S17 E1: Bruce Fenton on Suitcoiners & The Spirit of Bitcoin

0:48Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 1. It's a new year, it's a new season, and we are here to roast Suitcoiners with Bruce Fenton. And the reason why this is so glorious is that, basically, Bruce Fenton could have become the ultimate Suitcoiner. He has the right credentials, he has the right background, he knows all the right people, except that he seems to be more of a cypherpunk than the guys who LARPed as cypherpunks for a decade and now they talk to bankers.

1:22So this is going to be a lot of fun, it's really good to have you, Bruce.

1:26Bruce FentonThanks for having me. Yeah, that's great. I never heard the term Suitcoiner before, but I like it. It's funny.

1:32Vlad CosteaYeah, it's exactly what they deserve, right?

1:36Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah, I started out as a Suitcoiner, I suppose. I was a suit guy when I came in. It's funny, in the very, very early days, there's a funny Reddit post where I said something about working on Wall Street on our Bitcoin. And somebody replied, they're like, we don't need you suit-wearing Wall Street guys. And so now things have gone sort of full circle where I'm kind of on the other end of the spectrum in some ways, kind of the anti-establishment, anti-TradFi guy.

2:07Vlad CosteaWhich once again is super ironic, because once again, you have worked on Wall Street, you have tried to tokenize securities to put them on the blockchain. That's part of the reason why you were bullish for a while, or maybe you still are bullish on Ravencoin. And people gave you shit for that. But now you're basically more of a cypherpunk than the same people who are telling you that, no, you should only focus on Bitcoin. And now they say, well, institutions are bullish, and they make the number go up, so this is a speculative attack on the US dollar, and this is a Trojan horse, and it's just a phase.

2:45Of course, we're not friends with the bankers, but they're spending with their debit cards or credit cards, and they're not using Bitcoin for anything except for speculation. We're not winning anymore.

2:58Bruce FentonI see it as a regression a bit. What interested me in this space was the cypherpunk aspect. I had worked on Wall Street for almost 20 years or something before I came into this, and it was boring. I mean, it was cool. I had a really, really cool Wall Street career. I got to do some of the coolest stuff anybody could ever do. I started out with small-time retail as a smiling and dialing stockbroker. I managed stocks, managed portfolios. I did institutional work with 401ks. And then the coolest thing, later in my career, I was working with ultra large pools of money, sovereign wealth funds, going over to the Middle East, doing big PE deals, working on that kind of stuff.

3:40And then I became a big picture economic consultant, which is kind of fun. So I had a cool career, but I was very interested in human freedom. I was a Ron Paul guy, still am. I care about human liberty. And those aspects, which were really, really present and prominent in the early days of Bitcoin, attracted me. And I said, oh, OK, cool. This is a way I can actually change the world. Early on, I wasn't even really thinking about making money. I'm like, well, maybe this will be cool.

4:09Bitcoin will go up to $300 someday, and maybe we'll make some money. But I had thought of it as a way to change the world primarily. So I still have those cyberpunk roots. I've always had them the whole time I've been in the space. And I think this iteration is a little bit of a regression. And to your point of a lot of people saying, oh, only focus on Bitcoin, well, centralized strategies, ETFs, and banking products are not Bitcoin. And you don't have moral authority. I don't hate these things, just like I didn't hate altcoins.

4:40But I don't think you have some moral authority to be like, oh, Bitcoin only. I don't think that's a great philosophy anyway. So I always got a little bit of a hard time. I was never really, really big into other coins.

4:58Only invested in a few, wasn't really a cheerleader for them. But I think it's a little bit hypocritical if you're cheering for a centralized banking product, which are basically just altcoins also. It doesn't mean they're evil or the worst thing in the world, but I do think they're a regression, and I do think that it sort of defeats the purpose of what this was all about.

5:18Vlad CosteaWell, thank you for that. It's very refreshing. Like, I remember looking up to Pierre Rochard, for example, as one of the co-founders of the Nakamoto Institute. And he was writing all of these smart articles about why Bitcoin is cypherpunk and why we're going to use it as money, stuff like this. And now he really likes wearing his suit and pretending that we're running a speculative attack on the US dollar. And I'm like, man, you're just increasing demand for the US dollar. You're not competing with it anymore. We're just a stonk at this point.

5:52Bruce FentonYeah, yeah. I mean, you know, stocks are different. And it is kind of funny because he started, I think, maybe more on the cypherpunk side, and I was clearly on the Wall Street side. And I don't know, maybe it's switched now a little bit. We certainly had our share of debates. I don't think he's probably a big fan of me. He has had some really, really great points on Bitcoin. He's written some great stuff. I loved his mining video. But yeah, I think there's a lot of folks that have moved down this Wall Street path, and I don't see it as additive.

6:24I think that it is a regression. You're stripping away what makes Bitcoin special. If you go back to 2012, 2013, 2014, in those early days when people were carrying around their wallet, they'd say, hey, let me send you a dollar to show you how this new nerd money works. And they'd say, what's special about it? You'd say, you know, nobody can stop it. You don't need permission. You don't need AML/KYC. It's yours. With a 12-word phrase on your phone, you can be part of this huge financial network.

6:56These were the selling points of it, limited in supply. And now all we have left is the limited supply. With these Wall Street products, we've had kind of 10 million people onboarded, but they're not onboarded to Bitcoin. They're onboarded to a claim on a claim on a claim that sits in some centralized account right next to their AMC theater stock. That's not Bitcoin. It's not permissionless for them. They're still hardcore users, but I don't think that user base has grown much. The people who have self-sovereignty hasn't grown, certainly in proportion to the number of millions and millions that are onboarded to these BlackRock-style products, ETFs and stuff like that.

7:40So I see that as a regression. And the argument against altcoins used to be like, hey, we only have one chance to make this work. All effort should be focused on making this work. Well, when we have 10 million people onboarded to ETFs or 20 million people, we are losing an opportunity. We're spending a lot of money spinning wheels. There's a lot of regulatory overhead, and there's only so many hours in the day. We're all getting older, and time is going by. And if you have the best and brightest spending all their days talking with lawyers and talking with investment bankers about mNAV and this structure and that structure, and I'm going to roll into a SPAC and blah, blah, blah, you're not furthering the core principles of Bitcoin.

8:29You only have this limited supply narrative, which is cool. In a world where you have unlimited supply of fiat printed money, limited supply is valuable, but that's not how you change the world. That's not what the white paper was about. That's not what the early days were about. The early days are about a new form of money. It's peer-to-peer cash. It's money that can be used. And I see people using it a lot less, unfortunately. And sometimes a lot of this movement is actually one step forward, one step back, or sometimes one step forward, two steps back.

9:02Things like the Genius Act actually prevents you from being able to use Bitcoin as money in some ways. A lot of people have said as a criticism, to me criticizing these centralized strategies, they said, well, Hal Finney said that banks should be working with it? Well…

9:23Vlad CosteaThat's not what he said, by the way.

9:26Bruce FentonHe actually had a great idea, which I'd love to see, which is now actually coincidentally illegal, because of the Genius Act. What he said is that a bank could be centralized and own a bunch of Bitcoin, and then they could issue bank notes based on the Bitcoin. So you could have Venmo, who could have 200,000 Bitcoin or 100,000 Bitcoin, and then they could issue Venmo sats, which are backed one-to-one sat-backed, ideally audited proof of reserves on chain, or BlackRock or anybody else, or even a government.

9:57I always thought it would be cool if a government got some private keys and they put 0.1 Bitcoin each in hundreds and hundreds of safes with its own private key and issued a literal dollar, a Bitcoin-backed dollar with a serial number to say this serial number equals this thing in this vault, and it's secured like Fort Knox. And then you could trade that, you could have a dollar bill that's backed by literal Bitcoin. That's what Hal was talking about, and that's actually a great idea, and it solves scaling.

10:25But that's actually illegal now in America because of the Genius Act, the so-called Genius Act, which is not so genius. And this is what happens a lot of times. When you're trying to kiss up to Wall Street and do this centralized stuff, things suffer. You get regulatory things which hurt the cypherpunk aspects. They say, oh yeah, we want to do this, let's add more AML/KYC, more nonsense. So like I said, you take one step forward, sometimes one or two steps backwards. I love it.

10:58Vlad CosteaAnd I do want to mention, so you have had a very interesting journey. The last time you were on the show, you were running for the US Senate, and at the time you were questioning the philosophy of being a cypherpunk, and you said, well, I've tried for such a long time to private and not reveal too much about my life, but now I'm in politics and everyone wants to see what I'm doing and I have to be very public. And then you had a very interesting story arc.

11:25You sort of started cheerleading for Vivek, and then you realized that Vivek became friends with Trump, and then you realized that you're politically homeless. Those are your words. I do remember that. I was very entertained by the whole situation because you came full circle, and now you're a cypherpunk again. You realize, okay, this is where I feel comfortable, this is what I do, this is what I like.

11:51Bruce FentonWell, very good point, very good observation. I hadn't thought about it like that. But yeah, you're right. I got into the cypherpunk movement and Bitcoin to change the world. And then I did work on that for a while, almost a decade. And then I said, well, maybe getting into the US Senate would be a way to change the world. I care about human liberty and human freedom. That's what I want to do. I want to further that however I can, whether it's Bitcoin or politics. So I tried the political thing.

12:19I do like Vivek. I was his campaign co-chair for New Hampshire. When I ran myself, I ran for US Senate. And in some ways, there was probably, not probably, there was definitely some aspect of sabotage in that race, because I didn't really want that job. And the day that I lost, I was walking with my son, who was probably, I don't know, he was like 11 at the time. And he says, Dad, does this mean you don't have to go down to DC? And I was like, oh, that's right, son.

12:55I don't have to go down to DC. And it was like my happiest moment of losing. I was like, oh, good. I didn't want to go down to that swamp. Not my thing. But I really did view it as a sacrifice. I would, if somehow I got appointed or something like that, yeah, I'd do it reluctantly, because I am a naive enough person to still think that it could matter and change the world. However, a couple of years history has shown otherwise. Vivek and Elon, the two most capable people in the universe, didn't get anywhere with Doge.

13:30Vivek lasted 15 minutes, and Elon lasted 15 hours. I mean, Elon, these are smart guys. By the way, I spent a lot of time with Vivek. I introduced him for 30 different events. He came here to the house a couple times. He is smart. I mean, he's as smart as, you put him in the Satoshi Roundtable, smartest of the smart, he's going to be one of the smartest people there. I mean, he is just absolutely brilliant, and he knows his stuff. Elon, I don't know personally, but obviously ridiculously smart, very capable.

14:06They both have really good resources. Vivek is extremely wealthy, has a big following. Elon is off the charts, and they weren't able to do anything. The machine and the swamp is so big and so deep that even Elon Musk, I'm not Elon Musk. I don't have his money or influence or reach or anything else. So if he can't do it, maybe I couldn't do it. And senators don't even have that much power, honestly. One of the things I realized when I was running is there's not much you can do.

14:35I was trying to make campaign promises, you know, oh, I'm going to end the SEC. No, you're not. You can't really do anything as a senator. There's just a few limited powers that you have. You're just one of a hundred, and you're kind of a nobody when you first enter. So then I would say, and I like the cyberpunk stuff more, so I'm like, all right, well, maybe the cyberpunk stuff is the only way to change. As you've seen, people become disillusioned like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elon and say that this machine can't be stopped.

15:04The swamp is too deep. It's too strong. The incentives are aligned in such a way that nobody can make a difference. Maybe our only hope is the cyberpunk technology, the cyberpunk values. And I really hope that that works because if it doesn't, we've got nothing. And then I think that you'll have the people, the early cyberpunks in the Bitcoin movement of kind of my generation, and I've seen a lot of them already. They've already given up, and they said, all right, I made my money. The world isn't going to change.

15:34It sucks. At least I'm rich. And they go off into the sunset. And I can't really blame them, especially, like I say, time is the one constant in all our lives. The people who started in Bitcoin 12 years ago who are 22 are now 34. The people who are 34 are now 46. If you're 46, you're now 58. Those are big differences, a lot of difference between a 58 and a 46-year-old or a 22 and a 34-year-old. Your life changes. People get kids.

16:05They get older. They worry about their health, whether you're 20 or 70. People change, and their priorities change. And there's a lot of really good folks that you and I knew in the early days, the big names of 2012. There's a whole bunch of people who made fortunes, and they're just kind of gone. They're just enjoying life. And I can't blame them at all. So that's a risk that we have. That's why when people say, oh, let's onboard the banks first, and then in 10 or 15 years when we have a billion people on the banks, then we'll move it over.

16:38Well, for one thing, that doesn't work that way because you have a technical debt where you spend a decade where nobody is making privacy tools, nobody's making user interfaces better, nobody's making better wallets, nobody's increasing actual uses, cash and transactions, and you're building this big legal infrastructure where everybody is captive in these BlackRock products. It doesn't just switch all of a sudden. You have to do it now. And the other thing about waiting 10 years, like I say, in 10 years, I'm probably going to be retired.

17:10I'll be joining those friends of mine. I don't know, maybe I'll never retire, but I'll certainly be different, God willing, if I'm still here. You never know with life. And so we have to move fast, and this is our chance. And I think that all of these centralized strategies are a big distraction from that at best don't move us forward. At worst, they serve as an attack vector or a step in the wrong direction.

17:37Vlad CosteaSomething that I also want to mention, because it's important, is that when you were running for the Senate, you sold so much Bitcoin, like a lot more Bitcoin than most of the guys who call you shitcoiner or whatever on Twitter will ever have. I remember you were tweeting about selling 50 BTC to fund your campaign or something, which is insane, by the way. I'm not sure if you have any remorse about that one, but it was insane.

18:04Bruce FentonI actually, I loaned my campaign Bitcoin, but I didn't actually spend it. One of my challenges, I spent very little, actually. I didn't move quite a bit of Bitcoin. It was more than that over into the campaign fund. It was 72 coins or something, but I didn't actually use it. One of my challenges was that I wasn't able to effectively deploy money. I was a first-time candidate. I came into the race rather late. I didn't really know the system. There's a lot of grifters out there.

18:37The minute I announced, I got dozens of calls. And these are high-level people. Some of these people are on CNN every day, well-known political figures, former Congress members. Big campaign managers, people who've run successful campaigns, they all reach out to you immediately, and they all want their handout for one to three million each or whatever. So there's a lot of ways to spend money. There's a lot of grifters, and it was very hard early on to be like, whoa, who can I trust or not trust?

19:04And I didn't have a professional team. I didn't have a lot of people who had worked on campaigns. There's a couple of really good volunteers and others, but I just didn't have the machine. And I wasn't confident with spending millions of dollars on a big maybe. And then as the campaign went on, pretty quickly, I realized it was a bit of a long shot. There was a clear frontrunner who had already been running for 18 months before me, and then there was another guy who had served in the State Senate for 30 years who was also ahead of me in the polls.

19:35So to beat them, it was like a big roll of the dice. It's like, okay, maybe if you spend 5 million, you might be able to meet them. You know, if you knew for sure that you spend X number of Bitcoin or dollars where it's like a certain thing, it's never certain, by the way, there's nobody who can do it, but it is kind of a science. A Senate race, you know, like right now, I'm absolutely, positively not running right now, but there's a race going on right now.

20:01If I wanted to be competitive in that, you're looking at like $30 million to do that, but it's still not a guarantee because I'd be running against the two candidates are both former senators. So, you know, it's hard to beat either of them. And in my race, same thing. It was two, you know, the two people ahead were quite good. So, luckily, I didn't spend that. I didn't move it over there. And, you know, it worked out well. It was a great experience. You know, I got to learn a lot.

20:32I got to go all around the state, learn a lot about the political process, how it works. I honed up my skills a little bit. A lot of people think I'm very extroverted because I'm the world champion of talking. In fact, during the campaign, I spoke for 33 hours.

20:45Vlad CosteaYeah, I wanted to mention it because you broke the record for the longest filibuster. You basically looked at what the longest filibuster is. And I think that was the most beautiful part of your short political career, that you broke a record. You were actually there talking for how long did you say? 32 hours?

21:04Bruce Fenton33 hours. So that was fun. I got to level up some skills like that. People think I'm an extrovert because I do things like that. But I'm actually quite introverted and I'm not super. People don't even believe this, but I'm not really super comfortable in crowds and with people. But, you know, I've worked on overcoming that my whole life, but especially running for Senate. It's like, man, you can't. I used to go to Bitcoin events and I'd kind of hang out in the corner and get a little skeeved out if some random.

21:31Vlad CosteaThat's why you made the round table, right? To not have a corner.

21:34Bruce FentonYeah, I made the round table. So it's like some people have called it the introverts conference. It's like very quiet and we don't do the blasting music. It's a really great place to just sit down and have a one on one or a one on three or four small conversation, which is that's my style. But the campaign was great because now if I ever need to, I'm comfortable going into a room and shaking a hundred hands. I can give a speech on one second's noticed at any time.

22:02So I'd highly recommend it to anybody. You know, run for office. You'll learn something. And that's how I viewed it when I knew my odds were low. But I said, you know what? I'm kind of bored this summer. I'm not doing much. I can have some fun here. I don't have any major things on my agenda. I can have some fun, maybe even win, but especially have some fun, learn something, level up my skills. It's like the ultimate, not side quest, regular quest. You know, if you use a video game term, it's like a DLC.

