Title: S17 E11: John Carvalho on Bitcoin Depression, Bitkit & Pubky
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): John Carvalho (CEO of Synonym)
Published: 2026-03-05
Duration: 3:06:41
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2026-03-05_s17_e11_john_carvalho_on_bitkit_pubky.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-03-05_s17_e11_john_carvalho_on_bitkit_pubky.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream (three-way comparison over the whole episode). 57 doubtful, dropped or garbled stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (float32, VAD). A dropped stretch was restored at 03:04:24 ("I'm not saying there are better options... X compared to a lot of things is vastly superior") and a duplicated sentence was removed at 02:42:12. Speaker labels were fixed with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and John) and by hand; merged or misattributed turns were split or re-attributed at 00:01:24, 00:11:22, 00:15:05, 00:15:44, 00:20:09, 00:22:38, 00:35:23-00:35:33, 00:44:04-00:44:21, 00:52:06-00:52:24, 00:53:26, 00:55:49, 00:58:14-00:58:23, 01:08:41-01:09:01, 01:17:47-01:18:14, 01:25:25-01:25:34, 01:32:32, 01:44:14-01:44:39, 01:58:33-01:58:43, 01:59:22-01:59:55, 02:00:05-02:00:14, 02:02:31-02:02:45, 02:09:40-02:09:53, 02:16:13, 02:23:12, 02:30:43-02:31:08, 02:31:51-02:31:54, 02:32:21-02:34:08 (decimal places / pizza debate), 02:35:11, 02:41:45, 02:42:49, 02:43:26 ("They just want to HODL and do nothing" is Vlad's), 02:45:52, 02:54:38, 02:55:08, 03:00:49-03:00:55, 03:01:53, 03:02:09, 03:03:39, 03:04:24, 03:05:26 and 03:05:52. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Synonym (synonym.to), Bitkit, Blocktank, Pubky (pubky.app), Pubky Ring, Paykit, Atomicity and the Atomic Economy, semantic social graph, Pav (Pavel Nikolov, Synonym business developer), Bitkit giveaway, Bitcoin Error Log, Xotika, Bitcoin Uncensored, Bitrefill (Sergej Kotliar), Tether, USDT0, Omni/Mastercoin, RGB, Eric Voskuil, Moonsettler, SatoshiDice, BIP 110, Knots, Luke Dashjr, mempoolfullrbf, Gloria Zhao, Tone Vays, SegWit2x, Bitcoin Cash/BCH, Epstein files, Joi Ito, Blockstream, AXA, Adam Back, Austin Hill, Andrew Poelstra, Michael Saylor, Greg Maxwell, Giacomo Zucco, Paul Sztorc and his "Derangements of Bitcoin" article, drivechains, LayerTwo Labs (layer2labs.com), Nostr, Wallet of Satoshi, Ark, BOLT 12, Stephan Livera, Chaincode Labs, Binance, Roger Ver, Theymos, Taproot, OP_CAT, Citrea, Samson Mow, Cashu, Spiderchain/Botanix Labs, Hal Finney, millisatoshis, BIP 177, Frances Coppola, Tar and Feathers (tf.style, Cancel Cancel Culture hat), Braiins Hashpower (hashpower.braiins.com), NoOnes.com and Ray Youssef, Cake Wallet, SideShift.ai, Bitcoin.com News. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:46] Vlad Costea: Hey, hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 11. We are live with John Carvalho, the Bitcoin Error Log, the second person to ever join the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. If you go all the way back to seven years ago, Season 1, Episode 2, that's John talking about Bitcoin stuff. Now he's the CEO of Synonym, which he has been for like five years since he started the company Undercover, and he's been trying to build Bitcoin products. Now he is running the Bitkit wallet. I was going to call it Bitkey, but that's something else. Bitkit wallet, and we're going to do a giveaway from his Bitkit wallet. Basically, there's going to be a QR code on the screen when I let you know about it, and the first 10 people to scan it will receive some free Bitcoin. This episode is sponsored by Braiins Hashpower, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, Cake Wallet, and SideShift.ai. It's really good to have you, John. Welcome.

[00:01:50] John Carvalho: Thanks. Glad to be back.

[00:01:52] Vlad Costea: So, during the prep talk, we were having a lot of fun talking about different topics. I even said that there's going to be a double giveaway, one from Cake Wallet and one from Bitkit. I got to get used to it. Bitkit, and you said, no, you're not going to install a competing wallet.

[00:02:11] John Carvalho: Well, that's not quite what I said. What I said is I didn't appreciate advertising a competing wallet at the same time we're advertising ours. This was more podcaster advice than anything, but also that I'm just not going to help promote another wallet. That's kind of a weird way to start the show, but yeah, I guess you're talking about Cake Wallet or Spark or something. I don't know.

[00:02:36] Vlad Costea: It's all good. I'm going to do the giveaway on Twitter outside of this episode. Let's talk about what you've been up to, because the last time you were on the show, it was almost a year ago. We also had Eric Voskuil tagging along, and we spoke for about eight hours. At the time, it was the longest episode, and then there was the Moonsettler guy who came along and spoke for 10 hours. He sort of destroyed all the records.

[00:03:09] John Carvalho: Yeah, I'm not interested in breaking records today, I think. I don't know if I have that kind of stamina at the moment. It's the middle of the workday for me, so I don't think I'm going to be trying to break the marathon. I would say it was probably me tagging along with Eric Voskuil, since he was the one leading all of the actual technical answers and stuff. That was a fun show, and a few people have commented to me in the months after that they enjoyed the episode. I think it's a shame that more people don't care about examining Bitcoin that way, so I'm glad that more people did because of that episode.

[00:03:47] John Carvalho: As far as what I'm working on, well, I don't know. I'll riff. Mostly, I'm working now because I just don't think that social media is that interesting anymore, and being on X and trying to post on X kind of feels more like a game or something you're trying to play, where you're trying to see if you can trick the system to get people to show it your tweets and get likes. It feels like a game of some weird thing, and it's not how it used to be. I think they're probably making some long-term mistakes they don't realize.

[00:04:19] John Carvalho: That has been good for me because it means that I'm less interested in what people think about anything regarding Bitcoin, regarding Lightning, regarding a lot of topics like this, and just focus on working mostly. I'd say maybe the biggest maybe distorting factor in the past few months has been AI coding, vibe coding, changing how things are for us as a company, for me as an individual that likes to make things for the world, for the job market. I would say sometime around November or so, maybe a little earlier than that, was when we had Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5, all kind of actually doing pretty good at coding.

[00:05:05] John Carvalho: Then somewhere in the middle of the winter, I started vibe coding a lot and started doing highly speculative things. I ended up finding a way to incorporate it into our research process for the stuff that we do, for the stuff that we build, the features we choose, etc. So it's been really cool. That's kind of like what's happening in my world is just figuring out how to use AI more to do what I want to do, figuring out how to get our team using AI responsibly but effectively, and getting everybody's skill level up.

