block, that was a stunt. I assume we'll see better four megabyte blocks in the future that have more interesting content. But yeah, so the issue is that it's not exactly about the efficiency. Sometimes people make a large inscription because they want to make a large inscription. And if you made JPEGs more efficient, they would just make bigger JPEGs with more detail.

33:41But yeah, I think about compression a lot. We're going to add general purpose compression probably broadly so that you can compress. And certain kinds of formats will compress very well. So images will compress extremely well. And so that should lead to a 75% reduction in the size of HTML and SVGs that you publish. And yeah, for every image format, we will look to add more modern formats that compress better. So yeah, absolutely. That's something we're... I can't say that we're actively working on anything because there are very few devs out there in the open source salt mines.

34:19We need your help. But yeah, that's on our radar and it's something we want to do.

34:24Vlad CosteaRight. But I still have to ask, coming from someone who has used Counterparty and understood that original idea behind the NFT concept, which they used to call just tokens or assets back in the day. The concept was for it to be mutable, meaning that you could change the image if you wanted. Let's say that you linked it to some Imgur URL and that one got taken down. You could change it to something else, but still you had the name and the token is the art. That's like a meme which was started by the creators of the Rare Pepe movement.

34:58I think it was Joe Looney or... I think it was Joe Looney, I guess. No, it was Shawn Leary or Joe Looney. One of the two of them.

35:08Casey RodarmorShout out to... Is Joe Looney, is he the guy on Twitter who's Loon Pickens?

35:15Vlad CosteaI don't think that's his name, but it's Loon something. But they are the two scientists behind the Rare Pepe movement. Joe Looney created the Rare Pepe wallet and also another one that's called Freeport, I think. But the point is that they always argued that it's actually a good idea that in Counterparty, you can name your assets and you buy the asset which bears that name. And the art which represents that asset can be changed at some point. I guess this idea that you buy the JPEG or the art came from wrong expectations from the Ethereum people.

35:56And now we're adding these to Bitcoin as a more efficient solution to what Ethereum promised but did not deliver. But at the same time, this is not part of the point or the original vision because your NFT means token, right? You're buying the token with that name.

36:11Casey RodarmorThat's why I don't call them NFTs. I call them digital artifacts.

36:14Vlad CosteaOr an inscription.

36:15Casey RodarmorYeah, it's such a standard name. Inscriptions are a digital artifact.

36:19Vlad CosteaBut why does the JPEG have to be on the blockchain? Because that's what concerns most people.

36:24Casey RodarmorWell, if we look at Counterparty and the Counterparty's community's standards, we can actually see that that indicates how much people value on-chain data. I think that people do value the JPEG, they do value the image. But because the token and the token name are on Counterparty and are immutable, that is the thing that people rallied around as being the thing that had value. I don't necessarily think it's because the image being mutable doesn't have value. I think it's because it's very inefficient to store images on Counterparty.

36:56Or it's not supported at all. I'm not clear on the details. So I actually think this reveals the importance of immutable on-chain data rather than call it into question.

37:07Vlad CosteaI'm just saying, okay, I understand the importance of having...

37:10Casey RodarmorOh yeah, and we are going to add globally unique names, by the way. That's coming.

37:15Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess that's what the killer use case is in the end. Because nobody cares about the number itself. They care about naming it something, giving it some meaning.

37:24Casey RodarmorYeah, but if the image is on-chain, then that has meaning. And people are already very excited to own very low numbers or particular numbers. All inscriptions are serially numbered, starting at zero. And people care a lot about their inscription number. So I think anything that you can make on-chain, people very much like and appreciate.

37:44Vlad CosteaI'm not going to disagree with that. I'm just saying that it's not super efficient. And I don't know, we might incentivize in some way for them to use smaller file sizes.

37:56Casey RodarmorAbsolutely. And that's going to be a natural process of the fee market. As Bitcoin's fee market develops and also as ordinal theory and inscription technology develops, all of the artificers out there will be learning about this new medium. And in fact, there are ways to make very, very small inscriptions right now. So the ordinals block explorer, the ordinals.com block explorer, which you can run locally, has very good support for text inscriptions. If you make a plain text inscription, it will actually expand it to fill the preview viewport.

38:32So you can make a text inscription with one extra byte of content, one byte of content, which is a letter or a emoji or anything like that. And it will blow it up to full size. You can also use very efficient formats like SVG and HTML, which are essentially generative content formats, declarative generative content formats, where you declare the shape that you want, which can be rendered at any size. And so it's stored essentially as text instructions that the programmer writes instead of as pixels. So this means that actually there's this enormous creative space that the medium opens up precisely because of its restrictions.

39:12And as people explore that space and what can be done with very, very small file sizes, I think is when we will see a lot of interesting new developments there and new art.

39:29Vlad CosteaYeah, I can see there being a market for it. And I want to tell you about my friend from Miami, whose name is Justin Wales. He is an attorney right now. He works for crypto.com, represents them, I guess, across the entire America. And he wrote a research paper back in 2019 about using Bitcoin for expression and basically for exercising the First Amendment of the US Constitution. And in that research paper, he presented cases where people send political messages into the blockchain and all of them were OP_RETURN messages.

40:05And the case that he was trying to make is that Bitcoin should be protected as free speech under the First Amendment. And I guess that doesn't apply in most countries, obviously. The United States of America has the strongest protections for free speech.

40:23Casey RodarmorUSA! USA!

40:26Vlad CosteaYeah, I saw you dressed as Trump.

40:28Casey RodarmorErin debated democracy. Erin dressed up as AOC and I dressed up as Trump. To be clear, I think Trump is an idiot. But it was good content.

40:38Vlad CosteaBut now you're on the blockchain because someone made an inscription with you.

40:41Casey RodarmorThat's right. First photo of me on the timechain.

40:45Vlad CosteaYeah. So the point I'm trying to make with this story about my friend from Miami is that basically if we use Bitcoin only as money, it's a lot easier to regulate by governments as opposed to creating some sort of ambiguity where they're not sure what it is. Like it's unprecedented. People put Pepes on it. What the hell is that? Yeah. I mean, of course they pay a transaction fee, but it's a layer for artistic expression. The only concern that people have right now is that actually there are two concerns.

41:21The first one is when an asset becomes much more valuable than the block reward for the miner, which gives the miners an incentive to 51% attack that specific block because they take a bigger reward than the block reward. And the other concern is that people are going to use Bitcoin to create art much more than to make transactions and kind of defeat the purpose of the network, which was to be peer to peer electronic cash.

41:54Casey RodarmorCan I respond to the first part? Those First Amendment issues I think are very interesting and I think will ultimately help Bitcoin. Already people have been using inscriptions as a venue for political speech. There have been pictures of the Taiwanese flag. As you might know, Taiwan is a sovereign country in Asia, which is an island off of the coast of China. And the Chinese Communist Party, why would a flag be sensitive? Well, the Chinese Communist Party and let it be clear, I love the Chinese people, but the Chinese Communist Party, which is the authoritarian regime currently in control of what we call China, does not like Taiwan and would like to absorb it.

42:42Taiwan is a small island nation. It is a flourishing liberal democracy. Good people live there. They make amazing, tasty food. And so people have published the Taiwanese flag.

42:54Vlad CosteaThey make most of our electronics in Taiwan.

42:59Casey RodarmorI don't know. Yeah. I mean, so Taiwan is the home to TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. It is large and successful due to the intelligence and industriousness of the Taiwanese people. And so even the Taiwanese flag, posting the Taiwanese flag is an act of political speech. So somebody did that on an inscription. Somebody posted a picture of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which is of the tank man, as he is so known, which is a politically sensitive issue in China, which they would probably prefer that we all forgot about.

43:44So already Bitcoin is being used for what is in the United States protected speech. And I think that there is a argument that this increases the security of Bitcoin from attack by the government. It means that if it is a venue for speech in a very clear, very legible way, the argument that Bitcoin is speech becomes much more clear and legible, and people are much more likely to see it that way. There have been many times that due to the First Amendment, things that the government would very much like to suppress has been protected.

44:20It's not perfect. Our courts are not perfect. I'm basically some sort of weird anarchist, but our courts are good at protecting free speech often. And so your friend makes a very salient and interesting point that by essentially entangling Bitcoin with speech, even more so in an even more legible way, it protects it from the government due to the fetters that free speech, that the First Amendment places on the state.

45:01Vlad CosteaOkay, Casey, I did spend a lot of time watching your content today. I think it was like four hours.

45:07Casey RodarmorOh, dude, I'm sorry, bro.

45:09Vlad CosteaAt one point, I found your personal YouTube channel and you posted some Zelda content from Breath of the Wild.

45:15Casey RodarmorOh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

45:16Vlad CosteaAnd I just want to let you know that if you want to get some Zelda stuff, you can go to ShopinBit.com.

45:20Casey RodarmorBro, you need help shilling. Put it back further. You can't see it. It's blurry.

45:23Vlad CosteaShopinBit.com.

45:24Casey RodarmorThere you go. Yeah, it's got to be in front of your face.

45:27Vlad CosteaUse code BTCTKVR for five euro off. If you can't find what you're looking for, they can deliver to you anything. They have a concierge service. And what else? They're super cool and they take Bitcoin with a 3% discount if you use Bitcoin as opposed to fiat.

45:45Casey RodarmorThey should start including maybe an inscription in their products. That might be a fun add-on. Inscriptions are hard to store because you need a wallet, but you can put them on like a SATSCARD or an Opendime. So you could make an inscription, put it on a SATSCARD, put it on Opendime and include it with your products. And then a user could claim it in a wallet later by moving the private key to their wallet. I think that could be a great add-in or business model for Bitcoin businesses who want to do something fun for their Bitcoin customers.

46:16Buy one at the normal price in Bitcoin and we'll throw in an inscription, like a Rare Pepe or something.

46:24Vlad CosteaI mean, I'm not sure if rare Pepes are a good idea for a business which is trying to stay. I don't know. I guess Pepe has a better reputation nowadays.

46:34Casey RodarmorYeah, we're rehabilitating Pepe. Pepe was unfairly maligned, but he's a good frog. He's always been a good frog. And we've always known this. And thanks to all the gamers who just didn't give a shit that Pepe was controversial and just kept fucking spamming the frog. And yeah, I think that's why things are getting better. One thing is that, listen, I wouldn't use this as an argument if I thought it was really harmful. But when something is fun and you just don't like it, you just look like an idiot.

47:09You just look like a fucking idiot. You just look like you're anti-fun and it's stupid and people realize that you're stupid. And so if you don't like inscriptions or you don't like Pepe the Frog, people who have fun with them will continue having fun with them. And you will be increasingly like old man yells at Pepe-shaped cloud. Yeah, come on people. And also to the haters. This is really specific advice for the haters. If you don't like inscriptions, don't mention them. Don't mention them. Don't blast them to your followers.

47:38If you're a Bitcoin maxi, even if you have a small following, that includes a lot of really hardcore people who could probably sync a full node, run the code, etc. It's part of my target audience. Don't tell them about inscriptions by telling them that you hate it. You can't stop it and you're just going to make it spread faster, further.

47:58Vlad CosteaDuring the four hours of content that I watched today, I discovered that you made quite a few comparisons between ordinals and Counterparty and your experience with what are they called? 721 tokens on Ethereum?

48:13Casey Rodarmor721 tokens. Yeah, yeah.

48:14Vlad CosteaAnd also what else was there? RGB and Taro.

48:19Casey RodarmorYep.

48:20Vlad CosteaHow would you describe all of these in a nutshell? And why should people still use ordinals?

48:26Casey RodarmorOh, well, they all make different trade-offs and those trade-offs are in a lot of ways reasonable, right? So Counterparty is on Bitcoin. Counterparty has support for fungible assets. You could do fungible assets with ordinals, but it's kind of hard. We don't have editions yet. You can't do editions on ordinals. What else? Counterparty has numbered assets. I mean, inscriptions are basically numbered, but we don't have names yet. Counterparty has names. Counterparty has the community. Counterparty has the strongest memes, all right? I'm not going to get in the OG space and say that we've got better memes.

49:03Maybe in the future we will, but not now. ERC-721, Ethereum has a thriving creative community. ERC-721 contracts are arbitrary smart contracts. You can implement any kind of mechanic that you want in your smart contract and deploy it and the chain will enforce those according to its consensus rules. Now, I actually think that this is a hindrance more often than it is a benefit. I think that people usually just want something that's immutable and that has great art and that has great features and they don't want an arbitrary smart contract.

49:44You don't want to audit your JPEGs for security vulnerabilities, so that's a big advantage there. RGB and Taro are different. They're optimized for the fungible token use case. They're far more complicated than inscriptions and ordinals. Ordinals and inscriptions, I basically did all the design with help from a small number of co-contributors. Shout out to Liam and Raph, who have been my two paid apprentices.

50:10Vlad CosteaLeo and Raph, like the Ninja Turtles?

50:12Casey RodarmorNo, unfortunately not Liam and Raph, but they are as cool as the Ninja Turtles. They make different trade-offs. Taro is designed to be very friendly for fungible tokens and have very good interoperability with the Lightning Network, so that's really points for RGB, or sorry, Taro. RGB is designed with a whole bunch of extra features, like it has a very interesting privacy model where you can't actually trace asset transfers from UTXOs to UTXOs. RGB is very interesting, so they're all different. Ordinals and Inscriptions have been designed for, one, Ordinals, the base layer, has this rare and collectible sats thing, where every sat has a number, every sat has a name, and every sat has a rarity.

51:04And it's very fun, and you can see, you can go to ordinals.com and you can see these different ordinal ranges, these sat ranges and outputs, and you can collect them, and there's legendary sats, it's like out of control, and so that's fun. And then Inscriptions are really designed for the NFT use case, and they're really designed with the benefit of hindsight. Counterparty and then ERC-721 tokens have done a lot of experimentation to find out what people want. And that's one of the benefits, especially of Ethereum, is that you can do very quick iteration and development experimentation.

51:41You can just write some code and throw it out there and figure out what people want. And I believe that what people want, essentially, are what I call digital artifacts, which are things that are immutable, things that are permissionless, things that are uncensorable, and things which don't require being audited on an individual basis. I believe that is what most NFT collectors want. And so, Inscriptions are my implementation of what I believe NFT collectors want. And the reason I've been able to figure this out is because I've had the benefit of hindsight, because there have been so many pioneering projects that have come before me and which have really figured things out. And so, really, this is just another project in a long line of projects that represents just experimentation. What does art on the blockchain look like? And bringing all those good things that people have discovered home to Bitcoin.

52:41Vlad CosteaYeah. So, I also want to talk about fungibility and privacy. When I was reading for the first time about the outrage of the community, there was this thread with Adam Back, Rodolfo Novak from Coldcard, and a couple of others. And they were discussing how do we stop this? How do we prevent this from happening? I think on Monday, I read the Bitcoin mailing list on the Linux Foundation. And there was Andrew Poelstra expressing ideas on how we can stop this. But in the end, there was this paragraph which basically explained that any kind of intervention is a bad idea, and would cause more harm than good.