22:30You know, it's like a big quest and you level up and level up your skills. So I'd recommend it to anybody for sure.

22:37Vlad CosteaWhat about video games though? Like which quests do you recommend? Like what are you playing right now? And what is your favorite RPG or whatever? Because it seems like you're into that.

22:50Bruce FentonFunny you mentioned that. You know, I was, I made a post on Facebook just the other day. I said, I almost gave up on video games. Usually around the winter break when the kids are home and the holiday season and stuff. Typically, that's always been the time that I don't play a lot of games, but I enjoy them. I just don't usually have time. But usually, you know, around Thanksgiving, historically, that's when I grab some new game. I used to just play some game that week and then I play a little bit during the winter and the last several years.

23:24So I really liked Skyrim and Fallout, but those are old games. Those are like 12 year old games now. Fallout 4 and Skyrim, I love those. But I hadn't found any game that good for a while. And so like several years in a row, I was messing around with mid journey and AI for a couple of years. So I did that instead of the video games. And then I tried a few others and they were terrible. There were so many games. We tried like 10 or 15 games and I'm like, man, this high learning curve.

23:53It's annoying. I don't like it. I tried Baldur's Gate, which was game of the year. It was so bad. I was insulted. I'm like, I'm actually insulted. Like, I'm mad at this game. I'm angry at the developers for not just wasting my time and money, but you've insulted me. You've made such a bad game. So my son this year, like three years in a row, I couldn't find any game that I liked. So this year for Thanksgiving, my son is like, I'm going to find one that you like.

24:20So we tried like three games around Thanksgiving and they were all terrible. And then he's like, all right, I know this isn't usually your style, but I'm going to try because it was very popular. I'm going to try Diablo three. And I didn't think I'd like it. I don't usually like the fast pace like that, but I actually loved it. So I got obsessed about that. I played that all last month. And so that's the that's the game I've been playing now. Good old Diablo, which is really fun.

24:45I usually don't like that pace. I like more of the role playing style like Skyrim. But Diablo's kind of fun. It's kind of like it's sort of mindless and refreshing for your brain. So I find that one that one a good one.

25:02Vlad CosteaI played it with my girlfriend. It's pretty good. I mean, of course, people say that Diablo two is the peak of the series and everything else that came after is horrible. But Diablo three is not that bad and four is acceptable to like, don't be a snob. It's pretty good. Hack and slash action.

25:21Bruce FentonI'll try four next. But yeah, I like geek stuff in general. I'm not as big of a video gamer, but I'm a big gaming guy like tabletop games. I'm a Dungeons and Dragons nerd Pathfinder Warhammer. I like almost all geek hobbies. I'm huge on comic books. I like I have model trains. I have the Warhammer figures are the same scale as the Lego guys. And they're the same scale as the Warhammer. So I've got a big train room. That's all Warhammer plus Legos plus Dungeons and Dragons guys plus trains model trains.

25:54I got a couple of nice model trains for Christmas that that are really cool. And I've had some people helping me to outfit it a little bit more. So, yeah, I'm definitely a big nerd for sure.

26:07Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm not sure if you know Ray Youssef. He used to be the CEO of Paxful. And now he has a new business, which is called No Ones, and he's sponsoring the show, by the way. But when he was on, he basically said that when he's hiring someone, he's asking them what kind of video games they play and how they play the video games. Like he's looking for someone who doesn't just play to complete the story, but someone who does the side quests, someone who's grinding a lot to get to the max level.

26:36Someone who's really obsessed with the game and tries to find ways to hack into it, to discover shortcuts to get to the highest level, like the best spot to grind, stuff like that.

26:48Bruce FentonThat's funny. Yeah, I do know Ray really well. We're good friends. And despite his controversy, I like him.

26:55Vlad CosteaWhat's the controversy?

26:57Bruce FentonOh, he's always, he's Ray, you know, he's larger than life character. He's always saying something that is controversial.

27:03Vlad CosteaI mean, he looks like he came from the WWE, but otherwise he's a very nice guy. Of course, he seems to not like the Jews, but other than that, he's fine.

27:12Bruce FentonWe're good friends. And yeah, that's interesting. When I play a game, I'm interested in economics. Diablo isn't so much an economic game, but something like Skyrim, a lot of times I just say, all right, I'm just kind of curious, like how I can make the most money. I'm curious how I can manipulate. I used to play Ultima online, which was even better because it's like a multiplayer real world or real people. And so it's like more of a real economic system. And so I'm always interested. It's fun with my background in markets and stuff to be like, okay, what's supply and demand?

27:47What can I buy and sell? What has the best margins? So typically on those games I end up, you know, at Skyrim, I had millions of gold and in Ultima, I was like an absurdly wealthy player because I just figured out the kind of, not hacks, but just figured out the tools that you do to make wealth, which is kind of funny. Doesn't matter in Diablo. It's more just kill everybody, you get some money naturally. But yeah, I find that aspect fun.

28:13Vlad CosteaSometimes I do think that Bitcoin is sort of an MMORPG. Yeah, because we're joining guilds, right? And we're very tribal about it and we're doing quests and we have like a greater mission all the time. Except that I'm not sure if we're really making it.

28:30Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah. I mean, I was kind of I was making some sort of bearish. I don't know if you call bearish statements, but like less excited about Bitcoin than I typically had been. I don't like the idea of mindless tribalism and cheerleading, like rah rah Bitcoin is always great no matter what. I don't think that's a good investment philosophy. You want an investment who constantly proves itself to you and you've got to be aware of directions and trends and what it means to you and what is happening.

29:03So I'm not a huge fan of the trend of Bitcoin. If we go forward three, four, five years down the road and 90% of Bitcoin is just co-opted by large institutions, then I don't think that's a victory. Now, again, I don't like the word bearish because I still own Bitcoin. It's not like I'm going to—you know, if I say something negative about Bitcoin, people are like, oh, he's going to sell everything. It's like, well, no, I still think it's a great asset. But you've got to be constantly cautious.

29:37Your job as an investor is to make sure your investment proves itself to you every day. Otherwise, at some point, it's going to change no matter how bullish you are on Bitcoin, no matter how great of a bull scenario you have. At some point, that will change. The most bullish you could say is maybe it will last 200 years. Maybe there's never ever any quantum computing ever. It lasts. It becomes true global money. Everybody adopts it. It's the standard that—there's a Bitcoin standard that cash globally from the majority of the countries is backed on, and you have everybody having self-custody and everything.

30:16Yeah, great. But even in that ultra-bull scenario, eventually, that won't be true. In 150 years, maybe aliens come down, and they have a different kind of money. I mean, 300 years. Someday, it could be a year, it could be 300 years, but someday, the narrative will change. And so your job is to just be cautious of that. And also, is it the best thing? Bitcoin could reach a plateau. It could go to a million a coin and just kind of taper out and sort of stay stable like that for a decade, in which case it wouldn't mean—in that case, it would make sense to take your profits and buy real estate or something else.

31:00So yeah, you've got to be cautious. But I was less excited and less bullish when I went to some of the events, and all everybody was talking about were these centralized strategies. It's like when I go to events, and there's panels on KYC, AML, and regulatory panels. I just couldn't be less interested. I just don't care about that. It's not fun for me. If I was going to go put a suit back on and go work at Wall Street, I would have never left my own job.

31:28And frankly, if I thought that was the future, I would just retire. I'd go off, like I mentioned, all these cypherpunks who go enjoy what they build, and I would just go and try to focus on getting in shape and reading some books and just forget all this stuff, if I thought that that's all we were going to do. I have almost no interest in the centralized strategies. They're just not interesting to me.

31:51Vlad CosteaI think the main tenet of Bitcoin maximalism for a long time was that whatever is interesting in altcoin world is going to come to Bitcoin. And altcoins are just this experimental layer where stuff is happening and where developers play with different parameters and new technologies. And if there is any merit to it, we're going to bring it to Bitcoin. I think along this journey, the narrative changed to the point where we just said that this is the holy technology and this is pure and everything else out there is a shitcoin and there is no merit to anything and we don't want it.

32:29And then I think the narrative flipped once again to the point where we don't want Bitcoin to improve in any way. We don't want Bitcoin to work as money. We should never look at the white paper to see what this was intended to be. This is just the asset that Michael Saylor tells us that it's used for collateral, for, you know, accumulating and using it like gold, but not in the sense that it's something that's scarce and something that you mine, but something that is slow by design and also is held by custodians.

33:05And most people will never transact in a direct manner. And that really sucks. I don't know how we got here. I sound like a BCasher, by the way. And I'm at a point in my career where I realized that these big blockers were onto something and I wish we did not split and we had them around to give us a wake up call. Because this rift between the community philosophies was generally terrible. And we ended up in a situation where we lost some of the libertarians and some of the cypherpunks were part of the movement.

33:41Bruce FentonYeah, I agree. I feel the same way. It became very contentious. It became like political parties, one side hating the other. I was friends with all sides. I ended up more on the Bitcoin Core side versus the Bitcoin cash, but I'm friends with Roger Ver to this day. He came to the round table two years ago, which was great to see him because he was almost like an honorary co-founder. He came to the first four, but then there was the rift and people kind of went their own ways.

34:12Vlad CosteaI don't think it was years ago because he got arrested or something around the time. Maybe three years.

34:20Bruce FentonYeah, but I agree. I think we did lose something. I think it was not ideal and it's too bad. To your point about being anti-altcoin, there's a conflict if you're against altcoins but also against Bitcoin change. You have to kind of choose one because there is useful other things that other coins have. Monero, privacy, tokenization, whether you like it or not, is a thing. And even I think the most solid Bitcoin-only type of person has to admit that stocks have value. Tokenizing stocks and making them work with Bitcoin better is a natural thing.

35:07And so your choice is either put all that on Bitcoin and make Bitcoin the chain for ordinals and NFTs and stocks and tokenized securities and real-world assets and also add privacy and make it the end-all be-all of all coins, which I like that idea. Now, there is a security risk of that. Every time you add a change to core, it's a potential attack vector and maybe you clog the network and make it not as good for its core purpose of money. And that's a fine argument, too.

35:38But if you do believe that, well, then you have to support the other stuff. If you say, all right, Bitcoin should only be money and money only and shouldn't mess with anything. Okay, I accept that. Well, in that case, you kind of got to support something else. You should support Litecoin, Monero. If you want to go real cypherpunk, Litecoin and Monero are pretty good because there was no pre-mine and central control. But for something like tokenized securities, where there's already centralization, I'm not a huge Solana fan at all, really.

36:12I wish I bought some. But I'm not a fan of it. But I feel like it's more centralized. But it does serve a need that people want. So I think you either have to integrate those to Bitcoin, which has some drawbacks, or you should be more supportive of these other projects. But I think to be against both of them doesn't really make sense because these things are useful. And in a post-Bitcoin world, where Bitcoin really is the global money standard, of course, you're going to have tokenization.

36:42You're going to have things that trade with Bitcoin. You're not going to have no trading pairs and exchanges only offer one thing. That just doesn't, they wouldn't even be exchanges. That wouldn't make sense as a global vision.

36:56Vlad CosteaI do want to ask you at this point, what are the five altcoins that come off the top of your head that are not scams? So I'll let you think for a while and plug some ads in the meantime, because I do have to do this. I've mentioned NoOnes previously, which is Ray Youssef's business, so I do have to explain what it is. And it's a peer-to-peer marketplace that's built for the global south. So if you're choosing to trade on NoOnes, on the spot market or the peer-to-peer marketplace, you're giving liquidity to a bunch of Nigerians, to a bunch of Venezuelan people, to people from the Middle East who are trying to get their hands on these coins and use them on the local market to hustle.

37:40And I think that's really beautiful. It's not just some place where you can make some money, but it's also some place where you can help some people who need to hustle make some money also. The principle that Ray Youssef describes in this situation is called everyone gets a seat at the table and everyone eats. It's pretty cool. Check it out. It's NoOnes.com. Also, if you want to try a non-custodial wallet, which is interesting and has lots of features, including support for privacy coins, then check out Unstoppable Wallet.

38:12If you think it's just some sort of shitcoin wallet, then you should go to Bitcoin.org and choose your wallet section and then go to the mobile section and you're going to see that Unstoppable is one of the top recommendations. So check it out. It's free to download. It has lots of interesting features like the rest mode, which means you can type a different pin, which opens a wallet that has zero funds. If someone ever follows you home and you need to show how many coins you have in your wallet, or you can even put like $10 so that if someone's going to steal something from you, it's going to be a small amount.

38:47Check it out. It's called Unstoppable Wallet. And also for the purpose of this presentation, I'm going to choose LayerTwo Labs, which is the company that's building drivechains, which is following the vision of the 2014 sidechains paper, but making them enforced by miners. It's the idea by Paul Sztorc. He's working on this. He wants to bring every altcoin use case to Bitcoin with this technology. And it's not just an idea. It's software that you can download and try today. You go to layer2labs.com slash download and you can get the software for macOS, for Linux and for Windows and test it and see if this is what you want the future of Bitcoin to look like.

39:30Check it out. Now, Bruce, tell me, what are your five picks for altcoins which are not scams? Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

39:40Bruce FentonNo, I think, let's see. Well, Bitcoin Cash, we mentioned. I mean, that's definitely not a scam. It's a fork. It has exactly the same principles as Bitcoin. Whether you think it's a great idea or not is a different matter. Like I said, I'm kind of like you. I'm more warm to Bitcoin Cash. And it's stood the test of time now. It's still around. You mentioned Ravencoin earlier. That's a fair launch, no pre-mine. A lot of people misread my role in it. They're like, oh, it's your coin or something like that.

40:17It's not. It's nobody's coin. I don't consider it like mine. I didn't create it. I came up with an idea that developers created, like Tron Black did 9,000 times more work than I did. But nobody got any pre-mine or any incentive or anything like that. So the idea of it being like a person's thing is just different. And even for a fair launch open source like Litecoin, it's different because there's no Charlie Lee. And that would be another one. So I'd add Litecoin 3. I always think, and Litecoin I've used many times as an example in arguments with people about like, oh, everything's a scam.

41:03I'm like, well, is Litecoin a scam? How is it a scam? The guy took the code. It's open source. He took it. He changed a couple of things. He released it, similar to Raven and others. I just don't see how that's a scam. Nobody is getting scammed. Nobody gave Charlie any money. There's a huge difference between taking money and raising money from people and spending it on salaries or giving something away for free. It's like the difference between a for-profit and a charity. I mean, it's just night and day, very, very different.

41:35Now, even something where people do take a pre-mine and take money doesn't necessarily mean it's a scam. I don't think Ethereum is a scam. I don't think the people who gave that first 18 million to Vitalik feel like they were scammed. I don't see them asking for their money back. And did it deliver on what? I remember. I mean, I participated in that crowd sale. And I remember in the early days, they weren't talking about making billions of dollars. They were talking about it in an experiment.

42:03They're like, hey, maybe this cool thing will work. We think we can get a chain operating. They weren't even sure they were going to get a chain operating. So even something like that, I think it's night and day difference between Litecoin and Ethereum. I think that Litecoin, Ravencoin, Decred, Monero, Doge type model is much, more pure and unattackable. And you can't even claim that anybody was trying to get rich because they have a completely equal footing. Anybody can mine it. So it's a big difference, but even still the same.

42:34I don't think Ethereum is a scam. So I would add to the list, what do we have? That's three. And then we can add, like, Doge has the same background, not a scam. It's just like open source and Monero, too. And I think there's Decred, I don't know much about it, but I think there's a few, you know, people tag me on coins. Everybody, you know, I get many, many, I got a picture of me and CZ one time and it was the funniest thing. I have sympathy for CZ because just by posting a photo of me and him, I got, I don't know, 300 requests.

43:11Hey, introduce me to CZ. It's like, come on, you know? And there were all these coins. And usually what I do when somebody pitches a new coin, first thing I say is, was there a pre-mine? Was there a fundraise? Was there some ICO or similar thing to an ICO? Show me the money. Is there a treasury? Where did it come from? And if there is, that's a big negative. It doesn't mean it, I mean, I don't participate in these things typically. It depends on the use case and a lot of other things.

43:38But if there's not, then I feel like that's much more cyberpunk and proven. So I like the model of forks, you know, code forks or chain forks like Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin. Ravencoin was also a fork of Bitcoin. And, you know, that's what open source is. I mean, if you don't like it, then you should be in closed source because it's software and the license, the way it works, it's supposed to be copied. And there's been, I don't know, 2000 chain forks and code forks of Bitcoin.

44:07And that's a healthy thing. It's good for the network. You learn what works and what doesn't and what errors there are and things that make mistakes and you can try things out. Litecoin is pushed forward with trying some things that are a little bit harder. You know, some of this stuff with drivechains and others, it's harder to implement on Bitcoin. If you need a change in core, that's hard as it should be. And so, you know, there's a place for experimentation as well. I think it's a great idea to experiment, particularly with Bitcoin forks, because, you know, the worst thing that can happen is you learn something that doesn't work, like you make a big mistake, the whole thing blows up, and then Bitcoin learns.

44:45Bitcoin says, oh, wow, don't do that. You know, be careful. There was a malicious code thing snuck into one of the code updates for Ravencoin. And it was some way where they could print a small number of coins and take them and then it got caught, and they closed it. And that, you know, people know about those kind of, but that's exactly the kind of attack vector you got to watch. And it's exactly the reason that you got to be very, very careful with Bitcoin or any coin moving things around like that, because any change is a potential attack vector.