[00:05:45] John Carvalho: We just got up to roughly 30 people on the team for the first time. We grew very slowly at Synonym, so we're still acclimating to adding these extra people over the past few months. Yeah, I don't know. Any questions on any of that stuff?

[00:06:03] Vlad Costea: Well, just a comment that there's nothing wrong with growing slowly because it seems like a lot of companies in this space, especially during the bull market, they hired a lot of people and now they're letting them go. It's sort of healthier to only expand your team when it makes sense. Yeah,

[00:06:24] John Carvalho: I've noticed that trend as well. It seems more to affect things around shitcoins or things around exchanges. Exchanges tend to hire up during bull markets and then let a lot of people go at the end. I definitely don't want that to be a phenomenon with any company that I'm running. I don't want to have to fire people just because of cuts or whatever. Yeah, it's growing slowly. I don't know. I never ran a company of 30 people before until now, so how do you go from your only experience running companies of maybe five to eight people to now running 30?

[00:07:00] John Carvalho: It is not the same thing. Also, we're kind of a hybrid where we're doing a lot of research in addition to product design and development. It's just different. You have to acclimate and keep learning how to work and how to prioritize and this kind of thing.

[00:07:19] Vlad Costea: I think I've spoken with someone from Bitrefill last month, and they told me that their team has almost 100 employees, which is quite remarkable. I remember when you were there that the team building events were kind of small, maybe 20 people tops. They did expand. I wanted to ask you how it was with Xotika at its peak. How many girls you had working for you?

[00:07:47] John Carvalho: I never had any girls working for me. Remember, Xotika was a platform where other people could stream. I never had to hire people or anything like that. As far as Xotika, the actual project or the company, it was me, a co-founder, and a freelance programmer that we hired part-time. And we didn't have investment or funding or anything like that. It was just me paying for it, literally. When I decided I didn't really have enough money left to keep doing it, that was when we stopped doing it and I got a job at Bitrefill.

[00:08:24] John Carvalho: So it's not... Xotika isn't the best example of learning management lessons or this kind of thing. It's more of a lesson of, I don't know, I probably didn't need to do that. I learned a lot of lessons about you can't really make a platform for people that is missing features that they're used to. When you try to do, say, a streaming platform and you want people that use YouTube every day or Twitch every day to use it, what will happen is the people that are interested in whatever is unique about it, they'll try it and they'll use it for a couple weeks.

[00:09:01] John Carvalho: But as soon as they say, oh, I really need this feature and giving them that feature takes more than another two weeks, they're just gone. To go from being this, basically, garage startup with a cam girl streaming platform to competing with other streaming platforms in that niche that had been around for 20 years adding features. You just can't. You just can't actually compete. And then doing video at scale is even more complex. So I think that it was just biting off more than I can chew. But I did learn a lot about how to not start with a product.

[00:09:39] John Carvalho: Definitely don't go for something that you're not going to be able to compete. If I were doing a video platform, something like rumble or something like that, I would want a way bigger budget than what I do now because you can't actually compete unless you have a very robust platform, tons of marketing, etc. But yeah, so at Bitrefill, like you mentioned, we were less than the people that Synonym is now. And so I think, yeah, we were in the 20-25 range when I was working there. And yeah, now they're at 100.

[00:10:10] John Carvalho: I would say it's impressive that they're only 100. Bitrefill, other than exchanges, is probably the highest volume crypto company, you know, doing... actually using Bitcoin, using things as money. So they've been doing pretty well, as far as I know. But other than the past couple of days, they had some kind of downtime problem. But generally they've grown a lot and it's impressive that they can do it with only 100 people probably.

[00:10:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, on the topic of Xotika, I just wanted to say that I was very sick in December around Christmas time. And I basically listened to a stream of Bitcoin Uncensored 24-7. And a lot of the 2016 episodes, the later ones from their tenure as podcasters, happened on Xotika. And at some point they were so happy about it, saying, well, we can say whatever we want. There is no way we can get deplatformed because basically nobody cares. There is no TNC to ban us or whatever. So I don't know, it was a lot of fun and they kept going, I think, until 2017 on Xotika.

[00:11:22] Vlad Costea: And I've also listened to the episode where you're holding the camera while they were trying to get into the Satoshi Roundtable. And that's a lot of fun. 

[00:11:31] John Carvalho: Yeah, that was fun in person as well. Yeah, I mean, they're crazy guys. It was a crazy phenomenon. It was an interesting stage in my own Bitcoin kind of career, development, life, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I can see how listening to that is nostalgic, especially if you had heard it back then. For people now, I don't even know what it would look like, you know, because it's like a bunch of weird topics that I wonder how well it translates to new people. Yeah, that was a good time. That's how I heard of Xotika as well. They were the ones who introduced it to me.

[00:12:09] Vlad Costea: Something else that I've realized while listening to Bitcoin Uncensored is that a lot of these ideas that nowadays have activity and users on other networks, they started out on Bitcoin. And I think the best example is Tether, which was built on Mastercoin slash Omni. And I know that you're also building on Omni. Or not anymore.

[00:12:33] John Carvalho: No, not since years. In the first year or two, we were looking at OmniBOLT. But now what happened was I've always been interested in credit as a concept around Bitcoin and not in necessarily always the ways you hear about it. In other words, stablecoins as tokens, this kind of thing, more in the realm of actual credit. I think Bitrefill is a better example. In other words, what if gift cards were just tokens and the tokens were per provider? In other words, you could buy Amazon tokens and you knew that those Amazon tokens were worth a dollar of Amazon credit, just like a gift card.

[00:13:15] John Carvalho: And doing that in more of a crypto format instead of the gift card format. That was where my interest all started. And my interest started with doing something like tokens on Lightning. This was, you know, 2018, 2019. 

[00:13:30] Vlad Costea: I remember, way before.

[00:13:32] John Carvalho: Yeah, yeah. Well, I started with RGB after, you know, after I left Bitrefill and started Synonym, I did participate in the research with RGB, helped get it funding for a while. But I just decided that that was not a team that I wanted to trust to work with.

[00:13:50] John Carvalho: I had some trouble working with them and it looked like something that would just take too long to ship. And probably something that was also too complex. And so we looked at Omni and OmniBOLT. There was a team, I think, out of China that was working on OmniBOLT and this actually worked. It was just taking Omni transactions and making Lightning channels out of them. And I still think to this day, if you want to do tokens on Bitcoin and Lightning, that Omni and OmniBOLT are like the practical way to do it.

[00:14:18] John Carvalho: But nobody uses Omni anymore. I think even Tether dropped support for it on Bitcoin. Most exchanges have been dropping support for it in general, and probably none has supported it anymore, I would guess. And they moved on to the other chains. And what made Tether work was more like things like DeFi at first, and that helped it get off the ground and little things along the way. And now it has not much to do with Bitcoin at all. And really, it's kind of transcended any specific chain at all, right?

