S15 E71: Amir Taaki on Bitcoin & DarkFi
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0:47Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 15, Episode 71, and we are doing a year-end review with Amir Taaki. You have probably seen him in the latest HBO documentary. Now he's very famous. He's hard to get. And I appreciate his time. He actually accepted on a very short notice to join the show and talk about what's been happening in Bitcoin, between privacy and the cypherpunk space over the last year. And he also has a ton of questions from the audience. So stick around for those.
1:21I guess I'll ask them last. Amir, this is your second time on the show. I'm really happy to have you.
1:28Amir TaakiYeah, nice. Fun times. We did a Christmas time. We did a Twitter spaces that went on for nearly eight hours. So, you know, I was already thinking that you hang out for New Year's as well. So here I am.
1:44Vlad CosteaWell, I can go for eight hours. I'm not sure if you're keen on that one, but there's so much that happened over the last year. We saw how privacy on Bitcoin became something that is taboo nowadays. They shut down Wasabi Wallet, at least the company behind it. They arrested the developers behind Samourai, and then they approved ETFs. And it seems like privacy is a no-go in the world of Bitcoin. And you are the guy who started the first privacy wallet that I'm aware of. It was called Dark Wallet.
2:15And for its time, it was very ambitious. It was planning to do CoinJoins and Tor integration and everything that is useful and interesting. And I was wondering, what do you think about this past year in Bitcoin? Is it bullish? Do you feel like we're getting mainstream adoption? Are you happy about it?
2:36Amir TaakiWell, what's interesting in Bitcoin is these L2s, which if Bitcoin does get ZK rollup support, then it means that Bitcoin would just be this programmable layer where everybody can, you know, create their own completely secure sidechains with any features they want. And so maybe people could add a privacy sidechain to Bitcoin. But Ethereum is very much going into this direction where, you know, before they had all these kind of scaling plans to scale the base layer on Ethereum. Actually, a lot of people don't know that Polkadot started because Gav Wood early on.
3:23He said the way that we should scale Ethereum is through sharding. He had a big disagreement because they wanted to go for a more lightning kind of approach, which was called Plasma. He ended up leaving, but now Ethereum is kind of going, okay, we actually are going to do sharding now as our scaling techniques. It turns out like Gav Wood was right. But even though he's been vindicated by history, you don't get people flocking to Polkadot. They still stick on Ethereum. And now in Ethereum, they're building these L2s, but there's this question, I don't know if you've ever tried to use an L2, but you know, you've got the funds on there and you've got to kind of like bridge it to the L2 and then use it.
4:07And something like Solana is like, okay, we're just gonna, we're going to do like native L1 scaling just by basically running it on faster computers. So, you know, maybe, so that's, that's the question about, you know, L2 roadmap for Bitcoin roll-ups, you know, is it, is it, would it be cool because people can do new features, but are people actually going to use those features? Maybe they're just end up sticking on Bitcoin because they're too lazy. It's too cumbersome, et cetera.
4:46Vlad CosteaI mean, that's a good point. We have quite a few proposals for L2s on Bitcoin and none of them builds on top of Lightning because for a while, Lightning was the only solution that was acceptable, right? The only one that was receiving funding and the one that was regarded as the future. And then it came crashing down. Nodes were dealing with this high fee environment last year and people realized, okay, this was why Lightning exists in the first place. This is why we built it for this high fee environment.
5:22And it seems to be struggling if you get this situation where closing channels is expensive and some operators get their channels closed. And I guess that's when a lot of money went into these extra L2s with ZK rollups and other fancy cryptography on top. But I'm actually wondering if there's any particular one of them that you like and you're keen on, because there are like a dozen of them that I'm aware of.
5:51Amir TaakiSo I haven't looked. I really don't want to kind of go which opcode should be enabled. I kind of like what Eli said. Eli Ben-Sasson, he's a really good cryptographer, you know, StarkWare. He's actually invented not SNARKs, but STARKs, which is, you know, quantum secure type of ZK algo. Anyway, he's been trying for a while to make a Bitcoin L2. And he was kind of like, okay, all these other proposals, all these other op codes, you know, they're very complicated, you know, relatively for Bitcoin at least.
6:31And they're likely to take like several years for them to come in. OP_CAT is a very simple opcode. It just says, take two pieces of data and join them together. It's like a very, it's just a few lines of code. So he said like, you know, instead of going, oh, let's wait until, you know, we found the perfect solution. Perfect is the enemy of good. Let's bring OP_CAT, which is actually an opcode that used to exist in Bitcoin. Let's bring that back in. You know, it's a very easy upgrade, easy upgrade, you know, very well understood.
7:10And then if there's a better opcode, you know, we can, then we've got as much time as we want, but that way we're not holding up people building actually L2s on Bitcoin to bring some of these other features like scalability, like privacy. So I kind of, I think his logic is sound there.
7:34Vlad CosteaYeah, Eli Ben-Sasson has been on the show. A dozen of episodes were also sponsored by StarkWare and I've been telling people this for a long time. I tell them, you know, you're so afraid of OP_CAT because you see it being promoted by the Taproot Wizards people who are doing NFTs, but in reality you can actually do OP_CAT in Excel. You just write AB on one column and you write CD on the next one and then you concatenate them and you get ABCD. There's nothing evil in that.
8:05It's just something that you've had in computers and coding for a long time. It's just that some people are so concerned and they say, oh, you don't know what can get built with it. And I'm like what? And they say, well, we don't know. And that's a threat. That's a concern. We don't know what we don't know. And therefore we should never do anything because at some point in the future, someone can discover an evil way of using it. And that's where we're at.
8:34Amir TaakiSo I got into Bitcoin because I was really into money and I was like, oh, you know, we can have cyber money on the internet and you know, people can do all this crazy cool shit like gambling and funding causes across the world. And for me, that was like, you know, the Neuromancer, like radical cyber stuff, which I think is really cool, like cyber anarchy. But when I met Pieter Wuille, I think it was February 2011 and we were just chatting and he said to me, he was like, well, I don't really care about the money stuff on Bitcoin.
9:12I just like the smart contract functionality, the scripting languages in Bitcoin. And so I was like, oh, interesting. But now those same guys, they're like, oh no, we don't like the scripting functionality of Bitcoin. We just want it to be, you know, money, strictly money. A lot of people don't realize, I think it was 2011 where, or it might have been before. I can't remember. I think it was 2011. It was, there was this like, I mean, it wasn't Turing complete, but it was, it had OP_CAT, it had other opcodes in there, this Bitcoin script language.
9:56You know, somebody found some flaw in the scripting language. And there was just this like reaction where we were like, oh shit, this couldn't, you know, harm the network. And so some of these opcodes were just commented out really quickly, you know, as an emergency patch. But the idea was that, you know, one year later, we would take time to study and then a year later, we'd like add them back in a controlled way. When it was done, that was how it was represented. And then I think, and then there was like a desire as well, after that first change to disable those opcodes, to like make it more controlled.
10:39So that's when Gavin Andresen, he put into the, not into the consensus layer, which is, you know, the blockchain validation rules, but in the peer to peer network, which transactions get relayed, and there's like a template system. And it says, and this is what they call policy nowadays, which is if a transaction is of this type, or it looks like this type, it's allowed, but if it's anything else, it's not allowed. So, for example, if I made, back then, if I made like a multisig transaction, the network would not relay it.
11:15But I was developing multisig transaction tools for working with multi-sicks. This is before it even existed in any wallet or UI. And it was Luke Jr.'s mining pool that didn't have these restrictions. So I used to take my transactions that I wanted to put on the Bitcoin network. I used to broadcast it to Luke Jr.'s pool, so it would get in the blockchain because none of the other miners would accept it. So, I mean, once it ended up in a block, then, you know, it would be there and other nodes would validate it.
11:48But the challenge was getting it in the block. So that, you know, that was, that was also, when that happened, I was like, that's fucked up. Like, because that's stopping, you've got the Bitcoin scripting language, and you're stopping people to develop with it. You just have like, you know, Gavin, essentially saying these are the transactions are allowed on the network. But still, you could get around that. And I was. But then, somehow, over time, it became gospel. Like, literally, how the accidents of Bitcoin at that time, like, you know, arbitrary decisions became gospel about how Bitcoin should be.
12:31That's like, for example, the block size limit, you know, Satoshi was in favor of getting rid of that. I'm not going to get into the whole discussion about the block size limit, because I think the scripting thing is more interesting right now, because we're talking about OP_CAT, which is one of these opcodes that was like commented out in a hurry. But actually, it's a very well understood stood up code. And it can be added back very safely. It's like very simple. So there's no reason not to add it.
13:01You know, just for the sake of completeness, even, you know, not even about having sidechains, which now they're sidechains basically means like, oh, there's no argument not to have it. I mean, you can have OP_CAT and you can have another opcode. You know, that way it's not controversial. But then Vitalik, he was working with us on DarkFi. He was living with me for over a year in California in Spain.
13:30Vlad CosteaDarkFi or Dark Wallet?
13:32Amir TaakiSorry, Dark Wallet. Yeah, Dark Wallet back in 2013. And he became like, you know, he later left and he started becoming interested in Mastercoin. But before that, actually, sorry, he first went to the Bitcoin mailing list. And he said like, oh, you know, there's these types of applications I want to enable. Like, I think it was insurance. I can't really remember. Can we like enable like a couple of these opcodes? And everybody was just like, no, no, no, absolutely not. It was just like that. No, you can't do it.
14:08It's impossible. It will crash Bitcoin. So then he went to Mastercoin. And then after that he went and he made Ethereum. So it's conceivable that Ethereum wouldn't exist if there was just a bit more flexibility in Bitcoin. That if some of this innovation had been captured by Bitcoin. Now, would that be better or worse for crypto? You know, maybe it might be worse for crypto if Ethereum hadn't existed, because then we wouldn't have seen this big expansion of, you know, like, for example, AMMs, which I'm not sure you can do an AMM on Bitcoin.
14:46So now the fact that Ethereum existed, invested in, you know, zk-SNARK research, then zk-SNARK is a rollup. Now people are discussing bringing that to Bitcoin. So, you know, you know, it's expanded the ecosystem. Just kind of interesting how that whole process has happened.
15:10Vlad CosteaYeah, sometimes I also think that. So I did this interview with David A. Johnston, and he told me that there was a specific conference where Vitalik got on stage and basically told all the frustrated Counterparty and Omni and colored coin developers, let's just build a chain where you can do whatever you want. And everyone was happy because they needed that. They just wanted to build. There were people who wanted to build something and they were wrestling their way into adding that on Bitcoin. And every time they were doing something, there was someone telling them that Bitcoin should not be used in that way.
15:46And sometimes I think that at this point it would be really nice if there was a hard fork of Bitcoin, like Bitcoin dev or whatever, with real incentives where everyone can claim their coins, where all the upcodes, all the technologies can get enabled. Anyone can build and there is some real world incentive to break. Because I see that. Some Bitcoin cash. Yeah, there is Bitcoin cash for that, but it's just that the developers seem to refuse to build stuff on top of it. For example, there is the drivechain, right, which is a way to do sidechains.
16:19They're not happening on Bitcoin cash and the developers don't seem interested. And to me, that's something that is promising. I don't know what you think. Did you look into BIP-300?
16:31Amir TaakiI didn't. I haven't really followed too closely because a lot of the...
16:39Vlad CosteaOh, sorry. I wanted to mute myself and I muted you. Sorry, honest technical mistake. Please repeat what you said about if you want to build a system and you want to do it yourself.
16:52Amir TaakiYeah, so basically, you know, when I'm building something like DarkFi, all I have to do is I'm thinking about the frontier of technology. I'm thinking about like, OK, what's the math? You know, is this thing possible? OK, let's make it. And that's like the very, you know, like the very cutting edge, you know, pushing the boundary. And that stuff is, for me, it's like really interesting because it's like, you know, what's truly possible. But with Bitcoin, your limitations, they're not these kind of limitations. They're limitations about, you know, what are the constraints of Bitcoin as it's been made now?
17:34You know, what are the political constraints, you know, being able to convince people whether they allow it or not. So the whole process is not a process of actually technology, but it's more a process of, you know, like bureaucracy or politics, you know, like, you know, making alliances with people, like, you know, like discussing. It's just like, it's not, it's something that's like extremely limiting. And for me, it's kind of boring.
18:09So as a developer, the only reason people build on Bitcoin, I speak with these Bitcoin devs all the time and they're like, OK, but Bitcoin is the most used system. That's why it's worthwhile to build on. And I disagree with them because I'm like, OK, but there's so much that we're capable of and you're just shutting yourself off from that. But that's fine if you want to do that. I understand your logic. But then going to something like Bitcoin Cash, which is relatively low market cap, has less programmability than Ethereum or Solana or whatever.
18:44Why would you do that? That's like, that's just a bad trade off in general. If you're going to fork, that's why Bitcoin Cash hasn't taken off. If you're going to fork away from Bitcoin, why not make something that's better? And you might say, well, yeah, they've got better things. They've got what Bitcoin should have. But it's not, it's still not, it's still like just crappy old tech. So why would you go and build on crappy old tech? So that's why I think people don't use, you know, Bitcoin Cash, really.
19:17But yeah, you were saying about that stuff with the colored coins and all those people back then. Actually, I remember, so like, yeah, I built the open bazaar, which is called Dark Market, which is meant to be, which is based off of Silk Road. It was P2P Silk Road. And I remember when I built that, it was kind of because I saw what Silk Road is and what the components are. Oh, we can build this decentralized. And it was like that for a lot of applications. So when people were making Ethereum in the first place, I really didn't see why you need Ethereum.
20:01I was like, well, you don't need Ethereum to do this application you're proposing. Today, yes, you do need Ethereum. But back then I was like, well, this thing you're saying, we can do it on Bitcoin with Bitcoin scripts. And, you know, there's a way to do it. And even when they were making Ethereum, at one point they asked me to be the lead developer and the guy was going, oh, you should work on Ethereum with us, blah, blah. And I was like, but what can I do with it?
20:33And the guy goes, oh, you can do everything, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, but what can I do with it? And he was like, yeah, yeah, everything, blah. And I was like, no, no, no, give me one use case, one practical use case. And he's like, marriage contracts, you can put your marriage on the blockchain. I was like, what? No, I'm out, fuck this. And so that's why I didn't see the point of it back then. But it is true now, people are saying Ethereum lacks actual utility, but that's a different convo.
21:09But the point is that, you know, back then, when they were making Ethereum, for me, a lot of the use cases they were talking about were, it didn't, it was not obvious why you would want Ethereum, why would necessitate Ethereum, because they could build it on Bitcoin. But then I met people who were building on Ethereum, like years later, and they said to me, like, oh, yeah, it's so easy. I can use Solidity, you know, I've got this environment. And it's like, oh, yeah, Ethereum is actually made for people to make generalized applications.
21:45And that's why it's able to have this ecosystem, whereas Bitcoin is not made. In fact, if anything is hostile to that, if you make an application, like, for example, the multisig, as I said, I was doing multisig in 2011, the network was hostile to my transactions, I had to find a mining node, which was Luke Junior's node, to be able to get that into the blockchain. So, you know, that's, that's the argument why, you know, you'd want to, why would you build on Bitcoin Cash?
22:19Vlad CosteaYeah, I do get that. But it seems like the builders are avoiding Bitcoin Cash, and they keep up this political game, this lobbying, where they're trying to convince the Bitcoin users that they might want to have something on their network. And there's always this conversation when it comes to upgrading Bitcoin about consensus, whatever that means, because it took, I think, many, many years to get to the point where everyone agreed that we need Schnorr signatures. And then we got Taproot, and we didn't even get all of the stuff that was promised.
22:54It was just like maybe half of it or less. And it's so difficult just to get everyone to agree. I see that there are some initiatives right now to get the various people involved to say what kind of covenant soft fork they prefer. And it's madness. It's chaos. It's, it's just that we have like 12 proposals, and everyone seems to prefer a specific one because they have tailored their applications around it.
23:24Amir TaakiYeah, a lot of the argumentation about upgrading Bitcoin is very inauthentic, because back when the block size debate was happening, and I'm not making a value judgment about big blocks or small blocks, which I'm more concerned with the actual governance of how the upgrades happen. So back then, there was, it was a very contentious decision. And I remember reading the Bitcoin Core devs saying, you know, Bitcoin is not democracy. This is a technical decision that is decided by developers. And this is what we've decided. And, you know, that was imposed on people.
24:10Now, these days, they, those same people, they make the argument that the network voted to stay with the small blocks and the big block people lost, which is not how I remember it. So it's like, Bitcoin is not a democracy when it's inconvenient to us. It's a, you know, it's a technical project. But, you know, when it is convenient to us, Bitcoin's a democracy and, you know, we've got the legitimacy of the network having voted this way. If you don't like it, go and set up a node that way, which it stops any, you know, any real discussion about the governance or evil, scary word.
25:00You know, somebody said to me recently, Amir, that's not very anarchist of you, that you seem to want there to be a government in Bitcoin. And it's like, come on, we all know Bitcoin is not this, you know, imaginary decentralized project, you know, you with your Raspberry Pi at home is deciding about, you know, where Bitcoin's going. There are leaders inside of Bitcoin. There is a shadow governance. There are people in positions of influence with access to resources that decide which projects get funded, you know, and they are a clique and they operate together.
25:40And the fact that that is not acknowledged means that, you know, it's not public, that the process has no accountability, has no transparency. And so that's, that's not a well managed project of what the governance, they, people pretend that there is no governance, which, you know, we all know that can never exist. There's always people together, they form groups and, you know, you don't see the devs, you know, on Bitcoin talk, you know, they're obviously in private rooms discussing with each other, you know.
26:20Vlad CosteaYeah, and I had this pseudo fight with Matt Corallo last week, where I basically said in a comment, it wasn't even directed towards him, as in I wasn't replying to one of his tweets. But someone mentioned, basically, he tried to portray Matt, and I mean Blue Matt, the guy with the blue hair was at one point the youngest Bitcoin Core developer, was trying to portray him as a hypocrite because he had two conflicting statements, not too far apart from each other. And I commented and said, you know, Blue Matt sort of sold out, because nowadays he's hanging with Jack Dorsey, and he has his project, which is Rust Lightning.
27:02It's being VC funded and stuff, and he responded to me and said, you know, it's not really VC because he wanted to argue on the definition of what a VC is, and he hasn't sold out because he's been working consistently for the past decade and a half on this and that. And we had sort of a fight, but I also realized that there is no accountability, you know, it's so easy to just say, oh, I've done cool stuff, and I should be excused for the shortcomings of my work because I've done this and it's being used by these two businesses, but still it didn't live up to the expectations and it still didn't help the project at large that much.
27:41And it sort of sucks when you realize that, OK, on one hand, maybe that the model of funding developers from within the community with something like the Bitcoin Foundation was a good idea just because you had some leverage and you could say, you know, I want this to happen. Of course, it was a centralizing idea. Of course, you need more of these foundations, but it's besides the point. But when you have these developers being funded by whatever private interest that may or may not be friendly to Bitcoin and they might as well just fund them to do nothing or sabotage the project, it's not cool either because there are different threat vectors.
28:22Like MIT has been financing Bitcoin Core development for the past decade or so, but what they also do, and there's one of the Bitcoin Core developers who partook in this, is build their own CBDC pilot, which is called Project Hamilton. Whoa, that's crazy. Oh, you're not aware of it?
28:43Amir TaakiI've never heard of it. Look at Project Hamilton. Bitcoin Foundation, they were really corrupt. So I came in, people can hear me now, testing.
28:57Vlad CosteaThey should.
29:00Amir TaakiOkay. Yeah. I came in, so I came into Bitcoin in 2010 and I started, you know, making patches to Bitcoin and, you know, Gavin Andresen, he started, he would go, oh, it's not, it's not good. Like, and it rejects it. And then I'd be like, well, you know, try and tell me what I can do to get it in and he'd go, if you do this, you know, it would be, it would be good. Yeah. And so I'd spend like a month or two working and then, you know, that rejects it.
29:33And I was like, okay, you know, they're not letting me. You know, get coding. And then one time I saw one of the chat logs of the, one of the Bitcoin dev channels when I was offline. And I saw Gavin was slandering me as a dev. He was like, oh, me as a shit dev, blah, blah. And I was like, well, I know I'm a really good dev because I've worked in big teams on large code bases for a long time. And I was like, this guy's just a motherfucker.
30:05So that's why, you know, I went and I started libbitcoin. I remember the first presentation, first ever presentation about Bitcoin, which I went and I gave a bankers conference in Amsterdam. And when I came back home to England, Gavin DMed me in chat and he goes, I think you should not ever be allowed to speak at Bitcoin conferences again. I was like, I was like, what, who the fuck is this guy telling me what conferences I can and can't speak about, you know? So I was like, well, fuck you too, dude.
30:42And then when we announced, Dark Wallet, you know, if you see the original announcement on Bitcoin talk, Gavin goes, oh, great project guys. Amazing. But I'd literally just got off the telephone with a journalist and she told me that he was slacking off our projects on the telephone. So he's a very two-faced guy slacking us off in public. Sorry, talking nice to us in public, pretending to be the good guy. And everybody was like, oh, he's such a great guy, but in private and behind slacking us off.
31:19So I was just like, these were these were like these business guys that started to try and do a hostile takeover of Bitcoin back in 2011, 2012. And they were like, they were like, oh, you know, anarchism, libertarianism, that's just crazy. You know, those people are crazy, you know, and they were like trying to get on board with like the big banks payment networks. You know, they wanted to be accepted by, you know, globalist finance, which Bitcoin was meant to oppose. You know, they were like, you know, Silk Road, they were slacking it off, etc.
32:00So, and you know, everybody knows that post by Gav, when he goes, he goes, hi guys, I've just been visiting the CIA. And then he went, what? And he was like really happy about it. And we're like, bro, he's going to tell the CIA about Bitcoin. So, so, you know, when those guys were like making their moves and everybody, so when they remember Craig Wright, they were like, Craig Wright is Satoshi. I don't know if they really believed that. I don't, I don't, I, at the time I was like, come on, you guys obviously don't believe is Satoshi, but you just want to, you want to pretend he's Satoshi because it gives you legitimacy for your hostile takeover of Bitcoin.
32:55So that's why, that's what the block size war was about, was about stopping those guys. And the other side was victorious, but to the credit of those guys, those business guys, which, you know, include Roger and, you know, all the Bitcoin Foundation people, etc. They did have a vision for Bitcoin's future, but these people today, they don't have a vision for Bitcoin's future, which is why they're not fit to lead Bitcoin to take Bitcoin forward. You know, to take it anywhere, really just kind of squat it.
33:36And that's why these new people, this new influx of people has come from the Ethereum ecosystem back to Bitcoin. And they're like, we see a way to take Bitcoin forward, you know, to build an ecosystem around it. And those guys, they don't like it. That's why they go, oh, that shit corner. They instinctively know and feel that there's competition, that what they've got going, that what they're running is under threat. And they don't like that. But, you know, and it's, it's tough, as you said, because they don't see themselves as corrupt.
34:12They're like, if you ever, I don't know, you know, when you talk with a leftist and they're like, they're like, you know, I'm a good person because I'm, you know, against the rich and against capitalism. And it's like, well, you know, you think you're a good person because you moralize to everyone else. But are you really a better person than someone, you know, like, for example, I don't know, I'm not against, you know, vegans or anything, but I'm just saying, like, there is, as a silly example, you know, I go, oh, I'm a vegan, therefore I'm better than you because you eat meat.
34:50It's just like a really simple moral category to go, oh, you're better than that other person, you know, but it's not really true. So they're like that. It's kind of like that with the Bitcoiners, oh, we're morally pure, you know, we don't engage in. And I think, to be honest, I think it's pretty communist. I think it's like Bitcoin maximalism. It's just communism, the way that it's like, oh, you're not allowed to have other tokens. You know, there's going to be, there's going to be a global economic system.
35:24Everyone's going to use the same economic system, the single, you know, everybody's going to live. Imagine if that existed, it'd be dystopia, it'd be horrible. It would be just like, it'd be like living under Soviet communism. So there's only one economic system. You're not allowed to use any other. It is, it's like exists in the entire universe. That seems quite, you know, authoritarian to me. So, yeah.
35:52Vlad CosteaWell, it's not just that, but before I present my example, I just want to say that it's interesting to me that you said basically that the block size words were not about the block size, but mostly about deciding who's in charge of the project. And that was sort of a Lord of the fly situation where the young developers wanted to take control over the project and take it from Gavin and Mike Hearn. And I'm not sure if Jeff Garzik was too involved, but he did become the lead developer of SegWit2x.
36:23And he was the previous guest on the show. It was pretty interesting.
36:28Amir TaakiHe was involved, but he was like, you know, just like a friend of them as a tech guy, but he wasn't like leading it, but he was like a core, one of the first five in that team.
36:43Vlad CosteaYeah. And he was the first person to propose a block size increase back in 2010. He joined the project and released this patch, which increased the block size to seven megabytes. And Satoshi responded to that and said, you know, it's a bit too early.
37:00Amir TaakiYeah. So, yeah. I mean, Mike Hearn, he was actually proposing shit like that nodes should have like a proof of passport and that nodes should only connect to other nodes that have this passport ID. So he was like proper Fed tier. And so, and he was like, also, I remember he proposed, it was like bloom filters as a privacy technique, but then it was like, this is not a privacy technique. So a lot of that was really sus. That's why people were like, Oh, he's maybe he's like a Fed or something, but I don't know.
37:42I'm not going to comment on that, but he was definitely against the cypherpunk crypto anarchy stuff in Bitcoin. You know, he was like, he was like, Oh, you know, we need to integrate with the big banks. All of those guys are pretty much like that at the time.
38:00Vlad CosteaWhich is ironic because right now we are being integrated, but not through the Bitcoin network, but with ETFs and stuff like that. I sometimes like to joke that the ETF is the scaling layer that we got.
38:14Amir TaakiIt's because Bitcoin is weak ideologically. If you don't have like a, if you don't have like competent, you know, like leadership and like, if the community doesn't have a competent philosophy or vision, then it's not, it can't, it hasn't got like a really, it hasn't got a good enough immune system to defend itself. That's why the Bitcoin maxis, they don't really offer anything. You know, they're just, they're kind of like, you know, they can't, they can't develop any solution and that's how Bitcoin get infiltrated. So, yeah.
38:51Vlad CosteaBut you call them weak, but at the same time they pretend to be the most toxic, intolerant, resilient, you know, they say they don't allow any change to Bitcoin and stuff like this. It's just that I guess some feds figured out how to hack their way into this mindset and basically put every one in the community in a situation where nobody can ever agree with anything. And if there is any good proposal to improve Bitcoin, I think CTV is pretty good. Like I haven't seen any, for any proper argument against it.
39:28Amir TaakiNice. So I need to, I haven't looked into it.
39:32Vlad CosteaBut my point is that for every proposal that seems to have consensus to a degree, there's going to be like 20 more that are similar. And they say, you know, this is slightly better because it also does this. So why don't you forget about your old one? And we can have this new one. But this is how you get people to never agree on anything.
39:54Amir TaakiYeah, the op-cat is a good idea.
39:58Vlad CosteaOh, you seem to be a fan.
40:01Amir TaakiYeah, just because it's simple. I'd like rather Eli's logic. And I agree with what he says. Makes sense. You know, the other stuff, it's all, it is realistically going to take years. And you might go, Oh, well, it's just 20 lines of code. But you know, they're going to argue that shit for infinity amount of time. And I don't know if any of you know, as well, in the Linux kernel, you know, like Linus Torvalds is kind of like the Satoshi of Linux or like the Vitalik of Linux.
40:41So Linus was like, Oh, you know, Rust, because he vetoed C++. You know, Linux is written in C and he vetoed C++. So yeah, somebody asked about STARKs on Bitcoin. Yeah, I think STARKs on Bitcoin would be amazing. We could talk about what STARKs are if you want. But I was just going to say about Linus. So he vetoed C++. He was like, no, C++ is shit. It's never getting into Linux. And then it became this thing that Linux is like a C project, an old school C project.
41:16We're hardcore old school. It became like an identity, almost like the Bitcoin maxis. But then Linus kind of made this shocking break more recently where he's like, we're going to go for Rust, guys. And because like the amount of like shitting by old school, you know, people call them seniles. You know, people are into like C programming. They call them seniles. They're like Bitcoin maxis. They go like, Rust is shit. I mean, I kind of agree with them. Rust is shit. I love C. Yeah, the Hitler of Linux.
41:58But I mean, he's gone woke now. But anyway, so Linus, he was like, we're going for Rust, guys. Part of his decision was that, look, we're all old. We're all getting old. All the young Zoom Zooms, they're into Rust. We need to get new people into this. Rust is a good way to get people excited about Linux. And so, you know, he brought in people and they started working on Rust in Linux. And, you know, they were like, oh, you know, we've got these really strict requirements.
42:38And then the Rust devs were like, okay, well, you know, we're put. And they put a lot of energy into, you know, developing the Rust thing. But no matter what they did, it was not enough for the seniles. Everything they did would get blocked. And there's like, there was even like recently like scandals where I think it was like in a conference and the C dev was like shouting, just like autistically shouting at the Rust dev, going, what you're doing is shit. And then and then the Rust devs quit because they said, oh, no matter what we do, everybody's angry at us making stupid complaints.
43:20And they've brought it to a standstill. That's what's going to happen with these complicated opcode proposals in Bitcoin. They're going to autistically rage and drag it on for years because it's shitcoinery and they don't want it in Bitcoin. And they will like clock block it as much as possible. And they will like just discuss like endlessly, like really minor, you know, points. Whereas OP_CAT, it already exists in Bitcoin. It just needs to be uncommented. It's well understood. It's really basic. You know, everybody can agree on that and just focus, get that shipped.
44:03And then if we want a better one, then put the better one in. But the OP_CAT, it's just like, it's just a way of like breaking the Bitcoin maxi resistance. It's like, that's what I meant. Bitcoin is a political thing. It's not a technical thing. It's all about politics. So that's why, you know, I mean, I'm not, I don't want to, I'm not weighing in on the C versus Rust thing, but it is true that, you know, there was, they were raging. They were being really difficult.
44:38The C devs towards the Rust devs, I'm responding to these comments.
44:45Vlad CosteaYeah. Do you believe that Bitcoin should learn anything from Linux or is it so different because there's money involved?
44:54Amir TaakiI, yeah, I think, I think cryptocurrency is not, I think it's like a website, you know, like Yahoo or something. Everybody, I don't know if people know, but back in the very early stage of the web, there was like AOL, I think was like the first thing I remember, but everybody was like, Oh, AOL. It's just, it's just, there's no reason to ever leave. It's like, it's got, you know, cause everybody would, everybody back then they would get an AOL internet and it would come with an AOL browser and you had to install that and it would have all the websites and apps in AOL.
45:41So people were like, why would you leave AOL? Everybody's going to be in AOL. That's the new web. They thought that would be forever. That's like with Bitcoin. Everybody's like, Oh yes. You know, all this other shit is going to disappear. It's all just going to fold into Bitcoin eventually at some point. They don't know when, cause I heard it's been years now people have been going, Oh, it's all going to zero. You know, everything's going to go to zero against Bitcoin. I'm like, well, when, you know, can you give a day?
46:12Like, no, we'll eventually at some point, you know, they used to think that about the web first it was AOL, then it was Yahoo. Everybody was like, everybody's just going to use Yahoo. You know, that didn't hold. So, yeah, like, I mean about Bitcoin as well, you know, what else is crazy is, Bitcoin's written in C++. And the reason why, so in every other, every other cryptocurrency projects, there are multiple clients, multiple node softwares that are written by different teams. And in fact, this is something Ethereum actually prides itself on because Ethereum's like, Oh, we actually have like a really well diversified ecosystem of clients of node software.
47:06We've got five of them and the percentages are well balanced. And, what's funny is the Bitcoin maxis, they bring that up as an example of why Ethereum is so vulnerable, but when you're in Ethereum, they bring that up as an, as an example of why Ethereum network is so resilient. Like for example, like, you know, a few years back when one of the clients didn't implement, you know, this, the spec properly. And so because of that, the network was able to continue operating.
47:43So it's kind of interesting. But in general, in academia, it's well accepted that having multiple node softwares is the way to go. In general, in the rest of cryptocurrency, it's like standard practice that you should have diversified node client ecosystem. But for some reason in Bitcoin, it's not like that. In Bitcoin, they disregard all the other knowledge of the rest of the ecosystem. And, you know, that reinforcement is cult-like. There's not even like a balanced understanding of the issue. It's just like, no, this is the truth.
48:24And you're like, well, obviously it's not because academics disagree with you. And the Bitcoin devs, they will say something, although I haven't heard them say it recently, maybe because I've been calling them out about it, but they will say, they used to say at least that you cannot have another implementation of the node software for Bitcoin because that rely on certain features, unspecced features of C++. So what they mean, so I used to study the C++ spec, you know, it's like, it's true, but it's like a giant book like that.
49:03And every time, I used to go to bed and I used to read it before I go to bed. It's like a giant book by Bjarne Stroustrup. I used to read the C++ standard. Everything about C++ is completely spec'd, you know, except for one thing called undefined behavior. So undefined behavior is something that you do in C++. Which the spec says you should never ever do this thing. Because if you do this thing that is illegal and if you invoke this illegal behavior, your entire program is invalid.
49:40Not just, you know, you've got a program, you're running it and then it invokes undefined behavior and suddenly it's like it can do anything. It's illegal. No. If your program at any point in time can invoke undefined behavior then it means your entire program, even before that undefined behavior was invoked, is illegal. And what the spec says about undefined behavior is that a compiler which takes your code can compile that code into absolutely anything it wants. It can be any program. It can be a program that wipes your hard disk.
50:21You know, it can be a program that like, you know, I don't know, types like random garbage everywhere, whatever. So you are never ever meant to invoke undefined behavior. So when C++, so when, sorry, Bitcoin Core devs say that we cannot have a spec for, you know, Bitcoin Core because Bitcoin Core uses unspecced features of C++. What they're saying is that we're relying on illegal undefined behavior in C++. Which is fucking crazy. What that means is your program is invalid. People don't know this shit. Like, so there's no excuse not to have a spec.
51:15If your program is invoking undefined behavior, you fix your fucking program. You fix the bugs. You don't go, you don't go, oh, we can't do anything about it. No. It's just lazy. They're just lazy. They're like, you should go write a spec. So there's a spec that everybody can read. And then you tell people, okay, this is the spec. The spec is Bitcoin. Not this, because it's like, what is this? Like a repo on GitHub. Like you go, you know, GitHub slash Bitcoin slash Bitcoin. Owned by one group of guys.
51:50They own that repo. If you as a dev have an idea and you want to get it into Bitcoin, you have to get permission to get added to their repo or to get your code. It's permissioned. It's a permissioned centralized system. It's not, it's not a, you know, free market system of like people competing together. It's not, it's like a centralized controlled software project by one team. Not even Linux is like that. People don't know Linux is not even managed like that. In Linux, there are many different maintainers that maintain different branches.
52:31And you can pull from any of those maintainers and they are considered Linux. And, you know, Linus at the end, he pulls it into his branch and that gets distributed, you know. But in a, as well, like Linux ecosystems, you can replace your kernel even. You don't have to use Linux. You could use BSD. You can use something else. So, you know, you're not restricted to only using Linux. And in fact, that API is called POSIX. So, it's like, it's a replaceable thing. So, this is known all throughout software.