53:21And eventually, most likely, he's hoping that this will pass and it's just this fad, something that comes and goes at some point when people stop caring. And my proposal, essentially, because I made a proposal, I was like, okay, so if you don't like ordinals, add privacy to Bitcoin. Like we had so many excuses over the years to not add base layer privacy. Now, if you just add confidential transactions, Mimblewimble, or whatever you have been researching for such a long time, it's the end. Because you can no longer have these rare units that get traded at a premium because they are represented by a JPEG.

54:00They're all gonna look the same to everyone, because nobody's going to know. So what's your take on privacy? And how does this ordinals protocol affect fungibility?

54:11Casey RodarmorSo ordinals does not affect fungibility. And the reason is because ordinals don't exist. Ordinals are something that I... No, no, no, no. I mean, ordinals don't exist. Ordinals are the Satoshi numbering scheme, and the numbering and tracking scheme of individual Satoshis. And the reason they don't exist is because I made them up. And if you aren't interested in them, when you use Bitcoin, you just don't see them. You just see every sat in a UTXO is essentially like it's in a superposition with all the other sats in the UTXO in an undifferentiated goo-like state.

54:52So in reality, sats are already fungible. Now, if you care about ordinals and inscriptions, then you view the blockchain through this lens of ordinal theory. And then through that lens, these beautiful mysterious creatures begin appearing. These sats that can be numbered and tracked like little entities, little Pokémon off in the tall grass. But if you don't care, you just ignore them and fungibility is unaffected. And then with regards to the question about future and privacy improvements to Bitcoin, I would welcome such future privacy improvements. If the community decides on a proposal, and then that proposal can be implemented as a soft fork, I would be absolutely behind that proposal.

55:37If it really did break inscriptions and ordinals, that would be a small price to pay for making Bitcoin private. But the Bitcoin community has decided that the preferred way to evolve Bitcoin is through opt-in soft forks. And I believe that... and also to not confiscate old coins and to not create undue disruption to people who choose not to upgrade their software. And so I believe that any way ordinals is based on principles that are so fundamental to Bitcoin, the principles that the inputs and outputs are in a certain order, and the principle that each input and each output has a certain value, the fees.

56:27These are very simple things about Bitcoin. Ordinals would have been possible with Satoshi's client on day one. And so I do not see how a soft fork which introduced privacy, which was acceptable to the Bitcoin community, would disrupt ordinals and inscriptions. It seems very unlikely to me. So I think we're safe.

56:54Vlad CosteaOkay, I also have to make this mention about SegWit, because some people seem to be super confused about that four megabytes block, and they're assuming that from now on, we're only going to have four megabyte blocks because of inscriptions. And I did the math and I assumed, okay, this was also taken for granted when we upgraded with SegWit, by the way, they said, okay, four megabyte blocks are reasonable and we did not have to hard fork. So if you have four megabyte blocks every 10 minutes, that's 24 megabytes per hour and multiplied by 24 hours in a day.

57:32That's... wait. Anyway, I ran the math and it's like 200 gigabytes a year in total. That's added to the blockchain. They're concerned that people in third world countries are not going to be able to validate with their full nodes and store every transaction. Well, if they are running today with some sort of hard drive, they need one that's larger than 500 gigabytes because the blockchain already exceeds 500 gigabytes, which means that the next step in this evolution is one terabyte. It's the only one that they can get.

58:10I'm not sure if there are 750 or whatever one terabyte. That one is going to fill if we only have four megabyte blocks for a few years. That's going to fill in like five years. The one terabyte hard drive. And I guess that's a reasonable window, even if we do have that, which we don't, because right now the average is still 1.2 megabytes somewhere around that value. So I guess the concern is blown out of proportions, but it has nothing to do with size, because if someone, for example, there was Binance, which ran an internal audit, I think, or something like that.

58:50They filled the mempool with like 50 blocks and they raised the minimum fee to get included in a transaction to 12 units.

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1:03:23Okay, we're back. It's Jitsi, which is open source, and for some reason when you use the free version, they have this issue.

1:03:30Casey RodarmorThat's how they get you.

1:03:31Vlad CosteaI don't even know why it happens. But my point was that...

1:03:34Casey RodarmorThey should just display a Lightning invoice on the screen and if you can pay it, then it'll just go away. It'll just keep working.

1:03:41Vlad CosteaThat would be a good idea. And by the way, I know that you had a couple of Lightning projects which did not get the same amount of attention, but we can talk about that also if you want. But the point I was trying to make before we got interrupted was that we have this situation with people who are not angry when blocks get filled with multi-sigs, with Lightning channel openings, with exchanges dumping all of their UTXOs or doing consolidations. But we get angry when the kind of data that we don't like gets inserted into blocks, which means that we are running into this moral issue where we are concerned about what gets added into blocks.

1:04:22Some people were outraged that some users, for the sole purpose of causing outrage, added pornography into the blocks using inscriptions.

1:04:32Casey RodarmorAnd then other people were angry when I hid them.

1:04:36Vlad CosteaI guess that was the right call on your block explorer, that you're not displaying them, because I guess you're not trying to get that kind of attention. But these people were not aware that porn was already on the blockchain from 2013, 2014, when people figured out how to do it. It's just that our human ignorance causes us to imagine that it's something that it's actually not. I don't know how to explain it better. But if you don't know about it, you're more comfortable than knowing exactly what's happening on the Bitcoin blockchain.

1:05:09And we ended up having this conversation again about what is the right use for Bitcoin, because they're going to say, no, no, no, this is spam, but what the hell is spam?

1:05:18Casey RodarmorYeah, totally. I'm actually very glad that the conversation about arbitrary content on blockchains has already happened, really, years ago. I think that there's already some objectionable content on Bitcoin. There's probably certainly some objectionable content on Ethereum. There's actually a paper that somebody wrote in 2018, which is about arbitrary content on the blockchain. I forget which inscription number it is, but somebody actually inscribed the PDF of that paper in the Bitcoin blockchain. And so you can go read it. I think it's under 500. I don't remember. But yeah, it's not a new problem.

1:06:02But I think that when people don't know about something or they don't see it, and then they see it for the first time, they assume that it's new, right? They assume that this is a new issue, when in reality, this is not only an old issue, it's kind of a settled issue. And it's pretty interesting to see that for myself, to kind of see this dialogue emerge. And I already kind of know where it's going, and I've already seen what's going with it. But yeah, we'll see.

1:06:32I think it's just a non-issue. We do censor the ordinals.com block explorer, but we just remove stuff that's graphic. There were some images of goatse, which is this classic internet image of a gaping butthole. And if you are so offended that we censor this from our explorer, you are free to download ord and run your own copy of the block explorer. And then you will see the gaping butthole as much as you want, if that is what you so desire. So ordinals.com is a website.

1:07:09It is on a server. I own the domain. I own the server. And we have to do content moderation because as a public website operator, you have legal responsibilities. And we also don't have any particular obligation to show things or not show other things. You know, it's personal property. And certainly I want to have a very as loose a moderation policy as possible. But, you know, yeah, if you upload the gaping buttholes, they might be taken down. I honestly think that those gaping buttholes are going to wind up being really valuable.

1:07:44I don't want to encourage anybody, but like those early censored transactions, like those are probably going to be grail inscriptions at one point.

1:07:53Vlad CosteaYeah, this is something else that I want to talk about, because basically what we put today on a blockchain will be studied by historians in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, maybe longer. And how do you feel about the reflection of our civilization right now, of our culture? Do you think that these memes are really what people should find about who we were and what we were up to?

1:08:18Casey RodarmorI do. There's been a lot of great content on the chain already. A lot of it is memes, but it's a lot of people giving, you know, personal stuff, their voices, their pictures, pictures of their pets, images that we all think are interesting and important. The first human being to set foot on the moon, pictures of that footprint, pictures of Tank Man and Tiananmen Square.

1:08:50Yeah, I'm proud. Yeah, I think it is a good way. It does reflect well on us, and I hope these images live long into the future.

1:09:03Vlad CosteaYeah, I did listen to that episode from Hell Money podcast where you mentioned that maybe they're going to find that picture of you cosplaying Trump. And guess that is actually what Donald Trump used to look like or something.

1:09:17Casey RodarmorYeah, I actually want people to see that picture of me as Trump and then think that Donald Trump was an occupation rather than a person, like a court jester dressed a certain way and looked a certain way. But it wasn't one person. It was anybody who had the job of court jester. So I'd like people to think that that Trump was actually like a job and you like punched a time card and like put on the orange makeup.

1:09:43Vlad CosteaI mean, that's reasonable. I'm looking at the comments section and there is like a debate going on.

1:09:49Casey RodarmorWhat's going on? Yeah. Tell me what's going on.

1:09:51Vlad CosteaVery hard to keep up. But basically, I think that a reasonable comment is from Kristaps who says that maybe the issue is that NFT degens could take over and there is no space left for normal transactions. Do you think that's likely to happen?

1:10:08Casey RodarmorNo, I don't. No, I don't. I think that ultimately the reason I did this is because I'm a Bitcoiner who believes in essentially the mission of Bitcoin as a currency, as a money. And so I think that inscriptions will kind of continue to be a very marginal consumer of block space in the long run. There's a lot of attention right now. And so there's probably a higher volume than average. And that attention might increase and we might go through a period of even a few months or a year where there's a very high volume of inscriptions.

1:10:39To be clear, I think that's good. I think the fee revenue is good. But also, I do believe that the most valuable use of Bitcoin is for transferring money and for savings. And so I think that given that, people will ultimately be willing to pay more for those small Bitcoin, for those small purely financial transactions, and that those will ultimately be the largest proportion of block size space. If you told me that in 10 years inscriptions are more than 10 percent of blocks, I'd be really surprised.

1:11:14That'd be really surprising to me. And they're intentionally designed, like I said, that very small inscriptions can still be very cool. And so I kind of imagine that like we'll probably reach this equilibrium where there are some inscriptions. I think there will always be some inscriptions, but then the majority and they're going to get very good. They're just going to get really good. A lot of people kind of don't know this, but. Constraints on artistic mediums is often what leads to the most interesting work in that medium and the weird constraints on inscriptions make it a very interesting medium, so I think we'll eventually see a lot of very small inscriptions that are quite amazing.

1:11:53But then that, you know, even as amazing as they get, the most valuable use case is still money, and so we won't see the inscriptions be more than a small percentage, and those financial transactions will be the majority.

1:12:10Vlad CosteaI had a heated debate with a guy on Twitter today. His name is Cody Audetore. He works for LN Markets and a couple of other Bitcoin companies, and basically he argued that this is bloating the blockchain and this is not going to ever become part of a market. And I told him that's not true because you can use that rare unit that gets generated into your wallet and send it to someone else and get some Bitcoin in exchange for it. And the question that I want to address from this anecdote is if you're planning to build some sort of market for these inscriptions to be traded.

1:12:50Casey RodarmorSo to be clear, a market has already formed, but the market is all over-the-counter peer-to-peer trades that are happening on Discord. Inscriptions have already sold for over one Bitcoin. I've been very surprised by this, but people love degenning, and it's not just a supply-driven market. It's not just people making inscriptions and shilling them. There are people who show up in the Discord who are like, read the rules, read about inscriptions, and they're like, all right, sell me a rock for one Bitcoin.

1:13:22So these are people that enjoy this, and it's fun. So a market has already formed, and I hope to be able to make that market more seamless by providing trustless offers. So it's very easy in Bitcoin to write an atomic swap for some Bitcoin for another Bitcoin. Really easy, right? They're all in the same chain. They're the same transactions. Like, why not? I can swap UTXO for your UTXO. The only real reason to do this that I know of is something called CoinSwap, which is a privacy technique where you and me do an atomic swap for a UTXO, my UTXO for your UTXO.

1:13:58But there's no on-chain record, if all goes well, of that atomic swap. Now, that's like a sort of niche use case right now, but it shows that you can do atomic swaps for some Bitcoin for some other Bitcoins. So it's even easier to do an atomic swap that you don't care about the privacy for on-chain for inscriptions. So you can do an atomic swap for some Bitcoin for an inscription. So the way that it would work is you would make an inscription and put it up for sale for like one Bitcoin.

1:14:31And the way you would do that is by creating a partially signed Bitcoin transaction, which includes as input your inscription and then includes as an output the amount of money you want to receive for it. So the inscription is only a few sats, and the amount of money you want to receive for it is a lot more sats. It's like one Bitcoin or something. And so this transaction, which you've partially contributed your signature, it's unbalanced. Bitcoin only allows these balanced transactions to go through. So what you do then is you take this unbalanced transaction that nobody can mine, and you broadcast it out to the world.

1:15:05You broadcast it to anybody. And then somebody who wants to take you up on that, they add your own one Bitcoin input to the other side and give themselves a little output that gives them that inscription. And then they sign it, and then the transaction is balanced, and it becomes a valid transaction that can be broadcast to the network. So all of the stuff that I'm talking about is in development. Well, it's not really in development. We want to start being in development on it. But it's all stuff that's pretty specced out, not perfectly.

1:15:37But yeah, we hope to make a true decentralized marketplace where anybody can make and broadcast these offers. And it will not be a centralized marketplace on ordinals.com. Ordinals.com will never host. Well, I don't want to say never, but I'm prioritizing making a decentralized market that can be really decentralized. And only when that's possible and very easy and I've done all that I can to make that work will I start even thinking about a centralized marketplace. A centralized marketplace is not something that interests me. Neither is a marketplace that works like OpenSea.

1:16:16With OpenSea, when you want to sell an NFT, you give OpenSea the right to transfer that NFT arbitrarily on your behalf at any price. And you trust that they will only do that when somebody is willing to pay you enough and that you'll get the funds. So this is a very unappealing model to me that I will not pursue. So yeah, markets already exist. A market exists whenever I guess more than two people want something or more than two people are selling something. They're already degenning out in all of the discords, their auctions.

1:16:49They're all highly trusted and you are at risk of getting scammed, so be careful. But yeah, definitely going to make that better in the future with trustless offers.

1:16:59Vlad CosteaI think you just gave away the idea on how to build the Bitcoin version of OpenSea.

1:17:05Casey RodarmorYeah, go crazy. This is something that especially there's a GitHub issue that kind of describes like a sketch of how to do this. I would really like it if people reviewed that. Any sort of swapping doesn't really rely on inscriptions. It can be done without really thinking too hard about inscriptions because it only works on this ordinals layer. Anything where you can swap an ordinal for Bitcoin that is a particular numbered sat will work and it happens that inscriptions are on particular numbered sats and so you can do these swaps.

1:17:41So I would love it if like... mad alpha dropping. Yeah, try to build it. Try to see if like but like honestly the thing that will get this built the fastest is just reviewing the issue on GitHub and contributing some code or contributing a sketch. I'm not particularly good at these like dark art kind of Bitcoin stuff and so somebody much smarter than me can probably push this over the finish line much faster.

1:18:11Vlad CosteaWhat happens if you accidentally consolidate your UTXOs and include your inscriptions?