45:16And particularly with Bitcoin, I'm concerned now, because core has all of this infighting and internal drama, and it's very close. You know, it's a lot of power. You know, originally, we used to say, well, developers have no power. It's all about the nodes and the miners and stuff. I mean, developers do have power. You do have kind of centralized control and power to some degree. Of course, it's checked and balanced by miners and nodes and ultimately users and consumers and even the markets. But you do want to be concerned about that.

45:46And when they have all this infighting about, you know, political hot button issues and social justice and DEI and these kind of things, nepotism and other issues that have come into discussion and debate and conflict about who's this and who's that and what in-group is this and who's going to get kicked out, that's a concern to me. Because if I was an evil government and I wanted to influence or co-opt Bitcoin, it's pretty trivial for any government. Even the poorest government can spend 10 million.

46:19A government like China or the US or anybody in the EU, 10 million is nothing. But for $10 million, you could donate and control. You know, I was a critic of Jack doing the funding for Bitcoin.

46:31Vlad CosteaYou mean Jack Dorsey?

46:33Bruce FentonJack Dorsey, yeah. And that was one of the things. You mentioned Pierre. I was in a debate about Pierre because he was very in favor of it. And I said, hey, this guy is, by all accounts, a nice guy. I've only interacted with Jack a little bit and he is a nice guy. And I have a lot of mutual friends. And I have a lot of friends who say that, you know, he's sort of a secret libertarian. But for whatever reason, he did preside over some of the most severe private sector censorship we've ever seen in human history.

47:02So at the very least, he got fooled. That's the best thing you could say is, oh, the board bullied him or whatever. But hey, man, it's like, sorry. You might be the nicest guy in the world. But if you drive a train and the train goes off the tracks and 200 train cars all fall over and blow up, I don't want you being in charge of highway safety. I'm sorry. So the fact that he failed so badly with censorship, for whatever reason, given the benefit of the doubt, let's assume he got bullied.

47:35He didn't like it. He's redeeming himself with Nostr. Just the same, I'm cautious about him because he's shown his ability, on balance, to be co-opted. Maybe he's a bad guy and he co-opted on purpose. But that's exactly how I would attack Bitcoin. I'd have somebody prominent who everybody likes donate money and say, hey, I'm donating it. Interesting, he chose Africa too, because there's less accountability. There's less developers there. And people don't want to be seen as attacking Africa. You say, oh, we've got these great African developers.

48:07Well, maybe they're easier to co-op because they're not in the mainstream. It's harder to co-op somebody in New York City because they have like the NYC bit devs meeting where there's 200 developers there. And if you're full of it, they're going to call you out. But if you go to some place where they don't have that, it would be easier to co-op. So I'm concerned about that. And I think it would be trivial for a government to install a developer. And there's controversial developers now.

48:35There's some that are kind of brand new that haven't been developers a long time and sort of came into this position. And they don't necessarily share the values that I think Bitcoin is built on. I'm also very, very cautious when I see somebody with socialist tendencies who's a big statist who is heavily involved in the direction of Bitcoin, because that's not what this technology is. And if you get your core fundamental beliefs, you don't believe in human freedom and you believe in state control. I don't have a huge I it's you know, I have a big trust issue with you being able to make the right decisions when you need to for Bitcoin.

49:19Vlad CosteaIn the case of Jack Dorsey, it gets very interesting because last summer we saw the fight between Bitcoin Knots and Bitcoin Core. And we basically saw how there's a camp of people who are mostly financed by Jack Dorsey, who have their own mining pool and they run their own node implementation, which in some ways Bitcoin Knots reminded me of XT because they were trying to basically get a majority of nodes and they were looking at statistics all the time and they were saying that they're the ones pushing Bitcoin in the right direction and the others are regressive in comparison and they want to keep it pure and only keep it for financial transactions and whatever. But at the same time, the core side also got funded by Jack Dorsey.

50:07So I saw this meme, which was actually taken from a picture of the Iron Dome in Israel, which was getting bombed at the time with missiles from Iran. And the meme was saying basically that the missiles from Iran are U.S. Taxpayers' money and the Iron Dome is also U.S. Taxpayers' money. So basically, that was the meme that there is this entity, which is the United States that's funding both sides of the war.

50:35And that one got adapted for Bitcoin Core versus Bitcoin Knots. Both of them being funded by Jack Dorsey. Jack's money, also Jack's money. And it gets pretty shady to the point where you don't really know what this guy thinks. Maybe that he is naive and he just wants everyone to have equal chances. And he sees this clash of ideas as something which leads to a better outcome. But I think that he does a lot of harm in the sense that he's just paying people to pay.

51:10Bruce FentonYeah. Well, you know, think about if he was still in charge of Twitter. You know, I had said this is an easy attack vector. You get somebody popular like Jack, who's well liked. And this isn't anything against Jack specifically, but you know, it could be Saylor or anybody who's popular and has resources. They say, hey, I'm developing, you know, I'm donating to development. They can say that they're not going to have influence, but that's not the way donations and money works. There's always going to be money.

51:38There's always going to be some kind of influence. And then, you know, if you wanted to have an attack vector, what you do, you'd combine that with censorship. So you just ban everybody. You say, okay, you know, old Bitcoin is now called terrorist coin, a proper Bitcoin that uses symbol BTC. The one that BlackRock and Coinbase and Saylor recognize is now the one with the upgrade. The upgrade makes it more friendly to KYC. If you support terrorist coin, you're committing a felony, and you're going to be blocked from social media.

52:08And all the big powers are going with, you know, the real BTC. You know, that's a pretty easy attack. And then the old one, you know, what is actually the real BTC is called terrorist coin. You know, that's a pretty obvious and simple attack. And it doesn't take too much. If you compromise five or so sources, you know, and, you know, a lot of people have criticized Brian Armstrong. I don't think Brian Armstrong would participate in that. But he doesn't have all the control. Coinbase is a publicly traded company, and they could get rid of him.

52:44And he's not like the most hardcore cyberpunk. Brian Armstrong is not the kind of person to, you know, cause trouble. And maybe that makes him a better CEO. But either way, it doesn't matter. Let's suppose he was, you know, Roger Ver, and he was just like, hell no, no matter what, you're gonna, it's almost like it'd be easier to co-opt him. If he was just like, F you, I'm never changing. Coinbase is never accepting that crap. Government coin, simple BTC, we're going down with the ship.

53:20Big deal. Get rid of him, man. If you're talking about real power, they would target him legally. And look at how many important people in our space have been targeted legally. They just targeted legally, and then even if he ends up in jail, he can talk all he wants, but it wouldn't matter. When you have a public company, it's particularly easy in a situation when you have government level actors, and billion dollar actors. And you have big power players like BlackRock, who have massive voting power.

53:52BlackRock and Vanguard and a few others have voting power over the shares. So if you co-opt, if you co-opted Coinbase, and you co-opted strategy, and BlackRock has already co-opted, and Cantor and Vanguard and the company that does all the voting for them, that's just not even half a dozen entities in one country. And you have a decent, meaningful discussion about influence. Like if all five of those said, this is the real Bitcoin, this fork version, you know, 4.0, you know, is the real Bitcoin, and this is BTC.

54:32Plus, if you have the government flexing and saying, oh, Genius Act Two says it's a felony to own, you know, terrorist coin, the old thing that used to be called BTC. So even I'd sell. If it's a felony, and I'm faced with having to leave the country or commit a felony, even I would sell. And I'm a big troublemaker. You know, I'm the kind of person, you know, during the COVID tyranny, I got removed by police five times from my school board meetings. You know, I'm the most troublemaker.

55:01But they'd just delete me. They'd even pressure me legally or delete me, co-opt you somehow, delete you from social media so nobody cares. But even for me, with all my tough talking, if they passed a law right now that said it is a felony in the United States to own Bitcoin, I'd cry. I'd be angry. I'd yell and scream on social media, but I would comply. I'm not gonna risk my freedom, you know. I hate to say that. It sounds like such a cowardly thing. But, you know, the world has reality, you know.

55:39Like, I mean, what else am I gonna do? I could leave. And assuming if it's the United States did this, it's not like I could go escape to the UAE because they'd go along with it too. The United States flexing like this, the EU would automatically fall in line, the Gulf states would fall in line, especially if you had China and the US or Russia and the US team up. Boom. It's kind of game over. So, you know, I always like to, you know, it may sound like conspiracy theory, but I always try and think in terms of those attack vectors.

56:08You know, who would want to attack this and how would they? If you're not thinking about, like, how would a government attack it, you know, I think that's naive because there is vast evil powers. I mean, look at how much power somebody like Elizabeth Warren or Janet Yellen or Jerome Powell have or Christine Lagarde. You know, these are powerful people with a lot of influence and they ain't you and they ain't me. You know, they don't share our values. If they had their way, if Elizabeth Warren had her way, probably she'd lock up a thousand people in our industry.

56:42It wouldn't just be Fluffy Pony and CZ and Roger Ver and a handful of others. It would be everybody. And you think about that too. Look at the, if you think about an attack vector, who was the number one person who would have fought that? Roger Ver, jail. Who's the number two most important person to fight that? CZ, jail. Who's the number three most important person to fight that? Founder Monero or, you know, Fluffy Pony, charged with a 25-year-old. They pulled out a thing and said, oh, 25 years ago, you charged 8,500 bucks for lunch on your company credit card.

57:19I mean, you're in jail, you know. You know, privacy wallet developers, jail. You know, you think about it, like, it's not that hard. It's a chilling effect because for, you know, a lot of people in the Free State movement up here in New Hampshire were close with Roger. They see this. Oh, and then by the way, the guy who onboarded Roger, Ian Freeman, jail. You know, so it doesn't take much, you know. Like, they can silence people, plus you can censor them. And, you know, like I say, if there's certain people, if they had the power, I really legitimately worried if Kamala would have won and continued the Elizabeth Warren regime, with Warren being president of the economy, I worried about tanks coming down my driveway.

58:10You know, I would have been, I hope I've worked hard enough to be in the whatever, top 500, top 1,000. You know, I'm not Roger Beer, but thank goodness, I don't want to be targeted legally like that. But, you know, all you need to do is arrest 500 people. And look at what they did with 1-6. You know, like, they could just arrest, they could just take a list. You and I would be both on it, the top 1,000. You just arrest all of those 1,000.

58:37And then you ban everybody else from speaking about it. A few of them slip through the cracks. You know, maybe Mr. Hodl, because he's anonymous, he slips through, and he has to be quiet, and he doesn't reveal who he is, and he just kind of puts his head down and deletes his account. Or maybe they figure out who he is, and he's on the list too. But it wouldn't take much. You censor it. You say, this new thing is the real Bitcoin. You get rid of the people.

59:00You lock up any of the potential troublemakers who would stand in the way and game over. You know, so we have to be aware. It may sound far-fetched, but the world's a big place. There's nuclear war. There's other crazy things that happen. Every single thing I just mentioned could be done for probably $10 million. You know, it's not that hard to co-opt these things.

59:23Vlad CosteaYeah, I just want to mention that I've had Mark Edge on the show, and that's another episode from like six months ago. And if you want to learn more about Ian Freeman, go to freeiannow.org. It's another one of these Bitcoiner causes, just like right now, I think the more popular one is the Samourai Wallet developers. But Ian Freeman is the creator and co-host of Free Talk Live and Free Talk Radio. And he has been speaking about Bitcoin since 2010 or something, has been telling people. And a lot of, so he was talking about liberty and libertarian ideas, and he introduced a lot of OGs to Bitcoin.

1:00:04Roger, as you mentioned, I think he was listening to Free Talk Radio, and he heard about Bitcoin. And I think the story is that he sold a house and he sold the Lambo to buy Bitcoin with it, when it was sub $1, which is amazing. Epic. And that's how we ended up with Roger Ver in this industry. But yeah, free Ian Freeman. Roger, I guess, is already free, but he's not allowed to speak for the next three years. It came as a clause for the settlement that he reached with the IRS.

1:00:38I look forward to having Roger on my show in three years. I'm actually curious what he has to say on what he's going to be doing in the meantime, because he's not the kind of person who's just going to relax. On some sort of tropical island and do nothing. Pretty sure he's preparing. He's very idealistic.

1:00:58Bruce FentonAnd he's a man of principles, you know, and so is Ian. Ian knew the FBI was investigating him and everybody knew he was investigating because he went, the FBI went to all of Ian's associates and friends and said, what do you know about Ian? We're investigating him. So it was not a secret. And then they, I think, arrested him or searched him or tried to charge him with something and it fell through. And normal people, if that happened to them, would shut the heck up and go underground.

1:01:32Ian doubled down and he said, F you. And he went even louder. And you could call that insane or you could call that principles. But it's certainly some kind of backbone that I think you have to respect. I mean, I have friends who are defense attorneys who would say you're insane because they know the pain of going to jail. I can't even imagine. I mean, what a horrible thing. I feel terrible for them. Roger, similarly, Roger could have shut his mouth and avoided a lot of trouble.

1:02:00And, you know, there's a, there's a story. I forget the guy, you know, when they killed Galileo, there was a guy who, what was it? He, they were trying to get him to, I forget what I need to get my history better, but there was one of these philosophers. Some Greek philosopher or something who was saying that the world was round and they told him to say it was flat and they tortured him for nine years. And they'd be, they got tired of it. They're like, dude, please just admit it that the world is flat.

1:02:31We're going to let you go. We don't want the political fallout of torturing you all these years. We're going to let you go back to your house and just live out your days with your family. Just shut up. Just say it, just say the words and you can go home free. And he's like, no, the world is round, it's a sphere. And they tortured him for nine years. That reminds me of Roger. You know, it's a, it's a very unique person, honestly. You know, like I say, I'm a tough talker, you know, I'll go and give a speech and I'll rally and I grabbed my megaphone.

1:03:02I go to rallies and I'm an activist and I'll donate to this or that. Man, if you're faced with jail, when you really cross a line, you have to be quite extraordinary to look that in the face like Ian and say, at a few, the system's wrong. You know, bravery or insanity, I don't know. I don't, I think it would, I got kids, it would take a pretty extraordinary thing for me to do that. There are things, of course, I would stand on my principles for. But, you know, that's a hard thing.

1:03:35And so, you know, mad respect to those folks. But that's the interesting thing. There's a chilling speech and there's not a lot of people like that. Who is today's Roger Ver? Michael Saylor is as famous as Roger Ver was. He's the main figure, but he's not Roger in terms of philosophy. I don't see Michael Saylor like getting himself arrested and say an F.U. And being hauled out in handcuffs. And maybe that's good. A lot of people, especially his shareholders say, good, you know, I don't want a guy who's going to get arrested.

1:04:05You know, there's different ways to fight. Maybe it's more effective. The Winklevoss brothers are very interesting. They are not the type of people to get arrested, but they also are quite, I've been very happy with their posts over the last few years. Very bold and very pro freedom. And they say things that are quite risky, knowing their circles and knowing where they are and the establishment network that they have. It's very, in being in New York, it's very brave to say some of the things that they say, you know, the way that they've called out Elizabeth Warren and other things like that.

1:04:35There's a lot of people who are just terrified of doing any of that. You know, I took a big risk when I was running for Senate by calling out Gensler. And then I called him out again when Sam got, I was registered with the SEC at the time I owned a broker dealer. It was a very big risk for me to call him out because they could just show up. And, you know, like during my campaign, I called out the IRS and they showed up and gave me the audit from hell.

1:05:00And my lawyer was 100 percent convinced it was because of my words. SEC could have done the same thing. So it's it's brave to do that. But there's not a lot of people like that. You know, I don't think we have anybody quite prominent who has sort of that philosophy like a Roger Beer right now. And that's too bad because that's, in my opinion, the backbone of the whole space.

1:05:23Vlad CosteaYeah, you're right. And I also have a lot of respect for these libertarian guys who are willing to sacrifice everything for their ideas. You presented the case of Galileo, but I want to do the whole space of service and recall the father of Peter Schiff, who was a hardcore libertarian, went to jail and died in jail for writing a book on how to evade taxes.

1:05:48Bruce FentonYeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Schiff's father was a very interesting guy and he wrote a couple of books. He wrote a comic book. I'm a huge comic book fan. So he wrote a comic book about economics, which is talk about right up my alley. I was a Schiff fan well before Bitcoin. I met him in 2011 or maybe no, 2010, 2009, something like that. And I was a fan of him because he was an end the Fed guy who was sort of a I don't know about quite a Ron Paul guy, but he was on that spectrum.

1:06:23Definitely an end the Fed guy. And, yeah, the book, I think it's called How an Economy Rises and Falls. I have a collection of like because I'm a comic book guy, I grab any economic comic book I can find. There's like five of them. But if I remember right, his father's is well, I'm pretty sure that's the one. But it's really good. But yeah, I mean, very, very brave, very big sacrifice. And my heart goes out to anybody who's willing to do that, to be willing to give up your freedom.

1:06:54Which I value very high for a principle is very brave. And, you know, maybe everybody should have something that they're willing to die for or something that they're willing to give out their freedom for.

1:07:09Vlad CosteaSo for those who want to read something new, you can look up Federal Mafia, how it illegally imposes and unlawfully collects income income taxes from 1992 and the great income tax hoax. Why you can immediately stop paying this illegally enforced tax from 1985. These are two of the works by Irwin Schiff, who is the or was the father of Peter Schiff, and he died in jail in 2015, defending the fact that taxes are illegal and immoral. And once again, you have these people who have very strong conviction and are not willing to comply and they're willing to give everything for what they believe in.

