Title: S15 E39: Pete Rizzo on Bitcoin History, Journalism & Culture
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Pete Rizzo
Published: 2024-05-30
Duration: 1:53:28
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2024-05-30_s15_e39_pete_rizzo_on_bitcoin_history_culture.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2024-05-30_s15_e39_pete_rizzo_on_bitcoin_history_culture.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization (recorded as a livestream), reconciled against the YouTube auto-captions of the same stream paragraph by paragraph (the captions run about 4 s ahead of the podcast audio at the start, drifting to about 2 s behind at the end) and against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps (three-way comparison over the whole episode). Doubtful stretches were re-transcribed locally from 23 short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD). Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and Pete, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), the paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings, and short turns were re-attributed by hand where needed (e.g. 00:42:51, 01:15:19, 01:20:06, 01:44:15, 01:53:24). Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Bitcoin Magazine, Kraken, CoinDesk, Casa (sponsor of Pete's Bitcoin History project), Aaron van Wirdum, David Bailey, Jameson Lopp, Peter McCormack, Gavin Andresen, Mike Hearn, Wladimir van der Laan, Jeff Garzik, Luke Dashjr and Eligius, Pieter Wuille, Mr. Hodl, American HODL, Wasabi Wallet coinjoins, Roger Ver, Charlie Shrem, Eric Voorhees, Saylor, Udi Wertheimer, Christian Keroles (CK), Hodling.ch, Bitcoin Cash, Turing completeness, Ordinals, BitVM, Taproot Assets, Tether, Tron, Andrew Poelstra and Mimblewimble, Allen Farrington, Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, Zooko Wilcox, Zcash, Casey Rodarmor, LayerTwo Labs and Paul Sztorc (drivechains), Bitcoin Mechanic, UASF, Eric Voskuil and libbitcoin / libconsensus, Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell, OCEAN, FPPS, AntPool, Cory Klippsten, Jimmy Song, Satochip, Chris DeRose, Junseth and Bitcoin Uncensored, Counterparty and Rare Pepes, Eli Ben-Sasson / StarkWare, OP_CAT, ZK-SNARKs / ZK-STARKs, Ross Ulbricht, the Supra, Blythe Masters, Factom, Backpage, Ethereum Classic, John Dilley, Robin Linus, Bitcoin++, Rick Falkvinge, Amir Taaki, Mircea Popescu, Saifedean Ammous. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:49] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to Season 15, Episode 39 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad, and I'm live today with Pete Rizzo, who is one of the first people to write about Bitcoin in the entire world, and the first person that I'm aware of who ever called himself a Bitcoin historian. And he writes for Bitcoin Magazine, he manages content for Kraken, as far as I know, and he's done a lot for the space, and he's very active and he reminds us where all of this started, and what happened about 10 years ago, and what kind of people were criticizing Bitcoin and being super wrong about it.

[00:01:25] Vlad Costea: And it's very nice to have you, because this season I've had, it was Aaron van Wirdum first, and then it was David Bailey, and now it's you. I guess I'm going to get the entire Bitcoin Magazine crew by the end of this season. So welcome, Pete.

[00:01:40] Pete Rizzo: It's a very big club these days, but yeah, happy to be here. I appreciate the shout out and yeah, excited to chat about the history, where we're going, where we're at, all that good stuff.

[00:01:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So why do you call yourself a Bitcoin historian? Why do you think that Bitcoin, which is rather new, it's only been around for 15 and a half years, is worthy of having a history?

[00:02:09] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I really like that aspect of it, because people don't think of Bitcoin as being something like new emerging technology. Whereas if you say, hey, Bitcoin history, it kind of flips it on its head. Immediately, you kind of deem Bitcoin as something that's worthy of having history and that has a history. So what does it mean to have history? It means that, you know, there's sort of people and events that have shaped something and it's worth kind of understanding and really getting a sense of that knowledge.

[00:02:37] Pete Rizzo: And for me, yeah, it's really, as I was telling you before this show, right, you mentioned kind of my background in journalism as a writer. You know, I don't consider myself a native of Bitcoin land, right? I sort of moved here as an outsider. I'm not from a libertarian background or a technologist background or something like that, right? I'm someone who, you know, wanted to tell stories, always liked writing. I came to Bitcoin because there was exciting stories going on. That was, you know, my background and how I got into CoinDesk and how I was kind of on the original team over there.

[00:03:13] Pete Rizzo: So yeah, I think for me, you know, I had to do an about face kind of halfway through my career in Bitcoin where, you know, I was someone who was writing stories about Bitcoin, but maybe I wasn't so close and so connected to the actual technology and technical development. We can go into kind of why that was the case, right? But, you know, I realized kind of the people who were driving Bitcoin forward, you know, maybe didn't know that much more than me, right, that they were learning about it.

[00:03:40] Pete Rizzo: It became, you know, kind of went from something where Bitcoin felt like when I joined in 2013 as something that was very understood. It was something I would never be able to take part of into something where, you know, especially during the kind of 2017 era of Bitcoin, I had to build my own mental model of why I was participating in Bitcoin. I had to kind of ask more difficult questions about, you know, why I was doing this with my life, why I was interested in Bitcoin and how I should understand it.

[00:04:09] Pete Rizzo: So that process kind of took me back into the archives, right? There was a point when I left CoinDesk where I wasn't sure if I was going to continue in the industry. And I decided to, you know, if I didn't go back now to the beginning and kind of really figure out, you know, what I thought Bitcoin was and where I thought it was going, I would have probably just left the space, right? But instead I have spent, you know, three or four years now kind of going through the archives, really trying to understand the history and events that I wasn't part of, using that to contextualize the stuff that I was part of, and publishing that, right, and sharing that on social media has become kind of the way that I've externalized that.

[00:04:46] Pete Rizzo: But yeah, I still think that, you know, Jameson Lopp always says nobody understands Bitcoin. I think that's true. You know, I think that where I'm trying to get with the work is that I'd like it to be easier for people to understand and explore the Bitcoin history and kind of shape their own kind of path and understanding about, you know, where Bitcoin has come from and where it's going. Because I think too often, you know, Bitcoin is presented as an ideology, it's presented like as a certainty.

[00:05:12] Pete Rizzo: And I think that's, you know... We're seeing now that that's been detrimental, because we have a lot of people who are newer to Bitcoin, who seem to be very locked into specific understandings of Bitcoin. They feel like they were kind of told that Bitcoin was or should be a certain way. And they seem to be having some difficulty with the fact that our understanding of Bitcoin is changing. And in fact, like that is the status quo, that actually has always been the case. We've been learning about Bitcoin and changing our understanding of it.

[00:05:43] Pete Rizzo: And I feel like very much it's an interesting kind of fault line in the culture right now. This idea that Bitcoin can change or would change, when my experience of Bitcoin is, in fact, that it has actually always been changing. And that any change from that would be the change.

[00:06:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I understand very well what you're saying. And there's a lot to unpack here. But first of all, I need to give a shout out to Yellow, who is in the chat. And he said that you're wearing a jacket.

[00:06:12] Pete Rizzo: I'm wearing his color, right? Okay. Should I take it off? I don't know how that works. Shout out to Yellow. Appreciate you. I'm a fan of the Spaces. If you see a Bitcoin Magazine handle lurking there, that might be me.

[00:06:26] Vlad Costea: Don't stop believing. Anyway, I started from this point where I asked you why it's relevant for Bitcoin history to exist, because it's a rather new field. But at the same time, why do you believe that Bitcoiners are so bad at remembering what happened four years, eight years ago? Because it seems like every cycle we get the exact same issues and the exact same conversations. And we're so bad at remembering what happened not so long ago.

[00:06:52] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I think people are just bad at remembering things, right? This was one of the things when I was going back to kind of investigate the Bitcoin history. I spent about a year interviewing people, I probably did about 100 interviews. And I would say that honestly, like a lot of them were totally useless. I was able to kind of go back to the archives. One of the cool things about Bitcoin is we have these... A lot of the history is preserved. It's just really hard to know where it is. It's very inaccessible. There's IRC, there's BitcoinTalk, but you really can go and like read the actual forums.

[00:07:18] Pete Rizzo: And I pretty much just started at, you know, square one, the white paper and linearly read the forums, you know, probably really only into like 2014 now, in terms of like seriously kind of unpacking... Like, you know, what is a historiography? When you think of history, historiography is sort of this idea that, you know, there are people in events that kind of shape a time period and certain of those things become important because they influence other time periods. Right. So, you know, for me, I like to say that for a lot of the newer people, the history of Bitcoin is Satoshi, Hal and Michael Saylor, and that's kind of what they know.

[00:07:50] Pete Rizzo: And what I'd like to present them with is kind of a more varied you know, pantheon of Bitcoin thinkers because I do think that, like, you know, there's, and this is, again, like kind of where the disconnect with the current culture is, that you know, let's just take a specific view like the idea that block size shouldn't increase, right? This was once an idea that was so unpopular, it was probably held by a handful of people, and if not one person, that one person being Peter Todd. And him advancing the idea of a Bitcoin shouldn't have a block size increase in the public sphere was so controversial that he was chastised by Bitcoin's lead developer, castigated and basically you know, told to leave the ecosystem.

[00:08:30] Pete Rizzo: But now this is an idea that's so mainstream that the idea of doing anything else, would give you that sort of cultural penalty. So, you know, I see Bitcoin history as kind of this, you know, grand kind of pageant of people and ideas. And I think the thing that keeps me kind of, you know, suspicious of kind of the current developments is that there's a lot of cases where you can go back and say, okay, this single individual held this idea. And if it wasn't for them championing it, championing it through, you know, the difficulty of consensus and, you know, convincing other people, we wouldn't have this idea, right?

[00:09:07] Pete Rizzo: So that makes me want to kind of understand outsider ideas, because I think Bitcoin is the history of sort of outsider ideas becoming mainstream. The block size limit is just, I think, the best example of that one. Because right now, in today's Bitcoin culture, if you were to suggest, you know, that the block size limit isn't the greatest thing that Satoshi ever did, you know, you might get some pushback against that when, you know, the reality of the situation is that that was an idea that was held by one person, it was championed, and it became broadly accepted because it was correct, because people agreed with it.

[00:09:38] Pete Rizzo: And that that's the real kind of history of ideas in the space. And I don't think we've seen the last of that. I think that's very likely to continue. That's one of the reasons that I've become, you know, publicly defensive... That, you know, kind of come to the public defense of the Ordinals protocol, when I think a lot of people haven't, right, I kind of gave that famous, or not famous, but like, I don't know, people gave me shit about it, like, you know, podcast with Peter McCormack about, you know, what's the bull case for this, like, what would be the... If you were gonna, you know, make that wager?

[00:10:06] Pete Rizzo: What would it be? I see that as very much another sort of outsider idea, you know, that is now becoming accepted by the Bitcoin mainstream. That's been a very painful process, right, but it's very similar to kind of a lot of these other outsider ideas. So yeah, I'll stop there. See what we got.

[00:10:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I totally understand you. And it's funny, because you mentioned the maintainer of Bitcoin Core at the time, who maybe didn't treat Peter Todd the way that he deserved to be treated. And that was Gavin Andresen. And you have all of these names, Gavin Andresen, you have Mike Hearn, you have

[00:10:45] Pete Rizzo: Wladimir van der Laan.

[00:10:47] Vlad Costea: I actually met him in person. Super nice guy.

[00:10:50] Pete Rizzo: I have as well. Yeah, he's a hard one to find.

[00:10:54] Vlad Costea: And also, what's his name, Jeff Garzik. I've been chasing him for an interview for longer than a year now.

[00:11:00] Pete Rizzo: He's still around. Yeah, he's still accessible [unclear: by] email. But yeah, there's there's a large pantheon of people. And I think the trick with like historiography, if it's going to be valuable is like pinning a specific idea to these these people, right. So you can kind of look back and I'll give you another example with Luke right now. Luke is very popular. He's popular because he's kind of championing a very specific idea. But I think a lot of people within the modern [unclear: pleb] culture, they don't really actually understand Luke's contributions with any specificity, right?

[00:11:27] Pete Rizzo: Like they don't know Luke Jr. from Pieter Wuille, or from Pieter Wuille from Wladimir van der Laan. They just see Luke as being an older developer. They don't maybe understand his historical relationship with Bitcoin Core, they don't really maybe understand his historical contributions to Bitcoin Core. So they have a certain perception of him. And then that perception really is based more on their imagination of what it might be than anything that's, you know, a real understanding. And I kind of look at that as a problem to solve, right?

[00:11:56] Pete Rizzo: Like what's the problem to solve there that you you can and I think we can and this is part of what I'm working with you know I took on a sponsorship with Casa to kind of help me build out this Bitcoin history stuff is because I think we can go back and look at Luke's kind of early days we can catalog his you know conversations and we can kind of actually get a very granular understanding of what he contributed as a as a person. And I think that that would be good.