1:18:18Casey RodarmorSo then you just get this like big fat UTXO with one or more inscriptions sort of like in there and this has already happened due to a bug in the wallet. The ord wallet which is the you know that's the code that I wrote the ord wallet tries to operate under the simplified model where every UTXO has one inscription and that inscription is the first sat of the UTXO of the sort of list of sats in the UTXO. That makes the wallet much simpler to deal with and easy to write and easy to think about but the underlying protocol does not enforce that.

1:18:56The underlying protocol can support inscriptions transferring from any sat in the input to any sat in the output and any degree of merging and splitting that you want. And so another wallet could implement very different coin inscription management strategies where they had you know they're there that you could operate under a model where every inscription was like on one UTXO like just lined up with or without padding between them and then every time you wanted to do a transaction you like split them off. Now that's very hard I think and one of the key principles of ordinals and inscriptions is simplicity.

1:19:34It's like caveman technology. It's like the simplest thing that could possibly work much like Bitcoin. But yeah you could definitely do that and due to a bug in the wallet I don't fully understand how this happened. I think somebody was inscribing very, very fast and somehow the databases got desynced but there are already inscriptions that are that are on one UTXO. There's a few of them one intentional one not where you have this one UTXO with multiple inscriptions on the sats in them and we need to add code to the wallet to let users be able to recover from that situation and go back to the wallet's preferred model of operation where you only have one sat per UTXO.

1:20:14But that code hasn't been written yet so right now those inscriptions are kind of stuck in this Satoshi goo.

1:20:21Vlad CosteaOkay I did read a story last week on Reddit which basically said that there was a guy who had his seed words written on a piece of paper which he hid in the drawer where he was holding his socks. Bad idea, use Cryptosteel or whatever but what I'm trying to say here is that his girlfriend came in and tried to do some cleaning and found that piece of paper and threw it away. And in the future I can imagine the situation being where everyone gets more literate about Bitcoin and you're going to end up with a family member or friend coming to your house and seeing that you have this strange UTXO in your wallet and be like I'm going to help him with a consolidation.

1:21:05There's no way he can spend this.

1:21:07Casey RodarmorThat's actually one of my favorite parts of the protocol is that inscriptions they ride on sats and so they can be accidentally sent if you use a wallet that does not perform sat control or sat selection and they can also be paid as fees. So if somebody wants to do a very cool ordinal theory art project one thing they could do is start making inscriptions and intentionally sending them as fees.

1:21:39Vlad CosteaThat's like 400 inscriptions and pay one fee?

1:21:44Casey RodarmorNo, no, no, I mean, make inscriptions on sats and then use those sats to pay fees in other transactions.

1:21:52Vlad CosteaThat's kind of insane but yeah.

1:21:55Casey RodarmorSo those sats then, the way that the Ordinals algorithm work is those sats that go out of all the transactions, they reappear out of the Coinbase transaction. And they get assigned to those outputs in the order that those fee paying transactions appear in the block. And so you could make inscriptions enter general circulation by spending them as fees. I actually have an art project that I want to do once I get a little bit less underwater, which might involve sending some inscriptions to fees and then so you can see how they track and transfer in general circulation.

1:22:30Vlad CosteaThey're gonna end up on some exchange and someone's gonna buy them and withdraw them to their wallet and be like what's this? Oh I just got an inscription.

1:22:39Casey RodarmorExchanges could also start dredging their wallets for inscriptions and rare sats and start selling them as like a side business by extracting them from cold storage. Yeah it's actually there's only a couple weird ways to destroy an Ordinal in reality, these like numbered sats. One way is if the Coinbase reward is underpaid. So when a normal transaction underpays its outputs, those are just fees and the miner can spend those. When the Coinbase transaction underspends its outputs, they're gone. They're like gone gone. And so that is a way to send to actually destroy sats.

1:23:28Now I consider those sats to have been sacrificed, to have been lost and are essentially a kind of offering to the underworld. It's very common in various traditions to give offerings to the underworld in the form of incense or candles. Or burning money. One form of burning money that's very common is something called joss paper. And one form of joss paper, if you make joss paper it's just this money that's burned often in China and places with a lot of Chinese immigrants as a gift to ancestors.

1:24:07And joss paper can look like a lot of things but a lot of the time it is made to look like US currency, like dollar bills. And you'll see these weird bank of hell dollar bills. And that is Hell Money. And that is what the Hell Money podcast is named after. And if you're attending Bitcoin Miami 2023, I encourage you to sign up for your tickets with the offer code H-E-L-L, which will get you a discount. But anyways, that's beside the point. My point is that...

1:24:37Vlad CosteaThat was super cool the way you segued into the ad. You're getting practice, Casey.

1:24:43Casey RodarmorThank you. Thank you. Listen, I'm learning from the master. So anyway, so actually these sats, when the coinbase reward is underpaid, that's the only way to destroy ordinals. And I actually consider those hopefully as offerings to the underworld. Maybe they will appreciate us that we're sending harder money their way instead of burning a bunch of fiat currency. And so that's one way to destroy them. Like when they get going to fees, they just circle around. And then the other way to destroy them is by creating transactions with duplicate transaction IDs, which is no longer possible due to a very old BIP.

1:25:23So yeah, it's easy to lose ordinals if your wallet doesn't perform sat selection, but it is hard to destroy them. In fact, only a miner can destroy them.

1:25:35Vlad CosteaI think I spent too much time on Twitter, but you explain the origin of the name Hell Money for your podcast. And there was someone else speculating that this is basically some satanic message, which suggests that you're here to destroy Bitcoin. And you are some deep state operative, work for Facebook and Google.

1:25:54Casey RodarmorErin, was that you? Come on. So my podcast co-host, she likes to stir up shit. She's literally on 4chan posting like, this Casey guy, is he okay? Can he be trusted to stir up controversy? So the reason I called the podcast Hell Money is because when I was a kid, you would oftentimes see this Hell Money, this joss paper in party gifts or at a novelty store. And it was made for people to burn as a form of ancestor worship or as an offering to the dead.

1:26:29But it looks weird to have a dollar bill with some Chinese characters on it. And I think it's Diyu, who's the god of the underworld. And these bills, they got this mistranslation on them where they were translated as Hell Money. And hell has a very satanic and nasty connotation to English speakers. But in the original Chinese, I think it's just something like court of the underworld. It's underworld money. And when I was a little kid and I saw these things, I was entranced. These weird things, these weird things that looked like dollar bills, but they had Chinese lettering on them and they were called Hell Money.

1:27:10I've always thought that they were cool. And so when me and Erin were talking about names for the podcast, that's what we decided to call it. And then later we had this tie in. We started talking about like, well, like our ordinals, are they money from heaven or are they money from hell? And I think that's up to people to decide for themselves. Like the jury is still out on that one.

1:27:30Vlad CosteaI mean, you gave a strong hint, so.

1:27:33Casey RodarmorYeah, right. Yeah, no, it's I think fiat is the real Hell Money.

1:27:40Vlad CosteaI can agree with that. And by the way, how do you monetize your podcast?

1:27:46Casey RodarmorWe don't.

1:27:47Vlad CosteaHave you heard of Bumbee?

1:27:48Casey RodarmorNo, what's Bumbee? What's Bumbee.com?

1:27:51Vlad CosteaIt's basically OnlyFans for Bitcoin.

1:27:54Casey RodarmorOh, shit. Okay.

1:27:55Vlad CosteaYou put your content there and you put a paywall on top of it and you can ask, for example, one dollar in Bitcoin for people to unlock it.

1:28:02And that's how I put some time exclusive content on there so people can find it. And it's basically better than Patreon or whatever. If you want to monetize and you have a community, they're going to have fun paying to unlock whatever content you're putting there. So it's Bumbee.com.

1:28:20Casey RodarmorSick. Yeah, look forward to nudes from me soon. Maybe people can pay not to see them. Yeah, like monetizing the podcast is hard. We haven't really done it yet. Right now, Ordinals is such a big focus that it might turn out that the Hell Money podcast is really just part of the Ordinals media empire or maybe Ordinals are just part of the Hell Money podcast like media empire. Yeah, no idea. It was really random. So me and Erin met at the Bay Area Bitcoiner meetups. These are sick local meetups for people to hang out and drink beer.

1:28:55And I'm not sponsored by Bitrefill, but Bitrefill always pays for the drinks and the food. And we met and then she was just like, oh, let's do a podcast because she's done a bunch of like TikTok content, like TikTok nature girl content. And I did some part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:29:14Vlad CosteaSo much time watching your content today.

1:29:17Casey RodarmorThere's so much lore, you know, there's so much lore to discover. But yeah, so we kind of did the podcast like not related to Ordinals, but it's been great because, you know, we got into this habit of making these videos every week. And now this, you know, we're sort of, it's gotten into a rhythm and we're good at doing it and it lets us make content related to Ordinals, which obviously people are really curious about. We're trying to figure out how to make it easier to do.

1:29:41Like one thing is we always do it live because we always want to do like in-person recordings and just like editing and all that is hard. Maybe at some point we're going to look for a producer. I have no idea how that works, but yeah, we're just figuring everything out.

1:29:58Vlad CosteaYeah, so I want to praise Erin because when you talk with her, you're a lot calmer. Today you were a bit nervous playing with your watch and beeping and whatever. Probably you thought I was gonna...

1:30:08Casey RodarmorToday... no, no, today's vape day. I vape once a week on Sunday like an idiot and then I don't do it the rest of the week, so I don't get addicted or cravings. So it's like, and then my watch, it just happens to be here.

1:30:21Vlad CosteaYou're still more dynamic. You moved on your chair left and right and stuff that you don't do on your podcast. Like I observe certain types of behavior and I guess Erin is much better at asking you questions. She makes you feel more comfortable and she asks you good questions. Like a few times I was jealous, like I would have never thought about that. Maybe you guys spoke before, but at the same time, she makes it more digestible in the sense that she knows exactly where to stop you when you got to technical so that she provides extra context or lore or whatever you want to call it.

1:30:57So it's pretty entertaining to watch. And I guess the highlight of this interview is that basically you friend zone her when you call her your friend.

1:31:05Casey RodarmorNo, no, no, no, no. We've been in a mutual friend zone since we met, which is one nice thing about a relationship. It's very uncomplicated. It's strictly business. I mean, no, I mean, we're friends, but yeah, I don't know. Maybe I should pretend that there's some like juicy thing going on. But yeah, she's just a friend of mine, which makes things simple.

1:31:26Vlad CosteaThis adds extra lore, I guess. More reasons for people to watch and pay attention to small hints about what you guys are talking about.

1:31:35Casey RodarmorYeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely.

1:31:38Vlad CosteaSo would you consider trading these inscriptions on the sidechain? In the comments there are Litecoin people who say that they want that to be traded on Litecoin. I'm not sure if you want to work on that, but... Would you consider working with Paul Sztorc for drivechain for Ordinals or whatever?

1:31:57Casey RodarmorI consider the incentives of drivechain to not be the best. If drivechain becomes popular and people are willing to pay a lot of money to get their drivechain transactions confirmed, essentially, I believe that running a bunch of sidechains or drivechains becomes essentially mandatory for Bitcoin miners. So currently, I'm not really supportive of the concept. I think that Paul Sztorc is incredible. I love him. I think he's hilarious. He's one of the funniest Bitcoiners. We were at a conference, Scaling Bitcoin, I think it was 2016 or something, and I was telling him some ideas and he was like, I don't like that.

1:32:40That's not a good idea. And then another idea was like, I don't like that. And then another idea, I was like, whatever, I had some idea. And he was like, no, this is your most terrible idea yet. But he's such a likable guy that it was just really funny. I love him. Hopefully, I'll see him in Miami. So yeah, this project is for Paul Sztorc. I wanted to one up my last terrible idea. So this is a much worse idea. But yeah, drivechain, I'm not a huge fan of.

1:33:09I mean, I don't know, maybe I'll come to understand it better. But right now, I'm not a huge fan. As far as Litecoin and sidechains, I don't know, I'm just not interested in that. I'm not really interested in anything that has a different token. I think that it introduces bad incentives. I don't think we should be tolerant of people creating tokens out of nowhere. And also, if you want ordinals, you can probably just add ordinals and inscriptions to Litecoin. Any coin that has the UTXO model, it's very easy to add inscriptions.

1:33:43I mean, you could probably do it without modifying the ord client at all. I'm not really sure that I would bother. I don't know if I would accept PRs that made that easier or harder. Maybe, probably not. I don't know. I don't want to think about those other chains. They're simply not interesting to me. But I encourage the developers to start exploring the design space. As far as trading ordinals or inscriptions on another layer, those sorts of schemes are very fraught. Those sorts of schemes are usually called bridges.

1:34:15And bridges are very, very dangerous. There was a very large bridge, I think it was called Nomad or Optimism, I don't remember, that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a hack. And so I don't encourage people to use bridges. I encourage people to explore things that have good security properties. And those are things that include native Bitcoin, that include Lightning. And there's a lot of Rube Goldberg machines out there that people can kind of make so complicated that they can kind of trick you into thinking, well, I don't know.

1:34:51I don't know if they know that they're insecure. Maybe they've tricked themselves into thinking that these Rube Goldberg machines are secure. But they write them, they trick themselves, and then they trick you, and then you lose all your coins because you bridged it to Ethereum. So, yeah, these people are free to do what they want. But I encourage people to ignore their money losing bizarre schemes and just stick to Bitcoin.

1:35:17Vlad CosteaActually, this was my next question, the one that I was about to use as a follow up, because there are people who moved their Rare Pepes to Ethereum to sell them on OpenSea.

1:35:27Casey RodarmorYep.

1:35:28Vlad CosteaI don't recall exactly the name of the bridge, but they used that.

1:35:31Casey RodarmorI believe it's called Emblem Vault.

1:35:33Vlad CosteaYeah, that one. Yep. And I was going to ask you if you imagine a future where people are going to move inscriptions to Ethereum to sell on OpenSea, but I hope some sort of Bitcoin only market develops by then.

1:35:44Casey RodarmorYeah, I mean, I think that, you know, obviously people are free to do what they want. I believe that Emblem Vault, and I'm just going to say this, this is not the most informed opinion because I haven't audited Emblem Vault in detail. But the things that I've read about it make me believe that it's probably not secure and that a motivated attacker could probably find a bug or a way to exploit it. A lot of these schemes are secure until somebody really puts some energy into trying to break it or they're secure until something weird happens that nobody suspected.

1:36:20And so just because something has been running for a while is not really evidence that it is secure. In the words of Adam Back, sometimes these schemes just melt when somebody like puts enough eyeballs on them or just stares at them for long enough. I hope that things go in the other direction. I hope that people figure out a way to burn their NFTs on other chains and indicate a forwarding address and then mint an inscription and then trade the inscription on Bitcoin. I will never add support for bridging in the other direction, but people are free to come up with their own standards where they burn tokens that they value less than inscriptions on those other chains, or even on Bitcoin if they want to burn Counterparty tokens to teleport them to an ordinal.

1:37:10I won't add support for that, but I think it's an interesting thing that people could pursue. I much prefer the burn and teleport method, the fiery teleport method of moving NFTs to another chain because you don't need to ever look at the other chain again. You convince yourself that this thing was burned, and then you start following the inscription. You never have to go back to the chain because something went wrong with the bridge. Even that is hard, so don't just do this in a cavalier way.