1:07:52And fortunately, we have some of them left in Bitcoin, except that they're not loud enough or if they're loud, they're being silenced by the Twitter algorithms, which are horrible nowadays.

1:08:04Bruce FentonYeah, or they're joining treasury boards of centralized companies.

1:08:09Vlad CosteaYeah, we should go back to that. We should really go back to that, because the way that you describe them is like the Seinfeld of companies where you have to ask, what is this about? And they're going to say it's nothing. It's about nothing. There is nothing about it. There is no business model. There is no product. There is no service. There is nothing that they're selling except for the fact that they're buying Bitcoin and they're taking loans against that Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin. And that's it.

1:08:36Bruce FentonYeah. What do you do? We buy we buy an asset and what do you do? Why are you worth anything? Because we buy an asset. Why should we give you money? You know what's good about the asset? Oh, it goes up. You know, that's a that's a big another big negative of this is there's a whole generation and I've talked to some of them on spaces. There's a whole generation of people who don't appreciate and don't understand and don't even care about the core principles to them.

1:09:05It's only an asset that goes up and it's all they care about, which is important. Number go up, makes it work without number go up. And nobody cares, you know, because if Bitcoin was still a dollar, we wouldn't it wouldn't even be a podcast. And I wouldn't even be involved in it and nobody else would. I mean, a thousand goofballs would be just like ham radio operators or whatever. It would be a hobby.

1:09:28Maybe, you know, I'd like to think I'd be involved at a dollar. I think that would be kind of fun, you know, but you'd be on a little Reddit forum with 3,000, 30,000 users at tops, maybe, who just talk about this cool nerdy thing. And, you know, there would be no Bitcoin Twitter. But in the real world, you know, there are a lot of people who just don't care about these, even though number go up is good. There's a lot of people who don't care about the underlying philosophy. And some of them are very smart Wall Street people. I talked to Wall Street types who can go on and on and on. They'll tell you every quarter of Saylor's earnings and they know this and that. They know all about every, you know, pipe and SPAC and Treasury strategy and who's paying what debt and what loans at JP Morgan and Cantor and on and on and on.

1:10:15But you ask them what's special about Bitcoin, they can't tell you. You ask them what the Byzantine General's dilemma is, they don't care.

1:10:22They don't know. If you ask them if centralization is important, they don't care. They view self-custody as a quaint thing for, you know, weirdo Ayn Rand fans. You know, they don't get it. And the problem with that is that if you're onboarding 10 million people who don't get it, they're going to be easy come easy go. When the market goes down, they're not loyal to the market because they don't believe that it's anything unique. They say, oh, this is an asset. It goes up. Oh, I guess it didn't go up.

1:10:49It didn't do what it's supposed to do. I'm out of here. Whereas the early iterations of Bitcoiners were like, here's what it's supposed to do. It's doing what it's supposed to do. And I care about that because I think that has value. It's a big difference. It's a big difference.

1:11:04Vlad CosteaI do have to ask you, like, when the first ETF was announced, people were exuberant and enthusiastic and they said, well, we're going to go to a hundred thousand dollars, which actually happened. And then they said, we're going to go to half a million. We're going to go to a million. We're going to go into millions of dollars. Everyone's going to buy into this ETF. And this ETF is buying spot coins and there's this huge inflow. And for some reason, we never went beyond 125K. And some people are still in denial and they say, well, we were never in a bull market because this happened and this happened and we need to get past this point to consider it a bull market.

1:11:46And they also say that four-year cycle is dead, which I'm not sold on. I'm not sure if this tradition is going to die off just because we haven't had the pump that everyone expected. And I don't know where we are right now because it's very hard for me to look at the Bitcoin crowd, to look at the average attendee of a Bitcoin conference and identify myself there and become part of that crowd and say, you know, this is my tribe. This is my people.

1:12:16Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah. I feel the same way. And it's changed the feel and the vibe at the conferences has changed. I like conferences. I like people. I get frankly tired of going. It's just, you know, physically exhausting. You got to fly. It takes time away from work. I'm not sure that I'm like making money when I'm there or whatever. But then I go to some of them and somebody comes up to me and they say, I'm very flattered and honored that people recognize me and want to talk to me.

1:12:44And I love it when people say, Hey, I like your tweets. And so it was really funny in Vegas. Like these people were so excited to see me. I mean, you would have thought I was some kind of like, oh, we love your tweets. I mean, I'm flattered. But sometimes people come up with like stuff that I just am not interested in, you know, come on. Oh, we're doing a centralized central, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, banking this. And my eyes glaze over because I feel like I've gone back in time, 15 years to when I worked on Wall Street.

1:13:16And I'm like, I left that world. I'm not interested in that. No offense, but I just don't want to hear it. And so yeah, I don't know which way we're going, but I do know that the only way this is worth something is not based on a store of value only. It has to be digital money that works. That's what makes Bitcoin valuable. That's what makes it work. And if we lose that narrative, I don't think we have it. I think Saylor, I like Saylor. I spent a little time with him in Abu Dhabi in December.

1:13:49You know, he's brilliant. He's a very, very, very nice guy in person. He's one of the nicest people. He's very smart. He doesn't come across in his interviews as very like kind of soft spoken, intellectual, like he's in person. He's more like a college professor than a media personality. Very nice guy. And he's done a good job at onboarding in some ways with the narrative. But having said that, I don't think that the store of value alone is enough because you have to say, why is it a store of value?

1:14:26Well, because it's limited supply. Big deal. Every coin we just mentioned is limited supply. There are 1400 forks of Bitcoin that are all limited supply. If I make a limited supply or you have a stock called Vladstock, and you say, you know, it's limited in supply to 1 million shares, that doesn't mean anything. Limited supply alone is not a narrative. And I don't think that leads to store of value. I think the store of value comes from it being money and the money being good. You look at the Cantillon effect and you look at what makes good money money, that's what Bitcoin needs to do.

1:15:05And we lose that with these centralized strategies. And if we don't have it, then I am worried about Bitcoin. And I'm going down a path of bearishness because I don't see what the value proposition is. It's like, I got to ask myself, what's good about this? Why do we like it? And if Roger Ver had answered that question very easily in 2013, he would have said, it's money you control with 12 words. Nobody can stop you. Here, pull out your phone. I'll give you $1 worth. And he did that 10,000 times.

1:15:37You don't hear that anymore. They don't even talk about it being money that's unstoppable. They talk about it being this boring asset that sits on your BlackRock product on your centralized Robinhood account. So it's a very different thing. And I think my number one threat to Bitcoin is it always has been apathy. If people don't care, it's not interesting. And if all they're being pushed on is this centralized asset that they think is going to go up, that's not interesting and they will lose interest. And then it could fail.

1:16:12To me, that's the number one, not even an attack vector, but the number one thing that could make Bitcoin fail if we go forward five years in the future and Bitcoin's at, you know, whatever, 100 bucks and has pretty much imploded. I think that would be the reason. I think it would be that people just lost the idea of it being money for money's sake. And so, yeah, I think that's the biggest threat.

1:16:39Vlad CosteaI do believe that to a lot of these people, like they were pure all the time and they tried to slay every shitcoin on Twitter and they virtue signaled for like a decade and said that this is the best asset ever. And then when they finally had the chance to buy into Bitcoin treasury companies, it was like their big shitcoin moment, right? Because culturally they made it safe for this to happen. And suddenly they could actually shitcoin as an invest in something which is centralized and has almost nothing to do with Bitcoin except for the name and the fact that you're trusting this company or this fund to actually own some BTC.

1:17:20But then again, there is no audit, there is no actual proof, there is no link to the UTXO on the blockchain. You just have to believe them that they do have that Bitcoin and you're buying a paper asset, which is like a claim on that. But it's not a direct claim. Like it's not like you can actually withdraw from it. And they started this year. No, it was in 2026. So last year they had this phenomenon called the paper Bitcoin summer. And they were saying, yeah, we're going to compromise.

1:17:48We're going to sell out. We're going to make the number go up. But it did not go up. And I really want to ask you, like, you have a background in finance. You might be more literate than I am with these phenomena. Why didn't we go beyond, I don't know, a million dollars with Bitcoin? What do you think went wrong?

1:18:11Bruce FentonWell, we can only only guess with markets, but my best guess would be something along the lines of what you said. I think we lost our principles. And if you just say something's going to go up, that's not interesting. You know, people aren't going to be onboarded for that. You look at the last bull run when we went from 10,000 to 20,000 and 20,000 to 80,000. The discussion was the last hurrah of the Bitcoin principles. You could go on Clubhouse before space is even and during the lockdowns.

1:18:47The narrative was, hey, this is better money. It's going to change the world. It's permissionless. It's unstoppable. The whole world's falling apart, but there's nothing anybody can do about Bitcoin, no matter all this chaos in the world, politically, lockdowns, everything else. Next block, TikTok, every 10 minutes, the network says what's happening. And I made a lot of tweets back then. I was like, hey, no matter what's going on in the world, in a world of uncertainty, Bitcoin is certain. You know the code. You know the map.

1:19:20You know that every 10 minutes, roughly, there's going to be a block. And that's a powerful narrative that got people on board. And people said, all right, cool, I'm going in. I think the narrative lost. I think this last summer, the narrative was rah, money, number go up. And that's very alt-coining. It's very ICO wave. There was a lot of similarities to this and the ICO wave. It's affinity marketing, as you mentioned, using the Bitcoin name. It wasn't interesting. And remember, when you onboard those new people, when they don't have the principles, the people who are doing the onboarding might know the principles.

1:19:58They might be able to explain why Bitcoin is unique, why it's special, and why money works, and Byzantine generals' dilemma, and permissionless, and unstoppable, and all that. But the people they onboarded were not. Those people don't care. They don't see it. The BlackRock investors generally don't see it as an asset that's going to change the world. They see it as an asset that's going to go up. And very similar to the altcoins, when people jump into altcoins, they do it mainly because they think it's going to go up.

1:20:24And when it doesn't, you've seen 1,000 charts where the altcoins go like this, and then they just die because people say, oh, I guess it wasn't going to go up. Forget that. I'm out. And that's a big danger for Bitcoin because it is still early and still fragile. When you have millions and millions of people, look at all the tweets that people say, hey, we're still early. Three years ago, you could go to people where it's like, oh, I was at the grocery store, and I paid with Bitcoin, and the person behind me had never heard of it.

1:20:51We're still early. Well, if you're still early and you're onboarding those people for the wrong reasons, you're in this fragile situation where you're not making a compelling case. I feel sad that we've lost probably 10 or 20 or 50 million people with TradFi centralized products who may never even learn the real Bitcoin. When are they going to learn? They think they know Bitcoin. And even worse, if they buy a 120 and sell it at 80, the old days used to say, oh, we'll wait until next cycle.

1:21:20They'll come back in. Well, you don't know there's always going to be a next cycle because it only works if the underlying thing works. Now, the most bullish thing you can say about that is, hey, Bitcoin hasn't changed. The underlying thing still does work. None of this matters. But like I said, about time going on and generations and stuff like that, you don't have forever to wait around. You have to kind of make it work as money. And this cycle, I think, is the one where we have not progressed in that.

1:21:53I don't see us being further along. Maybe there's a minor silver lining that institutions care because institutions do have to own some. Maybe that'll create some sort of stability. Of course, if it works as a million-dollar asset, institutions will be involved. But in exchange for that, we can't sacrifice these core principles. It's got to be used as money. So, yeah, I worry about that for sure. And I think other people should be concerned.

1:22:23Vlad CosteaMan, that's depressing. The more I think about it, I feel like we lost our way.

1:22:31Bruce FentonWe might have lost our opportunity. It was always a big goal of David versus Goliath to try and make new money. And maybe this centralization is actually what broke it. Because right now, how many people can we list who are doing it? We're doing really, really cool cutting-edge cypherpunk stuff. Yeah, there's some, you know. But not in Bitcoin.

1:22:55Vlad CosteaThat's another pain that I see because I've interviewed so many 2011 Bitcoiners and they're like, yeah, they came here to change the world in a time when the price of Bitcoin was almost nothing. They had very high ideals and high expectations, but they gave up. They're like, OK, this is not happening here. I'm just going to go elsewhere. They built other chains. A lot of them work on Ethereum nowadays. A lot of them are still searching for that perfect way of implementing something like Bitcoin. There's the Casper project, which I think is interesting because it's so radically different from what we know with blockchains.

1:23:34There is the Zcash project, which was supposed to be just this privacy soft fork on Bitcoin, this zero cash upgrade, which never happened. It was a big deal. It was on the cover of Bitcoin Magazine like 12 years ago. But now nobody talks about that in the context of Bitcoin anymore. And it's so depressing when you realize how much stuff could have happened on Bitcoin, how much intellectualism and how much development power we actually lost. And then we end up with these stupid debates like, well, maybe we should confiscate the small UTXOs to make the UTXO set smaller so you can validate the chain on a Raspberry Pi.

1:24:14And that's so stupid. Like, seriously, how do we end up with this kind of conversations? And on the other hand, you have more cypherpunk, more interesting stuff happening on low liquid altcoins, which look a lot like what the spirit of Bitcoin used to be like. A decade ago.

1:24:35Bruce FentonYeah, yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, you know, you see that cypherpunk spirit and we've lost so much. And when you have the best and brightest and also the money, the money is not insignificant. When you have some cool scrappy cypherpunk project and they're struggling to raise a million dollars on their first seed round, and you have some goofy centralized banker product that raises, you know, 500 million, that's significant. You know, that means they're going to suck up all of it. It's the same criticism people used to make about the altcoins.

1:25:06They're going to suck up all the development, all of the interest. So all these, you know, there's an army of developers and an army of other employees and lawyers and consultants and investment bankers sitting around talking about mNAV and talking about how to do these centralized things and dealing with lawyers and regulatory and all this. And that's not, you know, developers are working on slick user interfaces for their centralized product versus all that effort could have been towards, you know, better privacy and better user interface for self custody, better self custody solutions.

1:25:45You know, that's a big loss. And we see it right now. I mean, look at the big funding right now. You don't see cypherpunk type companies getting these hundred million dollar funding routes. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors, centralized stuff where it's basically banker products, you know, and some of the biggest funding rounds. You know, the, you know, Golden Boy, great investments are just Wall Street products right now. And I don't like I said, I don't have anything against it, but it is drawing from the resource that could be for cooler things. And it's not moving us forward at best. It might be moving us backwards.

1:26:23Vlad CosteaI also see the value in this argument that Bitcoin is just this gateway drug or this compliant coin that basically keeps the entire industry in a state where they can feel free to experiment. But I just wish we had this one coin to rule them all kind of situation, like the kind of maximalism that makes sense, because maximalism as a philosophy is rooted in the network actually doing something and being useful. And if you look at the mempool, which I just did, you can get sub one Satoshi per V byte transactions in the next block, which is very depressing.

1:27:07It means that there is very little activity happening right now. And the people transacting are not willing to pay too much for their transactions, which once again is depressing. And I know that there's going to be someone in the comments right now saying, well, you guys are a bunch of shit coiners and you're ignoring the lightning network. And that one was major. It was maybe the biggest bet that this community has made in terms of scaling. And that never went anywhere. Like you can argue that it has a few thousand users, which is fine, but it never became that one true scaling layer that got everyone to increase the adoption of Bitcoin. That never happened. Yeah.

1:27:54Bruce FentonYeah, I agree. You know, I never understood lightning when I first when it was first explained to me, which is forever. What is it, eight years ago?

1:28:05Vlad CosteaI think it was more like 10 when it came out.

1:28:09Bruce FentonSo I remember going I was in the debate. I don't know if I was on camera. I might have been right off camera or like jumped in a couple of times, but it was John Dilley from Blockstream versus Roger Ver down at Anarchapulco. Jeffrey Berwick's anarchist festival, which was very big on Roger and libertarian principles, and became more Bitcoin cash focused when when Roger went that direction, because a lot of the hardcore anarchist libertarians went with Roger because they found out about Bitcoin through Roger. But anyway, John Dilley was at the time was a Blockstream employee, very highly technical, very smart guy.

1:28:47And they had a pretty funny debate. And the funniest part was Jeff Berwick is a flat earther. And John Dilley is like a pretty smart science guy. He had a debate about where the earth was flat, which was really funny. But the Bitcoin portion was on lightning. And they were like, oh, lightning is going to work in three years. It's going to work. And that was so like you said, that was nine or 10 years ago. But I didn't even understand it. The idea of being an economics guy.

1:29:16I'm definitely not some tech genius. I'm barely a tech guy at all. But I never understood the concept of opening a channel. I just said, that's not how money works. It doesn't make sense to me. And I just figured, well, you know, that's all right. I must be too stupid to get it. And there's smarter people than me who seem to get it. So I trusted them a little bit, but I was always skeptical. And then after a year or two or three, you know, every few years, I've made a tweet like, hey, wait a minute, did this work?

1:29:46You know, I've put a couple polls on there, you know, has lightning worked or not? You know, I just I think that that was probably a lost opportunity. And because I don't see it now, I said that at a Bitcoin developer, like a real developer came up after he says, of course, it's worked. There's so much on chain or, you know, lightning activity, especially between institutions. It has worked. I don't know. I mean, to me, I look at it from like a ground up consumer, you know, the pork fest libertarian Ian Freeman, Roger Ver kind of crowd from 2011, 1213.