[00:12:21] Pete Rizzo: It would be good if we understood the Bitcoin history to that level. Because I think that having these types of conversations, right, you take something like democracy, like democracy is a very messy subject, right? A lot of people have a lot of opinions on it. But the nice thing is you go back into the history if you want to, right, and you can read what Jefferson wrote about democracy, and Franklin wrote about democracy, and Hamilton wrote about democracy. You can see that they had different opinions. And, you know, there's a lot of artists and creatives that have made work that kind of helps us understand that.

[00:12:51] Pete Rizzo: And so, you know, back to what you're saying about history, it's like, why do cultures exist? Cultures seem to exist to align people around advancing ideas, and then cultures have a history. Why do they have a history? Because they need to navigate the future, right? They need to kind of in the present, figure out how to coordinate ahead. And your understanding of the past is only as good as, I think, is what you can go forward, right? Like the better understanding of the past you have, the more I think you can chart that future course.

[00:13:20] Pete Rizzo: And I think it's interesting, right? You can see the different kind of warring Bitcoin sociologies. They each have a different version of the past, and they each try to rewrite it, right? That's kind of one of the things that I thought was funny when the sort of like ordinals kind of Bitcoin season two crowd started to appear, right? Like, what was their first tactic was to actually rewrite the history, or it was to go back and say, oh, it was Satoshi sold this JPEG, or he wanted to sell this JPEG.

[00:13:41] Pete Rizzo: So we're good, because, you know, so there's always this act where like, history, I think is a battleground, right? Like you have present cultures that are kind of like warring in the present, but they're using sort of the past as like, excuse, even in the US political election, like this is very true, right? Like the Republicans, you know, they might claim that they're the party of the Constitution, and yada yada yada, right? So there's, I think this well understood idea in like, political science and social science that, you know, history is important.

[00:14:13] Pete Rizzo: History is kind of something that's always being fought over and preserved. And particularly right now in Bitcoin, I think it's an interesting point, because there's different groups that are trying to use history, or change history or present history in different ways to different aims. And if you don't have a good understanding of what they're doing, then it's hard to really analyze it with any degree of assurance, I think.

[00:14:37] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you mentioned your sponsorship with Casa. And now I have to mention my sponsorship with Wasabi Wallet. These guys are going to be shutting down their coordinator in two weeks, which means you only have two weeks to coinjoin with great liquidity and very large rounds with a lot of inputs and outputs. It can take years until someone, maybe a third party coordinator is going to build the trust to handle so many transactions. So you better coinjoin. The fees are low. These days, there's not going to be a lot of opportunity for a few months, I guess, at least until the elections, I don't think we're going to see much friendliness in regards to this idea of privacy.

[00:15:21] Vlad Costea: So it might be a good idea for you to do your coinjoins now, you only have two weeks to do that. And then they're going to shut down their coordinator, go to wasabiwallet.io, download the wallet. And even after the first of June, you can still use Wasabi, because it has Tor, it has block filters. It's pretty cool as a light wallet for your desktop, you don't need to use your full node on your on every computer, you just download Wasabi, you let it sync. And you're going to get a pretty private experience even without the coinjoins.

[00:15:52] Vlad Costea: And I'm pretty sure that at one point, someone will come along and say, Hey, I just started this coordinator, I'm super anonymous. And I have this computer that's on a hidden island, and nobody else can get access to it. So you can coinjoin with my computer. I guess there will be a day when we're going to get that. But it can take a long time until they have the reputation and the liquidity to do hundreds of inputs and outputs in one transaction. So do that fast and on or else you're going to regret it.

[00:16:25] Vlad Costea: Also, no fees for inputs lower than 0.01 BTC, and no fees for remixes. So you pay the first mix, and then you get free remixes for as long as you're happy. You can get as many coinjoins as you want. Of course, you pay the transaction fee to the miners, but that's another discussion. So I wanted to ask you, Pete, to maybe retweet this, because it seems like for some reason that it's obscure right now, only, I guess less than 100 people listen to this, and they should listen, because there's a lot to learn.

[00:17:01] Vlad Costea: And while you're retweeting, I want to ask you, why do you think that we have this situation where we forget about the good contributions of people once they do something in which they step out of line. So let's say that Mike Hearn did a lot of great stuff. There was an early competition organized by Satoshi, and that's also how Pieter Wuille got involved. And Mike Hearn was the first to build a specific type of wallet that Satoshi requested, and he collected a bounty.

[00:17:30] Vlad Costea: And I think that's how Mike Hearn became more involved in Bitcoin. I think his biggest problem was when he did that interview with Gavin and he said that he's trying to become more of a dictator of the Bitcoin protocol. And it was also the LevelDB, no, the Berkeley DB incident, where there was an accidental hard fork and because of him there's Bitcoin that has downtime. But at the same time, he was an author of BIPs, he's responsible for making the system more efficient. And he believed in the system before most people in the world did.

[00:18:04] Vlad Costea: So he does deserve some acknowledgement. But at the same time, it's unpopular to say on Twitter, for example, Mike Hearn was a great Bitcoin developer. If you say this, you're going to get ostracized and even if you say something like Gavin Andresen was great at maintaining Bitcoin Core, they're going to jump at you. People like Mr. Hodl, people like... Who else is out there? [unclear: Bob] or whatever his name is, American HODL. These people are like gatekeepers, like high priests, and they make sure that everyone uses the right kind of words and the right speech to address Bitcoin.

[00:18:43] Vlad Costea: And if they don't, they're going to come at you and call you names and insult you. Even Shinobi did this with me. Before working for Bitcoin Magazine, Shinobi was the biggest asshole I've ever known. I did an interview with someone he didn't like. And he spent, I think, hours of his life just insulting me, calling me a moron, and telling me to remove that interview because he doesn't like the person. And I was like, you're only making me want to keep it more, you know?

[00:19:12] Pete Rizzo: Well, I guess maybe I'll start with the Mike Hearn part, right? I think that, yeah, certainly, I think there's a, you know, they say the victors write the history, right? So there's certainly a tendency to undervalue, I think, specifically Gavin's contributions, because I think that, again, they were so early that it's kind of hard to argue that, you know, Gavin wasn't a particularly important person for Bitcoin, even if you think negatively about him. You know, you're talking about a person who really kind of built the Bitcoin development process, like as we currently know it, that wouldn't have existed without him, right?

[00:19:47] Pete Rizzo: Literally kind of started the GitHub, got the initial funding for developers together. You know, Mike Hearn and Gavin just had a different view of Bitcoin, right? They very much, I think, and I think they had a different view on, you know, how Bitcoin would be successful, particularly, you know, they saw, you know, I guess I've spent a lot of time over the last maybe year kind of delving into the 2013 kind of schisms. And I think, you know, the way that I've come to understand it is essentially, Gavin and Mike had a specific idea of how to secure Bitcoin in the future.

[00:20:20] Pete Rizzo: And how the Bitcoin protocol, you know, would succeed. And essentially, their vision kind of went something like this. The way for Bitcoin to succeed was to keep transactions free, and to increase the user base, essentially subsidize it as a startup would essentially the way that Facebook scaled to having, you know, billions of users. But they thought that by doing this, they could achieve a regulatory moat for Bitcoin, right? Essentially, what they saw was, you know, hey, there's this possibility that governments might attack and undermine Bitcoin. So the best way to get around that is to make Bitcoin so popular, so successful, so cheap to use.

[00:20:58] Pete Rizzo: I think Roger kind of evokes a lot of these things, that Bitcoin will achieve an escape velocity, and the regulators will have no choice but to acknowledge it. And therefore, you know, Bitcoin will become popular and successful and widely used because of, you know, it will escape government capture. And then there was sort of the equal opposite faction to that that emerged that was essentially you know, Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell, Luke Jr. kind of being the preeminent voices of essentially saying, no, the best way to kind of secure Bitcoin from this, you know, potential kind of attack vector or the best way to kind of think about Bitcoin as a heading off hostile governments is essentially to decentralize it as broadly as possible, right?

[00:21:40] Pete Rizzo: And that means keeping node costs low enough for people to join the network and for it to be maximally distributed, to really think about how to decentralize mining, right, so that this was kind of their big, you know, talking point, right, is that they didn't want mining centralization, whereas Gavin was not really concerned about mining centralization. And so that's really where the fissure emerged, right? You know, I think that, you know, certainly, you know, within war, within fights, right, people act certain ways. And there's a certain demonization of the certain things that people did, right?

[00:22:17] Pete Rizzo: You said, Mike Hearn's comment about whether Gavin should kind of kind of take up more of a dictatorship being kind of a linchpin for that. But there were things on both sides, right? Like there it was a fight, right? And in a fight, you know, both sides kind of act in different ways to achieve their political outcomes. And I think this is one of the things that's most misunderstood about the Fork Wars is this idea that one side was victorious. I think that's a really problematic view.

[00:22:44] Pete Rizzo: And that one side particularly wasn't involved in the politicization of Bitcoin development in some way. You know, the same side that kind of claims that they, you know, maybe didn't engage in politicization also kind of went to Asia and signed an agreement with the miners in order to, you know, buy themselves time in order to kind of create a technical upgrade, right? So there's all sorts of inconsistencies in history. You know, I think that also, when you remove yourself from the conversation, it's harder, you know, to continue to advocate yourself, I'd say, Eric Voorhees is like an interesting opposite voice, right?

[00:23:23] Pete Rizzo: Eric Voorhees really hasn't removed himself from the conversation, right? Whereas Gavin and kind of Mike have left. And so it's harder for Eric to really be, you know, he's here to defend himself, right? And I think a lot of people within the modern Bitcoin community, you know, see, Eric is a bit of an expatriate. Whereas Eric sort of claims, you know, I was a Bitcoin maximalist, I am a Bitcoin maximalist, I want the best for Bitcoin. You know, I simply accept that, you know, human freedom requires that I accept all these other technologies and their utility that Bitcoin doesn't provide.

[00:23:54] Pete Rizzo: And he serves as a useful counterpoint, right? People might not like what he said, I've struggled with Eric's kind of, you know, viewpoint at different times, but I've appreciated that he's kept a very consistent viewpoint, right? I think when people kind of leave the conversation, it becomes very easy to kind of rewrite or re-represent them. And you kind of get this idea what you're saying, where it's like, oh, Gavin's a spook, or this person's a spook, or Mike Hearn was a spook because he worked for some sort of government agency.

[00:24:18] Pete Rizzo: I mean, Peter Todd also, you know, worked for a Canadian military contractor. I mean, there's plenty, you know, you could sort of make one of these arguments for either side. It's just some of them have become more popularized in the culture out of, you know, political necessity. And just, again, for what, you know, the victors write the stories, right? And that's why I think like, preserving stuff in like an archive is much different than like writing a history, right? You can kind of make the materials accessible so that people can form their own opinion.

[00:24:45] Pete Rizzo: So my reaction to kind of hearing a lot of these things about Mike and Gavin and kind of these different you know, rumors and things was to go and actually look at the source material and like develop an opinion myself. You know, But in order to do that, I had to actually go. You know, And like download massive IRC files and like start kind of scraping this information and trying to make it make sense to me. And that's stuff that I want to publish because I would like for other people to be able to kind of like follow the journey that I went... Say, like, okay, yeah, if you hear this about Mike Hearn, here's where to go. Look, you can go look at the conversations.

[00:25:18] Pete Rizzo: You can see how he represented himself. And you can see if you agree, you know, with what people say, I think that's kind of what's absent is that, like, check and balance, right? It's the burden of proving or disproving any of these statements, like some of them I agree with, right? I mean, some of them I happen to have absorbed the kind of primary materials and come to the position that I think that Mike and Gavin's, you know, preferred roadmap wasn't as well reasoned as the other side, but that came from me, like looking at the materials and spending time with them.

[00:25:48] Pete Rizzo: I think that for most people, I actually really do believe this, I think most people are going to want to like look at the primary information for some of these things and make their own opinion. And it's not good enough for them to be told something, right? I think a lot of people, you know, like Mr. Hodl and those type of people, they, I think they're trying to be well intentioned, right? They're trying to save people time. They're trying to kind of help people understand things a certain way.

[00:26:12] Pete Rizzo: I'm just the kind of person that I have to go look at the actual thing and develop my own opinion. It's very hard for me to be, like, [unclear: fed a] certain opinion and then to accept it. I just immediately reject that process.

[00:26:26] Vlad Costea: I'm happy that you mentioned something about Eric Voorhees and his consistency, because I get the same opinion that he was this libertarian who got into Bitcoin for his ideological reasons. And he kept on using some other technologies for the same purpose. For him, it was never about one specific coin or one specific idea. It was just to preserve liberty to the extent that he wanted. So that's why I have some respect for him, because he doesn't strike me as being hypocritical or inconsistent.