[00:14:49] John Carvalho: Like it's on many chains. There's a USDT0 thing for bridging between the different Tether chains. So everything is kind of getting abstracted. Yeah, not sure if you have a question in there, too.

[00:15:05] Vlad Costea: I do have a question, because in 2018, there was a network congestion in Bitcoin because of Tether and a lot of people did not like it. I think like 20, 30 percent of the block space was taken by USDT transactions. And then it made a full migration to Ethereum. And then I think in 2020, they decided to also go into Tron. And I think right now, USDT on Tron is the most popular asset out there. 

[00:15:37] John Carvalho: Yeah, I think it was doing well on Solana for a while, too. I don't follow too much the stats of it, but yeah, that sounds about right.

[00:15:44] Vlad Costea: But my question is, don't you think that it was better off being on Bitcoin with people actually buying Bitcoin to use as the currency for paying for transaction fees as opposed to moving to these EVMs?

[00:15:58] John Carvalho: Well, I would ask you if that's true, why isn't it on Bitcoin anymore?

[00:16:04] Vlad Costea: Because all the time we get some sort of use case that takes block space and people call it spam and then it moves to other chains.

[00:16:12] John Carvalho: Well, this topic I agree with. So you can go back pretty far in Bitcoin's history, at least probably even before. And I just wasn't there, but I remember 2013 roughly with SatoshiDice, this was gambling and all of the bets were on chain. And so everything was, every single thing that happened was just constantly spamming the chain. And yeah, people complained and people wanted to find... I think even Luke might have been one of the guys trying to figure out what to do about it. But what happened there was they kind of peer pressured Erik to stop, I think is how it ended up.

[00:16:49] John Carvalho: And so they just kind of stopped doing it. And eventually people stopped caring and it just kind of went away. And that's what always happens is like the things that we think are problems that fill up the blocks more than somebody might like, they go away. They're just like, I think they're actually efficiencies. In other words, when there's no nobody's filling the blocks, people find creative ways to fill them because the block space is underpriced. And so they just do things. And we had, you know, we had the Ordinals and the spam and all of these things.

[00:17:18] John Carvalho: So I think that what you're missing is what I'm implying with my question back to you is if it were meant to be that way, the market would have it that way. In other words, the value probably isn't being on Bitcoin in the first place, the value is something else. And that's why it's not on Bitcoin anymore. And in Bitcoin, I think if I remember it, the way I remember it is as Tether grew on Bitcoin, it kind of coincided with that time where we had high fees for the first time for a while, like $25 fees or something.

[00:17:52] John Carvalho: And this was like leading up to 2017 and such. So Tether was like kind of turning up the heat. Right. And then Ethereum came along and they started turning up the hype and they started doing things with stablecoins. And DeFi and wrapped bitcoins and all this stuff. And that drew the liquidity over there for Tether. And so what ended up happening, it was just a convenient switch. It was, hey, wait a minute, blockchains don't actually scale. So we could never actually do Tether on Bitcoin because Bitcoin is actually more decentralized and the expense to secure things is higher.

[00:18:28] John Carvalho: It's a higher security chain. So now we're just going to keep moving and adding these layer, you can call it a layer, these layers on top of chains that can't sustain it because they're centralized or because they're younger or whatever it may be. But even you saw it repeat, right? Like when Tether usage got too big on Ethereum, the fees got too high and then it offloaded into other chains. Right. And so I think the phenomenon is more around the use case of Tether, something around the use case of Tether requires very low fees.

[00:18:59] John Carvalho: And very high speed thus basically requires some form of centralization or trust to be able to perform its use case the way that people need it to. And so if we were to say, put Tether back on Bitcoin, there's nothing stopping anybody. Like you can go ahead and boot up Omni network and get your friends to do it and you can get somebody to issue a stablecoin on it and maybe you can even get Tether to do it. But history will just repeat itself. You know, we'll end up at a point where the blocks are too full and then people are worrying about like American call options and whether there's more value in Tether or less value in Tether compared to the value of the Bitcoin and UTXO and we'll worry about whether or not you can afford a fee to enforce anything.

[00:19:41] John Carvalho: It's a lot like how layers and the problems that I think layers have these days that people are avoiding acknowledging is that it doesn't actually scale. Bitcoin doesn't scale, the layers don't scale. So when you put things on top, they eventually break and then that's a business and they try to find somewhere else to do it. So this also goes to an Eric Voskuil concept that I like that Bitcoiners seem to hate, which is, he likes talking about that the way that Bitcoin scales is already evident. You just make more blockchains.

[00:20:09] John Carvalho: That's not the maximalist way to look at it, but it's what actually happens, right? Like when you look at the world, there's more blockchains than ever since Bitcoin. They didn't like suddenly boom and then all of a sudden they all disappeared.

[00:20:21] Vlad Costea: Not just more blockchains, but more currencies.

[00:20:24] John Carvalho: Yeah, more blockchains, more monies, more tokens. There's just more of it all than ever because of Bitcoin. So this hyperbitcoinization idea is just wrong, right? Like on its face. It's not wrong in like why people would want it or the principles behind it. It's just wrong that it's not compatible with reality. And so we already see that how blockchains actually express is like a class system. You have like the most secure, most expensive one and the people that use that and they get maybe even the better store of value out of it.

[00:20:54] John Carvalho: And then it descends down where you have like it's just like a class system, like poor people will have to use shitty blockchains. That's not a judgment. It's an observation.

[00:21:05] Vlad Costea: Oh, man, I got to tell you my theory that basically Bitcoin is Linux and it does not adhere to your classification of having like the most secure, most expensive one and then shittier ones that people can afford. But basically, you can argue that Litecoin is a Bitcoin because it's a fork of Bitcoin. It's the same code base, but with some changes.

[00:21:33] John Carvalho: You have to be careful, like who you're talking to, because you have to like I understand what you're trying to say, but a normal Bitcoiner would be like, you're a fucking shitcoiner, what are you talking about? Because they don't understand what you're trying to say.

[00:21:43] Vlad Costea: But I'm not referring to the tickers. I'm just saying that technically it's Bitcoin.

[00:21:48] John Carvalho: No, but they'll get offended because you say technically it's Bitcoin. What they care about and what they don't always like to admit is they care about the scarcity aspect. And so if there can be 21 million over here and then another 21 million over there and another 20 million over there, they think that that means that that removes the scarcity aspect. But what it means is they have to relearn Bitcoin and why it has a valuable scarcity aspect and that it derives from it being expensive to secure and, you know, it being a higher value chain.

[00:22:21] John Carvalho: That's where it comes from. It doesn't come from there not being other options to store of value. There are always many, many, many options to store of value. The 21 million is meaningless. The economy will reshape around any number that you give it of unit, you know.