1:37:44If you think you might want your NFT on that other chain, you're free to keep it there. But yeah, I'm ignoring every other chain. I hope they do what they want, and I hope I can make something that makes them want to use ordinals and inscriptions.

1:38:00Vlad CosteaWhen I told people that I was going to interview you, the first question that came out was how much hate mail did you get? How much of a negative feedback did you get? And I also want to add something else before I let you answer the question. Basically, I tried to survey the community and observe the behavior of developers. And there was this camp that was trying to figure out if there is any way to stop ordinals from working. And there was this other camp that said it's a free market we cannot control.

1:38:31Maybe we can just hope that it's just a fad and it's going to go away because Bitcoin was designed for something else. But if people want to use it for art, then let them be, because there is no way we can intervene without breaking decentralization. In the first camp, there was, I mean, the one that was thinking about ways to censor, there were quite a few Blockstream developers. And I even got into an argument with Grubles from Blockstream. And we used to be good friends, but it seems like this time he was basically Roger Ver-ing me.

1:39:02And on the other camp, there was Murch and I very much appreciated that he was open. I think Peter Todd is kind of neutral, but doesn't mind it. And I think also Kristaps Kaupe, I'm not sure how his last name is pronounced, like he is Latvian, but he works on JoinMarket and Bitcoin Core. And he also said that this is basically something that we should not try to stop and just let it be. What was the feedback that you got? Did you speak with any of these developers?

1:39:32Did they try to persuade you to stop?

1:39:36Casey RodarmorIt's really hard because once something becomes part of like the discourse, it just gets so messy and these voices get blown out of proportion. So I've been working on it for about a year. Every single person I've told it to who is a serious Bitcoin developer has been like, oh, weird. Okay. Or like don't care or think it's interesting. I don't like it. I don't think that I've really gotten any really principled objections to it.

1:40:12Some people have gotten some hate mail now. But a small amount, the vast majority is from people who are really excited, who are really excited to be running full nodes. And so I just don't know how seriously to take the people who don't like it and how many there are. I'd say that easily less than 1% of the feedback that I've gotten has been negative. It's been overwhelmingly positive. If I go to just the Bitcoin maxi camp, I have to guess it's like maybe 10% or something or like 20%.

1:40:46It's really hard for me to tell. And those people who are of the opinion that we should actually act to do something about it, a lot of those people come around and when they're confused, they're a bit confused and they kind of come to their senses. So I think it's really small. And I think there will always be people that really hate it. And when something is controversial, sometimes people then dig in and they make it like their shtick to hate it. So there's going to be people who hate inscriptions forever.

1:41:15But I don't think they have serious principled arguments or serious principled ways to stop it without making Bitcoin worse. I encourage everybody to be nice. It's sad for me to hear that you had this instance where somebody was maybe not as friendly to you as they had been in the past over a technical disagreement. That happens a lot and I've seen that and I think it's really unfortunate. It's really like friends and the people you know, the people you trust, the people you like. That's way more important than any online disagreement. And the way that just telling people about how they can be persuasive. Luke Jr., I find very unpersuasive because he just says words and he doesn't really back them up. And people who just call me names also I don't find persuasive. And the people who I do find persuasive are interesting, smart people who give smart reasoned arguments, pro and con. Like Andrew Poelstra who he wrote in his Bitcoin dev post what it did, maybe how we could stop it if we wanted to, observations about why stopping it might be hard or have negative consequences. And then also legitimate concerns. So Andrew Poelstra was worried that the Bitcoin fee market maybe it would get tied up in pump and dumps essentially.

1:42:40Like people have sort of said that like oh if the economics of this like of inscriptions becomes very different from the economics of the underlying asset or it becomes dominant, there could be issues where all of a sudden we get this weird fee market fluctuations or whatever. I don't necessarily agree with that criticism but I have to think about it a lot more before I even fully understand the ramifications. But the way he phrased it was very nice. It wasn't a personal attack and I respect him a great deal.

1:43:07He's always been reasonable. Ord uses software that he's written and we've tried to upstream the changes that we've made to that software to that upstream branch. And that ultimately is going to be the way that we figure out how we as a community, whatever that community means, want to deal with it. Those are the voices that are really going to eventually shine through and are going to lead the conversation. I just encourage everybody to be civil. This doesn't change who your friends are. If it changes who your friends are because you disagree about JPEGs on the blockchain, you're kind of cucking yourself in this really unfortunate way.

1:43:49So be nice and you'll also be more persuasive because otherwise people will just tune you out or you're preaching to the choir.

1:43:58Vlad CosteaOkay, so this is a very, very personal opinion of mine. Actually, it makes no sense to add of mine at the end of the sentence. But the point is that the problem with ordinals right now is not necessarily that they occupy block space. The problem is that you broke the narrative. People were saying that you cannot do this with Bitcoin. And they were very, I mean, there's this social layer with which is trying to control the way in which people use Bitcoin. And they're trying to establish a right way to use it and the wrong way to use it.

1:44:32It's for the same reason that people using Counterparty have been kept in the corner and they did not want them to become too popular and they indirectly encouraged them to move to another chain to do that kind of stuff. And now that you prove that this can work on the base layer and it can have a 75% discount from SegWit and people actually use it. And it's incredible that it got so much traction, honestly, because when I first heard about it, when someone tried to pitch me a few months ago, I thought it was stupid and it was only working on signet.

1:45:10It made no sense to me, but now it seems to resonate with people and they use it. There is no way we can control that. I actually respect people who use Bitcoin in any way in which they choose because they're securing the budget. Like the miners don't run on hugs and nice words. They're supposed to pay for their bills. They're supposed to be profitable. And we have to sustain this somehow. And the concern trolling about the third world citizens not being able to use Bitcoin. I mean, the question is, why did they not use it in the last two years when the mempool was constantly empty?

1:45:48Casey RodarmorAnd why did they not use it in 2017 when we got a block size increase, which forever increased the expected size?

1:45:55Vlad CosteaBut at the same time, they're most likely on Lightning or in the worst case scenario, they're on exchanges and they're trading on exchanges. And that's a big concern because it seems like lots of Bitcoin advocates have failed to make Bitcoin get traction. And then when this idea, which decides to create not necessarily tokens, but rare units that get traded for Bitcoin and also have data embedded in the blockchain, this gets traction. And I guess this is a consequence because we also failed to make more people use Bitcoin.

1:46:33I understand why this happens. It's much easier to use custodial Lightning. It's instant. It's a lot cooler than explaining, you know, you should wait for a confirmation. You should use your wallet like this. This is a mempool. You're supposed to look in it for your transaction and whatever to understand why this happens. But still, it's a bit disappointing that we could not find a better way to use this block space. And now when someone like you comes with this proposal, it just resonates with a different audience who decides to transact on Bitcoin.

1:47:06I mean, a lot of Ethereum people are coming to Bitcoin because of you and they're running Bitcoin Core. And when you say it out loud, it's insane.

1:47:16Casey RodarmorYeah, they're running Bitcoin Core. One person said they're building Bitcoin Core from source. CB Spears, who's one of the mods on the Discord server, who's been very helpful, said that he's helped more people run Bitcoin full nodes, learn how to run Bitcoin full nodes in the last 10 days than he has in years of going to meetups and really banging the drum about running Bitcoin Core nodes. Yeah, I mean, I think that Bitcoin's money use case is really important, but I think that it only resonates with a small number of people.

1:47:50But if we can make Bitcoin do more things and more interesting things, then we can make Bitcoin resonate with more and more people. And as long as those things are in line with the incentives of the network, which I believe ordinals and inscriptions are, then it just brings more people to Bitcoin and it makes it stronger, it makes the community stronger.

1:48:10Vlad CosteaIt's hard to disagree with that unless we get some proper evidence that it turns out to be a bad idea. But for now, the impact is not even high. Like, as I said before, the reactions are blown out of proportions. If you look at the average block size on maybe a monthly scale, you're going to see that the increase is not that great. And even today, you could see that the mempool was empty for a few hours. You took a look at it. It's not such a large phenomenon.

1:48:40I mean, more than 4000 transactions have been made since you launched this two weeks ago, which is still admirable. But if you think about it, Bitcoin handles like what, 20,000 or more. Wait, like 1200 transactions per block on average. And in 24 hours, you do the math. You have to multiply by six and then by 24 to get the final number. So more than 100,000 transactions a day in Bitcoin and only 4000 in two weeks were inscriptions. So that's not such a large phenomenon, but people blow it out of proportions.

1:49:18And you get associated with Nick Carter, Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, who have been, I guess, outcast by the Bitcoin community because they have been vocal about other stuff. And I don't know, they just got pissed off at some point and decided to leave. And some people speculate that you're basically working with them to destroy Bitcoin.

1:49:43Casey RodarmorYeah, no, I'm not. I guess Udi Wertheimer was involved with the making that four megabyte block. I think he said some things about Terra and Luna, which may have... Do you know what he said about Terra and Luna? Did he say that people should go buy like Terra?

1:50:00Vlad CosteaNo, it was much worse than that. He called people who did not listen to him morons. And said that it's such a good investment that look, it's pumping, it's safe.

1:50:11Casey RodarmorYeah, well, fortunately, we all know how that turned out. So hopefully when Udi tells people to buy something next time, maybe they'll apply the Jim Cramer rule and do the opposite. Nick Carter I love. Nick Carter is a G. I love his podcast. He likes things that I don't like. He has opinions that I don't have, but that doesn't mean that I don't like him. I'm going to try to appear on his podcast because I love his podcast. I love those guys. They're clever people. He's very funny.

1:50:39Nick Carter is, I think, one of the best writers and speakers in the Bitcoin space. Like one of the most articulate people with such a lovely way with language. Always been one of my favorites. Who's the third person?

1:50:55Vlad CosteaEric Wall. Yeah, Eric Wall. He's not going to be happy about the fact that you forgot his name.

1:51:00Casey RodarmorEric Wall. No, no, no, no, no. I didn't forget his name. Just forgot the third person on the list. Eric Wall is I haven't really met Eric Wall that much, but we were on Bankless together. That's going to come out this week. He was very, very informed. And he has been making that argument recently that if we enable witness pruning for full nodes that are pruned, or yeah, below the assume valid height, that this will be like a free win that we should have been doing all along and actually makes nodes easier, full nodes easier to run in the long term, which is an argument that I'm still thinking about, which I think is correct.

1:51:41So I have no personal beef with any of these people. And I think that what people do is they turn Bitcoin into a purity test where they're like you're 100%, you know, on board with Bitcoin. And if you have any doubt, you know, or if you maybe think an alternative system has interesting properties or interesting trade-offs, you've failed some sort of imaginary purity test, and then you're evil and you must be outcast. Humans are very prone to this. It's like this idea of like a ritual impurity, you know, that, you know, like you're now evil or you're now impure or like you're in the in-group or you're in the out-group or whatever.

1:52:16And I think that a lot of people have seen this in other places outside of Bitcoin and know how stupid it is. And it's just as stupid when people do it in Bitcoin. I've stopped describing myself as a Bitcoin maximalist. Like, I think if you...

1:52:30Vlad CosteaWell, you're a Bitcoin maximalist. Wait, we should distinguish between the terms, right? Because maximalist means maximize. You're trying to maximize the use cases for Bitcoin. The people who call themselves maximalists are conservatives. They think that Bitcoin is fine as it is. Don't touch it. Only use it for what we tell you to use it.

1:52:51Casey RodarmorRight. Yeah. I mean, I guess if that's in that definition of the term, I'm certainly a Bitcoin maximalist. And I think that anybody who listens to this podcast will hear me very clearly saying what I think is wrong with other chains and why I'm not interested in them. But the term Bitcoin maximalist has been essentially poisoned by people just calling themselves Bitcoin maximalists and then being assholes. And when maybe, I don't know, maybe we can rehabilitate it or something like Pepe the Frog. But these people just get tiresome, right?

1:53:25Like, who wants to be yelled at? And if you're not an asshole, who wants to spend all your time yelling at other people? So it doesn't matter what your technical viewpoint is. If you're an asshole, you just look like an asshole. And that's why I sort of stopped calling myself a Bitcoin maximalist. Like, I'm not interested in an imaginary purity test where you're on this side or that side. Like, I think that I want people to run full nodes. I want people to hold their Bitcoin in secure self-sovereign ways.

1:53:51And I'm interested in more people doing that. And if they do other things, then I mean, okay, maybe those things are good or bad, but that doesn't detract from the fact that I want them to use Bitcoin more. And I think that it's not only do you look like an asshole, but it's just very counterproductive. There's sort of a small number of people who will be swayed by these very bombastic sort of arguments. But after a while, you'll really find that you're preaching to the choir and you're not reaching new people.

1:54:24And you've really limited the reach that you can do. And your outreach for Bitcoin will become increasingly ineffective as you try to just crank this same boring narrative of good and evil that is really quite subjective. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm a Bitcoin maximalist. I guess that's for everybody else to decide. I can just tell people what I think and what I think is good and bad and they can decide. I don't know. I'm curious. Do you think that like, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist?

1:54:59Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, but I have to define what that is. It doesn't mean that I agree with Saifedean. It doesn't mean that I agree with Jimmy Song. It means that I want Bitcoin to include every interesting altcoin case that you can find for which there is a market on some layer. So this idea of maximizing what Bitcoin is and taking that share of the market back, I think that's what maximalism is about. I don't think it's about saying, no, no, no, go to some shitcoin to play with your toy money if you like JPEGs.

1:55:30No, make money off of that.

1:55:32Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah. I guess then I am a Bitcoin maximalist. I look at the Bitcoin dominance index. I think it's chilling at around like 40, 46 percent or something. I want that to go up to 100 percent, like straight up.

1:55:45Vlad CosteaNot only that, but sometimes it's concerning. You said this on the Hell Money podcast a few times about Ethereum being centralized by the control of stablecoins. But if you look at the tokens that are on Ethereum and their market cap and the amounts of money that they transact from Tether to USDC to even exchange coins, like I think part of Binance, whatever token they have is on Ethereum. The LEO token by Bitfinex is on Ethereum. If you combine the market caps and volumes of all of these, you see that sometimes they exceed Bitcoin's.

1:56:20And that's a bit concerning when you realize that, okay, Ethereum is this terrible network which has a terrible programming language, which has lots of bugs and leads to all of these situations, which are part of the original design, which did not get changed even after they upgraded to 2.0 for some reason. They did not improve some fundamental flaws. But at the same time, people don't care about that because they have these tokens that they transact on and they see Ethereum like some sort of they don't care if it's centralized.

1:56:52They don't care if ETH will never be money. They just want to move stablecoins. They just want to use this application like whatever, Uniswap or what they have. And I want that to be on Bitcoin under some shape or form. It's just that when we spend so much time fighting and calling stuff like tokens scams, like if it's on Bitcoin, it's fair play with me. I can agree that it pays fees to miners like on Counterparty or Omni. That's not a shitcoin as long as it uses the Bitcoin network.

1:57:28Casey RodarmorYeah, actually, I totally agree.