53:08It's like standard practice, you know, that you have a standards organization, you know, like there's many different interests there. And they all want to, they, all the companies and the people that are involved in, you know, that ecosystem, whatever, you know, they get people, you know, nominated and they go to that standards body and they have public discussions and they publish, you know, upgrades to the spec and stuff like that. And everybody can see what's going on and everybody can see there's a process. And if something's not fair, you can critique that and you can say, well, this is not being done properly rather than there is an invisible leak that runs a GitHub software project.
53:52And what is Bitcoin is the code that they write, not that anybody else writes. And then, you know, people say that, oh, wow, you know, anybody can write a Bitcoin mode. Yeah, they can. And people do. But there is heavy lobbying and propaganda and control by the Bitcoin Core clique against those other competing projects. People don't realize that, but that's very blatant. It happens. And not only that, what they make is the official Bitcoin. Everything else is not the official Bitcoin. So why not get rid of their special status?
54:33Why do they have a special status as official? Why do they have that slash Bitcoin namespace? Just get rid of it. Just make Bitcoin into a spec. And then anybody can take that Bitcoin Core code and make their own version now. You know, I'm not saying we have to, like, delete the code from our hard drives. But, you know, now, a whole bunch of people, you know, a whole bunch of teams will go and fork it. And they will take it from where it left off.
55:03And then the community will decide, you know, which clients or nodes they want to run, which has the momentum. But none of those will have the special designation of being the official Bitcoin spec. We already have the BIP process. But that was made, like, in 2010, 2011 or something. It was made many years ago. It's not adequate. You need a proper formal standards organization, formal process, you know. But, yeah, as this guy says, it's 0% chance of happening. But that would be the ideal, you know.
55:43When I say that Blockstream and Bitcoin Core, they're corrupt. They don't think they're corrupt. As you said, they're like, oh, we've done this, you know, unpaid service for a long ass time. You know, we've got nothing from it, ostensibly. You know, why are people criticizing us? You know, it's the same thing that happens for any dictator who's the hero of a revolution. You come into power, you know, he's there a few years. People, after a while, people are like, wow, this guy's a death spot. You know, he's not, his legitimacy has, like, long since, you know, been over, overdue, you know, so.
56:24Yeah.
56:26Vlad CosteaBut I guess the elephant in the room right now is libbitcoin, which is something that you built as an alternative client. Right now, it's being maintained by Eric Voskuil. And he recently came up with some very cool optimizations. He was able to sync a full node in less than one hour on a computer that costs about $300. There's always this concern, right, in Bitcoin, and they say we should not have larger blocks because it's going to take longer to sync. And even today, if you buy, let's say, a $1,000 computer, it's going to take you a whole day to sync a full node with Bitcoin Core.
57:01It's just that nobody really has this hacky approach in Bitcoin Core. It takes libbitcoin and people like Eric Voskuil to ask questions and challenge what is believed to be established as a norm or a must-have in the client.
57:22Amir TaakiYeah, I mean, like, there's other teams working as well. Like, a very big part as well is just that, like, it's impossible to build anything that you use Bitcoin because the code is just so shitty. It's the same code. Like, they really aren't, they really don't, I mean, there's, I think there's an issue of funding and resources in Bitcoin. It's very hard as a Bitcoin developer to have, like, proper funding. Indeed, like, Bitcoin as an ecosystem in itself is, like, it's very difficult to operate, you know, funding-wise.
58:04But, you know, for example, like, just building something as simple as a transaction radar, which is, you know, I'm surprised why it doesn't exist in all the wallets, which is when you make a transaction in the network, you can see how much that transaction is propagated. To do that today with the Bitcoin Core code, you have to fork the Bitcoin Core code and then you have to hack this, like, really arcane code base. It's just not built to allow people to make these kind of, like, you know, applications using Bitcoin.
58:42So, and, you know, there's not a willpower to take Bitcoin somewhere, you know, it's, like, heavily politicized, so it's very difficult for, you know, some dude to go, you know, oh, I think Bitcoin, you know, should, you know, if we did this to the code, we get these optimizations and they can build up a user base, etc. So.
59:08Vlad CosteaYeah, what I noticed is basically the two extremes of the bell curve. On one hand, you have the ADIQ Bitcoin Hodler, who says this is the perfect technology. It was brought upon us by some sort of time traveling god or alien that gave us the perfect technology. I'm gonna buy more of this. I'm gonna give it to my children. I'm gonna give it to my grandchildren. We're gonna have generational wealth and whatever. And then you have the 150 IQ developers who realize how fragile the code base is.
59:41And that's why they don't really hold Bitcoin. They sell it and they hold just small amounts that they keep for emergencies or something. But they don't really believe in the future of the project as much as these guys who know nothing about how it works.
59:57Amir TaakiI mean, I'm holding a lot of cryptocurrency. I'm majority. I'm holding a lot of Bitcoin, other things like Monero, etc. So I'm all in on crypto. But yeah, I think like we're capable of like great things right now. I just don't see any of that going to be built on Bitcoin. So that's why I'm not like to invest it in Bitcoin's future. I'm more interested in like, so there's, I mean, like here's a cool example or something, which is I saw today that Rojava, they're raising funds to buy drones using cryptocurrency and they're using Monero mainly. So that's pretty cool that you can like, you can fund like a guerrilla warfare using Monero.
1:00:57Cause that's what crypto is about.
1:01:04Vlad CosteaNo, I was going to mention some someone in the comments that posted an introspection and 82 bytes code. And I was curious what you think about it because he seems to have it figured out. It's OP DUP, OP_HASH256, OP_2, OP_RSHIFT. And there is, I think this is a transaction hash and he wants to know what you think about it. It also uses OP_CAT. You just scroll a bit in the Twitter chat. Yeah.
1:01:44Amir TaakiSo it duplicates the data on the stack. It does a, it hashes it. It adds the number two. I don't know what R shift does. I can't remember a right shift, right shifts the data and then it pushes this data and then swap. I don't know. I don't know what that is trying to do.
1:02:15Maybe the guy can tell me.
1:02:22Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess this is the main point against OP_CAT with critics saying that it's hard to figure out what the code does.
1:02:35Amir TaakiBut I mean, a lot of the Bitcoin scripts is like that. You need to know what it already does. To be honest, I only remember the multisig and the payment one. And in the Bitcoin script, there's also been added all these like weird arcane rules because of the soft fork. It doesn't even behave as you would expect. So sometimes you get scripts where it's like, it looks a certain way, but when the scripting engine encounters that, it like does something completely different.
1:03:16Vlad CosteaThat's sort of messed up. I was not aware of it.
1:03:21Yeah. So there's an extra challenge to building stuff on Bitcoin because you have to manually activate or deactivate soft works for your node.
1:03:32Amir TaakiI mean, I think it was when the multisig first existed and Gavin was like really pushing for it and we were like, but bro, none of the wallets even have multisig. Why are you pushing for this like destructive change to scripting system? And it was me and Luke Jr. Who were like trying to spread the word about that. But it ended up going through. That was, you know, like a lot of the other devs as well. You know, once Gavin kind of marginalized me from Bitcoin Core, then he started doing the same to other people, but then he ended up creating enemies and that's when they did in the block size war, they ended up throwing him out of the repo.
1:04:26So, you know, it's like, even if you're like on the side of big blocks now, I think it's important to understand that it's like, it wasn't really about block size and like they, you know, a lot of those people that are in charge now, you know, whatever they're doing now, they kind of are like, oh, we saved Bitcoin from a coup, from a hostile takeover. That's how they see it. And it's not completely wrong.
1:05:03Vlad CosteaJust for the record, I'm not sure if I'm on the side of big blocks, but I do want every user to be able to onboard any ZK rollup sidechain or whatever layer two without custodians. So you should be in charge of your own keys. That's my main ideology. And I think that's sort of the innovation behind Bitcoin as a money system.
1:05:25Amir TaakiYeah, I'm not, you know, going to comment about it because I don't think it was really a technical discussion. I think it was a good discussion about the values of Bitcoin, what it's about. But I do think it was done in completely a wrong way where it was like people are not allowed to make a decision about this. This is just like a purely technical decision. But I don't think it was. I think it's like something very simple that you can explain to people that even like your grandmother could understand.
1:06:00If you have bigger blocks, less people can run the node. Therefore, it's less decentralized. That's not a technical discussion, is it? That's like just a discussion about the future of Bitcoin.
1:06:14Vlad CosteaWell, you're partially right, but it all goes back to Peter Todd, right? He was the original small blocker. He's the one who created that video in 2013 or something to explain that everyone should be able to run a node. And it all grew from here. And it's also funny because you've spent the last few years warning people about Peter Todd, saying that he most likely works for a free letter agency. And then you were...
1:06:43Amir TaakiI didn't say that. I said, no, I don't know what he does now, et cetera, but he did help an agent, that much is indisputable.
1:06:54Vlad CosteaOK, so you're referring to the John Dillon story.
1:07:02Amir TaakiIt's even more crazy than that, because there was a CoinJoin bounty fund that was on BitcoinTalk and they put an address and they said whoever whoever makes the first implementation of CoinJoin.
1:07:12Vlad CosteaOh, that was Greg Maxwell and... It's Greg Maxwell and Theymos, I think.
1:07:19Amir TaakiYeah, so I thought it was those guys that were stopping me get the funds, but Peter Todd worked with John Dillon, if you read the email, to stop us getting the funds. But Peter Todd was meant to be our friend, which is strange because imagine a guy, he just randomly come up to you and he's like, yeah, Peter Todd says, oh, well, I don't know that he was an agent. I thought he was could just be any dude. He's saying I'm an agent, but he could be anybody.
1:07:49OK, fine. So what of a fine some dude emails you and says, hey, I work for intelligence and help me stop Amir and his crew from getting money. You wouldn't go you wouldn't go like, oh, let's entertain the guy. I'm interesting. I wonder what he has to say. You tell him to fuck off. That's what anybody decent person would do. Not only that, not only did he chat with the guy, you know, like entertaining the notion, he actually sent the guy the money. He actually did the action to help the guy to so he could sign a message to stop us getting money.
1:08:28A guy that self identifies as an agent. If that is not spook behavior, I don't know what is. And the fact is like, you know, I was telling people about it and people didn't seem to care. You know, people, they want to be close to like famous, you know, people. And, you know, if you're famous, you can do anything. People will suck you off. They all want to be your friend.
1:08:52Vlad CosteaWell, he still tells you now, right?
1:08:55Amir TaakiYeah, yeah. But so that's the thing. The HBO documentary came out and in the HBO documentary, they show the emails and the stuff that happened. And then people now were like, oh, wow. Oh, he spoke with an agent. I was like. I was fucking telling you people before you chose to ignore it, you didn't even bother to read the emails when I linked to all the evidence. It's funny, isn't it? Oh, it's very long.
1:09:20Vlad CosteaIn everyone's defense, it's very long.
1:09:22Amir TaakiIt's on a HBO documentary. They don't believe, they're not, they won't go and try to research things themselves when you tell them that. Okay, now it's known to be true. He's like even admitted it. He's like, yes, I had this email. Yeah, this John Dillon guy who knows who he is, if he's an agent or not, fine. But it's still fucked up. That's still really fucked up behavior. Imagine not only that, you did that. You're hanging out with the dude that you've screwed over every day. They're chief scientists for their project.
1:09:58Peter Todd was a nobody back then. We put him as our chief scientist. As a counterbalance to Gavin Andresen. We brought him up out of obscurity. We put him on the stage. And then he's doing this with John Dillon. That is fucked up. That is really fucked up behavior. And what would any normal person do? Any normal person would be like, yeah, bro, I'm really sorry. That was fucking weird. I don't know what went through my head. I'm sorry, though. You'd do that, wouldn't you? It's 2024.
1:10:31You'd be like, yeah, that was wrong. He doesn't do that. He's unapologetic. He's like, yes, we need states because states build computers. That's what he said last time somebody asked him about it. He's like, we need states because states build computers. When questioned about interacting with a spook to undermine a group of broke open source developers to stop them getting funding for having implemented privacy techniques on Bitcoin, what the fuck? That is crazy. Crazy, crazy behavior. People. Nobody says anything about it. It's excused. I don't know why people don't call that out.
1:11:11Vlad CosteaWell, the interpretation of the events is that he was actually John Dillon himself and he was talking to himself because the amount of money that he supposedly received for pushing RBF is like a few hundred dollars, which is I don't know what developers were getting paid at the time, but...
1:11:28Amir TaakiI'm not on about the RBF. I'm talking about if you read the email thread, it's about the CoinJoin Bounty Fund. And John Dillon says, send me the funds so that I can send the funds back to the fund saying I donated the majority of funds to the fund and I disapprove of a mere receiving those funds, which by the way, we got zero from that funds. I implemented the first CoinJoin. Then later on, we made the dark wallet. We released the alpha of dark wallet. We released the code. We got zero from that funds.
1:12:02We never got anything from that CoinJoin Bounty Fund. After they made the funds, which the rules of the fund were, the first team to deliver the implementation, which we were the first, we fulfilled that, would get the money, they changed the rules. They changed the rules to say, as the owners of the fund see fit, these are the guys that are in charge of Bitcoin Core today. They are corrupt individuals. They're corrupt people.
1:12:33Greg Maxwell, he's a self-made developer. He has a really interesting story. But he's also a very jealous guy, a very bitchy jealous guy. He's not a strong person. He's not a strong-willed person. A lot of these Bitcoin Core devs, they're just weak, insecure people, and they're not fit to be leaders of Bitcoin. That's why they behave in this way. That's why Eric Voskuil, a while back, he got hacked. He was a developer. He's been at it for many years, funding dev with his own money, Bitcoin dev.
1:13:21I was saying to him, Eric, look, forget about Bitcoin. Let's make something new together. Me and you're a brilliant dev. You're a really good dev. You're really smart. He used to be a fighter pilot. What's that movie with Tom Cruise in it? Top Gun. Yeah, he's like Tom Cruise. He's literally a real-life Top Gun guy, you know, riding motorbikes, flying fighter jets. He's also a hardcore Rothbardian. You know, one time I asked him, I was like, hey, got any good books to read? And he was like, Man, Economy, and State.
1:14:10And I asked him a book and it was like that. And I tried, I really tried. It was so hard to read that book. But he's hardcore. He's very ideological. And if you'd almost said that to him, he's just like, no, he's really into Bitcoin. He's a really true believer in Bitcoin. Imagine that guy being oppressed by, you know, Bitcoin claws, clique. Trying to choke him. And he's just been self-funding everything for years, like a soldier. And of course, he's under-resourced. He hasn't got much stuff.
1:14:49He hasn't got any money. He's just doing it himself. And, you know, there was a floor found and, you know, he'd made some mistakes, you know, because he can't hire people to do audits and he hasn't got like massive exchanges funding him because of how corrupt Bitcoin is. But, you know, when that happened, you know, normally you'd be like, yeah, that's fucked up. But, you know, I feel for you, right? I feel for you as a developer, as ideological developers put their soul into this thing. But that's not what happened.
1:15:23The Bitcoin Core guys were really vicious. They really came out with the knives at him. And I saw that and I was like, that's disgusting behavior. You don't, when a man is down, you don't kick him to finish him off, which is what they did. So that's the kind of personalities that are in charge of Bitcoin now. And, you know, that's what I was saying, you know, the people that they kicked out, they were ruthless sharks, business guys. But they weren't like that. They weren't weak, vicious people.
1:15:57They were just sharks, you know, and they had a vision for what Bitcoin should be. Is that the cypherpunk crypto-anarchy vision of Bitcoin? No. But is that what we have now? No. Why not? Because the people that are in charge now, they're not strong enough to make Bitcoin into a cypherpunk technology. They don't have a strong, if there was a strong enough leadership, we would have full on-chain privacy in Bitcoin. If they were cypherpunk and they were, they were strong-willed enough. And in fact, it's even worse than that.
1:16:30Those people are compromised. I just told you about Peter Todd. It sounds shocking, but these entire emails are online. Anybody can go read it. Anybody can go find the Bitcoin Talk CoinJoin thread. They can verify the information. Don't trust, verify. Go search the information. Make your own conclusion. But that's the people in charge of Bitcoin. It's crazy, huh? So yeah, they're really corrupt, really corrupt people. I mean, they don't see it like that because they're like, oh, you know, we've been soldiering on defending Bitcoin, blah, blah.
1:17:06But it's like, okay, bro, maybe it's time to step aside. Maybe it's time to allow these, you know, young people to come in, you know, OP_CAT L2s on Bitcoin. Let them, you know, maybe it's time to wind down Bitcoin Core, allow new teams to compete. Maybe it's time to put in place a proper governance, but that's antithetical. But if Bitcoin want to survive, Bitcoin want to compete against BlackRock and all these other people that are trying to hijack it, which, if we're honest, those are the people that are in charge of Bitcoin now.
1:17:36That's what they'd have to do. They'd have to have, sorry, they'd have to have really drastic action taken, which I'm not saying it's impossible. I mean, somebody here said, you know, it's basically close to zero chance all of that happens. But, you know, if someone was motivated, like if I was motivated, maybe I would go into Bitcoin and I'd fight to make that future happen. Not like, you know, rally the community, et cetera. But I just have better opportunities with DarkFi, you know, doing the things that I want to do that I think are more interesting.
1:18:13That's why I'm not going to waste my time doing that. It's like a political work. It's not really a technical work, is it? It's just like, you know, I mean, I'm not saying like everything we do is political, but that's just like bureaucracy kind of political.
1:18:31Vlad CosteaBut I guess in order to build DarkFi, you have to believe that Bitcoin does have a future because DarkFi is this utility chain that's going to provide privacy to Bitcoin, Ethereum. And I guess something else that you're going to add along the way. It's this anonymization chain, as far as I understand it. So in order to build it, you do have to hope that Bitcoin is going to be successful in the future.
1:18:57Amir TaakiWhy? Why Bitcoin? I don't understand. No, it doesn't depend on Bitcoin, but cryptocurrency, yeah. I don't know if Bitcoin is like where the future is. I think Bitcoin exists, and it's going to exist for a long-ass time, and that's fine. But I don't think it's the future of cryptocurrency.
1:19:22Vlad CosteaWhat do you think is the future?
1:19:25Amir TaakiI think it's, you know, all that shit that we were promised back in 2013 that never got built. There's so much stuff that I thought would be made by now. Like, you know, P2P LocalBitcoins, or P2P Marketplaces, or, you know, P2P Trading, DAOs, et cetera, all fully anonymous. I just gave the example. So this is, I don't know if you saw this. There's the YPG in Syria, and they're fighting against Al-Qaeda in Turkey, and they are doing a fundraiser. Where people can send cryptocurrency, and they use that to buy drones, and they're using that.
1:20:16And I think Ukraine did a similar thing. That's some sci-fi shit. Like, every time you send money, it's like you pay, you send money, and you pay to get Al-Qaeda bombs. So it's like, you could have, like, you could even have that real time, you know, like, with stats and shit. So you see, you put, like, $100, and you're like, yep, hit all the jihadi, boom, you know, like a lottery. So that's the next frontier of, you know, struggling for freedom, struggling for the future.
1:20:57People don't know this. Assange, he was basically, the US government, their strategy was to bleed Assange dry. So they, you know, they nearly did that. They were successful. And, you know, then the US government was like, haha, we've got him, time to go in for the kill. And so that's why we made AssangeDAO. And AssangeDAO raised $55 million to free Assange by all means necessary. It's like a doubt. So people don't know that, but crypto is actually what saved Assange. It's funny because I was in a chat with a Bitcoin maxi.
1:21:38I don't know, I shouldn't even properly say this, but because, you know, fuck Bitcoin maxis. But I was in a chat, Bitcoin maxi was, like, trying to argue why Bitcoin's superior, and he was like, oh, look, you know, Assange needed his airplane, somebody sent him, you know, 100k. And I was like, bro, Ethereum sent him 55 million. So that's pretty crazy that on, you know, crypto, you can just spin up a DAO. You can give people governance tokens, and you can raise like this huge amount of capital.
1:22:15You can direct it for political change. You know, that means people can mobilize, they can actually change things. And, but DAOs are a thing already, but they're all transparent. But on DarkFi, we have anonymous DAOs. So I'm really excited about that, to see like, what's the crazy things that people get up to with DAOs, you know, pooling capital together as like a community because you want to do some particular type of thing. You have like a course or whatever. And then people put up proposals, and they're like, we should fund this, or we should do that, and they start doing it.
1:22:52You know, the Tornado Cash devs, they put them in jail because they got access to all their signal chats.
1:23:03So we were like, okay, like, you know, we don't want to go to jail. What do we need? We need an anonymous chat. So we made like the world's strongest fully P2P anonymous chat in DarkFi. We did that because we saw, you know, what happened in Tornado Cash, which they got access to their signal chats. And they said, well, you know, mister, you said that, therefore you're the CTO, you're the CEO in the court. But in DarkFi, like we have this anonymous chat, so there's no linkability between messages.
1:23:43So I can say something and if they bring that up later, I'll be like, well, you know, it wasn't me, sir. It could be anybody. You know, you've got deniability, you've got full protection. Nobody else is engineering for that right now. Everybody, all the projects, they're like, you know, join our Discord. And you're like, well, your privacy project though, and they put in privacy devs in jail. Or even...
1:24:07Vlad CosteaWorse, they use Slack.
1:24:09Amir TaakiYeah, I mean, they're all the same, Slack, Discord. I don't know what's the difference, you know. But, so yeah, we made that. So, and like, I don't know if, as well now in England, they've been, people are like being put in jail for speech. You know, like somebody was put in jail for holding up a sign that said BlackRock and the politicians are corrupt. He went to jail for three years and he died in jail. And what's even more crazy than that is the government just announced that they're reducing the time served for criminals from 70% to 40% time served to make space in the prisons because of this new speech laws that they brought in.
1:24:59Can you believe that? They're like, we are letting criminals out from jail early because we need to make space for people who've committed speech crime because of the new speech crime laws. What? How crazy is that? People need to get the truth out. People need to get the word about what's happening in their communities so they can struggle for freedom. That's why we have, we are the home that has built this, not Telegram, you know, not Signal, not anywhere. We are providing that platform for people to come, to be safe, to be protected, to organize, to communicate, you know, to make tasks, to, you know, make anonymous styles, to do all of this anonymously, to pay people anonymously, to trade anonymously.
1:25:52You need to cash out. You get paid us, you know, for example, salary, you cash out anonymously, you know, that's, you know, the basic features we want to ship with. And I think that's already incredibly powerful. Like, you know, everybody in, if you go on the Twitter feeds on Twitter, you know, which by itself is a fucking failure. The cryptocurrency community is using a centralized platform. We all know what's going on there. Oh, Mr. Elon, I love Elon Musk, he's so amazing. Make sure you put that in all your tweets, Vlad, because then Algo will boost you.
1:26:32And if you're, because you know, there's certain things that if you talk about, you're going to get deranked in Algo. We all know it's happening. It's just like one group of people took over from another group of people. They still have a biased agenda. They're still running the algorithm for their benefit. We all saw the accounts getting closed down, you know, what happened recently. They're doing that stuff. So where are you going to go and talk about the truth? Talk about what's really happening in your community.
1:27:06We're providing that platform, you know, and when we say free speech, we mean 100% pure free speech. Not, you know, free speech with, you know, quote unquote, conditions. No, full fucking free speech. Same thing with anonymity. When we talk about anonymity, we're not talking about this privacy bullshit, which loads the project. Like, you know, for example, we're going, oh yeah, Taproot, it's privacy. Lightning, it's privacy. That's a fucking load of bullshit. There's no such thing as privacy. You're either anonymous or you're not. 100%. It's not gray, it's black or white.
1:27:47That's how it is. So we're doing that. We're trying to give people full 100% privacy, no compromises, full free speech, full sovereignty. So people have to self-defense. People go rally for their community. I go and I see projects and they're going, oh yeah, I think the future. I think the future is AI agents communicating on the blockchain. And blah, blah, blah. You have not built any of that, have you? That is just a load of, you're just talking fucking rubbish. You just made that shit up.
1:28:20He's trying to pump your garbage. Yet, everybody's on Twitter. Everybody's on Discord. We haven't even made chatapp.exe. Bunch of Bitcoin max who's like, who do you use? Nostr. Nostr's shit. Nostr's not even decentralized. Not P2P. It's federated. And it's not anonymous. Why use a technology that's not anonymous? As soon as you say anything, they're going to put you in jail. You can't do, you can't speak freely. You can't really tell the truth. Tell your true opinion about what you believe. If you're not anonymous, if you're not protected.
1:28:58That's why we need these technologies. So people can rise up. Name of your podcast is take Bitcoin takeover. You know, we need to do the takeover. So that's what, that's what I go into cryptocurrency for, you know, to change the world, change the planet. And everybody's, everybody's talking about rubbish. But I think, you know, what we need to build is just, it's just really basic, you know, to even start. And yes, I have like more complicated long-term future plans, et cetera. I can talk about information marketplaces and you know, all that kind of fancy stuff, you know, decentralized derivatives exchange.
1:29:40You know, I'm, I'm looking, I'm looking at that, but I want to just at the beginning, deliver the most basic feature set, which we're missing. And make it and just iterate and make it as smooth as possible. Get people using those tools because that is 90% of what we need.
1:30:01Vlad CosteaYeah. People in the chat are asking, what's the product? Is it DarkFi chat? Is there a link to that? Can they try it already? Someone else wants to know if DarkFi is better than SimpleX.
1:30:15Amir TaakiSo the, yes, you can join our chat, the Dark IRC, if you go on DarkFi website, you go to community, there's a link there, but it's right now it's command line. But I'm literally working on a UI right now that's going to be released in this next month in like very soon. So it will just be, it will just be like an app that you can download onto your phone and you can use it really easily. DarkFi is an L1. It's a blockchain. It will have smart contracts.
1:30:52You'll have anonymous smart contracts. That's what it's made for. It's got generalized programmability, has ZK proofs, et cetera. So you'll be able to build any anonymous application on DarkFi. That's what it's for. But we're not just thinking about this as like, oh, you know, there's a platform and you go build on it. No, but we're also going, here's a product for you to use. This is the, you know, we're not just making L1, but we're actually building, you know, the, you know, we're building a wallet, a UI.
1:31:31And inside the wallet, you know, you can have different plugins. So you'll be able to have like the chat, you know, the tasks, the DAOs, the payments, the trading, you know, who knows, even maybe on-ramps, off-ramps. Let's see what we, you know, what we have there. And, you know, in the future, people will be able to extend that with new applications. But for now, I'm just focusing on the chat because I want to get people, you know, into the core community where they can talk and they can discuss and they can be involved.
1:32:13But we're adding more and more features onto that.
1:32:19Vlad CosteaYeah, it sounds promising. When do you think it's going to come out?
1:32:23Amir TaakiThe wallet is coming out like, you know, I don't know, in a couple of weeks, but the, so actually DarkFi now, we have quite a lot of new things happening very soon this next month. So we've got the new test net is out. This is the final test net before we go to main net. We want to operate that for a few months, see if there's any problems that pop up.
1:32:59We've also, you know, we've got this anonymous DAO. We've just made some major upgrades to it. So before the DAO, you know, there was like one key pair for everything. And now we've like split that up into multiple different roles and responsibilities. So, for example, in your DAO, you want to control, you want to restrict the ability to execute proposals to a smaller group of people to stop, like, for example, a vampire attack on the treasury. That's like where somebody buys up the majority of governance tokens on the market and then make a proposal to send it to themselves.
1:33:40That's good, like a vampire attack. So one way that people will protect against that, they have a key on the group of people who can execute it. So we've done a lot of work now on the DAO to split up those roles and responsibilities. So it's configurable. Who can see the DAO's treasury? Maybe, you know, you want that to be just the people in the DAO, or maybe you want it to be a wider set of the community. Maybe you want it completely public. Who can see the votes?
1:34:09So maybe, you know, when people are voting in the DAO, you don't want people to be able to see the running total until the end when it's ready to be executed and who can execute. We've also made this UI that I'm talking about, this product. So, you know, you'll be able to go and download it for Windows, Mac, Linux onto your desktop, onto your laptop and use it onto your mobile phone for Android. You know, and just have it there and it will be the chat and it'd be P2P.
1:34:43It's using the P2P network. We've optimized that a lot for the mobile phone.
1:34:51So, yeah, I was trying to think, you know, I should make a list. Let me see what else.
1:35:13Oh, yeah. We've also made a blockchain explorer. That's new. So the blockchain explorer will show like the metrics of the blockchain and stuff that's happening. So we're really setting that now. Also, we've made like a new tool to interact with the blockchain. So people will be able to like use the DAO and the wallet and all those features with our DRK tool. So it'd be a nice, that's kind of like what we're shipping with now. So it will be a nice release coming up. And then basically from here, we're not going to do any major big new projects.
1:35:51Just kind of polish and tweak until we're ready to launch.
1:35:58Vlad CosteaYeah, there's a lot happening. And I've known about DarkFi for about four years now. I remember it was in Majorca, I think, that I first heard about it back in 2021. So the summer of 2021, that's when I first heard about DarkFi. And your presentation at the time was more about going dark and the philosophy of lunarpunk. And all of that interesting stuff. And then you just came every year and you presented more and more in-depth technical stuff. Something which I appreciate about DarkFi compared to other projects.
1:36:35You then go straight into selling tokens. You didn't speak, as far as I'm aware, on conference stages about selling tokens. You just presented the technology, you invited builders. You even trained some developers who are not developers prior to your involvement. And you got them to work on the project. It's very grassroots, very anarchistic, as far as I could observe over the years. You can correct me if I'm wrong.
1:37:07Amir TaakiYeah, we're there. We've got quite a budding community. And I like a strong schizo energy, which is something I appreciate.
1:37:19Vlad CosteaYeah, you put a lot of work into making it accessible to developers. And that was the first step that you've made. You created libraries, you organized the website in a way that it was friendly to developers. Because I came back every maybe six months to look at where this is going. And I did see that you're updating stuff just for developers. It was not tailored for investors. It did not look in any way that was supposed to be appealing to the normies. It was just the bare necessary stuff that you needed to build a community.
1:37:55And you also had memes. I remember one, I think it was two years ago at the Hackers' Congress, you came with some Pepe's with the DarkFi branding. That was fun.
1:38:07Amir TaakiYeah, the memes. Yeah, we've got quite some cool memes. That's like a highlight is our artwork and memes and videos soon as well. But we've been working on this a long time. I mean, we announced it in 2019 or 2020. But we've been really working on this since 2013 or 2018, 2019. I actually started with Dark Wallet. And then I came back from Syria. And then people were like, oh, you should make Dark Wallet. And then I was like, but CoinJoin's not secure anymore. So I don't trust it.
1:38:50And then I was looking at MimbleWimble. And then I implemented that. And then I was like, oh, this is not very good. And I threw it away. And then I implemented ring signatures. And I got that really working well. I had ring sizes with 10,000 people and it would validate in 10 seconds. So I got it really fast, optimized really well. But then I was talking with a cryptographer and they said, well, you know, they can do a dust attack. They can just fill it with dust.
1:39:21That's why it's not secure. And I was like, oh, shit, I can't use ring signatures. Then I went, you know, Firo's got Lelantus, which is basically Jens Groth one-out-of-many commitment to zero. So I implemented that as well. But then I started getting more interested in, like, not just payments, but generalized functionality. So then I got interested in anonymous blinded credentials. So I implemented that tokenized scheme. And that was, that was, then I renamed the project Dark Futures. Because at the time I was really into BitMEX.
1:39:58So I was like, I'm going to build, like, anonymous futures market. And then, you know, when DeFi happened, I started getting more interested in, like, ZK proofs. So then I was like, okay, we're going to do ZK. And then by the time it was with the trusted setup and each new contract had to have a new trusted setup. So that was, like, the first version in 2019. Then we renamed it to DarkFi after DeFi. And then, you know, started iterating from there and then, you know, started bringing on other developers and more people.
1:40:36And then we rewrote the code, like, three or four times. So it was, but even, that's just the technical development. But even during the years, we were doing, like, a lot of, you know, philosophizing about what the project is, you know, what it's about, blah, blah, you know, agorism. So it's not just like, oh, you know, DarkFi appears now. You see, you know, the things you see. But there's, like, there's been a lot of groundwork over many years, a lot of research and stuff. So, yeah, but we need to ship this year.
1:41:14That's, like, our aim, to just get it out, get it liquid. Then, you know, to reiterate and to do the next phase after that. So, people always ask me about scalability. You know, that's the future project. We're just focused on anonymity. You know, we've got this anonymous chat. A lot of cool things, you know, like, people are really, they're, like, mentally limited by, you know, what exists. People are like, oh, well, how can you be, how can you organize anonymously online? You know, people's imaginations is so stunted that when you talk about new ways of doing things, you know, people just, they can't, they can't imagine it.
1:42:02And you're like, you know, but that, I remember when Cody, when he was first making the 3D printed gun, people, I remember he was just, he had no experience in 3D printing. He was just, like, a kid, basically. And he announced it to the world. Like, I'm fundraising 30k because I'm going to make a 3D printed gun. And I was just reading on, like, you know, these technical forums, like Slashdot, where people would write these massive walls of text about how it's not possible. You know, like, they would go, I'm, I'm, you know, blah, blah, engineer of this type of 15 years.
1:42:48And, you know, you just can't, you can't, blah, blah, it's impossible to do this, blah, blah. But, like, Cody was just like, he didn't give a shit about any of that. He just went and he, like, built the gun and turns out it was possible. And now, like, loads of people are 3D printing guns and making all different kinds of models of guns. So, always when I'm telling people there's a different way we could be doing things, you know, we can build something really powerful. People are like, people are so brainwashed by being on Facebook and Twitter where they're like, oh, but you need your real name and you need a blue checkmark.
1:43:26What? Like, in the 90s, we used to, they used to just be IRC rooms. And I used to just log on to the IRC room and I go like, oh, you know, I'm building this and here's my patch. And people were like, oh, yeah, and then we would chat and we would make projects. I was building projects with people and I didn't even know who they were. I had no clue. And, you know, then I was a professional poker player. I was a professional poker player for more than two years.
1:43:55And, you know, we, I'd be playing on PokerStars and I'd see an opportunity and I'd want to get on, you know, Full Tilt Poker and there'd be, like, these poker forums. And I had no fucking clue. There were a couple of dudes I met up with, but most of the people, I didn't even know who they were, just anonymous nicks on there, you know, with quirky random names, not like their real name or some shit. Just some, you know, like, you know, I don't know, Juju1276, you know, like stuff like that.
1:44:26And we'd be like, oh, hey bro, can I send you 10K and you give me 10K on FTP? And they'd be like, yeah, and we'd do the trade. I'd send him 10K on PokerStars and he'd send me 10K on FTP. We didn't eat on Full Tilt Poker. We didn't need to, we didn't need to have our real names or KYC or any of that shit. That's why when Bitcoin happened, I was like, oh yeah, it was like obvious to me because I was already doing poker and we were like moving a lot of money around on these like random poker sites and using it as cash and people were making bets on things.
1:45:09People would bet on shit on these forums, you know, prop bets. People would bet on other people's games or bet on like, I don't know, random political events, you know, like we have Polymarket and stuff now, but back then it was just people on forums. And if you lost the bet, you'll pay and people weren't scamming each other. It just worked, you know, and that was how the tech got built in the 90s. So you can, and like people forget about Silk Road. Silk Road worked amazingly.