1:30:20And, you know, where you're actually using Bitcoin. One of the things that's sad for me is that nobody uses it anymore. You know, in the early Bitcoin events, people would, you know, everybody would pay for their meal with Bitcoin. We'd convinced the restaurant to accept Bitcoin. Everybody was doing trades between each other. They were buying pins and Casascius coins and hats, everything with Bitcoin. The conference organizers would convince venues to accept Bitcoin. They'd say, hey, I'm bringing a 500 Bitcoiners into town. You got to accept Bitcoin.

1:30:50You got to accept this new nerd money. And when we did Satoshi round table number one, it was almost 100% Bitcoin payments. Last couple of years, it's almost 0%. You know, and then now the argument, people say, oh, well, that's just because it's so good. Nobody wants to sell it or spend it. I don't buy that. Money is supposed to be used. You can always spend and replace. You can blame some of it on regulatory and friction and especially taxes because it is a pain in the neck.

1:31:17One reason I spend it a lot last now is because of taxes. I just, you know, I used to buy whatever, some collectible or comic book or some nerd thing, and it's a big pain in the neck. You know, oh, $200. I bought a magic card and let me declare that on my taxes. So you can blame that for some of it. But overall, for whatever reason, and I think some reason is the scaling and other issues, it's just not used as money. And I think that's a big negative, and it's a big blow to us.

1:31:48And if we don't change that trajectory, I don't see as easy of a path for how Bitcoin does well financially. I don't think it's just going to go to $1 million a coin for no reason. I don't see the excitement that would bring that, the principles that brought it from 2011 to 2013 to 2015 and so on. You know, they brought it from $1 to $1,000, $1,000 to $10 or $20, from $20 to $80 or $100. I don't see those principles right now. I don't see people even talking about those things.

1:32:20And so I do worry that we can't lose this opportunity. Now, maybe we'll see that, you know, El Salvador seems to be doing interesting things on this. And, you know, Max and Stacey, who are big, obviously, like the biggest cheerleaders of El Salvador, they're also kind of against this centralization. They're against the centralized stuff. Apparently, more people are using it for day-to-day commerce in El Salvador. Maybe that's where it rises up from. Maybe all this centralized stuff just crashes. It's your typical four-year cycle.

1:32:50We have the ICO bust of this cycle, which is a bunch of treasury companies go under, and the new narrative comes up, and it starts back over again with the more cypherpunk stuff. And maybe people like places like El Salvador drive that. I hope, you know, or I hope it doesn't crash at all. I hope that we have somehow they both work in conjunction, and we build from those cypherpunk principles. But I really feel strongly that it's key that we've got to push those principles forward if we're going to succeed.

1:33:20Vlad CosteaYeah. So I just want to mention that at page 55 of the Lightning Network white paper, which I presume most people never read, they never went past the abstract.

1:33:34Bruce FentonToo long, 55 pages.

1:33:36Vlad CosteaNo, it's longer than 55. So this is just the 55th page, which has the relevant paragraph that says if all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside the network of micropayment channels to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 megabyte blocks, presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52,560 blocks per year. Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node with old blocks pruned out on two terabyte of storage. So I can safely say at this point that the Lightning Network works better on Bitcoin Cash because they have, I think, 32 megabyte blocks, which is still not enough for every person on the planet to make two transactions to open and close the channel every year.

1:34:35But it's closer to this than four megabytes, which we have with the SegWit hack.

1:34:43Bruce FentonInteresting. You know, it's a shame we talked about that. How, if anything, to me, that's the way to scale. It's simple. It's elegant. Anybody can understand it. You don't need to screw around with this weird economic voodoo of channels and open channels and closed channel. That's not how money works. People want to buy what they want to buy. They want to send it to the people. That's how money's always worked. They don't need the extra friction and extra thing to open a channel. It's a clever, weird, wonky, little bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, adding complexity.

1:35:15Hal's solution is obvious and easy. Go ahead and have your centralization, but make it real Bitcoin money that is workable. Put 100,000 Bitcoin in a vault and issue, you know, whatever, 100 million notes that are each worth one one hundredth of a Bitcoin. Is that my right math? Yeah, but whatever little fractions of it. And then you have, you know, like kind of like the open dime, but more institutional. And actually, you don't even need to carry the Bitcoin yourself. I think it would be really cool if El Salvador issued like a dollar bill that's backed by Bitcoin.

1:36:00And it would also be very interesting because it would solve a lot of the taxation issues because it would be then definitely currency and you wouldn't have some of the tax issues globally that you have with commodities. And that would be there would be scaling. And then the big institutions could pay, you know, 80 bucks to do a Bitcoin transaction between each other. And they wouldn't mind because it would be, you know, 100 Bitcoin or 1000. And maybe you could still lose use lightning for some specialized use.

1:36:34But, I mean, to me, the easy scaling thing and it's really tragic that that's, you know, probably never going to happen now, thanks to the Genius Act, not in America anyway. But that's an obvious solution. I mean, you know, it's fine to have centralization in some ways if the real asset is actually real Bitcoin. The centralization you have with the ETFs is not real Bitcoin because it's a claim on a claim on a claim of Bitcoin. Now, sure, if you issued those dollars, it's still a claim on Bitcoin, but it's one to one backed and you're actually using the dollar as currency.

1:37:11You can't use your share of your ETF to buy anything. It's useless. It's just a dead asset sitting there that can't do anything. And that's a night and day difference. You know, you're not furthering real adoption because you're not using the thing. I'd rather have Venmo own a bunch of Bitcoin and you have two options on your phone, your US dollar option and your Venmo option, or your Venmo coin Bitcoin option. Even if it's totally centralized, that is still using the, even though it's a claim, you're still using the claim as money.

1:37:47With MicroStrategy or ETFs, you can't use it as money. You can't use your stock to buy anything. You can't use your ETF to buy anything. And if we don't do that, then, you know, we've lost that main use case of being money. Yeah.

1:38:04Vlad CosteaAnd some people act today like this is what we sort of chose during the block size wars. And they frame it like, well, it was about either having digital cash, which is what Bitcoin Cash is doing nowadays, or having a store of value. But if you go back, it was never about that. Right. Both sides were claiming to accomplish the same mission, but in different ways. One of them said, OK, let's try on-chain scaling, which is more conservative. And the other side said, well, let's try layer twos, which is more experimental.

1:38:37Yeah. Except that the layer twos went nowhere. So what Blockstream built with their Liquid Federation is a ghost town. You can actually count the transactions on one hand for every block, which is very depressing when you think about it. But the amount of talent and money that went into that project. The Lightning Network is not the success that everyone expected. And we sort of lost focus on this whole concept of using Bitcoin for payments. Even some of the most hardcore people who are shilling Bitcoin as a currency are now telling you that you should save in Bitcoin and borrow US dollars against your Bitcoin or use your credit card for spending because you're going to earn points and it's optimized for commerce.

1:39:26Whereas Bitcoin is just this store of value. Which once again is depressing because you're not increasing the demand for Bitcoin as a currency. You're not helping its case as money. You're just using it as a beanie baby or collectible or whatever.

1:39:41Bruce FentonYeah, exactly. I mean, it's a meme coin. And I don't know why people don't see that. You need both of them to work. It needs to be the store of value and the money. And I would argue that the money is more important because, like I said, otherwise what's the point of a store of value? Limited supply, big deal. You know, you need better money. If you say this is better money, like gold is pretty good money. People like gold. They want gold because they know that it meets some of those properties of money. Everybody should Google properties of money. You'll come up with like six things. They predate Bitcoin. Limited in supply. Yeah, we've got it. Divisible. Gold is not great at it. Bitcoin is. Portable. Again, Bitcoin wins out over gold. Acceptability. You know, there's constant properties that good money has fungible. You know, that good money has that Bitcoin meets.

1:40:37And that's what makes it valuable. And gold meets a lot of those things to this day. It doesn't do as well on portability and a couple of divisibility. But you know, you can get little tiny gold coins. Also Acceptability and verifiability.

1:40:51Vlad CosteaLike it's very hard to verify that the gold is pure. And you can also argue that it's not fungible until you melt it. Because some people will prefer a gold bar over a gold chain. They'll say, well, this is jewelry. I don't trust that it has the purity that you say it has. And I don't like the shape of it. Just give me something that I can use much faster for payments, which is like a tiny gold bar or something. So in this way, you can discriminate between different types of gold.

1:41:22And it's only fungible when you melt it. In the case of Bitcoin, it's not fungible at all. Unless I think the only moment when Bitcoin is fungible is when it gets issued as a block reward. That's the most pristine kind of Bitcoin that you can have.

1:41:38Bruce FentonYeah, which is why we should add privacy so that nobody cares. So there's no concept of bad coins and good coins. But you know, interestingly, even just a few years ago, and it's sad that we've regressed, guys like you and I have been around a while, know the old days. You know, one year I got my wife a necklace, which I thought was kind of cool. It has one tenth of an ounce coins around it. So they're the gold coins. And I said, hey, you know, the world ever falls apart.

1:42:10You grab this necklace, the necklace is one ounce, the coins are one ounce. You got that and pretty much anywhere in the world, you can eat, you know, you can get a tenth of an ounce of gold. Right now today is 400 bucks. You know, the time I gave it to her is a couple hundred bucks. You know, so you can, you know, it's something that you can like, it's like emergency money around your neck. And sadly, six or seven years ago, I could have given her some Bitcoin on a hard wallet or a paper wallet.

1:42:46And you'd still be able to do that. Like, you know that anywhere in the world you go, you can find somebody to take that gold. Like you said, there might be variances in price. But if you go to a good dealer where they know, you know, there's always every town has a sign that we buy gold. Bitcoin, it used to be easier. It is harder now. You used to have local Bitcoins, you could go anywhere in the world with your phone. And you could take 1000 bucks worth of Bitcoin off your phone or 5000 and beat somebody at a Starbucks and they give you cash.

1:43:16You can't do that anymore. It's harder and harder. You need all kinds of AML, KYC right now. Having Bitcoin, you know, I had some old Bitcoin, a small amount on my phone, and I've been flying around the world for a couple of years. I really never use it. You know, I can't really use it that easily in places. I used to use it all the time. When I first moved to Portsmouth, some associates of Ian Freeman actually had gone and tried to onboard the whole town. There was 130 restaurants that accepted Bitcoin.

1:43:46We had like the record of the most restaurants in the smallest town that accepted Bitcoin. Now it's none. It's zero. I think there might be one or two left. And all kinds of other businesses accepted Bitcoin too. You could use it a lot more. It was more usable money. I could send 1000, 2000 dollars worth of Bitcoin to somebody anywhere in the world and I could know that within an hour or two, they could put cash in their pocket. And we remember the early days when people needed money in an emergency, you know, the Pakistan earthquake, it would send Bitcoin and somebody could cash it in and pay for food.

1:44:22I don't think you can do that that easy now. That's been cracked down on and changed globally. I bring Bitcoin to the UAE. It's useless. I pay for everything with fiat because there's even regulations and everything that prevent that. So, you know, that's a big step in the wrong direction and it's really quite sad. And, you know, these BlackRock things are not going to bring us back to that. They're bringing us further away from it. And I don't see where it switches. You know, you need companies to develop this stuff.

1:44:53You need to be building it. You need to have the companies, the BitPay and the people who are helping you accept and make it usable like that. And if you don't have that, it's kind of gone and I don't see it coming back. This narrative that, oh, once BlackRock becomes so big that it's worth a bunch, then it will happen. For one thing, how do you get to the pathway? It's worth a bunch. And for another thing, even if it does go to a million, people aren't going to all of a sudden say, oh, now, finally, now I'm going to accept it because you've built this big institutional thing.

1:45:24And by the way, BlackRock doesn't want that. They want to hold it so they get their fee. They don't want you to do it in self custody and they don't want you using it. So it is a big step in the wrong direction.

1:45:37Vlad CosteaYeah, and it's really depressing. Don't worry about it. Because you know very well where we started and what the goals were and where we got in terms of adoption at one point, where you had Dell and Expedia and Microsoft and Steam. And I sound like Roger Ver right now, but he's right. This is what we had. And now if you want to spend your Bitcoin, it's very tricky.

1:46:01Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah, it is a bit depressing. I mean, this conversation, you know, I'm a very positive person. I try and be positive, but I'm just trying to be realistic. I mean, you and I have seen, and there's a whole new generation of people who didn't see that. They see progress, but it's not real progress. People who've been around long enough, if they're honest, I think see regression. They see us going the wrong direction. And that's bad. You can't go the wrong direction. We've got to switch it.

1:46:28How do we switch it? How do we change it? How do we get it back? How do we couple guys and, you know, dozens or hundreds of like us, how do we get that back and change the course? Maybe it's all natural. I was talking to NVK. He's very positive. He's like, hey, nothing's going to stop this train. Bitcoin's still Bitcoin. Let the treasury companies do what they do, and we do our thing, and it's still going to work. I like that. There are some positive people.

1:46:55I went in one of my chat rooms. I've got a bunch of friends. I said, man, I'm feeling a little like I need some positive news. Tell me what's going on that's positive. I want to hear more positive news. But I really want to see us moving back that direction. And if we get the big drawback of these centralized strategies, they're tied in with the governments. They're tied in with the tyrants. They're going to make it harder and harder, if not legally impossible, to do the kind of things that are important to us.

1:47:23Vlad CosteaI do want to ask you about Satoshi Roundtable, because you're going to do another edition of it this year. And it's not in the U.S. Anymore, if I understand correctly. But before that, let me plug the last two ads of this episode, and then we can talk about Satoshi Roundtable. So Bitcoin.com news used to be known as this place which tells you that Bitcoin cash is faster and also has lower fees and Bitcoin Core is unreliable and stuff like this. But for the last couple of years, they changed and now their logo is orange.

1:48:00And it seems like the block size wars are over. They moved on. They understood that the market is actually looking for BTC and the orange coin. And now it's not that place anymore for the toxic people who think that it's such a bad website. They can finally open it and find some very good news coverage. And the reason why they decided to work with them and promote their website is that I think that Bitcoin Magazine is excessively pro-Trump. They decided to take on this political path where they try to present this administration as being the best thing since bread came sliced for Bitcoin.

1:48:43And CoinDesk, I think for many years, they have been very focused on institutions. And it's not so much about grassroots projects or open source software or whatever. It's more about institutions doing stuff. And I think in between these two extremes, you have Bitcoin.com news where you sometimes find very interesting coverage of community events and phenomena that happen on Twitter. And I like it. I miss the times when the news was just people fighting on Twitter and you had some sort of journalist trying to make sense of it.

1:49:17Those were such beautiful and simple times and part of it is still on news.bitcoin.com. If you check it out, you're gonna find some of it. But of course, there's institutions and Trump too, so it's inescapable. And last but not least, in terms of ads for this episode, we have SideShift, which is the place where you can swap something that you don't want for something that you want much more. And the way in which I recommend it is when someone offers to pay you in stablecoins.

1:49:47And those are not as censorship resistant as Bitcoin. There's no way you can get rich off of holding stable coins unless you're in a country where the fiat currency is hyper inflating. But I digress. You should swap that for something which makes more sense, for something that might go up in price, for something that nobody can take away from you. And SideShift can help you with that so that if someone wants to send you USDC or USDT, you send them the address and then you paste also your Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever address that you find valuable and you're just gonna get what you want to your address.

1:50:26Unfortunately, not available in the US. Fortunately, there might be workarounds, but I'm not gonna tell you which. The URL is siteshift.ai and thank you very much for sitting through the ads. Let's talk about Satoshi Roundtable, which used to be super controversial and nowadays it's sort of part of the culture, I think.

1:50:47Bruce FentonYeah, yeah, it's funny. I mean, it is funny to look back on those early days where people were just furious that we would have a you know, sort of private event. And it wasn't any, it was never like trying to discriminate against like people or not be inclusive or be secretive. It's just, like I said, I like a smaller event, you know, I mean, I'm kind of a quiet person and a lot of people do. I mean, it's funny. I'm not known as being a quiet person.

1:51:15I'm known as being a big mouth, but I like conversations. I like sitting down and having a conversation with people and I wanted to design an event that I like and I don't and you know, I'm friends with David Bailey and a lot of the people who do these big events and I attend them and I enjoy them and good for them. I mean, it's, you and I have seen each other at the big Bitcoin events many times and they're great events and there's a good place for that, but ours is a different kind of thing.

1:51:45There's something also additionally to be said, you know, sometimes you feel like going to a rock concert, sometimes you feel like having dinner with 10 friends. It doesn't mean one is right or wrong. You know, most people like both, you know, I like both. I do like that more quiet event. So to do that you have to have limited space. Otherwise, it would just be another giant event. It's a whole different field. You can't do certain things with it and whatever. So because it's limited in size, we used to have a reputation of being like super exclusive or wouldn't allow people.

1:52:19People are usually allowed. If you can offer, if you can add value, you can. I feel bad once in a while. I meet somebody who's like really cool and awesome. They'll be like, oh man, I wish I could get invited. It's like dude, just ask me. It's not like you have to be like, there's some street cred or something. If you've been in the space a long time, if you're cool, if I like you're not a jerk, you don't have a bad reputation, you're not going to shill something.

