Title: S15 E38: Crypsi on Crypto Art & Cypherpunk Culture
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Crypsi (a representative of the anonymous, decentralized crypto-anarchist Bitcoin art collective Crypsi, one of the original CrypArt artists since 2014, speaking through a Guy Fawkes mask; the collective launched the CRYPSI memecoin on Solana)
Published: 2024-05-30
Duration: 1:32:51
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2024-05-30_s15_e38_crypsi_on_crypto_art_cypherpunk_culture.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2024-05-30_s15_e38_crypsi_on_crypto_art_cypherpunk_culture.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization (recorded live on X), reconciled against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the same stream (three-way comparison per paragraph). 23 doubtful, garbled or dropped stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with small.en, with 20 re-runs (12 medium.en plus VAD, 4 medium.en and 4 small.en with tighter boundaries). The guest's voice is muffled by the mask, so several names were resolved against the web rather than the audio alone. Speaker labels were fixed with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and Crypsi) and by hand (Vlad Costea, Crypsi). Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: CrypArt and Satushi, Banksy, Pac-Man pictures (Dark Markets, Banks, Currencies), Liberté (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité), Adopt Now, the superhero, HODL and Seeing Red ranges, UASF and No2X pictures, Hush (Duke Leto), the Cardano Foundation, the BTCTKVR magazine, Cryptograffiti, Fractal Encrypt, the COPA trial, Bitcoin billboards, Marcus Connor and the Bitcoin Roller Coaster, RYR, Scarce.City and its creators group, Raretoshi, Counterparty, Rare Pepes, Fake Rares, Rare Scrilla/Fake Scrilla/Scrilla Ventura, DJ Pepe, the Tatiana Moroz show, Spells of Genesis, Christian Moss, Bitcoin Heads/BTCheads.com, Ordinals, STAMPs, Runes, BRC-20, Namecoin, colored coins, Kenneth Moon, Indelible, the Wojak Ways, the Drooling Ape Bus Club, the Pepocalypse range, Lucho Poletti, Anonymous and V for Vendetta, Wasabi Wallet and its CoinJoin coordinator shutdown, ShapeShift, Roger Ver, Samurai Wallet, Jamie Dimon, BlackRock, Hodling (hodling.ch), Specter DIY, Wizardsardine, Casa, Layer Two Labs, Paul Sztorc and drivechains, Darkfarms and BOME (Book of Meme), David Chaum, John Gilmore, Bruce Schneier, Tim May, the Cypherpunk Manifesto, Nick Szabo (unenumerated.blogspot.com, social scalability), the Genesis block headline, Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, Luke Dashjr, freewallet.io, Satochip, Satodime, Seedkeeper, Cryptosteel, TGBEX and Casascius coins, BIP39/BIP44, Casey Rodarmor on Hell Money, Phantom and Solflare wallets, Rebel Money and Flo Montoya. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters were removed, and factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken (for example "Pac-Man is a trademark by Capcom"). The intro music (0:00-0:47) is omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:47] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad and today we are doing a special interview about Bitcoin art with Crypsi. And we are speaking with the representative of the Crypsi art movement. It's something very cypherpunk and cool that's all about this culture of being anti-establishment and being real to yourself and not accepting anything from the bankers or from the government, just giving them what they deserve. It's really good to have you, Crypsi, and I know you have quite a lot of works that you are selling, that you are creating, and that you're promoting, so it's good to see you here.

[00:01:27] Crypsi: Thank you very much for having me, and it's great to kind of finally, kind of almost meet you face to face.

[00:01:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So tell me more about your art collective. When did this start?

[00:01:39] Crypsi: Sure. So Crypsi started in 2014. We started making CrypArt, which was Bitcoin wallets in QR code. So behind me, just there, is an example of one of them, and another one here. So they're basically just paper wallets with the QR code for the public key hidden within the picture. So there was another company called CryptoArt that made very similar things, but they had the QR codes separate to the picture, in the corner. And although they were like fantastic pictures, we wanted to kind of put the QR codes in the print.

[00:02:20] And so yeah, we started doing that. I think it was a bit out there. I think at that time, in 2014, there weren't that many people into Bitcoin, and there weren't that many people who also liked the idea of art as well, and certainly having a wallet and a piece of art. So it wasn't the greatest business enterprise. But yeah, Crypsi kind of spun out of that. So Crypsi was one of the three artists within CrypArt. And yeah, ever since then, basically, we started making spray-painted graffiti art, kind of street art, inspired by Banksy.

[00:02:53] So we're huge fans of Banksy, and obviously crypto. And in the early days, all crypto art was Bitcoin art. So yeah, we were kind of Crypsi, based on Banksy and kind of crypto.

[00:03:05] Vlad Costea: You mentioned two concepts in this intro. The first one is crypto art. And then you said that all crypto art used to be Bitcoin art. So what happened there? It seems like there was a fork down the road.

[00:03:18] Crypsi: Exactly. No, I think crypto art

[00:03:20] Became kind of co-opted. I think it's a long story. So yeah, I think part of what we want to discuss, or to be given this opportunity to discuss, is the idea of NFTs. And a lot of Bitcoiners hate NFTs. We hated NFTs for five, six years. But we think Counterparty NFTs in particular... there's also [unclear: Ordinals] NFTs, there's a number of other solutions nowadays. But yeah, no, Bitcoiners have never been big on buying Bitcoin art or spending their Bitcoin. So it's always been a labor of love, I think, to be a Bitcoin artist.

[00:03:58] It's always been a labor of love. And a lot of artists have been driven out of Bitcoin purely because there isn't that much money in it, there isn't that much profit in it. So a lot of them have been driven to Ethereum, driven to other solutions. And yeah, no, we've always been trying to support Bitcoin art. We've got a lot of collections, I hopefully get to show you some of the other art we've got here. So yeah, we're big collectors of Bitcoin art, whether it be physical or NFTs, based mostly on Counterparty.

[00:04:31] And yeah, no, obviously, I think the younger, especially the younger generation, in these kind of cycles, I think people get carried away with all kinds of crazy stuff. And yeah, NFTs are a big part of that. If people are all going to Ethereum to invest in their Punks and Rocks at grossly overinflated values, while the Bitcoin NFTs get completely ignored, then the Bitcoin artists get driven into other kind of shitcoin NFTs, effectively. And I think that's been a problem for a number of years.

[00:05:05] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if you're doing something with your voice to modulate it, or there's an issue with your internet, but it's not great. But at the same time, it's comprehensive... or comprehensible, what's the word for it?

[00:05:25] Crypsi: Either, I think. The mask probably doesn't help either.

[00:05:30] Vlad Costea: It's muffled, but there also appears to be something. Anyway, I know that you also own some BTCTKVR magazines, which I created and I sent to you a couple of years ago.

[00:05:41] And I'm proud to know that they ended up in your hands.

[00:05:46] Crypsi: Yeah, we're keeping them very... they're almost pristine.

[00:05:50] I got them out especially for the day. But yeah, no, listen, we're big fans of anything Bitcoin, and obviously you've been a massive proponent of Bitcoin with the podcast, with the magazines. Yeah, listen, this stuff is important. I've watched a lot of your interviews over the years, and most of them are with devs, a lot of the technical side. And I think there also needs to be a concentration on the kind of public perception of Bitcoin. And I think you do a great job in kind of getting the message out, making it kind of understandable to normal people.

[00:06:23] But I think there also needs to be a lot more to be done. I mean, I think you saw, I'm sure a lot of people saw the Ohio stadium booing the guy talking about Bitcoin. And yeah, I think there is an attitude within Bitcoin: it's like, we're right, you were wrong, you should have listened to us. And I think that's a dangerous attitude for Bitcoiners to have. And if Bitcoiners aren't spending their Bitcoin on things that are supporting Bitcoin, whether it be Bitcoin art or Bitcoin NFTs or Bitcoin key rings or Bitcoin anything...

[00:06:55] If Bitcoiners are reluctant to spend their Bitcoin, then people will go and promote other things instead, where there's money. And yeah, Crypsi for years, we refused, during the ICO days, we refused a lot of offers to market and help promote a lot of ICOs. We did do one in the end, which was Hush, by a guy called [unclear: Duke Leto]. It was secure messaging. I have no idea what happened to that. And then we did actually do some work for Cardano as well. So one of the Crypsi collectors was involved in the Cardano Foundation, and we ended up doing a lot of kind of material for them.

[00:07:31] Although I don't think it was ever used. It was probably not quite in line with their vision.

[00:07:40] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here and I do have quite a few questions. But let's start with this. If you were to present two or three pieces of art that represent your art collective, where would you start?

[00:07:56] Crypsi: I mean, we've been doing a lot for the last 10 years. So it's hard to pick one or two. I think they each have a moment in time. So I think probably the most iconic Crypsi kind of pictures are probably the Pac-Man pictures. So we've got three of them: there's one called Dark Markets, one called Banks, and there's another one somewhere, it's got Currencies, behind me there. So yeah, those are probably the most iconic pictures. I personally, I mean, I think everyone has a different favorite picture. So the one above my head has the French flag with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the French kind of national motto.

[00:08:49] And we think that Bitcoin represents that motto far more than the French government, for a start. So that would be probably my personal favorite. Everyone seems to have a different one. And yeah, I don't think you can pick out any individual pictures. I think we've done about, I guess, about 40 pictures over the 10 years. Most, virtually all of them spray stencil, spray paint and stencil on canvas. Normally editions are kind of six to ten. But we have done some sculptures, we have done various [unclear: laser-cut] Bitcoin symbols, we've done various bits and pieces.