[00:22:38] Vlad Costea: I'm not even sure which one of us made the more controversial statement there. I just said that... I'm just trying to translate: Litecoin is a Bitcoin, Dogecoin is a Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin. But you just said that-

[00:22:55] John Carvalho: They're forks of Bitcoin because when you describe it that way, when Eric describes it, Eric Voskuil, what he's trying to say is what Bitcoin is, is a design pattern. It's a way of applying technology. And so when you deploy a blockchain, you're deploying Bitcoin. Now, what Bitcoiners think Bitcoin is, is a specific blockchain, a specific network and a specific pile of units. Of course, when you start calling other piles of units Bitcoin, you make them mad because then they have to think, they have to think, oh, what does it mean if there's a world where there's 21 million Bitcoins over here and 21 million Bitcoins over there with a different name?

[00:23:31] John Carvalho: Like they don't want to think about that. They want to think about hyperbitcoinization and everybody's going to buy my bag. That's what they want to think about. But they don't want to talk about that being their incentive. You know, but yeah, I want everybody to buy only my Bitcoin, too. But I know that they won't because it'll be too expensive. It'll be more useful to solve problems in different ways, in different situations, and that Bitcoin can't cover everything everybody needs. It just can't.

[00:23:59] Vlad Costea: So let me combine the two previous topics into one question. Let's assume that we're going to have another blockchain, which is a UTXO fork of Bitcoin, but which is technically superior to Bitcoin. So basically, you get the same amount of coins, much better network. Would you support that? Just like I said the previous two topics, because we talked about Tether being tokenized on other blockchains and there's also Bitcoin on Ethereum as WBTC. There's also Bitcoin on Solana and whatever. But these are just tokens. What I'm talking about is a different network, which is maybe doesn't even have a blockchain or whatever is technically superior, but copies the ownership from Bitcoin and gives everyone one to one whatever they own.

[00:24:52] John Carvalho: Well, I don't know what problem you're trying to solve with that, but I can talk about that design if you want. I don't think it solves the problems. What problem do you think that solves?

[00:25:03] Vlad Costea: Maybe scaling, maybe privacy, maybe both. And it just gives everyone who owns Bitcoin the option to have all the features that they want.

[00:25:15] John Carvalho: But you can argue we already tried this, right? It doesn't mean that it's the only one experiment is good enough. But Bcash is this, right? Like it copied Bitcoin. It's a facsimile of Bitcoin and it has the same ownership.

[00:25:28] Vlad Costea: As in they just increased the block size and they activated. So the good part about BCH, they activated some Satoshi era opcodes, which right now we're wrestling to activate in Bitcoin.

[00:25:41] John Carvalho: But we have to like choose a thread here, because if your goal is to, say, explain and understand what Eric Voskuil means by they're using many blockchains to scale Bitcoin, it's a different thing because there's only two ways to make more blockchains. There's to take the one that exists and duplicate it like Bcash did, or to take a design that exists and replicate it and have a separate instance of the same thing starting from the beginning. Right. And so basically it's Bitcoin. What I'm saying is there's Bitcoin and there's Bcash, but there's also Bitcoin and there's Litecoin.

[00:26:23] John Carvalho: Right. And these are the two ways of kind of bootstrapping or scaling in this context of making more blockchains. Right. And I think you're trying to. Maybe convey that you think there's like a third way of making a blockchain that is separate, but what transfers the value over and now it's over here and it's like hard fork fantasy, kind of. I don't think you can actually do that kind of thing. It's a physical limitation, like each individual subjectively decides where the value is. And so you can't migrate it.

[00:26:56] John Carvalho: You can duplicate ownership, like you mentioned, but it doesn't mean people will value that, you know, just like what happened with Bcash. Right. And then you put in another dimension in there of maybe it's not a blockchain, maybe it's just a whole other thing. Well, that's maybe more interesting to talk about, but harder to pin down. Like there are many other things, right? There's Visa, there's a bank, there's credit systems, there's eCash, there's all kinds of other ways that people could kind of compare to Bitcoin. But you have to choose like what problems, what scope, right?

[00:27:32] John Carvalho: Like some people think it's store of value is the only use. Well, I think they're going to be disappointed in Bitcoin because you can store your value in anything. It just depends on how long and how much you want risk, you know.

[00:27:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah, to me, it feels like we sort of lost the plot to a degree when we focus too much on the store of value aspect. Like you're going to find out that Tron, since it added Tether, has been a better store of value than Bitcoin. And that's going to make a lot of people angry. But it's true if you look at the charts. But there's nothing about Tron that has a narrative that it's a good store of value. It's just that people use it.

[00:28:13] John Carvalho: You have to be careful to not if you start cherry picking dates, you know what I mean? Then your opposition will do the same thing. So on some cherry picking date line, yes, you surely can say that that's like Bitcoin. Right. But is it but what's the topic? Is the topic what's Bitcoin's performance over five years? Because I don't think that was the topic. Or what is the best thing to have invested in over the last five years? That's just these are just investment topics, right? Like probably was Nvidia or something like that probably had nothing to do with Bitcoin.

[00:28:49] John Carvalho: And so I don't think it just you have to really agree on not only definitions of things, but what the two people discussing Bitcoin or scaling or whatever, what you have to get them to agree on the definition of success, because that's the problem is when people talk about Bitcoin, you start talking about store of value and then it morphs into a conversation about scaling, which is more of a technical conversation. And it just keeps changing goalposts. So you never really have an answer because you keep switching the topic.

[00:29:21] John Carvalho: So I would say if you were if we were to sit here and say, hey, John, what do you think is the way to solve scaling, the most self-sovereign method of doing payments at scale? I would give you a different answer that would have nothing to do with blockchains. So it's it really depends on what problem you're trying to solve.

[00:29:41] Vlad Costea: OK, it's been 30 minutes. We have more than 200 people watching. Let's put the QR code in the middle. People will be able to see this for 10 seconds. And what does it do, John?

[00:29:53] John Carvalho: I don't know. I'm guessing that you win a prize. So the marketing guys set this up and I think they're testing, trying to see if giving any creator some sort of program that they can opt into so they can make extra money and kind of an ad hoc sponsorship. And so I'm guessing that what you're about to share is a QR code that where if people install Bitkit, they'll be able to get some free lightning channel with some money inside of it that they can spend at Bitrefill or whatever accepts Lightning.

[00:30:23] Vlad Costea: Let me try to scan it. I mean, I'm not going to try to claim anything.

[00:30:27] John Carvalho: I think it claims automatically if you have Bitkit.

[00:30:31] Vlad Costea: I think it sends you to the App Store to get Bitkit first.

[00:30:36] John Carvalho: Yeah, yeah, you have to have Bitkit to do it.