1:45:39You'd go on there and you'd, you know, there would be like Dread Pirate Roberts and he's got like, you know, he had a reading group every week discussing like agorist literature because he was building a movement. And you'd log on and people were like, yeah, this is the fucking future. We're gonna overthrow the US government with drug trade and stuff. That's what the vibe was. Everybody was so excited about it. I went to a friend's birthday party and I was just hanging out and we were up and, you know, everybody left and I was just hanging out with these two random dudes, like really late at night.
1:46:21And I didn't even know who they were. They didn't know who I was either. I mean, this is like 2011 or something. And one of the dudes started going, hey yo guys, there's this website Silk Road. You can buy it and sell drugs on there. You know, he's like, we're doing something that's fighting the power. That was like exciting. That's why people use Silk Road. That's why people got involved in these things. They didn't do it because, you know, like they've got a blue checkmark on Twitter and they're going to get like, I don't know, whatever.
1:46:56It was just like, oh look, we've got a Juju1276 on the dark IRC. But, so this is like, this is like, I think we can do it. We can like really build something, you know, like now everybody's still trying to play the game. Everybody's still, you know, trying to do the thing Apple does, you know, Apple, they've got like, they've got like, I saw in the ads recently and it's like, you know, it's like kind of depressing. Cause it's like this little girl and it's like, you don't even need to know how a computer works.
1:47:36And she's just like got an iPad and that's like her life. And she's like, oh yeah, I'm on the iPad. I'm just like a disempowered consumer drawing pictures and making photos like that. And, it's like, well, yeah, you're not really changing anything. You're just, you know, you're making TikTok videos. You're not really like acquiring wealth or like gaining power, you know, or like expanding the territory of freedom. That's what Satoshi said in his thing. Like if people look it up, it says, they look up Satoshi, P2P Gnutella, G-N-U-T-L-L-A.
1:48:19He talks about P2P networks. I mean, he was like, you know, he says like, you know, Bitcoin will expand the territory of freedom outwards. He's like, you know, this is a project to expand freedom, expand our freedom networks. So, you know, that's what we're, you know, that's what we're going to do and we're going to build. Everybody else, they're all still trying to play the Silicon Valley game. What does Silicon Valley do? Silicon Valley is a proprietary industry. When I use a Microsoft product or any proprietary product, I'm a consumer.
1:49:02And if something goes wrong with that product, I have to go to the company. I have to beg them like a cock to fix it for me. I cannot do shit except beg them. I'm dependent on them. And that company does not respect you. It does not, it does not go, oh, this is one of our equals. This is one of our respected users. It goes, no, you are a stupid, dumb pleb. You're a sheep. You know, low IQ cattle. Like, there's, you know, there's other words I can use, but the elites, they don't respect the people.
1:49:41They look at them as stupid. I read an article recently that said that Gen Z does not know how to use a product. It's a printer. Gen Z does not know how to use a file system. Why is that? Well, it's because, you know, the technology that this Silicon Valley proprietary mindset develops, it's not, it's made to attract stupid people because they see everybody as stupid. To attract as many low IQ, normie sheep as possible. The bigger the numbers you have, the more you can tax them.
1:50:17You know, but not only that, not only is it made for stupid people, but it's making people stupid. It's like actually making people stupid. If you go on the Mac computers, the file system browser, it hides the file system from you. That's why people don't know about it. Your computer is deliberately keeping that hidden from you. It's like, no, you don't need to know about that. You should not know about that. So it disempowers people. Why do they want, why do they want to build this tech this way?
1:50:55Why, when, for example, you go on Twitter. Twitter, first of all, the layout, it's shit. It's a shitty, crappy layout. It's like so much white space everywhere. It's not efficient to look at. You know, it's not like informationally efficient. But okay, forget about that. Let's say you make a post and you've got notifications. And you've got lots of notifications. And you start, and you go start responding to them one by one. First of all, it's interspersed with garbage, like ads and stuff. And it's not, it's not condensed in one place.
1:51:36But second of all, when you're responding to everyone, periodically it refreshes you to the top. So you see new responses. This is what's called a dark pattern. It's a dark pattern because the way that the app is entering engineered is to get you to spend more time using the app than it is to have utility for you to become efficient, for you to be powerful. So it's not, it's difference between making software that allows people to acquire wealth, to acquire power versus software that entraps people so they can tax them.
1:52:15Like, you know, like something that's like, you know, attached to you and you can't do anything. It's like, it becomes like, you know, like you become dependent. What's the name? Walled Garden is like another name for like an ecosystem where you're trapped inside. They use that for the iPhones. You know, you've got your data. You've got your contacts. There's no way to migrate it off elsewhere. You're trapped in that place. Why do they want to do that? Because every single user or consumer that they get, they can tax them.
1:52:48And more tax equals more profit equals more money. It equals more revenue. So the thing is that cryptocurrency people, they're developing their software as if it was a Silicon Valley proprietary app. And that's why they're like, they're not able to innovate is because they're playing catch up with the same system that they're meant to be opposing. They're like, oh, the big banks, we don't like the big banks, but we want to be better than the big banks. You know, but the tech is, the tech is meant to be, it's meant to be a new paradigm.
1:53:23It's meant to enlarge the territory of freedom. That's what Satoshi said. You know, allow us to do new things to like, you know, get the truth out, you know, to claim back our freedom. You know, it's, so that's, so if we want to make that, we have to start like imagining and not, and stop being, and stop playing their game. You know, even just look at the UIs. They're so crap. Like they're so like, I like really can't stand this like globohomo dancing, colorful people, which, you know, corporate Memphis is the name, which, you know, is like, you like literally live in a Soviet dystopia surrounded by like gray office blocks.
1:54:11And you can see that the economy is collapsing around you. But, you know, there's these images of like, dancing, colorful people, you know, like on Gmail or like Facebook, they have this art style and it's like, oh wow, diversity. But it's like, wow, it's so, wow, it's, wow, it's so interesting what we live in, wow. But actually what you live in is just like a dystopia, like Soviet dystopia. It's so fake and it's so ugly as well. And so crap looking, like, you know, like look at the, you know, I don't know, Escape from New York, like in the intro where they have all these like terminals or like the Aliens, Alien movie, the original Alien movie on the Nostromo.
1:55:03And, you know, they have these like sci-fi interfaces with like vector art. And you're like, wow, that shit is so fucking cool. And I cannot wait to live in the future because we're going to have like these like, you know, like futuristic UIs. Which are just smooth and they operate well. What do we get instead? Dancing global homo people, you know, big white, you know, with like loads of animations and they like crash and they're laggy, like trying to just deliver some food or something. And it's like, you know, just to open the app is like this elaborate animation and, you know, just crash.
1:55:43You try and open it again. It's like, ooh, it's like, no, just show me the app. You know, so it's like, why we, why when crypto people do a project, they're like, oh, Google material design. That's what we're going to do our UI as. We're going to copy that. So you just go to like, you know, what the corporate people are doing and go like, oh yeah, that's what we're going to, that's what we're going to copy. And then the same thing, like everybody makes a project and they're like, they're like, oh yeah, we've got a, you know, we've got an idea.
1:56:19And then they're like, they don't even have like a product or anything. Maybe they, maybe they make like a prototype or something, but there's no tech there. And then they go and they like get some seed money. And then with that seed money, they start, they're like, oh, we need to hire like marketers and HR. And they start like pumping the project. But it's like, and they're like, oh yeah, the tech. Oh yeah, we built that at some point. But they just, you know, they're like, cause it's like, this is, this is a Silicon Valley thing.
1:56:51They do, they like, you know, you get money, you get marketers, you pump it. And you know, like somewhere down the line, the tech is like an afterthought. Like, oh yeah, once we get big, yeah, we'll do something. But then, you know, you make some like, it's just like a web app. You know, you're going, oh yeah, we're a P2P blockchain, blah, blah. But it's actually just a web app. It's like running on a server somewhere. It's just a centralized database or whatever. There's like loads of projects like this.
1:57:16And you get more money and use that to get growth. And then you're like, you go to the VCs. And they're like, oh yeah, look our Discord. It's got thousands of people, but those people, you've incentivized them to join the Discord with like Airdrops or whatever. So it's like, it's fake as fuck. And then as soon as the money dries up, all those people are just going to leave. But you know, you pump it like that. And then later on, you're like, oh yeah, let's build some tech.
1:57:40But then, you know, for a dev, he's like, he wants to build something cool. You're like, oh yeah, join our giant corporation. Except, you know, you've got to get past Karen at HR, you know, the marketing Stacy's as well. So he's like, who wants to join that as a dev if I have any dignity or if I have any, you know, if I'm really a great dev, you know, great devs. Who'd want to join that? I'd be like, nah bro, I'm good. So all you're gonna do is get soy cuck devs.
1:58:16And that's indeed like the type of devs that projects try and hire. They're like a friend actually told me this. I'm not joking, but he said to me, he's like, Amir, you know, you can't have too many alphas in a project. You've got to have betas and the betas are under control of alphas. It's like, bro, like that's why the technology we use is so crap. Like it's because everybody's hiring soy cuck devs. They don't hire like alpha devs. How are you going to get real creativity and stuff made unless you hire visionaries?
1:58:50And yeah, they're like, they're going to be visionary and they're going to fight each other, but they're going to make the best products. It's good, but you want that. You want like, you know, that environment where people are like, you know, they find out not just like passive slave people, you're like, you know, run by marketers, visionary marketers, and they're like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, we did the metrics and the market say we've got to, you know, have Shingle, Damble, 5D, and really cool animations. That's what our, you know, blah blah says, you know, our big bad analytics say, you know, that's why we get such crap projects because the people that do know the tech, they know what's possible, but they're not building it.
1:59:34But the people that are putting the products in front of people that people use are like marketers and the people that they get to build the products are just slave betas and they never have an opinion on anything. So they never like say, well, you know, the tech if we made it this way would be better. So that's, yeah, of course, you're just going to build garbage, but that's the crypto community. And I thought crypto was bad, but it turns out that big tech is worse. And in fact, not just big tech, but the entire economy is a scam as well.
2:00:13You know, now the H1B thing where they're like, oh, yeah, we're just going to like, Sorry, Macca, your trap waifu is off the table. We're just going to mass import like cheap slave labor from the third world to replace you.
2:00:30Vlad CosteaThat's the history of the US. Anyway, I enjoyed your rant because you went full Richard Stallman and then you went full art critic of the Memphis corporate style. And then you started getting into more elaborate stuff like your Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley. You know that show?
2:00:49Amir TaakiOh, yeah, I've seen the clips of him. He's the tech dude, isn't he?
2:00:53Vlad CosteaYeah. Yeah, he's the one with the dry humor. He hates who hates HR and marketing and whatever. He just wants to be left alone, has the most dignity of all developers.
2:01:05Amir TaakiOh, yeah. He should be in charge, I guess.
2:01:09Vlad CosteaHe's also the Bitcoiner in the show. He's the one who's mining. And anyway, it was a very great run game.
2:01:18Amir TaakiThe squid game has a crypto guy in it now. The new one is coming out.
2:01:23Vlad CosteaI heard about it. I just don't have time to watch shows anymore.
2:01:28Amir TaakiOh, squid games. Quite good, though. I will definitely watch it when it comes out. But one of the characters is a crypto scammer. So that would be quite funny.
2:01:40Vlad CosteaI might torrent it. Just kidding. If you're listening, I will pay for Netflix, of course.
2:01:45Amir TaakiOh, guys, you should definitely use torrents. What the fuck? I'm shocked that people buy Netflix and Apple and all that shit. Like, I go to people's houses and they have Netflix and I tried to look up a movie or something. I want to show them. It's not, I can't find it on Netflix. It just has Goislob. They're the latest shitty slop on there. And I was like, what, you're paying for this crap? Wow. And it doesn't even have everything on there. And they're like, oh, maybe I'll have it on Apple TV.
2:02:17And you have to go and like, it's like, what load of crap? I just have one app on my computer. It has a search bar in it. I just open it and I search what I want and it downloads in a minute. But I can just watch it straight away. It's fantastic. Everybody talks about like, you know, good UI, UX, and they uplift like Netflix and stuff as an example, but qubit or nothing holds the candle to that, especially when you enable the search engine in there, which is a few steps, it's like four steps because they can't legally distribute it.
2:02:50But it's super easy when you know how. But people are like, oh, it's too difficult. I'll just, I had some guy recently respond to me like that. He goes, yo, I know how to use it, but I'll just, it's just easier to pay for Netflix. I was like, what is he really, is he really that, are people really that retarded?
2:03:11Vlad CosteaI guess they're lazy and they have enough money to not care. I finally...
2:03:15Amir TaakiYou can't even get everything on Netflix. But I tell you what's good. I've been watching recently is Dune Prophecy. That's dope.
2:03:25Vlad CosteaI'm not even sure where I can find that. But now I know, qBittorrent.
2:03:31Amir TaakiYeah, if people go on on my on, I think it's on my website, agorism.dev.
2:03:43Oh, no, I don't have it there. Okay, I will put it there for people. But yeah, if you go on my website, agorism.dev, you'll see my sci-fi list, my top sci-fi that I like. But if you go on my Twitter account, sorry, but if you search my profile and you search qBittorrent, I have a guide there, but I'll put that up on my website after this call because it should be there. Basically, you can get everything for free and it's super easy.
2:04:17Vlad CosteaYeah, you mentioned a quote by Satoshi Nakamoto and it's from the peer-to-peer forums, peer-to-peer Foundation. It's a reply to someone who said you will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography and Satoshi said, yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled network like Napster, but pure p2p networks like Nutella and Tor seem to be holding their own and he signed Satoshi.
2:04:54And what's interesting about this quote is that he said we can gain a new territory of freedom for several years. And the question that spawns from this quote is do you believe that these several years are over for Bitcoin or we should be doing something to extend it?
2:05:14Amir TaakiWell, you know, unless there's like a major political reform in Bitcoin, you know, like new leadership, you know, maybe you know, some of the old guard because I have I had my beef with with people, you know with Roger Ver. Roger Ver was suing me for two million dollars, but I do think that you know, the treatment that him and others got was, you know, I mean they got a punishment but the punishment was like really extreme. They were like forced out of Bitcoin completely like just hand-sawed, you know, so that was really extreme.
2:06:05So, you know, maybe if those people, you know, they came back together with these new L2 people like Eli Ben-Sasson and it was clear that there was like a new cohort of people ready to contribute to Bitcoin to take Bitcoin to the future and they were ready to do all that stuff, you know, then yeah, like they could conceivably take Bitcoin forward, you know, Bitcoin could have on-chain privacy could implement full chain membership proofs, you know, you should just implement it in my opinion. I don't think there's an argument against it.
2:06:42But I'm personally like I described about AssangeDAO earlier and how we raised 55 million to free Assange, which basically bankrolled Assange's freedom and I'll zoom out like how in Rojava they're fighting a guerrilla war and they're using cryptocurrency now to like fund drones being purchased. That's like the new way of like political struggle of the future. Like you can use cryptocurrency to change things in a radical way. That's fucking crazy as sci-fi. In 2020, in Ethereum, there was this idea of squad wealth. There's an article by other internet called squad wealth and it was this idea that in cryptocurrency, it would enable this post-corporate new form of kind of organizations to sprout called squads and squads would like mobilize and they'd like change things and the whole idea would be like I would be making DAOs and there was like loads of people forming DAOs on chain.
2:07:53There was like free Ross DAO that raised like 20 million for Ross Ulbricht. There was Ukraine DAO, which I think I don't know how much they raised, 2 million or something, but there was a lot of these DAOs at the time and people were like, oh, you know, it's going to change everything. This is the future wave. But the DAO thing, it kind of fizzled out. It didn't really take off the way people expected it. And this idea of squads and squad world, it kind of became WAGMI, you know, we're all going to make it, bros.
2:08:34And it just became the kind of like, you know, DeFi, degen, you know, kind of nihilism. You know, it went from like squad world, you know, like concept of wealth, which is like, you know, you have a good life and, you know, it's not just about money. It's about like being free and, you know, being enriched and having power, economic power. You know, money is like, it doesn't matter how much fiat currency you've got, if it's in an American bank account, at the end of the day, they can just seize your money.
2:09:08So you're not, you're still a slave in some way. That's why cryptocurrency makes us free. Everybody's somehow being debanked, etc. So the whole idea was that, you know, DAOs were going to do that. But then it fizzled out and it just became WAGMI and, you know, Shitcoin, Gulag, Casino. You know, because everybody, I don't know if anybody knows this channel on YouTube called Leonardo of Biz. It's a really good channel. There's like a video there called 2021 Bull Market. It's like exactly 2021 where it's this like crazy montage of like, you know, like the markets are just like, they're just booming and like, it's like fucking crazy.
2:09:56And there's like, you know, Poopoo, NFT and like, you know, all the dog coins, you know, going, who let the dogs out? And it's like, just everything's going fucking nuts. And it's just really schizo. It's got all the bugs and everything. But then at the end, it's just like Wojak and he wakes up from this like crazy dream, which is 2021 Bull Market. And he puts on his McDonald's hat because he needs to work at McDonald's. And it's like, it's literally like, you know, Half-Life 2, the intro where, you know, the Combine have just taken over.
2:10:34It's like, it's like a security guard and he's talking like the Combine goes, no pass, no entry. And he has to go into his job. And there's like, the like hamburgers, you know, they're like, the guy says these coworkers like, oh man, this is really tough economy. He has to put the prices up again. And he's just like, the back, the price of the hamburger at McDonald's is like $30 or something ridiculous. And then he's going, he goes, how about you, Wojak? Tough day with the cryptos?
2:11:12And Wojak's like, yeah, he goes, hey man, you've got to do what you've got to do, you know? And then like Wojak's like, yeah, haha. And it's just like, it's just so depressing. Because it's like everybody, you know, they have this like grim reality that there's like no escape from. Like, what do you do? You just, you've got to like, you've got your last $1,000, which is your life savings. Let's YOLO it into fart coin or something, you know, cum rockets. Maybe it will 1,000x, maybe not, you know, but that's, that's the only hope that, you know, that was like the vibe then.
2:11:54You know, but I'd say now is because, you know, I started talking about how everyone's playing this Silicon Valley proprietary game. And they haven't woken up to what's possible now. Things have changed now massively. Like a year ago, two years ago, everybody was really pessimistic. They were like, oh, yeah, yeah, we know we live in a surveillance dystopia, nothing we can do about it. Now there's like a sense, there's like a palpable sense of like, yeah, we can actually change things. The elites are like corrupt, everybody knows this, but we have the power to change things.
2:12:30So we just need to like, and crypto projects, they're still trying to play, they're still trying to play that game. That's why they have all this like really safe, neutral marketing that's like not meant to offend anybody. Because, you know, they're like, you know, they're still trying to be a part of that broken, corrupt system. But they haven't tapped into that popular energy of people yet. You know, where we're like, everybody's like, yeah, we need to rally, you know, the populist energy. Politicians are doing it. That's what happened now with these oligarchs where the MAGA people are like, oh, yeah, we just got used, basically.
2:13:11They lied to us. So, you know, crypto projects, they're still trying to do the same game. But I was talking about the DAOs, you know, 2021. We can do things differently. 2021, I think the reason why those DAOs just descended into that like nihilism, you know, shitcoin casino type thing is because they didn't have, they weren't cypherpunk. How can you change things when your DAO is transparent on chain? I mentioned Assange DAO, which raised 55 million. Its slogan was free Assange by all means necessary. What does that mean?
2:13:53That means like every means possible, everything's on the table, you know, with this DAO. But now you've got a DAO where everybody's doxxed on chain. And if you vote for something and if they come for you and they put you in jail, who's going to come after, who's going to help protect you? You're just a nobody. So nobody wants to act in that sort of DAO. So that's what stopped those DAOs actually being changing things. If you're going to change something, that's what I was saying about DarkFi.
2:14:25Like, you know, projects going, oh, you know, we're building a privacy project. Join our Discord. Bro, they're putting devs in jail based on their signal chats. So if you're telling people to join Discord and you're building a privacy technology, you're obviously not afraid of going to jail. If you're not afraid of going to jail, you're probably not building anything important. Probably not building anything that's going to change things. So like, how can crypto projects be like, oh, yeah, we're the future. We're going to really change things if they're not thinking about building proper cypherpunk platforms.
2:15:07You know, where, you know, people have anonymous, that's why anonymous DAOs didn't change things. Because, you know, like, they weren't, you know, they weren't, there's enough people now. I gave this example, like, oh, yeah, look, they're raising funds to do drones. We did the Asan style. You know, imagine the crazy shit people are going to do when they have anonymous DAOs. Anything. You can change anything. You and your group of guys, there's loads of people that want that now. But they don't have it, nobody has it.
2:15:40All these people now, they're organizing on Telegram. Would you believe it? Telegram of all places. Need to get off Telegram. That's a spook platform. And people are like, oh, we'll use Signal. Signal's even more of a spook platform. I don't trust any of those people that run Signal. You know, okay, maybe Signal has better algos, does that it, etc. How do I know, though, those Signal updates haven't got a backdoor in them? The FBI goes, oh, Signal, can you put a backdoor here? And they're like, oh, yes, sir, of course, sir.
2:16:12You know, like, you know, like Binance, you know, someone told me a crazy story recently, which is, I mean, you know, Israel-Palestine, you can think whatever you want to think about it. But there was someone who told me that, you know, it was a Palestinian guy, and he said that, you know, he was trading on Binance, and Binance said, Binance seized his funds, and that was all of his money. It's like, just a university student, and emailed Binance, and he's like, oh, look, can I get my money?
2:16:47And Binance is like, look, you have to message Mossad with your, like, details. So he messaged Mossad, and Mossad goes, can you confirm this is your home address? And he said, yes. And they launched a missile at his house. They blew up his house. Yeah, that fucking shit is happening, Binance. Because, you know, CZ before, he made this, like, platform where everybody can trade anything. The Americans did not like that. They put CZ in jail, they've taken over Binance, and they filled it with lawyers, and you can be sure that Binance is reporting everything, you know, to the US government.
2:17:28You know Binance runs trust wallet as well, people using trust wallet. You can be sure your transactions are being reported to the FBI if they're interested, you know. So it's like... You know, you can think whatever you want about Israel-Palestine, but should, you know, Binance be giving the details of their traders to Mossad, who launches a rocket at them, and they're just a university student, not a member of Hamas, just a student in the university, you know. I don't think crypto should be involved in things like that.
2:18:03I think crypto... So you can go like, oh, but, you know, Binance, they're a company, fine, but you know, that's why we need... That's why we need to be building the technologies, like we're doing with DarkFi. Bitcoin, Nostr, fuck that shit. That's not going to do anything. BlackRock owns most of the Bitcoin anyway. Why are you going to waste your time making Bitcoin more valuable? It just makes BlackRock more wealthy. You know, let's build things that's actually Cypherpunk. I want some of these, you know, what's that book?
2:18:36You know, I've got the book Sovereign Individual. That's talking about how... You know, they're literally going to go to war with this tech because it's like the future and, you know, they're not going to like it. And it's true, like global international finance. That's what crypto... That's what, if you look at Satoshi's writing, that's what he's addressing. He's like, oh, this is why I've made it, to challenge the power of, you know, the globalist finance networks. That's what it's about. There's no denying it. So what, you think...
2:19:10The most powerful empire in the world whose entire power is based off of, like, owning all the financial networks, you know, that they're just going to roll over and go, oh yeah, oh yeah, that's cool, guys. Yeah, cryptocurrency, yeah, you can take over. No, you can smash it. You know, maybe we have a few years with the SEC off our backs where we can build. We really have to, like, not be complacent. It's 2013, 2014. We were like, oh, you know, this technology, it's so powerful. It's like a scientific inevitability that we just need to allow it.
2:19:50We basically just... It will just, like, take its trajectory and it will, you know, hit home and that's it. We just need to onboard people and, you know, then we're all good. We had that attitude and we weren't, like, actively going, we need to get, we need to get. Wealthy, we need to build organization, you know, build structure, you know, etc. And so what happened? Then, of course, like, all these, you know, business people, all these VCs, you know, all these people from the old system came in and, you know, started to occupy all these niches because we were not prepared enough to lead it, lead the space forwards.
2:20:36And, of course, like, there were collaborators. You know, Ethereum got to the way it, where it was because it made deals with, you know, WEF and globalists and JP Morgan and stuff. And people don't know about this stuff but it's, they have a lot of close connections that now Ethereum has, like, lost its soul and it hasn't, you know, delivered this stuff we're talking about, you know, this real cypherpunk stuff. And it kind of feels a sense of regret where it's like, oh, yeah, we're really good.
2:21:09We're really big. We've got loads of money, but we've lost our soul. And that's why Ethereum people are talking about North Star. And they're like, oh, but we want to, we want to be cypherpunk again. But they're not willing to go all in on cypherpunk. They kind of want to, like, they want to be cypherpunk, but safe cypherpunk, like, without having a stance on political issues, without standing up for anything. Just like, you know, we believe in the values of decentralization, but it's like compliant versions. So, for example, they have privacy pools now, KYC privacy pools.
2:21:43That's what they're pushing since Tornado Cash was shut down, which is, it's just weak. It's just a weak attitude. Like, all right, fine, build privacy, KYC Tornado Cash if you want to on Ethereum. But that's not, that's just weak. Why not just stand up to the SEC and tell them to fuck off? Stop persecuting people for P2P tech. Grow a spine. That's why they're not going to be able to be cypherpunk, because they're too cowardly. But, you know, and then meanwhile, like, Solana, they're doing the, you know, the ruthless, you know, they've done exactly the same game Ethereum's done, but they're just, they're more efficient.
2:22:31They haven't got all of these, like, you know, random HR hangers-on and useless people. They just, they just fire people who are not, who are not good. They just, they want competent people. That's why, like, there's a lot of coping by Ethereum people. So, you know, yeah, like.
2:22:59Vlad CosteaI really much enjoyed your rant and it's useful. I was waiting for you to actually say this because in person, you're, I don't know how to put it, very ambiguous about Ethereum. On one hand, you enjoy what it can do. But on the other hand, you're not happy about the compromises that they made very early on with the chain and the direction towards its heading. And that's why I guess you're building DarkFi. But something else I want to ask you about, because you mentioned the name of Roger Ver and he was on the show.
2:23:33And when he was on the show, he actually said a story about you. And it's based on a forum post that you made on the Bitcoin.com forums with a trip that you made together. And you were taking a city tour on segues and that you wanted to run towards a fat girl who had a free hugs T-shirt to hug her. And then you dropped the Segway, and it went across the street, hit a tree or something and almost hit two cars and you ran away.
2:24:04And also Roger Ver is promoting something that's called Zano nowadays, which is basically like Ethereum for the Monero people. It's a platform for issuing tokens with ring signatures and Monero technology. And I think in its goals and its ambitions, it's trying to be sort of like DarkFi, except that it's not using the zero knowledge cryptography that you chose. And I was wondering if you have any opinions about that one.
2:24:36Amir TaakiYeah. You know, if people, you know, can do what we're doing, but do it better, you know, fair play to them, but Zano is using ring signatures. I don't think ring signatures is anonymous and it's not a generalized programmable platform. It's fixed number of applications. So yeah, I don't really have, but apart from that, it's decent. The bridge they have confidential layer, it claims to be trustless and decentralized. I don't think that's a real claim. The bridge has oracles, so you're trusting the oracles and if the oracles collude, then they can steal your money.
2:25:31But, you know, so it claims to be the first such bridge, but there's multiple bridges like that.
2:25:44Vlad CosteaOkay. But in terms of tech, you think it's solid or do you believe it's obsolete because it's using Monero technology as opposed to the new Zcash stuff?
2:25:55Amir TaakiI think ring signatures is broken. And also, you know, if you had something like Ethereum, where every single app was like public, but just the payments were fully anonymous, would you call that anonymous? So for example, there was a trade in like an AMM and you went in AMM and everybody could see your trade and people could even frontrun you. Would you say that that's anonymous? Because in DarkFi, what we're aiming for is not to reveal that information, but a lot of these other projects, they've basically just got anonymous payments, which as I said, in Zano's ring signatures, it's not fully unlinkable transactions.
2:27:00If they upgrade, then that's good, which I heard they're going to upgrade to FCMP, which Monero has, which they should, then it will be strongly anonymous, you know.
2:27:16Vlad CosteaYou have some questions on Twitter from people. WowNero, he's like the official account of the Monero meme coin, wants to know when token for DarkFi.
2:27:28Amir TaakiI don't know. Like we have to, so right now, I'm not working on the token stuff, but... Someone in our group is working on token stuff and they've just died now. And then when we have the first proposal, then we will like go to the community and we will like propose it to them. You know, then we will refine that over time. So, yeah, that's the main stuff is now we've we're releasing the token. Testnet that's, you know, going to be released soon. There's, there's like, we have to make a bridge.
2:28:20We have to do one small change to the P2P and, we have to do the token stuff. So those are like the remaining work to be done on DarkFi. When that's done, then we're ready to release.
2:28:40Vlad CosteaI have an even more advanced question from someone named heteronominodgen. Where are they? Oh, they're posted as comments. When I announced that we're going to do an interview yesterday, a bunch of people put their comments there. They're not from the chat. So this guy says, how long until DarkNet markets embrace DarkFi? Will DarkFi OTC solve the DarkNet exit scam issue? And what do you mean by that? DarkFi 2.0.
2:29:13Amir TaakiOkay. What does he mean by the X? What exit scam issue?
2:29:18Vlad CosteaI don't know something concerning DarkNets and the fact that maybe you pay for something and you never get it?
2:29:22Amir TaakiNo, I think he means where people set up markets and then they shut down the market and they seize all the funds because they're custodial. Yes. When we have markets, it will solve that issue. What was the other questions?
2:29:40Vlad CosteaAbout DarkFi 2.0?
2:29:42Amir TaakiYeah.
2:29:44Vlad CosteaWhat do you mean by that? And how long until DarkNet markets embrace DarkFi?
2:29:49Amir TaakiOh, okay. Well, you know, I'm thinking of DarkFi as a kind of, you know, more smart contracts kind of, you know, tech platform. So, you know, our idea was that you'd bridge Monero or you bridge something into DarkFi. And then you can use it on the mark on the markets there. And you could also use DarkFi as a kind of mixer by bridging funds in and bridging them out again. So then you can just call smart contracts on Ethereum. So you can call, like, for example, make an AMM trade.
2:30:34DarkFi 2.0, I haven't really spoken about that yet, but you know, there's a lot of, there is a lot of things we can do in the future right now. You know, we just want to get it out because perfect is enemy of good. And if we start trying to make the best product, the best thing ever, you know, we're going to get, we're never going to release, you know? So right now we have it, you know, I think it was like a year ago or so we said, look, let's just lock it down now in terms of like features and so on, in terms of like products, et cetera, and ship with this.
2:31:18So we're going to just, we're just going to polish it. We're going to get it smooth. We're going to release to our community. We're going to get liquid. Then, you know, once it's released, we have, we have something there that people using, we want to keep polishing it. And then we can start to like, think about the future, start to think about the future products we want to build. Start to think about the future of DarkFi. Now, if people want me to go into what that future looks like, I can do that.
2:31:48You know, so, you know, first of all, you know, we were just talking about having a marketplace where you can buy and sell goods, you know, that never got made a place like LocalBitcoins, where you can find traders and trade with them. You know, we also need that, also information marketplaces, decentralized WikiLeaks. So I have a design for that, which is, you know, you've got a document that you want to sell on the internet, or you've got like a video of UFOs, or you've got the latest Hollywood Marvel cape shit five.
2:32:24You go, you post on the forum, okay, I have this document or video or something. I say, prove it to me. So we do a protocol where a random chunk of the file is selected and it gets revealed, but you can't predict which part of the file gets revealed, but that process actually, then validates your claim about what the file is. So you claimed it was this thing, like UFO document, random chunk gets revealed. I'm like, wow, this is legit. This is the actual thing. And then the rest of the people can start bidding, start bidding auction.
2:33:04And the winner of that auction gets to decrypt the file. They get access to that information. That is really cypherpunk because we've got this industry based off of, you know, proprietary secrecy, you know, corporate secrets, et cetera. Now it destroys that business model because people from one corporation can sell information to another corporation on an open market. So that'd be amazing. You know, now also we've got the anonymous Dow that I mentioned, which I'm, I think it's like incredible. And I'm really excited to see, you know, what people do with that.
2:33:41What comes out of that, right now at the Dow though, all the voting has to happen on chains. Every time you vote, you have to pay a transaction fee, which, you know, is a kind of disincentive to vote inside a Dow. So ideally I want to have off-chain voting. So a way that, you know, there's some third party where you send the third party anonymous votes, and that third party aggregates the votes together, but they can't see the votes, what they are individually, but they just aggregate them into like a single ZK proof or a single transaction.
2:34:26And then, they can post these batched, transactions on the blockchain. So that's like a scalability thing. So rather than, you know, let's say 20 people having to pay, you know, 20 transaction fees, they just all aggregated together and they paid it once. So it's much cheaper to vote in a Dow. So that's like a, that's perfectly doable, but it requires like quite a bit of infra. I'm also interested in MPC. So that's very interesting for like decentralized order books. There is some really crazy crypto coming out now, like indistinguishability obfuscation, functional encryption, you know, FHE, et cetera.
2:35:15Indistinguishability obfuscation is a really, really crazy idea, which is imagine that, you know, I've got a secret key and, you know, you give me, you give me like a, you know, some message to sign with my secret key and I make a signature using my secret key and I post it on the blockchain, you know, but I, you know, in order to, in order for me to do that, I need to know what the secret key is. But indistinguishability obfuscation is that I can post the function on the blockchain and anybody can call that function.
2:36:00And that function could be like, it could have secret keys, it can have secret data, and it can be signing messages. It can do it doing stuff with, you know, secret keys, but nobody can see what those secret keys are. So now you have programmable smart contracts on the blockchain and they're actually operating with private data, but nobody can see what that private data is. So that really unlocks like a massive amount of applications. Then, you know, there's also, you know, the question of scalability, which at some point we will have to like address will become a concern.
2:36:39So, there's a lot of strategies that we can employ to deal with scalability. You know, we have to like weigh them up, like, you know, there's a lot of optimization that can be done, you know, just in the implementation level, like, you know, even about like, you know, validate a node's processing transactions faster or delegating responsibilities, et cetera. But as far as I'm concerned, like the blockchain scaling trilemma is a fundamentally solved problem. Now I say solved because it's not solved in a practical sense, but it is solved in a theoretical sense.
2:37:16What does that mean? It means it's very, very hard now to make a node that solves, you know, all the problems of, you know, scalability, decentralization, privacy, et cetera. But it is possible. So for example, if I was working on Bitcoin full-time and I knew it would be something that would be accepted in Bitcoin, I was just doing a payment system, nothing else, you know, you could, you could have a system where every time you make a new block, that block gets delegated to like a third party.
2:37:55And what that third party does is it generates a ZK proof of the block. And that gets, that becomes like the blockchain. So it's completely trustless. But what it means is that, you know, when you run your Bitcoin node and, you know, you get new blocks and the limit to the throughput of the Bitcoin nodes, that's what the block size debate is about. It's about the throughput. It's like how many transactions can we have in our blocks? The limit to that is how fast the computers are running the network.
2:38:28And if the computers are like Raspberry Pi, or they're really slow computers, then, you can't have many transactions in the block. But if a ZK proof of the transactions, as opposed to transactions themselves, it's very fast and you get a massive boost in scalability. It can be 10 X, it can be a hundred X. So that's very interesting. You could have something like Bitcoin, which is really decentralized, completely private, and, you know, and very fast and very cheap to make transactions. It's completely doable.