[00:09:30] But yeah, all of it, apart from since the CrypArt days, has been stencil, spray paintings on canvas.

[00:09:39] Vlad Costea: I know that there's this saying within the Bitcoin maximalist circles, which says that if you're trying to make someone part with their Bitcoin, then you're a scammer. And I do know that Crypsi as an art movement is trying to sell art for Bitcoin. By conflating the two definitions, would you say that Crypsi is a scamming collective?

[00:10:04] Crypsi: Certainly not. I mean, it's always been a labor of love. So, I mean, people... you get accused of this type of thing, but I mean, we used to sell pictures for, sort of, $30, $40, $50 back in the day. I think we've only ever sold pictures for Bitcoin. And yeah, no, we totally agree with the idea that, say, is a piece of art going to be worth more than the Bitcoin you pay for it? And I would argue that the chances are absolutely not. However, I do think it's important for Bitcoiners to support Bitcoin artists.

[00:10:42] Because Bitcoin artists... I mean, the pen is mightier than the sword. Well, I would argue that art is far more important and powerful than the pen in this day and age. So in this day and age of, like, memes and Instagram and TikTok, you do need kind of Bitcoin promotion in those areas. And yeah, the people who are promoting Bitcoin are often left behind. So yeah, I mean, listen, there are some fantastic, successful Bitcoin artists. Cryptograffiti is the kind of godfather. We've always said that all we've ever done is totally copy him. [unclear: Ian] likes Fractal Encrypt, and you read his tweets

[00:11:32] Going on during the [unclear: COPA] trials. I mean, it's just like historical documentation, as well as being a fantastic artist. And there's a lot of great artists out there, and these people are not scammers. These people are big, big Bitcoiners. [unclear: Bitcoin Billboards] are putting billboards up in every Federal Reserve town or city in the US. I mean, that's not done for profit, that's done for love of the Bitcoin idea, I think. And that's what we certainly try to emulate.

[00:12:06] Vlad Costea: Right. So you mentioned that you're not scammers because you're fulfilling a role within the community. And it's unfortunate that there isn't more Bitcoin being spent on art. But what would you say is the role of art in this revolution?

[00:12:21] Crypsi: Well, I think it affects the psyche.

[00:12:24] So society is influenced by art. Advertising is the perfect example of that. And if Bitcoin isn't being advertised... I mean, Bitcoin is the one cryptocurrency that doesn't have a marketing budget. People do it for the love of it, not because there's real money in it. So yeah, we think it's important to market. And I mean, all the Crypsi art for 10 years has always been... it's not designed to be fine art, it's not designed to be the best art we could make. It's just designed to promote Bitcoin in a kind of in-your-face way. And that's what we've done. It's never really been designed for profit.

[00:13:01] It's always been done as a hobby between a collective of people who are big fans of Bitcoin.

[00:13:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So let me ask you this. Where would you draw the line between two terms that are used a lot in this space? There is memes and there is art. Where would you say that a meme becomes art, or when does art not become memeable?

[00:13:28] Crypsi: I think it's a very, very fine line. I mean, we would argue that a lot of our art is effectively crypto memes or Bitcoin memes. But some other people would argue it isn't. I mean, the memes kind of came from the 4chan community alongside Bitcoin. I think it was the Wojaks and then the Pepes and then the Doge. And I think the memes are almost as important as the art. I think in this day and age, the younger generation especially are big into memes. The memes are what they're interested in.

[00:14:04] They're not interested in Bitcoin. They're not even interested in Ethereum, any of the kind of sensible cryptocurrencies, if you like. They're only interested in memecoins, which makes zero sense to most people who've been in Bitcoin for a long time. But you can't fight reality, unfortunately, I guess.

[00:14:21] Vlad Costea: Right. I'm not sure if you answered my question directly, but if someone is an artist by, I guess, academically an artist, they went to art school, they learned how to do this, they create stuff for a living, and then they get into creating memes, is that still art? Or if someone who makes memes gets to the next level and makes his memes more artistic, do the memes become art?

[00:14:50] Crypsi: Getting deeper. I would say... I think memes is definitely a form of art. I think it's probably the most powerful form of art in this day and age. A meme can reach millions and millions of people, whether it be on social media or... and it can have a far more impact and far more reach than potentially any piece of art in this day and age. So I think memes are certainly a form of art. And yeah, at Crypsi we're trying to create memes that are worthwhile, that people can kind of... that have a meaning.

[00:15:26] So yeah, we're all about the kind of OG roots of crypto. And yeah, the idea of privacy and anonymity, the idea of rejecting kind of too much government surveillance. And yeah, sorry, I'm not sure if I answered your question again. Certainly memes are a form of art.

[00:15:45] Vlad Costea: Okay, I think that's a good answer, because actually, let's get into this. But before we get into this, let me present an advertisement for Wasabi Wallet, because it's that time of the episode: after 15 minutes, I have to present an ad. And Wasabi Wallet will be shutting down their CoinJoin server in about two weeks, so you don't have much time left to CoinJoin. But even after that one expires... and unfortunately, I don't think we're going to have, when we decentralize coordinators and we're going to have dozens or hundreds of them from random people on the internet, we're not going to have the same amount of inputs and outputs.

[00:16:28] For now, Wasabi has hundreds of inputs, hundreds of outputs, with a much larger anonymity set and more plausible deniability. I hope we're going to get to this point at any moment in the future, but it seems unlikely. There was a fan of Wasabi who ran his own coordinator this week, and he was only able to get eight participants for a CoinJoin round. Anyway, even after Wasabi shuts down their coordinator, you should know that it's still one of the greatest light wallets for your computer. It downloads block filters, it runs on Tor, it has integrations with all the major hardware wallets.

[00:17:07] It's a pretty good wallet. It's a simplified version of Electrum with some privacy features embedded in. So you should definitely download it. And if I were you, I would also CoinJoin in the next two weeks, just to benefit from all of this large pool of coins which are already there for mixing. So check out Wasabi Wallet at wasabiwallet.io. And unfortunately... I will keep on promoting them because I love their project. I have been using them since, I think, February of 2019 or something. So almost four years, more than four years.

[00:17:45] Wow, I'm old. Fuck, five years. So yeah, check them out, wasabiwallet.io. Unfortunately, it is what it is. We have to fight the privacy wars, and it's like this. So I was going to ask you something about memes and art once again, but let's get into this. What's the role of privacy in this space of Bitcoin art?

[00:18:14] Crypsi: Well, I think Bitcoin art is designed to hopefully promote all the ideals of Bitcoin. So there's a lot of great artists. Yeah, I mentioned Cryptograffiti, Fractal Encrypt. I mean, there's the likes of Marcus Connor, who created the Bitcoin Roller Coaster. There's the likes of RYR, a German artist who's fantastic. He does a lot of pictures made out of old banknotes. There's a huge community out there.

[00:18:46] And we're lucky enough to be members of a site called Scarce.City, which is a fantastic auction site that only sells things through Bitcoin, through Lightning mostly. And they sell, yeah, mostly Bitcoin art, but they also sell a lot of kind of connected Counterparty NFTs. And they're also, I think, selling Ordinals and STAMPs,

[00:19:06] Which are probably not our thing, but a lot of our friends are into it. So please check them out if you have a chance.

[00:19:10] Vlad Costea: Okay. I asked you about privacy and you got into something else, but you're wearing a mask right now.

[00:19:20] Crypsi: So I think the role of art, I guess, is to promote... So Bitcoin certainly, one of the ideals of it was supposed to be about privacy. It was supposed to be about having some independence in your transactions, away from the government. And that's kind of been lost. I mean, I think you've got a lot of coin analysis and other things going on. So yeah, the role of art... I mean, I think the art has always been about maintaining the ideals of Bitcoin. It's always been about promoting the likes of privacy, I guess, and the idea of being anti-central banking, the idea of having some freedom. And I guess privacy is a...

[00:20:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and you're wearing a mask right now. You're wearing this Guy Fawkes mask from the film... what's the name of the film?

[00:20:12] Crypsi: V for Vendetta.

[00:20:13] Vlad Costea: V for Vendetta. I was thinking of "Remember, remember the 5th of November." Is that how it goes?

[00:20:19] Crypsi: The Guy Fawkes idea. So I think it's all connected. And the whole idea of Anonymous is... I think it's not dead, but it's certainly more underground than it used to be. But the idea is the 99%, and we all live in a world controlled by central banks, by the mega-wealthy, who are accumulating more and more of the world. Well, the idea of Anonymous is really

[00:20:43] Supposed to be about the 99% fighting back against the system. And Bitcoin, we always thought, was a crucial part of it. It was a kind of... yeah, it shared a lot of the same ideologies, I think.

[00:20:57] So yeah, we've always been proponents of Anonymous as well as Bitcoin.

[00:21:02] And yeah, there's a lot of great artists, Lucho Poletti, a lot of other artists who use the Anonymous theme, because we think it fits perfectly with the kind of Bitcoin ethos.

[00:21:15] Vlad Costea: That's really great. And I do respect people who keep their privacy for the sake of promoting privacy, and they try to create a cultural movement, basically. It's not just digital art, it's a cultural movement that's all about promoting the values behind Bitcoin. And now let me get to the question which I wanted to ask you. I think fundamentally memes are different from art, because memes are basically open-source art. A meme is something that can be turned into a template, and then you're going to have multiple people contributing with versions of the same meme.