[00:30:38] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So before you claim anything, you have to download the app. But it's been on the screen. You can follow the steps. You know what to do. You're going to get some free Bitcoin. I don't know how much. I have no idea. This was part of the deal to get this interview done.

[00:30:54] John Carvalho: Well, you don't have to make a deal to get an interview with me. I'm always happy.

[00:30:58] Vlad Costea: I made this deal with Pav. He set up the interview and I said, OK, I'm going to do this on my show.

[00:31:03] John Carvalho: Yeah, I think Pav was just trying to help me with some scheduling, but I'm always happy to come on the show.

[00:31:09] Vlad Costea: Thank you, John. And for the giveaway, which I announced a week ago from Cake Wallet, I want to announce the winner. He actually made the effort to send me an email. Everyone else was tweeting on my thread and posting addresses like, "Give me, give me, give me." This guy actually sent me a picture that proved that he has the wallet on his phone. His email is [unclear: another aptly]. I'm not going to dox it. So another aptly is the winner. If you want to win for the next episode, try to send an email to bitcointakeover@protonmail.com and prove that you installed the wallet and you get better chances, because Twitter replies, they just disappear out there. But this one actually stuck with me. So, I respect the guy. I respect the hustle.

[00:32:00] John Carvalho: I don't know if this is good advice, but I want to give you some advice anyway that one thing I think about when I think about your podcast and through the lens of Synonym and sponsoring or Bitkit or Pubky or whatever is it's it's hard if you have like I think I don't know if you have it right now. I'm looking at the Google Meet feed, but you have like this feed of like 10, 15 different logos of different sponsors. And then you have now in this episode where you have two different wallets that you're promoting in the same episode.

[00:32:34] John Carvalho: That does make it difficult to become a sponsor because you probably have, I assume, engagements from beforehand with some of these people where you now you're stuck with these logos everywhere and these things where if a new wallet wants to come around and say, hey, I want to sponsor your show and I want you to be I want to be the show's wallet and to be the wall that you talk about or use and this kind of thing. Can't really do that. So I think that mixing competing sponsors is a mistake.

[00:33:06] Vlad Costea: Well, it's a good problem to have.

[00:33:09] John Carvalho: Depending on how much money you get, I could be totally wrong. Yeah. If this is the best way to optimize the revenue, I'm wrong. But just some sharing perspective from the outside.

[00:33:19] Vlad Costea: I understand what you mean. It's a rare situation. But I had to compromise here. I had to make Pav happy. And I also had to...

[00:33:29] John Carvalho: Well, granted, we weren't offering a real sponsorship anyway, right? It was like opt-in...

[00:33:34] Vlad Costea: Hypothetically. Yes.

[00:33:35] John Carvalho: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's just something I'm observing and I'm just trying to help. Sorry.

[00:33:43] Vlad Costea: That's fine. Also, check out Braiins Hashpower. I'm going to plug two more ads and then we get to the next topic. Braiins Hashpower is the service where you can rent hash rate for any purpose. Maybe you want to 51 percent attack BCH or maybe that you just want to hit the next block and try a lottery ticket or whatever. I think for the price that you pay for an actual tiny ASIC miner, which sometimes costs like 300 bucks, you can get like a hundred of these ASICs running for a day or something.

[00:34:16] Vlad Costea: So I don't know. Just think about how you want to approach this mining lottery and check it out. It's also pretty anonymous. You just need an email to sign up and then you pay with Bitcoin. It's pretty cool. It's hashpower.braiins.com, Braiins with a double I. And NoOnes.com. The next guest is going to be Ray Youssef. He got arrested in Mexico and got deported to the US. And that's going to be an interesting story. I guess the sin that he committed was that he tried to build a peer to peer marketplace for the global south, which is NoOnes.com.

[00:34:50] Vlad Costea: They have the peer to peer marketplace. They have a spot market. They have debit card for spending. They have a marketplace for goods and services. They have like the whole package. And most users are from Nigeria in the Middle East. And there are some from South America, too. So if you choose to use that platform, you're also sort of giving liquidity to these people who might need it for something more than store of value, maybe just survival hustling, whatever. NoOnes.com, N-O-O-N-E-S.

[00:35:23] Vlad Costea: Now, John, I got to ask you, what do you think about BIP 110?

[00:35:27] John Carvalho: I mean, you don't have to ask me, but everybody... So the last person who asked me, I actually was just watching the video from... I did a presentation in El Salvador and Tone Vays was there in the crowd. And he asked me the same question. And my answer to him was it's the most ignorable event in Bitcoin's history.

[00:35:50] Vlad Costea: You can say I don't think about BIP 110.

[00:35:54] John Carvalho: Right. Yeah. The meme, whatever. I mean, I think about it because people always make me think about it, but I would prefer not to. I really think it's embarrassing how easy it is to sweep Bitcoiners into a trend. You know what I mean? To just be like, oh, this is the thing now. And we're all just going to argue about this thing because we all need something to argue about. There has to be some enemy or some thing that we're all smarter than everybody else about about.

[00:36:24] John Carvalho: And this is the thing. And unfortunately, the thing is just not that interesting. It's not that sophisticated. It's not it doesn't fix anything. It's really, really inconsequential. There's no way we'd ever get off the ground. But what's embarrassing is everybody taking it so seriously and feeling like there needs to be like humoring these people and debating these people and having podcasts about it and panels. And it's like, wow. To me, it feels like doing the, like, Bitcoin Classic. I remember before we had Bcash, there were a few attempts where people tried to do forks with Bitcoin.

[00:37:00] Vlad Costea: XT, Classic, Unlimited, SegWit2x. Those were the four big ones.

[00:37:05] John Carvalho: And some of those were just like a week or two. You know what I mean? It was a week or two. People were like, oh, this is maybe going to be a thing. This is dramatic. This is news. And then it fizzled. It didn't succeed. And everybody moved on. But like now Bitcoin is like it's like they feel like there's some sort of like reply guy Sparta or something like they have to be like whenever there's anything that is bad, they have to be the police of Bitcoin and go fix it.

[00:37:31] John Carvalho: And now people are arguing about who the police are. It's like, you know, Luke and Mechanic want to be like the spam police and then Core wants to be the Luke police. And it's just all fucking nonsense. It's all embarrassing. It's all just not actually useful. It's the same thing as like complaining about SatoshiDice or whatever. It's like people are going to fill the blocks with any time people fill the blocks with an identifiable niche, there's going to be a counter niche of people who want to prevent those people from filling the blocks that way.

[00:38:05] John Carvalho: And so this is my concern is it's just cultivating a culture where, oh, yeah, it's normal to get up into a big argument when we notice a trend where people are using Bitcoin in a way that we didn't predict. And I think that's horrible. I think that I don't care about people writing data on Bitcoin. They're not really writing data on Bitcoin. They're kind of hacking Bitcoin to use it as a database. They won't be able to afford it if Bitcoin is more useful for something else.