[00:26:57] Pete Rizzo: Well, I think the whole libertarian wing, they went that direction, right? Like, I think that modern Bitcoin maximalism, like, is not libertarian. I think it's ironic that modern, you know, sort of Bitcoin culture is viewed as libertarian because the early libertarians within Bitcoin have sort of forked off. And they forked off for the reasons that you sort of suggested is that, sort of rather than, you know, they were sort of presented with this Bitcoin, in their view, being unable to scale kind of coming into a fork and, you know, how they rationalize it, I think they would be, for me, would be like Roger, Charlie Shrem and Eric Voorhees being the kind of principal participants.

[00:27:32] Pete Rizzo: You know, they said, okay, well, rather than sticking with Bitcoin only as the view, I think it's just better that there's a million cryptocurrencies will exist. It's better for freedom, it's better for human liberty. And Bitcoin maximalism is antithetical to that, because it essentially says that you should reject that and that it's better for everyone to be invested in Bitcoin. So you sort of have this idea that like, or at least in my kind of the way that I view it, I see libertarianism as like a very like crypto pluralist kind of view, right?

[00:28:02] Pete Rizzo: People who are, these are people who are pro crypto, pro Bitcoin, and they're anti state, right? But you have various mixes of these, right? You have people who are anti crypto, pro Bitcoin, and pro state. And I think that's a better, you know, if you were to say like, what is the average Bitcoin maximalist today? I think they are pro Bitcoin, they're anti crypto, and they're they have a neutral to positive view on the state, because I think, you know, especially when you start to get into, you know, the modern culture, which is essentially asking the United States regulators to say, like, well, you should enshrine Bitcoin maximalism.

[00:28:37] Pete Rizzo: Bitcoin maximalism is not only technically valid, it should be regulatorily valid, right? Bitcoin should be given some sort of special designation within the regulatory infrastructure as being better than other cryptocurrency. That's that's essentially what the modern culture, I think, in 2021, 2022, with the rise of Saylor and those kind of things. I think this is where Eric Voorhees, like, really kind of was like, okay, I can't, I'm out, you know, because any engagement with the state, for me, I would rather side with kind of an open internet, open technology set.

[00:29:09] Pete Rizzo: I, you know, his take on that, I think would be like, I'm not so anti crypto, that I'm going to become pro state, but a lot of people made that choice. And I think the culture shifted in that direction. But yeah, I think, you know, again, there are many sociologies within the cryptocurrency world. And I think, you know, sorting them and kind of coming to a framework, like, I have my own framework for this, even though when I presented you this idea that you can kind of sort them with, like, you know, there's these three vectors, like pro... You know, your attitude towards the state, your attitude towards Bitcoin, your attitude towards crypto, you know, if you multiply them, then that's nine different sociologies, you know, because you could basically have a positive, a neutral or a negative view on each of those things.

[00:29:52] Pete Rizzo: Right, the no-coiner is anti-crypto, anti-Bitcoin, pro-state, right? The crypto person is pro-crypto, anti-Bitcoin, maybe pro-state, maybe anti-state, whatever, right? So you can kind of play around with these little things. It was funny, I kind of, you know, maybe you go back to 2022, I started to think that, okay, the modern Bitcoin culture really is pro-Bitcoin, anti-crypto, anti-crypto being the huge part of it. And then neutral to positive state. That's like kind of modern Bitcoin maximalism is that alignment.

[00:30:27] Pete Rizzo: And I think a lot of the tension right now is there are, you know, there are people who are not so anti-state that they're, you know, or so anti-state that they're pro-crypto. This is kind of like the Udi faction or the Eric faction. And then there are some people who are saying, you know, we're so anti-crypto that we're pro-state, we're okay with the state coming in and intervening. And so that's really where like the specific kind of tension is currently. You know, and this, I think CK, Christian Keroles, says this a lot, and I think it's very true, it's that like Bitcoiners now are so anti-crypto that like they've essentially become pro-state, right?

[00:31:07] Pete Rizzo: They're asking the state for regulatory, you know, to intervene on their behalf rather than, you know, what the alternative is. And the alternative is, well, Bitcoin has to compete in the market and out-compete these other things. I'll say one more thing that I think is useful is that I think there's kind of two conditions under which Bitcoin maximalism, I think, is a valid opinion, like it succeeds, right? So what would be the success conditions for that? You know, the first is that everything fails other than Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin's fine and never changes, right?

[00:31:40] Pete Rizzo: But everything else fails. That's... Bitcoin maximalism was successful under those conditions. And the second is that Bitcoin sort of out-competes all the things, right, and everything that was other cryptocurrency sort of becomes Bitcoin. Either of those two things, Bitcoin maximalism wins, but they're very different realities, right? Like in one of them, you have this like messy decades-long market competition. And I think for some people, they're, you know, so into this kind of like a doomer-ish culture, like, and they seem to kind of prefer one of those over the other.

[00:32:10] Pete Rizzo: For me, it's like, I don't care. I think either of those states is fine, right? Like if Bitcoin out-competes all the things, great. If everything else fails and Bitcoin doesn't change, great, it doesn't matter. Both of those are success states. So I don't know why there is so much tension, though, for the second one, this idea that Bitcoin has to kind of like out-compete or, you know, emerge through a market competition as being, you know, better than all the other cryptocurrencies or doing some of these things.

[00:32:35] Pete Rizzo: And I think the answer is that you have to validate the crypto infrastructure. You have to like actually interface with it and say that, oh, it's not a whole huge scam. We have to take the good parts of it. Even having that conversation, you have to acknowledge that it exists and it's not a huge scam. And like, part of the culture is just so unwilling to do this that that's where we're at, right? Like they're unwilling to have that conversation and, you know, they're looking at these consensus conversations and this is where like you get the shitcoins on Bitcoin stuff, right?

[00:33:03] Pete Rizzo: Everything they don't like is shitcoins on Bitcoin, right? I'll stop there. I don't know how much of that was useful.

[00:33:12] Vlad Costea: No, I think it's really interesting. And I think I should ask you a couple of controversial questions that stem from this. But before that, I got to introduce the advertisement for Hodling.ch, which is a service from Switzerland, which helps you with your self-custody. So if you're part of a company that wants to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet, but has no idea how to manage it, how to give keys to the executives, or you are a very rich individual and you have no idea how to keep your Bitcoin out of the house, these guys are going to help you set up your multi-sig and they benefit from that Swiss privacy that gives you, I guess, better tools to protect the information about how much money you own.

[00:33:53] Vlad Costea: So check out Hodling.ch and figure out how they can help you in these cases for whatever reason. And they're better than Casa, by the way, because Casa holds your keys. These guys don't.

[00:34:05] Pete Rizzo: Holds one of them, at least, right?

[00:34:08] Vlad Costea: Okay. So I want to ask you a controversial question and then another controversial question. So we spoke briefly through DMs, I'm not going to divulge the details about this, but we both bought Roger's book and we skimmed through it and we searched for spicy details and discovered that it's not really what we expected.

[00:34:31] Vlad Costea: And I want to ask you, what's your opinion on it? Did you find the time to read everything?

[00:34:37] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I read most of it. You know, again, I think that I understand why Roger wrote it this way. I think it's very much kind of like a Bitcoin Standard for the Bitcoin Cash perspective. You know, it's essentially an amalgamation of public data or public information about, you know, sort of his position and why he thinks it's valid, which I think is helpful, right? I guess it's good for people to have that if they want it. I don't agree with his conclusions about, you know, the time period.

[00:35:07] Pete Rizzo: But yeah, I think it's pretty much written kind of like you could tell he was inspired by The Bitcoin Standard, right? He wanted to kind of make an explain-it-like-I'm-five kind of version of why the Bitcoin project failed, and his view of Bitcoin Cash is kind of the Bitcoin project. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to say that it really moves the conversation forward in any real capacity, right? Because if Bitcoin Cash was better than Bitcoin, right, then the market would at least say that or, you know, you would write a book in a different way, right, if Bitcoin Cash was really so much more useful than Bitcoin, it wouldn't feel like it's written the way it is.

[00:35:44] Pete Rizzo: Which is kind of, you know, critiquing the current Bitcoin project, right? You would just say like, this is why Bitcoin Cash is great and why it's destined to be the future or you would sort of omit. It's like the, you know, modern Ethereum books, like don't talk about why Bitcoin failed, right? They just talk about why Ethereum is great or the modern Solana books, right? Like they don't take that perspective. But yeah, I mean, for me as like kind of an anthropologist, I was hoping for some juicy stories.

[00:36:06] Pete Rizzo: I wanted to hear his like thoughts on certain backroom dealings. I didn't get any of that. So yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's a bit disappointing. I think that it doesn't really add much to the current conversation because the market has essentially, you know, kind of spoken on Bitcoin Cash to a large extent. So it feels more like it's dredging up the past, but like without really kind of adding much of anything, unfortunately. I don't know. What were your thoughts?

[00:36:32] Vlad Costea: Well, to me, it was interesting because he chose this approach that is very unlike for Roger. Yeah. He likes to make big statements. He likes to challenge people. He likes to organize debates where he donates a lot of money to charity or whatever. So this is his style. But the book is written in a way that takes information that's public, that you can already find and interprets it in a way that justifies the existence of Bitcoin Cash and says that Bitcoin could have been much bigger. There is a conflict between the statements that Roger makes in the sense that he says that if Bitcoin scaled with big blocks and there was no pushback in regards to this, there would be merchants like Expedia and Microsoft and Steam still accepting Bitcoin and the price would be 10 times higher.

[00:37:20] Vlad Costea: This is what he says. Because the rest of the crypto inventions stem from this block size war conflict with developers who decided that, okay, they can't build this on Bitcoin even if they want. So they're going to launch their own layer ones or they're going to build on Ethereum. And I do sympathize a bit with this. But if you add up the market caps of all the other coins, you're still not going to get a 10x. So I think Roger is trying to...

[00:37:50] Pete Rizzo: They're already, you know, they're still cheap, right? So that's the thing. It's hard to really understand where he's coming from there because, you know, yes, fees were expensive during the block size wars, but they've certainly come down considerably. I mean, even with Runes and Ordinals, it's still pretty cheap to send a Bitcoin transaction. I understand that he wanted it to be free and he saw that as part of the value proposition. This was kind of the same thing with Gavin. But that wasn't the case. And Bitcoin Cash has been providing that to the market for so long.

[00:38:24] Pete Rizzo: So it's like, how do you explain, you know, if you wanted that? I don't know. It's hard to go back and armchair quarterback, that kind of thing. Because essentially what Roger and Gavin are saying is, oh, if only we had executed this one plan, then this one plan would have been successful. And it's like, OK, well, I mean, that's the story of most people who like, you know, I'm sure Pete Best thinks that the Beatles would have been much better if he was still the drummer. If you write, like, the history of the Beatles according to Pete Best, it's like he was better than Ringo Starr.

[00:39:00] Pete Rizzo: He would have been much better. But I don't know how to deal with that claim, right? Because he wasn't the drummer for the Beatles, right? The world moved forward. So, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say, right? Like Bitcoin Cash has not fared well in the market. The market has been very kind to other cryptocurrencies. So if that theory was really valid, I mean, I think we'd see a lot more evidence that that was the case. So I don't know. Again, I think it's unfortunate. I don't see it as moving the conversation really forward.

[00:39:30] Pete Rizzo: I think it's dredged up a lot of stuff that is kind of unhelpful, especially a lot of the block size stuff. I mean, you know, I mean, look at it. Even this year with BitVM and the other things that have happened, you know, BitVM literally like disproves that like 15 years of other blockchains, like, you know, even the claim that like you can now do Turing complete smart contracts like on Bitcoin or that's even theoretically possible. You know, undermines so much of the other stuff. And again, this is very early and it's, you know, it's exciting.

[00:40:01] Pete Rizzo: We don't know if it's gonna happen. But, you know, let's just imagine that like Bitcoin went down the road that it went and that was never discovered, right? You know, like, maybe you needed 15 years of forcing developers to find the best solution. And it's like, only when you get that leapfrog, right, somebody finally leapfrogs and figures it out. Like Bitcoin script is Turing complete, whereas every other developer like Vitalik and whoever just would look at the Bitcoin and say that this isn't, they weren't good enough to figure that out.

[00:40:29] Pete Rizzo: And you needed 10 years of people looking at Bitcoin to ultimately figure that out, then it's sort of like, was that worth it? And I think you have to say yes, because like, you know, what if you just never knew that? Like, right? What if we had just gone through all this trouble to make Bitcoin, like Ethereum, and then there was, you never got that advance? So it's like, what is scientific achievement worth to you? And I think it should be worth a lot. Like if anything in the crypto space, you know, is valuable, it's like the specific scientific advances where somebody proves that something that was impossible is now possible.