[00:21:54] I don't think you get the same situation with art. I think art has some ideas of intellectual property or artistic depiction associated to it. I don't think you can reverse engineer some painting and then publish a different version of it and send a message other than you're a hack, you know? But with memes, they're designed for that purpose. You make a meme and everyone is supposed to pick it up and make their own version. And I think that's where they intersect. It doesn't mean that a meme cannot be artistic, and it doesn't mean that a painting cannot be memeable.

[00:22:33] I can think of The Scream. I can think of lots of versions of Mona Lisa, La Gioconda, that have been modified over the years to mean something else. But memes are made exactly for this purpose. I think that's the beauty of it.

[00:22:51] Crypsi: Yeah, I mean, listen, it's hard to describe exactly what a meme is, or to define it, I think. But yeah, there are memes, lots of memes made by [unclear: Vlad and Patrick Knight]... [unclear: everything has just been turned into a meme]. It's almost everything, in this day and age.

[00:23:13] Vlad Costea: So if you were to describe Bitcoin art to a novice who knows nothing, and you could only do it through a few memes, what do you think are the most powerful memes that you can show to someone to tell them what Bitcoin is about?

[00:23:30] Crypsi: It's hard to pick. Let's have a look. What have I got in front of me?

[00:23:36] I mean, I think you can go back to just the original idea of the original meme, the Bitcoin wizard.

[00:23:47] If you go to... I mean, we've got some great stuff here. This is an artist called Kenneth Moon, who does some amazing kind of futuristic cyberpunk art.

[00:23:58] But yeah, no, I think for us, we always ignored NFTs. We hated NFTs. We were Bitcoiners who just didn't like the idea of NFTs. We thought they were a bit scammy. We did get into the Rare Pepes eventually, and we've been kind of a mad fan since, especially of Counterparty NFTs. We did do some Rares as well. But this is by an artist called Indelible. This is a Rare Pepe, or part of a Rare Pepe. And I just think the Rare Pepe tells the story of Bitcoin.

[00:24:34] If you go through the history of Rare Pepes, from, what is it, over four years... and it's like a historical account of what's happened in crypto. There's shitcoin Pepes, there's Bitcoin Pepes, there's everything. Every story involved in Bitcoin has been documented in the Rare Pepe base. So we're big fans of those. We didn't create them, so we're not shilling our own NFTs here. But yeah, no, we've always been a big fan of them, and the Pepes are kind of the intersection between art and memes, you'd think. They're kind of the NFTs originally created back in the day, some of the first NFTs, other than Spells of Genesis and stuff like that.

[00:25:15] But yeah, no, the Rare Pepes, we think, were the first kind of collection that took off. But yeah, it's much unloved and much maligned by most of the Bitcoin community, which we find strange. And yeah, it's meant that a lot of those artists, who are big Bitcoiners, have been driven into kind of Ethereum or other chains, which we think is a real shame.

[00:25:36] Vlad Costea: It is a real shame. And there's a debate to be had here, because at first you had these people building on Bitcoin with Counterparty. They made Spells of Genesis, which was a video game that was using these assets. It was very innovative and inventive for its time. I did interview Christian Moss, so you can look that interview up if you want to learn more about Spells of Genesis. And you had Rare Pepes, you had all of these collections. I've also made one of my own, which is called Bitcoin Heads.

[00:26:09] And then I went on to inscribe them as Ordinals. So the JPEGs are permanently on the blockchain. One of them features my face with this expression. And that one is also on your node. Anon, you'd better watch out, you can't filter that out. It's already there. So basically, what I'm trying to say here is that there was a lot of this Bitcoin art. And then people said, you know, Bitcoin should not be used in this way. It should be kept for financial transactions. And then they said, okay, let's create a chain for this.

[00:26:41] The first chain that they made for non-financial transactions was called Namecoin. Namecoin was for domain registration. It was for all of this cool stuff that you could theoretically do on Bitcoin, but it was a better idea to not do it on Bitcoin. So Satoshi himself worked on Namecoin. He also came up with the idea to merge mine, that Namecoin coin. And it was also with a fixed cap with 21 million and stuff, and it never took off. But then you had a bunch of people who saw the rise of colored coins, which was another concept created on Bitcoin.

[00:27:18] And then they looked at Namecoin. And then they looked at Counterparty and the markets. And they said, you know, why don't we put this on another blockchain? And we take this off of Bitcoin, we allow Bitcoin to just be money, and then we can be something else just for this sort of applications and maybe some smart contracts. They made Ethereum. And a lot of people moved there, right? They moved into Ethereum to create their projects. And then it was still not fine. You know, they took the load off of Bitcoin's shoulders.

[00:27:50] It could scale only for financial transactions, but they still call them shitcoiners. So what they did was say, okay, we're shitcoiners now. So what do we do? We come back to Bitcoin. And now you have all of these, quote unquote, degens coming into Bitcoin to create art because they know it's permanent. They know it's going to be there forever on someone's node. It's not like Namecoin where you could spend a lot of money to mint an asset, to buy a domain, and then discover in a couple of years that if you didn't pay the right fee, it expired and nobody was running a node to keep that alive.

[00:28:26] So with Bitcoin, you know that it's going to be around forever. Block space for now is still relatively cheap. Just a couple of weeks ago, I did an Ordinal inscription with David Bailey's face, and it was not that expensive, not as expensive as something as valuable as immortalizing the image of someone in everyone's computer should be. And it's a lot of fun, but at the same time, people call this shitcoining, when it's not. It's a valid Bitcoin transaction, which is built out of Bitcoin opcodes. It's very confusing because the culture kept on changing.

[00:29:04] And now we're at a point where we're back to square one. It's almost like we're back in 2014, trying to figure out how to do this on Bitcoin. And then someone else is going to come along and say, you know, maybe we should move these on another chain. And it's just funny.

[00:29:23] Crypsi: Yeah, it's never-ending arguments, I think. Is Counterparty a shitcoin, or XCP? Is Liquid acceptable? Is it a Layer 2 solution, or is it just controlled by Blockstream? These are never-ending arguments. Yeah, we created a few Ordinals, I think, in the early days when it first came out. But yeah, we didn't like the idea of, I think, STAMPs, Ordinals... We've got a lot of friends who create these things, and yeah, we've got nothing against them. But at the same time, we do think if they're damaging the Bitcoin blockchain, then our attitude is we don't want to create art

[00:30:01] That damages Bitcoin in any way. So we've kind of veered away from the Ordinals and STAMPs side of things. We still occasionally make things on Counterparty for various projects. We make things for, yeah, the Fake Rares, something called the Wojak Ways, which are kind of Wojaks on Bitcoin, and something else called the Drooling Ape Bus Club, which is kind of a piss-take of the Bored Apes. But these things are, yeah, they're made by real artists, they're made by, like, a community of artists. These people tend to be big Bitcoiners.

[00:30:34] And yeah, they're much unloved, but I think one day hopefully they will get the love, these communities.

[00:30:38] Vlad Costea: Yes, you mentioned Fake Rares, and I gotta give a shout out to Rare Scrilla. I think he goes by the name of Fake Scrilla these days. I'm not sure anymore. It was Scrilla Ventura like six years ago. I don't know, Scrilla, that guy.

[00:31:00] Crypsi: He's a very famous NFT artist now. He's much deserved. He's got a massively growing fan base. He's probably, yeah, probably one of the most famous Bitcoin artists there is, I guess, at this point in time.

[00:31:14] Vlad Costea: I think he popularized Pepe beyond what was already out there. He enabled a new generation of artists to come up with their own concepts. I know a lot of OG Rare Pepe creators who are not happy with the fact that he created a new collection and many of them were remixes of the original ones. And it felt like it's just a money grab. But if you look at what the artists have made for this Fake Rares movement, you're going to see that there's a lot of genuine creative stuff that was made specifically for this collection.

[00:31:49] And I do have a lot of respect for him. I did watch an interview with him. It wasn't back in the day, but I did see an interview with him in 2016. He went on the Tatiana Moroz show. I think it was called Proof of Love. And he was like a crazy man talking about DJ Pepe, which was his creation. It still is. It's his creation. It's the one that got him, I guess, the first moment of fame. And he was talking about it and more like 200 people were listening.

[00:32:23] Even today, if you go and look for that interview, you're going to see that it wasn't that big. But he did get big. And there is even a cover of the Bitcoin Takeover magazine, the one that you have, which has his design. And it's very unique because he makes this remix of the Pepe concept with various modifications. And he has a style of its own. You know when it's something that's drawn by Scrilla. And I very much respect him and I'm grateful that he accepted to do that cover.

[00:32:57] Maybe there's going to be a Crypsi Collective cover one day.

[00:33:00] Crypsi: We would love to do one. We would love to do one. We'd pay you a fortune to be on the cover.

[00:33:06] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And we got to the point where I got to present the second advertisement for this episode, which is for Hodling. And if you are not aware, Hodling is this service from Switzerland, which is supposed to help people who want to take self custody into their own hands. But they think it's too complicated. But it's also mostly aimed at large holders and companies. So let's say that you're a company, you want to add Bitcoin to your balance sheet for whatever reason, because it's a good idea. And you don't know how to do it because you have shareholders, you have different people who want to hold keys.