1:57:31Vlad CosteaThis is also a distinction between a Bitcoin maximalist and the BTC maximalist, meaning that you want the network to be used in more use cases if you're a Bitcoin maximalist and you want the BTC token to be maximized, I guess, if you're a BTC maximalist.

1:57:46Casey RodarmorI think I'm probably both a Bitcoin maximalist and a BTC maximalist, but I wouldn't want to see BTC being maximized, the token, like somehow at the expense of or by destroying other things. I think that there are good reasons to prefer having a single form of money and for that money to be as high market cap as possible. But yeah, the idea that you need to destroy other things to promote your own thing is this very weird negative sum, zero sum game thinking where in reality, you should focus on growing the pie and figure out how to compete.

1:58:25But compete by making that pie bigger, enable more valuable things, enable more use cases. I don't know. For example, bringing stablecoins to Bitcoin makes me a little bit nervous because of the fork choice issues where a stablecoin issuer could have a lot of undue weight over which side of a fork they preferred and would recognize their coins on. I don't know about that, but again, that's not an issue that I'm really going to work on or work out and I think other people can figure that out.

1:58:54But in general, grow the Bitcoin and BTC pie instead of playing these zero sum and in some cases, negative sum games where you actually only win at the expense of others.

1:59:09Vlad CosteaLet me run this maximalist test on you. Do you eat steaks, Casey?

1:59:13Casey RodarmorYeah, sometimes. Yeah, I love steak.

1:59:16Vlad CosteaAre you on a carnivore diet?

1:59:18Casey RodarmorNo, no, I eat all sorts of stuff. I eat this stuff called Huel, which is this meal replacement powder, not for every meal, but it's super convenient. And I wish I could shill a discount code because I probably eat a lot of this stuff every week, but I love it. But I eat just a random diet. I don't know. I like food and I like steak, but I'm not on a carnivore diet.

1:59:41Vlad CosteaI mean, you would get dismissed by Saifedean by now, but let me continue. Are you any type of Christian?

1:59:49Casey RodarmorNot really, no. I mean, technically I'm Jewish. My maternal great grandparents are Jewish and so I'm one quarter Jewish by blood. And according to religious Jews, because it's on my mother's side, that makes me like 100% a Jew. For everybody who's wondering, the Jews are not behind ordinals. The Jew is behind ordinals. And then the rest, the other 75% is just like random white European, mostly. I think I'm one eighth Swedish. I'm one quarter Welsh. And then just random Euro mutt, basically.

2:00:33Vlad CosteaOkay, that's fair.

2:00:35Casey RodarmorOh yeah, and then religion. You asked me about religion. I'm basically an agnostic. That's the easiest way to describe myself.

2:00:40Vlad CosteaI mean, you have a podcast that's called Hell Money.

2:00:44Casey RodarmorIt's kind of a giveaway that I'm not taking any of that too seriously.

2:00:49Vlad CosteaOkay, what's the other litmus test? What kind of hardware wallet do you use?

2:00:54Casey RodarmorColdcard. Damn, now I'm passing the maxi test. Let's go. Coldcard. Let's go.

2:01:01Vlad CosteaOh, that's a maxi choice.

2:01:03Casey RodarmorWhat's that? Yeah, Mk4. USB-C.

2:01:07Vlad CosteaI'm actually an open source maximalist, so I don't recommend Coldcard because they decided to not use an open source license. They use Commons Clause, which is explicitly not open source if you check it out. And I recommend Trezor or BitBox02 or what else. There's even the Passport, which is a shameless clone of the Coldcard, which decided to stay open source. So I would rather recommend that over the Coldcard. But in their book, you would pass the test.

2:01:38Casey RodarmorNice. I'm an intellectual property minimalist. If you go to my website, rodarmor.com. I believe it's rodarmor.com slash copyright. There is a public statement where I dedicate all things that I have ever made and intentionally published in any venue to the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication tool. So literally everything that I do and say, every piece of content that I publish anywhere has no copyright and you are free to do with it whatever you want. I am. Yeah, like, yeah, open source Coldcard.

2:02:21Make your great products even better.

2:02:23Vlad CosteaThey don't want to go open source again. The story is that they forked Trezor code. They renamed some of the files to remove any kind of association with Trezor. And then when they finally made some money, they paid someone to rewrite the code entirely and move from the open source code base to something which is source available. So you can see it, but you cannot use it.

2:02:47Casey RodarmorThat's really weird. Like the thing is, is I think they don't need that. Like their product is so great that I don't really understand. They have such great name recognition. I'm a huge fan of the Opendimes that they make. I've been running ordinal bounties.

2:03:02Vlad CosteaYou have 21 of them on your website.

2:03:04Casey RodarmorSo that's right.

2:03:05Vlad CosteaI did my research.

2:03:06Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah. So like these are from bounties. So I've been running bounties for people to send me rare and exotic sats. And these have been the addresses that I've been posting them. So I think they add this fun physical layer to Bitcoin. This one right here is from Bounty 2. And this one has a sat on it from block 426, I believe. So very, very early sat that somebody submitted to win a bounty. So yeah, Coinkite guys...

2:03:38Vlad CosteaYou have an inscription?

2:03:39Casey RodarmorNo, no, no, no, the sats, you can trace them back to their origin block.

2:03:45Vlad CosteaAnd that's cool.

2:03:46Casey RodarmorYeah. And so that sat was from block 426, I believe. So like that's the thing is I actually think that a lot of companies, I don't know, some of them have weird business models that require like copyright and patents, which I think... copyright and patents are something that I do think are sort of morally wrong. I think you're relying on the state to exercise violence for you in sort of an inappropriate way. But I'm not going to... try not to get preachy with anybody.

2:04:16Awesome. There we go. I guess I think I was going to say that a lot of companies don't need to use intellectual property to protect their business model. Like I own ordinals.com. And that is essentially my personal property. I happened to see that it was available for sale months and months and months ago. And I bought it for $2,000 at the time through one of those like aftermarket sales. And now it is like the second or third result on Google when you search for ordinals.

2:04:50And so essentially, I've taken this, like, I've taken this, this, this land, and then like kind of homesteaded it. And now it's more valuable. And I'm not relying on an intellectual property moat to, like protect some, like use case, you know what I mean? Or protect some value that I think I'm going to create, I think I'm going to make the best thing. And I think people are going to like it. And you know, I might do things like... I'll never add ads to ordinals.com.

2:05:19Like I really don't like ads. They just suck for a lot of reasons. I actually like but not like shilling on podcasts. I actually don't mind shilling on podcasts at all, for different reasons. Like because for ads on websites, you have to do a lot of invasive stuff to make the ads valuable. Because if you don't know who your users are, people are much less willing to pay for ad space.

2:05:39Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, I know about that. Yeah, even for podcasts, it's harder because it's hard to tell advertisers. Okay, who listens to your show? I don't know.

2:05:48Casey RodarmorYep. Yeah, yeah. So I don't collect, I don't have any analytics on I don't have any JavaScript analytics on ordinals.com. I haven't added Google Analytics, and I don't think I ever will. It is behind a Cloudflare proxy. And so that lets me see, like the IP addresses, and like the times of day that people are connecting. But that's, that's it, kind of, and I wouldn't want to add ads that would force me to add analytics to make them valuable. Current ways I'm thinking about monetizing are maybe having a gallery section on the website, where you can pay to like boost your inscription in that gallery.

2:06:21With Lightning, you just like click on an inscription, click on how much you wanted to pay with Lightning, pay some sats, and then it would get upranked by that amount. And like maybe you would like decay over time or something. And, you know, everybody else is free to run the software and make their own sites and have better galleries and fork the code. Some people who are, some kind of BSV shitcoiners forked it with no changes and upgraded from alpha to beta and put it up. And they're free to do that.

2:06:50They are free to try to compete in that way. And I won't stop them. I don't have, I probably have intellectual property. It's not only hard to get rid of. It's often hard to make sure that you don't get it in the first place. I probably have some weird intellectual property that I don't understand that I would have to get rid of, but it's not my intention to use intellectual property to compete. I do everything under an extremely liberal license. And I encourage my competitors to do the same or not and just lose.

2:07:22So yeah, open source is, I'm for sure an open source, open source maximalist.

2:07:28Vlad CosteaI also have an open source magazine, which is called BTCTKVR and you can download it for free. It's on GitHub. You can print it, you can sell it, you can modify it. It has Bitcoin content in three languages, English, Spanish, and French.

2:07:42Casey RodarmorWhat language, what languages do you speak? Like what's your, what's your mother tongue?

2:07:47Vlad CosteaRomanian.

2:07:48Casey RodarmorAh, no way. Okay. Yeah. So I'm like one quarter Romanian Jew. That's where my, my Jewish heritage is from.

2:07:56Vlad CosteaWere they escaping the Holocaust after World War II?

2:08:00Casey RodarmorNo, they came from a town, I think it's called Iași.

2:08:03Vlad CosteaYeah. In Moldova.

2:08:05Casey RodarmorYep. And they, my grandfather came, or great-grandfather came before the Holocaust. He, he didn't, he wasn't fleeing. It's really lucky they got out because obviously I don't know, I don't know if I have any more relatives left in that town. But yeah, Bitcoin, Bitcoin nation, Bitcoin takeover nation, if you know any Romanian Jews in Iași, maybe with the name Leibovitz or Leibovici, those might be my distant ancestors. I forget what I was saying, but then you were saying your other languages you speak, so you speak Romanian as your, as your mother tongue.

2:08:39Vlad CosteaMm-hmm.

2:08:41Casey RodarmorOkay. Got it. Got it. Got it. I was wondering...

2:08:43Vlad CosteaI also speak French and also speak a bit of Italian and I tried to learn Spanish, but I had translators for the French and for the Spanish editions, volunteers who decided they liked the original and made their own. And what I did was to get some funding for someone to put them with nice graphics on pages and stuff like that. They were even printed. So last year I printed like 1,200 copies.

2:09:10Casey RodarmorNice.

2:09:11Vlad CosteaIn total, or maybe 1,500 close to that. I sent a lot of them to El Salvador. I have no idea what happened to them.

2:09:17Never got any feedback, and they were costly. So if anyone is listening and has any idea, please let me know. But yeah, that's like my open source project because I used to write for Bitcoin Magazine, right? And I hate them.

2:09:33Casey RodarmorReally? I have a lot of friends.

2:09:36Vlad CosteaYou're going to the conference, blah, blah. But I know them from the inside and the way that they treat writers. Yeah, I have to send you one of mine. And I just decided to just build my own because that's what Bitcoiners do, right?

2:09:50Casey RodarmorYeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just compete. Just compete for sure.

2:09:54Vlad CosteaYeah. I'm not sure if I compete right now, but I'm pretty sure that I printed more magazines last year than they have.

2:10:02Casey RodarmorNice.

2:10:03Vlad CosteaAnd I gave them away mostly so I lost money. I could have been much richer right now. But coming back to your litmus test, someone in the chat said that there are two more criteria. One is do you eat seed oils?

2:10:17Casey RodarmorYes. Love seed oils. Love, love them. Love them. Give me that canola oil injected into my veins.

2:10:24Vlad CosteaThe other one is do you have at least five children?

2:10:27Casey RodarmorNo, zero children. Zero children. Not doing well on the maxi test.

2:10:32Vlad CosteaNo, you're a spook, man. You're so going to get roasted for these answers. Not for anything technical that you said, but for the reason that you eat seed oils.

2:10:43Casey RodarmorYeah. I mean, when people don't have anything of substance to criticize you for, they will criticize you for things of no substance.

2:10:52Vlad CosteaI can pretty much agree with that. Yeah. So what else did I want to ask you? Oh, yeah. About your background. Like you mentioned that you met Paul Sztorc at Scaling Bitcoin in 2016.

2:11:05Casey RodarmorYep. Yep.

2:11:06Vlad CosteaAnd you also had a Lightning project, which I found that you announced on Telegram at one point, and it's called Agora.

2:11:14Casey RodarmorThat's right.

2:11:15Vlad CosteaAnd you also created this compiler, which is called Just.

2:11:19Casey RodarmorYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, I'm really proud of. Just is a make replacement. Just makes saving and running commands really easy. I encourage everybody to check it out. It's called Just. So it's at github.com/casey/just. It's got very good error messages. Very carefully considered feature set. A lot of features at this point. Just makes life programming easier. Yeah. Just is actually probably my most successful open source project so far. I started working on it in, I believe 2016. And it was one of my first Rust projects.

2:11:57It used to be a shell script and that I would use to call make more conveniently. And then I started to rewrite it in Rust and kind of turned to a learning project. And then it just slowly started to get more and more popular. It got to the front page of Hacker News a few weeks ago, which got it up over 10K stars, which is absolutely insane. But yeah, it's a great tool. I encourage people to check it out. So yeah, I don't know. I grew up in the Bay Area.

2:12:32I dropped out of high school when I was like 15 or 16. I kind of didn't know what I wanted to do. I was depressed. I didn't like school. So I just kind of did whatever. I worked at a movie theater. Shout out to the California theater in Berkeley. Eventually when I was 21, I took a programming class and I really, really liked it. I was like, I didn't really understand the point of school beforehand. And then I learned to program and I was like, okay, this is great.

2:12:57I'm just going to do this. I had been going to community college and I hadn't been the best student. But every time that I like dropped out or failed classes, I would play these like weird administrative tricks to make sure that those grades never got on my GPA. So even after dropping out of community college, like three times, I had a 4.0. I kind of fooled them. And then I was able to transfer to UC Berkeley. I studied computer science. I got a degree in computer science.

2:13:27What did I do? I studied abroad in Sweden. So I learned Swedish. I used to speak it really good. Now I speak it like, okay. Then when I got back, what did I do? I finally graduated. I had taken so long, they tried to kick me out, but it didn't stick. So they let me come back and do one more semester and finish everything else. Then I entered my spook years. So I got a job at Google where I worked as a site reliability engineer at Google.

2:14:06I worked on a team called Traffic Team, which is the team that sort of is the all purpose team for dealing with load balancing and managing data center traffic. And so I was essentially like, I was an SRE, which means that I was like part software engineer, part sysadmin. And I was going on call and that like broke me. Like I could not go on call in such a stressful environment. Like you have to solve these really, really complicated problems. And they're real emergencies. Like the company is losing money.

2:14:42You have to solve these things. So I kind of burned out in that role, but I was lucky that I was able to transfer. I transferred to the Google Maps team where I worked on. I don't remember what the code name was called, but that JavaScript redesign of Google Maps, where they sort of got rid of the old MapQuest style sidebar and made everything like floating widgets on the map. That was like when I joined and I just did like JavaScript, graphical JavaScript stuff and like wrote HTML and CSS and whatever for that.

2:15:14Wasn't super happy. I didn't really like being a big cog in a small cog in a big machine.

2:15:20Vlad CosteaThat's why you became a spook.

2:15:22Casey RodarmorYeah. So then I broke off and I quit. And then I started getting into like generative art. Like I started making generative art. I did some like audio reactive visuals for live music. You can actually see a lot of that on my website, rodarmor.com. What did I do then? Then I moved to Denmark because I could get this weird green card that you qualify for based on points. While I was there, it was really cold and really expensive. So I took a vacation to Taiwan, which is why I love Taiwan so much because it was a great time and it's an awesome country.