2:39:09We have the technology now. Not only that, the other interesting property you'd get from this system is, you know, when you spin up a new node, that node would sync instantly. It wouldn't need to download all the blocks, you know, add the blocks to the block blockchain, you know, validate each one, et cetera. It gets to the end. It would just download the current state as it is now, and bam, it's instantly synced. So it's just, it's just a node software. You could probably run it on your mobile phone.
2:39:44You know, just a full node. You can run your mobile phone, you download it. It instantly syncs. It's super fast. It's cheap to make transactions. That would be really interesting. However, doing something like that on a fully, you know, smart contract programmable platform like DarkFi, like Ethereum is immensely complex because you're not just dealing with, you know, simple payments. You're dealing with like loads of other stuff, like state machines and, you know, like, you know, generalized, you know, what's it called? Like virtual machines doing generalized computation, Turing complete, et cetera.
2:40:30So it's like, that is, that is a huge project. So it's, you know, that's a possible future for DarkFi, you know, but it would be like, that would be like a DarkFi 2.0 because it would be like a fundamental huge change and it would require like a lot of research and a lot of resources. It would be, it would be quite complex. You know, we'd really have to start from like ground one, like, you know, really build like a new DarkFi. Now we could certainly leverage like a lot of the code we have in DarkFi, but it would necessitate like a lot of really deep changes, you know, to how we're doing things now.
2:41:10Now the DarkFi that we've built is something very simple because, you know, we want something that works, that we can analyze, that we understand fully, that we can, we can use, you know, to build these applications. That's why, you know, bigger projects like Aztec and some on they've spent years and years trying to make these like solidity compatible Ethereum L2s and their massive engineering projects, but they really haven't been able to deliver much in terms of applications. Part of that is just because, you know, they're too chickenship because they're VC owned projects, like as in the sense that like, you know, they're, they're like trying to play this game that we were talking about with the Silicon Valley game of like, you know, being part of the club, DarkFi don't give a shit.
2:42:05Like, we're like, no, we're outside that club. You know, we're like, you know, we're building the stuff because we want to change things, you know, cypherpunk tech, et cetera. So, you know, we're not afraid to build the applications everybody else is afraid to do. You know, that's part of the reason why people haven't made the stuff, but not only that, I think part of it is also just, you know, a lot of these big projects, you know, you mentioned Eli as well. I mean, to be fair, StarkWare, they're not focused on anonymity, they're focused on scalability.
2:42:43So, you know, they're STARKs. They didn't even have the ZK part for a long ass time until like a couple of years ago. You know, they weren't ZKs or knowledge, which people were talking about ZK roll-up. A lot of these ZK roll-ups. They're actually just, what are called validity roll-ups, which means that, or snark roll-up. When you say zk-SNARK, what that means is zero knowledge succinct arguments of knowledge. Well, I never really thought about how that's such a weird acronym, but the ZK part means the anonymity part.
2:43:23And the snark part means the scalability part succinct. That's what that means. Snark succinct. So a lot of these ZK roll-ups, they don't even use the ZK part. They're just succinct roll-ups. They're snark. They're using the snarks in zk-SNARK. They don't give a shit. So, and then, you know, those that are focused on anonymity, they're just, you know, they're trying to be Ethereum L2s. They're like, you know, they're in a swamp. They're like, you know, like you're in a swamp waist deep and you're like, really, it's like all this grass and shit pulling on you.
2:43:57It's like really difficult to do stuff. DarkFi, we were just like, fuck all that shit. We're just going to build what we want. You build it how we want, you know, we're going to build it ground up. So we did that. It took a long ass time, but we have the fucking power to do shit. Like we just spin shit up all the time. And the shit that would take projects like years to do, they can't even do that. They're like, don't even have the capacity, let alone.
2:44:23We're not just doing it for one product. We're doing it like all over the place. We're doing it. We have like many, many such products. We're just spinning them up all the time. Now I even now I was like, I put a lid on it. I was like, okay, we've got to stop spinning up new products because we actually got to ship. Let's focus on shipping. Then when we ship, we can start, you know, spinning up new products again. You know, we have like, we have a liquid market, we have treasury, et cetera.
2:44:50So, you know, but it, you know, it's already, you know, quite easy. Just go, oh yeah, let's build this ship. This let's do this thing. You know, just we've got all the components in DarkFi. We've got loads of shit in there. People don't know. We've got a fucking ZK programming language. We've got a ZK virtual machine. We've got like a ZK compiler. We've got a ZK analyzer, you know, we've got like, you know, what's it called? Like, I forgot the name. It's like a ZK graphing system.
2:45:20It like shows you like the, what the, your like chips in your ZK system look like, you know, we've got a ZK debugger. We've got like a node visualizer. You can see all the nodes on the network. You know, we've got like an event graph visualizer. We've got an event graph, which is used for like synchronizing state between nodes. We've got like a DHT network for like sharing files, like an IPFS type thing. We've got a P2P subsystem that's super powerful. You know, it does like broadcast networks.
2:45:57You know, you can spin up subnets. You've got different like ways of like seed syncing. You know, we've got like a WASM virtual machine. You know, we've got, you know, like a whole, like what else, you know, like what else have we got? I need to have a look. You know, we've got blockchain. We've got, you know, we've got serialization subsystem and, you know, yeah, like loads of stuff. We've got like loads of apps. We've got like our own task manager. You know, we've got our own, you know, as I mentioned, chat system and, you know, all the OTC swaps.
2:46:42You know, we've got a DEX on DarkFi. You'll be able to trade. So when we have a bridge, you'll be able to bridge into DarkFi to anonymize your funds and bridge out, or you'll be able to just use DEXes to trade in DarkFi. We've got the world's only and the world's first anonymous DAO. You know, we've got anonymous payments. We've got protocol owned liquidity. That's how we do the DAOs. That's how we do the swaps. We do all these apps. You can have your funds and you can put them, you know, to be owned by smart contracts and you can give permission to the smart contract to use the funds in a certain way.
2:47:18That's how we do it with the DAO. When you are sending money to the DAO, you're actually using protocol and liquidity. So you're giving permission to the DAO to spend these funds. There's a reference to a smart contract function inside of the coins themselves, which you can't see the coins. They're completely anonymous. When the coin is spent, only the smart contract can spend it. So, you know, that's how you can, for example, you want to put your money on a DEX. You know, you LP your funds in the DEX and you tell it you can only make orders at this price or above.
2:47:55And the order matches you with other orders. And it settles the orders on chain. But it can't do anything else with your money. It's not custodial. It can only do the trades as you specify. So it's completely trustless. And if you're not happy at any time, you can cancel and you can take the funds out before the trades have been settled. You know, so that's some really advanced stuff right there. Nobody else in crypto has come up with that stuff, you know. We have Python bindings, you know.
2:48:23So now we've just got Python bindings to the P2P subsystem and the event graph. So pretty soon people will be able to spin up, you know, their own P2P apps using just Python. You know, we're building our own UI toolkit, you know, fuck all like QT and Electron Slop, Java, web shit stuff. We just wrote an OpenGL straight up. That's like hardcore stuff, you know. So, yeah.
2:48:53Vlad CosteaSo the question is, how are you able to finance all of this? Because there's a lot of work that went into this project and all of these applications that you described. And it took you many years to write everything and you had other coders. Was it maybe your Bitcoin stash that financed everything or did you raise funds?
2:49:14Amir TaakiWell, I'm not going to say anything about token just yet. As I said, we're going to wait for that proposal to be written and then we will put that out.
2:49:25Vlad CosteaBut that's part of the answer, right?
2:49:31Amir TaakiI'm not allowed to talk about the token now. That's like a legal issue.
2:49:36Vlad CosteaIt's fine. I don't want to push you to break any NDAs or something. I was just wondering.
2:49:41Amir TaakiIt's not NDA. There are certain laws about token issuance. So if I say something, it has to all be done in a proper way. I understand that.
2:49:54Vlad CosteaI was only wondering how this massive stuff gets built. Because I see other developers and they complain all the time that there's no funding and they have to access grants and they get rejected and stuff like this.
2:50:09Amir TaakiYeah, so that's why tokens are a really powerful thing. Because with tokens, this is what happened in Ethereum where Ethereum is basic. So this is what I was saying earlier about Ethereum versus Solana where Solana is just like a ruthless business. But Ethereum is kind of like this hippie, you know, in the inside, this hippie socialist thing where they have a kind of social welfare for the community, which is like the Ethereum Foundation. So you've got all these, you've got people like even sociologists that work for the Ethereum Foundation doing research.
2:50:56You know, you've got like journalists and media, you know, like for example, I don't know, Unchained Podcast or UpOnly or, you know, like many, many such groups. And there's funding inside of the Ethereum ecosystem because they did the token sale. And they had a token. And so they were able to fund all this ecosystem.
2:51:26Vlad CosteaOK, you also got some questions about the top three biggest issues with Bitcoin right now. And what you think are the solutions?
2:51:38Amir TaakiI think the main issue is governance. And, you know, I spoke earlier about the need for standards body with because we have the BIP process. But that was that was made more than 10 years ago. That was made in like 2012 or 2013. So that's no longer adequate. There should be a formal governance, formal standards body. So that's the main issue. If people really want to know what the main issue is. Second issue, you know, there's like an official Bitcoin client. There should be no official Bitcoin.
2:52:17Should be a free market.
2:52:22I mean, if you solve those things, then everything else is solvable. Because now you've got, you know, proper governance. The community has like real power over Bitcoin. We could start to open it up to real discussions about its future. But you know what I would like to see in Bitcoin is for on-chain privacy. FCMP, full chain membership proofs. But let's see what happened with the Bitcoin L2s. Because if the Bitcoin L2s take off and they actually do become successful, maybe DarkFi will become a Bitcoin L2.
2:52:57I don't know. Let's see. It's very easy for us in the future to do that if we wanted to.
2:53:04Vlad CosteaI'm actually curious what you think about sidechains. Because you mentioned roll-ups, you mentioned other types of L2s, but you don't specifically address the idea of the sidechain, which is how Blockstream first got that funded in 2014 or 2015.
2:53:23Amir TaakiI mean, a sidechain is basically just an L1 with a bridge, which is what DarkFi is.
2:53:33Vlad CosteaWell, the idea of a sidechain is to not have a native token of its own, but to only use...
2:53:38Amir TaakiOkay.
2:53:40Vlad CosteaBTC.
2:53:42Amir TaakiThey use BTC for fees. I mean, if they want. I think the advantage to a native token is there's a way for your community to participate in the upside. So I think that's a good thing. It means that, because if I'm bullish on your sidechain, how do I as the community participate in that?
2:54:09Vlad CosteaSo you're saying that there's no incentive for sidechains to be successful?
2:54:15Amir TaakiWell, you are asking why Ethereum was so successful. I think it's because they launched a token.
2:54:24That's I think the difference with Mastercoin. I don't think Mastercoin had a token.
2:54:32Vlad CosteaYeah, it became the Omni layer and that's where Tether first got launched.
2:54:37Amir TaakiHuh. It's funny because Tether is like issued on Ethereum and Tron network.
2:54:45Vlad CosteaYeah, they moved from Mastercoin Omni to Ethereum and then Tron and Polygon, and they're trying to move it to as many blockchains as they can, basically.
2:54:59But it is interesting, you know, how this has evolved over time. It's also interesting that USDT is more in demand than Bitcoin, and it feels like a failure. In the previous episode, Jeff Garzik said that it was almost impossible for Bitcoin to become a currency for daily transactions when the valuation against the US dollar is so wild. So people have trouble pricing goods and services in it. So that's why it didn't take off as expected. But still, it feels a bit saddening when you realize I went to Argentina last year.
2:55:36I had my usual setup for Europe, you know, your Bitcoin wallet, your Lightning, whatever. And I realized nobody wants this. They all want USDT.
2:55:47Amir TaakiOn Tron network.
2:55:49Vlad CosteaEven worse on Binance. And I was thinking, OK.
2:55:52Amir TaakiBut I thought it was pretty cool, to be honest, because I was in Lebanon and all the OTC dealers, they accept USDT. And I was like, whoa, that's fucking cool. And, you know, in Egypt, one of my friends, he was selling USDT and he was like, oh, yeah, the guy, you know, he gives it to he gives me 16 percent. I was like, you're paying 16 percent for this trade. He's like, no, the guy pays me 16 percent for the trade. That's crazy shit.
2:56:32Vlad CosteaNow, worldwide, I think this token that started on Bitcoin and was built on Ethereum and Tron afterwards became much more successful. It's the medium of exchange that people want.
2:56:47Amir TaakiMaybe we should build a stable coin, an anonymous stable coin on Monero and Zano and DarkFi and other networks.
2:56:59Vlad CosteaThat can work. But at the same time, it's not free market money. It's not why I got into this. I didn't get into this to send more dollars. You know, I get the point of privacy. I just don't see why we should increase the demand for the dominant currency around the world.
2:57:18Amir TaakiI mean, you can't blame people, though, because, you know, I mean, part of the problem with Bitcoin is the transaction fees as well. Imagine you're just a dude, you send a payment and you have to pay like, you know, five dollars. It's a lot of money for people. And as you said, they don't want to send the money and then it changes. So that's the volatility.
2:57:46Vlad CosteaDo you ever get this impression that there is a very short window of opportunity that's going to close soon if we don't act now? Because I remember not too long ago, people were saying, you know, it's still the early days. Don't hurry. We shouldn't be irrational about making decisions. Let's just wait and see how this plays out. And all of a sudden you see all the suits, all the Wall Street guys that previously we used to pretend to hate. And now they say they're friends with us and they shake hands and they come to conferences.
2:58:22And it feels weird. I don't recognize the space anymore. At the same time, the price is going up, which is bittersweet. It's just that it happened too fast, much faster than anyone expected. And we are here at approximately a thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars per Bitcoin. And it's confusing. I don't know how I should react. Should I cheer? Should I be happy that my net worth is going up or should I be upset because all that cool stuff that we hoped that Bitcoin could do does not seem to be happening anymore?
2:59:03Amir TaakiI mean, you shouldn't use that knowledge to get wealthy and, you know, slash punks the right code and, you know, we should actively build the stuff because the reason it doesn't get built is because people like us, you know, good men stand by and don't do anything. That's what happened in 2013, 2014. You know, we were kind of like, oh yeah, it's going to happen. Onboard people. That's all we need to do. We should have been more active in our mindset. But, you know, there's opportunity and, you know, people haven't woken up yet to what's possible.
2:59:44We're rallying people and we're going to tap into that. So, here's an opportunity. But yeah, if we're, you know, gains compounds and, you know, when you get in early, you know, time in the market beats timing the market, you know, compounds over time. And, but also, sometimes there are just like really good moments, you know, by the dip. So, if we don't buy the dip when the dip happens, you know, we don't get in there when it's our moment, our opportunity. And we're like, we're not prepared.
3:00:25You know, we're too relaxed. Then we've lost that opportunity. Maybe there will be more opportunities. Maybe not. But we shouldn't be complacent. We should be ready to seize the moment. So, that's why, that's what we're doing now. We're like, we're building and we're preparing, you know, so that, because we sense that there is a moment coming up. There's going to be a big moment. There's a possibility to change things in a big way, to really create something new. You know, that original vision of, you know, what crypto should be, it was written in 1997 in The Sovereign Individual, in that book.
3:01:03You know, it's still there. It's still, you know, it still exists. Turns out that we don't live in a Marxist world. What did Karl Marx say? Karl Marx said that, you know, history is like this scientific process. And, you know, you can study it like a science, like a mechanism, and then it will just, it has these like inevitable chain of causality. It's not like that. It's more like, you know, there are opportunities. There are tools of power. You know, crypto is a very powerful tool. But unless, you know, people seize that tool and put it to work, it's not going to happen by itself.
3:01:54It's not happening because, you know, everybody else is like, you know, with their thumb in their ass, waiting for everybody else to do it. So, and then go, whoa, why is none of this happening? Oh, this is so fucked up. You should see it as an opportunity. You should be like, nobody else is doing it. I'm going to fucking do it. Because I'm going to get, I'm going to make a shitload of money if I do that. Get wealthy doing it. That's what opportunity is. There is a massive market, you know, big agorist market.
3:02:27And nobody's tapping into that. Nobody in crypto is tapping into that. Everybody's trying to go after the same, you know, pool of consumers and, you know, like banking, international banking money. Nobody's going after the real agorist traders out there, real businessmen, not people that have been helped by the state, by the central banks, real business people. Nobody's building for them. And meanwhile, people are being put in jail for speech crimes and we haven't even delivered them chatapp.exe. And they're forced to go on Telegram or Twitter.
3:03:11We all know that Twitter is censored now. I mean, the algo is completely biased. So it's like, where are we? You know, DarkFi is out there building, but like, you know, where's, where's the, where are the rest of the tools that we need? There is a, I saw a project recently, decentralized Git. That was pretty cool. It's called radical. So we're going to try that out. We need projects like that. You know, why are people using, I don't know, Google docs and spreadsheet, we've got Nim's doing a really important job as well.
3:03:49You know, I was speaking with a tour devs recently and they told me, turns out if you're, if you're making, if you're sending, you know, if you've got a connection to another node within the same country, the government can see that they can see the traffic between them. Between those two nodes in the same country, it's only anonymous in tour if it goes outside the country. And you've got to assume that the USA is pretty much like a global government and they can probably see everything.
3:04:25So I was saying to them, I was like, and these are ex-Tor developers from the inside. And I was like, so what do you guys suggest? Is there any, no, like Nim is the only option. So Nim's the only alternative, real alternative to tour. Nim is out there building that, you know, we need more people doing that and we all need to work together. You know, Monero needs to get his FCMP upgrade, et cetera. So, you know, it's a, it's a great time.
3:05:01Vlad CosteaThere's a lot of exciting stuff happening in parallel. And we started our conversation from this idea that this year has been terrible for privacy on Bitcoin and Ethereum. You had the situation of the Tornado Cash devs that actually happened last year in 2023 when they got arrested. And it seems to be getting better for the developers. And there's also the situation of Samourai and Wasabi. And my question for you right now is if you actually went all the way with Dark Wallet and you built it and I guess it would have been a great success on Bitcoin.
3:05:43Do you see yourself in their shoes, in their position, or do you think that if we started having this sort of privacy much earlier, it could become a norm and therefore it could be more resilient to political actors?
3:05:59Amir TaakiSo my lawyer, she's a very good lawyer. She used to be the CLO for Gnosis. She told me, she said, Amir, if you ever released Dark Wallet, and thank God you did not, you'd be in jail. Because you were openly, and look, money laundering is a bad thing, okay? But I was advertising it as a money laundering tool. And she said that if you released it, you would have gone straight to jail. So maybe thank God we didn't release, we did an alpha release, which is what actually we were paid to do.
3:06:37The Dark Wallet alpha, that's actually out there. But we didn't do like, you know, the main release.
3:06:48Vlad CosteaI guess that one inspired Samourai and Wasabi, which came out a couple of years later. But it was an important stepping stone in this evolution of privacy, because this was the first aspiration ever. If you look at Hal Finney's tweets, he tweeted running Bitcoin, and then two days later he said looking into ways to make Bitcoin more private. It's been a struggle for a long time, and for a while it was believed that CoinJoin was just good enough. It seems like it's not, unless it's full blockchain CoinJoin, but that's another idea.
3:07:25Amir TaakiI think anonymous payments is pretty much solved though now.
3:07:33Vlad CosteaWhat's your favorite technology for that?
3:07:37Amir TaakiI really like the FCMP on Monero. I think it's a very good tech. Why? I mean, DarkFi is using zk-SNARKs, we're not using FCMP. But zk-SNARKs is very powerful machinery. I know all the math behind it. I've implemented several zk-SNARK algos. But there is a lot of moving parts. FCMP, it's quite simple, and I like simple. It's quite elegant. You do need some sort of zk proofs, some sort of proofs, but they're very simple proofs. And Liam Eagen, he made a very nice efficient proof for that.
3:08:25So FCMP, it's elegant, I like elegant and simple, and it's also performant and fast. And then they're also using confidential transactions to hide the amount in Monero. So I think that's a really good job that Luke has done. He's really good.
3:08:57And he's very talented.
3:09:00Vlad CosteaI just sent a DM to Liam Eagen. I told him, I've been chasing this guy for like three months trying to get him on the podcast, and he's always traveling. So I just sent him a message and said, I'm your talk, he just praised you on my podcast.
3:09:14Amir TaakiOh, did I? I also praised Luke. You should get Roman Storm from Tornado Cash as well.
3:09:23Vlad CosteaIs he available for these interviews?
3:09:26Amir TaakiI could message him, but he's trying to raise two million now for his case. And imagine, like all the Ethereum people, all the shitloads of money they have, and he can't raise two million for his case after delivering all that value to Ethereum ecosystem.
3:09:49Vlad CosteaI think they're going to throw him under the bus, just like they did with Virgil, the guy who went to North Korea to teach them how to use Ethereum technology. Yeah, but that was just unfortunate.
3:10:02Amir TaakiI mean, you know, the FBI told him not to go, and he still went.
3:10:10And you know, the Ethereum people, I was telling them about Rojava and Syria, but they were not interested because it's Syria, and that's like a scary place. But they're perfectly happy to go to North Korea and talk to North Korean dictators. So what does that say about Ethereum people? It's a bit of a larp, to be honest, to go to North Korea. I've seen dudes who are like, oh yeah, I went to North Korea, check out my pictures. And you go on a guided tour, and it's like, okay, so do you like communism?
3:10:53Do you like North Korean communism? If not, why are you there? Do you support them? I mean, if you do, fair play, I don't mind. I'd be like, okay, you know, we can have a discussion about your ideology, but at least you're authentic. If you don't, why are you going there to educate them about crypto? Same thing as going to the CIA to educate them about Bitcoin. Why do you go do that unless you support them?
3:11:27Vlad CosteaWell, there's a lot about Gavin that is interesting because he's also the one who enabled Craig, right? But before I get there, I just want to say that 100% I want to get Roman on the show. So I'm more than interested. I would also donate to his cause. I have no problem, hopefully, with this. I'm very open about my beliefs, and I do believe that writing software is not a crime.
3:11:52And Gavin Andresen, I really want to get him on this show and ask him some questions. Maybe that he's going to hand me a list of questions that he doesn't want to answer beforehand, if he agrees at all. But he's responsible for a lot of the evolution of Bitcoin. He became the maintainer after Satoshi left. He went to talk to the CIA. He co-founded and was the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. He was the main politician and the main advocate for a while. He went on libertarian shows.
3:12:26He was going to all sorts of events promoting Bitcoin. He was in the center of all the pictures, if you look at Satoshi's roundtable, which was this elitist meeting that is still happening every day. And he wrote BIP 101, which was his way of saying Bitcoin needs to scale. Let's look into increasing the block size. What happened is that he destroyed his own reputation when he had that signing ceremony with Craig Wright. It seems like he was running a compromised version of Electrum for that signature meeting. And there were two other people in the room, and they were all so fooled.
3:13:15And I'm not sure if there's going to be a redemption arc for him. Because he seems to have gotten involved with the Craig Wright trial to help Hodlonaut and Peter McCormack. But at the same time, I don't know what he stands for anymore. I don't know if he cares about anything. All I know is that he was in the middle of a lot of significant events. And I also know that Craig Wright, even though he's responsible for launching the big block version, or the biggest block version of Bitcoin, is responsible for destroying the big block movement.
3:13:52Because I do believe that if it wasn't for Craig Wright, maybe there could have been much better consensus about scaling Bitcoin. And maybe that big block version of Bitcoin could get more users if it wasn't for this con man. And it was all enabled by Gavin. And it's mind-boggling when you think about it. How much he influenced the future of this space.
3:14:18Amir TaakiOkay. Yeah, I don't really care. I lost interest in all this stuff a long time ago. I was shocked. People were really into it. Like, I write a Bitcoin thing, and people were like, oh wow, I get thousands of Bitcoiners. Like, big blocks, small blocks. It's just not interesting anymore. There's so much cool shit about zk proof, solving the blockchain trilemma, and indistinguishability obfuscation. Now I'm studying this really crazy math, which is called arithmetic cryptography, which uses motives and étale cohomology. And I'm studying algebraic function fields.
3:15:08You can do non-native field arithmetic, and it's like, wow, this is fucking cool. We were able to have zk proofs and weird math proofs and make them interface together. The future of zk is kind of going towards like, right now we have this zk proofs where they're like one giant thing, and you just compute all your stuff in there, like hash functions and everything. It's not good at doing anything, except you can add up numbers in this finite field. But apart from that, it's not really good at hashing.
3:15:55You have to make these weird special hash functions that are suited to the zk proof. The elliptic curves, you have to find weird elliptic curves. I mean, they're not weird. They're like good elliptic curves. But you have to find special elliptic curves that work with the zk and so on. But the future will be just like modular, where you have a proof that's really good about doing this specific function or doing this specific function, but you have some kind of glue that ties them together. And that stuff is just new.
3:16:29It's new coming out now. People are doing that. So that's really powerful. And FHE, it's still really slow, but it's becoming more and more feasible.
3:16:44FHE is cool because you can do computations on private data. So maybe we could move stuff off-chain and do computations off-chain, and that way things are a lot faster. I had someone telling me who's really into quantum stuff, and we're always really scared about quantum, like breaking the crypto. But the really weird stuff that I learned is with quantum physics, you can actually transfer state to someone. So we could actually have cryptocurrency, but there's not a blockchain. So I literally have a token and I just send it to you, and we don't even need a blockchain.
3:17:32Can you imagine that? In the future, if that becomes possible, with quantum computers, that'd be crazy.
3:17:41Vlad CosteaDo you believe that quantum computers pose a threat, like an imminent one, for now?
3:17:47Amir TaakiI don't. I have a friend and I trust, whenever like people tell me about quantum stuff, I'm like, oh, okay. Okay. Cause I don't know anything, but I have a friend and I just, yeah, whenever people tell me about quantum stuff, I go like, oh yeah. I was like, I just always go like, oh yeah, I've got this friend and he says, and I trust what he says, cause he's really smart. And basically what he says is that any quantum article, like this new one that came out by Google recently, he's like, just open the page, control F and search for coherence.
3:18:25If it doesn't have the word coherence appearing in the article, it's a fucking scam. And indeed these Google articles, none of them mentioned coherence. And then I was like, he was like, bro, quantum computers, then they're not going to be here for decades. Why? Cause quantum computers is a type one civilization thing. Like, do you know semiconductors now? Have you ever studied that stuff? Like how crazy it is. There's a YouTube channel called Asianometry. Have you heard of this channel? You should, Asianometry. He has a whole series about semiconductor manufacturing.
3:19:11Let me put it in the chat, in the Twitter chat, at least here, this little chat box. So he has a whole series about semiconductors. There is like, imagine like you go from like, I don't know what the like sand or whatever to go into like the CPU and there's like a pipeline, right? That pipeline, it goes across the entire world and like really key parts, like are like in Taiwan or like in Amsterdam, but it's like just one chain. It's a global chain and it's like the entire humanity, the entire global humanity is just all directed on producing computer chips.
3:19:59Can you imagine that? Like it's not even redundant. It's not even like duplicated. It's just like, that is the peak of the entire human civilization is like making those semiconductors. Imagine quantum computers. He was just like, look, to make quantum computers would require an enormous amount of energy that it would require. Basically, it requires to be a type one type civilization. We're a type zero civilization now. So we'd need like a massive amount of energy. Like we'd need to be like, you know, we've, I don't know, fission reactors or fusion reactors, you know, or like Dyson spheres, crazy shit like that.
3:20:44So when it would require huge industrial processes, you know, it would require all of humanity working together. So not only that, he was like, you know, because of how many people it would take working together to produce a quantum, just one quantum computer to have all that industrial pipeline, you know, we will all know about it years and years in advance because it will require such a huge amount of labor input to produce this quantum computer. So I'm really not just, I trust what he says. It sounds legit what he's saying.
3:21:25And he knows about, he actually like, he builds simulations for quantum physics, you know, and he knows all the math. I talk with him about the math. There's a lot of dudes I meet that are like, oh yeah, quantum, and they start talking about quantum stuff, but they don't know any of the math. And so I'm like, oh, that's, they're just fake. They don't know. You can't know quantum physics if you don't know math. You don't know manifolds, topological manifolds, and I don't know, whatever else you have to learn to be able to know that stuff.
3:21:56And all the people that I talk to, they're like quantum truthers. None of them know about quantum physics. So how can you know that what's feasible with a quantum computer if you don't know quantum physics? So, you know, and you remember that fucking Google guy who was like quantum computers are imminent. You know, I think it's Chamath. He just wrote that thing about like breaking, you know, the sharp cryptography and everybody is like, what? Like, he's just talking fucking rubbish. Sharp, sharp hash function is not cryptography.
3:22:35Like anyway, it's just, I mean, maybe it is like, but he just made like a lot of stupid claims that everybody was like, yeah, this guy has no zero credibility. I mean, as someone who knows about cryptography, when I see, you know, him talking like that, I'm like, okay, well, if he's talking about quantum, it's probably bullshit. You know, this is what VCs do. They bullshit everything. I used to think VCs are really smart. And I used to read them, oh yeah, they're giga brains who do market analysis.
3:23:05I realized after following them for a few years, I realized they're just all, they're all just fucking charlatans and bullshitters. That's their job. They're like larping to make people think they're smart, but they don't have a crystal ball. They don't know what's next. I remember like in 2020, when all the VCs were like hyping up like options markets were like the next big thing on chain options markets. Turned out as a complete dud. They're always pretty, they're always going, oh, this new thing. They just jump on the bandwagon and they don't even have any long-term vision, have no consistency.
3:23:40And they're not even builders. They can't even make anything. They just have loads of money. They just, and they get that money. I'm like, okay, some VCs I respect, like crypto self-made VCs, crypto native VCs, especially ones that bet on cool shit like DeFi. But the institutional VCs, they just get their money from, you know, the financial system from central banks. It's a complete scam. They didn't earn that money. They just stole it from people. Now they're managing it and they're like retarded and they're thick, like a lot of them.
3:24:17But yeah, they just took rubbish. So now that they're going, oh yeah, AI, quantum computers, blah, blah. You know, before they were talking about gamify, social media fire, what the fuck happened with that? Complete duds as well.
3:24:34Vlad CosteaI think what Chamath said was something along the lines of putting together multiple of these quantum computers to add up their qubits and crack cryptography, which makes no sense. That's not really how it works. It's not like you're putting together, you're stacking 50K, 56K modems to get broadband internet. That's not really the approach.
3:25:01Amir TaakiYeah. I think that's what my friend was saying about coherence, which is like, you can't just get, you get problems with coherence. You need like error correction. I'm just paraphrasing. I don't know anything about this. I just, you know, it's not my area.
3:25:19Vlad CosteaBut my favorite reaction to all of this madness, which is rather recent, I think it happened like two or three weeks ago, with Google announcing their new powerful quantum computer. Then you get people like Andrew Tate saying, you know, Bitcoin can be cracked by this and blah, blah. And then you have Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream, who calls himself the inventor of proof of work. And he says we should soft fork post quantum signatures into Bitcoin just to keep traders, or maybe I should look for the exact tweet, but his rationale was that we should do it just for the Bitcoin price to keep going up and people to stop panicking.
3:26:03Amir TaakiIf you want the Bitcoin price to go up, you should get rid of the, just re-denominate Bitcoin, the satoshis, or maybe like something a bit above satoshis, depending on, because you don't want the fractional amount to be basically zero. But if it was like under a dollar each, if they were like a cent per Bitcoin, normies would love that shit. That would make the price go up massively. The re-denominate Bitcoin.
3:26:35Vlad CosteaBias is real. People say, oh, I can't afford a whole Bitcoin. Let me buy XRP.
3:26:41Amir TaakiIt's true. We had to think about that when we were deciding how many DarkFi tokens there should be, because it's like, if you put it too low, then normies will go, oh, they're $500 each? Nah, I'm priced out. It's true.
3:27:07Vlad CosteaYeah, they're going to say, oh, I was too late.
3:27:09Amir TaakiBut yeah, I think he's wrong. There's a much simpler thing. Just re-denominate Bitcoin. I don't think normies care about quantum stuff that much. Just like some Bitcoin normies, but normies on the street, they're like, oh, one Bitcoin, that's too expensive. I'll buy Litecoin or something, or Ripple.
3:27:32Vlad CosteaI think a bunch of institutions do care about this, and they get their wisdom from Michael Saylor, who is just this bullshitter who talks in metaphors and is not able to explain anything in terms of how it works. He just knows some stories.
3:27:50And to me, this is a bit dangerous, if you ask me, because Bitcoin right now is in this transition phase from being rebranded from digital cash. I mean, that ship has sailed. It's not digital cash and hasn't been for a while. But it used to be considered money, but now they're trying very hard to make it this commodity, this digital gold. But it comes packaged with the trade-offs of gold because it's expensive to transfer. And it's also supposed to be custodied by some institution.
3:28:28Amir TaakiYeah, I mean, yeah, of course. They're like Bitcoin devs are now full-time micro-strategy analysts.
3:28:38Vlad CosteaAnd do you own any stocks in micro-strategy? Do you care at all about what's happening?
3:28:44Amir TaakiI don't own any stocks. I've never owned any stock ever. I did want to buy stocks, but I was waiting for them to be tokenized as crypto assets. But they never got tokenized, so I never bought any stocks. I can't be bothered to go on some market or something, you know?
3:29:10Vlad CosteaYeah, and I guess you bought tokens. You bought into projects that promised to build something. And that's a way of buying stocks, except that they're not called stocks because they're not registered to some government-approved authority.
3:29:24Amir TaakiOh, yeah, I bought a lot of tokens. I did maybe buy some NFTs, not that much, though. I'm not very good at that stuff, but I do have a friend who's an artist. And recently, he or she, to give their identity away, but they bought some token called Sonic Obama Shiba Inu token.
3:29:59Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, that's, I don't know. It's hard to describe.
3:30:04Amir TaakiYeah, they did really well. And I was like, how the fuck, how did you know to buy that? Because they were holding it for like two years or something. And they were like, because they went really heavy in, big on it, and they bought a lot of it. And they were like, oh, yeah, I just I knew it was a good project, blah, blah. And they described it to me and I just, I just, I just did not understand. I was like, but you know, it's like a different world, isn't it?
3:30:37Different logic.
3:30:40Vlad CosteaSo I don't even know what a good project means when it's called Harry Potter, Obama, Sonic, Inu, whatever.
3:30:46Amir TaakiI mean, I can buy the tech projects because I can, I'd look at it. I remember when Solana first came out, I bought heavy into that. And a lot of people, a lot of Ethereum people said to me, Solana is really bad. And I was like, oh, but they're made by, it's made by Qualcomm engineers. Anatoly, he seems really smart. You know, I didn't even look at their technical claims, but I just, I just, I just think that they're competent software devs, you know, I'm not describing, not their research and something, but I think, you know, Anatoly seems, he seems like a competent developer.
3:31:30Like, you know, they use Berkeley packet filter, et cetera, but the Ethereum people really did not like Solana and everybody kept saying it's bad, but I just held it because I liked it and turned out I was right and they were wrong, you know, so I've had like a lot of those kind of calls in cryptocurrency before, you know.
3:31:52Vlad CosteaSomeone in the chat told me that it's actually Sonic Obama, Shiba Inu or whatever. I don't know, man, too many names. It's it's hard to compute how you come up with that sort of name and the logo is just genius.