[00:41:00] Pete Rizzo: That's very, you know, so what's the, you know, you have to kind of... To take Roger's view on it, you have to sort of say, you know, we should have just made it much easier to like upgrade and develop Bitcoin when I think Bitcoin has been served quite well by its, you know, current conservative attitude, and even more so in the last year, because the majority of the things that people are upset about, are people figuring out how to do new things on Bitcoin. You know, the two like kind of big cultural, if you look at like, really, what are the big cultural boogeymen right now, it's sort of Ordinals, BitVM, and, you know, Taproot Assets. Those are kind of the big three, like narrative infractions. They all kind of stand kind of in contrast to the current culture: stablecoins on Lightning, and this idea that we can use Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin, and NFTs on Bitcoin.

[00:41:52] Pete Rizzo: Those are all ideas that within the 2021, 2022, like, maxi ideology, were seen as separate from Bitcoin. So now they're all sort of imposing on the Bitcoin ideology. And that's, you know, what are you supposed to do about that? I mean, that's just a natural occurrence, right? You know, I don't know, there was the meme "cry harder," right? Like, there's this idea that you have to accept reality that reality can impose on you. And like, you know, reality is imposing on us in interesting ways, we have to adapt.

[00:42:23] Pete Rizzo: I don't know, I don't really understand what people are so upset about these days, really. It's hard for me.

[00:42:31] Vlad Costea: Well, at the same time, it's hard not to notice some inconsistencies in this ideology, because it's not about the action itself. It's about who does it. If it's Bitfinex or Tether that do something, I mean, it's fine for them to have a layer two on Ethereum. It's fine for them to compete directly with Bitcoin's promise for transactions.

[00:42:51] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, right. Exactly.

[00:42:52] Vlad Costea: They're banking South America, they're banking Africa, they're banking...

[00:42:57] Pete Rizzo: I said this... I said that particularly in [unclear: a passionate rant], and I said, look at what they do, look at what they do. And if you look at... With Tether, it's like, okay, well, they put US dollars on a blockchain, therefore allowing the US dollar to compete against Bitcoin's global settlement infrastructure. They pay transaction fees, they pay for development, they support development of Ethereum, Tron and other blockchains, would validate the crypto complex, give VCs the, you know, means and impetus to invest in those things and to continue developing them.

[00:43:31] Pete Rizzo: And they, you know, largely buy US Treasuries, they support the existing US dollar structure, because they're one of the largest buyers of its debt. Look at what they do. Yes, they say all the right things. They say... They're very nice to the right Bitcoin people, they pay for the right parties, but look at what they do. And now look at the ordinals people. Well, they say they're attacking Bitcoin. What are they doing? They're paying transaction fees for miners. They're getting new users to adopt Bitcoin. They're actually onboarding these users onto wallets and exchanges and building tools that make it more simple for them.

[00:44:03] Pete Rizzo: So it's like, you know, it's almost like they're saying I'm going to attack you. But then you go to somebody's house and then you make them dinner and like you make them bed. It's like, what are their actions? Their actions are all good. Like, new people using Bitcoin is good. Those people holding Bitcoin is good. People paying fees to the miners and using the network is good. Those people troubleshooting edge cases of how the Bitcoin network works are good. And they're good for Bitcoin, like because demand is good for Bitcoin, intellectual capital is good for Bitcoin, real capital is good for Bitcoin, all these things are good for Bitcoin.

[00:44:31] Pete Rizzo: But because they're not saying the right things, because they're not giving lip service to the right people, that movement is largely maligned. And I think this is where I think like that the leaders of that, you know, they kind of consciously play around with this. They know that people aren't validating what they're actually doing. So they're just saying things to be inflammatory. But again, if you look at what they're doing, it's all net positive, right? So I don't know, I have a hard time with it because it's, yeah, there are large inconsistencies.

[00:45:00] Pete Rizzo: It is not clear why the Bitcoin culture views these things as valuable. And I think that fault line really is that it is a lot about this anti-crypto. It's like, what does it mean to be anti-crypto? And to what extent is the culture against cryptocurrency, right? And I think that there's this idea, there's a kind of this myth of like the evil shitcoiner. Or like the shitcoiners are like this, they're destroying the food, they're destroying the money, they're destroying health care. They're like the reason why, you know, our kids can't go to school safely anymore, right?

[00:45:37] Pete Rizzo: Like they're poisoning the world. There's this idea that the shitcoiners are so immensely bad. And you're like, is that true? Is that like an actual net real comparison? And to me, it's like, I remember being on the same stage as Adam Back and Joe Lubin. I remember sitting on the same stage with these people, physically, in the world, talking about the same... Having a civil conversation in which neither side yelled at the other, there was no, you know, big arguments. And so something I maybe would say to you is I think that, like, this is how I feel about the current culture, it's Bitcoin and crypto.

[00:46:13] Pete Rizzo: And there is this big wall. So it's the Berlin Wall. And on one side there's East Germany, on one side there's West Germany. And it's great. The wall was great. I loved the wall. It was great that the wall was there. I enjoyed the wall. I chose to be on this side of the wall. But the wall is coming down. The intellectual capital is coming to Bitcoin. The real capital is coming to Bitcoin. The wall is not useful anymore. But I remember the old Germany, where we were one group.

[00:46:41] Pete Rizzo: We were just one. There was no wall. And there were people who grew up in West Berlin. And they've kind of been taught to, like, hate the East Berliners. Like, oh, these people are all evil. Their incentives are bad. They're ruining everything. You know, to me, it's hard to get it. I don't get it because I remember it being one group. And these young kids, they can't even mentally grasp that. They can't understand that. They've just been taught to hate this group of people.

[00:47:10] Pete Rizzo: I mean, look, I'm old enough to remember most of the Bitcoin Core developers having worked on other altcoin projects.

[00:47:20] Pete Rizzo: What am I supposed to do with that information?

[00:47:22] Vlad Costea: Yeah, look up the Dogecoin GitHub repo, and you're going to see all the Bitcoin Core developers having worked on that one.

[00:47:30] Pete Rizzo: Or Viacoin, right? Litecoin. A lot of these things were worked on. Even Mimblewimble, as you mentioned, was worked on by Andrew Poelstra, right? So there's always been this idea that the cryptocurrency industry has broadly shared ideas. But I think it's also a product of, to be fair to the newer people, the ask of them to get into Bitcoin is higher. If you're going to put two weeks of your paycheck into Bitcoin, and you're going to really DCA, dollar-cost average, and really sacrifice. I noticed this when I go on Reddit and I watch the posts of people like, I finally got my 0.5 Bitcoin.

[00:48:05] Pete Rizzo: It's a lot. You're really asking these people to really believe and sacrifice a lot. So it helps to have this other, this group that you hate. Allen Farrington said this, and I'll leave it with you because I think it's correct, which is that Vitalik is our Emanuel Goldstein, and Twitter is our Two Minute Hate. He's talking about 1984, where you're sort of taught to hate this group. But yeah, I mean, look, I don't know. To me, it's really this idea of being anti-crypto. And while there were certainly a lot of things that I don't like about the cryptocurrency industry, I never disliked those people because I worked with them.

[00:48:44] Pete Rizzo: I spent a lot of formative time with them. And so maybe it took me longer to make a decision that I was in the Bitcoin camp. But I interviewed Vitalik, I interviewed Vlad Zamfir, I interviewed Zooko Wilcox. I spent a lot of time with all these people. I don't hate them. I can't believe that they're bad people with bad incentives to the level that some other people do. And I don't accept this. I just don't accept that idea. And I think what's happened recently is sort of the anti-crypto faction is so loud, and they're so demanding that even when, you know, Casey Rodarmor sort of invented this contraption to get crypto people to use Bitcoin, really, he psyopped them into using Bitcoin.

[00:49:27] Pete Rizzo: That was unpopular because, in order... You had to admit that those people were real people who could use Bitcoin, right? I don't know what to do for the new people because they seem to want some reward for having done the right thing. This is, I think, the problem with the kind of pulpit preaching culture that kind of developed around Bitcoin. They want some reward for not shit-coining. When I say they, I mean like the 2021 to 22 kind of class Bitcoiners. They want some reward for having done the right thing.

[00:49:58] Pete Rizzo: And the thing is that there isn't one. I can't give you one because there's nothing that exists. If you are not happy with the fact that you didn't scam anyone, and you didn't use any other cryptocurrency projects, and you didn't invest in those things, and you discouraged those people. If you're not individually happy with those things, there isn't anything else for you. Because if Bitcoin is going to be very successful, then all the cryptocurrency projects will just, they'll migrate to Bitcoin, they'll use Bitcoin, they'll buy Bitcoin, Chris Dixon will make money, Vitalik will make money, Vitalik owns Bitcoin.

[00:50:28] Pete Rizzo: The Ethereum Foundation owns Bitcoin, these people own Bitcoin. They won't be taken out into the streets, they won't be shot and killed. They will prosper just as you will prosper. And I think it's that idea that is like so threatening and so unpopular, that people will like contort reality around it. And it's like I don't, there isn't anything for you if you don't find value in your actions being, according to your own guidelines, ethical and moral, then there isn't a greater reward for you. And so that what is there to say, you know, I sympathize with you greatly, I agree that you have done right and good things.

[00:51:08] Pete Rizzo: But that's not... The world is not... The markets are not a machine that's going to like make you more wealthy, because you've done that. They don't exist. That's not how it works. Right. So you either have to find value in those things. Or you don't, right? And then you act differently. So it's like, kind of choose your path, right? I choose to believe that most of the people in the cryptocurrency worlds can be convinced that Bitcoin is the best money and the best system for them to do most things.

[00:51:42] Pete Rizzo: I choose to believe that. If you don't choose to believe that, great, I'm not imposing on you. Don't go to those forums, don't engage with those people, like ignore them. But they exist, right? And most of the world operates on that level, right? Most of the world's... You know, I said this at the beginning of my McCormack interview, and I tried to really kind of like underscore it, like the worlds and we're gonna see this with the 2024 election, right? Like the Bitcoin and crypto industry will both support Trump in all likelihood.

[00:52:12] Pete Rizzo: And Trump won't care that we don't think that the crypto industry is good. He doesn't care. Not gonna care. It's like he is going to back Bitcoin, the whole industry is gonna back him. And we don't get to sit there and say like, Oh, well, he likes Bitcoin. He doesn't know that Bitcoin is better than the other cryptocurrency. He doesn't care. Doesn't care. Not gonna happen. It's gonna be one ball of thing. And we're gonna have to choose whether we want to be get the benefits of that, right?

[00:52:39] Pete Rizzo: Whether we want to be pragmatic as like a culture and support that, or we want to be ideological and just oppose it on the basis that he's gonna take money from Coinbase, and he's gonna take money from Ripple, and he's gonna take money from all these people. He's gonna take money from all these places. There's no reason for him not to do that. So you know, it's sort of like, I'm a pragmatist. That's me. I don't care. I mean, that's that's who I am. I'm pragmatist. I'm a pragmatic person.

[00:53:02] Pete Rizzo: I will choose pragmatism over being ideological. It's okay for me if Trump doesn't embrace Bitcoin and hate shitcoins. So it's okay for me. I don't know.

[00:53:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah, speaking of shitcoins, and speaking of maximalism, because that's another conversation that we had, I got to present the advertisement for LayerTwo Labs. And for that, I got a message from Paul Sztorc. And he says the following. Okay, let me open Telegram. It's right here. Is Blockstream going downstream? Has RGB getting you down and brown? After a long day of listening to Peter McRetard, why not feel something for a change? Feel alive. Join LayerTwo Labs and make everyone feel sad and frustrated and angry. Our next ritual is at 3am in the ancient forest.

[00:53:51] Vlad Costea: See you there. I'm Paul Sztorc, and I approve this message. Or do I?

[00:53:59] Pete Rizzo: It's a tough one. I love me some Paul, but it's tough.

[00:54:04] Vlad Costea: I mean, I do like what they're building. I did take a look at their GitHub repo. They're getting ready for something. I'm not sure exactly what, maybe that he negotiated with miners, maybe that he thinks that he can get drivechains through with some sort of covenant soft fork. But they do have a sidechain for Ethereum, which is up to date. They do have a sidechain for Zcash, which is up to date. They do have a sidechain for Namecoin that's up to date. And to me, this is beautiful.

[00:54:33] Vlad Costea: You know, it's the promise of onboarding people with the features that they want in a non-custodial way. I think this is the holy grail of Bitcoin maximalism. And to me, this is what it's all about. One coin to rule them all. All the features, all the functions, everything that's been researched over the past decade under one coin. To me, that's Bitcoin maximalism.