1:52:45You know, mainly if you're additive. And sometimes people, they're really psyched to go and they may not even be that additive, but they're not distracting. Even if you're not that additive, okay fine, just keep your mouth shut and just listen to them. You know, very rarely do you get somebody who causes trouble. So yeah, that was the controversy, that it was sort of exclusive, you know, a place for leaders in an industry where there is no leaders. But yeah, now that it's been 12 years, like nobody can say that now because we've stood the test of time.

1:53:17And it's been a great event and we've been, the other thing that we avoid is tribalism because nobody can criticize it because one of your people criticizing it, because somebody leaked, they leaked something, there was one of the developers said, oh, we've got to something like, you know, we've got to think about banning this or that, and somebody leaked that. They said discussion at the round table talking about banning something and everybody went nuts and thought it was like a conspiracy. Not a whole bunch of, I was really flattered because a whole bunch of prominent developers are like, no, no, no, no, no.

1:53:54I was in that meeting. That's not, it was a debate. It was like one person's word from one person, 19 against them. So yeah, it's been good, you know, it's been, but now that we've had so many different people, you know, I'm proud of the selfie that Justin Sun and NVK and Adam backed it, because it's funny, you don't see Justin Sun and Adam back together, you know, and we've had everybody from Vitalik and Brian Armstrong to CZ and, you know, founders of the major exchanges, major, you know, other coins like Hoskinson and Charlie Lee have attended, a lot of Bitcoiners, a lot of Bitcoin devs, Roger Ver, as I mentioned, you know, it's been a good group of attendees.

1:54:31And now, yes, you do have more of the mainstream, you know, we do have some of the big bankers and billionaires. There's a lot of billionaires now, there's billionaires in our space, but you have some of the big sovereign funds and, you know, we have it in the Middle East, so you have different sheikhs and royals and others that have attended. So it's a good group, you know, it's a nice event. I like it. You know, it's to this day an event that I would like attending if I wasn't the host.

1:54:59Keep it simple, keep the logistics easy, you know, and this year, you know, I made a video, I don't know, a month or two ago, saying that I hope it will discuss the kind of things that you and I are discussing. I hope we'll go back to our cyberpunk roots. I didn't, I went to a couple of the events recently, you know, some of the big events, and I was kind of like a little depressed about the focus on centralization, and I said, man, I hope my own event isn't all about, I don't want to have the event that I love.

1:55:28It's become like part of the family. My kids have basically been raised at, you know, one of my youngest birthday almost always falls on the round table. So we, so our kids, you know, and my oldest, he was like, what was he, five years old at the first round table. Now he's 19 years old, you know, is that right? Something like that. I mean, he's, he's a grown man, he's in college, and he's grown up with these people, and he's gotten to know these attendees, and so it's like part of the family.

1:55:59I care a lot about the event, and I don't want to see it just become a shill fest for centralized crap. You know, I'd rather just not even do it. If it's just a bunch of panels sitting there talking about KYC and AML and how we can kiss up the bankers and governments, I'm cool with that. I'd probably let somebody else do it. You know, I'm not, I might attend because it's got great food and it's chill, but it's not exciting to me. What's exciting to me is talking about changing the world and getting those cypherpunks and the who's who of the space together and say, you know, what are we really going to do to push this technology forward?

1:56:36What are we going to do to change the world? And that's what's exciting to me. So that's my biggest hope for this year. It's coming right up in just a few weeks. That's my biggest hope. I hope that we'll talk about our roots and embracing this stuff. Interestingly, bear market roundtables, Fluffy Pony said this. Ironically, Fluffy was arrested on the way to the roundtable. You know, Fluffy from Monero. But he had said the bear market roundtables are the best because, you know, it's less noise, more signal to noise, more of those cypherpunk people who really care about the principles.

1:57:10So this one, I suppose, counts as a bear market. It's bear market-ish. You know, we're certainly down from our highs. And so, you know, if we were at 250 right now, we would see a little more fluff. You know, we'd have more people coming in there kind of pitching projects. We you know, we have a no pitch policy. But yeah, these people still talk about what they're doing. So my biggest hope is that we go back to those cypherpunk roots. I think that's really, really important, more important now than ever.

1:57:39Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm looking at a picture from the first Satoshi's roundtable. It's on your website, which is Satoshi's roundtable dot dot org. And I see Nick Spanos, who was the creator of the first stock exchange that integrated Bitcoin in New York. I see a very young version of Peter Todd before he got fat. I see Dan Held before he got fat. Charlie Lee, Trace Mayer. I don't think Trace Mayer goes to many events nowadays. Vitalik, when he was like 19 or something, looking not very happy. David A. Johnston, David Bailey. When he had a lot of hair. Roger Ver.

1:58:31Bruce FentonI guess this was Michele Seven, Bitcoin Belle.

1:58:36Vlad CosteaYeah, it's really...

1:58:37Bruce FentonAdam Back, probably, in that photo. Patrick Byrne, maybe. Yeah, I mean, it's a great who's who early times. I mean, I love those photos. We have a little like flyer thing that we give out to people once in a while. Like if somebody asks me about it at a event, I say, here you go. And we have that picture on it because it's a cool picture. You know, it's a piece of history now. And so many of those people are still in the space, which is great. Michael Kao is in there.

1:58:58Bo Shen from Fenbushi. The majority of the people are still in the industry. You know, one or two of them have left. One or two have passed away. But almost everybody else is still in this, which is kind of cool. And a lot of them still attend. Probably several of those people that you just listed are going to be there again this year.

1:59:23Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess this is Peter Van Valkenburgh from Coin Center.

1:59:30Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah, he's come before. I think he's come. I don't know if he... I don't think he came that early. Maybe. I'm not positive he's came. I think Neeraj and Jerry Brito has come. But I don't know if Peter has attended. He might have. I don't remember anything.

1:59:44Vlad CosteaI guess his Glasses are very hard to confuse for somebody else's. Oh, right.

1:59:50Bruce FentonOh, yeah, it's not. Yeah, yeah, you're right. He might have come. He might have been pre-Coin Center. I think that first one was before Coin Center existed. I don't remember what he was doing before that. But yeah, it's a great group. You know, and it's fun. And now there's all these who's who. Now it's interesting because there's like all these big money people. We upgraded it like, I don't know, five years ago because everybody got so rich. I'm a very basic guy. I'm like a burrito and pizza kind of guy.

2:00:18You know, I like a hotel to be clean. But other than that, I don't really care. And sometimes the real fancy ones are a drawback. But we did have a lot of people who they wanted something more upscale. So we've upgraded it significantly. It's pretty nice now. It makes it a lot more expensive, though, which I don't like. You know, I'd rather... I wish it was free. I wish it was $1,000. Every year I tell my team, I'm like, man, I wish we could get the ticket price down to $1,000.

2:00:42And they're like, dude, it costs us eight. It's just no way. You know, we try and do that. We do have some scholarships and discounts and stuff that we've done. We try and make it so that cost isn't an object. But it is expensive, unfortunately, because it includes everything. We do a full buyout of the entire resort, which is a really nice resort. Every room, every conference room, every restaurant, including these really, really nice five star restaurants. I think one of them might be in Michelin. We get super good security so nobody can get on there, even by walking on the beach.

2:01:17We include everything, all the coffees, all the food, three luxury meals a day, including the dinners, which are really, really luxury. And, you know, so yeah, that does have a cost.

2:01:34Vlad CosteaIt seems like he even had William Shatner. But something that I do want to mention is that possibly the strongest influence that this event has ever had was when Justin Sun came and he met the Tether people. And it was after Satoshi Roundtable where basically, I think this was a joke that was started by Woody Wertheimer, who at the time was trying to really make fun of Ethereum. And he was like, whatever Ethereum can do, Tron can do even better. And because of this meme and the fact that Justin Sun attended and was able to meet the Tether people, nowadays we have Tron, which is the most prominent hub for USDT.

2:02:16Like, I think the largest amount of liquidity of any chain for Tether is on Tron. And a lot of this happened because they attended Satoshi Roundtable.

2:02:28Bruce FentonSee, I've got to get a commission on all these things. There's been billions of deals that have happened because of the Round Table.

2:02:35Vlad CosteaI mean, I'm not sure if billions of deals, but maybe billions of dollars worth of deals.

2:02:41Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I say billions of deals, you know, billions of dollars in deals, for sure. A lot of people have merged. Now it's been going so long. There's people who've done like two startups together. They met at Round Table 3 and they did a startup and then they did another startup. And, you know, every once in a while I get a real nice note from somebody who's like, hey, I wanted to thank you, just had an exit. You know, I got an investor, I met somebody, I met my partner.

2:03:06We've got a couple of people getting married, you know, who met there. You know, it's been a cool journey for sure.

2:03:16Vlad CosteaSo why would you say that this is not happening in the US anymore?

2:03:21Bruce FentonWe only did one year in the US. That was Round Table 2. Hold on one second. Just have to let somebody get my dog out.

2:03:40We only did one in the US. The US has always been hard because there's some people who couldn't go there, like Roger and others. You know, US has, it's expensive. We used to do like Latin America and stuff. The safety issues are too significant now with so many ultra high net worth people. I just think I used to get the security briefings when I was in Mexico and it gave me sick to my stomach. I'm sitting there the entire thing like, holy crap, is people going to come in here and shoot my attendees and steal the right money?

2:04:14So that's out. Remember, US is not out of the question. We've thought about doing a summer one. You know, we looked at like Cape Cod or New Hampshire for the summer. You know, I've thought about doing like, we've called them side tables. We did a small couple of New Hampshire ones. You know, US is not out of the question. Particularly, you know, I thought about doing one right after Trump got elected. It's kind of like a 4th of July, America, rah rah America kind of thing.

2:04:48But we've really found a nice home in UAE. This particular venue in Dubai has been very, very nice. And we get to know the hotel. It's centralized for people from Asia, Europe, obviously Middle East. It's not bad for people from the US because they have a lot of business to do there. The business, it's a little more signal to noise. When we used to do them in Latin America, people would party a little bit more and there's no business there. You know, like, nobody has business contact, whereas here they like, oh, I'm going to come here.

2:05:18I'm also going to run over to Abu Dhabi and meet some business partners or I'm going to talk to my associate in Dubai. You know, in Cancun, there's very little business. Nobody's like, oh, I got to run over to, you know, Tulum to go see my regulator or whatever. So this venue works for a lot of reasons. You know, UAE is a good spot. You know, I've been going to the Middle East for 20 years plus. I love it over there. It's like a second home. I like the UAE.

2:05:46I like Saudi Arabia a lot. That's always been on the short list of doing one there. We haven't pulled it off over the last few years, but if we did move a venue, it wouldn't surprise me if it ended up being Saudi. Or we might just keep it there. You know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. A lot of good venues, a lot of good events like Davos. I don't know if that's a good event. It's a successful event, though. But, you know, they stay in the same venue for a long time.

2:06:12So we've gotten into a nice groove with this. You know, we maybe just keep there and maybe add another one. We've talked about that forever, and we've never quite done it because it is a lot to pull off. And the event business is a bit of a labor of love, particularly a small event like this. You don't make a lot of money on it, even though it's kind of a high ticket cost. Like, there's not a lot of profit in that. So we just sort of cover the resources we put into it. It's a lot of work to put these together.

2:06:45Vlad CosteaYeah, I was just looking at pictures. The one that's most famous, I think, was Satoshi Roundtable number two. Because it happened on the same year as the Scaling Bitcoin conferences. And there was a lot more tension surrounding it. And there was also the fact that you had a podcast happening in the toilet with people who were not invited there. And they got some sort of clearance from the venue or something. And I've listened to that episode like three times during this winter break. And it was so unfortunate because you and Chris DeRose were just talking past each other.

2:07:22And you were just asking him to give you the footage that he recorded. And he was just pointing out to something which was totally irrelevant for the context. We were just screaming at each other. But I think the content that was generated at the time was beneficial for both sides. And it's historic at this point. I think that was the peak of Bitcoin engagement and community. It was.

2:07:47Bruce FentonIt was kind of funny. For those who don't know, so Roundtable 2, which was controversial because it was talking about... We had Brian Armstrong there and Adam Back and Roger Beer. And people were all arguing about the block size.

2:08:01Vlad CosteaYou also got people to sign to agree to some sort of list of principles.

2:08:07Bruce FentonI did. I made a mistake with that one. I thought that, well, for one thing, I had this vision. I'm like, I'm going to get everybody together and put them in a room and, you know, figuratively lock the door and say, we're not leaving until we agree. Well, that didn't work. The other naive thing that I did was I tried to railroad and herd things. It was only the second roundtable. Over the years, I learned that the less I do, the better it works. It's a decentralized space.

2:08:30And if you just let people run their own thing, they're smart and they'll figure it out. But in the early days, I used to railroad people a little more. I'd be like, come on, come on, come on, there's a session starting. Come on in. These days, I'm just like, hey, you want to sit and have a coffee? Go have your coffee. I want them to know that a session's going on, but I don't try and herd people. And I tried to say this exercise. I say, let's get everybody in a room and find everything we agree on.

2:08:54Can we at least agree on 10 things? And we did. And we had an artist make a nice bowl, a banner about it. Like, okay, we agree 21 million coins can't be messed with. We agree it should be permissionless. You know, whatever, basic stuff. So, you know, in some ways, it was the worst roundtable. The weather was also bad. The venue wasn't that nice at the time. It's like, you know, three and a half, four stars, not the five star stuff we ended up with later. Which I don't mind.

2:09:23I mean, I'd keep it there to this day if it was up to me, because it's cheaper for the attendees, and we'd end up with a more broad cross-section. I always feel sad if somebody can't swing it. So, in some ways, it was the worst. In some ways, it was the best, because it did have that engagement. And it had the reputation, because we were talking about the block size, you had people saying like, oh, this is a secretive event. So, you had DeRose and Junseth, who snuck in, which was funny.

2:09:56And they wore these, brilliant move, actually, because we were in Mexico. So, they wore these sombreros, just to be ridiculous, which is even funnier, because here I am, like, threatening to call security on them. And they're wearing sombreros, making a viral video out of it, which is, I got to give them props on that. That's brilliant, because it makes me look silly, arguing with a guy with a giant cartoon sombrero on. You know, it was funny. But yeah, you know, that rough and tumble argument kind of environment, I think, was important.

2:10:31Senator Lummis was there. She wasn't even a senator yet. And she said she was fascinated by how people interacted, and she loved the block size debate, because she's like, man, the US Senate should do this kind of thing, where people actually care, and they're passionate, and they're arguing about something with so much passion, because they care. And so, in many ways, that was kind of like, I don't want to say peak Bitcoin, you know. And it's interesting, because a lot of people who've been to all of them, usually say that was the worst.

2:11:02The weather was bad, everybody's angry, they're arguing at each other. The venue wasn't that great. It was still early on. We'd only done one of them before the previous one. It was like small. The first one was like 80 people. So, you know, it wasn't as smooth. You know, now it runs like clockwork. We've done 11 of them. This is our 12th. It's smooth. The food is on point. The venue's awesome. Everything's perfect. Everybody's on their best behavior.

2:11:32But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I certainly miss aspects of those old days. It was very, maybe more cyberpunk in some ways. And that's why I want to bring back more of that feel. You know, I want to have those discussions and debates. And you can still do it in a nice setting. But I like that rough and tumble, you know, like, rebels trying to change the world, you know, wildcat type people. I like that vibe that you saw in the early events. You don't see that as much now.

2:12:10Vlad CosteaYeah. And the reason why I would argue that it was peak Bitcoin in 2016 and 2017, it was possibly the last time you could get everyone in a room to talk. Because afterwards, it seems like the schism became more pronounced and everyone had their own camp and their own incentives to push their own token and one up each other. And I think that was one of the last moments when everyone was passionate about doing something, even if they disagreed on how to do it. And everyone agreed that Bitcoin is the only way to do it.

2:12:45Because afterwards, you got a lot of altcoins, you got a lot of basically all of this energy was dispersed into 100 different projects. Some of which succeeded, some of which only made Ethereum more relevant, because I believe that the outcome of the block size war wasn't that we had two versions of Bitcoin, we actually had a lot of brain drain into Ethereum, which I think in the beginning was not taken very seriously. But in 2017, when it became obvious that Bitcoin is not going to be the chain to do everything, we had a lot of developers just leaving for Ethereum. And that's when it became more legit.

2:13:29Bruce FentonYeah, it was the last time you listed off all those prominent people who came in those early days. What's crazy is that the industry was so much smaller. That's still an impressive list by 2026 standards. But back then, that was everybody. I mean, that was the whole industry. It's like, you can't do that now. There's too many people. You could still get the top 100 people, we try. But it's a it's harder. You know, they're a lot wealthier, they have a lot more demands on their time.

2:14:05But even 100 people is not like back then you had like everybody, you had the biggest miners, and the biggest CEOs of the exchanges and the founders of a couple alternative coins. I mean, everybody was in one room. And we'll never have that again. I mean, you'd need 500 or 1000 people, but you'll just never, you could probably never get them together. I mean, even the President couldn't, you could come close, it would be very hard to get all those people together. And it would be a different vibe, for sure.

2:14:38It wouldn't be like, friendly people arguing with each other, it would be camps, and everybody would be more polite and civilized. They probably wouldn't argue as much. But they in some ways further apart. Because when people are real far apart, they don't argue. Nobody's having a debate. You know, Roger Ver and Adam Back are not having debates anymore. You know, nobody's having a debate about things once the camps are two separate, you know, no, no, no, like hardcore, you're not gonna have Peter Todd and Vitalik arguing about whether Bitcoin or Ethereum is better, you know, like, it's like, it's a different vibe now.