2:15:59And then what else? Then I went back. I don't remember when in all that timeline I got into Bitcoin, but around that time, I think I got a job at Chaincode Labs, which is a Bitcoin R&D company that does open source R&D development on Bitcoin. They had an office in New York. They still have an office in New York, but they did then as well. And I did basically Bitcoin Core development. And if you search for me on GitHub, you can see that I've made, I think, like 16 commits to Bitcoin Core.

2:16:34I don't really advertise that I'm a Bitcoin Core developer because my contributions have been relatively minor.

2:16:39Vlad CosteaActually on YouTube, there are a couple of videos that you named this great Bitcoin Core developer does stuff.

2:16:46Casey RodarmorYeah, exactly. Working on Bitcoin just wasn't... like, it was hard. It's a slow moving code base. It's very conservative. It's all written in C++. And at the time I was getting into Rust and I really liked Rust and I just didn't want to write C++ anymore. So that wasn't really a good fit. Now I regret that I didn't try to figure out something that worked. The guys who run Chaincode Labs are very flexible. And I think if I had said, hey, listen, just working on Bitcoin Core is not working for me.

2:17:16Let me do some weird shit. But related to Bitcoin, they probably would have let me. So actually, if I had stayed at Chaincode Labs, we probably would have had Ordinals sooner and it would have come out of Chaincode Labs. Or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe they would have thought it was silly or whatever. So I quit and then I became a spook for real and started working for Facebook. I worked for Oculus for a while. I didn't really work on VR, though. We worked on this thing, which was this API that developers would use to make VR games for high scores and cloud saves and stuff like that.

2:17:57And while I was there, the main contribution that I made was I started writing this tool that would just generate all this boilerplate code. And that had a very high impact. I wrote this thing. We had a lot of boilerplate and it started generating more and more boilerplate code so that programmers could just edit YAML files and then it would just spit out all of this code that they didn't need to write. But I was very unmotivated. I thought that VR is niche and didn't really believe that it was going to take over the world.

2:18:26And so I started doing less and less. And all I would do is edit a YAML file once a week and spit out all this code. And my manager noticed, or I think one of my co-workers noticed in a peer review cycle. And they said their peer feedback was, Casey is doing the minimum possible amount of work not to get fired. And in a feedback review with my boss, he slid that feedback on a piece of paper and was like, so what do you think about this?

2:18:55And I was like, let me stop you there. I quit. And then I did a bunch of random shit, including some what people maybe consider shitcoining, trying to work on Grin. And I basically did custody for a startup that was trying to get investors access to Grin, which was this kind of interesting privacy coin that happened a while ago. It's like the Mimblewimble implementation.

2:19:20Vlad CosteaIt's one of the best of shitcoins. It had a fair launch. It's pretty pure from this point of view. Unknown founder, no pre-mine. I guess you can speak of worse shitcoins. I guess this is in top three, I think. Monero and Grin are the purest, but go on.

2:19:37Casey RodarmorYeah. So we tried to make something where we would get unsophisticated investors or people who weren't technical access to Grin. So I did custody there.

2:19:47Vlad CosteaBut it's such a bad store of value. I don't really understand.

2:19:53Casey RodarmorDefinitely. Yeah. And I also think that actually, I think it's hard to do other things if you're not a good store of value. I think it's hard to really compete on currency if you're not a good store of value. But so I did that and then didn't do that. That didn't work out. Then I forget what else I did after that. I worked on Agora with my friend, Sönke. I worked on other random projects. And then I'd have to go back in archives and see what I was doing around then.

2:20:28That's when I was brainwashed by the FBI and turned into a Bitcoin sleeper cell spook. That's why I don't remember what I was doing at that time. And then in early 2021, I started working on this. And that kind of brings us up to the present day in case anybody wants to know all the random shit that I've done so far.

2:20:50Vlad CosteaAbout a year ago, you were still working on Agora, because I found a message from you on a Telegram channel that's called Lightning Liquidity Pool. And that's where people find other peers to open channels. And what's Agora? What was it about?

2:21:07Casey RodarmorSo you can still use Agora. I don't know if it's bit rotted or needs to be updated, but it's on GitHub. github.com/agora-org/agora. And it is just a web server where you can put up files and charge people to download them with Lightning. So you like just whatever files you want, and then you can have this little manifest that says how much you want to charge for each file. And then when somebody tries to click the file, they'll get a Lightning URL or a Lightning invoice that they can pay, and then they can download the file.

2:21:40And I worked on that with my friend, Sönke. It was basically 50-50, the two of us. And we just never really got adoption. It was hard to set up. You had to have your own Lightning node. It also was, we didn't have user uploads. I think maybe that was part of the problem, that if users had been able to upload things, maybe that would have helped instead of having a curated selection that was by the site person. But yeah, it still works, and it's open source, and anybody is free to use it and try to extend it.

2:22:13I'm not really looking at PRs or issues there anymore because I just don't have the time to. I think maybe there's a fork or two. I'm not sure. I still see messages in the Telegram every once in a while. I think that if somebody wants to build on it, one thing that would be very popular would be basically like pirate Netflix, where you just have a server with a big hard drive and every movie that's ever been made on that hard drive, and you charge people like 10 cents a movie to download it.

2:22:39So this is not legal advice, but it is financial advice. Okay. So you could do that with Agora very easily.

2:22:52Vlad CosteaSo basically Filecoin without the coin.

2:22:55Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, Filecoin. Once you take away the coin, there's just files. So yeah, I guess you're right.

2:23:02Vlad CosteaBut on Lightning, which actually scales.

2:23:05Casey RodarmorYep, yep, exactly, yeah.

2:23:07Vlad CosteaSo why did you not choose to work on RGB or whatever?

2:23:14Casey RodarmorSo one is probably just that I like doing my own thing, you know, and those projects are already very well established. I'm always really drawn to things where I think that if I'm not the one to do them, maybe they won't happen. So they have to be something that I feel is like kind of unique. And I don't know if that's ego or it's maximizing my impact on the world, but that's just what appeals to me. And RGB and Taro I think are going to succeed or fail on their own merits, and there's not much that I can do to move the needle there.

2:23:47And the technical reason is that they're not really optimized for this really hard digital money, digital collectible use case. This is really optimized for sort of high value NFTs, basically. If you look on Ethereum, a lot of the highest value NFTs are on chain or are moving on chain. That's kind of what collectors prefer. And so I made a lot of choices to fit that use case really well, and things like scalability were really secondary. And RGB and Taro are both intended to be extremely scalable. So they're really different market segments, and Taro and RGB are... Ordinals and inscriptions are actually also vibes maximizing.

2:24:46If you look into the technical details of how it works, even the technical details are designed to be fun and interesting and have things to discover. Like you could find a sat. Okay, so every sat in the block that's not the first is common. The first sat in the block is uncommon. The first sat after the first block after a difficulty adjustment is rare. And the first sat after the first block of the halving is epic. And every six halvings, the halving and the difficulty adjustment happen on the same block.

2:25:26And that sat is legendary. And you can make an inscription on a common sat, and most of the inscriptions that we've seen have been on commons. But you can also make inscriptions on rare sats, which is like the absolute height of bling. That is like balling out of control if you make an inscription on a rare sat. And that hasn't happened yet. And so there are all these technical details where really ordinals and inscriptions are fun optimized. They're optimized for people to have fun with them. Whereas RGB and Taro are pursuing different sets of goals, which I think are great goals.

2:26:05But they're simply different from what I wanted to make ordinals.

2:26:11Vlad CosteaYeah, I have two more maxi test questions for you from the chat. One of them is do you lift weights?

2:26:20Casey RodarmorI do, yep. Check it out. No, I'm not going to show that direction. But yeah, I have weights in my home. You have to believe me.

2:26:30Vlad CosteaAnd do you post pictures at the gym with the hashtag proof of work?

2:26:34Casey RodarmorNo, I don't. No, I don't. I go to Live Oak Strength, which is a great gym, very small gym. The guy who runs it is awesome. And no, I'm always just lifting, you know.

2:26:50Vlad CosteaThere is this depressing comment that I really want to read from Pledit. And he says, if we knew in 2021 and 2017 when people were debating Taproot and SegWit that people uploading JPEGs were going to have a 75% discount to regular transactions, then Taproot and SegWit would have never been passed.

2:27:15You dropped out.

2:27:16Casey RodarmorYep, I'm back.

2:27:17Vlad CosteaSo basically what he said, and I guess this was recorded, is that if he knew or if the community knew about the 75% discount to upload JPEGs, then I guess SegWit and Taproot would have never been passed.

2:27:34Casey RodarmorYeah, I mean, if you want to shoot yourself in the foot over things that you, over really frivolous things, you are free to do that. I mean, I don't want to be too negative, but SegWit and Taproot were done for completely different reasons. For a completely different set of benefits. And we have reaped the rewards of those benefits. And you can't have one without the other. So like, I hope you consider those technical trade-offs more carefully. And maybe you'll come to the conclusion that those upgrades were worth it, even if they enable some people to do things that you don't like on the chain.

2:28:15Vlad CosteaYou know, I would love to hear you on a debate with Eric Voskuil.

2:28:19Casey RodarmorOh, that'd be an interesting debate. I wonder what we would talk about. I think he's really interesting. He's like a real hardcore ancap. I think he's always been an interesting voice in this space.

2:28:30Vlad CosteaI think he's a true maximalist. And he doesn't larp about anything. He doesn't need to prove anything to the world. And that's something which I respect. He also wrote one of the best books about Bitcoin.

2:28:40Casey RodarmorYep.

2:28:41Vlad CosteaIt's also underrated.

2:28:43Casey RodarmorLibbitcoin, I believe? Or one of the primary authors?

2:28:45Vlad CosteaHe still maintains it, yes.

2:28:47Casey RodarmorI don't know anything about the book he wrote, though.

2:28:51Vlad CosteaIt's called Cryptoeconomics. Basically, it's a series of articles that he wrote in time. I know this because I had him on the show like three years ago. But he wrote an article every time someone would ask him a question. So next time someone would ask it again, he would point to that article. And in time, he gathered lots of articles. And basically, the book is a combination of his understanding of the fundamentals of Bitcoin from a technical point of view. And Misesian economics, of which he is a big fan.

2:29:23And I guess this is another litmus test for Bitcoin maximalists. What do you think about Austrian economics? Do you read any?

2:29:32Casey RodarmorI have, yeah. I think Rothbard is very funny. He's one of the best speakers in economics I've ever heard. He's incredibly engaging. I'm not a specialist, but I think some things are a little bit wonky. In particular, the idea of praxeology. I think the idea that you can just noodle on economics and come to these universal truths, I think that's a little wonky. I think you have to, in some cases, kind of observe people and how people are and what they want and how they act. And you might also need to collect data.

2:30:10And I think that that is something that they're not a big fan of. My favorite economist is David Friedman, who is definitely a libertarian. One of the hardcorest ancaps there are.

2:30:25Vlad CosteaAnd he's the son of Milton.

2:30:27Casey RodarmorThat's right. Yeah.

2:30:28Vlad CosteaThat's also worth a mention.

2:30:29Casey RodarmorYep. Son of Milton Friedman, father of Patri Friedman, who is the seasteading guy and also the startup nation guy. But David Friedman is not a Hayekian or a Rothbardian or a Mises guy. He believes that collecting data is important. He believes that you can't necessarily just reason your way from first principles into universal truths. About things like economics. And he has extremely interesting ideas about how we could do things. He also doesn't make moral arguments. I'm sure he has moral opinions, but he doesn't consider those to be persuasive arguments.

2:31:15And I'm inclined to agree. I think that when you say something is good or bad or something is evil and not evil, and that's what you base your thinking on, you don't make very good arguments. And he's always avoided that. And that's why he's one of my favorite thinkers. So, you know, I think I agree on a lot of things with Mises kind of people. But when you really dig into the specifics, I think I probably disagree. So, yeah, failed that one, too.

2:31:43Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess. I like praxeology for the simple reason that it instills some healthy principles in not trying to observe behavior on a mass scale. I mean, from a religious point of view, if you believe in that, it can be healthy for a free society to exist. If you don't teach that and you don't tell people that they're unique and different and you cannot measure what they are, you're going to end up with some sort of Orwellian system. And I guess that's the way towards which we are heading.

2:32:15And I don't think we as individuals, you and I make too much of a difference. But we can still be real maximalists and have kids and feed them with the chicken that we grow in our own yard and teach them all the good stuff so that they read Saifedean at the age of 10.

2:32:35Casey RodarmorYeah, totally. Yeah, I think it's important to realize that a lot of the time, things that we think are very important differences are really not, are really just quibbles over details. Yeah, Friedman is a hardcore ancap. He even thinks that we can privatize security and rights enforcement, that those things can be provided by the market, essentially, and that market dynamics would emerge that would perform the duties of the state or the things that the state does that are useful. I don't know if I think that would work, but I think it's very interesting.

2:33:15I'm very much, in terms of like how I think about myself politically, what I think is I wish that there was more competition between governments. I think that when governments have constraints, and when people are free to, for example, do things like go to another country, or move to another city with different laws, or they're able to live in one country and get a job in another country, that these sorts of things increases the degree to which states must actually do things that are useful in order to earn their tax dollars, in order to earn the desire of humans to seek out the citizenship and retain the citizenship of that country.

2:34:00I don't know what the ultimate configuration of nation states is that is the best for human flourishing, but I believe that the direction that I think we should go is a direction of more competition. I'm very interested in people starting new countries. I'm very interested in people creating zones of freedom that they can operate in, whether that be economic or political freedom. I'm very interested in things that allow people to evade taxes, because if you can evade taxes, the government might have to lower them in order to convince you to pay them.

2:34:41It might have to provide you useful things in exchange for your taxes. I think that competition is hopefully increasing, and hopefully might help us avoid that Orwellian nightmare that I think we all feel that we're headed towards. I think the world in which there are 10,000 nation states and they all have to compete for citizens and no one of them is too large is a world where even if we don't have a pure ancapistan, there'll be a real human flourishing because they simply have to compete with each other.

2:35:20The analogy that I always use is like restaurants where you have absolute freedom over which restaurant you go to, but you don't have any say over the menu or the prices. Restaurant owners can put what they want on the menu and charge whatever they want, but you don't have to go there. The equilibrium that we reach is a lot of really great restaurants, because humans decide which restaurant they go to and the better ones will get more people and the worst ones will go out of business.

2:35:50That's what I hope happens to nation states, that simply they're forced to compete in a way that makes them not do useless things and waste our money and hurt us.

2:36:03Vlad CosteaThis was a lot more elaborate than I expected. It goes to show that they train their spooks very well down there.

2:36:11Casey RodarmorBro, if they train their spooks to fucking regurgitate that, holy shit, we are in trouble.

2:36:17Vlad CosteaI was about to ask you what kind of books you have behind you and if those are PlayStation games.