[00:54:56] Pete Rizzo: I mean, that was the original definition, I think, in 2014, 2015, when it emerged, right? I mean, that was the vision of the early developers. I think that the problem is ideas change over time. And different people, you know, think different things. I think now that isn't what people think Bitcoin maximalism is. Me and you remember that that was what Bitcoin maximalism was. It's just that the majority of people who were taught sort of what Bitcoin maximalism is, they were just sort of told that everything was a scam.

[00:55:23] Pete Rizzo: And so because they were told that everything was a scam, they believe that it's not worth doing these things. And so they are coming at it from a completely different perspective. That's totally fair. And they have every right to come at it from that perspective. And I'm not trying to take that away from them. I'm just sort of saying they're gonna face a pretty cruel lesson, I think, in what consensus actually is. And this is, I think, most of what I'm seeing now around sort of the, like, fix-the-filter crowd and those type of people.

[00:55:49] Pete Rizzo: Again, I have a lot of discussions with Bitcoin Mechanic and others, those people who I respect, but it's, you know, the fact is that it's the economic majority that determines forks. It's the economic majority. And to the extent that the UASF might have plausibly shifted the tides in the SegWit, you know, debacle, it was that it convinced the economic majority not to hard fork to two megabytes. That's it. That's pretty much the extent to which you can say the UASF was impactful. I think the idea that the economic majority in this case will turn against a tide of new users coming from the crypto space to build things on Bitcoin, specifically when if you look at the two largest components of the economic majority are miners and exchanges.

[00:56:39] Pete Rizzo: That's really hard for me. But again, I think that this is where it does get difficult, right? Like with the consensus forming consensus building, because I think a lot of the newer people also haven't been part of this, right? They don't really understand what building consensus looks like and how to be involved in that. You specifically see this like on Twitter recently, this idea that like, participants aren't acting in good faith or there are blah, blah, blah, you know, these sort of like, fringe programmers, right, fringe developers.

[00:57:09] Pete Rizzo: They're just told they're just they were taught that like Bitcoin, you know, small blocks are great. And they would have been small blockers, because if they were born there, they would have been the same small blockers the same way you would have fought the Nazis if you were born in Germany, you would have there would never have been a small blocker. You could have never been a Nazi. You could have never been a Nazi because you're so good. You're so great. Why would you have been a Nazi?

[00:57:25] Pete Rizzo: You know what's right from wrong. Of course, you wouldn't have been a Nazi. So like, you know, now they're sort of dealing with the fact that they have to kind of make a more complex, like moral understanding and judgment. And, you know, they sort of don't understand what to do. And again, I have a lot of sympathy for them. But like, look, this is Bitcoin is going to continue to upgrade. It's very clearly clear that the culture wants that. And it's very clear that there's like kind of a messy alliance going on right now between, you know, the anti-maximalists, who are really like, sort of, you know, I don't know, this is how I would break it down.

[00:57:57] Pete Rizzo: I think the anti-maximalists sort of see this as Bitcoin having failed. And the idea is that they want Bitcoin to modernize with the other blockchains, you know, they want to bring Bitcoin up to the same level as Ethereum and Solana. This is kind of like the Udi and Eric wing, right? I would say, like, they're anti-maximalists, they're against maximalism, they think maximalism failed. They want to kind of restore Bitcoin up to this level of these other chains, right? That's kind of their vision that they're selling.

[00:58:22] Pete Rizzo: And I always kind of thought that there would be like, you know, another group that emerged, and I think this group is emerging. You know, you have like kind of a reactionary group to that, and the reactionary group is sort of the developers who sort of say like, you know, these are the kind of the script group, the Great Script Restoration group. You see all the kind of the people who are talking about all these like BIPs, and they're sort of saying, look at all these anti-maximalists are getting all these crypto people to come here.

[00:58:48] Pete Rizzo: And there's all these things we want to do natively in Bitcoin, we don't really support this idea that we validate the other cryptocurrencies. But we want to increase Bitcoin's development capacity, we want to increase its capabilities. So there's a political sort of alliance there, and they're bringing money for development, they're bringing attention to development. So like, there's a tacit alignment, sort of between like the kind of developer maximalists, and the sort of anti-maximalists, because now there's funding and attention to technical developments. And both sides can work with that, even though they have fundamentally somewhat different views.

[00:59:20] Pete Rizzo: And then the kind of monetary maximalists are the ones on the outside, right? They used to be kind of the ones driving the culture. And now they're sort of the odd one out. And you know, why are they the odd one out is because other than the ETF, they don't really have anything in the can, right? The other cryptocurrencies aren't failing. The government's not really coming out against these other cryptocurrencies, kind of a lot of these, like inflation isn't running out of control, governments aren't failing. These are a lot of like their kind of dominant narratives over the last cycle.

[00:59:51] Pete Rizzo: And I don't see those I don't particularly think any of those are valid. So I think the other two sociologies kind of like have this tacit alliance. I think that's just going to emerge that the new monoculture will be born out of those two cultures. But I think they're different, you know, and I think that may be a bit specific, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that Bitcoin sociologies are complex. I think there's a rough alignment between general groups. And, you know, I think the momentum away from sort of the monetary maximalists and asset maximalists is just going to continue.

[01:00:25] Pete Rizzo: And I thought that was kind of obvious as soon as ordinals kind of came out. It was just sort of obvious that there was something that they couldn't explain and didn't want to acknowledge. And then as soon as I kept compounding, like our worldview of Bitcoin has to accommodate reality, right? So if you're saying Bitcoin doesn't have NFTs on it, well, the reality is Bitcoin has always had NFTs on it. It's had NFTs on it since 2014, when NFTs were created on Bitcoin, and never at any point in the interim years was there a point at which Bitcoin didn't have them.

[01:00:54] Pete Rizzo: So like now you're in a point where you're, as a group and an ideology, you're sort of like, you're saying you want a reality that has in fact never occurred, and like saying that that should be the case. And that's just a really untenable position, like what are you supposed to do with that? Not only are you not describing current reality, you're misrepresenting past reality, and then you're using that to sort of dictate a future reality. And it's just a terrible position. You know, why would you want to be in that position?

[01:01:18] Vlad Costea: It's also funny that the forces that are aligning with these ideas and these movements are not always consistent. If you know anything about Luke Dashjr, you know that he put some verses from the Bible in the Bitcoin blockchain. And that was the old Luke. The old Luke was using his hash rate from his Eligius or whatever the name of his mining pool was to attack... To 51% attack other blockchains. So there's a lot about this guy that we don't currently know. It's just that he came out with this improved reputation from VC funding of OCEAN mining pool.

[01:01:59] Vlad Costea: He also lost like 200 Bitcoin not so long ago.

[01:02:02] Pete Rizzo: I mean, look, Luke is, I would say, like for me, Luke is a top 10 Bitcoiner of all time. I think Luke is someone who has probably intersected with every major event in Bitcoin history in some way. Going back to like the early forks, you know, earliest forks like P2SH, you know, and the hard fork and SegWit. And I do think that Luke is very valuable because he has a very iconoclastic perspective, right? It's very much the way that Paul has a very individualist perspective and Peter Todd has a very individual perspective.

[01:02:34] Pete Rizzo: They have very, they're useful because they have this very cohesive worldview. And that, you know, again, it's just what can you say about it other than it's like wholly original. There are very few people in the entire world who have wholly original views of what Bitcoin is. I would say you could probably count on like two hands. It's like Eric Voskuil, maybe like Peter Todd, Paul Sztorc, Greg Maxwell, right? And these people tend to be like very unpopular, right? Because they have very, very specific views of what Bitcoin is.

[01:03:03] Pete Rizzo: And they're very, you know, intricately built. So yeah, I would come to Luke's defense there. And I think what he's trying to do with OCEAN is very valuable, right? Like the idea that right now that there is a problem with the mining infrastructure, the way that payments are structured on the back end with FPPS, and you know, sort of the way the AntPool is kind of, you know, these are all like concerns that are valid. I mean, again, I think that I try to separate those and see those things.

[01:03:29] Pete Rizzo: I don't I don't see him as being the particular problem. I do think that there are people who follow him and sort of misunderstand what he means and sort of pretend that he means something else, right? I don't think I think there was a need for a champion of someone who just like was against ordinals and had some sort of technical solution. And Luke just sort of filled that void, right? If it wasn't Luke, it would have been somebody else... Would have come out and kind of filled that void.

[01:03:54] Pete Rizzo: There was this, again, these people who are sort of anti crypto, they feel like they're owed something for doing the right thing. They feel like they're better than the people who are using cryptocurrencies. There's sort of this built in kind of like, social group that wanted that action. My worry with those people is that they're just going to get increasingly radicalized. And they're going to, they're the most likely to fork off, I think, because they have the most dogmatic view about what should be going on, right?

[01:04:18] Pete Rizzo: Like their view is that the Bitcoin Core project is failing, that the Bitcoin Core project is compromised. These were all things that the Bitcoin Cash people said, you know, you like go down the list of like, okay, well, what did the Bitcoin Cash people believe? You know, that's why I said like, the big sin of the Bitcoin Cash people is just that they like, you know, they could never adapt their mental model of what Bitcoin was. It was never flexible enough to allow for anything other than cheap payments.

[01:04:41] Pete Rizzo: And they have their own blockchain for that now. So I don't know, I think, you know, the question is, will we see like a pure Bitcoin, Bitcoin Pure, or sort of like some sort of fork? And, you know, the reality, I think, you know, is the market participants who want that have all the cards for that they have their own implementation, they have their own mining pool, they have their own exchange, and they have a moral cause that they feel like they want to champion. So the answer that I would have then is what's stopping them from imparting on consensus.

[01:05:09] Pete Rizzo: And I think that's very obvious that the economic majority does not support them. But you know, how far do they go along before they realize that? And how far are they willing to go to push that? That's kind of the question right now.

[01:05:22] Vlad Costea: Well, I guess the idea of how far depends on how much money they raised for this and how long they're going to be able to run on a loss or at a loss because this is not profitable. You have to understand that they are not mining according to the best incentives, they're mining according to ideology. And Bitcoin is not some sort of ideology machine. It's a zero sum game. It's survival of the fittest. You either become profitable, or you fade. And they can only do this...

[01:05:55] Pete Rizzo: I think what Mechanic sort of says and his view on it is essentially like the Bitcoin culture is what Bitcoin maximalism is. Like his view, and I've really tried to understand with him and sit with him and really kind of steel man like his point of view. And his point of view is essentially like, okay, the thing that differentiates from Ethereum and other blockchains isn't anything about the technology of Bitcoin. It's the culture of people and the culture of development. So he sort of has this like very sociological view that there are like good people working on Bitcoin and the bad people are not working on Bitcoin.

[01:06:29] Pete Rizzo: And like he wants to sort of preserve that. But then he sort of also seems to, you know, I've told him, I think the problem I have with his viewpoint is that he has to believe that people are inherently bad, right? Like he has to believe that some group of people are here to like compromise Bitcoin in order for his worldview to sort of work. And then, you know, I think on the flip side, it's like, how can it be that the culture of Bitcoin is what maximalism is?

[01:06:51] Pete Rizzo: Because if you want everyone in the world to use Bitcoin, then clearly our insular, like, anti-UASF or pro-UASF culture is not going to scale to 8 billion people. So that doesn't make any sense. So it's like you simultaneously want Bitcoin to kind of be this like niche punk rock kind of ethos driven thing. But then you're saying it's that ethos that's going to scale Bitcoin to being an 8 billion, 8 billion person project. It just seems like there's like an inherent, and at the same time, you sort of have a worldview that suggests that like some people are just net bad and can never be good, because they, you know, this is the whole thing with like the big blockers are using Ordinals, right?

[01:07:32] Pete Rizzo: Like there's this group of people who are inherently bad. If they are using Bitcoin, they're using it wrongly and to do bad things. And that they can't be Bitcoin users, like, for like, they like that's, which makes no sense, right? Because I think this was, like, when Vitalik Buterin sends a Bitcoin payment, like he is a Bitcoin user, like there is, there is not a single thing in the, in the universe that can invalidate him from being a valid Bitcoin user that is the same as every other Bitcoin user.

[01:08:03] Pete Rizzo: When he signs a transaction, broadcasts to the network, and then it gets in a block, Vitalik Buterin is a Bitcoin user. And if your ideology sort of opposes that on some level, I don't know what to say to you, because that that person is using Bitcoin, he's using Bitcoin as any other user would. And whatever you think of his actions, like that, you can't stop him from using Bitcoin in that way. So like, what's the point of the being opposed to that? Right? I don't understand it. So I don't know, I've really tried, I feel like I've tried to understand the worldview, I think the worldview is sort of like, there are people who are bad, these bad people can't be allowed to use Bitcoin, these bad people can't be allowed to develop it on Bitcoin, because they will have bad things will happen.