3:32:09Amir TaakiI remember when they were talking about NFTs and I think there was one NFT collection and it had like attributes and the whole point would be like, oh, you could use the attributes in like a game and you'd be able to use it like an RPG game, you know, that would have been cool if that, you know, take off, you know.
3:32:31Vlad CosteaThat was Spells of Genesis on Bitcoin.
3:32:34Amir TaakiI don't know if it was Bitcoin. I think it was made before Ordinals on Bitcoin.
3:32:41Vlad CosteaYeah, Counterparty, 2014. I interviewed the guy.
3:32:45Amir TaakiOh, interesting. Yeah, there was also another one I remember when it was all about generative NFTs, you know, I don't know if that's still around. Now a lot of NFTs, I don't know, I really haven't been following them that much, but yeah, kind of interesting. I wonder if there's like any scope for anonymous NFTs, you know, if there's something to be done there.
3:33:17Vlad CosteaWell, there are tokens, so there's value in transferring them as long as people understand what it's about. Maybe you can transfer art, like real physical art with anonymous NFTs, or maybe you can just do concert tickets.
3:33:34Amir TaakiYou know, there was this game a while back called Dark Forest, which was like, someone says like, oh my God, it's still going, finish it already. Because they want to download it from YouTube. No, motherfucker, we're going double time, we're going for 20 hours.
3:33:59Vlad CosteaWait, who said that?
3:34:02Amir TaakiOh, it's in our chat on the Dark IRC. I'm going to do a three hour workout and we don't have to record it, leave it running. I'll show you my 180 kilogram deadlift.
3:34:18But there was a game a while back called Dark Forest, which it was like a ZK game. I don't know if you ever heard of that, but it was kind of like, it was kind of cool. It was like, a lot of people got really excited about it because they had these like planets and you had like a little settlement on your planet and you had to like go out to other planets to like discover other planets.
3:34:53But it's like this dark forest and you don't know who's out there because it's using ZK proofs, everybody's using ZK proofs and they're proving that they reached a certain spot in a certain amount of time. But then the whole point is like when other people discover that you're in their like quadrant, they start going after you and it starts conflicts. So the whole point of the game was to like expand your colony without being discovered by the other people trying to settle this world. It's like using ZK proofs, so it was like anonymous.
3:35:28So yeah, I wonder if there's something like that with NFTs, gamified NFT. We had this idea a while back to do an NFT collection. It would be like a generative NFT collection, but it like generates political factions. We actually sold an NFT to LunaDao, which is like this elliptic curve NFT, but it's not generative, but it is a piece of like math art that we did where like we make these scripts in Blender, which is elliptic curves. They're like one of these fundamental like geometries of the universe, you know, like it's like the torus in complex space and the torus is like a fundamental geometry.
3:36:19They say that the universe is maybe a torus and there's a lot of it's like a reoccurring geometry throughout nature. Like the, you know, if you look at the galaxy, it's like around a black hole with like energy coming out of the middle and it's like a disc, so it's again a torus. So, you know, the elliptic curve is also like a fundamental cryptography geometry that we use. So we made like this, we generated it inside of Blender and then we made this like cool piece of elliptic curve art that we like sold to the LunaDao.
3:37:03That was a pretty cool project. We put quite a bit of love into that. So it wasn't just like a worthless, it's not just an NFT, but it's actually something we, you know, we put out there for the community. Somebody's asking why you're not using XMR Superchats, XMRchat.com. And they're saying that you should, you know, Bitcoin is no longer an apt name for your podcast.
3:37:31Vlad CosteaOh, that's not up to them to decide.
3:37:35Amir TaakiBut you're locked into the brand now. You're like brand locked in.
3:37:41Vlad CosteaWell, according to Eric Voskuil, everything that derives from Bitcoin is a scaling layer of Bitcoin. So.
3:37:50Amir TaakiIt's an interesting perspective.
3:37:52Vlad CosteaIt is. Basically, everything that uses the blockchain is like a Bitcoin sibling or something or a child, and it's helping the entire ecosystem grow.
3:38:06Amir TaakiSo what's XMR Superchats? Have you used that?
3:38:09Vlad CosteaIt's basically something that you install to your stream, to your OBS instance, and every time someone sends a comment and pays for it appears on the screen and you have to read it. Okay. So the reason is that it feels a bit distracting. Like I like to pick comments and I don't want to let people pay for the privilege or whatever. If you want to send me a donation, you just go to the donate page.
3:38:36Amir TaakiOh, I see.
3:38:39Vlad CosteaBut I do like the concept. So for some people it works or for some formats.
3:38:46Amir, is there any way you can do some pull ups to show off so I can do some ad reads? We've been going for three hours. Yeah, go. We have 2,000 people who tuned in on the live stream. I'm not sure if it's cumulative or something. But I got to tell you guys about SideShift.ai, which is this platform where you can swap between various currencies. They have a lot of liquidity. They have low fees. It's really cool. You should check it out unless you're from the U.S., case in which they don't provide support.
3:39:18Amir has perfect form for his pull ups. But if you can right now, also check out SideShift.ai and see how you can swap some stablecoins for some free market money. Also, Ray Youssef is a big fan of Amir Taaki's work and he is running this platform that's called Noones. And his mission is to onboard the global south to this Bitcoin or crypto or whatever standard that empowers them to have more economic freedom. Check out Noones. You can actually trade gift cards with someone from the third world country and help them with their hustling and all of their economy.
3:39:58The philosophy of Noones is that everyone eats and that's sort of the tagline because there is a fee for everyone selling on Noones. And in the end, everyone is supposed to take a cut and have a small margin. There's also hodling.ch which is a business from Switzerland. They're experts in self-custody solutions. And if you have a lot of coins or else you're part of some company or institution that wants to buy coins, then you can go to them. And they're going to tell you exactly if you should use hardware wallets, if you should set up multisigs, what the quorum should be.
3:40:37And all of these details to help you not have any single points of failure. And they also have a coin recovery service, so if you forgot your seed phrase but you have maybe 80% of the words, they can actually help you brute force that or find ways to recover your coins if you have enough clues. So check out hodling.ch. And last but not least, there is LayerTwo Labs. Paul Sztorc is a big fan of the show. He actually called it the best podcast in Bitcoin right now.
3:41:10So I guess shame on you people who tell me I should not put Bitcoin in the podcast name because it's the best Bitcoin podcast according to a bunch of OGs. Paul Sztorc right now is working on drivechains which are these two-way pegged sidechains that are merge mined with Bitcoin. They pay the Bitcoin miners so there is also an incentive there for using and they are secured by the Bitcoin miners. Check out their documentation and also check out their apps because if you go to layer2labs.com slash download, you're going to find some actual clients for an Ethereum sidechain, for a Zcash sidechain, for a Namecoin sidechain, and I guess something else with prediction markets.
3:41:55You can see how they interact. You can download them and run them on the Bitcoin signet and it's pretty cool. That can actually be one of the futures of Bitcoin if we activate something like BIP300 but we can also get drivechains with OP_CAT if that's going to happen. So check out LayerTwo Labs and thank you for sitting through the ads and also, Amir, perfect form with your pull-ups. I was actually going to compliment you because I was searching for pictures when I was doing the graphics for this episode and I did notice that a couple of years ago you were overweight and you actually got in much better shape right now and it shows.
3:42:37Amir TaakiOh yeah, thanks a lot. I was under a lot of stress. I actually have a graph I can show you but there was one stressful year and then when I'm good I'm declining like that. So that's good. I'm very consistent. I track all my calories and I do meal prep and everything.
3:43:10Vlad CosteaSomeone in the chat called you deadlift Taleb. Deadlift what? Taleb. You know, Nassim Taleb.
3:43:17Amir TaakiOh nice. Somebody said in our chat about Bitcoin that it's a plaything of BlackRock and it will never have privacy improvements on its base protocol. And it's a gauche to talk about improving Bitcoin privacy because it scares BlackRock. So what I know from a friend of mine is he said he met with Michael Saylor and Michael Saylor is anti-privacy. He says privacy is bad because it scares trillions of dollars coming into Bitcoin.
3:44:00Vlad CosteaI did hear the same story from someone else. I'm not sure if it's the same person or some other guy who's trying to bring privacy. But there's also a story about Michael Saylor trying to convince one of the ETF companies to not give money to Bitcoin Core developers. So basically he effectively got involved in cutting funding for some developers who maybe could have done something interesting for the project.
3:44:25Amir TaakiOh interesting. What an irony, a twist of fate, if it ended up that the incompetent leadership of Bitcoin Core ends up with them getting co-opted and hijacked by BlackRock and those kind of companies just taking over.
3:44:50Vlad CosteaI got to tell you that Roger Ver's book, which is called Hijacking Bitcoin, in its initial phase was actually called the Bitcoin Takeover book. I had no idea about that until I saw some concept art that was published on Twitter. I was like holy fuck, he could have brought so many listeners to my podcast if he did that. But the meaning is entirely different. I mean you could just call your podcast Hijacking Bitcoin. I don't think there's that much territory to cover because I was trying to do something which is very tech oriented, you know, to talk about Bitcoin as a technology and what it can do and how it can take over the world.
3:45:34But now it seems like some actors have taken over Bitcoin and there's a takeover of the Bitcoin project.
3:45:42Amir TaakiYeah, or I mean they took it over a while ago, just squatting it and not doing fuck all, you know, just being influencers. But anyway, you know, I say this stuff and people, the Bitcoin maxis, they get really angry, but it's like bro, I'm allowed to have fucking opinion. You know, and they're like, they're like cypherpunks write code is like, you know, I'm writing code. That's why I'm working on DarkFi. So, you know, in the end, I've told, you know, people, that guy asked, he was like, what's the top three things of changing Bitcoin?
3:46:22Number one, governance. Number two, you know, core being official Bitcoin, no official Bitcoin. Number three, which is much further down the list, is having on-chain privacy. You know, that's, you know, that's, I mean, I think on-chain privacy, maybe you could have that, but I think you should probably just fix the governance and then that would come as a consequence. So, but you know, apart from that, if we like, I think that's the only thing that will save Bitcoin inevitably. Maybe the L2s, the ZKL2s might be very interesting.
3:47:05Could be.
3:47:07Vlad CosteaYou know, it would be such a nice hero arc for Vitalik if it turns out that the research that he funded with Ethereum ends up improving Bitcoin in such a massive way. And he's going to come back like the Count of Monte Cristo or Monte Crypto or whatever, proving to everyone that he was right all along and he made it happen.
3:47:31Amir TaakiYeah, I mean...
3:47:33Vlad CosteaOr Zooko. Zooko also gets vilified.
3:47:37Amir TaakiYes. So originally Zcash was actually meant to be a prototype for zk-SNARKs to go on Bitcoin. And, you know, when it was like that, I was accepted by Bitcoin people. Peter Todd was one of the people that generated the signing ceremony for Zcash. For Zcash.
3:48:02Vlad CosteaYeah, I have his laptop. I bought it from him.
3:48:06Amir TaakiOh, really? Yeah, so...
3:48:08Vlad CosteaThe compute node. Yeah. But he destroyed the CPU, so it's useless for that.
3:48:15Amir TaakiBut they didn't adopt Zcash. So, you know, and then they did a massive funding campaign against Zcash, which was, I think it was quite unwarranted and unfair. This is what I mean about being predatory. You know, it's like, okay, you don't want to put, you know, ZK on Bitcoin? Fine. But I don't know why, you know, those Bitcoin devs came out with their knives and daggers and went so harsh. After Zcash. You know, we're all people in this world. And, you know, it's a harsh existence. And everybody's just trying to do their best, you know, and people are trying to climb up.
3:48:58And I don't think it's nice to, you know, people are trying to do their best. People like Zooko and Zcash. Zcash devs are, you know, I could, you know, you can criticize them. You can say, you know, I don't like this. You know, they're corporate, blah, blah. But, you know, some of the Zcash devs, they're like very ideological. You know, they've done like really spectacular work. You know, I will give credit where credit's due, you know. You know, like, what's his name? str4d, Daira, Hopwood.
3:49:41You know, all of those people. You know, Jack Mallers, etc. So, they've done a really good job. So, but they, yeah, they really fought it them hard, which was kind of annoying.
3:50:00Vlad CosteaAre you sure that's Jack Mallers?
3:50:02Amir TaakiOh, maybe I got it wrong. I'm sorry.
3:50:08Vlad CosteaJack Mallers is this guy from Strike with the laser eyes.
3:50:11Amir TaakiOh, sorry. No, I got you wrong. I can't remember. It's like, there's like three or four devs. Strad is one of them. He's, he's like very competent dev. It doesn't come to my head right now.
3:50:28Vlad CosteaI actually interviewed Josh Swihart like one or two months ago. And I do like what they're doing. They're getting rid of this dev fund pre-mine or something, because they did have that tax for building the protocol. And they say they're always moving forward. And they don't care if there is chains like Pirate Chain that are forking off and copying whatever they're doing, because they're always ahead and they're pushing for cryptographic innovation. And that's their focus. Even if they're organized in a corporate way, what they build is beneficial for the entire space.
3:51:06And I have a lot, a lot of respect for that, because otherwise, I'm not sure who would accept to go on this journey. And pay developers and pay for research and hire academics and all of this. I mean, it's necessary.
3:51:23Amir TaakiWell, originally Zcash, they were a group of academics who had this concept of anonymous money. And now she started Zcash as a way of funding their research. You know, that initial group was, you know, Zooko, obviously, also Eli Ben-Sasson. He was part of that. Ian Miers. I think, I think Ian Miers, he actually invented the schema where you have like a coin and you issue like, at the time it was a serial number, it later became a nullifier. And there's like no link between them. Are you getting the, it's dinner time, Blake?
3:52:09Are you getting the dinner time, Blake?
3:52:13Vlad CosteaOh, no, no, it's fine. I can go on. It's fine. We're supposed to go to the gym, but the gym is closing in 20 minutes.
3:52:21Amir TaakiOh, you should go to the gym. No, go to the gym.
3:52:23Vlad CosteaNo, we don't have time because that's how long it takes us. We're going to go in the morning.
3:52:28Amir TaakiI should eat chocolate anyway. It's chocolate time.
3:52:30Vlad CosteaOh, you have a chocolate time?
3:52:34Amir TaakiYeah, I just had, I just did fruits, you know, on the show. I was eating lychees and mandarins and passion fruit. But these are all the lychee skins.
3:52:47Vlad CosteaThat's beautiful.
3:52:49Amir TaakiYeah, they're so good. I love lychees. They're absolutely delicious. I just bought 200, 200 euros of them to last me for three weeks.
3:53:02Vlad CosteaWait, they only last you for three weeks? You must eat a lot of them. Or maybe they're expensive.
3:53:09Amir TaakiBut Switzerland is like, is mental. It's crazy. It will drain you.
3:53:17Vlad CosteaWell, why are you building DarkFi from Switzerland? That's another question.
3:53:22Amir TaakiI'm in Switzerland. Not everyone's in Switzerland. But yeah, we have a Swiss company. The reason why is because our work is illegal in Europe because of MiCA and various regulations. So we, in Switzerland, are offering a safe haven for privacy. That's why we're here, where NIM is here as well. But they don't actually live here. They just, they pretend to live here. But I never see any, I mean, there is one NIM guy, Alexi, that I see here. But I actually live here. I thought I'd moved here because I thought as well, this is where all the privacy projects are.
3:54:04You know, we get safe haven status, you know, from being targeted. And I thought you actually have to live in the place. But so I moved here. But turns out, like all the projects are here. Nobody actually lives here. I'm like the retard that thought that residency actually meant you live in the place. But I mean, there's other jurisdictions that are better for different reasons. Like there's BVI, you know, there's Lisbon, there's Dubai. But they're better for tax reasons and, you know, they're maybe cheaper. But Switzerland, it's like, it's not better for those reasons.
3:54:52But it is better because they have more sovereignty and they have more protection for privacy, which, you know, we're worried about in Europe. But now in the US, let's see what happens. You know, things could change.
3:55:14Vlad CosteaI did see that you did something which is not typical for yourself. You endorsed Donald Trump because you perceived him as the only solution to free Russell. I mean, I feel optimistic at all about the Trump presidency for the industry.
3:55:34Amir TaakiSo a lot of those guys that are close to Trump, you know, like for example, like Jesse Powell or Bruce Fenton or any of these guys. I know a lot of those guys from back in the day and they're the guys that are backing Trump. And I think they're friends with Roger as well. They're like, they're libertarian. They're like some, they're like ideological. I know you mentioned the Satoshi round table, which I think Bruce Fenton maybe runs. I don't know. I think it's just a bunch of dudes in Dubai who sit at the table, you know, pretending to talk about Bitcoin stuff, you know.
3:56:16But anyway, there are guys that were like, you know, they funded Trump to a huge amount. They fundraised for Trump from other guys. You know, they raised a lot of money within Trump. So he's kind of in debture for them. You know, when you give money to a politician, that politician owes you favors. A lot of big backers behind Trump are crypto people. That's true. You know, you know, the tech bro elite, you know, they use the MAGA people. They don't give a shit about the MAGA people.
3:57:01They're just a tool to gain power. They have their own agenda, but they're into crypto. You know, Elon Musk is into crypto. Was, you know, Donald Trump's son, all those kinds of people. They were somewhat into crypto.
3:57:24So there is enough of an interest, you know, close to Trump that will hold him to his promise to free Ross Ulbricht, you know. So I'm pretty sure they will. I don't see why he wouldn't. It's like nothing to gain by not doing that. You know, it's not like build a wall, you know. Build a wall is like, you have to build a wall. Free Ross Ulbricht day one. It's just like, you have to sign a piece of paper. There's like nothing to it. And if you don't sign it, then all the people that backed you would be pretty pissed off because they've put all their reputation for you know.
3:58:09It's not like he has to work against anything. It's not like, you know, Donald Trump's talking about like, he's like, Oh, we're going to change. We're going to get rid of all these foreign wars. Is he going to defund? You know, they're talking about dudes, right? And like, defunding the government. Fuck the government. You give a shit about the government. Like, what is the government? Nothing. Where's the real money going? The military industrial complex, the CIA, you know, maintaining American exceptionalism in the world. They're not going to get rid of that, are they?
3:58:47You know, that's going to continue. There's no way that Donald Trump is going to go up against the real deep state, the military industrial complex. He'd be assassinated if he did. Absolutely no way anybody can challenge the power of CIA, especially a political candidate who does not have an army of his own. Every person in history that did a coup, that did a revolution, takeover, Hitler, et cetera, they all had their own force. Hitler had the brown shirts. You know, the Russian communists, they had the Bolshevik guys, you know, they will have like a group of dudes.
3:59:28And I'm not, it doesn't even, your army, the army can be like thousands and thousands of people, right? But when you take power, you're not going to have thousands and thousands of people. You don't need thousands of people. You only, but you do need like some force. You know, it could be like a dozen dudes, you know, your crack squad that's there to like really defend you. You know, like Putin, when he was interviewed by Oliver Stone, Oliver Stone says, tell me about your security. And Putin says, that is the one thing that I deal with myself.
4:00:03I do not outsource. Security is a big deal when you're talking about power. No force of arms, no power. So, you know, and we already see it now. We already saw what happened with the H1B stuff, right? They, you know, like all the, I was, cause I went on some of these MAGA calls and you know, they're just like, they're just working class dudes. You know, they're not educated, you know, they're not sophisticated, whatever. They're just normal everyday working class dudes who like do all the jobs in the, in the economy, you know, the locals.
4:00:40And, you know, as I said, everybody's born in this world and they're just, you know, they're, they're trying their best to, you know, make it, you know, and it's like, it's getting harder for people. And, you know, now you tell them, you offer them hope, you're like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna allow you to aspire, you know, you're downtrodden and help you get up and you get into power. And then, and then they hear, they hear the opposite. They hear like, actually, we're just gonna create, we're gonna replace you.
4:01:12We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna create an open labor market. Cause, you know, we want, and we're not talking about like, you know, they were like, oh yeah, we need to, we need, America needs the top talent to go to the stars. Let's be realistic here, right? H1B. That's not, like most of the tech that's being made in Silicon Valley is dog shit. You know, like JavaScript, web shit, apps. It's not complicated. It's not, it's not like Uber, whoa, oh geez, rocket science, ooh, nice. It's just somebody making an app and it's a shitty app.
4:01:52And it crashes and it's laggy. It's low tech. Anybody can learn that. It's not high tech, but they're just like, oh yeah, we're gonna outsource that cause it's cheap. You know, you already got rid of, you got rid of your local industry. You gave it to China. So now there's no effort. There's no, people had dignity before they could work in a factory. So you got rid of that. Fine. Whatever. You know, now you've got tech. Now you're telling people you can get rid of that as well.
4:02:21You know, like, you know, understandably, like people are upset and they're like, oh yeah, we just got used to get into part. Of course. That's what happened. That's what they, that's what they're going to do. Right. But how are they going to maintain that? Like, if you look at these tech elites, they're talking about, they're like, we have to build, you know, a big civilization that can do like huge mega projects, like building rockets to go to the stars and stuff. You know, we need to have people like live forever and we need to do eugenics and cryptocurrency and stuff like that.
4:03:00Look, bro, I love all that shit. That's why I'm, that's why I'm into tech, you know, but you can understand that the normal working class dude, he doesn't give a shit about living forever. He wants a trad waifu. He wants his kids to grow up. You know, he wants to live in a, you know, he wants to have a job. You know, he doesn't, he doesn't care about any of that. How's that going to impact him personally? So when you're telling him like, Oh yeah, actually, it's just going to be, America's going to maintain like a global empire because that's how it's going to be able to source all this labor from across the world.
4:03:33You know, to be able to build all this massive industry is still going to need all that oil from the Middle East. It's going to be needed to be involved in all those wars and everything. And we're just going to like have this like massive open market where, you know, if you're not willing to like, you know, compete, you know, with like, you know, the, every, the entire world, then, you know, tough luck buddy is going to have to disappear. So, you know, it's two fundamentally different visions there at the base of it.
4:04:10So is America going to give up its empire? Because imagine if America was, you know, Switzerland, people know Switzerland is like, Switzerland's a direct democracy. It's an ethnostate pretty much. I mean, they're changing that now because globalists have taken, like trying to take it over, but you know, Switzerland's for Swiss people and they look after it really well here. Everybody's really wealthy. That's why I said you went like 200 euros for lychees. Yeah, it's, I'm fucking dying here from the cost of living expense. That's what it's like in Switzerland.
4:04:47They drain the fuck out of you. I'm foreigner, you know, I'm paying like, I'm paying the taxes and stuff, but you know, Swiss people, they are so comfy. They have it really good here. It's like, they're wealthy. They're well off. They're looked after. They're well educated. They have a good standard of living. So, you know, America, if it focused on itself, it could be a very wealthy nation. It would be perfectly secure because not, who the fuck is going to go to America? It's an island in the middle of the ocean.
4:05:19Nobody's going to touch it. It's like, nobody can touch it. And it's got the fucking rockets and shit. It can bomb, it can just sit there and bomb everyone. Nobody can touch it. But it would have to focus on itself, you know, invest in America, invest in, and it, maybe it couldn't afford to have like all these lithium mines and like stuff in the Congo and like, you know, oil from the Middle East so they can do like, you know, people live to 500 and, you know, like we've got like mother ships being built in low Earth orbit and, you know, you know, all this, you know, like cryptocurrency stuff and everything going on, you know, like quantum computers, you know, AI agents on the blockchain.
4:06:08But is that, that's not what normal people want really. So, yeah, America is very much going to continue its like global adventures. So, you know, what's the basis of that CIA military industrial complex power? It's global finance. It's the dollar, you know, you already see some of these tech accelerationists. They're like against the Bitcoin strategic reserve because they're like, this would actually be a threat to the dollar itself. And we need to maintain dollar preeminency. You know, I'm one of those dudes who's like, I'm like, abolish the Fed, you know, abolish like global finance, free markets.
4:06:52You know, I want like free market capitalism across the world, you know, agorism, whatever. But America, if they had that, you know, if they had like free fair markets that was not backed by military force. If the dollar was undermined, they would not be able to maintain that, like, you know, that thing that they're building. So it's against their interests. You know, obviously they see that cryptocurrency is the future, they want to invest in cryptocurrency. Are they going to allow agorist finance to take off? Are they going to allow, you know, Bitcoin mixers?
4:07:35Are they going to legalize, you know, like mixing technology? Probably not. Like it's probably a bit too radical for them. And let's say crypto did start to take off and did start to like be a, be an equalizer across the world. I mean, look at China now, right? America was all about free markets until China came along. And now China's here, it's talking about protectionism. It's like, we've got to close off our markets to China.
4:08:04We've got to put tariffs because they're, you know, they're taking advantage of us. China's not free market. You know, we are free market. And so that's unfair. So, okay. So you actually don't believe in free markets, do you? If you're putting, if you're putting tariffs like that, you know, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. They probably should have tariffs. You know, you should probably keep it. I mean, it depends what you're trying to make, you know, if you're trying to rule the world, you know, and you're telling other countries, look, you need to open up your economy to allow McDonald's and our mega corporations to come in and harvest.
4:08:42Your local resources, then it's a bit rich to turn around and go, actually, we're going to close off our markets to you. So that's, you know, obviously, when they are running the show, they're going to want to have everything open, you know, but in Switzerland, they have a strict control over what comes in and out economically. And so you're forced to consume from within Switzerland. Does that mean that Switzerland is the most efficient economy that it could be? No, it doesn't. I mean, we all know that having those kind of tariffs means that, but what it does mean is that Swiss is able to maintain its sovereignty and its autonomy.
4:09:25Why? Because it has local food production. If Switzerland ever went to war with Europe, not saying it would, but if it had that possibility, then, you know, imagine you've got your fortress and your fortress is under attack, but you're self-sufficient. You know, you're not dependent on goods coming in from outside. You are perfectly good where you are. You can defend your turf from an invader. That's the only reason that Switzerland is able to have, like, cryptocurrency and, like, free finance and, you know, black market money coming here.
4:10:02And all that stuff that they do is because they have their sovereignty and the force of arms to protect it from the EU communist globalists that want to take over. And they're trying, they're really trying their best to do that to Switzerland. You know, Switzerland's slowly losing. It's being forced to kneel. A few years ago, I had to implement the banking secrecy acts, you know, so, you know, there's only so much they can do. Now Switzerland's trying to pivot to cryptocurrency. They've been trying to do it for years before America has, because they recognize it's the future, you know.
4:10:37So there's a lot of crypto projects in Switzerland. But now maybe, you know, America might become the next standard. America's very attractive for a lot of projects, because, you know, America is a single, unified market. They speak a single language, English, which is lingua franca. They have a lot of influence in the world. And if it's like offering, you know, haven for cryptocurrency, you know, then it could be a very attractive place for many cryptocurrency companies. They might move away from Switzerland back to the US. There's many companies here who were US formerly, and they've moved here, you know.
4:11:21So let's see where that goes. But it is, it does. I mean, look, as you said, like, you know, why am I in Switzerland? I said, because of the law, right? The law is putting people in jail. So we're always using the law to like, try and defend ourselves. And there's different, like, you know, when there was Operation Choke Point by the SEC, they were really heavily going after, like, all of our means of, you know, like, for example, you're launching crypto projects, and you have a token.
4:11:57And, you know, I don't know, you need to raise money, or you need to do a sale. And there's all these laws and different jurisdictions you can do it in, and maybe do it in one jurisdiction, it has, you know, these things. And so maybe you might, you know, send it to another company in another jurisdiction and do it, do something else there. And, you know, do this, whatever. And maybe you want it, you want some funds in this other jurisdiction, because you want it in this bank account, or blah, blah, there's all this stuff going on, you know, the lawyers deal with.
4:12:26And Operation Choke Point, the SEC was heavily going after that. And the lawyers kept inventing new strategies, new tactics to get around that. And the SEC was, like, really investing a lot of resources to try and shut that down, to try and make our lives really difficult. We were really persecuted a lot. Now with the US, that pressure has, like, eased up quite a lot, you know, so it, like, gives a lot more breathing room for people to build stuff, you know, even privacy projects like ourselves building, you know, I'm not like going, Oh, yeah, the US government, cool man, Donald Trump.
4:13:03I mean, like, you know, it is what it is.
4:13:07Vlad CosteaYeah, there's a lot to unpack there. But it's hard to not be a bit optimistic about the future for mentions that for reasons that you already mentioned. And I actually checked while you're talking, I checked the Dark Forest video game that you mentioned previously in our conversation. It's not working anymore. They seem to be stuck at round five, which has been going on for two years and a half, and they haven't finished. And if you try to enter one of the lobbies, it just doesn't work. So it was ZKGA.ME, a video game that was built on zero knowledge proofs.
4:13:50They had only five rounds from version 0.6 and five previous rounds. And that was it. It was maybe just a small experiment. Something that I do want to ask you, because I also checked, it's called Harry Potter, Obama, Sonic 10, Inu. So that's the name of the coin. And the ticker is actually Bitcoin.
4:14:18Amir TaakiYeah, ticker Bitcoin. That's what they say.
4:14:22Vlad CosteaAnyway, we talked about this one because it's obviously a joke. There's nothing technical behind it. But I was gonna ask you, can you name like five or more if you feel like it? Projects that are new and you find interesting and you follow them and you might buy them. I'm not asking you for your portfolio or something, but just something that you find interesting in the space.
4:14:45Amir TaakiI actually started making a list recently. I've lost that list. Let me see if I still have it somewhere. Let me see.
4:14:57Was it H? It's not this one.
4:15:02It's just let me see. J, G. Nightly rain.
4:15:12I'm not sure where I saved it.
4:15:18Vlad CosteaI'm actually curious how you do your research for this, what you analyze.
4:15:22Amir TaakiYes. I mean, research. That's a fucking, that's a bit of a, I mean, I was trading at one point and I was doing like, you know, methodical research. But, you know, now I'm not really trading to be honest anymore. But I did, I was just recently, I was like, oh, you know, I want to make a list of projects that I think are good. You know, I can't remember what the list was. One of them was THORChain. I thought that was, that's quite good projects. Just, you know, I'm not, you know, I know, what's his name?
4:16:08No, Luke. He's making Serai DEX, you know, so I'm, you know, I'm curious when that comes out. But the thing that I liked about THORChain is they're integrating a lot of projects and, you know, they're just, they're like consistently growing. So I kind of see that they're kind of like, they're quite competent in that, in that regard. So I kind of thought that was cool.
4:16:45Yeah. What's another project? Just trying to find my list because I literally was trying to make a list.
4:16:56It's like one of those things, isn't it?
4:17:00Vlad CosteaI actually got a reply from Roman from Tornado Cash. He seems interested. Maybe I'll get him on the show. So you get a free spoiler. If you have been here for four hours listening, you can actually get a sneak peek into what's going to happen with this show.
4:17:19Amir TaakiSo I have also, you know, you know, these Web3 privacy things.
4:17:33So I've seen that a lot of people are recommending dDocs. Have you heard of that? I haven't tried it yet.
4:17:40Vlad CosteaIt sounds like detox, but trying to get rid of the docs.
4:17:46Amir TaakiYeah, it's like decentralized docs. I think it's ddocs.new.
4:17:53Vlad CosteaIs it docs as in documents or docs as in D-O-X?
4:17:55Amir TaakiNo, documents. ddocs.new. It's like a decentralized, it's like a p2p. I don't know how it works or anything, I'm just saying, but it's like, apparently, it's a p2p encrypted version of, like, Google Docs. I'd need to look. I mean, I opened it, but I never really, I didn't really look deeper into the tech to see how it works. But I met the devs, they seemed nice, you know, they seemed like they had like, you know, good intent.
4:18:29I'm just going through some of these, like Web3 things that people are talking about. You know, there was also Penumbra mainnet launch.
4:18:47Another interesting project for privacy is Railgun, which is kind of like a Tornado Cash, but they don't advertise it as such, but it is a Tornado Cash. I like that they have a command line utility that you can use.
4:19:07Vlad CosteaSo how does it differ from Tornado Cash?
4:19:15Amir TaakiI'm not sure. I don't know how. I think it maybe is just like Tornado Cash. But if you go to the Railgun website.
4:19:26Where is it?
4:19:29Vlad CosteaIt says user compliance tools right on the main page. Tax integrations, viewing keys.
4:19:41Sounds cypherpunk.
4:19:43Amir TaakiIs it the on-chain ZK privacy for Polygon? Oh yeah, user compliance tools. I think they're just, they're very scared aren't they? Talking about privacy pools and tax integration. Oh dear.
4:20:02But yeah, maybe worth looking at. So let's see what else is other people recommending. Oh yeah, well, dDocs is Fileverse. That's what they are.
4:20:29Vlad CosteaInteresting. So Railgun is basically Tornado Cash, but super compliant playing safe.
4:20:37Amir TaakiYeah, exactly.
4:20:42Yeah.
4:20:47Vlad CosteaSo you mentioned THORChain, you mentioned Railgun, you mentioned dDocs.
4:20:54Amir TaakiI tell you a really good project Gnosis.
4:20:58They're not like... It's G-N-O-S-I-S.
4:21:02Vlad CosteaGnosis.
4:21:03Amir TaakiYeah, Gnosis. They're not a very flashy group of people, but I think they basically raised a shitload of money in the ICO era. And they haven't done anything like, I mean, yeah, they've done, they're not like, you know, super cutting edge of technology, but they're really solid. So they've done like, you know, they've done Gnosis multisig. It's called Gnosis Safe. So that's like the best multisig on the exist. They also have Gnosis VPN now. And they also have Gnosis Hashi, which is the bridge that we're looking at for DarkFi.
4:21:55That's like possibly the bridge that we might use. And Hashi is a really interesting, is a trust minimized bridge. So basically whenever you want to bridge funds from one side to the other, instead of using just like one, like kind of thing, use like many different things. There's like redundancy. And they're also talking about using like TEEs for that as well, which is an interesting application of TEE. So I think Gnosis bridges is really interesting. Yeah. And there's also layer zero, which is also bridging solution. So that's pretty interesting.
4:22:42Yeah, I like Gnosis as a project.
4:22:48Vlad CosteaThere's someone in the chat named Random Shiz wants to know your thoughts on taxation. And I guess you already said that you're paying taxes in Switzerland.
4:22:58Amir TaakiI love taxes. I always add a tip when I pay taxes, I pay extra.
4:23:12You know, another interesting project, maybe not crypto, because I'm looking at Pavol Lupták's suggestion on Web3 privacy, GrapheneOS. So I have a Graphene phone. So for people that don't know, you know, the Graphene phone, you have multiple profiles. I don't know if people can really see that. So all the Google Play apps, you can segregate them. You see, I've put them in craps section because I've got social, bank, et cetera. And so you can use that to isolate apps to stop them spying on you.
4:23:55Another interesting app that I used recently was SimpleX. And I noticed that SimpleX, as you run Tor on the backend, I don't think it's P2P, but it's very easy to make an account. You do have this ephemeral identity, but the identity is persistent. So you would have to reroute. It's not like Dark IRC, which is like the identities are completely ephemeral. You would have to regenerate your account, add yourself to new groups, et cetera. That's a downside of SimpleX. I think DarkFi has stronger anonymity than SimpleX even.
4:24:36But it was good. I really liked that they have a command line Tor. NIM VPN and NIM, as I talked about NIM earlier, that's like a real alternative. That's your new alternative to Tor, basically. That's an interesting project. I also have a PinePhone. The PinePhone is a Linux phone, but basically you can change your IMEI code. So if people go on my website, I have a guide on how to do that. That gives you full anonymity when using your phone. So that's really cool.