2:36:23Casey RodarmorOh, no PlayStation games. Here, let me get one. Number one is a book on Jewish law. I'm really fascinated by legal systems. I think that legal systems have a lot to teach us about human organization and how legal systems evolve to solve problems. If you sort of ignore for a second the coercive nature of the state, oftentimes legal systems are very clever. In particular, I really think that they all have something to teach us. Actually, these are two really good ones to put together. So this is a book about English common law and this is a book about Jewish law.

2:37:07And you can see that in both cases they are trying to solve a lot of the same problems. They're trying to avoid violence. They're trying to help people do productive things. They're trying to resolve disputes. Many of the same kinds of disputes like somebody, neighbors, people living together in close proximity is a source of disputes. There's tons in both systems on how to resolve these disputes and avoid them happening in the first place. I'm a big fan of common law. I think it has a lot to teach us about a system that kind of evolves.

2:37:39Maybe that's something that the Mises people will like. They probably like common law as well. This is a book called Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. It's a book by David Friedman. It's about different legal systems. So Chinese law, pirate law, Romani law, Irish law. This is a book on linear and geometric algebra that I have not read at all. But it's because I'm interested in computer graphics and computer graphics uses linear algebra a lot. I love linear algebra. This is Nick Land's Fanged Noumena. Nick Land is a now exiled and shamed thinker.

2:38:21He basically invented a lot of the crazy cyberpunk aesthetics. I mean, I can't even summarize Nick Land. But yeah, these are things. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think about my book selection?

2:38:37Vlad CosteaAre you asking me or the chat?

2:38:39Casey RodarmorEither.

2:38:40Vlad CosteaI mean, I was thinking right now about the cyberpunk aesthetics and I guess they were mostly promoted after the novels got published. So maybe in the films of James Cameron with The Terminator, which was very futuristic with the lights, the neons and everything. And there was also Blade Runner.

2:39:01What else is a cyberpunk movie? Like, obviously, nowadays it's popular because of the game Cyberpunk 2077, which was very big a few years ago.

2:39:15Casey RodarmorAnd that's... Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, like the idea that...

2:39:20Vlad CosteaIs it L-A-N-D?

2:39:21Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah. Land.

2:39:23Vlad CosteaOh, okay. English philosopher. Yeah, I was not aware of this.

2:39:35Casey RodarmorHe's a controversial figure at this point.

2:39:39Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, scientific racism and eugenics. That's not something to get associated with, I guess. Oh, there's also something about Bitcoin. In August 2019, Land is still working on a book about Bitcoin.

2:39:55Casey RodarmorYeah, I mean, it just goes to show you Bitcoin is a big enough tent for people you disagree with.

2:40:03Vlad CosteaI mean, there is this saying that Bitcoin is for enemies, right? But we only apply it when it's convenient and the people are not really enemies. When enemies use it, we consider it an attack and it means that we must act. And that kind of defeats the purpose of a decentralized permissionless network. And it means that these words are just words. And I don't agree with that. I validate blocks. I'm a validator. I guess so. I'm not going to run any kind of code which censors the network activity.

2:40:42Casey RodarmorYeah, like, I mean, legal systems are designed to enable people to live in harmony and avoid violence, even when they have very bitter disputes, right? Like, I mean, property rights saying this thing is yours and not that other person. And so we can adjudicate disputes. We can avoid violence, things like that. And Bitcoin is very similar. Bitcoin is a kind of money which has rules that help people use it and avoid violence, even when they might otherwise. It can be made more secure. So it's hard to confiscate and it disincentivizes people from even trying to confiscate it.

2:41:21So, I mean, yeah, Bitcoin is really for people you have bitter conflicts with. And by using it, they maybe don't become friends, but you avoid violence and you're all sort of contributing in this interesting way to the same economic system. And that's really the whole point. It's not a great strategy to try to convince everybody to believe what you believe, right? There are just going to be people who don't believe you. The best strategy is to create things that enable people who you don't even like or don't agree with to do useful things, which is why I think this purity test is so unuseful.

2:42:02What if there's somebody who hates Bitcoin, they just loathe it, but they find it the best way to pay for goods and services or the best way to save for their future, for their children's future. Don't we want that person to use Bitcoin? Can't they continue cursing Bitcoin till the day they die and engage in the most outrageous shitcoinery and still actually have contributed to our health and security by their mutually beneficial economic activity using the Bitcoin network? Yeah, of course. And is it important to try to outcast that person for being a shitcoiner?

2:42:41Probably counterproductive.

2:42:44Vlad CosteaI agree with that. But I guess your point of view doesn't sell books and doesn't sell tickets to steak dinners. And I'm being mean right now. But it seems like there's this disconnect between Twitter and real life. These people are not like that in person. They can be a lot more reasonable. But they found out that they created this echo chamber where they farm engagement. And whatever it is that they say becomes like a gospel for their followers. And it's a bit dangerous. I have very big concerns.

2:43:19Like, you don't give me spook vibes, whatever. But Michael Saylor does. Because he might seem nice. He might seem like this big Bitcoin bull who's buying stuff and he's turning himself into the gigachad who is controlling or whatever, encouraging some sort of hive mind to develop. I'm speaking in buzzwords right now. But what he actually does is to centralize Bitcoin around himself. Like, where does this guy come from? He started educating people about Bitcoin less than one year after he landed on the scene. He started to get the spotlight at conferences.

2:43:57Like, he sells more tickets than Nick Szabo, which to me is a bit okay. This is where we're at with adoption. But the most dangerous stuff is that he's not for privacy. He believes that Bitcoin should be like gold, meaning that it's going to have custodians and you traded on somebody's balance sheet. Meaning that institutions traded for you and you don't have to deal with all of that trouble to use blockchains or whatever, or side chains or second layers. And I'm pretty sure that this is the direction in which MicroStrategy is heading.

2:44:30And if you want to get more conspirational than this, you have to look up the distance between the MicroStrategy HQ and the CIA HQ. It's like 30 minutes away by car. And not only that, but if you look at what MicroStrategy does, it's kind of intriguing to me that people think it's such a great company when all they have is... gold.

2:44:55Casey RodarmorRight. Yeah. I mean, I try not to impute any hidden motives to people. I don't know if Michael Saylor is a spook, but I agree on all of those points about what he's doing. I think that there are some people who want Bitcoin to quietly fit into the legacy system and they want it to really fully be a part of that legacy system. When in fact, Bitcoin was designed not to fit into that system. Bitcoin was designed to resist control and to actually violently, in some ways, wrest control away from the government.

2:45:38This is one thing some people say about inscriptions. What if somebody put some illegal content on the blockchain? Well, what did you think would happen when Bitcoin eroded the ability of nation states to print money, issue debt and collect taxes? Did you think that they were just going to go quietly into that sweet night? No, they're going to fight and they must be resisted. The idea that if somebody puts a copyrighted JPEG or a nasty image on the blockchain, this will somehow give them the pretext that they need to attack the network and win.

2:46:16You're just confused about the network. Bitcoin is a network that is designed to resist the nation state and to take away its power. That's what it's for. I'm not totally negative on people using Bitcoin in a custodial way because I do hope that they use it. But yeah, I agree that huge custodians having the vast majority of Bitcoin just amassing golden hoards like Smaug, the dragon, that is not ideal. It would be much better if it was in the hands of a bunch of internet weirdos. That's not the direction that I want to see Bitcoin go.

2:46:54I don't know. Do you have any ideas about what the next 10 years are going to be like? What happens? Where do we go from here in terms of how much integration happens with the legacy system? Does the nation state wake up and fight us or do they continue just letting us win?

2:47:14Vlad CosteaAre we really winning if we get incorporated? That's a difficult dilemma to figure out. What does it mean to win? Does it need to replace the fiat? Because that's another reason why I think Michael Saylor is a spook. Because he tells you never use your Bitcoin, never sell your Bitcoin, just hold it and borrow US dollars against it. What does that mean in plain economics? It means that you are increasing demand for another type of currency and you're using it. And for as long as it's being used, it's going to be there because fiat money depends on this demand.

2:47:48There is trillions of dollars being printed, but as long as there is demand for it, it's fine. It's only going to break the moment when people stop accepting it and they say this is shit.

2:48:00Casey RodarmorYep. Yep. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a reality that Bitcoin doesn't serve some of the needs yet that people have that are served by fiat currencies. So we can't get off it entirely. It's tough. Being very volatile just makes it hard to use. I've been really surprised that nation states haven't reacted worse against Bitcoin. I thought for a long time that there was going to be real... If anybody's familiar with e-gold or Liberty Reserve, these are these old digital monies, private digital monies, that were shut down by the government very handily and that never happened to Bitcoin.

2:48:46But I was always expecting that... I didn't know if it could be shut down, but I was always expecting that they would try really hard and they haven't, which is weird. One thing is that I think that nation states are not these evil masterminds. The reason that they suck is often really because they're stupid and disorganized and they have a lot of competing incentives that prevent them from acting effectively, which I think maybe has contributed to the fact that we haven't seen a real attack on Bitcoin.

2:49:22They're just kind of dumb. They just leave it alone until it's too big. But yeah, I mean, dude, borrowing against your Bitcoin and getting leverage is a great way to get wrecked, right? BlockFi users got absolutely wrecked by depositing their Bitcoin with BlockFi and taking out loans. And then BlockFi was engaged in shitcoinery either directly or by proxy and now those users have lost their coins forever.

2:49:52Vlad CosteaYeah, it's pretty insane. And we have to define what winning means. When do we win? When Bitcoin goes to one million dollars or when there is no dollar to denominate Bitcoin against because we use Bitcoin as a unit of account? Do we win when there are a million users who trade with MicroStrategy or do we win when there are 50,000 users who run full nodes? I'm not sure if we are at 50,000 right now, but maybe you're helping.

2:50:24Casey RodarmorI hope so. I think we win. I don't think fiat currency ever goes away because I think that nation states, if they just stop managing their currencies badly, can provide a useful service in their currencies. In some sense, I think the point that we win economically is when nation states are so fenced in by Bitcoin, where if they make weird rules, people just avoid them and use Lightning. If they print a lot of money, everybody just buys more Bitcoin with that money. Essentially, this principle of competition that I was referring to earlier, where they can't do the shitty things with fiat money that we all agree are harmful.

2:51:11Once they're forced to compete, they'll probably be forced to compete by having reasonable monetary policies, having low or zero inflation over the long term. Certainly, having less inflation, maybe playing fewer weird games with intervention in financial markets simply because they can't when they're forced to hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset because it makes the most sense. Maybe Bitcoin will still be more volatile than fiat currencies, but because of them being forced to compete, those fiat currencies will actually just be much better managed and will not have these deleterious properties that we all dislike about them.

2:51:57So I don't see Bitcoin as ever, well, I don't know. Or maybe they just fall apart. Maybe at some point they just fall apart and nobody wants them anymore and Bitcoin is stable enough that we all use it and we get hyper Bitcoinization. But I think either of those would be fine by me. Everybody just uses Bitcoin awesome or nation states have to suck less. That'd be awesome, too.

2:52:19Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess your hypothesis that we get small city states which compete against each other is somewhat preferable to a full fledged anarchy, you know, because as much as I like and embrace chaos, it's not for everyone. And a lot of people cannot really exist without someone telling them what to do. And I used to think that it's dumb and they need to figure out what their life is about and get their shit together. But it doesn't work like that. I mean, it's very hard to when you're super young and you're very competitive with everyone else, it's easy for you to criticize and say, why don't you guys catch up?

2:53:03But later in life, you realize that even you yourself have limitations and you're more sympathetic with other people.

2:53:11Casey RodarmorYep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think the thing that like a blind spot for a lot of anarchists is just, you know, if the state does anything useful, it's avoiding violence, a certain kind of like out in the streets kind of violence that you see in places where the rule of law is like disrupted, or you see in earlier human history where violence was much more frequent, and violence is so destructive. And, you know, the state, a nation state that has a monopoly on violence is not like a perfect solution.

2:53:44But it kind of works. It might be better than other alternatives. And like, I would love to live in an anarchist paradise. But if you make me choose between an anarchist paradise, where violence is much, much more common, and sort of a nation state of some kind where there's rule of law, I will pick the nation state with rule of law, because I think that that violence is very unappealing to me. And I think it's very unappealing to a lot of other people. And I think just imagining that it would work out is not useful.

2:54:20You need to build things that provide people an alternative that show that it can work and expand the sphere of, you know, human freedom. And don't wind up leading to a bunch of weird violence because you've got like, you know, because it's like Mogadishu or whatever, you know, not to pick on Mogadishu, Mogadishu, Somalis have a really interesting clan based legal custom, which does a great job of avoiding violence in a lot of ways is a unique set of circumstances, just referring to the fact that, you know, there's been a lot of violence in Somalia.

2:54:54And so like, when the nation state crumbles, it can be very, it can be it can be very, very bad. It can be very, very violent. And I think nobody should like want that. So I really hope for a peaceful transition, where the world really looks a lot like it does now. And maybe there's some nation states, but they just suck less, you know, they suck a lot less.

2:55:16Vlad CosteaAnd where do you see ordinals in this large picture of small nation states?

2:55:21Casey RodarmorI don't know. I mean, just being this like really cool form of permanent art and culture that people are like, you know, putting graffiti on the Bitcoin monolith, essentially. And yeah, just like fun art and culture, you know, like in the citadels, right? If we get the citadels, what do you think people are going to put on their walls? You know?

2:55:43Super stupid idea, but whatever.

2:55:45Vlad CosteaI mean, I can explain to you when the meme came out, I was still at Bitcoin Magazine. And there was I don't want to mention his name, but one of the co-owners came into a morning call and said, Why don't you guys write about citadels today? Like, that's such a dumb idea. Like, how about you get all Bitcoiners to live in one place that's known for the outside world, and they can just launch a missile and kill everyone who's using the network?

2:56:12Or much more than that, even if you don't care about that, and it's super decentralized, and it works. I think that the purpose of Bitcoin is to make the world around you better, as opposed to give up on the outside world and say, you know, you guys are stupid, I'm gonna move into my own citadel, and I'm gonna live with like-minded people. And we're all gonna be rich. And we're all gonna have a lot of Bitcoin. There are no social classes, which of course is a utopia.

2:56:38There is no distinction. I even hate the pleb culture, because basically, it's imposing on your label, which means that you must always be humble. And you can never be much more than that. Like, you're not supposed to make money off of your podcast, because you're a pleb. You're not supposed to act in a certain way or speak nasty stuff against Saifedean's books, because you're supposed to like that. It's part of the culture. If you're a pleb, you must embrace this set of values. Otherwise, you get kicked out of the community.

2:57:10This is why my podcast is not popular, by the way.

2:57:14Casey RodarmorYou don't really fit into any category, right? Like, it's not like, yeah.

2:57:19Vlad CosteaI have my audience, but at the same time, it's very hard to find reasonable Bitcoiners. And right now, I might market this as the intermediate Bitcoin podcast, which means that you're not a newbie anymore. You outgrew Pomp, you outgrew McCormack, you outgrew Livera, you outgrew maybe Saylor and Breedlove and whatever. And then you're searching for something with, like, I try to have discussions with builders, with people who actually build stuff. People ask me, okay, so you're not telling me to buy Bitcoin. You're not telling me to invest my money.