[01:08:54] Pete Rizzo: And if like, that's your worldview, then how are you arguing anything other than like, you want to keep Bitcoin like a very niche project, right? Because I mean, obviously, Bitcoin has to scale to have more users, or like you would, you would think that if every cryptocurrency would fail, then all the other cryptocurrency users use Bitcoin, right? Like, I mean, that's what you're saying, right? Like, if your view is that all other cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin will just fail, then are you saying that those people will just stop using Bitcoin, they'll just use fiat, but then Bitcoin will replace fiat, so they'll have to use Bitcoin.

[01:09:27] Pete Rizzo: So what the fuck are you talking about? It's like, there's such a, it's like, I wonder whether they've just run their own assumptions to like the end. It's like, what are they, what are they talking about? Because, you know, it's like, this is what I said on McCormack, like, I was like, what do you want from the shitcoin? What do you want from the crypto industry? What do you want from them? How do you want them to surrender? Say that you were winning, what do you want them to do?

[01:09:51] Pete Rizzo: Like, what is your ask? Your ask can't be that they just live their lives in poverty forever. This is an irrational assumption. You know, I think that you can convert them and they can become good Bitcoin users. I mean, look at most of the people who are in Bitcoin today, you know, were part of the cryptocurrency industry. I was part of the cryptocurrency industry. Cory Klippsten was part of the cryptocurrency industry. He built a great Bitcoin business. Was there a reason should he not be using Bitcoin?

[01:10:18] Pete Rizzo: Should we be kicking him out of the Bitcoin industry? Giacomo was developing Ripple. Jimmy Song developed a bunch of stuff. I mean, like... And then this token response that you sort of get is like, well, they haven't apologized or they haven't said something. They haven't asked for forgiveness or something. And it's like, what do you know, what do you want? Like, you want these people to write an apology?

[01:10:40] Vlad Costea: Once again, to whom are you going to apologize? Like, who is that authority that gives them a free pass and says, okay, you're good now because you did apologize?

[01:10:48] Pete Rizzo: Well, this is the problem with like the [unclear: Pleb Twitter] culture and like the culture on social media. And it's like, you know, I call out [unclear: Pleb Twitter] specifically because I particularly like, you know, I think that this is a case because when you as a culture, you know, I said this to Jimmy Song once, it's like there's two options. You either want people to do more good or less bad. A culture that prioritizes people who do less bad. Well, in a less bad system, the way to get ahead is you don't do anything because if you don't do anything, you can't do bad.

[01:11:20] Pete Rizzo: In a more, so what is a more good system? Well, a more good system is clearly a system where you're trying to do the right thing, but you're doing a lot of things to try to do the right thing, and some of those things just don't work out. But you would hope that you do more good. There's more good things that happen. So the Bitcoin, modern Bitcoin culture at some point, I think probably around the like crucifixion of Nick Carter sort of became like a less bad culture.

[01:11:45] Pete Rizzo: It's like the people whose voices were the loudest were the people who had done less bad, not the people who had done more good. Eric Voorhees has done more good than most Bitcoin maximalists will ever do. But he's not a Bitcoin maximalist because he hasn't done less bad. He's done more bad, they think, than he's done good. But no, the reality is he's done more good. And so the people who have done less bad, well, the thing is that they don't do anything because there's no incentive for you to do anything.

[01:12:12] Pete Rizzo: If your incentive is to do less bad, your real incentive is to do nothing. That's the best way to maximize a less bad system. Right now, it's like I'm talking to you and I'm talking very candidly, and the more I talk, the more I increase my chances of doing something bad. There's no incentive for me to be talking like this in a less bad system because I can get canceled for saying the wrong thing. Like maybe somebody will screenshot this and they'll say, maybe at some point I said Roger Ver is good or something, right?

[01:12:40] Pete Rizzo: And that bad thing is enough to outdo all of the good things that I've done. That's a less bad system. And I think the less bad culture is bad. It's a bad culture. We don't want that. You should want people to do more good because doing more good is good, and you will do more good if more people do good. It's fairly obvious when you kind of map this out. But I digress. That's kind of why we have a cancel culture, I think, is because we've wanted it on some level and we've incentivized it, and so here we are.

[01:13:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but this also goes back to your idea that people need some sort of reward for not shitcoining. And before we get into that, I need to present the last two ads of this episode for Satochip. So go to satochip.io to get your card that can turn your Bitcoin into a bearer asset. Stop waiting for people to create scaling layers and create your own local scaling layer by having a card that you can give to someone else as a gift. And that will not get recorded on the public blockchain, that can change as many hands as you want.

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[01:14:26] Vlad Costea: It can, so this device can resist water, fire, earthquakes, and all sorts of hazards. And if you use promo code BTCTKVR, you get 10% off. And if you buy like 10,000 of them, I guess I can get myself a Supra. Anyway, I want to get into this conversation, Pete, which goes back to the spirit of Bitcoin Uncensored. And that show has been so influential in my journey. And I did interview Chris DeRose about four times, and I wish I could get him more on the show, because this guy is so ahead of his time.

[01:14:58] Vlad Costea: He understands sociology and ideologies and how people interact with each other a lot better than most people. I know that Junseth is still out there busting scams and showing off that he's doing a great job. But it's just that the culture has changed so much that a show like that cannot exist today.

[01:15:19] Pete Rizzo: Oh, no. I mean... Well, I think maybe people today know Junseth and they respect Junseth. I don't think people really understand how influential Junseth is. I mean, Junseth is a top 50 Bitcoiner easily. He's somebody who I would say is among the very few people who have also been a cultural figurehead and then receded. They didn't have to be taken out forcefully. I think he's done a really good job of receding into being sort of a respected figure. But Junseth really is a titan, somebody who's provided a lot to the industry.

[01:15:56] Pete Rizzo: But DeRose as well. I think DeRose was equally. I think he's sort of been forgotten because he's not here to represent himself. But if I was going to say who my favorite co-host was of Bitcoin Uncensored, it would be Chris DeRose, because he was my favorite listening at the time. But yeah, I mean, you know, what did they bring? They brought like a critical thinking and they brought, you know, sort of a, you know, critical lens to the industry. Right. Like their lasting contribution, I think, is this idea that, you know, there was this idea at the time, people who aren't aware around, there was Bitcoin Uncensored, it was this podcast that ran from 2015 to 2017.

[01:16:32] Pete Rizzo: And at the time, during the Fork Wars, there was kind of this pervasive claim that the companies represented the users. Right. And so Bitcoin, Blockchain, BitPay and Coinbase and all these kind of early VC funded startups, they were essentially saying, we represent our users and we say this is good. We want to impart on consensus and we are doing so on behalf of the users. And I think if Junseth and DeRose really have a lasting contribution of Bitcoin, it's that they really busted this idea that, you know, the Bitcoin user was someone who used these companies and they did so in a really clever way.

[01:17:05] Pete Rizzo: Right. So they would interview street prostitutes, they would interview like, you know, drug dealers online or Bitcoin ATM owners. And they really kind of got at this idea that Bitcoin, you know, Uncensored, Bitcoin was this permissionless platform. And that the average Bitcoin user was someone who, in fact, like none of the companies who were claiming that their users represented consensus actually represented. And yeah, I think they did that in a really hilarious way over a lot of content that like, you know, it's hard to digest. But yeah, it was a really meaningful contribution.

[01:17:36] Pete Rizzo: You know, I was editor at CoinDesk and we put them on our 10 most influential people of 2016. I think I was in more meetings about why I should have taken them off that list than pretty much anything I've ever had while I was at CoinDesk. They were very unpopular. And we were bad because we acknowledged them, you know, we put them on the list, that was a very bad thing for us to do. And we shouldn't have done that. We regret that very, we regret that.

[01:18:02] Pete Rizzo: But yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to say other than, yeah, I think they've had a lasting value in the culture. And yeah, I mean, some of that is lost. Right. You know, but I like to think that that can be regained. Right, that Bitcoin has this culture of absurdity, right? Like they were really like the absurdism. And I think you can tap into that. I think American HODL is a little bit of like a, you know, a descendant of that order of absurdist Bitcoin, that we can, you know, chart a course forward by being critical and being being smart and like thinking about things.

[01:18:39] Pete Rizzo: I love that time period in Bitcoin. I love that podcast. I mean, DeRose was also very early in like this, you know, because his last thing, I don't know if you remember on his way out, was this idea that Bitcoiners were communists. That was like his final epiphany like before he left. And yeah, that's kind of ironic, probably how correct that was, especially when critiquing the modern ideology that's become very in vogue.

[01:19:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think Junseth is responsible for the best description of this industry there ever was. The one where blockchains are... Were... And libertarians are layer zero, and Bitcoin is layer one. And then you have the users for layer twos. And then you have layer fives, which are Ethereum, and no toxicity that this is what it was about. Toxicity is layer one, or layer zero, I don't recall exactly which one. But it's a very good description of what this is about, and how all of these altcoins, shitcoins, call them whatever you want, are just experiments and layers of Bitcoin for stuff that's going to come into Bitcoin.

[01:19:48] Vlad Costea: This idea was originally part of the thesis of Bitcoin maximalism. And now it's more evident than ever that this is the case. When you see I did an interview with Ellie. What's his last name? He's working on something called StarkWare.

[01:20:06] Pete Rizzo: Oh, I can't remember that guy's name. Eli Ben-Sasson?

[01:20:11] Vlad Costea: Yeah, exactly. And he basically told me point blank, if there is this soft fork for OP_CAT, then we're going to be able to do the same thing with ZK-SNARKs and ZK-STARKs and whatever he's working on, on Bitcoin. And he was one of the first people to talk at a conference about validating a full node in only a few seconds with zero knowledge. What I remember...

[01:20:34] Pete Rizzo: Like I said, he remembers Germany. That's the... You know, he was there, right? He just moved to a different part of Germany, right? But yeah, I mean, I think that I would say one thing to you about this, and I think this is going to be the culturally dominant view of the cycle. I think what you're talking about of everything kind of coming back to Bitcoin, but I will just say one thing. I will say even if it is true, that everything other than Bitcoin is a scam, and there's no need for Bitcoin to change... Remember when I said there was like kind of two states at which Bitcoin maximalism is valid?

[01:21:05] Pete Rizzo: It's like one, Bitcoin kind of stays the same, everything fails, and the other is everything kind of comes to Bitcoin. The market will still go through this other thing, even if this one is true. Even if it's true that everything other than Bitcoin is a scam and it's not useful, it will still have to pass through this other thing. And what is this other thing is seeing whether all the blockchain stuff can survive on Bitcoin. So I sort of take it, I would say that spiritually I'm kind of aligned with you, but I would like soften it a little bit by saying that I still think both of these states are true.

[01:21:37] Pete Rizzo: I think you could take an even more neutral position by saying I'm okay with either one of these states existing, because I think I am. I think if everything was to go to zero other than Bitcoin, I think it would be fine. But if everything comes to Bitcoin, I think those are both success states for Bitcoin maximalism. I'm sort of biased towards the second one, because I think it's more rational and plausible that not everything in the crypto industry is a total scam. I think some small percentage of it is.

[01:22:06] Pete Rizzo: But if there are people who are saying, okay, I believe that everything else is a scam, what I would say to them is you're still going to have to deal with the 10-year reality that is the second thing of all those scams trying to come on Bitcoin and reposition themselves. When I say that I think that is going to happen, I'm not saying I want that to happen necessarily. It's very obvious that the incentives dictate that that will happen. It's very amusing that the beginning of this was some guy just putting a Dickbutt on the blockchain, and, you know, he sort of punctured both cultures.

[01:22:42] Pete Rizzo: I think the end of this cycle will be like the a16z, the Ethereum godheads, capitulating to Bitcoin, and on the Puritan Maxi side, this understanding that a lot of this stuff is going to get moved over to Bitcoin. It all just starts from such an absurd... Honestly, I think if Casey Rodarmor... Like, if you're going to give him a distinction of somebody, he might not be a bad person for the absurdist mantle, because what did he really do? Really, it's like, what did he do? A lot of people got mad at me for talking positively about Ordinals.

[01:23:14] Pete Rizzo: It's like, I didn't write Ordinals. I didn't create it. I don't run the Ordinals software. I don't do any of these things. But Casey did, and he did it with a very specific intent, and his intent was to disrupt the crypto space, to attack that ideology and that culture. He's been phenomenally successful, and I think to the extent that he isn't properly respected for that, I think is just absurd. It's honestly my biggest critique with the current culture. Kind of going back to what we said at the beginning, it's individuals and individual achievement within Bitcoin and people who would champion those ideas.

[01:23:48] Pete Rizzo: Again, I'm not saying Casey's correct about everything. I'm not saying you have to agree with him about everything, but I think it's just phenomenal how he shifted the conversation. And the last thing I would say of praise on that, I was like, even if you think NFTs are not art, paradoxically, Ordinals is the greatest piece of Bitcoin art, because art does not have a medium. There is no medium that contains art. Art is just any human expression that can be viewed that allows other people to ask critical questions.