[00:33:44] And you're going to go to these guys who are based in Switzerland and they're going to tell you exactly what kind of multisig you should do and what kind of hardware wallets you should be using. Spoiler, they're fans of the Specter DIY because they're nerds and they like stuff that's open source that you can do with hardware that you can verify yourself. But they can also recommend you something that's simpler for you to use if you are a whale and you don't want to keep your bitcoins in your house, because it seems like there is a witch hunt out there for bitcoiners.

[00:34:19] I guess it's a good idea to listen to them and maybe ask them for an opinion. So go to hodling.ch and just so you know, they were the first company chosen by Wizardsardine, which is another Bitcoin security company that deals with complex inheritance and multisig setups. They were the first company chosen to become partners. So if you own a lot of bitcoin or know someone who does, or you're part of the company that is about to buy bitcoin, check out hodling.ch. They're better than Casa because they don't hold your keys.

[00:34:55] They just show you how to do it yourself. So thank you guys for sponsoring the show. Now let's talk about more art, Crypsi, because there's never enough art. And I want to ask you something interesting about the art that you said is most famous for the Crypsi Art Collective, which is the Pac-Man. And you said there was something else, like a Banksy remix.

[00:35:22] Crypsi: Well, I mean, there isn't really. I think the picture that sold the best was the Adopt Now, just behind me. That was one of our first pictures.

[00:35:33] Yeah, I mean, we've got all kinds of pictures. We've got a whole range of...

[00:35:43] So this was done, I think, three years in advance, before the solar flare. So if we all get wiped out, we're blaming this picture. Yeah, no, we've been doing lots of pictures. So we did a superhero range, which is all kind of Bitcoin-inspired. We did the HODL range, which is, well, that was an example of it. We did a Seeing Red range, which was kind of very anti-Federal Reserve and Jamie Dimon and obviously the dollar. And there's a few more. So yeah, we basically don't try and... I mean, I think it changes.

[00:36:25] So yeah, some years there's a lot going on, and we obviously did the UASF picture. And yeah, we've got a No2X picture somewhere. And yeah, whatever is going on, whenever we think the Bitcoin community needs a bit of a helping hand, that's when we try and create pictures.

[00:36:46] Vlad Costea: I was going to ask you something about this, because obviously you have a remix of the Pac-Man main character, and Pac-Man is a trademark by Capcom. So if tomorrow Capcom comes with their lawyers and says, you know, this is copyright infringement, how are you going to

[00:37:03] Respond to that?

[00:37:06] Crypsi: Well, I don't think... it's obviously a Bitcoin Pac-Man, so it's completely different, would be our argument. But it's an anonymous collective, so we like to pretend we don't exist, and we're all decentralized. And the Crypsi collective at the moment consists of sort of seven people, all part-time, from seven different countries. So the idea is, yeah, we're supposed to be a decentralized anarchist art collective, spread out across the place, so there's no point of failure. So yeah, it's an art collective based on the kind of fundamental principles of Bitcoin, I guess.

[00:37:41] We're trying to get there, anyway. It's not quite as decentralized as it could be at the moment.

[00:37:47] Vlad Costea: It is interesting, because in this space, especially when you deal with blockchains and different networks, there was a case where they took CryptoPunks and they took Bored Apes and stuff like that, and they inscribed them on Bitcoin as Ordinal inscriptions. And it wasn't necessarily their owners who did this. It was just people who took the graphics and they inscribed them to another chain. And you don't really own the art. That's something that should be discussed more often. When you're doing these tokens, which have a JPEG attached to them, the JPEG is just a representation of what the token is supposed to mean.

[00:38:25] But what you're buying, if you're buying one of these, is actually just some numbers and an asset on a blockchain. Isn't that the same as Bitcoin? It is, yeah. It is the same as Bitcoin. And there was this conversation when NFTs came around that Bitcoin is basically an NFT, because you can map every transaction. It has a degree of privacy that can be broken at this point. The smart tricks that you can use for CoinJoins and for coinswaps, where basically you're swapping UTXOs with someone else, they're interesting.

[00:39:03] But at the same time, you can still observe all the transactions. And maybe you don't know who everyone is, but it's not fungible.

[00:39:19] Crypsi: Yeah, listen, it's sad to hear that CoinJoin is stopping. I think [unclear: ShapeShift] back in the day, and these things are... yeah, we're big fans of them. And yeah, it is a pity that governments are jumping down on these type of things. And the Bitcoin community, I don't think we've been together enough to actually be able to fight back against some of the kind of criminal campaigns that are going on, with the likes of, like, Roger Ver or Samurai Wallet or all the things that are going on at the moment.

[00:39:48] Vlad Costea: We are at war, and our enemies can also be seen behind you. I see a painting of Jamie Dimon,

[00:39:58] If I'm not mistaken. Can you show that?

[00:40:01] Crypsi: Yeah, we've never been big fans. So yeah, I mean, I think back in the day, the banks kind of ignored Bitcoin. They don't really get it, they don't want to get it. I think they're not stupid. They're beginning to get it, and they're realizing that it's probably the last one in who's going to be in big trouble. And so yeah, I think the bank FOMO is something that's probably going to come in three years' time. I think at the moment there's a lot of talk about banks buying

[00:40:31] Bitcoin, but actually I think it's more their private clients, the private clients of BlackRock, insisting... they're the ones buying Bitcoin through BlackRock, rather than the likes of BlackRock buying it themselves. So I think probably the next cycle, in three years, when it's kind of half a million dollars, will probably be when the banks start buying in. And then, yeah, hopefully governments will start at the same time, and maybe that might

[00:40:54] Last.

[00:40:58] Vlad Costea: It is unfortunate that we went from this cypherpunk movement, with plans to replace the dollar and use this non-governmental money for daily transactions, and we ended up with a situation where we say, oh, please, come on, government, buy some. Oh, this corporation, it should add 1% of its balance sheet and allocate it to Bitcoin. It's really unfortunate that we got to this point, but it's also what people wanted in terms of adoption. Maybe the wet dream, or the pipe dream, call it what you want, is to have everyone around the world except for the governments adopting Bitcoin.

[00:41:38] But it's not the case. We had the same banking elite that we wanted to replace getting in on this invention and figuring out how it works and becoming some of the financiers of development. And it's not great, but at the same time, it's how adoption happens for everything. You have the elites that figure out, because there is an asymmetry of information... they figure out how this works, they get in, and then they convince the rest of the world to also get in.

[00:42:10] Crypsi: Yeah, I think it's definitely a case of be careful what you ask for. Yeah, Bitcoin has asked for this. It's asked for the banks to get involved, and they are getting involved. The one thing I would say is there's a worry that the banks are going to take over Bitcoin. And I think, what is it, Bitcoin was 92 or 93% distributed before the banks even thought about it. So the idea that the banks are going to own a large percentage of Bitcoin, or the big financial institutions... if they want to own a large percentage, if they want to own 20, 30% of Bitcoin between them, then they're going to have to pay an absolute fortune for it.

[00:42:44] So either way,

[00:42:46] Vlad Costea: I think Bitcoin wins. Bitcoin wins, but it doesn't mean that we win. And there is a distinction to be made here. There is a way in which Bitcoin can win by becoming a CBDC, which gets co-opted by the government. And is that a situation that we want? There are some people who are going to be bullish on this and say, oh, if the government acknowledges that this is money, then we win, because we're going to get rich. But are you going to be rich if there is no privacy and you're running everything under a surveilled system where every transaction is visible and you're going to have to KYC?

[00:43:22] I don't know. We have to see about that. But the title of this interview is Crypsi on Bitcoin Art and Tokens, and we haven't talked too much about this tokens part. You said to me before starting to record this interview that you're reluctant in terms of accepting to issue Counterparty assets for the art. You did art before you did tokens, and then you started tokenizing the art and selling it. So what's the difference between the two in the Bitcoin space? Do you get people buying physical art?

[00:43:58] Do you get people buying digital art or do you get more people buying tokens representing that digital art?

[00:44:07] Crypsi: Well, I think you get a bit of both. It's each to their own. So some people like the physical art and they hate the NFTs. Some people like the NFTs and they don't like the physical art. I think it really varies depending on the collector, or the person interested, in whatever they buy.

[00:44:27] Vlad Costea: You're being very vague here but I was curious to find out why you got into these tokens. Why does it make any sense?

[00:44:37] Crypsi: Sure, sorry. So basically, yeah, we've been making art. We always ignored the likes of Counterparty and the Rare Pepes. We'd heard about them; we weren't big fans of NFTs. Yeah, and through the Scarce.City groups, the Scarce.City creators group, and through Rare Scrilla, who you mentioned before, or Fake Scrilla, we got invited to make a Fake Rare. And that was the first NFT we made of any sort. Actually, that's not right, because we made a few on Raretoshi before that.

[00:45:10] So yeah, we got into it very, very late. We weren't big fans. But the more we've learned about it, the more we looked into it, the more we realized that we were wrong, and we should have got into it much earlier. And yeah, I think that was certainly a mistake we made, in terms of not getting into it earlier.

[00:45:28] Vlad Costea: I got a message in the chat from... wait, I'm searching. Halloumi says "C for Crypsi is a new and better version of V for Vendetta."

[00:45:43] Crypsi: Well, that's... we don't get that far.