2:15:18And I do miss a lot of those early days, I miss the early conferences, not just our own conference, I miss some of the real rough and tumble ones even more, because they were really cypherpunk and really like, unplugged. And, and, you know, it was like volunteers almost, you know, nobody was there for the money in those early days, and I miss some of that.

2:15:42Vlad CosteaRight. So what do you think that it takes for us to get back to that spirit?

2:15:48Bruce FentonI mean, we got to tell as many people as we can, and try and onboard one on one. I mean, I think, hopefully, we're still onboarding people to these principles. And even despite all the drawbacks that I mentioned of these centralized strategies, hopefully some portion of those people dig into the real roots of what Bitcoin is all about. And, and they, you know, figure out what, you know, what the real principles are. Somebody has to, you know, somebody has to figure it out. And, and if net net, we're onboarding more people, that's good.

2:16:25And if the industry is huge, and maybe even 90% is dominated by this other stuff, but at least some people are still focusing on these real cypherpunk values. Well, that's a win as well.

2:16:41Vlad CosteaYeah, I don't know if there's any easy answer or any easy solution.

2:16:48Bruce FentonI wish there was, you know, I can't just control the whole industry. Even with the Satoshi Roundtable. You know, they used to think it was like some conspiracy. Same as the Bitcoin Foundation, by the way, which I also was in charge of at one point, people thought like, oh, Bitcoin Foundation is going to secretly control everything, which is really hilarious, because that obviously didn't happen. All those arguments were for nothing. But, but if I could, if I could wave a magic wand, you know, I used to joke about it with the round table.

2:17:21I posted a thing one time I said, oh, it's the secret meeting where everybody's going to get together in secret and plot on how to leave you alone. And, and that's, that's sort of what I would like to do if I did have, if I did have the influence or power that people thought I had back in those days. And nobody thinks I have that now because the industry is just so big. Nobody's like, oh, Bruce Fenton's controlling everything. You know, they, you know, they maybe say that about Saylor, but that's not true either for him or me or Fink or anybody else.

2:17:52But I'm not even on that list now. But back in the old days, you know, people thought I was trying to control something. If I ever did, all I would do is leave everybody alone. That would be my goal. If I had power, I would over this leaderless space. If I was the leader in an area with no leaders, I would just leave everybody alone and have everybody focus on those core principles of preserving privacy and cyberpunk values and moving forward for a more free world.

2:18:23Vlad CosteaSo for people listening, how can they get into Satoshi's round table?

2:18:27Bruce FentonYou got to move fast because it's coming right up. But, and we do have very limited space. But we, you know, you can reach out to me directly. If you know me, that's a big help. If you know somebody who's attended, that's also a big help because we love referrals from people. If you don't know anybody, that's fine too. You can go to satoshiroundtable.org and submit something and just explain, you know, how you're at value and how you know, what you're there for. If you say, you know, you've been in Bitcoin for 11 years or something and you've done a few cool things and you're a cyberpunk and you share these values, that's a huge plus.

2:19:07If you've done something like notable, like you've started a startup that people recognize, that's even better, you know, or you have some position at some company now, if you're like a C-level officer at one of these billion dollar Bitcoin companies, that's... Huge, you know, or if you're, you know, some big family office investor or something like that. We don't turn down too many people. We are limited on space, but, you know, we like to have new voices and new people. It is limited. So, you know, not...

2:19:39I mean, sadly, if you've just never ever done anything in the space, and you're just dabbling and kind of interesting, it's probably not a great fit for you anyway. And we've got to kind of give that space to somebody who has. But yeah, you know, reach out, you know, communication is good. The worst thing is, you know, we don't mean any offense if we say no. It's just because the space is limited. If I let everybody in, it would be, you know, 1100 people. And then that's not the round table anymore.

2:20:06That's a convention. You know, I don't want to... Nothing against convention. I just don't want to run one. It's not... It would lose the vibe. The people who go there for the small field wouldn't be happy. And it would be more work for us. Frankly, it's much more manageable to deal with smalls. One of the secrets... A lot of people are like, man, how do you make everything run so smooth? Well, there's a secret. The secret is it's small. You know, it would be... It's really hard to do things at scale.

2:20:36If you have 18 people, you can always serve a nice meal, you know. With us, with 300, it's a little harder, but completely impossible for a huge... You know, one of these 10,000 person events, absolutely impossible. If you wanted to make David Bailey's events to the same level of standards of the round table, it would cost 50,000 a ticket. I mean, it'd just be impossible. You'd never be able to do it. You'd need $50 million. It would be Davos, basically. It would be exactly Davos, is what it would be, which is about 50 million.

2:21:11So those are... I'm not just throwing out a random number. And, you know, Davos tickets are 50 grand, you know. So, you know, it's just not workable for a big crowd. So that's why we keep it. It's nothing against anybody. I don't want to... I hate offending anybody. My staff gives me a hard time because if it was up to me, I'd let everybody in for free. And I would let everybody in. But then it wouldn't be the round table. We'd be broke. We wouldn't be able to...

2:21:40Because with the full buyout and all those nice luxury meals, they charge us a significant amount. So our costs are high. You know, we spend millions and millions of dollars on this thing, you know. So I just can't... I can't make a grand... A thousand bucks a ticket and I can't let everybody in. I wish I could.

2:22:00Vlad CosteaSo where is this new event taking place this year, in 20 days?

2:22:05Bruce FentonIt's going to be in Dubai again. We rent the Waldorf Palm Jumeirah. We used to be secretive about the location and not tell anybody, but I tell people now because, frankly, the security is so good, it doesn't matter. There's just... Don't waste your time. There's zero chance anybody's going to sneak in. It's just not going to happen. You know, you can't come in off the beach or pretend you go to the spa or go to the hotel next door. Any of those tricks are just not going to work.

2:22:33So I'm not as... I don't worry about... And I also don't worry about like large-scale kidnapping. You know, in Mexico, we had very, very good security, but, you know, there's always the chance you can have, you know, three truckloads of armed guys roll up, you know, and have a gunfight with your security, you know, or your security is going to run and hide. That's also not going to happen in the UAE. It's very, very, very secure. So we do disclose it. It's Waldorf Palm Jumeirah. We rent the whole resort, like I say, every room, every conference room, every restaurant, which is a really nice vibe.

2:23:03That way you go to the room, the gym. The person at the gym is, you know, they're an attendee. You know, last year or a couple of years ago, when the thing ended, I was still there. I usually come a few days early, a few days late. Everybody's gone. So the last day after the event, I get on the elevator and I'm still in round table mode. I don't know every attendee. So I see this couple and I'm like, hey, how are you doing? And then I realized like, oh, they're not with the round table.

2:23:31There's some random German couple who's a tourist. You know, I'm like, oh, my event's gone. But there's a nice vibe when it is going, because that's how it is. You get in the elevator, everybody's friendly, because they know that even if you don't know the person, they know that everybody at the elevator and in the gym and the kids and everybody, they know that they're an attendee. So they know they have at least something in common. And a lot of people start up a conversation. If it's during the round table, you might be in the room.

2:23:57Hey, how are you doing? You're in the elevator. Yeah, what do you do? Where are you from? And so you end up with a nice vibe because people, one of the most interesting things is the volume of the venue completely changes. There's so many conversations going on, because it's a very fine resort. So you go there a couple days before, everybody's kind of quiet. Five star resorts like that, people keep to themselves. They're with their families. They're not having lots of conversations. They're chilling. And with our event, everybody is talking to somebody all the time.

2:24:31So there's like a volume, there's like a buzz of a cadence of speech throughout the venue, which the staff love. They love our event because it just changes the vibe. Everybody's kind of happy. And, you know, glad to see each other. There's a lot of old friends. They're excited to be there, excited to be talking about things. So it changes the vibe of the venue. And I love that. You know, it's a cool vibe for sure.

2:25:00Vlad CosteaYeah. I was looking at the comments. Someone actually said, and I want to read it out loud because it's funny. His name is Sine Nomine, which means probably without name in Latin. And he said, Vlad is a sellout and Fenton is a spineless coward.

2:25:21Bruce FentonWhat did I do that was spineless? I don't know. I try and be brave. You know, I do stick on principles, you know, things like I said, you know, getting thrown out by cops at the COVID tyranny. Ironic that somebody with a fake name would have accused somebody of cowardly because, you know, there's a lot to it when you put your real name out there. You put yourself at risk safety wise, attack wise, attack vector wise. It's easy to hide behind an anonymous thing, but going out there, put your name out there, I think, takes something. And, you know, you never know until you walk in somebody else's shoes. Right.

2:26:01Vlad CosteaBut as a sellout, I do have to ask you this. What is it about the United Arab Emirates that is such a good host for libertarian events? Because I see like a paradox here. It's not the most freedom loving country. There's a lot of stuff that you're not allowed to say or do in that country. But at the same time, you have an inflow of libertarians doing stuff into cities like Dubai. Yeah. And it's interesting, like, is there something that I'm not observing that's happening there?

2:26:38Bruce FentonYeah, I mean, I've thought about that a ton because I've been going there and I've been a liberty lover for a long time.

2:26:48And I think about it, about the whole Muslim world and Arab world as well. You know, I lived in Saudi Arabia too. And Saudi Arabia is one of my favorite places in the world, which is really funny because it's not known as a libertarian hub, to say the least. But the thing is, so there's a few things. One, the structure of these countries is different. You know, it's a different structure. You have people that own the land and they own the country, basically. So it's kind of like a giant version of my farm.

2:27:19It's like somebody's own private domain where they enforce rules on their own domain. Now, what about the people who were born there or come there? Do they don't have the same rights that they would elsewhere? That's a valid concern. They don't necessarily run things the way that I would, for sure, as a libertarian, just like my own country doesn't. But they do tend to get a bad rap, I think. There are things that are, believe it or not, more free market. You know, UAE attracted thousands of people because they were more free.

2:27:54They were more free than the U.S. Regulatory-wise a couple of years ago, particularly when we were in the height of the Biden administration, and it was very difficult to even do a crypto startup. UAE welcomed them with open arms. And from a daily oppression standpoint, you know, it's crazy. I have residency over there. I've been going there 20 years. I spend a lot of time there. I'm there several times a year. I almost never, ever see any police of any kind. I don't see anybody walking around armed, nobody harassing anybody.

2:28:26No, you just don't have that oppressive vibe. People kind of do their own things. And there's a lot of things that would surprise people, you know, different lifestyles, different, I mean, a lot of people have a misconception, like, for example, they think it's illegal to be gay. That's just not true. There's no law whatsoever about that. There's absolutely zero law in the UAE Penal Code mentioning being gay, and there's plenty of gay people there, and people mind their own business. Even things that are illegal, like drug use, prostitution, gambling, things that are illegal, still happen there. And it's not some big oppressive thing where they're trying to constantly crack down on stuff.

2:29:15The government minds their own business more than they do in the US or EU, to quite a big degree.

2:29:26Yes, there's rules against you speaking against the ruler, for example. I've never ever heard of anybody being charged with that. I've never seen it. I've never seen anybody's speech infringed there. To be fair, I don't see a lot of people criticizing, I don't think because they're afraid, but because there's not that much to criticize. The rulers do a good job there. Whereas in the EU and UK, and even to some degree the US, but especially UK, people get arrested all the time for speech. So, you make the wrong tweet, you say that there's male and female, you can get arrested in certain places in the world.

2:30:06So, there's drawbacks. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. I would change things. And sadly, they're going more the direction of statism. They've increased the regulation on crypto every year that I've been going there. There's always some new regulation, and there's just too many regs. They built one of the greatest cities in the world because of free and open markets. They said, come on in, do your business, as long as you're not blatantly, overtly committing terrible crimes, we're going to leave you alone. And I think that was very healthy, but they've gone the other way now.

2:30:43They've unfortunately copied. They have a lot of these dimwit consultants from the EU and the US who come in there and say, oh, you need this law, and this law, and this law, and this law, and they try and export the bad habits from the West into these places. So, yeah, there's some aspects. A lot of people just assume it's all negative, like on a liberty basis, say compared to New Hampshire, where I live. But it's really not. It's like I could take certain things in New Hampshire.

2:31:16I have better firearm rights here. I can get a gun and carry it easily. But over there, I have better property protection. Over there, I have way more economic freedom. I can open any kind of store. I can open a building. I can get a 100-story building approved with the permits in six weeks. If I wanted to build a 30-story building in New Hampshire, it'd take me five years to get the permits. If I wanted to do it in Boston, it'd take 10 years, if ever.

2:31:47So there are some things that they're more free about. And then overall, standard of living. It's got a nice standard of living. So I'm interested in the best of both worlds. There's a lot of people who assume that there's nothing we can learn from the Gulf states. Saudi is an even more extreme example. It's even less libertarian in many ways. But even in Saudi, they have some strengths. Protection of your own home, for example, is, believe it or not, probably a little better than the United States.

2:32:21The bar that you have to do for police to enter your home is very, very high in Saudi Arabia. Your home is considered your castle. And it's part of the religious beliefs and everything that's like, you don't mess with what somebody does behind their own doors. You may have a million laws against this or that, but if they're behind their own door, it's none of your business. So even Saudi, where they're known as having strict rules, in some ways, they're as good or better than what you might see even in the US, which is supposedly the most free country in the world.

2:33:00And then overall, quality of life. There's things you can learn from that are not related to the politics and the government. There's a lot of very strong social aspects. There's a concept called the medullus, which is an Arab concept of kind of like powwow or gathering. And I love that. It's not so much government related, but it's just like people get together and hang out. And I don't do that here in New Hampshire. I wish. I wish that every Thursday I had the medullus and Vlad and a bunch of friends could come, but we're all spread out, so it's harder.

2:33:32And I do have good friends in New Hampshire, so I've been, you know, for a long time trying to bring that tradition here, but it's just not part of our culture. Whereas over there, it is. Everybody goes to some, whether you're a 17-year-old kid, you go to a medullus and play video games, or whether you're the crown prince and you have a medullus that, you know, Jeff Bezos and other sheikhs attend. Somebody's doing that and I like that. It's nice. You know, I've had so many hours and hours of discussions there.

2:34:02So there's cultural things we can learn, a lot of the strengths of families, social things like the medullus. But even from a political standpoint, even as a libertarian, there are things that work. And as a libertarian, I've talked about these things a lot. You know, when I go to these medulluses, I've talked to government officials about why these philosophies work and the things you've done right and the things you haven't done right. When I was in Saudi, many years ago, they changed the rules and they did two things simultaneously.

2:34:34One, the Department of Labor, Ministry of Labor, basically, they did this thing called the Nitaqat, which said you must have a certain number of Saudis that work at your business. Then simultaneously, they also said, because they were trying to increase Saudi employment of locals, they said you must hire a certain number of Saudis and also no more restrictions on women. Women used to not be allowed to do certain jobs. And they said, forget that. Women can do whatever job they want. And I went to people, I said, well, you've done two things.

2:35:03One, very libertarian. Good. You reduced regulation. You allowed women to do more jobs. Good for you. The idea of mandating a certain number of Saudis, that's bad. So, you know, I'm trying to constantly educate people about libertarian philosophies and why these ideas work. Less government works across the board. Having less regulations, I think, is a good thing. And to the extent that they do that, it's good. They have more open immigration too, which is a fascinating thing, because a lot of people blame the immigration, the problems on immigration in the EU and California and other failed states.

2:35:41But I don't think it's the immigration. I think it's lack of enforcement of the laws combined with overwhelming immigration and entitlements. So if you don't enforce crime, you're going to get more crime. They enforce crime very carefully there. So they do respect property rights. And if somebody punches you or steals from you, they're going to get caught. So they've actually done really, their model of immigration is a great model. They let a lot more people in. I would love to let more people into the US. I don't want them costing me money, tax-wise, and I don't want them committing crimes.

2:36:15But other than that, like most people, I would allow them in. And then UAE has found a good balance for that. It's a myth that people are slave labor. I could go on about that for 20 minutes, but bottom line, that's a myth. Very outdated information that wasn't even really correct 20 years ago, but it's certainly not correct. Now, there are poor people who are on low wages, for sure, but they're still making more than they would have at their own home. So your question is, if somebody's making $10 a day in Somalia and you pay them $30 a day, are you more moral than the American who pays them zero and won't let them in under any circumstances because we have unions?

2:36:54And theoretically, if they could come, they'd make more. I think you're more moral if you improve their life. The world's a big place. People are going to die of starvation. You give them any job, it's better. And if you don't know how to read and you come from a failed state, you just don't have the opportunities that you or I have. So the world's a big place. And if somebody's going to die, I think they're better off. Overall, they do have the Dubai version of the American dream, where people come to these places and they do improve themselves.

2:37:24They learn skills and they get better and better jobs. Across the board, you have rags to riches stories, and more often, rags to not rags, which is better. And stability for their kids, where their kids are educated and the next generation might be the richest. So yeah, a lot of good things about it. I think about these things a lot. I want to see more libertarianism there and in my own country. But I also like to look at the things that work better here and there. And kind of a combination of all of these things might be the model society. We don't have it all figured out, that's for sure.

2:38:05Vlad CosteaGoing back to the issue with suit coiners, would you say that many of them will be coming to Satoshi's roundtable? Or if they do come to Satoshi's roundtable, do you think that they're going to become more cypherpunk?