4:25:12Vlad CosteaOh, this PinePhone looks interesting.
4:25:15Amir TaakiYeah, but it's a Linux phone. So it's like, you know, it...
4:25:20Vlad CosteaHas a keyboard?
4:25:24Amir TaakiNo, it's a phone. It doesn't have a keyboard, but you can get an optional keyboard.
4:25:29Vlad CosteaYeah, yeah. I'm looking at accessories.
4:25:35It looks very hacky.
4:25:37Amir TaakiYeah. I just use it because it's a Linux phone, but also I can, you know, change my IMEI code, which is something that I want to do.
4:25:54Vlad CosteaThis looks like fun. So why would you recommend people to use NIM VPN? Because I did try the beta version of it. It's a bit slower than I would like. Maybe that they have improved it in the meantime. But I guess for most people, the go-to privacy application is the Tor browser. There are all of these onion websites. They can type them in the address bar or bookmark them.
4:26:21Amir TaakiBro, Tor is completely fucking compromised though. I do not trust Tor at all. I already said that, like, you know, they can observe all the traffic within a single country, but like, just fucking look at some of the people that are in Tor, like on the board, on Tor's board is a guy called Rabbi Rob. That's literally his fucking name, Rabbi Rob. This guy runs Team Cymru. Search it. Rabbi Rob. Team C-Y-M-R-U. C-Y-M-R-U. Team Cymru. He runs the majority of Tor nodes on Tor network.
4:27:09It's a fucking NATO consultancy. What the fuck is a NATO consultancy doing, running the majority of Tor nodes on Tor network and sitting on Tor's board, Tor project's board of people, board members. Why is he a member of their board members?
4:27:29That is, you know, when you tell people, they go, oh wow, yeah, but you know, it's open source and you can trust the code. But man, that got as dodgy as fuck.
4:27:48Vlad CosteaOh, this is messed up. I'm actually looking at the page. And you're right. Sina Rabbani, this is the guy.
4:28:02This is fucked up. And I guess the more you look, the more connections you can find.
4:28:08Amir TaakiYeah, so Tor, a lot of these projects, even Signal Messenger, people are like, oh, yeah, well, you know, the Signal Messenger, who's in charge of Signal Messenger? You know, just some deep state woman, you know. Who did she work for before? Who's this? Who's, it's like Meredith something, CO, Signal Messenger. Let's do some internet sleuthing. I mean, before it was Moxie, you know, Matthew Rosenfeld.
4:28:45Vlad CosteaMeredith Whittaker? Meredith Whittaker? Whitaker? I don't know how you pronounce this. Whitaker. With a double T.
4:28:57Amir TaakiSo what's her history?
4:29:03Vlad CosteaSenior advisor.
4:29:06Amir TaakiOpen research group. Federal Trade Commission.
4:29:14She led the walkouts at Google.
4:29:21American Civil Liberties Union. This is all like Soros shit, look. White House, FTC, European Parliament.
4:29:35Vlad CosteaAnd she's the kind of person you would want to have as a spokesperson for something very cypherpunk.
4:29:44Amir TaakiI don't know, man. I would not, if I was trying to, if I was trying to like, you know, the Canadian truckers, imagine if they were using Signal. She'd probably go, oh, they're racist. They need to be shut down. You know, she's probably, she's probably concerned about what's this, what's this thing called?
4:30:12Yeah, so she led the walkout at Google because one of the, you know, people, one of the people, one of the leaders at Google advocated for Donald Trump's war, border war in Mexico. So she probably, she's probably like one of these people that's like, oh, we need to, we need to combat wrong speech. We need to combat misinformation. That's a, that's a red herring. That's why all the dissident groups, they don't go on Signal, they go on Telegram. Even though Telegram's like doxed by the Russians, and probably a lot of these groups infiltrated by Russia.
4:31:00Vlad CosteaIt's fucked up because when you make searches on Telegram, you're gonna find some Russian page. But it's also a very good resource for example, when the Ukraine war started, it was the best place to find genuine pictures of what's happening with the war.
4:31:16Amir TaakiYeah, it's funny because people like, you know, Meredith Whittaker, she does like, you know, like this rebrand as like, you know, like, oh, I'm an activist of privacy and you know, everybody eats the heart. They don't, they don't go like, oh, this is really sus, this woman's connections with the deep state. There's not, you know, who we should have for building like a true, you know, people's movement.
4:31:54Vlad CosteaYeah, that's fucked up. So I guess we should all move to Nim and try to use their product.
4:32:01Amir TaakiI mean, I don't trust Tor really, but Nim, so we want to integrate the SDK.
4:32:10In Nim, but the issue is that there's like a massive, for us, just using the SDK, when we try to integrate in DarkFi, there's this massive attack surface because it pulls in all these dependencies. So you need to clean that shit up, you know. But then yeah, I think we will integrate Nim. We have Tor right now, but Tor, it's like really slow and shitty. So let's see. I mean, because we're using a rewrite of Tor in Rust, which is called RT, A-R-T-I, but it's still quite new.
4:32:55They're doing a really good job, to be honest. I mean, Tor is like fucking ancient, but they're doing a good job. Here's another good project. Radical, I mentioned it earlier, the P2P Git, so R-A-D-I-C-L-E.
4:33:13You know, they recently integrated Tor support.
4:33:18Vlad CosteaNice. I know that Jack Dorsey was looking into ways to build a decentralized GitHub.
4:33:27Amir TaakiOh, yeah. Well, those guys have done it. And the dev is, he's like a good, he's a decent guy. Cloud head.
4:33:39Vlad CosteaSo how does this work, Radical?
4:33:45Amir TaakiSo it's, yeah, it's like, it's just P2P nodes and they share the data. It's like, I think they're using, I don't know if they're using libP2P, but it's got kind of DHT network.
4:34:00So you can use that to do, you know, Git stuff.
4:34:09Vlad CosteaIt's so nice. And there's so much stuff to discover. I guess this is really golden age of privacy stuff and sovereign stuff that you can just run on your machine.
4:34:22Amir TaakiI'm going through this list and to be honest, a lot of this suggestions by people are pretty shitty, pretty crap, but like, you know, I, there are a few good ones, but I mentioned them.
4:34:35Vlad CosteaWait, what list?
4:34:36Amir TaakiOh, the web3 privacy list by people. You know, I've also got like a whole bunch of new suggestions that I've just been opening up in my tab. I'll go through them in a second. But there's like quite a few people talking about zk passport, but fuck passports, man. Fuck the government. I don't know why people are so mentally cut that they're into passports. Oh, I've got to have my passport. You know, why do you want that? Who cares? You're going to, you're going to show your passport when you enter, you know, the land of Silk Road.
4:35:17Have a look.
4:35:18Vlad CosteaBut I also don't like people who are obsessed with building digital identity on public blockchains.
4:35:25Amir TaakiWell, the other day I was, I was like doing a spaces with Harry and he mentioned, you know, an anonymous p2p reputation and I was like, holy shit, that's what is the thing. It's not identity that we need, it's reputation. You know, how do you accumulate tokens in a way that can't be sippled such that you can, you know, you can prove that you have enough reputations to do some action. That's not, that's different from identity. You don't actually need identity. You just need like some kind of p2p reputation system.
4:36:13Vlad CosteaSo are you on the webpage, webfreeprivacy.info?
4:36:18Amir TaakiYeah, I'm actually on their Twitter page. I'm on the media tab and they have all these like projects that have been suggested by people recently. So I'm just, I'm going through the list. There's like loads of them.
4:36:42Vlad CosteaI'm looking at their list of recommendations for VPNs. I see that Nym is here. They also have they have IVPN. I don't know about the other ones.
4:37:00And how does this work? It says there's this boring protocol, a decentralized VPN on Solana. How do you build a VPN on a public blockchain?
4:37:14Amir TaakiI don't know. Could be a scam.
4:37:20Never heard of it.
4:37:21Vlad CosteaIt's listed on their list, listed under list, under documentation, whatever. They have a GitHub repo.
4:37:33Amir TaakiOkay.
4:37:34So.
4:37:36Okay. One of the suggestions was Zashi, which is a mobile wallet for Zcash. So that's quite cool.
4:37:45Vlad CosteaI tried it and it's very nice.
4:37:47Amir TaakiYeah. I think I know a guy, he made a wallet for Zcash. I have it on my phone. Nighthawk. I used that before in the past. That was quite good. Oh yeah. Somebody, so there are, so somebody in our chats asking about I2P and Freenet. So yeah, Freenet, I used that fucking years ago and yeah, it does work. You know, let's see how their rewrite goes. That's interesting. They're rewriting it. But I mean, I think Freenet is for like transferring, it's for like accessing static data. You know, I wouldn't necessarily use it for like a chatty protocol, like a chat app.
4:38:42Although maybe you could. I'm trusting. I've never seen that. So there is, and then I2P is good, but unfortunately they're just, they're really struggling in terms of like, you know, resources. That's the advantage of something like NIM is that NIM actually has a business model behind it. In the case of Tor, when they started it, you know, the US Navy came along and said like, you know, we fund all your stuff, but you just make it a nonprofit. And so that's how Tor become a nonprofit.
4:39:24And, you know, get captured by these NATO guys. Whereas I2P, I've met the lead maintainer for, I think it's the, is it the, is it the Java code I2P? Anyway, I think they were rewriting it in C++. I don't know how that's gone. There's good integration for I2P with Monero, actually. But for DarkFi, we needed something that we could integrate much more easily. That's why Tor has this RT. And I think I2P, it doesn't really have a lot of investment of time into, it's like C++ code.
4:40:11So the main thing is that Java code, which is kind of also not being maintained very well. So that's, you know, why I'm like, okay, Nim is the only alternative right now.
4:40:28Okay. So we looked at, we talked about what, so in terms of wallets as well, I get Zashi wallet, Zcash, you know, as Nighthawk, I've used that before. There's Unstoppable wallet, you know, that the guys that make that they're really solid. I really like them. There's Cake wallet. There's Edge wallet. They're all really good wallets. Edge wallet, I know the guys working on that a very long time. Very good guys. Cake wallet as well. It's Monero focused. You can trade Monero natively inside of it. That's a really big deal, really good feature.
4:41:09You know, that's how I buy Monero. I transfer, I buy Bitcoin in ATM, I transfer it to Cake, I swap it to Monero, you know, that's a good thing. Okay. So now I'm looking at some of these suggestions by Web Free Privacy. So one of them is Rarimo, R-A-R-I-M-O. It says future of identity is censorship, on-chain, permissionless. Okay. And it's backed by a lot of cocksuckers, a lot of trendy cocksuckers in the Ethereum ecosystem. A ZK registry, a registry for abstract statements.
4:41:56Okay. ZK reputation. Is there a single app? Can I use it now? Yes and no. Okay. They mean no. They're like, oh, their main app is ZK Passport, which I said, fuck off. Like we don't need any fucking passports. Rarimo is some ETH hype garbage. That's what it looks like.
4:42:23Vlad CosteaI like your review of it. I was just looking to see who are the backers because you call them trendy cocksuckers. You know, the usual suspects, but I don't see in recent Horowitz.
4:42:38Amir TaakiNo.
4:42:41But I mean, it's just, it's like, you know, they've made this, we have this on DarkFi. This is like, this is not even a thing. Like why do you need to make a project and give it a fancy name? You know, they've just made some thing that the stupid normies in Ethereum think is like a new innovation. It's not like we've got that in, that's really easy to make, but I guess, cause no one has it on ETH. Now they've made it. They're like, oh, it's a ZK registry.
4:43:11You can use it for a permissionless identity purpose. Fine. Like it's for Ethereum people. That's why they think it's cool. But it's not, it's not like a major innovation. It's very basic, but I guess, you know, okay. Another one is a non-cast. Okay. What is a non-cast?
4:43:36A social application, okay. Using zero-knowledge proofs without revealing identity. Okay. Where's the website? Is there a website but a non-cast?
4:43:53Vlad CosteaFeels like 2017 searching for white papers.
4:44:03Do they have a working website? Barely.
4:44:10Amir TaakiI mean, they have something like a Twitter, but everybody's completely anonymous.
4:44:24Vlad CosteaIs this like 4chan?
4:44:29Amir TaakiI mean, it's Ethereum people, so it won't be like 4chan. It will be like nice and friendly.
4:44:36Vlad CosteaSo Reddit?
4:44:38Amir TaakiYeah. You know, something more like, yeah, more Reddit vibes.
4:44:47Yeah. Hyperliquid. I'm just trying to understand, like, because, you know, we have an anonymous chat as well. But the reason people go on our non-chat is because, you know, stuff is happening there. We've got a team that, you know, is learning, a team of like people learning dev. We've got people studying philosophy. We've got people sharing tools. We've got a fucking, we've got traders on there. You know, I even heard a guy tell, he said that he's making, he's making phones, anonymous phones with the dark IRC to sell to Russians.
4:45:28You know, I have no involvement in that, but he told me, and I was like, well, you know, fair play. That's a fairly decent business model, I guess. You know, we're developing dark file on there. So it's like mission oriented, mission focused. That's why people are on there, even though there are none, they've got something binding them together, you know? So here on a non-cast, people are posting cute bunny pictures and talking about random things, like on Twitter. But on Twitter, the reason why people are on Twitter is because they're trying to get, what's it called, rap, you know, what's it called?
4:46:07That's why people write in this like double space, you know, way to get boosted by the algo, but here they're doing it for free. So why would you do it? I guess because people, but there's literally one post that says op cat. So, okay, if I post on here, do I get money? I guess that's why I get these anonymous tokens. So what's the incentive for me to donate to people's posts? Is it just because I like the posts or is it posts that get visibility? But if it's just posts that get visibility, how do you stop people, you know, harvesting that to get money?
4:46:51If the tokens get valuable, that's what people would do. Let's look at some of the posts. It'd be cool if I could screencast, but my fucking drivers are buggy as fuck and I need to upgrade. I will do that in the future. MAGA tech versus MAGA racist versus maga crypto versus maga church versus maga commies versus maga porn stars. Yeah, I already lost interest. I'm not going to learn anything from that. Okay.
4:47:22This reminds me of Nostr. All the Bitcoin maxes are like, oh yeah, Nostr. I'm like, well, it's not anonymous. It's not P2P. It's just federated. So, and I go on Nostr and it's just, it's full of, full of spam, just complete garbage. I'm like, well, what? And it's just laser-eyed Bitcoin maxes, you know, like I'm laser maxing. Oh yeah, I'm hardcore. It's like, no, you're a fucking, you're worse. Like, I see you in real life and you're like, you're just like a midget and you're an alcoholic.
4:47:58You're no funny story. There is, you know, Harry, he moved into, he moved into Switzerland here and he had an apartment and he moved in, when he moved in, the apartment came with a Bitcoin maxi. On the sofa, but the Bitcoin maxi was meant to pay half the rent. And it was, he was like a real Bitcoin maxi. And he would like, he'd like, when you run, when you're, we were just me and Harry talking about the crypto ecosystem. He didn't understand half of it. And he'd get angry and he'd start going, yeah, it's called clout.
4:48:38He'd start going, he'd start going, oh shit, coins. Like that. It'd get red in the face. He'd get angry. You could see it get really angry.
4:48:50And, and he'd be like, just, he'd just be walking, he'd just be drinking all day. And he never actually built anything. He would never be programming. He'd be like, well, what are you working on? And he was like, oh yeah, be your own bank. And he'd just be drinking beers. And it turned out he was massively in debt. He has like debts. He got kicked out of the canton. But he never paid any rent. And he was, he was sleeping on Harry's sofa for six months. And Harry was like, didn't want to evict him because he had nowhere to go.
4:49:26He was homeless. But he was going to conferences, like in France and in other countries, like, you know, in conferences, talking about how Bitcoin is the future of finance. And it's like, bro, this guy's broke. I don't think he should be giving financial advice to anybody. He's like sleep. He's telling, talking to people about shitcoinery, a Bitcoin conference. He lives on the sofa of a shitcoin, a guy who has a shitcoin company, AKA Harry Nim. So it's like, whatever I, whatever I see, like Bitcoin maxes, that's what I think of.
4:50:06It's just like homeless, broke, alcoholics, you know? So anyway, I don't know why I just randomly went, oh yeah, because I was talking about Nostr and all the LARPing, of being a big man on Nostr. Cause that's, I went on there. I was like, well, this is really boring. I don't want to read about, I don't want to read about Bitcoin maximalism. I want to know what's going on in the world. It's like, I remember years ago when I was really young, I learned to speak Esperanto because, you know, I was like so idealistic.
4:50:39Every, anything that would be like, had a vague intention of making the world better, I'd invest in that. I mean, we all were, that's why we got into Bitcoin. Like look at Luke Jr. Everybody, everybody likes to hate on Luke Jr. Now, cause he's like, you know, he's, he's wacky as hell. But he's, you know, he's really defended the values of Bitcoin as he sees, he's 100% authentic. Anyway, back in the day, he was really into what's called the total number system. Have you ever heard of that?
4:51:16Vlad CosteaI know he has his own system, the Tonal Bitcoin.
4:51:20Amir TaakiYeah, the Tonal Bitcoin. And he was, he tried to chill me on that a few times. He was like, this is a much better number system than decimal numbers. Amir, you should use these tonal numbers. They increase a natural frequency. But anyway, Esperanto, I learned Esperanto because I was like, oh, if everybody speaks it, the world would be a fair place. There's some good arguments about Esperanto, but I won't get into them because it's not about Esperanto right now. But anyway, I invested quite a bit of time.
4:51:54I learned that language. I hung out in the communities. But when I was in Esperanto communities, you know, what did they talk about in Esperanto? They talked about Esperanto. And I was like, well, you know, I'd like to talk about other things. I didn't come into this community just to talk about Esperanto all the time. I want to talk about the world, about science and stuff. So I kind of felt like that. I was like, okay, it's just about Bitcoin maximalism, you know, Bitcoin. We should stop calling it Bitcoin maximalism.
4:52:26We should call it Bitcoin life stylism. You know, it's like lifestyle anarchism, which is like, you're not actually changing the world. You're just like living a trend, like a subculture. You know, you've got your NODL, your N-O-D-L, your little node running the lightning. You know, you've got all the little icons on your Twitter profile. You've got like a laser thing. You've got like a, you know, like leftists. Have you ever seen like lefty activists? They have all these like badges and it's got all the cool like leftist causes on there.
4:53:01And like the more badges you have, the more you like, you meet someone else who's in that subculture. You're like, whoa, you're also into the same causes I am. You're a comrade, you know. It's not any real ideology. It's just like bonding over a subculture. That's the Bitcoin maximalism thing. That's why it's boring because it's just fake. It's just like little badges that you attach. This is what Ted Kaczynski said in his book. You know, I know a lot of you guys don't like Ted Kaczynski, but you have to read his book, Anti-Tech Revolution, because he is really smart.
4:53:35Whether you think he's batshit insane or not, he is really smart. The book's like an instruction manual on making a revolution. And in the book, one of the things he says is that when you have revolution, there will be these type of people. And he gives the example of like leftist persuasion where, you know, they come in to your cause and they like try and attach their indiscriminate causes to it. And so he gave the example of what happened to the environmental movement because he's like a radical ecologist, right?
4:54:14He was like, I'm going to bomb everyone that's against technology, you know, which, you know, obviously I'm not into that. Otherwise, I'd be Ted Kaczynski. You know, you see guys that got psy-oped by that, like Luke Smith, you know, he fell for the, he fell for the Ted, because he fell for the memes of 4chan, like unironically. But anyway, he says, he gives the example of ecological movement where he said, you know, originally it was just about ecology, but then all these like people started going in and they're like, oh, you know, maybe we should make it about gays and trannies.
4:54:53Oh, maybe we should make it about homelessness. And they like add like all these other causes to it. And it no longer becomes about the ecological movement and it becomes a subculture. And that's when it kind of loses power to actually like change things, which originally was like, we're going to do, you know, ecological stuff. So there's, yeah, you know, I mean, there's a guy here saying, you know, in defense of Nostr, you can curate your feed. I mean, yeah, but the problem with Nostr, my problem with these technologies, Mr.
4:55:34Solarpunk, is that they're just a tiny bit better. And to be honest, is it really better than Twitter? Like when you use it, is it really better? But okay, let's say it's like better in a values assessment. Like, I mean, because, you know, when I talk to devs who are building on Bitcoin, they're like, well, Bitcoin's the most liquid, it's got the most amount of money in there, blah, blah. That's why I build on Bitcoin as opposed to building on here. Okay, that's a valid argument. You know, yes, there is a switching cost.
4:56:11And if you're switching from one thing to another thing, there's a barrier, right? Because, you know, like, why should I use this other platform? All of my contacts are on this platform, you know, like social media, you know, for example, Signal, et cetera. So your platform that you're offering has to not just be a little bit better to convince everybody to drop what they're doing in this other place, to change everything and to move over, has to be much better. It has to be really much better.
4:56:44Nostr, I'm not even sure it's better than Twitter. But okay, let's say it is better because you can curate your feed. I don't think it offers, it's not offering real, it's not offering like, well, let's say we really want to do radical stuff. We want to free Assange from prison by all means necessary. And you start writing your plans on Nostr, they're going to fucking grab you and put you in jail. You ain't going to be freeing shit. So like, what's the point? What's the point of advocating for that?
4:57:15You know, it probably just, it just means, it just means Bitcoin devs are incompetent. They're not able, they haven't been able to, the maximum they've been able to do is Nostr. That's it. And like, I mean, I'll tell you, like, what we're doing in Dark IRC, why is this different? Well. We don't, I mean, we don't have it integrated yet, but we have rate limit nullifiers. What's that mean? So, okay, your network is fully p2p and anonymous. How do you stop people spamming your network? You have rate limit nullifiers.
4:57:49What's that mean? It means, okay, when your network is under heavy traffic, let's say you're staking in a key pair to poke every epoch, which, like, let's say it's every, you know, five seconds or so. When you send a message, you have to send this zk proof, which is the rate limit nullifier. And the rate limit nullifier means if you try to spam the network, so in one epoch you post two messages, people can calculate your private key, de-anonymize you, and slash your key pair, which is a disincentive to spam the network.
4:58:26You own, and there's not something that, like, you have to worry about as a user, but I mean, if your, like, client or your wallet was malicious in the sense that, like, somebody hacked it to try and spam the network, so then the network would be able to punish you for spamming. So that's, like, a p2p, you know, anonymous technique that we have in DarkFi. Rate limit, we haven't implemented it. We haven't integrated it in our chat yet, but we will at some point. It's quite easy when we want to, you know, we've just got all this other stuff, shipping mainnet, for example, right now.
4:59:02You know, but that's a feature there, like, why doesn't Nostr have that? Why isn't Nostr really p2p, not fake p2p, which is federated? In Nostr's even actually worse than Mastodon and these woke platforms that have censorship. Why? In Nostr, if your node goes down, you lose the messages, so it's not even properly federated. Then, also, what else do we need in our p2p chat? We need the ability, people want moderation, you know, like, you know, if some guy, we've had this in the DarkFi Telegram chat originally.
4:59:44We said, like, look, we are an uncensored project. We don't believe in censorship, so it's free speech zone, 100% free speech. You know, we got some dude, and, you know, he started talking about the Jews, and we were like, okay, whatever, like, you know, that's your opinion. You're free to your own opinion. We don't care about people's political opinions. Say whatever the fuck you want, like, pro-Israel, anti-Jew, you know, whatever, communism, you know, tranny stuff, like, we don't care. Anyway, but the guy would not shut the fuck up.
5:00:23He just kept going on and on and on, flooding the channel, like it was his fucking blog, and we're like, bro, this is DarkFi channel. It's meant to onboard people into DarkFi ecosystem. It's not your blog. There's over 2,000 people here that you keep spamming with your Jew stuff, and he's, and so then we were made a compromise, and so then we were like, oh yeah, and you know, because Telegram doesn't have the ability to mute people, so even if I block someone, if I'm in a channel, I still get notified when that guy's posting, and so then we had to be like, okay, well, you know, we have to, we didn't actually end up banning him.
5:01:06We just threatened to ban him. We're like, bro, shut the fuck up, or we will ban you know, and then he did, he did go quiet for a while, and then he started again at some point, and then we warned him again, and then he just, he got upset, and I was like, well, bro, why didn't you join Dark IRC? But it's funny, because all the mid, all those midwits, they don't want to join Dark IRC. They just want to spam the Telegram.
5:01:33But anyway, we've got active buzzing community. It's hardcore. It's the best community on Telegram, on the Dark IRC. I mean, you know, it's like, that's where the real people, the real Gs are, you know, and there's some real Gs on there, but I know, I'd like, you know, there's people like, who are like international OTC networks and doing mad stuff, but anyway, so, you know, what do you need in your chat? You need the ability to add filters when there's messages that have certain keywords or certain patterns, you know, you want to fill that shit, like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm in a dev channel, the dev channel, any word that has the word, you know, Jews, probably some mentally ill conspiracy guy come in there, and he's spamming the dev channel, you know, is not the right place to be, just go somewhere else, you know, stop shitting up this channel.
5:02:33This channel have a specific function, you know, we're trying to ship the text so that you can, you know, talk about your political opinions freely. So, but then, you know, what about, so that's one thing, adding filters, optional moderation. So, you know, you're in a channel, somebody starts, you know, like now we just had in DarkFi Telegram as well, a guy, he literally is writing blog posts, like multi-page blog posts about the libertarian movement in the US and like how free state projects is infiltrated, and he's like, bro, just post it on your blog and give us a link, and we, and people told him like, bro, it's DarkFi channel, shut the fuck up, and he just would not shut the fuck up, and he got, we had to ban him, you know, he's like, I hate it's just because we don't have the proper moderation tools on Telegram.
5:03:33Ideally, we wouldn't have to do that, but, you know, if we had optional moderation, the mod can just tag it with a tag, and it goes like, you know, plus philosophy. If you're subbed to the philosophy stuff, you see it in the philosophy stuff, you know, if you're in the dev channel, you see it in the dev channel, so it's just like moving a post from one channel to another channel, you know, so, you know, we need, with those features, you can have fully p2p anonymous spam resistant chat, where the information is like, you know, everybody's completely anonymous, they have unlinkability, you know, you could even have channels where only certain key, only people who possess certain keys are allowed to post there, everybody can read, but only certain people can post there, you know, stuff like that.
5:04:26There's loads of different strategies you can use, so if we're going to start building stuff like, let's be inventive, let's say you build stuff that's original and new, but like, okay, I'm looking at a non-cast, it just looks like Twitter, but why are you trying to build Twitter? People aren't building shit on Twitter, they're just talking rubbish, they're trying to just get followers, you know, but okay, like, I'm looking at it, you haven't curated much in terms of content here that's like informational, so similar to Nosta, you know, and I'm not, I mean, I guess I would, maybe I'm wrong, you know, I need to look into it, there's not much information on the page about the project itself, like, I want to like read more, you know, I want to see how is it novel technologically.
5:05:11Okay, so I looked at a non-cast, which is a lot of people's had in their list, Predicate, Ethereum, Docs, Predicate, so a network for simplifying transaction Predicates. Okay, this looks like a technical project, could be interesting, Predicate.io.
5:05:42Vlad CosteaYeah, so ironically, Amir, you do have some questions on Nostr. I posted about this interview and some people ask questions. Ah, nice.
5:05:54What's the questions? There's Alex Anarco and he says, what distro and desktop environments is Amir using?
5:06:07Amir TaakiOkay, I'm using Void Linux because I'm really into minimal Linuxes, but I really don't like System D and, you know, people go, oh, but System D, it's like more convenient to use, but it's not Linux and this is not like a discussion about your convenience, this is a discussion about like your power as a user and the Linux philosophy and so on. So, you know, System D, it's garbage, it's just, it's like even made by Leonard Pottering, who now works for Microsoft, turns out he was an agent all along.
5:06:48But, okay, I wanted something that was like Arch Linux, I use Arch by the way, I mean, I do have a Manjaro laptop over there, but I wanted something that was like Arch Linux, but without System D, so Artix is one possibility, but I started using Void Linux because I actually really like the package manager, XBPS, because it's just nice. I really, I think Pac-Man and the AURs are kind of shitty, to be honest. A lot of the packages are quite crap. The Void Linux, it has everything, but I don't think, I think it's very rare I've wanted to install something that wasn't there.
5:07:35Recently, you know, I decided to go back to using Gentoo again. So I installed Gentoo on my laptop. Big mistake. Damn. That was awful experience. I like, firstly, I wanted to install LibreWolf. And then I had to like, because you know, Gentoo, it's like everything's compiled from scratch. So it had to compile, like, you know, I don't know, hundreds of packages. And it just, it would like, one of the packages would just file halfway and I'd have to debug it and then run it all from scratch from the beginning.
5:08:17And just kept doing that and posting on the GitHub to get it working. And then, you know, and then I had wanted to install SageMath, which took fucking 600 packages and some weird Gentoo overlays and stuff that I had to add. And I just felt like my system was being polluted by like random packages that I just could not keep track of ever. And it was just crazy. And I did all that. And then one of my devs was like, oh, actually, you know, we don't actually, those things like LibreWolf and Sage, we don't actually like install them on our system.
5:08:59We just like, we run them inside of like, you know, container. They're not even like, they're not even installing like the database. They just use the base system of Gentoo, which I got to be honest, I really love the use flags in Gentoo. It's got this really cool system where, you know, when you install your Linux system, you install these like packages. So for example, I don't know what you'd like, what would I like, let's say install WeeChat. When I install WeeChat in Gentoo, you go on the Gentoo Wiki, which the Gentoo Wiki is fucking amazing.
5:09:43It's the best resource, the best Linux resource in the world. You search like Gentoo Wiki, and then any topic, and it will have fucking everything there. And it was massive page full of like, wow, so good. So for example, WeChat, you go on the WeChat, or you type in your terminal, I think it's a merge-k WeChat, and it will show you the list of all the use flags, and it will have all these features that will be disabled by default in WeChat. But you can, you can like add this in your use flags, and then when you install WeChat, it will add these optional features.
5:10:25So for example, I might want the Python for Python plugins, but I don't want the like Lua and Ruby and whatever else, because I just use Python plugins. So I was like, that's an amazing feature, and you can even, and for example, I don't use X, I'm using Wayland, right? But my devs, they make fun of me for that. They think Wayland's poo. I like Wayland, I think Linux needs to evolve. I mean, I've got some critiques of Wayland. But anyway, I was using, so I put in my use flags, minus X, because it's like everything that is gonna have X involved, just take that shit out, I don't need it.
5:11:03And I have Wayland, plus Wayland, so then it's like, oh, if a package, have Wayland support, add the Wayland support, because I use Wayland. You know, just things like that. So I was able, you're able to fine-tune your system, and it gets even better than that, because your CPU, your hardware, you know, it has specific features, which, when a program that you install on your computer, that program is just, it's compiled, you know, to work on a wide variety of machines. And so it probably might not, you know, compile in that CPU-specific feature or architecture into the program.
5:11:43But in Gentoo, I can actually specify all my CPU features, all my hardware, so I get the full optimization, full power of my hardware. And I was like, that is really fucking dope, actually. That is a really cool system. If I had something which was like Gentoo for the base layer system, but Void Linux for all the, like, applications, like SageMath, anything else I run, that's really cool. I really like that. Like, some mix of, you know, compiled and binary system. In terms of my window manager, I'm using DWL, which is like a minimalistic window manager, like DWM.
5:12:28But for Wayland, you know, I think, I like, I'm really into, like, this Linux renaissance that's going on, where everybody's, like, rethinking, like, fundamentally what Linux is about. So I use, I use PipeWire, I don't use Pulse Audio. I actually do use PipeWire. So, for example, you know, when I'm here, if I'm, for example, with my girlfriend watching a movie, you know, maybe I'm, afterwards, you know, when we've finished eating the main meal, when we're eating the fruits and the chocolates, or just the chocolates, and drinking tea, she will want to keep watching the movie, but I just want to play video games.
5:13:16So I put in my bone-conducting headphones, which allows me to listen to the movie at the same time, but also hear the audio from the video games. And in my computer, in PipeWire, I open QPWgraph, and it's on the same computer with multiple monitors. So I just, I open it, and I have the video game running, and I reroute the audio from the video games to my headphones, and I put the, and I leave the other audio for the movie going through the speakers. And so I'm playing the video game, watching the movie at the same time.
5:13:55Vlad CosteaWait, what games do you play?
5:13:57Amir TaakiI've got a PlayStation 3 emulator on my desktop, RPC-S3, and I just completed Tomb Raider, and I really like Metal Gear Solid, and I like Wipeout, and now I'm playing Deus Ex Human Revolution. But I play all the games on the hardest mode, and Deus Ex is fucking hard as fuck, and I'm stuck on the boss battle, and I've just kind of, just kind of given up at this point. I just like, it's too hard that, like, now I've just got bored of it. I'm like, oh, well, fuck you too, Deus Ex.
5:14:46But Tomb Raider, it's just, it's just so cinematic, I got really into it. But yeah, you know, don't play video games, waste the time. But another thing that's cool with PipeWire... It's better than watching movies. Well, I watch movies and I eat my dinner at the same time, you know, so. But, yeah, you know, multitasking. But, so for example, another thing that's cool with PipeWire is I can do like a Twitter Spaces, and I can route the audio from my desktop. I can make a fake microphone device, and that's the microphone device that my browser uses in Twitter.
5:15:32And I can route the audio from my, from the output of my computer into my speakers and into the microphone that the browser gives. And I can get my microphone output into that as well. So I can play music and people can hear it at the same time on the Twitter X Spaces, you know. And I could even put filters in there. I can like mask my voice if I wanted to and do stuff like that. So that's pretty, that's pretty cool that you can do that, you know, or you can even, you can even route that stuff into OBS Studio and then you can write out of OBS Studio into other places.
5:16:12So that's, PipeWire is really cool, you know. Wayland, I like how minimalist it is, but they did get that by just ripping out like a bunch of shit from X, like just deleting X stuff, you know. So, the other day in, you know, in my app that I'm making now, I can show this app that I'm developing. Oops, fuck. Just knocked this fucking...
5:16:43Vlad CosteaYeah, your video is gone. But yeah, it was fine.
5:16:49Amir TaakiOh yeah, but now it's no longer the same, is it? I was going to show this app I was making just when I was going to show the app. I believe that. Anyway, I guess that's for next time, you know. What do you say? Rock hop time. Well...
5:17:12Vlad CosteaIt's almost midnight here, but I'm super excited and honored to have spoken for such a long time to pick your brain on so many issues. Like you seem to be doing a lot.
5:17:21Amir TaakiHonestly, I thought you would get bored at some point and you'd tell me it's time to stop, you know.
5:17:26Vlad CosteaNo, I would never do that to you. Okay, well don't be embarrassed to. No, it's not just because it's about yourself. I feel like the knowledge that you shared is going to be useful to someone listening. And I don't have a format. I don't tell people, you know... In one hour and 30 minutes, let's stop. This is the beauty of internet content. You can go for as long as you can, I guess, have storage for your files.
5:17:51Amir TaakiThe podcasts are just getting longer and longer these days, aren't they?
5:17:57Vlad CosteaI guess it's demanding, but with AI, you can actually skip to the parts. I think, so I've seen an Apple podcast, something incredible. You can just search for a keyword and it automatically gets you to that part. It's really beautiful. You can just search for what you find interesting in an episode.