[00:38:35] John Carvalho: So it will just go away if it needs to go away. And if they do it when nobody's using Bitcoin for anything else, it's probably an efficiency that helps keep the miners paid and gravity on Bitcoin. So I just think that the arguments are not sophisticated. They're divisive. It's causing probably miseducation of Bitcoiners on the Knots side. It's causing a lot of embarrassing things that people will look back on this in a few years. And, you know, I saw a video of Jeff Booth saying he's running Knots and whatever. I'm just like, this stuff is fake.

[00:39:08] John Carvalho: This is a big LARP. None of these people are important. None of these people are helping or hurting Bitcoin. It's just a big, like, performance. It's like some kind of... It's a LARP. It really is a lot of LARPing. People want to feel like they're in the movement, but they're not really doing anything.

[00:39:29] Vlad Costea: I think to me it's a much more interesting sociologic study because these guys have been on a quest for purity. And since they discovered Bitcoin, they feel like some sort of crusaders in their daily lives as quote unquote plebs. They do what they call mining fiat, which means they have normie jobs and they don't work in the field. But once they come home and they get on the internet, they feel like they should defend this pure holy invention. And once someone pointed out to them that there might be technically one way to do this, which is ineffective, but at least gives them the feeling that they're going to fight in some sort of larger movement.

[00:40:14] Vlad Costea: They're on it. And I think it's also good for generating engagement and being part of this social club where people are aggressive and toxic and they insult others and they feel like they're having their own SegWit moment. I think a lot of these guys came after 2017. They never fought in the block size wars. And to them, fighting spam is their own block size war. And they want to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And I do understand why they're doing it. But on the other hand, I don't understand why they're so stupid, because...

[00:40:55] John Carvalho: I'm not convinced they exist. Honestly, I have not met a lot of real world supporters. I have some people that have like had questions or kind of sympathize or interested in the ideas of the Knots side and want to understand it. But I don't. I think that it's not a coincidence that most of the people on social media supporting Knots are not using real identities. You know, people have to understand like pseudonymity is fine, but it means you don't get as much credit as people who do expose their reputation.

[00:41:29] John Carvalho: And so even if they're real people or bots, what you're doing is you're choosing you're saying, OK, I am trading more anonymity, more privacy. Also be more easily confused with a bot. And so I think a lot of them behave like bots. I think a lot of the support is bots. I don't think there is a lot of real people, and I'm disappointed in the people that kind of are taking it very seriously on both sides, supporter and feeling like they need to vehemently defend Bitcoin against Knots people.

[00:42:00] John Carvalho: I think both sides are just, it's way too much. Just, and what it does is, you just mentioned that it feels like, you know, a community thing, like you're a part of something, like you can contribute, but what it does is it alienates the other people that aren't that way. It's a very alienating behavior, even to me as like, I used to literally say, like, I... not recently, I'll say things like, I am the purity test. What's wrong with wanting to be pure? What's wrong with trying to be pure about Bitcoin ideals?

[00:42:30] John Carvalho: I've made many quotes like this in my own Twitter over the years, but I was coming from a different place. It's not purity in some sort of religious subjective sense. It's just being as scientific about and pragmatic about things as you possibly can, admitting reality because you actually want to fix it. And for me, my path of Bitcoin maximalism, as you can see, there's been a trajectory to it where it peaked. And now I'm not like, I will be toxic. I will defend Bitcoin. I will, you know, share traits with these people, but it's coming from a much more pragmatic, technical, benevolent place.

[00:43:10] John Carvalho: It's not because I think I know better. It's because all my questions, when I do ask people, weren't answered satisfactory enough, so I just keep digging until I am, and I end up in a different place. And so I think everybody would end up in a different place if they were thinking more critically for themselves. Instead, they're outsourcing their judgment and then they're like joining a movement. I think most people... like, come on, spam's not hurting you. It's literally not hurting you. It's literally not hurting anybody.

[00:43:38] John Carvalho: You know what I mean? Data on Bitcoin is not affecting anything anymore. And even when it does, so what? Pay more fees than they do. Are you trying to say that? If you think they're a problem, it's like admitting that you think Bitcoin might actually be for storing data instead of using it for money, if you think there's a problem. I don't think that's a problem. I think it's fine. I think it's an extra feature of Bitcoin that you can use it for data if you want to.

[00:44:04] Vlad Costea: No, but the lore goes much deeper. Like they tried to...

[00:44:08] John Carvalho: You mean like that we're going to go to jail or something for running a node or...

[00:44:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's where it started. And then they came up with the CSAM. I'm not sure if you pronounce it like that or it's...

[00:44:20] John Carvalho: CSAM is how we pronounce it. The term I always... Anybody who ships, legally ships a social media website or anything that has social anything in it, comments, you know, threads, you have to follow, there are regulations around CSAM content. And so it's a term I was already familiar with from doing Pubky because you can't ship a product without monitoring for CSAM and removing it. You have to follow the law. And so I know exactly what they're talking about and they're wrong. Like there's just... Nobody is actually using data as an intentional data.

[00:44:57] John Carvalho: In other words, the Bitcoin node doesn't have files. You know what I mean? Bitcoin core doesn't try to facilitate any sort of thing. It's a hack. It's a hack for using the network that stores data and there's not like any intent behind you randomly running a node to support the network and making a claim that you are now spreading CSAM or something.

[00:45:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Yeah, but the lore goes deeper because they said, okay, we're gonna...

[00:45:25] John Carvalho: You're making me go deeper.

[00:45:26] Vlad Costea: We're gonna protect the network against these bad actors and look, Adam Back is suspiciously defending spam and then they found Adam Back in the Epstein files and now they call him Andy Back and they're like, oh, of course, this guy is a pedophile and we're trying to protect Bitcoin from these guys and we're trying to fight against core and look at Gloria Zhao. She got promoted by being this guy's girlfriend and then she has no merit for any commit that she ever made to her GitHub and then they made her resign and I don't know.

[00:45:59] Vlad Costea: It's so much more than trying to gatekeep the spam. It seems like a movement that's trying to replace Bitcoin Core.

[00:46:09] John Carvalho: Well, you can't disagree with Bitcoin Core without ultimately having to double down to trying to remove Bitcoin Core. In other words, if I was unhappy with the outcome of mempoolfullrbf, like that little battle that I had with them a few years ago, if I wanted to keep going, if I didn't want to give up, the only thing you have, the only turn you have is to offer a fork. You know what I mean? You have to say, no, I still believe this is still very wrong and I'm willing to make a whole new client for it and I'm willing to risk working for it.

[00:46:39] John Carvalho: That's what they're doing. They're doubling down. They just keep going with it. Whereas it's not what I did because I just think that there's a point where you have to give up. You have to say, OK, this is what Bitcoin is, and I am not... I'm just one person. And my opinion of what Bitcoin should do is only really going to be justified by my own willingness to do the work myself. And so unless I'm willing to code up another version that does it the way I want, it doesn't really mean anything.