[00:45:45] So yes, listen, I did want to kind of sabotage your interview and mention that we've launched a memecoin, which I wanted to leave till later on, because I realize that at this point half your listeners will probably turn off and give up on us completely. But the whole idea of Crypsi is a Solana meme... we're not fans of Solana, but the Solana memecoins are all the rage this year. And yeah, we wanted to release a meme that effectively represented the OG cypherpunk ideals of Bitcoin. So we've got a Telegram chat, Crypsi Coin,

[00:46:23] And the whole idea is we're doing lots of quizzes on David Chaum and John Gilmore and Roger Ver and Bruce Schneier and lots of the people you've had on your show, like the original Bitcoiners. And we think that a lot of this newer generation, who are into their kind of Doge, Pepe memes, they don't really know anything else about it. We're going to try and encourage them to look into at least the kind of original roots of it all. So it's kind of a memecoin for Bitcoiners. So we've lost a lot of followers. A lot of our kind of Bitcoin fans, like, hate us for launching a memecoin.

[00:46:55] A lot of the memecoiners hate us for saying they're all kind of a bit scammy and they should look at Crypsi and Bitcoin and the original ideas. So yeah, we're kind of stuck in an unusual place. But no, it's going well. We've had a lot of interest. We've got a lot of people creating all kinds of kind of anti-establishment art, anti-central banking art. And yeah, we want to promote that side of things. And yeah, we're certainly not going to tell anyone to put all their money into memecoins. But yeah, we're just trying to have a bit of fun. We've built a kind of... it's all not-for-profit as well.

[00:47:28] So we're not trying to, like, profit from a memecoin. We've been doing it all the way, over five years. So yeah, no, we're open. We've got a lot of criticism for doing it. I think a lot of our kind of friends aren't speaking to us at the moment over it. But we still think it's an important thing to do, because yeah, as you say, Bitcoin has all become about ETFs and banks, BlackRock and derivatives, and that's not really what it was about. I mean, what happened to the ideals of anonymity? The idea of... yeah, we want to encourage the Bitcoin Core coders to make sure it is more anonymous, because that's going to be key in the future, I think.

[00:48:09] As you say, otherwise it just becomes a CBDC.

[00:48:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it sounds really interesting how basically you're diving into this Solana ecosystem for the purpose of educating this audience on the history of Bitcoin, and hopefully giving them an idea about the cypherpunk intentions behind this project. Maybe they're going to start caring about it. But I think this is the perfect transition into the next ad, which is for Layer Two Labs. Paul Sztorc has been promoting this idea of drivechains, which are sidechains for Bitcoin that are going to cover every interesting use case. You can have a sidechain for Ethereum.

[00:48:53] You can have a sidechain for Zcash. You can have one for big blocks. You can have anything. You can onboard them with your own keys. You don't have to trust a federation or whatever. You just have to trust the miners that they're going to be honest. And honestly, miners have the largest skin in the game. Are they really decentralized, and can we get to 51% attacks? That's another conversation to be had. But Layer Two Labs is pushing this idea of drivechains on Bitcoin. And yeah, I get this message from Paul Sztorc regularly.

[00:49:31] He sends me messages before interviews, and now I have to read this. So just a second, I'm scrolling on Telegram right now for the message that I got. I'm a fan for reasons which concern scaling Bitcoin, because to me, the real Bitcoin maximalism is the one where... yeah, I found it... is the one where you do stuff with Bitcoin and everything gets divided by the 21 million coins. Otherwise, we're going to keep on creating different chains for no reason other than inflating the money supply. And people are going to buy into that because it does something interesting, and not everything we don't like is scammy, for better and worse.

[00:50:17] And I'm going to read this from Paul Sztorc. He said: "Is Blockstream going downstream? Has RGB got you down and brown? After a long day of listening to [unclear: Peter McRetard], why not feel something for a change? Feel alive. Join Layer Two Labs and make everyone feel sad and frustrated and angry. Our next ritual is at 3 a.m. in the ancient forest. See you there. I'm Paul Sztorc, and I approve this message." Or do I? Anyway, he's poking fun at all the people who say that this should not be on Bitcoin, not even as sidechains, but at the same time say that all the chains that are not Bitcoin are scams.

[00:50:59] It's very difficult to understand.

[00:51:04] Crypsi: Yeah, there's no right or wrong answer. I mean, I think most people who've been involved in Bitcoin for, say, 10 years... I can't think of a single person who's never traded or held another cryptocurrency. I mean, back in the day, yeah, we... we were having fun, because we hate Doge. And the main reason is because everyone used to offer it to us for free. We'd have probably tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds' worth of Doge if we'd accepted it all.

[00:51:35] But at the time, we were like, no, we don't want the Doge. But yeah, those were big Bitcoiners back in the day. And they were... yeah, most Dogecoin holders were big Bitcoiners back in the day. And yeah, a lot of big Bitcoiners were involved in other projects back in the early days. And yeah, the idea that... I think Bitcoin maximalism has got a bit out of hand, and it seems to be a lot of the newer Bitcoiners... I suppose not all of them, but some, a lot of them, are the real kind of toxic maximalists, which we're big fans of as well.

[00:52:06] But yeah, they seem to not recognize the fact that cryptocurrency was always multi-chain. It was always going to be multi-chain. And Bitcoin is the most important of those, but it doesn't mean no others are going to exist, especially for specific purposes other than money

[00:52:24] Or a central bank reserve currency.

[00:52:28] Vlad Costea: I mean, I do hope that we're going to get drivechains and we don't need other chains for other stuff. But if we end up in a future with multi-chain and multi-coin situations, I guess it will get interesting. We're going to get a new chain for everything that gets discovered along the way. But I do find it interesting... I'm looking through the comments that we got and all the stuff that we get on Twitter. By the way, more than 350 people have watched this live.

[00:52:58] So thank you, guys. It's really cool to know that people care about this sort of stuff. And it's interesting that someone called you a based dev. Why are you a dev?

[00:53:10] Crypsi: Well, this is a bit of an ongoing joke in our chat, I think. I think "based dev" is a very memecoin term. So yeah, Crypsi is a collective of artists, so if we're being honest, we don't really have any specific kind of dev or technology expertise. But yeah, we like to pretend that we're devs to a certain extent. For a memecoin, hopefully it doesn't require too much dev. We managed to issue it, we managed to mess it up quite a lot. But yeah, listen, that's still going. And yeah, we're devs in the very, very loosest sense of the word, I'd say.

[00:53:51] Vlad Costea: In regards to what you said about culture and Dogecoin, if you look at Dogecoin right now, in the GitHub repository, to see who are the developers who worked on that one, you're going to find Gavin Andresen, you're going to have Wladimir van der Laan, who reviewed a lot of PRs, you're going to find Luke Dashjr, and all of these big names, legends who worked on Bitcoin, because at one point they regarded every chain that was funny or interesting as something which they could use for testing. And there was nobody on Twitter, Reddit, BitcoinTalk, not anywhere, who was going to call them bad actors for doing this, or scammers, or whatever.

[00:54:29] They would just take something which is nearly identical technically with Bitcoin and work with that, to see if they could discover something new, or play with some parameters, or try soft forks on those chains before they tried them on Bitcoin. And it's incredible how we got to the point where just mentioning something that is not Bitcoin, just using the word crypto instead of Bitcoin in the context of referring to electronic money that you transfer over the internet, gets you into trouble. And I have been canceled. I'm one of these guys.

[00:55:06] And it is very interesting, because if we had drivechains, if we had scalability with Lightning and everything else, and Bitcoin was a perfect system, I would understand this. But if Bitcoin has not really progressed, or at least doesn't do these use cases, what's the point of calling out this stuff? And my question for you right now is: why did you go for Solana? Because I guess Ethereum is the one with the largest liquidity.

[00:55:38] Crypsi: Yeah, so basically, it's a long story. So basically, Crypsi was formed... or the Crypsi memecoin was formed on the back of... we're friends with an artist called Darkfarms, or Darkfarms1, who released a meme called BOME, and it went absolutely, completely mad. So basically he managed to create, I think, over a billion dollars in the space of three or four days, from the presale to the launching on exchanges. And we sent him a congratulations saying, like, fuck me, that's amazing, like, congratulations.

[00:56:09] And he sent one back saying... I shouldn't really say this, but he sent one back with words to the effect of: it's great to fuck the system a bit. And from that, an alarm bell just went off in our heads, and we thought, fuck me, we've got to do this. Like, this is a calling. So yeah, no, we've been on the mission ever since. We launched the memecoin about a month ago. So yeah, it was on Solana purely because BOME, or Book of Meme, was on Solana.

[00:56:40] And yeah, it's obviously the hottest thing at the moment. I think back in 2017 you had the ICOs, and then you had the NFTs, and I think this year, yeah, it is really the Solana memecoin year. So if we're going to try and educate, or try and bring some of the OG ideals and ideology back to a new generation, I think it's got to be done through a Solana memecoin. We did look at, like, a BRC-20 token. And yeah, ideally it should have been done on Bitcoin.

[00:57:13] However, if we're kind of preaching the Bitcoin ideology, I think we're kind of better on another chain, even if everyone hates us for it, if that makes any sense.

[00:57:24] Vlad Costea: Well, it does and it doesn't. Depends on which school of maximalism you attended. If you're from the school of protocol maximalism, then you're a shitcoiner. If you are from the school of monetary maximalism, then you're a hero, you know, because you're not bloating the Bitcoin blockchain with these transactions, and this token doesn't have to be stored by everyone's node forever. But let me ask you this. I was not aware of a Crypsi token when we started recording this interview. You told me about it. I understand it's on Solana.

[00:58:01] So when people buy this, what are they actually buying? What's the ownership about?