5:18:17Amir TaakiI guess at some point we would just be like streaming our lives 24-7 and generating content.
5:18:27Vlad CosteaI don't think I would enjoy that sort of life, but it's a lot of fun.
5:18:34Amir TaakiIt's a different webcam, but that's the integrated one.
5:18:37Vlad CosteaI do have a lot of respect for your work and I'm happy that you're excited. Let me end this with a question from Ernst Heft on Nostr. Oh, actually I have to unlock again. He says, is there any chance it will make you laugh? Possibly. I don't know. Is there any chance that Amir... Yeah, go on. I'm listening. Okay. Is there any chance that Amir, as an advocate for privacy, channel his work to Bitcoin instead of his own project? We need more privacy on Bitcoin and he has admirable skills.
5:19:15Does he think that the early days spirit of Bitcoin is already lost? What are the chances of Bitcoin success in terms of freedom money? Does a freedom fighter in 20 years still have the chance to transact Bitcoin instantly and privately? Or do we live in a world where miners only mine identified addresses and lightning nodes and other layers are also fully registered?
5:19:39Amir TaakiI mean, I already said what needs to happen in Bitcoin to fix it.
5:19:46Vlad CosteaNo, but what would it take for you to put all of your time and energy into Bitcoin? I think that's the core of the question.
5:19:51Amir TaakiIf they fix the governance, if they made like a neutral standards organization which is responsible for developing the Bitcoin spec and the Bitcoin spec is what Bitcoin is, not the Bitcoin Core software. If the Bitcoin Core software, if, you know, the namespace on GitHub slash Bitcoin and other places was retired as like, you know, no project is official Bitcoin anymore, that was closed down. And then it was just, you know, spun up elsewhere by independent teams and there's no statement about which is official Bitcoin. The market decide, then, you know, that's a Bitcoin that I think has a future because that's a free market Bitcoin.
5:20:41That's a Bitcoin where teams can compete. Right now, if I want to go and I want to be a part of Bitcoin, you know, I have to go and suck up to the Bitcoin Core people and hope that they see my point of view and allow me to get my code in there, which is not a technical work. I want to work on technology. I know I'm very capable. I want to, you know, work where I'm not limited by other people with their small minds. You know, cypherpunks write code.
5:21:15I want to show people what I'm talking about. Because if I try to do this on Bitcoin, right, I'm going to go, oh, we need this on Bitcoin, blah, blah. I'm going to just be, I'm going to be really fighting against, you know, a bunch of dudes and they make me go gray and they get gray hair. I'm not going to end up doing much technology. So, you know, but as I said, like if the L2s on Bitcoin become a thing and they take off, maybe DarkFi will be a Bitcoin L2, let's see, you know.
5:21:46We're like of the opinion, just, you know, we see where the market goes, you know.
5:21:56Vlad CosteaAlso, I forgot to tell you about this and it feels weird that I finally do it. Did you take a look at the Privacy magazine?
5:22:06Amir TaakiYeah, yeah, I've got it upstairs in my library.
5:22:10Vlad CosteaI feel a bit sad that you were not able to write an article for it. I was hoping that there's going to be something about DarkFi, but maybe I'll do another one next year. I'm happy that this was downloaded like 3,000 or 4,000 times digitally. And I've also shipped like 100 of these worldwide and I still have like 50 of them. So if you want one, hit me up. There is an auction. Buy Bloods magazine. Go to XMR Bazaar if you want to use Monero for it.
5:22:43Otherwise, just send me a DM and we'll find a way. Use the PO box. I don't want to know where you live. I don't care.
5:22:53Amir TaakiYeah, nice. It's been a pleasure.
5:22:57Vlad CosteaAmir, I remember the first time we did an interview in Majorca. You were in a hurry. I could only get 30 minutes. And then we had a nice conversation about Final Fantasy 7.
5:23:07Amir TaakiOh yeah, I love that game. Best game ever.
5:23:11Vlad CosteaDid you play the Remas... Not Remas, the remake?
5:23:16Amir TaakiI played a demo of it. I liked it. I thought it was good. But my friend, he's just a contrarian about everything. You know, I show him a good movie. You know, I show him a good anime. He will go, oh, that's shit. That looks trash. I was playing this and he was like, this game looks awful. This game looks like a midwits game. I was like, no bro. It's the best game ever. Just be a contrarian. You don't know.
5:23:50Vlad CosteaHe said that about the original or the remake?
5:23:52Amir TaakiNo, the remake.
5:23:54Vlad CosteaYeah, it looks more anime, I guess, than the original.
5:23:59Amir TaakiI don't know. I didn't play it fully. But the original, I remember, wow. So good. That story was intense. Such a good story.
5:24:10Vlad CosteaAlso super confusing.
5:24:12Amir TaakiI'd just tell people, because it's such a vast story. It has so much depth and so much going on. Just even all the side stories and all the characters and everything. You play it for many hours and people just don't get it. It's hard to explain. But anyway, I played also Chrono Trigger a long time ago.
5:24:41Vlad CosteaOh, that one is a much more compact experience. But it's beautiful. I also played Breath of Fire 3. Oh yeah, and Suikoden 2, I think, on the PlayStation.
5:24:57Amir TaakiYeah, and Pico the Onion and all those people.
5:25:02Vlad CosteaI still play RPGs these days. The one that I played today is called Live Alive. It's a remaster of an original that was only released in Japan. What do you think of Nier: Automata? It's pretty good. I just don't have the time for it. I just tried it for a few minutes.
5:25:24Amir TaakiI did hear it was really good, so I was kind of curious. The other one that I heard was good was Metal Gear Solid. Metal Gear Solid is amazing. I love that game anyway.
5:25:40Vlad CosteaYou mean the original or the one...?
5:25:42Amir TaakiNo, the one with that guy with blonde hair. I completed it, but I was a bit disappointed, to be honest.
5:25:52Vlad CosteaI think the second one has the best story. And the third one, I think, is the one that... Is it on PS2 or PS3?
5:26:01Amir TaakiThe PS2 one, yeah. Raiden. Raiden. That one.
5:26:06Vlad CosteaAlso Resident Evil 4. That's a masterpiece.
5:26:10Amir TaakiOh, I started playing now, actually.
5:26:14Vlad CosteaThe original or the remake?
5:26:18Amir TaakiI don't know. There's a remake of Resident Evil 4?
5:26:21Vlad CosteaYeah. It was launched last year, and it's really beautiful.
5:26:25Amir TaakiOh, that's crazy. I don't have a PlayStation. I just have a PC, so I'm using... And I just did, because what happened was I got back from Mexico, and I wanted to get back in my normal routine, so I did this thing where I looped backgrounds, so I stayed up for 30-plus hours, but at the end of it was getting really tough. I downloaded a PlayStation emulator, and I started playing these PlayStation games. On my PC. But the PlayStation 4 emulator, I don't think it works, so that's why I saw the PlayStation 4 Tomb Raider.
5:27:07It looks excellent. So I was like, oh, I'm getting FOMO. I want to play this. And I also want to play Ghost of Tsushima. That looks really cool. I only want to play it on the PC. I don't want to fucking buy a console and pay for games. But on the PC, it's amazing. It's a really good experience. The PlayStation 3 emulator. You just go on the website. You don't even have to, you know, it's just a website. You just download it and it's a bomb and then you play it.
5:27:37It's that easy.
5:27:39Vlad CosteaI mean, you can also do something. So what I play mostly on is the Nintendo Switch because it's portable. I can hold it. I can play in bed or during a random break, even on the toilet. But basically, what I like about it is that you can also mod it. And I'm not going to promote modding or whatever, but you can find sources for that.
5:28:00Amir TaakiOh, cool. I used to do that back in the day, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. I'd get a chip installed and I just had like a big box full of CDs that had like all of the PlayStation 1 games in that we used to just pirate them. And then also we used to get this cartridge that we used to put on the back of the because the old PlayStation 1 had a serial port.
5:28:25Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. The GameShark?
5:28:28Amir TaakiYeah, I feel it was called Exploder even. You could type hex codes in. And I got these magazines full of hex codes and one of them was to get Lara Croft naked. So I spent three days entering with a PlayStation controller entering hex codes on the PlayStation. And, you know, you can't save it or anything like if you switch it off, it like disappears. So I had to leave it running and I had to come the next day and just enter these hex codes. And then when I finally did it didn't work because I'd entered something wrong somewhere.
5:29:07But I didn't know where because it was like pages and pages of hex codes just to change the texture of Lara Croft's body into just like, you know, a peach color. So it looks like she's naked.
5:29:22Vlad CosteaOh, that's insane. That was Tomb Raider 1, I guess.
5:29:26Amir TaakiYeah, I think it was I think I actually did it on I might have been Tomb Raider 2, but yeah, it was like a long ass time ago. So it would be like super like when you look at Tomb Raider 1 and 2, it's just like triangles. It's just like like massive polygons. So it's not like erotic or anything. It's just like, oh, Lara Croft naked. Yeah, let's get Lara Croft naked. Because I thought it was like funny or interesting. I don't know.
5:30:00Vlad CosteaI mean, for your imagination at the time, it was the coolest thing ever.
5:30:07Amir TaakiYeah, it would have been funny, like it would have been like a funny hack.
5:30:10Vlad CosteaBut that's how you became a coder, right? I think you told me this because you started thinking about creating video games because you wanted to make something for the PlayStation. And you read somewhere that C++ is the way you write games. So you started reading the C++ manual because you wanted to make games.
5:30:31Amir TaakiYeah, well, I went because I was reading in a PlayStation magazine. And they were like, oh, yeah. And PlayStation developers use this quirky thing called C++ to make games. I was like, well, I've got to learn C++ and then I can make games. So I just went to the shop and I bought a book and the book was called Sam's Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, except it's 600 pages. And that book took me like seven months. So it's fucking scam that says 24 hours, you know, but anyway, I read that book every single day.
5:31:15Vlad CosteaBut it gave you a career.
5:31:19Amir TaakiYeah, after I read that book, I was a C++ dev pretty much. But before that, I was messing around with QBasic. That's an amazing thing if people have heard of that.
5:31:37Vlad CosteaI know Visual Basic, but QBasic?
5:31:41Amir TaakiYeah, so Visual Basic is like QBasic, but with like Windows GUI stuff. But QBasic was like...
5:31:57Vlad CosteaSo how is this different from Borland Pascal or something?
5:32:01Amir TaakiI mean, it's basic. It's like, the way I learned basic is I went to me and my friends. We were into like computers and video games, RPGs, you know, Sonic, you know, that kind of stuff. Mod music, 8-bit mod music, all that kind of stuff. And I went to my friend's house and he was programming a fighting game. But it was a fighting game just using ASCII characters. So, you know, the character's head is like a zero and they've got the bar for the body and two lines.
5:32:37And you have just a menu of options and it displays a menu. There's like option one, two, three. And you can choose which one you put. So you put two and then press enter and it would be like fight. And then like there wouldn't be like magic. And you've got all these stats and shit. So I just went to his house while he's programming it. And he was just using if, so, you know, if something, variables, go to and print. That's all he was using to make that video game.
5:33:09Nothing else. So I know loads of devs, they're like really against go to. I think go to is the shit. I love fucking go to. We should have that in every language. Anyway, he was just using that and I was just watching him. And I was like, oh, that's so, oh, he's making a fucking video game. And I went home, I downloaded QBasic. And just with that, if and print and variables and go to started writing a fucking fighting game like he was. And then, you know, we started, you know, all the three, there was like three of us making little games in QBasic, adding features.
5:33:49And it got to the point where we learned how to do bitmap graphics. So we would make, you know, I wish I had these games that are some of the fucking dope. We had like this like little spaceship game where you're flying through a level and you're avoiding obstacles and there's like scenery and stuff. And it's just, you know, it's eight bit graphics. But you do quite a lot with that. You can do like, and it's like bitmap graphics. But we went from making ASCII games to using the audio, the beeps in the computer.
5:34:22I don't know if people remember that. There used to be like a little speaker inside the computer. Not your normal speaker, but like a little speaker that would make it. And you could just type in QBasic beep one or beep two, beep three. And you can make little musical tunes with that because you could like just make a sequence of beeps and pauses and stuff. And it would make a little tune. So it started with this fighting game. And then my friend, he made, he like realized to make little beeps.
5:34:50So every time you went attack, go beep. And then your music go beep. You know, like it would have different beeps for different actions. So the game's got more and more elaborate. And we started using more and more features of the computer. And then, you know, we had these like little games where you're flying a spaceship. And then that's when, you know, I was like, okay, I've got to learn C++. That's what they use to make real games. So that's why I went and I just got this book.
5:35:18And then I was every day, you know, after school grinding that book. And it was tough. It was really fucking tough. And I had no fucking clue why. I was like, this is, but I would literally, you know, they would show a program and it would be like three pages long. And I would just diligently type that into the computer, copy it from the book, compile it, you know, it would fail. I'd try again, keep doing it until it works. And it was really painstaking and laborious, but actually really good.
5:35:53And so now when I train new developers, it sounds kind of fucked up. But I actually tell them, look, you've got to type all the examples out by hand because training their muscle memory. And that muscle memory is really important because it's like when you learn to play the piano, you know. One thing is being a musician, you know, reading the sheet music. Another one is just like learning where the notes are so you can put your fingers there. Same thing with learning a programming language, you know.
5:36:22You know, when you're in the beginning, you're a beginner, you type something out and you miss a semicolon and it gives you an error and you get so confused. And you're like, oh, I'm confused. And I remember like, you know, typing things out from the book and trying to compile it and spending ages and ages trying to figure out where is the mistake that I made, you know, or, you know, even just writing a line of code myself and it wouldn't compile. The compiler would give me some error.
5:36:53And I'll just delete the line or I'd delete the file and I'd retype it all out over again and I'd be like, that's exactly the same thing that I typed. You know, I wrote my own, you know, I write a line of code that I make up and it doesn't compile and I'll just write below it the exact same code. And then I'd comment the one at the top and I'd compile and it would work. And I'm like, what? There's the exact same line and I couldn't see the difference, you know, now.
5:37:20When I'm typing code, I like, it's like natural, right? I don't even, you know, I don't even care, like, and then some, I'm like half asleep and I put the compiler and it goes, oh, I know what's wrong. I don't even have to read the error, like, just fix it. So it's like, you know, that's, that's also part of, part of it. And the thing with programming, though, there's off-putting for a lot of people, is that it is really, really difficult. The hardest part is the beginning.
5:37:49But as you get more fluent, it gets easier over time. It gets much easier. You accelerate in your learning the better you get at it. So the hardest part is actually just the very beginning. And that's a massive filter for people. So I don't actually think programming, you have to be that smart. I think anybody can really learn programming. I don't think, I don't think it's outside most people's skill set. I think it's just about hard work, really. I don't think it's a difficult task. I think to be a good programmer, you just have to do a lot of it, basically, just write a lot of code.
5:38:27That's it. To be a good mathematician is very difficult. You know, you have to really think about what you're doing. And, you know, it's really, really, really tough. But programming is, I think it's a lot easier than math, to be honest.
5:38:46Vlad CosteaYeah, I agree with you. That's also why. So I did C++ in high school. In elementary school, I learned Borland Pascal, and I thought it was boring. You mentioned the go to instructions. There was go to x y that you're using for making stuff move around the screen. I did.
5:39:05Amir TaakiOh, yeah, I remember that.
5:39:06Vlad CosteaElementary graphics with it, like drawing a star or whatever. A what?
5:39:14Amir TaakiThe turtle. You mean the go to?
5:39:20You said when you say go to, you meant for drawing graphics? Yes. But that, what's that in Pascal?
5:39:30Vlad CosteaI think it's go to x y. I was calling it go to xy.
5:39:37Amir TaakiWere you calling it what?
5:39:39Vlad CosteaGo to xy. You know, I was trying to...
5:39:41Amir TaakiOh, go to x y. Okay. Okay. Nice. Yeah, I used Pascal very briefly, very briefly. Like not a few days, you know, I just played with it, you know, like making the forms and doing the code for it. But yeah.
5:39:58Vlad CosteaI think I had a similar start as you did, because I was playing Quake and Doom and I was thinking I want to be like John Carmack. Nice. And then somehow I lost interest in high school. I went to high school to study computer science and somehow by the time I graduated, I was dumber. And I realized maybe it's not for me and I'm not good enough at this. So I went and studied political science in university. And now I have a podcast.
5:40:27Amir TaakiNice. Yeah, QBasic is good. I like it because it's just a program and you run it and it has an editor. You write the code and press F5 and you run it and it works. That's like, that's really good for kids, to be honest. I've seen other languages that people have made and it's like, oh, you have to write the code in a text editor in Python and then blah, blah, you know. And they like teach, they try to teach the code to like the kids to write good code using proper constructs.
5:41:02They're like, oh, you should use like structured statements while and stuff like that. I don't think kids need any of that shit. Just fucking go to them if they can learn all that later, to be honest. You know, but yeah.
5:41:15Vlad CosteaThere's also four, which is for, you know, conditional instructions. And it's pretty cool. It's just that I think what was boring was that I was doing math problems in C++. And to me, there was no joy just trying to input the data and then getting the result. And I was like, by the time I actually input this, I can actually solve the problem with pen and paper. So I really didn't get the point and I lost interest.
5:41:49Amir TaakiYou know, I'm in these like communities online. Like, so for example, I like had to write something in Pygame. So I joined like, they have a Discord. I joined the Pygame Discord and it's all these like little kids and they're all like trying to make like 2D games in Pygame. They're like talking with like, you know, kiddie, bad kiddie grammar. And then, you know, as well, I'm in now some 3D community called Miniquad. That's what I'm writing my app in. But it's like actually for 3D.
5:42:31So all the people using it are mainly writing video games. I'm probably the only person that's fucking wild enough to write an app in a 3D stuff. But they're all like early 20s, you know, they're already, they're like young dudes. And I feel kind of sad to be honest because video games is a tough world, you know. You're not going to make a lot of money. There's like, you're going to be just like slave labor for these like, you know, game corporations. And it's also very meaningless.
5:43:04It's just like a game, you know, it doesn't change things. But they're all like young dudes working on games. And they're like very talented. They're putting their like life energy in like, you know, doing 3D game stuff. So it's like, you know, but, you know, we have like a dev now in our channel, in our hackers channel on Dark IRC, like Learning Rust. And Z was saying like, oh, I need some motivation to learn. I need something to motivate like this learning that I'm doing. And I gave, I said like, oh, you should look at like compilers, LISP compilers, that kind of stuff.
5:43:48You know, but, you know, does that excite people? I mean, it excites me like, oh yeah, Linux command line tool, this fucking cool shit. PipeWire, yeah, oh yeah, you know, anonymous smart contracts, you know, cryptography algorithms, mathematics, woo, I'm like really into that. But, you know, for someone else who's like not in it already, like what's going to excite them? You know, what's going to motivate them to learn programming? Is it going to be to make a game? I don't know, maybe. Maybe I should be telling people just make games, you know, make little fun games for, you know, maybe we should be making games, you know.
5:44:34I should make like a little Q basic for our app so that people can like, you know, dev little games that run in our wallet app and like make use of, you know, P2P crypto functions. That'd be fun, maybe that's a good idea, it's not a bad idea, you know, then we can build our ranks.
5:44:55Vlad CosteaThat can actually be fun, or maybe some video game that is more like a tutorial on how to join DarkFi.
5:45:05Amir TaakiYeah, yeah, I'll think of something. Actually the app, so I was telling, I was showing this app here, I mean, I'm like writing it from scratch, I'm not using any GUI framework. I've disabled the messages because I'm like debugging, I don't want to spam the P2P network, but normally there's like messages there's like the chat, you know. I should put that so next time I show, but, you know, I've just been working on the text input for now, you see like, I don't know, see people, what happened to the keyboard?
5:45:38What the fuck, this phone, man. Below you can see it, see it's typing text. But anyway, the whole idea is that in Ethereum you use MetaMask in your browser, but MetaMask was a mistake and people like deployed these web apps, but in this app it's just going to have a little store inside of it and you can select what you want and people can distribute whatever they want in there and it'd be P2P, so you can download it on the P2P network. And so people can write these little apps in Python, et cetera, and they have access to all the functionality.
5:46:19Pretty cool, huh? So you're going to have everything in there and you can run it phone, desktop, Android, Mac Linux and Windows, maybe iOS, but I don't know. I need an iPhone to do iOS, I guess. So I'd have to buy an iPhone, but I don't want to do that, you know.
5:46:44Vlad CosteaOh, I guess it's nice to outsource, but if you want to do something right, sometimes you got to do it yourself, which sucks. It's time consuming.
5:46:54Amir TaakiThat's right. I'm trying to, you know, like the problem with like a lot of teams is, you know, they're just focused on making tech because that's what Ethereum did. Ethereum built the tech and then the teams came, but that's not the market phase we're in any longer. Now we're in the market phase where, you know, people are like demanding utility. They're like, what can I actually do with it? So, you know, I'm of the opinion you can't just outsource that shit to, you know, some, you know, like there's something called like.
5:47:27UI devs. UI devs is a synonym for shit devs. So there is no such thing as UI devs. So it's just devs. So that's why for DarkFi, we did not get any UI devs. I was like, I am personally, I think products is the core. Nobody gives a shit about your technology. It can be the best tech in the world, which DarkFi has really good foundation to build a really fucking good house. We've spent years doing that. We've spent a lot of time and energy, as you know.
5:47:59But now I've actually got to show people, what can you do with this tech? I don't care about your tech. I care about what I can do with it. So it's all about products. That's why I'm personally overseeing product. I've put my focus on products. And yes, like I'm like doing the initial phase, you know, to get this like, you know, code base up and running to ensure it's done right. Because you can't like, you know, you can't outsource the thing that you think is really important.
5:48:33So, you know, that's why I've done this. I'm working on the app, you know, building our own UI framework from the beginning, trying to make something new and original as well. Not just derivative, you know, like dancing, colorful people. Trying to do something that's sci-fi and cool, you know, like with the cool vector graphics and monospace font. And, you know, I've even been looking recently at like video game UIs. There's so much fun stuff in there, like the way that you interact with video game UI.
5:49:09You know, like when you open a menu and it's not just like, you know, a flat list, but it's like a circle that come out with like things all around it and you can like spin the circle. You know, I really want to see stuff like that in our UI, you know, like, you know, it feels sci-fi, it feels future. I really want, that's what the crypto experience should be. It should be like, whoa, I'm like logging in to the future and I'm changing the world.
5:49:34So I'm trying to, that's like where we're trying to go with this, like mentally, you know. And, you know, as opposed to like working with like, you know, UI people, which, you know, they're already boxed into way of thinking. I'm trying to find artists to work on this, you know, like real actual artists, you know, with like, you can bring like the whole art dimension to it. Usability, nah, fuck that shit. That's a fake, that's a fake job description. You know, like you can, it's obvious if something's usable or not, you don't need like a PhD to tell you know, they're just going to, they're going to confuse you anyway.
5:50:15That's why we've got into the mess we've got because of these people. Like they've, they've got a whole confused thing. They're like, they're like, oh, you know, file explorer on Mac, get rid of the file system. It's like, what? No, people will need the file system. Why would you get rid of, why would you get rid of the core functionality from your file explorer? Don't let people use the file system. You're trying to, you're trying to make people retarded because that's what you're doing. What kind of community are you building?
5:50:46So, you know.
5:50:47Vlad CosteaYou can get an app for that, I think.
5:50:50Amir TaakiPardon?
5:50:50Vlad CosteaYou can get an app for that, I think.
5:50:52Amir TaakiI mean, yeah, you can enable it, right? You can re-enable it. Is there a total commander for Mac? But isn't the whole point that you buy a Mac, people are like, oh, I'll buy a Mac because it's perfect. It just has everything I need. Well, evidently it doesn't have everything you need. It doesn't have the things that you don't know that you need. It has, it just has the things to keep you a stupid, dumb consumer. So like, you know, we got to break people out of that paradigm. People got to wake up.
5:51:20You know, people got to start like aggregating wealth and getting powerful. So that's going to take effort. We're going to build a movement and, you know, they're not going to know what's going to hit them. Because when we start coming out with all these applications and people are like mobilizing and actually building agorism, it's going to be like the sovereign individual, you know, cyber money issued by private markets, which is algorithmic versus fiat money that is issued by governments and travels at the speed of law. Money that travels at the speed of light versus money that's traveled at the speed of law.
5:52:04Vlad CosteaI like this dichotomy. And I got to ask you, maybe the last question of this interview, but what happens after we fix the money and we fix the finance and we get money that travels at the speed of light or speed of the Internet? What's next?
5:52:23Amir TaakiThen we, you know, then we colonize the universe. Like that's like we expand life, you know, we elevate, we ascend to our next phase. Like if, you know, if once, you know, if we go to space now, as we are as a humanity, just going to do the same shit we're doing now. People are going to nuke each other. How can humanity build towards the stars as it is now? Just not equipped spiritually. How are we going to get there spiritually? You know, where is the source of morality?
5:52:58Source of morality is not other people. It's not the state. It's not science. It's society. It's humanity. That's the source of morality. That's where all morality comes from. And where, what is humanity? Humanity comes from nature. What's nature? Nature is not like trees and stuff. Not like, you know, just green stuff everywhere. Nature is something more powerful. It's like the drive, the will to power. You know, upwards expansion, growth, et cetera. Humanity is not just like people as well. It's not just like, well, there's more people.
5:53:37There's more humanity. NPC slaves do not have humanity. So when I say we need to restore humanity and fight for the people, I'm not saying we need to create more NPC robot slaves and like, you know, just allow them to continue to consume retarded consummation. No, we need to get rid of their welfare state system and get rid of slop and consumerism and everything like that. We need to like create a society where people are uplifted, people are creating great works, they're building. We're activating as many people as possible.
5:54:16We're bringing them in. Everybody's moving for freedom, you know, and we're like, you know, we're doing massive things. We're training leaders. We're creating the next generation of leaders. So that's what we need. We need leadership. You know, Bitcoin people, they tell you Bitcoin projects decentralize. It has no leaders. That is not a fucking decentralized project when you don't have leaders. A decentralized project is when everybody is a leader, when everybody has the power, when everybody's activated. Just having, just pretending you don't have leaders, but the leaders are hidden, but everybody's a slave.
5:54:55That's not freedom. That's not decentralized. That's just highly centralized. That's more centralized than if you had a king. At least the king, if you know he's misbehaving, you go cut his head off. Who are you going to cut your head off when, like people don't know this. Do you know? I was just fucking crazy. You know the Khmer Rouge? I started reading. I know. This is why we're going to start talking about the Khmer Rouge because I started reading about that the other day because I went like in a whole pop phase.
5:55:27I was like really interested in this. I thought they were communists. They weren't communists. They were like weird, I don't know, like nutsock communists because all the other communists didn't like them. Vietnam, actually the reason they disappeared is because Vietnam waged war against them. They were extremely racialist and like Vietnam, they were basically like hyper-fascist, ex-Buddhist monks who wanted to turn Cambodia into like a Buddhist temple, into like a strict Buddhist where everybody would be like a farmer in the commune and there'd be no tech.
5:56:10They were like, a lot of the ex-revolutionaries were Buddhist, but like extreme ascetic. When I say, I mean like, you know, like really strict Buddhists. And yeah, and so they, you know, they... But anyway, the interesting thing about the Khmer Rouge is there is a lot that nobody knows about the Khmer Rouge. Like, you know, even when it was happening, nobody really knew who was in charge. There was like this thing, you know, there was a vague reference to the organization but it had no name.
5:56:48But it was a leadership that was like managing things. You know, it's a fucking massive genocide. You know, like, they don't even know how many people were killed in that thing. They're like, oh, estimates range from like one to six million. Imagine that. There's not even that. There's not even that like old, that genocide. And, you know, there's such a massive range on that, one to six million, you know. So, you know, there was this genocide happening. You know, it was extremely racialist. They were expertists. They wanted to revive the old Angkor Wat kingdom.
5:57:33They had all this like... You know, they were like, oh, we're going to revive the ancient kingdom of Angkor Wat, but it's going to be like a Buddhist slash racialist, communist kingdom. Very, very interesting, wacky stuff. But, you know, everybody was like, they were like, there's no leaders in charge. There's a dude, Pol Pot. Otherwise, there's no leader. It's just like, there's an organization, but nobody knows who they are, really. And nobody really knows much about this organization or what happened there. So, you know, you know, that's what happens.
5:58:17That's how power hides itself. There's even an essay on this, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which is about how all these like anarchist kind of communes or projects. They just, you know, they were like, we're decentralized. We have no leadership. But they actually just like, they had this like really ruthless leadership. I actually have a really good story about this because I remember I went to an anarchist hacker conference, you know, like they've got CCC. They had another one called Hack Meeting. I went to it and I had a talk that was on a on a certain day.
5:58:59And they and, you know, I think it was like, you know, four o'clock or something on a Saturday or something. I don't know. Well, Friday. And I like I built hype for my talk. I like emailed my friends. I told them I email your friends. You know, I'm doing this talk. I put up posters of all my talks at this time. I was telling everyone I was all come to my talk, blah, blah. And then two hours before my talk, they said, oh, Amir, like if you know, we can change your talk to 6 p.m.
5:59:35Tomorrow. And I was like, no, I'm good. I like this time. They're like, oh, but if you want, you know, you could have this time. And I was like, no, no, I'm good. And then, you know, they kept they were like at first they were like heavily suggesting it would be better for me. But then it became clear that I didn't really have a say in this matter. But I kept going to people and I was going to them like I was going, who made this decision?
6:00:07Because, you know, they're meant to be like decentralized anarchist conference. And they were like, oh, well, you know, nobody's in charge, blah, blah, blah. I was like, yeah, but you tell me nobody's in charge. But there's a decision that's been made and it's been handed down to me and I disagree with this decision. And I want to know who's responsible for the decision. And oh, well, nobody's in charge, blah, blah, blah. And like I was like, you know, I'm talking one guy and he like sends me to another guy and to that guy.
6:00:40He sends me to another person to get that sense. Another person just handing me off to each other or the other people. You know, that's how these decentralized organizations work. So when people fuck up, there's nobody you can go to and go, hey bro, you fucked up. You're responsible. Just people go, oh, nobody's in charge. Nobody's responsible. Lightning, what a debacle, right? Maybe it could have been done better. I don't know. But there's been some serious deficiencies there. Who do we question? Who do we go? Okay, this is all new.
6:01:18You're the one that advocated for this, right? You know, this is yours. Oh, Bitcoin's a decentralized community. Community consensus, except it's not community consensus, is it? Because you say it's not a democracy. That's what they say. No, Bitcoin's not a democracy. Okay, so what is it then? Who's in charge? What kind of leadership do you have? How are decisions made? You know, oh yeah, blah, blah. We have GitHub issues. Okay, that's completely opaque. You know, who decides which issues get thing? How does that work? Where's that documented?
6:01:56That's not governance. It's just arbitrary decisions made by a clique of people to have ownership of that thing. So, you know, the ephemeral hidden organization. So, if we want to build like things that are effective, you know, we have to have accountability there. Decentralization. People misunderstand that thing so much. Building a libertarian, decentralized society does not come from, you know, people just doing whatever the fuck they want. And, you know, having no accountability and pretending that there's no leaders and everybody's a free, unique, special snowflake individual.
6:02:42That's fucking myth. We all know it's a myth. If anyone has been in any kind of libertarian organization movement knows that that shit never happens. That's not how it happens. There's always a core group of people. Every project, every open source project. Wikipedia is not just a neutral thing. There's a clique of people there running the show. We all know that they're biased, right? So, it's like, how do you make decentralized society? You make everybody a leader. You give everybody, you bring everybody up, you know, and you imbue people with philosophy.
6:03:18That's what it is. That's how you build a movement. So, at the end of the day, we're about spreading the morality of philosophy and mindset. It doesn't even matter what structure you have, to be honest. The structure is a boat. It's how we get from A to B. It's like a vehicle when we sail across the ocean, you know, we're rowing together. It's like, you know, DarkFi, we're making DarkFi. How do we get shit done? You know, this guy's responsible for this. This guy's responsible for that.
6:03:49That's how we work together efficiently. That's the nature of organizations. That's how humans have done it since day one. But how do you get people to be free? You teach them about the world. They learn, they get the philosophy. Then it doesn't matter what structure you have. If you have people that are not spiritually awakened, they're just going to become despots because they're weak people and they're going to seize power. They're not going to give power. They're not going to try and empower people below them. You want to make people strong.
6:04:32You have to help them to see the world, to understand the world, to understand their own deficiencies, how we can work together, to make them see the long-term objective about this.
6:04:52That's why in DarkFi, we've started small now. We started with philosophy, reading groups every two weeks, also training hackers. That's really low-key stuff. If we had a lot more resources, we'd have an academy. We'd be bringing people there and training them up. The university is shit. The academy is much better. It's half focused on building practical projects and half on theory. You'd go there and you'd be training hackers and you'd be studying theory. You'd be lifting weights or doing some form of exercise. You could be dancing for women or gymnastics or running, anything.
6:05:50As long as people are evolving physically and studying philosophy, learning hard skills, whether math, programming, etc. That's how we're going to make the hackers of the future. If they cut my head off or they cut anyone's head off, pass in jail, etc. It's like a hydra. It just grows another head. That's what Satoshi said in his post. People just keep going. They carry the torch forth. I was before crypto with all these anarchist hacker groups. My bro, my mentor, he trained so many hackers up. When those hackers got skilled, they would just end up working for big tech because he didn't train them philosophically.
6:06:40He didn't train them in ideology. Each one of them was like, We're part of a movement and we're all working to spread this philosophy, this movement. That's been the biggest problem with anarchism. It fell into the trap of modernity that it claimed to be fighting against. It wasn't able to put forward a coherent vision of the future it was fighting towards. Right now, everybody is going, show us the future. Show us what the future will be. We have to put that in front of people to inspire them.
6:07:16That's what people really desire right now. Trump and MAGA, he's just channeling anger and nostalgia for the past. That can't build the future. That can't build anything new. If we're futurists, and I say futurist, I don't mean like... You know, globohomo, Ray Kurzweil, transhumanist futurism. I mean like archeo, you know, tech prim, archeofuturism, that's some fucking cool shit. Like, you know, taking the best parts of modernity, but also the good parts of like the old world, like the ancient world, the pagan world, you know, like the spiritual world, you know, like building like an activated society, you know, like Rose made a talk at Devcon about lunarpunk and that's like, she's got like a vision of the future, it's quite interesting, it's got like, you know, like Celtic druids, like researching eugenics and like high-rise network states, which have got like launch pads into space and like, you know, like all kinds of mad stuff in there.
6:08:40People should check that out, like a colonization on Mars with terraforming and everything like that. But if we're going to go into all these big projects, what's it going to be? Is it just going to be like neoliberal America nuking China, but in space? Like, that's not going to be compelling. We're going to have to evolve the human as well. The human is going to have to like, you know, go to the next level. So that's like, that's what we're doing here with this stuff that we're building.
6:09:18When I say helping people to get the truth out, you know, to tell people about, you know, the struggle for freedom, to expand parallel societies, that's reclaiming humanity, nature, you know, the will to power, you know, everything, freedom, you know, true stuff and getting more people in the cause, like elevating them mentally. We're going to build a force. This was going to be so powerful. It's gonna be like, you know, hackers, next generation of hackers. I already see the people in our chat and they're there and they're like, they're all making an effort.