[01:24:16] Pete Rizzo: And if that is the definition of art, then the Ordinals protocol is the best piece of art of the current time because it asks all these critical questions about Bitcoin. What is the fee market? How should it work? How does block space work? What is the market for block space? Is arbitrary data valuable if we embed it in arbitrary block space? And the fact that Ordinals raises all those questions, even if it doesn't answer them, it makes Ordinals the greatest piece of Bitcoin art that has ever been created.

[01:24:42] Pete Rizzo: And on that basis, Ordinals is art, and I'll fucking go down with that ship.

[01:24:49] Vlad Costea: That's a strange hill to die on, you know.

[01:24:52] Pete Rizzo: It's a very strange hill to die on, but it's like, I 100% agree with that. It's like, Ordinals is... Paradoxically, it fulfills the definition of art, and therefore is even more art than real art. You know, it's like, I think so. It's like, it's art, right? What he unleashed on the culture was art, and I think that, I don't think we have answers to a lot of his questions, right? And I think if we had better answers to those questions, there wouldn't be so much anger and uncertainty and unrest, and it's like, man, what a beautiful thing, you know?

[01:25:24] Pete Rizzo: It's like, you think you're in this industry for a long time, and you're like, I think you have it all figured out, and somebody just comes and they just upend the whole thing, you know? And then you have to kind of go back to square one, and you know, the whole process starts over again. And I don't know. I think that, to me, like, that's what I think is, it's amazing that we're still learning what Bitcoin is. We're still trying to understand it, and I'm here to learn.

[01:25:50] Pete Rizzo: I would like to help people learn, but I don't think I have all the answers, right? I don't know. I don't think we have all the answers. We might. I think we're getting closer, but you know, we shall see. That's why they play the games, right?

[01:26:03] Vlad Costea: Yeah, speaking of anger and uncertainty and Ordinals, you can still buy the ordinal inscription depicting David Bailey for 3.125 Bitcoin. I'm going to get a Bitcoin and buy a Supra. He's going to get a Bitcoin and do whatever he wants, maybe buy a Supra also, and 1.25, no, 1.125 Bitcoin is going to go to Ross Ulbricht's legal defense. So that's how it works. If you want to buy it's still available. DM me or whatever, or don't, I don't care. Cancel me. Once again, I don't care.

[01:26:37] Vlad Costea: But just so you know what kind of people listen to this show, Peter, because it's very important. I got a message from Eric Voskuil about an hour ago, and he made a comment and I guess that's worth exploring. And also got a message from Robin Linus, who sent me Junseth's exact post from Reddit. And I think it's important to read it because this is an important part of history. And I want to thank Robin for listening and caring about the quality of our conversation. So Junseth said this on Reddit.

[01:27:07] Vlad Costea: He said, "It's always been toxic, Mayu." I don't know who that is. Maybe DOP. "You know that blockchains are... Where toxicity is layer one. Layer two is libertarians. They provide the payment channels wherein the toxicity can be used. Layer three are the users like prostitutes and drug dealers. They are... They are served by layer one and two, but know nothing about the politics or the poison of layer one. They just know that they can pay for their ads on back packages..." Backpage, Backpage, sorry.

[01:27:45] Vlad Costea: "Layer four is Blythe Masters and the Factom, who provide an impenetrable regulatory shield that is doing its best to build broad regulation for MySQL databases." Some people say "My S-Q-L," but I don't care. "They're promoting magical thinking about how blockchain can do anything. This sends regulators in all directions trying to make sure that blockchains don't become sentient. Layer five is Ethereum and Dogecoin, which lets noobs practice blockchaining without pooping on Bitcoin. Layer six is Roger Ver who runs about screaming that there are hordes of hobbits at the gates of Moria wanting to get into the cave filled with trolls.

[01:28:33] Vlad Costea: "He's providing shield for layer five, which is actually where the hobbits enter and that is absent of trolls. Rather layer five is filled with farts. These farts are the fuel of speculative inflows into Bitcoin. This synergism is called Byzantine fault tolerance. Every blockchain needs all six of those elements to function. It is how we know that Ethereum isn't a blockchain. It is a layer five, not layer one. Toxicity is not its fundamental layer. They are running on compassion. They will need to be replaced as the layer five infrastructure as soon as they begin using POS, proof of stake.

[01:29:15] Vlad Costea: "Perhaps ETC will become layer five." ETC being Ethereum Classic. "In any case, layer five is a drop-in." So this I think is the most eloquent and relevant piece of commentary about the state of the crypto industry. There is so much to it and it's so prophetic in some ways. And we spoke highly about Junseth and I think it's worth also praising Chris DeRose because if you read Vitalik's post on Bitcoin maximalism from 2014, I think it's 2014, where he explains the ideology of Bitcoin maximalism and I think people took that article and they took that derogatory term and embraced it as they did with a lot of stuff, from maximalism to [unclear: ADIQ], I guess.

[01:30:02] Vlad Costea: And that response was to Counterparty, and Chris DeRose at the time was the marketing person for the Counterparty project. I think he is one of the largest collectors of Rare Pepes and someone who really saw in Counterparty something that can beat Ethereum and the argument at the time was okay, you can create Ethereum, you can bring Turing completeness, you can bring smart contracts, but then again, so can Counterparty. And Counterparty already has all the users on the Bitcoin network, actually, not all of them, but can have them and has more liquidity.

[01:30:39] Vlad Costea: And what's the point of trying to do all of this with Ethereum when we just take your free open source code and put it on Counterparty and we're going to beat you indefinitely. So this is where this debate stemmed from and Chris DeRose was at the center of this propaganda machine for Counterparty and he was trying to make all of these colored coins and assets happen on Bitcoin. It was not the case. The history turned out to be different, but he was so instrumental in pushing this narrative at the time and he was one of the first Bitcoin maximalists.

[01:31:14] Vlad Costea: Actually Junseth takes credit for being the first person to call himself a Bitcoin maximalist. I'm not sure if that's true, but these two people...

[01:31:22] Pete Rizzo: John Dilley. John Dilley is the other one.

[01:31:26] Vlad Costea: These people were so influential and so ahead of their time.

[01:31:33] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I mean, you said a lot there. I agree with a lot of it. If I were to throw that back, I would say like a recent thought that I've had is that Bitcoin is a technology that is misunderstood as a cultural movement and Ethereum is a cultural movement that has been misunderstood as a technology. And I've kind of been trying to meme this into existence because I think what I mean is that what that post acknowledges is that the Ethereum and cryptoverse, it's like really, they weren't as much as the vehicle of how they express themselves and how they engage in their sociology is technology, they really just wanted freedom from the Bitcoiners to kind of tinker and experiment and see what was possible.

[01:32:13] Pete Rizzo: And so it kind of flips it on its head, whereas Bitcoin is primarily understood as a culture, like meat eating and like kind of, you know, lifting weights. There's kind of this idea that Bitcoin is a culture and not a technology, whereas Bitcoin's primarily vehicle is the technology, right, it is actually a technology and it plans to be this technology in the way that it is a technology for decades, if not centuries. So whereas Ethereum isn't seen as a culture, right, so it's kind of ironic, like Bitcoin is seen as a culture, even though it's primarily a technology, and Ethereum is seen as a technology even though it's primarily a culture.

[01:32:45] Pete Rizzo: I think there's like an inversion there. And that kind of speaks to why, you know, again, I don't have any like direct hatred for the people on Ethereum. They were doing what they thought they should do based on the limitations that they thought Bitcoin had at the time. The thing is that they have to be correct about that forever to have created anything of value. And I don't think they will be correct about that forever. I didn't think that then, and I don't think that now. But they're more than willing, they're, you know... It's a free market, it's a free... They're more than... They can spend their human time and energy doing that, right?

[01:33:25] Vlad Costea: Well, I got to give Ethereum credit, and I got to give a lot of other projects like Zcash some credit, because they did a much better job pushing research and development in this field than companies like Blockstream or Chaincode or whoever defines themselves as Bitcoin only did. If you think about it, Blockstream has been pretty stagnant, they tried to push sidechains, then they gave up on the idea of sidechains and made a federation that still uses some of their technology like confidential transactions. But it's not quite, you know, for the past decade, they haven't done that much, or not as much as people expected from them.

[01:34:06] Vlad Costea: But if you look at BitVM, that one's inspired by Ethereum's capabilities, but also Ethereum's criticism. I'm super grateful that we have Robin Linus listening and giving feedback. But this guy, I think he told me during our interview that he was working on some ICO on Ethereum, and he became very quickly disillusioned. And basically, he thought, how can we do this in a non-scammy way? And in a way that makes sense from a technical point of view and scales. And he took this idea of putting computation, but he took it off the chain, instead of put it and get on chain, which I think was the hip thing to do in 2014, 2015, when they would put everything on a blockchain.

[01:34:50] Vlad Costea: He decided to create a way that actually scales and makes sense for smart contracts. And I'm a super big fan of his. I'm super honored that he's listening.

[01:35:03] Pete Rizzo: What he did is unbelievable. And it's the same way with Casey Rodarmor where it's like they both did something that was previously inconceivable. I mean, obviously, Robin's is, you know, an order of magnitude, because so many people thought that was inconceivable. It's so foundational. And of course, we're still seeing that play out. I would say one thing, though, in defense of the Blockstream Corporation, Blockstream I still think does carry a lot of authority. I think you saw that at Bitcoin++, when, you know, who kind of gave the reframing for the technical community about the Great Script Restoration, or thinking broadly about how Bitcoin script could evolve?

[01:35:40] Pete Rizzo: It was Rusty Russell from Blockstream, right? So I mean, I do think that there is still a veneration for that institution, and I don't think we should be too hard on that institution for its perceived sins, in the same way that we probably shouldn't be hard on any of the institutions, right? I think that there's good people working there. They have good ideas for how Bitcoin should proceed. I think we should continue to evaluate that on individual merit. And yeah, I mean, for as much as people want to think that maybe that organization is irrelevant, I think they definitely disproved that, I think, a little bit.

[01:36:15] Pete Rizzo: But yeah, I mean, look, I think when Casey Rodarmor sort of appeared, I sort of went on some of the crypto podcasts, and I said, you know, this is the new gold standard. This is the new thing. It's like, bring the thing to Bitcoin. Robin, I think, has kind of been the next person in line, and I hope we see more of those people, right? I think this is the great... This would be the crypto intellectual capital coming over the wall. This goes back to the analogy of like, the Berlin Wall is done, the Berlin Wall is falling, the intellectual capital is coming, and so I hope to and expect to see more people.

[01:36:47] Pete Rizzo: But you know, obviously, we can't expect to have sort of BitVM-level achievements when it takes 15 years, right? It might take 15 more years to have the next breakthrough on that level. But my hope would be, and like when people say, oh, well, why do you want the crypto people coming over to Bitcoin? You know, why don't you just hate the shitcoiners? My hope would be that intellectual capital can accelerate this, right? So we don't have to wait 15 years for the next one, because we have so many more smart people coming to look at the problem.

[01:37:15] Pete Rizzo: That's not saying that that's guaranteed to happen, but I think by the law of numbers, it's more likely so.

[01:37:23] Vlad Costea: I know that we're a bit over time, and I apologize to you, Peter, for being late to this interview. But I want to go to do a quick run through the comments that we have in the chat, because I think some of them are very relevant, especially in the context of history and maximalism. So, there is John Binky, who says Swedish Rick... Falkvinge, I guess, ah, Rick Falkvinge, was a top leader in early libertarian attraction to Bitcoin, and also the Pirate Bay people. I guess we spoke a lot about Eric Voorhees and Roger Ver and Charlie Shrem, but we didn't give too much credit to the stuff happening outside of Europe, outside of the US.

[01:38:06] Pete Rizzo: Well, I mean, Amir Taaki is a hugely important person from that period. I like to say that the early history of Bitcoin is essentially like, you know, early Bitcoin was Satoshi left, and then Gavin and Amir sort of warred for the soul of Bitcoin. Amir sort of pushed forward the anarchist, sort of more European hacktivist sort of vision, and you know, Gavin sort of evangelized for the American sort of Silicon Valley can-do, Washington DC do-gooder sort of thing. But I think the reality is that like, Bitcoin didn't need either of those people to be leaders, right?

[01:38:35] Pete Rizzo: And I think that's why they've had such a hard time. I mean, Amir is such a, it's a tragedy that he's not in Bitcoin anymore, and that he's, I mean, in many ways, you know, he predicted a lot of what would happen in the Fork Wars. I just think that, you know, he missed the most formative years. I think that's the struggle with Amir is that, you know, he wasn't here from 2015 to 17. And I like to say, if you have a formidable opinion, or you have an interesting opinion on the crypto space in general, it's 90% likely that your opinion was formed during those years, because those were the most formative years of the entire space, and to the extent that we've kind of all gone in our different directions into different Germanies.