[00:58:10] Crypsi: It's a memecoin. Yeah, I mean, it's just a meme and an idea, no different to Doge. We don't want to do anything special. We're not trying to be too clever. We do drop NFTs. So we've got a couple of Fake Rare, Rare Pepe artists involved in the collective, so we're planning to drop a load of NFTs to people. But other than that, we're just going to keep it very, very simple. And the idea is, yeah, just to have some fun. And we encourage... look, if there's any listeners out there who are big Bitcoiners who hate memecoins, please do come into our Crypsi Coin Telegram chat and tell us we're full of shit.

[00:58:40] Try and help educate people that they should be investing in Bitcoin rather than memecoins. We could think of nothing better, as strange as it is, because yeah, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to, like, help people, educate people, especially the younger generation. If they're obsessed with memecoins and that's all they're investing in, then we think they do need some help. And we're going to set up a Doge helpline for anyone who invests in Doge, and say, look, what are you guys doing? So we're just trying to have some fun.

[00:59:07] And we're trying to promote kind of anti-centralization, anti-government, anti-state, anti-central banking art, because we think that's important for the kind of society's psyche, if you like. That art is very, very important. If you can put ideas into people's heads that governments are not all good and privacy is a good thing, then we think that's something worth pursuing.

[00:59:33] Vlad Costea: Now, let me ask you the classic question: why don't you do this on Bitcoin? Why don't you stick to Bitcoin?

[00:59:40] Crypsi: Sure. I mean, I think you mentioned it. It's like, why... we did do some Ordinals. We've never done any STAMPs. But we don't want to damage the Bitcoin blockchain in any way.

[00:59:50] Vlad Costea: No, I mean this awareness, right? This education that you're providing through the memes. Why don't you do it to the Bitcoin community? And you chose to go for the Solana community.

[01:00:01] Crypsi: Sure. Well, I think the Bitcoin community are already the Bitcoin community, so it's like an echo chamber. If you're preaching Bitcoin to a Bitcoin community, then you're not really doing any good. If you're preaching the kind of cypherfunk ideology to memecoiners who have no idea what crypto was in the first place, we think that does

[01:00:19] A little bit more good, hopefully.

[01:00:22] Vlad Costea: I think I've heard this one once before. Do you call it cypherfunk instead of cypherpunk?

[01:00:28] Crypsi: Well, either or, I mean, I guess. But yeah, it should be cypherpunk, shouldn't it?

[01:00:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you call it cypherfunk, and I was thinking, okay, is this something else?

[01:00:38] Crypsi: There's a lot of futuristic

[01:00:39] Dystopian art, so we probably get the terminologies confused, I guess. We did a Pepocalypse range on Ordinals. But yeah, we haven't... That was a few years ago, I think.

[01:00:52] Vlad Costea: My thought process with this inquiry that I just made is that Bitcoin seems to have an identity crisis and people seem to forget why this was created in the first place. So all of this anti-establishment, anti-bank rhetoric is partially gone in a time when bankers are some of the biggest investors. So when I asked you, why don't you do this on Bitcoin? I guess what I asked you basically is, don't you think that Bitcoiners also need this to be reminded why we're here in the first place?

[01:01:25] And maybe that they don't want to hear. Maybe that they only care about the number go up aspect, and as long as they're getting rich, nobody cares. But I do think that creating more of these Bitcoiners from a crowd of people who otherwise don't care about Bitcoin is admirable. I'm not saying you should buy Crypsi or any other memecoin. I'm just saying that teaching a community of people who don't care about Bitcoin about the history and philosophy of Bitcoin is admirable.

[01:02:02] Crypsi: Yeah, listen, we're certainly going to do our best. And anyone who... we're not going to come on the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast and urge people to buy a memecoin, so that's not the idea. But anyone who wants to help us try and educate someone, hopefully a younger generation... we're going to bring as many in as we can. We're going to give them all... as we say, like, the whole thing is we're going to give it all away over five years, 1 million out of the 21 million.

[01:02:28] So yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, we really do want to kind of help educate people about what it was all about in the first place, which, as you say, is slightly being sidetracked and lost a bit.

[01:02:37] Vlad Costea: Now, people are going to ask: can't you do this without the token? Can't you provide education in a Telegram channel without having this token that people can trade?

[01:02:52] Crypsi: I think, listen, it's very hard. It's a very hard sell. How do you do that? How do you get new people in? So I think, to give you an example, we've had massive problems with Twitter. We've had a couple of accounts shut down. But I think the main Crypsi art account, in 10 years, was up to 1,800 followers. I think it's now 2,400 in the space of six weeks. So that shows that you can bring in a lot... a lot more people are interested in memecoins than they are in Bitcoin, unfortunately, in this day and age.

[01:03:19] So if you're going to try and, like, attract those people, you're going to struggle unless you're something trendy, if you like. Unless you're kind of in the community that people want to be in at this particular point in time, then yeah, you're going to struggle to find kind of new people to

[01:03:36] Try and help.

[01:03:39] Vlad Costea: I do understand this. Maybe the token is the bait into getting into this sort of cypherpunk and anti-bank culture that started... this was the foundation of Bitcoin. Anyone who has been around for longer than seven, eight years knows that this was the case. This is the ideology at the foundations of Bitcoin. The fact that we had changes in narrative, and now we think that Bitcoin is this perfect digital energy that people can only transact if they can afford to pay a very large fee, and that's fine because it's for billionaires who are going to be sending billions of dollars in Bitcoin at a fee of $100, which is fine.

[01:04:26] I don't know, we got to this point and the medium of exchange is no longer a priority. Even the Lightning project seems to be not as well funded as it was in the past. There seems to be this desolation about scaling solutions and everyone is screaming that we should activate this soft fork or the other one for the sake of enabling new dev tools that people can build to make new cool stuff for Bitcoin. So I think we are at a pretty low point from a cypherpunk point of view.

[01:05:00] Ideologically, I think we are still struggling, but we're going to make it. Technically, I hope we will make it. But culturally, we need a change. We need, at least among the masses, we need people to remember why this was invented in the first place and the ideology behind it and the fact that the bankers are not your friends, the government will only agree with something and the politicians running for office like Donald Trump, they will say they want to save this and help it regain its wild nature.

[01:05:37] Of course, they say this during the campaign and then they're going to do the opposite once they get elected into office. Politicians are not our friends. Bitcoin was created... If you read Nick Szabo, and this is a long rant, I know, but if you go to unenumerated.blogspot.com, I believe you're going to find a lot of articles about social scalability. And this idea of social scalability starts from the idea that we needed trust to get to nation states, to get to large cities, to get to large human societies.

[01:06:12] But once you get a technology that no longer requires trust and it's trust-minimized by design, you can scale at a global level in a way where two strangers can meet and they don't need to know anything about each other. They don't need to know where they come from or what they're going to do. They just say, okay, I'm going to give you this currency, which you agree that is universally great. And you're going to perform this service or give me this product. This is the ideology behind Bitcoin.

[01:06:45] This is the cypherpunk literature. You can read Tim May, you can read John Gilmore, you can read the Cypherpunk Manifesto. You're going to find a lot of this stuff. And Satoshi was a cypherpunk. You can see it in the ways that he was writing. And in the fact that he chose this message for the Genesis block, "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That only proves that Bitcoin has a mission. And we forgot about this mission. We have the bankers buying Bitcoin. And ironically, we run our nodes.

[01:07:23] We forgot the point of this. [unclear: Yes, rant over. That's me done.]

[01:07:34] Crypsi: But yes, we couldn't agree more. We couldn't agree more. Yeah, we're big fans of Bitcoin. We think Bitcoin, in its original ideals, was such an amazing idea. We do think it, listen, it's worked incredibly well. It's done what it said it was going to do, I think. But yeah, we do think that, yeah, listen, if we can help educate, or try and bring Bitcoiners back to the original roots as well, then yeah, we'll certainly try and do that. And some of the money we raised in the presale for the memecoin, we're going to have an art exhibition, so it's going to be funded by Solana

[01:08:11] Suckers. And we're going to hopefully have a Bitcoin art exhibition in Bristol, probably in July or August. And yeah, no, the whole idea is, yeah, we're certainly not going to be promoting Solana or Ethereum NFTs or anything like that. It's all Bitcoin, Counterparty, Rare Pepe, and that's what we're interested in promoting, because that's what we believe in.

[01:08:35] Vlad Costea: I was going to ask you before... actually, I can do it while I promote my ad. You can check out the website BTCheads.com. I put my cards there, you can check them out. They're issued on Counterparty, and they're also created as Ordinal inscriptions for the sake of immortalization. And you can check them out. I have some of the most interesting figures in Bitcoin being immortalized. Maybe I should make a Crypsi Head card.

[01:09:03] Crypsi: We'd love you to. We'd love you to. I think we actually have one or two of your kind of Counterparty NFTs, or tokens. So yeah, no, we'll have to dig those out at some point.

[01:09:14] Yeah, double-check our collection to make sure we've got them all.

[01:09:17] Vlad Costea: Yeah, go to BTCheads.com and check out this collection. It's on Counterparty. You're going to need Bitcoin for it. You need to transact with Bitcoin, you need a Bitcoin wallet. I think the best one for Counterparty right now is freewallet.io. Not freewallet.com, that one is scammy. Don't touch it, don't download it, it might be malware. Freewallet.io, it's open source. You can verify the source of it and the code. It's being maintained by a bunch of Counterparty people.