2:38:21Bruce FentonI hope so. I'm going to have a bunch of them there because that's the way the industry has gone. So certainly a lot of those who are in the industry are focusing on these things. And we invite prominent people who run big companies. And if you hold a lot of Bitcoin on your balance sheet, of course you're welcome. I mean, I like to be a big tent. I welcome everybody. I like altcoiners, bitcoiners. I have my own philosophies and I like that to inform it a little bit.

2:38:47But again, I don't try and railroad. I certainly hope that people will come in and I think it does work. I think that these, not just cypherpunk values, but also these libertarian ideals, because of my own beliefs and my closest friends focus on these things, I think it does influence. So I think you're going to have more people that say, you know, this is the direction that they go and hopefully it does influence people.

2:39:17Vlad CosteaI sure hope so. At this point, I don't even know how to get these people to remember why they came here in the first place. But part of the reason why I decided to continue with this podcast is that I constantly try to remind people why we got here. And it's this existential pursuit where, OK, let's say that you came here for the gains and this was always the reason. But isn't there so much that you learned along the way and so so much that you pretended to believe in?

2:39:48And then you got to ask yourself, wouldn't the world be a much better place if those ideals that you're promoting and now you seem to have forgotten about were actually true? Like, of course, you would still be rich like you are now, maybe even richer. But you would also have more freedom around the world and you would see your peers being able to resist government oppression in a nonviolent way, which actually empowers them economically. Like, wouldn't you want to see that in the world? Or you're just happy that we have BlackRock buying our bags?

2:40:25Bruce FentonI don't see another way to live. I mean, I don't know why it's in my blood, whatever. I had a couple of rebellious parents. I think we've got to make the world a better place. Maybe it's because I was a wealth manager when I was young. I've seen people with wealth. I've seen people without wealth. And it matters and it does make your life better in some ways, but it is not everything. And I think, you know, later on in life, there's a lot of more important things for me.

2:40:56I have to look back and be able to say that I tried to make a difference and tried to add value and make the world a better place and save lives. And to me, that's very important and, you know, do well for my family and my community. I want to do well for my family, my local community, my town, my region, my state, my country and my world. And I couldn't see any other way to live.

2:41:26Vlad CosteaFor the listeners who maybe haven't seen Bitcoin 10 years ago and have no idea what it was like, what do you think is a good resource like a time capsule, something that they can just open on YouTube or some kind of book or whatever article where they can find what the spirit of Bitcoin used to be like?

2:41:46Bruce FentonThat's a good question. I think probably the easiest would be some of the old YouTube videos. You know, you go back and look at the early, you know, just sort by date and go back and look at things from 2011, 12, 13, early Andreas, early Erik Voorhees, you know, me even on some of these. There's a fun one where Eric and I did a panel together in 2013, 14, maybe 2014 probably. We did the first Bitcoin event or crypto event of any kind. It was a Bitcoin event in the UAE.

2:42:21We did the first event and now they've had 10,000 since then, several thousand for sure, probably at least 3,000 or 4,000. But we did the very first one. And yeah, you can find that online. Just put Erik Voorhees, Bruce. Eric is a great speaker. I like it. It's not that old, but his permissionless speech from I guess it's a few years now, four years maybe, that was a really good speech. I'm a big fan of Eric, big fan of, you know, early Roger stuff is good.

2:42:51Talking about those early things, if you could find, you know, it's funny, they didn't even do video for a lot of this early stuff. The Miami Bitcoin Conference, the day that Vitalik announced Ethereum, Roger gave a really good speech. I remember I had tears in my eyes listening to it. And just seeking out those people are still around if you can find them. You know, guy like Wences doesn't appear on many panels or he doesn't go to conferences much, but if you can catch him, he's great.

2:43:20You know, listen to those early voices, you know, the people who really built this stuff and what they care about and cared about back then.

2:43:27Vlad CosteaYou mean Wences Casares of Xapo?

2:43:31Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah, he's an early OG, cyberpunk, you know, shares these values.

2:43:37Vlad CosteaBut there's a very funny story about him, because around the time when the bank runs in Cyprus, and I think that was 2013 or 2014, and the price of Bitcoin went up. The narrative was that it's most likely people from Cyprus buying Bitcoin. But it turns out that the reason why the price was going up at the time is that Wences was onboarding a bunch of VCs, like some of his very wealthy friends were buying Bitcoin, and that's why the price went up. But that's something that we learned many years later when it was basically after the fact happened.

2:44:18And we do like to romanticize and make up different narratives about the reasons why the price goes up and down. But the real reason is usually something else, which is much more boring or not as interesting as the official narrative.

2:44:35Bruce FentonYeah. Yeah, he's done a lot of interesting things. He was on a stage one time where he, I think he was talking to like the CEO of Google or somebody, and he took his phone and he got him a wallet and he sent him some huge amount of coins. I think it was, I want to say 100,000 coins, but it was at least 10,000 coins, I think. This was a while ago, but it was like $100 million, you know, and he sent it to him and then had him send it back right on stage, just as an illustration of how it is easy to move this.

2:45:08So, yeah, there's a lot of cool legends like that. A lot of them are quiet. Like I say, a lot of them have kind of gone off into the sunset, which is sad to some degree, but I certainly understand it. There's drawbacks of being in the public eye, a lot of drawbacks. And, you know, I can't blame people for just trying to, also just enjoying life. You know, you got kids or family or hobbies or whatever you want to do, fitness, you know, you kind of got to do that. So I don't blame anybody.

2:45:39Vlad CosteaI also want to give a shout out to Ross Ulbricht, who came out of jail and did his first public appearance at the Las Vegas event organized by David Bailey. And I think that his speech marked like a major departure within the community or rift where he sort of put a nail in the coffin of toxic Bitcoin maximalism. As he spoke about other chains as being part of the defense around Bitcoin and part of the decentralization. And people were saying, well, maybe that he was in jail for too long and he's not aware that the culture changed.

2:46:21But I think he's very much aware. I think he knows that a lot of the money that came to his Free Ross campaign was actually coming from Ethereum people selling NFTs.

2:46:35And I'm pretty sure that he's smart enough to understand that Bitcoin did not end up becoming what everyone was hoping that it would.

2:46:47Bruce FentonYeah, I was there for that speech and I got to meet him and it was moving. You know, he's a special guy and I've known his mom for a long time and I tried to do my own small art to help.

2:47:01And yeah, I think that his philosophy is the original philosophy. This tribalism stuff is silly. Oh, I don't like your coin. You know, as we get close to time, I have a joke for you, which I've shared before, but I think it's funny. So it's right in line with this. So I'm on vacation and I meet this elderly woman and we get to talk. And she's sitting by the beach at this luxury resort, right by the pool or by the pool at the beach. And she says, what do you do?

2:47:39I said, oh, I'm in finance. She said, what kind of finance? I said, oh, you know, fintech. Well, what kind? I said, well, have you ever heard of Bitcoin? She said, oh, of course I've heard of Bitcoin. I run my own node. I said, really? You know, she's an older lady. She said, oh, yeah, yeah. I have some people at the senior center. We play a game on the lightning network. I've been in Bitcoin for 12 years. I said, really? You've got to be kidding me. And we get to talk and we find out we have the same show as we both like Game of Thrones.

2:48:12She even reads comic books. Turns out she was a VC back in the day, back in Silicon Valley. And she went to MIT and she's brilliant and she got way early on Bitcoin. I said, man, you're 80 years old. I wouldn't have expected you to be a Bitcoiner. You're not the stereotypical Bitcoiner. She said, oh, yeah, definitely. So she mentioned she went to MIT. She goes, yeah, you know, my son goes to MIT too. He's a developer and he's made some new privacy tools and he made this wallet.

2:48:46And he even sent me one Litecoin. I said, oh, wait a minute. You're a shitcoiner. I pushed her in the pool.

2:49:00That's my contribution. But that's the silliness of the debate. You can have so much in common. I thought of that joke because I was thinking it's like you meet somebody at a barbecue, man, and they start talking about Bitcoin. Oh, I'm into this other coin. And also young people, you know, like my son when he was my second son, the oldest, a lot of people know because he used to come to conferences with me. He's 19 now. My other son is younger than him. When he was really little, like three years old, like he hears about these things.

2:49:38He doesn't even know what the word Bitcoin means. Somehow he got the idea that he liked Litecoin. Just like a little kid, you know, somebody likes the Hulk or Captain America, or they like the color blue or green, or my potato chip is bigger than yours, or I like Cheez-Its and you like Oreos. He's three. He's a little tiny little kid. And he decided he liked Litecoin. And I thought that was cute. And I always thought it was funny. It's like, somebody out there would call this three-year-old a shitcoiner because he likes Litecoin, you know.

2:50:07And it's like, why be so tribal? Who cares, man? We're all going to die and be dust in a grave sometime. What are you sitting there arguing about? Oh, my code is better than your code. It's Star Trek versus Star Wars. It's a bunch of nerds. You know, in the real world, 99% of society is going to look at us. They think we're all nerds. They don't care which one's which. They can't distinguish the difference. They can't tell you the difference between, a lot of people have never even heard of Litecoin or Bitcoin.

2:50:37And so I think it is silly to get too caught up in these things. People think of it as a tribal thing, like they're white knighting and like, oh, I'm, you know, they justify it by saying I'm stopping scams. No, you're not. You're trying to, you know, white knight and speak to your tribe. I could make the dumbest bot in the world and I could get followers by just being tribal, by calling everything crap and just being pure maximalist. That's kind of died down over the last few years, actually.

2:51:05That model wouldn't work as well as it would a few years ago. But there's not a lot of mindless, you know, a lot of, it's mindless. There's not a lot of thinking involved with it. And I think it's important to be open minded, open source, whatever, not everything. Litecoin is not a scam. I'm sorry. It's just not. You could say it's a bad idea. You could say you don't like it. You could say it's stupid. But it's not a scam. It didn't scam anybody. And sort of just broadly saying everything is a scam.

2:51:35It's kind of ignorant. And I see it more like Ross does. It's not us versus each other. It's us versus the system and the state. And I think all of this stuff helps. You know, one coin or whatever, certain things. Yeah, that is an actual scam. There are things that are very predatory and extractive where, I don't know if I'd call them a scam, but I'd call them bordering a scam, you know, extractive pre mining nonsense. And that goes for treasure companies, too, by the way. You know, there's some of those.

2:52:06Those are borderline predatory and extractive. So I just view markets differently. You know, you don't get ahead in life just by sitting there just, you know, crapping on something else. I came from markets early in my career. I was a stockbroker. Nobody ever gets rich sitting there just railing about how crappy certain penny stocks are all day. That doesn't get you ahead. You know, I say, God bless them. Go do it. Make something of yourself. I hope that your penny stock does well. I may not buy it.

2:52:37And that's my attitude towards treasury companies and altcoins and everything else. It may not be for me, but if I sat there railing about everything that's a scam, the whole world's a scam. The left, the right, the Republicans, the Democrats, cough syrup, gym memberships, everything's a scam. You know, I mean, you know, cough syrup doesn't even work. Like, it's just a big scam. It makes you worse. You know, there's a whole bunch of scams. But that's the nature of the world. I'd rather focus on positivity. And even if somebody, you know, if I meet somebody and they tell me that they, I met somebody one time, they said that they had 70% of an altcoin.

2:53:16And I cringed, you know. I mean, that's pretty, I don't like the word scam, but that's pretty bad. And one person. And, you know, I'm not hating on them. I hope it works somehow. I hope they do well somehow. I'm not going to buy it. I'm not going to recommend it to anybody. But I think it's a healthier attitude to share, to figure out what we have in common and what our common ground is, rather than try and tear other things down. And I don't buy that you're a big white knight because you crap on altcoins all day, especially if you never talk about anything else.

2:53:49If you don't talk about other things that are a scam, you know, if you've never mentioned other scams, and that's the only thing you mentioned, then I don't really buy that you're out to, you know, serve the greater good. And inform people, you know, I think it's just being negative and tribalistic and being being in a tribe is antithetical to being a good investor.

2:54:12Vlad CosteaI think one healthy way to look at this is to compare with Linux, where you have a Linux distribution for video games, one for security, one for system management, one that's like general purpose for media and whatever, one that's optimized for video editing. And I don't think there is any one true version of Linux or there's only one of them that is worth using. I think there is something out there for everyone or different use cases. And under the same considerations, I think that this design, which was first published by Satoshi Nakamoto, was broken down into different optimizations.

2:54:56And people came up with privacy ideas, they came up with ideas to scale it, they came up with different consensus mechanisms, they came up with different ways to do smart contracts to make it quantum resistant, and all of these tiny experiments. And I think ultimately we're going to get to a point where we have maximally optimized projects for different use cases. And it's not such a terrible world if we have a situation where you have maybe 500 million coins, as in the supply, not 500 million projects, but maybe you have 10 projects, which are super legit, and they're interoperable, and you can swap between one another, and you're going to have a supply of 500 million.

2:55:47And that's perfectly fine as long as people are more free than in the fiat system where the credit card issuer can basically stop your transactions and can look into everything that you're doing and has more control over your money than you actually have yourself. So if we actually get to that point, maybe that will never have this 21 million utopia, but a 500 million practical future is not that bad. And that's something that I want to tell my listeners to reflect upon.

2:56:22Bruce FentonYeah, yeah, I agree. And I think we're coming up on time soon. And I got to wrap up. I've thought that for a long time. I thought that you'd have a number of special purpose chains that do certain things. There's certain tokens, other things are legitimate uses. You can have people specialize, just like you said, Linux. That's an interesting model, looking at the Linux. And using Bitcoin forks, you know, say this one is more focused on tokens, this one's more focused on privacy or whatever. I think that's a healthy way to do it.

2:56:57And if you do it as an open source project, especially with no pre-mine, I don't see the issue with that. It's like you're trying something. You're not trying to get rich on people. In fact, you can't get rich on people. You can only take your own risk. If you get rich, maybe you do, maybe you don't, but it's not at the cost of somebody else. So yeah, I'm a big believer in that. And I think we have to, because you can't put everything on Bitcoin. There's always going to be edge case stuff that doesn't belong on Bitcoin, or it needs to be tested first.

2:57:28You've got to try it out, see if this breaks something, and then you put it on Bitcoin. Andreas in the early days used to say, hey, whatever works, we're going to absorb into Bitcoin. And some people still say that, but it is harder, and there is a drawback of, it's an attack vector when you add things, and I don't see Bitcoin being the chain that's just going to keep adding stuff to it. It hasn't had that structure and that sort of community philosophy so far. So if we do end up with, I like your idea of one chain to rule them all, it'd be simple for us.

2:58:00If Bitcoin could just integrate the best of the other chains, and second layer stuff integrates it, then we could. But that might be a more boring world. There's always going to be somebody who wants to do their own thing, and have their own way, and their own community, and their own style. And I think that's healthy.

2:58:18Vlad CosteaYeah, I agree with that. I think it's not such a bad future to have as long as people are more free. And we should look into the Linux model, because I think that one is fascinating, and it's getting more traction. I think Microsoft is doing a lot of bad choices right now, and Linux is capitalizing on it. And all of it is open source, all of it is very useful. And it got to the point where it's comparable in terms of user experience, which is very interesting.

2:58:54And I hope that also with internet money, we're going to get to a point where it's as seamless as tapping your card, because we lost the user experience battle. We are still stuck in a point where you have to scan QR codes and look for confirmations on a block explorer. It's really unfortunate that the user experience did not match fintech. But it's still freedom tech, and people should use it for reasons which concern their own privacy, their own freedom to transact, their own ability to have money without having it confiscated.

2:59:32And that's very powerful and it's something that I think is worth fighting for. Any closing thoughts or anything you want to promote in closing?

2:59:42Bruce FentonI think we covered it, man. You just said it perfectly. It's all about freedom, human freedom. I would urge people to try and understand money as much as they can. Saifedean's books are good, economic books, understanding Austrian economics, understanding human freedom, Ron Paul kind of philosophy, and the roots of this cypherpunk movement, and trying to share it and spread it as much as we can so that we go down the right path. Because if we go down the right path, we can change the world. And I think we're going to all be rewarded for it. Even if you're only in it for the money, I think you'll be better off money-wise if we do change the world. If we don't, then I would be bearish on your asset. But if we can make the money better, we fix the world and we see it go up.

3:00:28Vlad CosteaThank you very much for your time, Bruce. Thank you to the 1000 people who listen to this on livestream on YouTube and Twitter. It's pretty amazing that I did not promote this too much, but we got 1000 people showing up. And also thanks to the sponsors. Once again, Bitcoin.com, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, Unstoppable Wallet and SideShift.ai. Thank you very much. I'll see you in the next one, which will have Tyler Spalding. Do you know Tyler?

3:00:57Bruce FentonI don't.

3:00:58Vlad CosteaHe was the CEO of Flexa, a payments processor from the US.

3:01:02Bruce FentonOh, cool.

3:01:03Vlad Costea2011 Bitcoiner, very solid, has some interesting ideas about proof of work and proof of stake. It's going to be pretty cool. Should be a good one.

3:01:12Bruce FentonAwesome. Well, thanks for having me.

3:01:14Vlad CosteaThanks for being here and thank you for staying for three hours. I mean, this was not part of the deal, but I'm happy that you stuck around. Thank you.