2:57:55How do I make money off of listening to your show? And I'm like, these people have projects and companies. Why don't you invest in them? If you like them, there's some value there.

2:58:08Casey RodarmorDo you ever have very technical conversations with developers who are doing protocol level stuff?

2:58:14Vlad CosteaI had some very intense interviews with Peter Todd when he was trying to explain why tail emission is a good idea. And it's very hard to argue with Peter Todd because he has an answer for pretty much every question. It's like playing chess. And at one point you have to concede for the sake of being nice and being the host, you know, for having him once again. I mean, I'm not saying I would insult him. He's super smart, but I don't always agree with him. And I still have to be nice.

2:58:46I also had some discussions with the Wasabi people, but you don't like them?

2:58:52Casey RodarmorNo, no, no, no. I like them fine. I like I like them fine.

2:58:55Vlad CosteaFor example, I had Yuval who designed the WabiSabi protocol and he's like Greg Maxwell genius. But this comes with tradeoffs sometimes because he is moody and it's very hard to get him in a mental state where he is willing to share information. He tends to be a bit shy, but once he opens up, he's a super genius. Like, it's very hard to have a proper conversation with him. But I did have lots of developers. I'm sorry for the ones that I don't remember right now.

2:59:30Casey RodarmorBut I find that what you mentioned is very... Very smart people are often not very good at expressing their ideas like they just their brain goes at like a million miles an hour. And so they can say things that are maybe true, but it's not obvious why they're true or the additional information that they're thinking about that makes it true. One of my favorite devs and also obviously a controversial one is Jeremy Rubin. I love Jeremy Rubin.

2:59:56Vlad CosteaI was going to ask about that.

2:59:59Casey RodarmorOh, sure. Yeah, I'm friends with Jeremy. And yeah, I think sometimes he's so smart that it's very hard to see why his ideas make sense. And I struggle to understand some of his ideas, but he's incredibly smart.

3:00:16Vlad CosteaYou guys have a lot in common, but the difference is that you built it and he had to ask permission to build it. I mean, yeah, well, not build it.

3:00:25Casey RodarmorYeah, exactly. Yeah, he built it. But yeah, that was also very intentional on my part. When I was at Chaincode Labs, I think I don't remember if we were having a block size debate, but when I saw the block size debate, I just had no desire to engage with that kind of environment. I was very pro SegWit. I liked SegWit. I thought it was good, but it just seemed awful. It just seemed like political. You had to go out and you had to be a soldier. And I didn't want to do that.

3:00:57And so Ordinals was very intentionally designed to not have to require any kind of change from the Bitcoin network. And there are no changes that I would propose to Bitcoin to make Ordinals better. Ordinals is designed so Bitcoin can ignore it completely. And this was because God bless Jeremy for being willing to try to move the rock up the hill. But I did not want to engage in that political thing. So if I came up with something that required a change to Bitcoin, even if I thought that it was better than Ordinals, I probably would not propose it.

3:01:36I would probably be like, okay, well, that's going to be hard or it's not going to happen. So I better think of a way to do it without requiring a change to Bitcoin. And Ordinals would have worked on the Satoshi client. I could have built Ordinals on the Satoshi client. No lie. The data storage would have been inefficient, but I could have done it some sort of same thing like in a script output commit to some data with a particular hash. And then when it's spent, require that that data be revealed in the input.

3:02:12And it would have been less efficient. It would have been uglier. But inscriptions and Ordinals could have been done almost unmodified on the day one Satoshi client 100 percent.

3:02:26Vlad CosteaYeah, I like Jeremy as a person. I think he's a bit weird and it's very hard for him to fit in this culture. He has this awkward side with the pictures that he takes with the takes that he tweets. He's not the likable Saifedean type. By the way, what do you think of guns? That's another test.

3:02:48Casey RodarmorOh, I find guns are interesting. I think that the government should fear the people. I recently added support to ord to support STL model files so that you could inscribe STL model files. STL model files are a 3D CAD format for making 3D shapes, including 3D printed firearms. The support for STL files was intentionally so that people could inscribe things like the FGC-9 in an inscription. FGC-9 is the Fuck Gun Control 9 by the late and great JStark. It is being used in Myanmar by rebels to fight the regime there.

3:03:34But I'm not a firearm enthusiast. I may or may not have a firearm at home, but I don't go to the range and shoot all the time. But I actually think that over time, I become more and more convinced that having access to guns is actually crucial. People laugh and go like, how are you going to resist the government with an AK-47 when they've got bombs? Yet, all over the world, we see people doing just that. We see rice farmers with AK-47s and tunnels that they dug out of the ground with their bare hands, resisting the most powerful nation state on earth.

3:04:16We see Ukrainians who are better equipped but who are still worse equipped using a lot of the same tools and technology against a much larger adversary. Guns are an interesting kind of like power leveling. Pre-firearms, we had these professional soldiers with specific training. Obviously, training with a gun makes you better at using it, but you don't need to be a knight and train on being on horseback. I was saying that I think access to firearms is important. Obviously, training with firearms will make you better at using firearms, but the skill floor is very low.

3:05:03If you can pick up something and point it and pull a trigger, you can be effective at using firearms. That's a bad thing, of course. Things like school shootings are terrible tragedies. I think a lot of the time, it has to do more with mandatory education. Why is it this one place that these things happen? Well, it's because there are these places that look like prisons that have rules that are quite similar to prisons, but that's a whole other thing. That skill floor is very good because it means that the nation state, which has a lot of resources, doesn't necessarily have the hugest advantage.

3:05:36Vietnam beat the US straight up, full stop. That was like AK-47s and like hand-dug tunnels.

3:05:44Vlad CosteaWell, that's a different debate because you don't deal with the same environment when you fight the US government. You don't have canyons and deserts and that situation where you cannot see. It goes back to Sun Tzu, I guess. When you read The Art of War, he says that if you know yourself and you know your enemy, in 100 battles, you're going to win. If you only know yourself and you don't know your enemy, then you're bound to lose. If you don't know yourself and don't know your enemy, you're going to lose every time.

3:06:16It was a case of knowing yourself but not knowing your enemy in Vietnam and all these wars that have been conducted. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, your nation is pretty good at this.

3:06:35Casey RodarmorWell, fortunately, the nation is good at this. The US is good at this, but the American people are a canny adversary themselves. If it ever comes to the nation of America versus the people of America, I don't know, I'm putting my money on the people.

3:06:53Vlad CosteaThey have greater motivations than money or patriotism. To them, it's about defending their land.

3:07:01Casey RodarmorWe're also a crazy bunch. Oftentimes, I think that makes us very hard to anticipate as an adversary.

3:07:13Vlad CosteaI don't know about that. I never fought in a war with an American or in a war at all. If I were two decades older and born in Yugoslavia, I would have had a different experience. Yugoslavia is just across the border.

3:07:31Casey RodarmorWhat's the Romanian tactical advantage? What do the Romanian people bring to the table?

3:07:36Vlad CosteaSuper stubborn. You cannot enslave us. We fought the Turks for thousands of years. There was this Ottoman Empire that conquered the old Roman, actually the new Roman Empire, which was the Byzantine Empire. They conquered Constantinople and they turned it into Istanbul. They had these conquerors who took everything that they could. They conquered all the lands. They had all of our neighbors, but not us because we were super Christian and we would rather die than convert to Muslim or Islam. That's our history. We did not develop as a nation, mostly because we would go to war all the time.

3:08:21When they realized that they cannot really conquer us and convert us, they would ask us to pay taxes. We did not want to pay taxes. We paid for a few years, but then we're like, no, fuck them. Then they would start a war against us. They would send their army. That's our history. We had to poison the wells. We had to burn down the crops and everything when the invaders were coming. After that, it was rebuilt from scratch. We have this culture of being super disobedient. It was really great, I guess, but for some reason, communism caught on and we had 50 years of that.

3:09:01We were the last country to remove it from Europe. Actually, there was still Russia because USSR dismantled in 1991, but of all the countries in 1989 that had anti-communist revolutions, we were the last. It took all the others to fall for us to mobilize. Even the mobilization, I guess, was induced by the KGB and the CIA that wanted to remove the dictator, but that's a different conversation. I guess that's the ultimate power for Romanians. We have a long history of fighting and struggling and you can't really enslave us.

3:09:41You can think that you do, but mentally, we're very resilient.

3:09:45Casey RodarmorNice.

3:09:46Vlad CosteaAnd super Christian. I guess I get extra points with the maximalists right now.

3:09:51Casey RodarmorNice.

3:09:52Vlad CosteaOr actually conservatives, not maximalists. I'm a maximalist. They're not.

3:10:00Casey RodarmorI think maybe I'm getting ready to eat. I should probably get some food or something. This has been a fun marathon. I think I was a little nervous at the beginning. You look a little bit like Howard Stern. You have the long hair. I thought maybe you were like a Bitcoin shock jock or something, but I really enjoyed the conversation. It was great.

3:10:21Vlad CosteaI'm surprised you did not do any kind of background check.

3:10:25Casey RodarmorZero. Zero.

3:10:26Vlad CosteaYou're not aware. People in the chat told me about other developers. That I had, and you might know, I had Dr. Maxim Orlovsky from RGB just a few months ago, and also had Paul Sztorc...

3:10:43Casey RodarmorNice.

3:10:43Vlad CosteaTwice.

3:10:44Casey RodarmorNice.

3:10:44Vlad CosteaAnd Eric Voskuil and lots of developers. I like to interview developers. They're my favorites.

3:10:49Casey RodarmorAwesome. Awesome. Exciting.

3:10:51Vlad CosteaI like the people who make this happen. You know, there are marketers who get on every show and they say the exact same stuff.

3:10:58There are company CEOs who get on every show and say the exact same stuff. And I don't see any value in hosting the same ideas in my show. I just get builders who make stuff happen and push us to succeed. Because without builders, you don't really have anything, just narratives that people invent. But those tend to fade as the phases of the market change. But there's one question that I really want you to answer from the chat because it's so good. It comes from Kevin Ravensberg, and he says, would you OP_VAULT an ordinal inscription?

3:11:33Casey RodarmorYes, you could. Yeah. So because ordinals are secured by normal Bitcoin scripts, you can use OP_VAULT and other proposed opcodes like that. In fact, any Bitcoin opcode in your locking script for your inscription. So OP_VAULT is a proposed upgrade to Bitcoin by James O'Beirne, which is a sort of like a mini covenant that just does the sort of vault use case of putting your Bitcoin into cold storage. But then when you withdraw it, you have this like time period where you can claw it back. So if somebody gets into your cold storage, you can claw it back before they can transfer it to an address they fully control.

3:12:14And all the details of OP_VAULT have not been worked out. But yeah, it should certainly be compatible with ordinals and with inscriptions. Yeah, like anything that Bitcoin adds, like if Bitcoin ever adds any sort of more complicated primitives, ordinals and inscriptions benefit from those, essentially, because you can lock them with those primitives. Obviously, somebody has to write the code to do that. But it's a nice consequence of the design that, yeah, I would absolutely OP_VAULT an ordinal and more controversially, I would OP_CTV an ordinal.

3:12:51Vlad CosteaOkay. So Casey, I very much appreciate your time. I want to say that you mentioned in the beginning the names of your interns, and I heard them as Leo and Raph.

3:13:02Casey RodarmorLiam and Raph.

3:13:04Vlad CosteaBut you are Casey, just like Casey Jones.

3:13:07Casey RodarmorThat's right.

3:13:08Vlad CosteaThere's like a huge lore from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You need to find an April and Michelangelo and Donatello.

3:13:17Casey RodarmorYeah, absolutely. Yeah.

3:13:20Vlad CosteaThe Liam can be Leo. I'm fine with that.

3:13:23Casey RodarmorOkay. Yeah, I wonder who I am. I hope I'm not Krang, like the brain or something.

3:13:29Vlad CosteaI don't know. I hope you're not Rocksteady or whatever. One of the dumb ones.

3:13:34Casey RodarmorYeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I don't know. Maybe I'm Master Shredder. That'd be pretty cool.

3:13:40Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if he is Master. Is he?

3:13:44Casey RodarmorOh, no, not Master. Master Splinter. Master Splinter. That's right. Yeah.

3:13:48Vlad CosteaShredder is like, whatever. Anyway, also wanted to say that I knew you're not quite a spook when I saw your video on the Base58 YouTube channel. So you're vetted basically by Lisa Neigut, who was also part of the podcast a few months ago. And she's also a developer and I forgot her name to mention. But anyway, you have a nice background. You're working on something interesting. People get triggered, but I think this will pass. But at the same time, I also hope that this participation gets you invited to other shows.

3:14:24So you get to show more people that, you know, you're a normal Bitcoiner trying to do Bitcoin stuff.

3:14:31Casey RodarmorYeah, right. I mean, honestly, the press tour has been exhausting, like just being on podcasts. It's been like, got to go out, got to shill. So I think I might tone that down a little bit. I've already been on a lot of podcasts. I was on Stephan Livera. I was on Bankless, which is like an Ethereum podcast. I was on Galaxy Brains. I've been trying to do more Bitcoiner podcasts. But yeah, it's been crazy. It's been insanity.

3:15:01Vlad CosteaYeah. So thank you very much for your time, Casey. Good luck with your ordinals. Hope you build more stuff like a marketplace. And I hope that some of it goes off chain, but that's an unpopular opinion with you.

3:15:13Casey RodarmorNo, no, no, no, no. Actually, it's not an unpopular opinion. I just hope that if somebody makes an alternative scheme that they call it something other than inscriptions and they can use ordinals for the off chain scheme. But I think that for the purpose of confusion, ideally, they shouldn't call them inscriptions because that's like a specific implementation. So if you make it possible to trade inscriptions off chain, that's great. If you make another NFT protocol that's different, all I ask is that you call it something other than inscriptions to not confuse people.

3:15:53Vlad CosteaAnd I was hoping that we could rebrand NFTs as inscriptions because it's such a good name.

3:15:59Casey RodarmorSo, yeah, well, I would prefer that we didn't. I'm a dev, not a cop. But inscriptions are the specific implementation of NFTs that use this particular format in the witness data. And the broader area, the broader thing of like NFTs that have good properties, I like to call digital artifacts. So maybe we can call them digital artifacts.

3:16:20Vlad CosteaThat's kind of long, like NFT is shorter. But inscription, like it has a certain ring to it. Anyway, it does. I'll leave you alone.

3:16:30Casey RodarmorAll right. Thank you so much. It was actually it was my pleasure. Yeah. And I hope you find continued or new success in the niche, which is a great one.

3:16:40Vlad CosteaYeah, I hope so, too. That's why I'm still doing it. And thank you, everyone in the chat. I haven't done this before. I mean, I have a couple of times, but not with this much participation in the chat. So it was challenging to try to keep up. And I was also nervous in the beginning because I saw you are nervous and I was like, oh, this is going to end very fast. But then you relax. And I think it was great. So thank you.

3:17:03Casey RodarmorDefinitely. Definitely. Cool. Awesome.

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