[01:09:50] And it's pretty cool. I have this collection. I also turned them into physical cards, which you can buy from... I think you can still buy them from them, I'm not sure, I've got to ask. But they're called Satochip, S-A-T-O-C-H-I-P. I'm not sure if it's .com or .io. But they do make these physical cards with bearer assets. And they have this product, the Satodime, that you can buy for about $20, if I'm not mistaken. It's affordable. You can customize it with your own card.

[01:10:25] So if we have a bunch of Solana token guys, or we have Crypsi, who wants to put his art on that one, you can order a customized card which has your graphics on it. And it has NFC, so you can scan it on your phone and make sure that the asset is there. And it also has a sealing mechanism that's physical. So if you physically unseal the card, it means that you have withdrawn whatever token was on it. So check it out. Use promo code BTCTKVR if you want to buy anything from Satochip, like the Satodime or the Seedkeeper and a lot of stuff that they're making.

[01:11:09] And you're going to get a 5% discount, if I'm not mistaken. And also, I want to talk about Cryptosteel. They are the OGs of cold storage. They make these metal plates that are designed to last forever and they're made in Europe from the finest European steel sourced from Germany and Poland and a bunch of other places. Everything is manufactured in Poland and they were the first ones to create this concept. I think you have very loud fans by the way, Mr. Crypsi.

[01:11:41] Crypsi: I know, apologies. We're blaming Solana. All this Solana stuff on our computer is running.

[01:11:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So if you want to get one of those Cryptosteels, they're resistant to fire, water, physical damage, a lot of hazards. Go to cryptosteel.com and use promo code BTCTKVR, which stands for Bitcoin Takeover, to get 10% off on your order. So if it's 80 bucks or something, you're going to pay only 72, because you get a 10% discount. BTCTKVR for Cryptosteel and also for Satochip. And thank you, guys, for sponsoring. So I was going to ask you what you think about my cards, if you took a look at them, if you have any physical ones.

[01:12:28] Crypsi: Sorry, your particular ones, the BTC Heads?

[01:12:32] Vlad Costea: Yes, the Bitcoin Heads.

[01:12:33] Crypsi: We don't have any physical. I didn't realize there were physical ones, but we certainly have a couple of the tokens.

[01:12:39] Vlad Costea: Only Satodime made them, for a while. They were available for sale, but I think they made them available at a time when the market was at the peak of the bear market, around the FTX moment, so they did not sell too well. I guess they have them still in stock somewhere, so they can sell them for a low price still.

[01:13:03] Crypsi: But again, you always have the problem: Bitcoiners don't like spending their Bitcoin, or something has to be amazingly good for Bitcoiners to spend their Bitcoin. So yeah, it's always a hard sell. Anything... trying to sell anything for Bitcoin is not easy.

[01:13:17] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but this kind of stuff, like metal plates from Cryptosteel or these cards from Satochip or Satodime, they're agnostic to the type of blockchain that you use. You can put assets on it. They use BIP44, if I'm not mistaken, which is the one that enables you to have the same seed phrase for multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin testnet and a lot of stuff. So if you're into that... I'm not saying you should buy anything other than the products, like Satochip and Cryptosteel, but if you're into other coins and you want to store them, you might as well store them in a way that makes you not lose them, as opposed to being reckless with something that may or may not become valuable one day.

[01:14:06] Who knows?

[01:14:09] Crypsi: Yeah, no, we were going to show you... I mean, Crypsi, when we first got involved in CrypArt, there was a kind of sister company called TGBEX, which made these physical Bitcoins, you see that. So we've got big collections of the Casascius coins, and this is a silver wallet. But yeah, no, we're big, big fans of anything physical, because it reaches a far wider audience than just people who are kind of technically advanced and can understand Bitcoin. So physical coins, yeah, we always used to argue, were an essential thing. And Casascius being shut down, I think, was a big disaster for Bitcoin.

[01:14:50] So yeah, we helped the TGBEX guys in their promotion and tried to help that. I don't think it was good timing. But yeah, we're huge fans of... like, the CrypArt is all paper wallets. So yeah, it's about looking after your own keys. It's about being your own bank. And we've always said that, yeah, just print your own paper wallets, laminate them. Whether you stick them on a picture for a bit of fun, or on a coin, is another thing. But yeah, you should look after your own keys and print your own wallets. And anyone using a Coinbase wallet or anything like that

[01:15:19] Is just an idiot.

[01:15:22] Vlad Costea: Well, you heard it from the Crypsi dev that you should not use Coinbase or any custodial exchange for storing your assets. Just get off, get out, embrace freedom, because that's what this is all about: sovereignty.

[01:15:37] Crypsi: Exactly, yeah.

[01:15:39] Vlad Costea: But did you just flex whole Bitcoins in front of the camera, as physical collectibles?

[01:15:44] Crypsi: No, unfortunately, that was an old coin, so that one was actually redeemed. But yeah, unfortunately, it doesn't have any Bitcoin. All our Bitcoin... we're a non-profit organization, and any Bitcoins were lost in boating accidents, obviously.

[01:16:00] Vlad Costea: And of course, it's unsealed. It's not the kind of Bitcoin that you can buy for above spot price because it's a collectible.

[01:16:10] Crypsi: Yeah, well, obviously, completely off-chain, completely. But it's the same idea as your sponsors. Anything, if you can store it on... I mean, obviously, like, engraving a private key or something, along with a two-factor authentication, you can engrave that on a piece of metal. And that's even better than laminating it on a piece of paper.

[01:16:32] Vlad Costea: It is. And you should not trust printers either. You should know that when you print a private key, there's a memory slot on your printer... not slot, there's a memory chip that remembers everything you've ever printed. So if there's any sort of investigation happening, maybe you need to destroy your printer. And there's this very tiny chip that stores information about the documents that you printed. So it's not safe to print for offline use either. You have to destroy your printer in a very specific way.

[01:17:06] Crypsi: Yeah, well, even in 2014, we struggled enormously, I think, certainly for CrypArt, because we had to find computers that had never been connected to the internet and didn't have modems and things in them. And yeah, it was a struggle. But the lucky thing was, obviously, the cheapest computers were the ones we could have used. I doubt you could find one nowadays, though, that's never been connected and would never be connected to the internet, in order to make these things.

[01:17:31] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's a difficult task to secure your Bitcoin. Today we have much better solutions. We have this BIP39 standard. We have these physical bearer assets, which are better connected with applications to your phone and stuff, that allow you to check at any point what's happening. But it was scary. It was reckless back in the day. I guess also the smaller number of people being interested in this meant that you had security by obscurity, meaning that you could leave 12 words written on a piece of paper, or a private key, in a park on a bench for a day, and people would look at that and throw it in the garbage, not knowing what this is.

[01:18:13] But if you do that today, it's likely that someone is going to find that and be intrigued by the series of 12 words and look it up on ChatGPT or Google or whatever, and realize, oh, this might be something that opens a Bitcoin wallet. So don't be reckless.

[01:18:33] Crypsi: No, keep it saved, write it on alternate pages of your favorite book in random orders, or... yeah, I wouldn't recommend trying to remember these keywords in your head. But yeah, no, whatever is easiest for you. I mean, I think a lot of the solutions have almost become too techy for a lot of people. And I think that, again, Bitcoiners can get a bit carried away with multi-factor signatures and things and all kinds of crazy ideas, which makes it almost unattainable for the average person. So yeah, there's a balance between security, being your own bank,

[01:19:11] And also, like, not making it too complicated for most people to understand, I think.

[01:19:17] Vlad Costea: Yeah. We just surpassed 509 people listening to this on Twitter slash X. It's good to have you, guys. It's a lot of fun to talk about art and talk about tokenizing it and selling it on free markets and allowing it to have eternal life. Basically, it can either die but still exist forever on someone's node, or it can become a popular phenomenon that's going to make historians talk about it decades or centuries from now. So it's very raw and uncharted territory. We have no idea where this is going to lead, but it is admirable when you do it not for speculation, not to dump on your followers, or your investors... or can you call them investors?

[01:20:05] I don't even know. It's a memecoin. It's something that you get for the...

[01:20:09] Crypsi: Definitely not. It's definitely not an investment. It's a flutter at best.

[01:20:18] Vlad Costea: It's a flutter. And I also want to mention this. I watched... what's his first name... Casey Rodarmor on the Hell Money podcast. He was talking about Runes, and it was so funny to see him say all the time: you know, you should not be using this. You should only buy Bitcoin, you should save in Bitcoin, you should do this and that. And he was saying, yeah, you should follow whatever everyone says that the rule is. However, if you're interested in shitcoining and you want to create this and you want to have fun with your own Ponzi scheme or whatever, you have Runes now.

[01:20:52] And it's funny how self-aware everything is, because nobody's saying, oh, this is the most legit stuff ever, it's going to be the next [unclear: Bitcoin], we have very advanced technology for it and it's going to go to the moon. Everyone's saying, ha ha ha, this is fun, we're going to buy a bunch of these tokens and then trade them with each other and see what happens. But there's no promise about anything. It can go up, it can go down, you can lose, you can win. It's all for fun.

[01:21:18] Crypsi: I think a lot of these things are fads as well. So a lot of the NFTs, a lot of the... I don't know, whether it be Ordinals, Runes, STAMPs, any of these things. I mean, listen, a lot of our friends make them, and good luck to them. And yeah, we have no problem with people, each to their own. But yeah, no, people tend to think whatever they particularly are doing, that's okay, and everything else isn't. And it's become a bit segregated, I think, the whole kind of, certainly, the Bitcoin art and certainly the NFT communities.