[01:39:15] Pete Rizzo: We all kind of came from that. And so because Amir missed that, it was very hard, right? Like he wasn't around for the most interesting period. And it's hard to go back, and like, we don't need a charismatic leader anymore the way that we might have needed him early. But yeah, I mean, if you want to speak about people who are outside of the United States, I would say, Amir Taaki and Mircea Popescu, I think are both some of the people who I think are amongst the most influential Bitcoiners.

[01:39:42] Pete Rizzo: And I think Amir was also, you know, he was born in the United Kingdom. So Mircea, I think, is even more important because he's the first kind of non-Western Bitcoin user to really kind of write and philosophize about it. You know, being sort of like someone who was born in the wreckage of the Soviet empire and the American sort of democratic empire, I think he had a really unique voice in a lot of, you know, I mean, a lot of Bitcoin, modern Bitcoin ideology is basically just Mircea, right?

[01:40:08] Pete Rizzo: Because Saifedean was orange-pilled by Mircea. So Mircea, Saifedean is just a light version of Mircea. And the people who followed Saifedean are sort of just even lighter versions of Mircea. So, you know, but Mircea, you know, is another example of somebody who had a really iconoclastic view of what Bitcoin was. And, you know, I was talking to Paul Sztorc about, you know, if there was a theme of this cycle, it would sort of be like exorcising the ghost of Mircea, right? Because Mircea's primary contribution was this idea that I, the end user, get to dictate what Bitcoin is, and any sort of consensus alignment against me as an individual is an attack.

[01:40:44] Pete Rizzo: Therefore, the developers are an attack. Therefore, Bitcoin development is an attack. And if it sounds similar to what I'm saying to what you're hearing from some sociologies of Bitcoin right now, you'll understand how dominant this ideology has become. But again, this was held by one single person, right? At one period of time, it just happened that he was very influential. A lot of the UASF crowd was very influenced by Mircea, you know, Saifedean probably being like the largest one. And I think a lot of his ideas are kind of Mircea's ideas.

[01:41:13] Pete Rizzo: But yeah, there's this idea that development is an attack on Bitcoin, right? I call this like Mircea's paradox. Like, what was Mircea's real contribution? It was the idea that any upgrade to Bitcoin was indecipherable from an attack. There was not a difference between these two things. And he was the first one to both understand that and then externalize it through action, right? Through action that created conversation. And, you know, this would be like his death threat that he put on Pieter Wuille, right, threatening to kill a developer.

[01:41:42] Pete Rizzo: That's a pretty strong message. But like, again, it's sort of there was a critique and an ideology behind it. But yeah, I mean, you can see in the culture today, I mean, there was a very anti-development culture in Bitcoin. So the question would be, like, as a historian, what do I attribute that to? Well, I attribute that to the influence of Mircea, both that, you know, that was his original idea, that it permeated through that culture kind of in that order, and that we sort of have to deal with that legacy culture.

[01:42:09] Pete Rizzo: And I think there's a bunch of people who just think that, like, oh, Bitcoin developers are bad, and it's like, we don't need them. And, you know, now Michael Saylor, apparently, allegedly, you know, doesn't think development is good. And why does he think that? It's probably because we're stuck with a lot of these, you know, second, third, fourth-order things, right? Like, ideas are interesting, right? Like, it's sometimes the people who have ideas don't even understand where they came from. And so then trying to figure out how an idea moves forward through time is kind of interesting, because, you know, there are people who might not know where their ideas come from.

[01:42:45] Pete Rizzo: So it's sort of like, does your idea change, you know, if you knew that small-block Bitcoinism comes from Peter Todd? Does that matter to you? Does that change your view on it? I don't know, right? But I think it helps for a conversation, right? You can actually analyze an idea and deal with it. But yeah, we have this very mainstream idea in Bitcoin. Now that development is bad. Like, that's, you know, it seems like I don't know how we deal with that, or how we undo that.

[01:43:15] Pete Rizzo: But it seems certainly the status quo.

[01:43:18] Vlad Costea: Yeah, as a Romanian, I just want to thank you for acknowledging the contributions of Mircea Popescu. We call him Mircea ("MEER-cha") here in Romania, but you can say "Mersa" or however you pronounce it.

[01:43:31] Pete Rizzo: I know it's a bastardization of the art of how beautiful it sounds in his native tongue.

[01:43:40] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's like me calling you Peter.

[01:43:42] Pete Rizzo: Right, right, yeah. I'll learn to pronounce it for you next time.

[01:43:46] Vlad Costea: No, it's fine. It's all good, because most people will have no idea. If you say "MEER-cha," it will not ring a bell. But if you say "Mersa," possibly that's how they read it when they found this.

[01:43:57] Pete Rizzo: I hear "Mersa" most of the time. I either hear, like, people, if I say "Mersa," they don't... They'll say... They understand "Mersa" or MP. That's like kind of a... But yeah, again, another fascinating individual, and yeah, I think we certainly owe him a lot, like he's a very interesting figure in the space.

[01:44:15] Vlad Costea: Or was, I don't know.

[01:44:18] Pete Rizzo: He's as dead as he wants to be, right?

[01:44:22] Vlad Costea: You can say that. So also, there's a comment from, and I guess we can wrap this up after this. Eric Voskuil, he said the single coin idea is based on flawed economics, a misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of scarcity and supply.

[01:44:42] Pete Rizzo: I wouldn't know enough to disagree with Eric on that one. You know, as I said, I'm not a technologist, right? I can't tell you whether an idea is empirically true or better than some other idea. You know, I am sort of biased towards, you know, this idea of Bitcoin kind of conquering all the things and being all the things. I mean, I get where Eric is coming from, and, you know, him and John Carvalho talk a lot about, like, replacement goods, right? If you can just... If Bitcoin becomes expensive, people will just switch to some replacement good, and therefore you'll always have some sort of cryptocurrency.

[01:45:14] Pete Rizzo: I think that's how I understand it, but I apologize, Eric, if I'm bastardizing your view. But I have to spend more time with the cryptoeconomics book that you've written, which I quite enjoyed.

[01:45:28] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm a big fan of Eric Voskuil. I had him here on the show twice, and he is always very patient and takes his time to explain the stuff. Even on Twitter, if you disagree with him, he will take the time to explain to you why he believes you're wrong. And he has this opinion of economics, which follows an axiom. So he doesn't believe that economics is relative or is psychological, as the modern economic theory believes. He thinks it's something axiomatic, something which is just like math, which you can empirically prove with data.

[01:46:10] Pete Rizzo: I mean, again, I can't disagree. That's out of my pay, out of my pay grade. But I encourage people to read Eric's book, and I think that we need more people who have different ideas about what Bitcoin is, right?

[01:46:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and libbitcoin, that's a major breakthrough. And the fact that we still have it around and people or businesses still use it, even though there was some bug and they disclosed the details of this issue, it's still useful to know that there's a complete rewrite of the Bitcoin code, and Bitcoin Core is not the only implementation that's out there. And this is the nature of decentralization and open source.

[01:46:49] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I mean, look, I think that these are kind of, again, the idea that there's alternate implementations of Bitcoin is, again, one of these really outlier ideas. It's not properly assimilated into the Bitcoin kind of ideology currently. I mean, I think you could argue that Bitcoin Core sort of has settled into this idea that Bitcoin Core sort of is Bitcoin, that their process is Bitcoin. Certainly, there's some of that thinking and argumentation there. And that's, you know, Luke Jr. talks a lot about that as well, and Bitcoin Knots.

[01:47:23] Pete Rizzo: And yeah, I mean, that's an interesting fringe area of exploration, for sure. I wonder if we'll ever get a... There was that fabled project, right, that was supposed to... Libconsensus, that was never completed. So I'll be interested to see if somebody completes that.

[01:47:43] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I want to ask you if you want to make any prediction about Bitcoin. When do you think the cycle is going to end? And what do you think is going to be the dominant narrative? I guess you mentioned bits about this, but not under one sentence or one main idea.

[01:48:02] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I've been saying the same thing, I think for mostly the last year and a half. I think that, you know, we're moving towards my mental framing, where I think we're going from Bitcoin and crypto to Bitcoin is crypto. And what do I mean by that? There's going to be sort of a revival and a reawakening to this idea that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, that Bitcoin can do a lot of the things that other cryptocurrencies can do. So I think the mental transition is from Bitcoin and crypto.

[01:48:34] Pete Rizzo: There's kind of like two separate, but maybe somewhat equal or one's invalid and one's valid sort of visions for like the technology to Bitcoin is crypto, which is this idea that I think that the sort of season two kind of group is broadly moving towards, which is this idea that you know, Bitcoin is capable of doing many things that other cryptocurrencies can do. Bitcoin can compete with other cryptocurrency markets and is competing with those markets, of course, you know, in the case of NFTs and things like that.

[01:49:02] Pete Rizzo: And I think that you know, I expect this cycle to end with sort of Bitcoin, Solana, and Ethereum sort of coming to parity and having similarly sized markets and competing for the same markets. But I think if you take that view, I think you can see that most of the activity is going to come on the Bitcoin side. And I think that kind of shift of like, you know, there's going to be the continued brain drain and capital drain from the crypto infrastructure into Bitcoin. Because even if you just take that framework, right, it's pretty obvious that if you're a crypto VC, you know, if I say I think Bitcoin is going to come up to parity with the other blockchains, I mean, even just then, you know, there's an immediate opportunity, even if you're not ideological.

[01:49:40] Pete Rizzo: So, yeah, I mean, I think we're moving towards the reunification of Germany, you know, and the tearing down of the "and crypto" wall. You know, I would like to see the Berlin Wall torn down. But that's just hope. That's a hope.

[01:50:00] Vlad Costea: And that's a very beautiful goal to which you can aspire, not inspire. And I believe that it's doable. In a couple of years, maybe that we're going to forget about this tribalism. And we're going to embrace the idea that people build and create economic activity and create value, because this is what it's all about. And maybe, just maybe, if we get Trump reelected, or elected for a second term, because they're not consecutive. There's gonna be a change. But I don't think we should rely on some political actor or hope that there's gonna be a change somewhere else, other than the way in which we build software, we use it, and we promote it.

[01:50:43] Pete Rizzo: Well, I think the last thing I would say on that is just there's this idea that that's even new, right? And whereas the thing that seems like the big takeaway from Bitcoin Hong Kong is that a lot of the Chinese community has been living under this for like two or three years, right? Like one of the reasons they're so interested in like, kind of Bitcoin DeFi and Bitcoin native applications is that essentially China banned the whole market. Right? So I like this idea that like, draconian government action against the industry is new is sort of like a Western privilege, right?

[01:51:10] Pete Rizzo: Like, the fact of the matter is most of the Chinese CEOs have been living under house arrest, have been arrested, and their businesses were shut down. And to the extent that they still have their wealth in Bitcoin, they had to seek other means, right? So I think assimilating some of that, those lessons to the culture would probably be good, right? So all that I mean to say is that like, you know, we kind of talk about this kind of negative political action as if it's going to happen, when in fact, it is happening.

[01:51:37] Pete Rizzo: And actually, it has been, it's a present tense occurrence. It's like saying that NFTs don't exist on Bitcoin. There is currently one of the world's largest governments that has a carpet ban on Bitcoin and has had for three or four years a complete ban on those on that on that culture. And they've had to actually be fighting back. And it seems like are fighting back by using tools, right? We just we haven't been involved in that story. We removed ourselves from it.

[01:52:03] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and I guess we can only hope for the best in some regards. Because there's the world is such a big and complex place. And there's only so much we can grasp. And most of the times that the narrative is dominated by what's happening in the US. And we believe that the events are shaping the rest of the world when in fact, we have all sorts of surprises coming from the places that we overlook or forget that they exist sometimes.

[01:52:32] Pete Rizzo: Yeah, man. Well, appreciate you having me. I mean, I appreciate you having difficult conversations with people. It's been nice to kind of it's been a very suffocating environment.

[01:52:40] Vlad Costea: It was very pleasant to get you canceled. So some people can take some of your statements out of context that Roger Ver was good. Gavin and Mike Hearn, you're canceled now. Mr. Hodl, you can block him now.

[01:52:55] Pete Rizzo: I'm supposed to catch up with him this week. So maybe you can cancel me in person, you know.

[01:53:00] Vlad Costea: Say hello to him from me.

[01:53:02] Pete Rizzo: I will. Yeah, I mean, look, he's he's another great Bitcoiner, right? And then we should we should hold up people with original views, right? Doesn't mean you have to be right. But, you know, try to appreciate all Bitcoiners.

[01:53:16] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Pete. And I look forward to reading your tweets and threads about Bitcoin history because I very much enjoy those. Thanks, man.

[01:53:24] Pete Rizzo: Take care.