[00:47:06] John Carvalho: And so I think people are taking a lot of the wrong lessons from all those dramas. I do think some of those things are interesting, but not for the reasons of spam or not or whatever. I think it's just interesting to think about Bitcoin Core and culture and the phenomena all around it and the incentives and how things work. I think that a lot of those people act like they're actually vetting somebody like Gloria, but probably never actually looked at any of her code. I'm not qualified to judge her code versus somebody else's code.

[00:47:38] John Carvalho: There's a lot of nuances there where it just all turns into bullshit. So I think there is a good thread that could be pulled out of what they're doing, but they're not doing it, which is their main thread should just be promoting the idea that there needs to be more than one popular Bitcoin client, more than one popular Bitcoin implementation. Things like libbitcoin, formerly things like Knots, but now Knots have corrupted their own... Like, they were the original version of this. For many years, it was just that other Bitcoin thing you could use if you wanted and it worked a little bit different.

[00:48:12] John Carvalho: That was actually a nice seed that they could have built on and they could have moved a lot of power their way if they were trying to gather people in agreement. But now they're trying to make a whole war and this kind of thing. So they have to say things like Core is evil. They have to hang on every little drama they find. The interesting lesson with the Bitcoiners appearing in the Epstein files, for example, to me, is that most of them were introduced through Joi Ito, who is the guy that was leading the MIT DCI.

[00:48:46] John Carvalho: Whether you want to have a conspiracy theory about him is not important either. It's just the truth that, as an example, I made this example to my team recently when all this news came out. I said, this is the value of managing reputation and intentionally managing your relationships, which bridges you burn, things like this. I recognized very early on that something was shady about MIT and their relationship with Bitcoin ever since DCI started, that a lot of the Bitcoiners that came from MIT were also of the kind of suspicious type that made me worry about what their contributions would be to Bitcoin, like Jeremy Rubin, things like this.

[00:49:26] John Carvalho: And so it was interesting to me. I was like, I could have... I've been in Bitcoin since 2012. I could have been this close to being in the Epstein files just by being friendly with DCI and MIT and supporting what they did. Randomly, one day, Joi Ito knows me, and he's trying to introduce me to get funding for something that I want to do. It could have just as easily been me. What that says to me is that the value or the revelations of these names appearing, you really have to be very sensitive about the context.

[00:49:56] John Carvalho: You have to be like, OK, if all they were trying to do is raise money, you and... and the mistake they made might have just been trusting Joi Ito to be a good contact, you know what I mean? And then you can ask, oh, well, did they even know who Epstein was? Did they know they were doing business with somebody who was a criminal or were they ignorant, were they naive? Who knows, right? But in the end, you can't make the claim that any of these things seem to clearly result in any pedophilia or any illegality, you know what I mean, for most of the revelations related to Bitcoiners.

[00:50:31] John Carvalho: There may be some that are a little shady and questionable to look at. And also, like even I even I did this a little bit, right? Like I found that [unclear: Epstein had emailed] some things about Michael Saylor and I do, I'll admit, I have a kind of a little grudge against him and I think that he's hurting Bitcoin a lot. And so I was happy to share it. But I'm happy to also admit that what I shared did not make it clear that Saylor did anything illegal or did anything pedophilic or anything like that.

[00:51:01] John Carvalho: It just makes it clear that he tried to have some sort of connection with Epstein more than once and that they knew who each other were and that Epstein thought he was too creepy to work with, which I think is funny. And but if you try to go too deep with it, you can believe anything you want. You know what I mean? And so I would be careful. I think it's [unclear: low] to like, you know, say that Adam Back is a pedophile if I haven't looked at all the details.

[00:51:27] John Carvalho: But if the details are mostly just that they were trying to raise money for Blockstream or something, there's probably even other shady people that they talk to that didn't even know that they were shady. This is why raising money is not fun. There aren't a lot of, you know, VCs and things like this where you're going to always be totally happy with them. A lot of them are fucking idiots, for example, and you feel a little bit embarrassed taking money from them. Like there's all kinds of different dynamics when it comes to fundraising.

[00:51:54] John Carvalho: So it's not good enough to me that they appeared in a database that holds millions and millions of emails, including like notification emails and stuff. So, yeah.

[00:52:06] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but at the same time, the conversation is about Blockstream. At the time, the CEO was Austin Hill, and he seemed to have really enjoyed his time on the island, at least according to the emails. But I'm not going to go there. I'm just going to ask, what did Blockstream...

[00:52:21] John Carvalho: I haven't read them all, to be honest, so I'm not that useful to talk to about it.

[00:52:24] Vlad Costea: What did Blockstream actually accomplish after the fundraiser? Because they got a bunch of money, not once, but twice. I think at some point Bitfinex bailed them out.

[00:52:35] John Carvalho: I don't know if they bailed them out. Bitfinex did invest a few years ago, but this was highly detached, I think, from any timeline of this, because this wasn't that long ago. The stuff in the Epstein files, I think, was 2018, something like this, maybe earlier. I should keep disclaiming. I just really did not read them all, because once I saw that there was too much uncertainty in there, I thought, well, what is true or what is the most important will surface later? I'll worry about it later.

[00:53:02] John Carvalho: And that's how I'm handling it, because my own experience digging into Saylor was just like, whatever. I'm still not going to like him. I still don't think he's a pedophile. It is, you know, I really doubt that Adam Back is, but whatever.

[00:53:20] Vlad Costea: He got called Andy Back twice.

[00:53:22] John Carvalho: What does that mean, Andy? This is like a nickname for a pedophile or something?

[00:53:26] Vlad Costea: No, it's just that Epstein could not remember his name, so...

[00:53:30] John Carvalho: Oh, okay. Yeah, Epstein's mocking everybody in his email.

[00:53:37] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but my point is, what did Blockstream accomplish? Like, they were supposed to be this big Bitcoin development company, and it seems like a lot of other companies are doing a much better job than they are.

[00:53:51] John Carvalho: This depends how you define success. I mean, as a shareholder, I would define it as whether they're making me money. My guess is they're not. I don't have any info, though, so I couldn't tell you. If you are going to judge them on, say, their contributions to Bitcoin, I think they have contributed a lot. The devs that they funded that work on Core certainly contributed large things. You could criticize whether those things were actually all that useful in the end and this kind of thing, but they have probably been a positive influence on at least generating Bitcoin code.

[00:54:25] John Carvalho: You could criticize Liquid. You could criticize the side projects like the satellite and things like this. But in the end, I don't know what their official vision is. I don't know how they measure success. And so I'm a bit out of touch with how to judge Blockstream at the moment, to be honest. I know that two or three years ago, if you had asked me, I would say, yes, I'm very disappointed in Blockstream. They were like the great hope of Bitcoin when they were created and they didn't really ship scaling.