6:09:55They're all trying to evolve. Like, you know, where it's a tough world, you know, you've got to work to pay your rent, but here those guys are, and they're all trying, they're trying to learn to be devs, you know, they're trying to learn about the future of p2p tech, you know, so they could organize with their communities, like a lot of respect to all those people, you know, like we've got like, you know, solar punks and, you know, I don't know, Chinese people and, you know, uncaps and OTC traders and, you know, Linux people and people into even AI and stuff like that.
6:10:32So it's like amazing, you know, kind of community and schizos, every community, every good community needs its share of schizos. They give the wisdom, they're like the spiritual guides, you know, they say stuff and you're like, bro, that's wack, but, you know, that wack stuff is a nugget, is a nugget of wisdom that you just are not, you're not, you're not enlightened, you're not awakened enough to perceive just yet. So, you know, all the prophecies, you know, respect the prophecies, they are being entombed on p2p tech networks, ready to be uncovered by future generations that will give them insight and depth into, you know, what is really happening, because those prophecies will come to light when they need to be, when they will need to be coming to light.
6:11:32That's when people will perceive them. They've been put down now to be discovered by later generations.
6:11:39Vlad CosteaI'm here. I did not want to interrupt, but this is really great news. We just broke the record for the longest episode in the history of the show. It was previously at five hours, 16 minutes. Now we are past five hours, 28 minutes, still going.
6:11:55Amir TaakiOh, brilliant. Well, who was that with before? Paul Sztorc. Oh, wow. He spoke for six hours.
6:12:05Vlad CosteaYeah. I have a lot of respect for people who can last this long and stay coherent. It's quite an accomplishment. Like you have a lot of stamina. I respect that.
6:12:18Amir TaakiWell, yeah, I know. I mean, I've just got a lot of material, so I mainly just working by myself. So I'm like, I don't talk about it that often, but yeah, you know, I want to get my setup done so I can stream and then we can go on programming adventures with the community. But I was trying to think how I can get it so that, you know, people can like, cause I really like the Twitter spaces that people can call in and they can just like start talking.
6:12:46So I was even thinking I'll just have like, you know, a call open and anybody could like just call up and join in and start chatting. That'd be funny.
6:12:58But in Twitter, it's like, it's more natural cause you see the spaces and you just join, you know, maybe I could do both. I could actually host the Twitter spaces and a Twitter live and the Twitter live has the desktop, but anybody can like join the spaces. I don't know if that would work. Oh, it would be. Oh yeah. Okay. So I'd have the YouTube doing the live and I'd have the spaces and anybody could join the spaces, but then they could talk on the YouTube. That'd be interesting.
6:13:31That'd be funny. And then yeah, people, I guess people would know on the Twitter spaces, they could join the YouTube. I don't know. Anyway, let's see how that works.
6:13:44Vlad CosteaThat can work, but I guess a lot of people do video. It's very useful for people to see your face and Twitter spaces is limiting in this regard because I guess you can only do voice. You can also do video, but you cannot let other people join. You have to invite them with a third party video application, but you can read the comments live. That's very useful.
6:14:10Amir TaakiYeah. If, if I, so for example, you're doing live and you have like a call open, like this or a gypsy meet or something like that. How do people know that they can join? Where do they see, how would you advertise that? I don't know.
6:14:26Vlad CosteaOh, you have to tell them and then you must tell them to join some chat room or you send them the link privately to join you.
6:14:33Amir TaakiNo, not private. I want anybody to join.
6:14:37Vlad CosteaYou just post the link, but then you'll have to deal with everyone potentially bots or spies or whatever.
6:14:50Amir TaakiCool. Yeah. Sounds good. Maybe I'll try that out. Just actually, it's just like a live, I'm live streaming, but it's open any time. So people can just like call in randomly and start, you know, start like chatting and like, Oh, hello, sir. Welcome. You know? And then they'd have a request. They were like, Oh, can you put this music on? I'm like, yes, you're not putting this music on.
6:15:16Vlad CosteaYeah. There's a lot of stuff that you can look into what streamers and there's a lot of Twitch stuff, OBS stuff. It's a rabbit hole and you need to dive and figure out what's good for yourself and what you like and what kind of guy you are, because not everything that other people do is good for yourself, or at least you're not going to feel comfortable doing a little bit. So...
6:15:43Amir TaakiIt would be cool if it was interactive, like people could like, you know, they could like join and then they could like, you know, put stuff on screen.
6:15:54Vlad CosteaYou're going to end up writing your own messaging application.
6:16:02Amir TaakiOh, true. That's right. In the dark IRC, I'll have just like an OSD on top of my screen and people will be able to like, you know, spam it with stuff. Oh yeah. I just, it's easy. I just put a window on top. Easy in the corner. Always on top. That's easy. Okay. Yeah. I have a good idea how to do it now. Plus people can call in, plus people can chat. Perfect. Okay. I know my format now. Anyway, it's been a pleasure. I broke the record.
6:16:41No, this is the part where if we had emojis on the screen, we could put confetti, you know.
6:16:49Vlad CosteaOh, that's not what my audience likes, but you can do that definitely. But I'm super happy that we were able to do this. We covered a lot of ground. You spoke, yeah, we basically scheduled this yesterday and you told me after five and I wasn't sure what after five means, but it turned out to be five o'clock.
6:17:12Amir TaakiOh, sorry. I mentally put five. So I was like rushing for five, but yeah, you're right. It was that.
6:17:20Vlad CosteaBut it turned out really great. And I hope that everyone listening found some useful information. I'm pretty sure that if they go through this episode, they will be much better people, better informed and less indoctrinated because I guess the goal of this show is also to... Unprogram people or deprogram, whatever the term is. There's a lot of tribalism, which is not necessarily rational. Of course, there are a lot of shitcoins out there and a lot of bad projects, but it doesn't mean that everything that is not written by this circle of people is horrible or should not be looked into.
6:18:03And I'm not telling you to invest in anything. Just look at what other people are doing and try to imagine what kind of future we're heading towards.
6:18:15This is the last episode of the year, actually, I just realized.
6:18:20Amir TaakiHappy New Year. I actually thought it was New Year's today. Just shows I'm not really keeping track of things.
6:18:27Vlad CosteaYeah, we're going to have to pop the champagne, but I don't have a bottle.
6:18:34Amir TaakiI actually bought these truffles that by accident were champagne and I fucking hate the champagne chocolates, but I've got loads of chocolates, Swiss chocolates, the best. So yeah, very good. I'm going to eat some of that right now.
6:18:55Vlad CosteaOh, you do that. You deserve it. You've earned it. Look at this. Almost five hours and a half. It's insane. I don't know who's going to listen to this, but if you do listen to this, leave a comment and say, what should they say, Amir?
6:19:12Amir TaakiWhat do you mean? Oh, I saw the thing. I do what? Instead of watching five hours, I mean, if you're probably watching five hours, they'd watch it in parts and they'd like play it on the move, but probably, you know, go on the dark IRC, you know, that's like hard.
6:19:32Vlad CosteaWe need a special word so that we know that people got to this point.
6:19:37Amir TaakiOh, Deinonychus. Can you say again? Deinonychus. By nonicus? No, Deinonychus.
6:19:53Vlad CosteaDeinonychus? Yeah. What's that?
6:20:00Deinonychus. Oh, it's a dinosaur.
6:20:09Oh, nice. You're going to have to look it up to spell it correctly.
6:20:15Amir TaakiThere is a really good, so I don't know if any of you have seen Prehistoric Planet 2, there is a really good scene from that, which I think is called Velociraptors hunting pterosaurs on a cliff. I just really like that clip from Prehistoric Planet 2.
6:20:34Vlad CosteaI like the Velociraptor meme, the one that thinks.
6:20:38Amir TaakiOh, yeah. I sometimes use that nick on Dark IRC.
6:20:49Vlad CosteaVelociraptor meme.
6:20:51Amir TaakiActually, I have a Deinonychus here. Well, I didn't even remember. Is this Deinonychus? Yes, Deinonychus. That's Deinonychus.
6:21:02Vlad CosteaThat's so cute.
6:21:06Amir TaakiI have all these friends. I have all these friends. Oh, you call them your friends? No, no. I mean, I have friends that tell me that like a mere dinosaur is a fake. You know, we live in the center of the earth. That's just a psyop. So that's a popular position these days. Sadly, I'm a believer in the psyop, in the dinosaur psyop. Sorry, guys.
6:21:39Vlad CosteaOh, we don't know what they really looked like. I guess most of it was made by Steven Spielberg for...
6:21:46Amir TaakiNo, we do now. How? Go to Wikipedia, search dinosaur coloration. These are actual dinosaurs that they know the coloration of. They know the coloration of some dinosaurs, like fully all over their body, because you know feathers? There are microstructures on the feathers called...
6:22:12I forgot the name of it. I need to look it up. Anyway, these microstructures, they can actually examine them with microscope and they can see, and depending on what the microstructure is, they can see what the color is. They have fossils where they have the full plumage from the dinosaur, complete 100% body plumage. So they can analyze these microstructures and they can see melanosomes, that's what they are. So you see this article? These are like accurate depictions of dinosaur coloration on the Wikipedia dinosaur coloration article.
6:23:08What's interesting is that, you know, mammals are blind. A lot of mammals are colorblind or they have poor eyesight and mammals typically depend primarily on smell and sound. That's like the primary senses of mammals. Humans are an exception. The reason why apes and monkeys have color perception is because we use that to pick berries, to pick fruits, but in general it's not a constant across the mammals. And if you look at a lot of mammals, their coloring is very bland, single color. So whereas birds, if you look at birds, they are primarily visual, whereas mammals are like smell and auditory, you know.
6:24:08Birds are primarily visually oriented. That's why they have these elaborate mating rituals, that's why they're very colorful, etc. What's interesting is that birds, is that when you see this icon, dinosaur coloration, this actually tells us that this visual orientation that birds have is actually a dinosaur behavior. So a lot of these like mating rituals, elaborate mating rituals that birds do, was actually probably something that dinosaurs did. And mammals during the time of dinosaurs, they were subterranean, they existed underground, they came out on nighttime. And this is where we get, as mammals, our predominance, our emphasis on auditory and auditory and smell, and our lack of emphasis on visual acuity, comes from the long ass period of approximately, you know, a hundred million years where mammals were living underground, they were nocturnal, whereas dinosaurs were in the daytime, you know, they were very visually oriented.
6:25:34So that's still behavior that carries on today in birds and mammals. So it's kind of interesting, that dinosaur coloration. Now that article is mostly feathered dinosaurs, but there are some dinosaurs that are not feathered, where there are perfect casts of them. I saw one such fossil, which is the Pacificosaurus in that article. And if you look at it's like an orange, small looking dinosaur with, you know, these protofeathers on its tail. And that fossil is absolutely crazy. It looks like a photograph of a dinosaur. And it's so, you can see the parts of its skin, which were saggy, the parts that were tight, which were smooth, et cetera.
6:26:28You can see the coloration of the skin. The color is preserved in the fossil. Absolutely crazy fossil. There's also another fossil there, the Borealopelta, which is the ankylosaur, that is also really well preserved. Somehow they can detect the color from that, although it's like much less visible. Just really interesting that it's like, you know, 80 million years ago and people can, science is able to perceive this now.
6:27:05Vlad CosteaFascinating stuff. What else are you into, Amir? You're into dinosaurs, you're into video game programming, you're into futurism, you're into C++, you're into privacy, you're into cyberpunk culture and cryptocurrency and cypherpunk culture. They're distinct. You're into lunarpunk stuff.
6:27:32Amir TaakiMathematics and evolution and science and physics and stuff like that. And natural history.
6:27:46So yeah, maybe. Maybe I would have been a scientist if I weren't in tech. I mean, it's quite normal, a lot of tech guys, they're very into science.
6:28:00But I really like natural science, like, you know, biology or evolution. Evolutionary dynamics. There's like a lot of mathematical models, really interesting. You know, it's kind of like related or tangential to game theory. So like, you know, a lot of people study game theory, but you know, parallel to that is like evolutionary dynamics, which I'm more interested in. The game theory, I've looked at some of that stuff before and I just don't, I just don't find it as profound as people make it out to be. I think it's alright.
6:28:41But there's a lot of interesting stuff in evolution. It's quite interesting because I'm like, for example, I see a lot of guys using metaphors from evolution to explain society, but their understanding of evolution is wrong. It's just like a popular understanding and it's just not how evolution works. A lot of people think evolution is just like competition among individuals towards like, you know, a gradual optimum. But evolution doesn't really act like that. Evolution's like punctuated. You have like just massive long periods when nothing happens and, you know, complexity builds up like, you know, deadwood in a forest until at some point like a match just sets it ablaze and it all just burns down and it's like that with the environment where, you know, complexity builds in networks and it just, you know, it reaches a kind of tipping point where at some point like collapse practically becomes an inevitability and the longer it goes without collapse, the bigger the collapse will be.
6:29:57And when that cascade does happen, the more complex and more layered the ecosystem is, the more it kind of starts to unravel and then suddenly there's like all these new niches opened up and there's this like, there's this massive race to occupy those niches. But evolution doesn't happen by populations like gradually moving towards an optimum. Actually, you know, a tendency of evolution is not to homogenize but actually to divide into sub-populations. So actually population, the way that you can view populations is like, you know, you have a population and it just kind of, it splits into two new populations.
6:30:46That's just like a natural tendency over time and maybe they will occupy different niches or, you know, maybe they, you know, maybe they will end up, one of them will end up, you know, dying off and that's what happened with human evolution. You know, there's like homo erectus literally walking across the earth for like two million years at the same time like Australopithecus and then Homo rhodesiensis and like, you know, the origin of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens evolved. And even like some homo erectus was still around like when, you know, you know, Homo heidelbergensis or like, you know, the ancestors or like the original Homo sapiens were even around, you know.
6:31:31So, you know, crazy to think about like all these different human species and subspecies existing at the same time for millions of years just walking around on the same planet earth. But, you know, I mean there's, if you look at homo erectus, early population and late populations, there is a massive divergence in like all the phenotypes like, you know, brain size, body shape, etc. So it's a massively diverse species of human but, yeah, but, you know, they were one species that existed and there were other human species that coexisted with them.
6:32:20So, and, you know, yes there was a lot of variance in that population but also, you know, that was a single species and that existed continuously for several million years and there were other human species, you know, and they were, you know, somewhat, you know, unchanging. Yes, there were changes, you know, but when there's a drastic change, so the tendency of populations is to speciate, that's, you know, what they technically say. And a species is a very well-defined term, you know, a species is where it has a geographical, you know, it has this geographical distinct space, you know, they can't, you know, they are either unable to reproduce or they are tending towards being able to, unable to reproduce.
6:33:24So a subspecies is a subpopulation, is geographically distinct and is tending away from its like host or parent population. So, you know, anyway, off topic but I think that stuff's really interesting. Has no relevance to cryptocurrency, you know, I thought about it before, like is there any relevance to all this stuff? You know, I can't think of any relevance except maybe if I'm making an anime about future worlds and speculative evolution, you know, that's really interesting. I always find aliens in Alien movie really boring because it's like they haven't tried to speculate in any realistic way how it evolved and there is like just this huge knowledge of like our Earth's history that we can draw upon.
6:34:24A lot of it's like really surprising, that's probably what the biggest argument why it's not fate is like it's just too elaborate for humans to have created that, you know, it's like it's too surprising and it's just, you know, it just there's so much realism and depth to it that you could not make that up. But I have never seen it being used in when people think about aliens, when they think about speculative worlds. Another really cool thing about evolution is convergent evolution. It's the way that like multiple times throughout history the same like, I mean, I wouldn't say species because that's not the atomic level that they use in the fossil records, actually the genre species is like kind of too fine-grained and too patchy.
6:35:24Maybe as you get more recent like, you know, like last two million years or so you can talk about human species or species of mammals but if you're talking about dinosaurs there's it's like more like a grouping of species which is a genre but yeah you just get the evolution of these like different forms like you've got sharks, you've got dolphins, you've got ichthyosaurs. They look pretty similar they have the same body plan they evolved it three independent times throughout history. It's obviously a really successful body plan because if you want to be a ocean creature you should probably have a body plan like that, you know.
6:36:10Same thing with beaks in flying animals, you know, beaks they're lightweight, pterosaurs evolved beaks, birds evolved beaks independently twice, you know. So yeah anyway good time to wrap up I'm going to eat my chocolate and watch anime.
6:36:31Vlad CosteaBelieve it or not you still have questions in the chat.
6:36:35Amir TaakiOkay what's the questions?
6:36:38Vlad CosteaSo the most important one is blondes or brunettes or tights or asses. Ties not tights.
6:36:51Amir TaakiTies or asses? You mean tits?
6:36:54Vlad CosteaThat's what he probably means. I don't imagine someone would choose between ties and butts but yeah I guess it's boobs or ass.
6:37:09Amir TaakiI don't know.
6:37:13Vlad CosteaYou're not a guy to compromise and choose one.
6:37:18Amir TaakiI don't know, maybe, I don't know, maybe asses or maybe I don't know it depends like you know.
6:37:33Vlad CosteaVery hard decision to make.
6:37:35Amir TaakiOne or the other. Maybe if you're not getting one of one you might want one of the other. You know maybe one day if you've had one of one the other day you want more of the other. I don't know.
6:37:50Vlad CosteaIt's good to live a balanced life you know. Without excesses. So what's your favorite mathematician past and present?
6:38:05Amir TaakiAlexander Grothendieck is a fucking chad. He's absolutely fucking chad. But there's I'll name some. So Alexander Grothendieck, let's think about him. You know he was born to an anarchist family and he just you know he fucking invented algebraic geometry. Basically just invented it and anybody that studies algebraic geometry is a vast vast field. At some point if you want to study it you know he wrote these books called EGA and SGA but they're in French and nobody's even been able to translate them because they're so massive.
6:38:49They basically just invented the field and you know when I read math forums about algebraic geometry you know for experts who are like oh how do I get good people are like oh you should learn some French so you can read those books. For real that's what they really do at the high levels of math. People learn French to be able to read his books. And in his later life he did a Ted Kaczynski and he moved to a cabin in the French Pyrenees and he said he told everyone to burn his books you know he was like oh fuck that shit burn all my books.
6:39:26Another guy that's absolutely chart is what's his name what's the name the guy that wrote the book? Serge Lang. Serge Lang he so let me let me find his Wikipedia because Wikipedia explains it well.
6:39:51Isn't it Serge Lang? Or Serge yeah. S-E-R-G-E. His books are considered like they're like he's got loads of massive fucking math books like the algebra book is like that and they're considered like canon basically. So you know he had these like massive debates with people where you know he says look Lang engaged in efforts to challenge anyone he believed was spreading misinformation or misusing science or math to further their own goals. so he he mounted a one-man challenge against Samuel Huntington saying that he misuses math and pseudoscience and then blah blah and then he says Lang kept his political correspondence and documentation in files.
6:40:50He would send letters or publish articles, wait for responses, engage the writers in further correspondence, collect all these writings together and point out what he considered contradiction. He then mailed these files to other mathematicians and other interested parties throughout the world. He published some of the files in books, his extensive file criticizing David Baltimore and in his blah blah blah. So he was like he was doing all these massive debates before the internet was a thing and like keeping extensive records on it and like just real autist type stuff and then you read about his math book because Lang was a prolific writer of math texts often completing one on his summer vacation.
6:41:38He writes fucking graduate level math texts on his summer vacation. Well in that case, how does he do that? I don't understand it. I actually can't understand it. Another, so that's an absolute chad. Another chad is Neil Koblitz.
6:41:58So let me see if I find it, Neil. But I actually messaged him and he was like oh I've heard about you Amir blah blah and he was like but then he we were talking about crypto and he's just he's massively anti-crypto because he's a bit of a socialist. So you know everyone's perfect but you know he did some really cool stuff. He did like a lot of really cool elliptic curve cryptography and he was in Vietnam when Vietnam was being bombed. You know organizing you know or helping them with the teaching mathematics there.
6:42:41He's done like quite he's had quite an interesting life you know. He's contributed a lot to cryptography. Another really interesting guy is the guy who wrote is Shafarevich. He's just a crazy nutcase.
6:43:04So you know he wrote these books against an anti-socialist and like about individualism. And he's got like he's gone deep into the matrix and he's like an orthodox conservative but he is a really fucking good mathematician. Like really smart mathematician. He basically defined the Soviet score which is this entire score of mathematics. Then finally you know I have to give a shout out to what's his name? I mean what's the name of the guy? You know the guy von Neumann. This guy is crazy. Let me see.
6:43:58John von Neumann. So let me see. So this guy he would just be doing he would just drop into an area of maths. Change that area of maths like draft like contributes a major thing. Get bored and drop in another area of maths. If you look at his Wikipedia it's massive. He's everywhere. You go every field you go he's there. Economics, physics, computer science, the Manhattan Project. Let's look at work habits. So this is the funny thing. So wait I'm trying to find where blah blah.
6:44:58Anyway he used to let me see.
6:45:09Vlad CosteaThis guy makes me feel like a mid-wit. He was only six years old and he could divide six digit numbers in his head.
6:45:23Amir TaakiOh yeah so okay so he would be doing maths. You know like all the mathematicians when they do maths myself included. You go to a very quiet room you know nobody's allowed to talk to us. We're like deep there we're trying to focus our thought thinking. He was not like that at all. He liked to do his maths like around loads of people around kids extended family in the living room. He would play really loud music. So and you know he would play really loud German march music.
6:46:05And he would work in noisy chaotic environments. And you know he would be out partying all night and stuff like that. He was just a wild man. And he had an office next to Einstein. And Einstein would complain his music is too loud all the time. You know? Okay here's another crazy guy. Paul Erdős. Probably a lot of you guys know him.
6:46:36Vlad CosteaHow do you spell his name?
6:46:38Amir TaakiPaul E-R-D-O-S is the last name. So he was mainly concerned with number theory. That's what he is focused on. But he was just like an extreme math autist. He never had like a relationship with a woman. You know he just he would only like to talk about math. He was homeless. But, you know, every mathematician, it was like a dream to work with him. Because if you just spend a couple of weeks working with him, you'd make some major breakthrough and you'd be famous forever.
6:47:19So he was just itinerant. He would just go, he would just go to random people's house, turn up at random people's houses with a suitcase randomly, because he felt like it. And then everybody would be like, oh, come in. And they would open their doors to him. And he was extremely autistic. Like he did not give a fuck. I mean, he probably he just didn't care. And like, I remember reading the story of mathematician. He said he came home one day, and there was like red liquid like everywhere around the kitchen and stuff.
6:47:55And it turned out, and he got worried for a second, but it turned out that Paul Erdos had really liked grapefruit and found grapefruit juice carton in the fridge. And I just couldn't be bothered to open it and stopped it with a knife. It was just shrinking out of the bottle like that. And it just finished, just chucked it on the side somewhere, didn't give a fuck. And he was like, he was taking meth. He was like, he was like taking meth so he could do more math.
6:48:27He would fall asleep in the restaurant. Like, oh, you're asleep in the restaurant. He's like, no, I'm just closing my eyes. But he'd be asleep sitting up in the restaurant. And like, look at him, just look at him. This guy has taken way too much meth in his life. But he's done like, he would just take meth and do math. He's a fucking mad man.
6:48:53Vlad CosteaAnd it's sad because Von Neumann lived for 50 something years, 53. And Paul Erdos, he lived to 83. And this guy actually did meth and lived that kind of lifestyle.
6:49:10Life is unfair.
6:49:13Amir TaakiOh, bro. If we're talking about mathematicians, there is a really noteworthy mathematician that must be on this list, which is Gregory Perelman. No list goes without mentioning Gregory Perelman. So Gregory Perelman is Russian mathematician. He's a fucking uber-chad. And he won the Nobel Prize equivalent in mathematics, the Fields Medal. And they offered him a million dollars. And he said, fuck you guys, you're corrupt. In fact, he didn't even say anything. He just ignored them. He's like, I want nothing to do with these guys. And he solved the biggest problem in mathematics, like won the Millennium Prize, the Clay Millennium Prize.
6:50:12And because he did that mega achievement, suddenly he's the superstar. But he didn't want any of it. He was like, it doesn't matter any of these prizes, man-made stuff. All I care about is the math. I don't want to be part of any of your stuff. And he declined the prizes. They chased him. They chased him down into Russia because he didn't even answer their calls back. He was like, I'm just not interested. Blah, blah. They really tried to coax him. But he's like, I don't need it.
6:50:51I just need math. That's all I care about. What a chad. He's dedicated to his craft. Doesn't care about these man-made inventions, prizes, designations, et cetera. He's got what he needs. He lives with his mum in Moscow, eating chicken tendies, doing math. That's all he cares about. You know who else, Chad, as well? Not a mathematician, but a physicist. The one who plays the drums on the Manhattan Project.
6:51:26Richard Feynman.
6:51:30You can search Richard Feynman orange juice. You can see him playing the bongos and singing about orange juice. But if people want the best Feynman thing, I suggest is go on YouTube, there's a really good video, and search Feynman series honours. So it's Reed Gower.
6:52:02The YouTube channel is Reed Gower, but the video is called The Feynman Series and it's honours. And it's Richard Feynman talking about Nobel Prizes, honours, that kind of stuff. And how he's just like, we are scientists. We discovered the natural world. Honours, human rank, that's all fucking bullshit. That has nothing to do with science. Scientists, they don't need any of that crap. I was like, this is kind of stuff when I was growing up on, you know, Richard Feynman. I was like, well, I want to be like Richard Feynman.
6:52:47Vlad CosteaSo that's so cool. I feel like I've learned so much over the last 20 minutes or so. And I opened their Wikipedia pages. Now I just have to read them all.
6:52:58Amir TaakiWhat was the other question? There was another question or is that it?
6:53:02Vlad CosteaWell, John Maynard Keynes or Murray Rothbard.
6:53:09Amir TaakiRothbard, probably.
6:53:10Vlad CosteaYeah, I mispronounced. And also, what are your thoughts on David Chaum's xx network and coin and best hacker of all time? You're getting a lot of questions.
6:53:22Amir TaakiRichard Stallman is the best hacker of all time. If you want to know why I say Richard Stallman, followed by Terry Davis. I mean, Terry Davis is like really interesting. But Richard Stallman, there is a really good documentary series. Sorry, not a series, a documentary called, let me find it on YouTube. I think it's called Hackers, Wizards of the Electronic Age.
6:53:59Yes. So I recommend people to watch that documentary. And in particular, you will see Stallman, a young Richard Stallman, and how the same way in crypto, you know, crypto got co-opted by big money and everybody was like, oh, yeah, I love money. Let's go. The same thing is happening to the PC industry. And Stallman is one of the kind of founders there at the early stage. But Stallman is one of the idealists. It's like, I reject this. I believe this technology is powerful. And I'm going to fight for free software for open source.
6:54:45And that's the young Richard Stallman. I find that so inspiring. I really respect Stallman, you know, like, you know, he's an older dude now. He has his opinions about certain things, whatever. But what, you know, he's from that generation, you know, so many people that generation, you know, they were communists or whatever, or socialists. You know, Stallman is really enlightened. Like, he really is a, did a huge amount for us. Like, he really contributed something massive and he did a great thing. I have nothing but a huge amount of respect for him.
6:55:22And, you know, there's also a book, if anybody goes deeper into this, it's called Hackers by Steven Levy. So this is a really good book about that particular history of time.
6:55:46Vlad CosteaWhat about David Chaum' XX Network?
6:55:48Amir TaakiI haven't looked at it. I think it's a mix now, right? For voting or something.
6:55:54Vlad CosteaYeah, and Quantum Resistant and some other stuff too.
6:55:59Amir TaakiOkay. Yeah, David Chaum is legit, isn't he? I guess we should pay attention if it's David Chaum, you know. I also liked Bram Cohen's project, Cheer. They didn't get much attention. But, you know, I mean, this is fucking like, just, who cares about a new mining algo. But they have some really good crypto in there. And Bram Cohen is really smart, dude.
6:56:27Vlad CosteaI wish I could get him on the show. He blocked me on Twitter. I don't know why.
6:56:33Amir TaakiOh, really? Oh.
6:56:35Vlad CosteaBut he's the creator of BitTorrent for people who don't know.
6:56:39Amir TaakiYeah. I mean, the project's legit. Bram Cohen. I've never looked him up on Twitter.
6:56:52What's his nickname?
6:56:56Vlad CosteaNo idea.
6:56:59Amir TaakiOh, I found it. It's @BramCohen. Okay.
6:57:11Yeah, I'm blocked. Oh, I'm not. Well, that's good. At least he know about you. I don't know about me.
6:57:21Vlad CosteaI don't know. Maybe I should post it about Chia at some point.
6:57:25Amir TaakiOh, you can say to a neighbor, like, you know, different times, but Chia's, it's got good cryptography. It uses these binary quadratic forms, you know, ideal class group, unknown order groups. So I'm quite interested in that math. I like it's related to class field theory, which one day in my life, I hope to study.
6:58:02Vlad CosteaSo you don't have an opinion yet about the XX network? No. And what was the other one?
6:58:10Amir TaakiI looked at XX network before, but I think it was a while ago.
6:58:20I think it was, I think I just, I was like, okay, you know, David Chaum was probably good, but I was like, oh, it's not related to things I'm interested in now or anything I want to do or use. So I was like, oh, interesting. But then I didn't really look deeper into it.
6:58:38Vlad CosteaWe're past the six hour mark. We have 2900 live viewers in total. And someone wants to know, what's the future of AI in your opinion?
6:58:50Amir TaakiOh, I don't know. Because honestly, it's not my area. It does seem that crypto. Okay, so there is a really interesting video if you search Palantir AIP on YouTube. And it's basically, Palantir is like, you know, Thiel's US military organization. I mean, these guys, you have to understand, like, Peter Thiel and, you know, the big VCs and like these guys, you know, I don't know, Musk, and they're neoliberals. So they want, they're not, they don't want, you know, like, you know, a trade America, so you can have your trade waifu, you know, America to, you know, become non-interventionist, which if America did that would be wealthy.
6:59:44They want an American global empire, you know, they want the oil to flow, they want the dollar to continue to dominate, you know, they're going to continue, they want the military, etc. That's how they're going to build those things that they're building is by continuing to rule the world, by continuing to own the world's resources. So that is a lot of the economics that's driving AI now. It's like, you know, surveillance, state, neoliberalism, military technology. If you look at the Palantir AIP video, it's quite enlightening in the sense of, like, how AI can be used in warfare, which is it allows operators to deal more efficiently.
7:00:30So for example, in the video, they've got this, like, kind of, it's like a kind of terminal where, you know, the AI is saying, you know, oh, there's these threats that's been identified, you know, would you like to see some battle plans? And the person, would you like to see a map? The person opens a map, it identifies what's there. The person's like, can you give me three different scenarios for how to deal with this threat? The AI gives three scenarios, you know, then the person's like, can you tell me more about scenario one?
7:01:06It then goes in and it's like, should I deploy the drone network to begin, you know, going around this area and clearing? The person's like, yes, deploy the drone network. They start coordinating the other activity. So that's kind of like, you know, what they're, how they want to use the kind of AI stuff, which if you imagine as well, will allow, you know, people, tools like perception management to be used at scale, to influence public opinion, you know, like the algorithm on Twitter. Like, so I actually looked a bit more into the algorithm on Twitter and you know, you know, what it's boosting and reducing is not just based off of what you like and retweet, but it's also based off of what you read for any period of time.
7:02:00So if you're scrolling and you stop and you read a tweet, the algorithm's actually logging that. Logging is like going, oh, you're, you know, you're interested in that thing. And, you know, that's going to have a social credit, Chinese social credit scoring effect on your account. You know, now I've been on Twitter, like there's certain types of content where I'm a bit worried to read that because I'm like, oh, if the algo sees I'm connected to that, it's going to start trying to de-rank me. So, you know, the AI is also going to be able to, you know, go into the posts that people write and see what type of content they're writing about.
7:02:44And it's going to be able to capture the nuance even. So right now, you know, before there were filters, like I remember the old Twitter, I'd write something, I'd get shadow, I'd get like blocked for two weeks because, you know, I told someone to fuck off or something like, you know, and I realized on Twitter. So this is actually true. In the algo, now, you know, now if I insult someone, I won't get banned, but if it's aggressive or if it's like using that kind of language, if it's insulting someone, the algorithm does de-rank you.
7:03:24So the algorithm elevates posts. That's why people move to this way of insulting people, you know, by making digs at them where they're not outright calling them names. It's because of the algo and how it works. But soon, you know, the AI can even capture that nuance, you know. And the drone stuff is especially scary because before you could like, you know, like you could move through territories and, you know, you could do a guerrilla resistance, you could hide in the mountains, in the forest, but drone swarms now, they can just fill up the sky.
7:04:13And they're just like a mobile surveillance platform and they're just like a big CCTV that fills the sky and they can just stay in the sky forever. It's like really cheap to maintain, especially with like fixed wing drone aircraft that fly in circles and they just look at a certain area of the ground and it's just like a still image on a screen. And you've got like all like, you know, like AI, algo, imagine like Google maps for like an entire region, like a massive, like, I'm not just talking about like a city, I'm talking about like an entire country or like part of a country.
7:04:53And it's all real time and you can see everything happening and you've got AI analyzing that. And like every single person's identified how you can do guerrilla resistance. If your government isn't the whole point of right to bear arms, if your government is like violent, you can resist them. So now imagine like with this tech what they have. So crypto is like the main resistance against that. It's like, that's why, you know, people like right to free speech, you know, right to anonymity, you know, right to own your internet.
7:05:26That's the dark forest where we can mobilize all these like surveillance big tech platforms. That's like the monocultures, the desert. You know, we need to we need to use the forest.
7:05:40Vlad CosteaYeah, I agree with you. And once again, we're past the six hour mark. This is a record holding episode. I don't think we'll ever surpass this. I'm starting to get hungry. Yeah, me too. I'm starving right here. But it's really great. And I want to thank you, Amir, for everything that you're doing. You're like a human encyclopedia. Like I ask you something and you give me a very in-depth answer. Well, you know. You should start your own YouTube channel, you know, where people ask you questions.
7:06:19Amir TaakiAh, yeah, I will. You know, just live stream chatting and programming, I guess. Let's see.
7:06:29I need to do a lecture series on dark five, like going deep into it for people. Because not people know about what we're building and it's coming up to the point where we've got to tell people. But yeah, OK. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, guys. Fun times. I didn't even I don't even see it's like seven hours. I just kind of like I'm like having fun chatting with people. And then at some point I'm like, well, I'm really hungry and I haven't eaten chocolate yet. And it's midnight.
7:06:59So, yeah.
7:07:00Vlad CosteaIt's a bad time to eat chocolate.
7:07:03Amir TaakiIs it? Oh, I've got to eat my chocolate. Swiss chocolate, man. I'm going to eat it. Oh, damn. OK, anyway.
7:07:12Vlad CosteaWe have almost 3000 live viewers, six hours, 12 minutes, 13 minutes right now. It's incredible. Thank you all for listening and tuning in. Make sure you subscribe. Follow Amir on Twitter. He's at narodism. If you don't know what narodism is, go to the Wikipedia page. You got to read that one.
7:07:34Amir TaakiOh, yeah. Interesting.
7:07:38Vlad CosteaAnd happy new year.
7:07:40Amir TaakiYeah. Happy new year, guys. Tomorrow at least will be the new year. But yeah, been a pleasure. See you guys later then. See you. Bye bye. Fun times.