[01:21:53] But again, a lot of that is just down to a lack of demand, a lot of people being driven into other things.

[01:22:04] Vlad Costea: Someone just said on the chat that I should call the show Bitcoin Caviar, for some reason. And Memecoins on Twitter said that "these podcasts are like stardust, each unique, yet collectively illuminating the crypto universe. Great listening." Thank you. Well, I'm glad that there are people commenting on this.

[01:22:27] Crypsi: Yeah, well, listen, I mean, yeah, hopefully the whole idea of the... really, Crypsi, the memecoin, is to kind of intersect, or to try and bring Bitcoin into a wider sphere, especially for the younger generation. If all they're investing in is Solana memecoins, then someone needs to kind of do something to try and persuade them that they shouldn't be putting everything into Solana memecoins, and maybe they should be looking at Bitcoin and looking at the future and caring about what it was all about in the first place.

[01:22:58] Vlad Costea: Well, what is the point of Solana? I've been trying to understand for a while. It's basically Ethereum, but more centralized.

[01:23:08] Crypsi: We've always argued

[01:23:09] That Bitcoin is a kind of digital central bank currency, designed to replace the central banks and make the world a fairer place, and every other cryptocurrency will just eat itself. So yeah, you mentioned before... I mean, Litecoin is a massive testbed for Bitcoin, and you can't really, as a Bitcoiner, you can't really have a massive problem with Litecoin, we don't think. And the same with Monero; Monero is just more privacy-focused. So yeah, we certainly don't have a problem with a lot of these things. But on the other hand, every five or 10 years, another cryptocurrency is going to come along to replace Ethereum or to replace Solana, and it's going to be cheaper, it's going to be quicker, and they're all just going to eat themselves.

[01:23:48] So yeah, we've always said that Bitcoin should survive in the long term. It has to, for any crypto to survive. And then all the other cryptocurrencies will just eat themselves, and so they'll all be forever replacing themselves. And I think Solana is just the kind of latest... as you said, it's just the latest Ethereum. It's the latest thing that people are trading and using to buy these memecoins in this kind of hysterical age, which we think will probably last, yeah, certainly for the rest of this year.

[01:24:18] Vlad Costea: It is funny to me that this is required to get more people to care about Bitcoin. But, you know, sometimes the end justifies the means, and the end justifies the memes.

[01:24:33] Crypsi: Yeah, that's the... yeah, it's a big debate. And listen, in the Crypsi collective, between ourselves, a lot of the artists weren't happy. They were like, there's no way we're doing a memecoin, and especially not if it's not on Bitcoin. So yeah, it caused... a lot of people aren't speaking to us. We have had a lot of internal arguments, a lot of external arguments, and people are kind of pretty bemused by what we're doing. But yeah, as you said, like, the end justifies the means, hopefully. And it's a bit of a gamble.

[01:25:02] But yeah, we think it's a gamble worth making, because, yeah, we think otherwise this new generation is going to be completely lost. They're going to know about pink unicorns, they're going to know about fluffy cats, and they're not going to know anything about where crypto came from or what it was about.

[01:25:22] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah. So basically, are you saying that you're dealing with young people who are into this Solana ecosystem?

[01:25:31] Crypsi: Yeah, I think mostly, yeah, it does tend to be much younger people. I think they're disillusioned with society. But instead of looking to Bitcoin as a way out, they're just messing around with memecoins. And some of them have made a fortune, no doubt; lots are going to lose a fortune. But again, we just don't think we can change reality. I mean, we'd love it if memecoins were much bigger on Bitcoin and we could release a BRC-20 and have some impact. We just don't think that's possible at the moment.

[01:26:03] And so that's why we went for Solana, against lots of advice, against lots of internal arguments, people arguing against it internally as well as externally.

[01:26:15] Vlad Costea: I understand this very well. I think at one point you have to choose between not doing anything or doing something shitcoiny. And if you're going to wait for the tech to get built on Bitcoin so that it becomes available, you might be missing out on these people who might be Bitcoiners but not know about Bitcoin yet. Because I believe still that Bitcoin is a mindset. It is an ideology. It is an idea of what money should be like. And if people don't learn about this and they get nihilistic in these NFT trading circles, it's unfortunate.

[01:26:56] And it's a net loss for everyone. I do believe that these bear markets are usually very good at creating new waves of Bitcoiners, because people who didn't care about Bitcoin previously, are going to be looking at the number one asset which lost a lot less of its value, as opposed to everything else that went to almost 99% in the red. And they're going to care much more about this, and they're going to get themselves educated. But if they can be saved before that, I think it's even better.

[01:27:30] Crypsi: Yeah, and listen, I mean, again, memecoins... I mean, is a memecoin worth existing? You only have to look at Doge. And again, we say we're not big fans of Doge, but the fact it's worth, what is it, 20 billion dollars, it's survived for so long... memes are here to stay, whether Bitcoiners like it or not. And yeah, if we can have a meme that helps push people a little bit in the right direction, we think that's better than some dogs and fluffy cats and things.

[01:28:00] Vlad Costea: So I've got to ask you this, because I came up with this idea just a few seconds ago. How was the distribution of coins managed? And is it possible to do something special for this show right now, live, and give away some of your Crypsi tokens to people listening?

[01:28:17] Crypsi: If anyone at all would like it... I don't know if you can... if anyone has a Solana address, you can maybe download a Phantom or a Solflare wallet, just especially for the Crypsi. Don't invest in any of those, because we're certainly not going to. But yeah, we're quite happy to give it. If anyone would like 21 Crypsi free, which I think is about 50 cents at the moment. Yeah, please do post your addresses, or come and join our Telegram chat. And yeah, we're trying... as you said, we've got a million Crypsi to give away, out of 21 million,

[01:28:47] And we're going to give it away all over five years. We've also got a lot of Solana that we raised, that we're using to give away as well, to help promote it. So yeah, the idea is, yeah, we want to give it all away. So yeah, more than happy, if anyone is prepared to try and put up with a Solana wallet and send us an address, we're more than happy to give them 21 Crypsi.

[01:29:06] Vlad Costea: Okay. Is there a limit to this offer, like 21?

[01:29:12] Crypsi: No limit. No limits, I don't think, unless we're expecting more than 1,000 people.

[01:29:19] Vlad Costea: So a thousand people, and then it's done. You're giving away 21,000 Crypsi coins, or tokens, or whatever you call them, and then it's done, to people coming from the show.

[01:29:33] Crypsi: I mean, we're giving it away for five years. A lot of the people creating art, we're giving them weekly rewards. We're not paying anyone. A lot of people are coming into the chat and saying, you pay us this, we'll do this. And we're just saying, no, that's not the way it works. So yeah, it's all done on a rewards basis, and we pick, sort of, 10 or however many people every week, and we give them rewards. But yeah, on the other hand, yeah, we've got loads to give away. So if people want to, if people come and join our Telegram, then we do give.

[01:29:59] I don't think you'll find anyone in our Telegram at the moment who doesn't own any Crypsi.

[01:30:04] Vlad Costea: Okay, that's interesting. At least if you listen to this show, you get a benefit, if you're into that. And if you do care... I'm not saying you should buy Crypsi, I just asked how you can get some for free. And if you want to get some for free, you heard how you can do it. You get one of these wallets and you join their Telegram chat, or comment under this thread about this interview. And what else did I want to mention? I think that's pretty much it.

[01:30:34] What's your final message to the world before we end this?

[01:30:38] Crypsi: My final message is: listen, we're not here to shill Crypsi or to shill a memecoin. We are here to shill Bitcoin art. So there's a lot of fantastic artists. Scarce.City is probably the main place to find them. Pepes as well. Please do have a look into Counterparty and the history of the Rare Pepes and its connection to Bitcoin, Bitcoin's history. Because a lot of... yeah, a lot of NFTs... most people in the world think NFTs were invented on Ethereum, and two, three years before that, Rare Pepes were kind of documenting the history of Bitcoin.

[01:31:11] And for Bitcoiners to hate Counterparty, to hate Rare Pepes, it's counterproductive, we believe, to the whole system. So yeah, please do keep supporting. And yeah, I'd like to give a few shout-outs to Rebel Money Art and Flo Montoya, who are two great artists. They run a podcast, or Twitter Spaces, every Friday, I think it is, on crypto art and the kind of scene, and they have great people on. Yeah, please do visit Scarce.City. And yeah, I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to know.

[01:31:46] But no, thank you so much indeed for having us on. Is there anything else we can help with, or...?

[01:31:54] Vlad Costea: Yes. So if people mention Bitcoin Takeover Podcast before posting their address, can you give them 22 instead of 21?

[01:32:03] Crypsi: 21 is a magical number, though, you see. We don't like giving... If anyone mentions the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, we'll try and give them... the first 20 people, we'll give them 42 instead.

[01:32:16] Vlad Costea: Nice. I just negotiated more for a bunch of guys who might be doing this. Yeah, so thanks, everyone, for listening. Thanks for tuning in. This was, I guess, another one of those episodes that's going to get me canceled, but at this point I'm used to it. It's still interesting from a Bitcoin point of view that people are spreading culture and history through these unconventional memes... memes and memes, you know. So thank you a lot for this, and I'll see you in the next one.

[01:32:48] Crypsi: Thank you very much indeed.