[00:54:53] John Carvalho: They didn't ship real side chains. They didn't ship various things. They doubled down on Liquid and things like this. But these are all kind of subjective takes, like, I don't know, they're still here. They're still getting funding. They're still making things. And there are a lot of people that aren't. So it just depends on how you define success, I guess.

[00:55:15] Vlad Costea: If success is survival, then I guess they were successful. But if success is shipping their goal or their mission or whatever, they did not deliver on the sidechains paper. Liquid is a ghost town. They don't have a single product or service that is profitable.

[00:55:34] John Carvalho: I don't know. I know they do mining, too. I don't know if that makes them money or not. I honestly don't know. That's why I said I would need to see their current vision. You know what I mean? To be like, OK, this is what they're trying to accomplish. Do I think they're trying to accomplish it? I don't know what their current vision is, but I do like the context...

[00:55:51] Vlad Costea: For the record, I respect Andrew Poelstra and I was going to call him Nick Jonas, but it's Jonas Nick. And there are a bunch of guys that I respect that work for them. Christian Decker, I think, still works for them. Rusty. There's two Rustys working for Blockstream. So they do a good job.

[00:56:14] John Carvalho: They do a good job. They have talented people. They have good people. But I think you're right to just be asking the question of are they successful and what is success to them? What is it to you? Like you said, I agree with the context you gave in that if their mission and vision is the same from when they were formed, they did fail. They did not make sidechains. But then again, nobody did. Right. And so it just became, I think, a realization that it was physically impossible and that's what actually happened.

[00:56:43] John Carvalho: And they ended up pivoting to another version of it, Liquid and many other things. I honestly haven't looked at the website lately. I'm not sure what their main products are or what their launches are. Oh, they had the Jade thing. They do hardware wallets now, too. That probably makes them money. I don't know.

[00:57:03] Vlad Costea: Like 10 bucks per device. How many do you think they sold?

[00:57:07] John Carvalho: Depends on quantity. I know it makes Trezor and Ledger a lot of money, but they're like the market leaders and they've sold probably millions of those things, which just tells me that if you make an earnest effort to compete, you probably can take part of that market because it's a large market. Whereas if you try to do something like this with Lightning, it's like, oh, yeah, Phoenix or River or somebody says they made $200,000 on routing fees. Lightning is viable. But the problem with that is it's not a big market.

[00:57:39] John Carvalho: And so if everybody goes in there and tries to make routing fees, it gets spread. You know what I mean? It's not like you can actually become something in the Lightning network. You're just going to be taking it from someone else. And so there's not growth there and it's a different monster.

[00:57:57] Vlad Costea: On the topic of hardware wallets, I know for a fact that Ledger has like 60 percent of the market and Trezor has like 20, 25. And all the rest of them are basically fighting for the remaining 20 percent.

[00:58:14] John Carvalho: Yeah, I don't know. Sounds reasonable.

[00:58:18] Vlad Costea: And what else did you mention there? Lightning? Yeah, River did a good job centralizing the Lightning network, at least in terms of narrative, telling people to stop running their Raspberry Pis and whatever, saying that it needs to become more efficient.

[00:58:38] John Carvalho: I mean, I like, you know, River has a normal reputation with me. I don't think they're scammers or liars or whatever. But I do think there's something going on with those reports where they painted themselves into a corner and now they can only show bigger numbers. And so they have to keep like tweaking and things like this. I think that if I was provided the source data that I would probably present the numbers much differently than they present them in the report.

[00:59:07] Vlad Costea: When we were establishing what we're going to talk about during this interview, you presented two very interesting terms. One is Bitcoin depression and the other one is Lightning Derangement Syndrome. What do these even mean?

[00:59:25] John Carvalho: Well, maybe your listeners agree, at least if they're like me in some way, been around a while or don't appreciate the way the culture has shifted and this kind of thing. I've been just terming it as when I talk to other people in calls and stuff as Bitcoin, I say I have Bitcoin depression and it sounds like you have Bitcoin depression, too, this kind of thing. And what I mean by that is just disappointment. And what. Comparing, I mean, this is usually what causes, you know, disappointment is the whole Buddhist thing is if you want for nothing, you can be happy.

[01:00:00] John Carvalho: But we all want a lot for Bitcoin. Right. And we were all raised to want a certain vision for Bitcoin. And there's a lot of versions of that. But there's a lot of commonality between how we look at it. And when we look at and step back, when I step back today, so maybe some more veteran people, I don't know what kind of person is in common with this for sure. We just look at it and compare. And there's a dissonance there. It's like, oh, this is what I thought I was doing.

[01:00:25] John Carvalho: This is who I thought I was helping. This is what I thought would happen. And this is who I'm actually helping or not even helping. And this is what actually happened. You know what I mean? And so that's that's will cause depression that will cause anxiety. That's like how it works. And so that's why I refer to it that way. And it's like I just think about things like, oh, going to a conference and speaking on stage and arguing with people about BIP 110 and arguing with people about anything to do with Bitcoin and reading the mailing list and seeing the quality of things in the Bitcoin dev mailing list or how interesting they are on and the speculativeness of the complexity.

[01:01:06] John Carvalho: And everything just feels like it's become corrupted or [unclear: ossified] or corrupted. You know, it's not what I thought it was. Right. And so I think that I'm probably. I like to think that I'm not that special when it comes to trends and that probably if I feel this way, that there are probably a lot of people feeling this way. And I feel like those are the people I probably need to be more connected with because we probably all have the same standards and want more similar things.

[01:01:37] John Carvalho: And that maybe what I want isn't the same as what Bitcoiners want anymore. And so Bitcoin depression is partially like figuring out how to cope with still being a Bitcoiner, still feeling like a Bitcoiner. In my case, still feeling like an OG, as you call it, but feeling like I have no power, feeling like I have no influence. X is making it worse, too, by the way, with like... It just feels like you can't really reach anybody anymore. You have to use it all day every day for months is the only way you can maintain reach.

[01:02:09] John Carvalho: And now, even me with like 70,000 followers or something, I really have to get aggro or have something that really, really stands out, even get a few hundred likes. Whereas, you know, in prior years, once in a while, I would get 1,000, 2,000 likes on something and a lot of interaction. All of my controversial good morning tweets, that would never work now. You know what I mean? It works differently now. And so I think that contributes. Maybe you could also argue that that combined with the fragmentation of like, Nostr becoming Bitcoin chat.

[01:02:45] John Carvalho: And so it fragmented the Bitcoin community and kind of isolated like, oh, there's the now there's like the Nostr Bitcoiner and the Nostr Bitcoiner is a certain culture and a certain breed. And they have their own tribe and they they're not on Twitter or they're not on Twitter as much or the same. And so you have this fragmentation that happened at the Bitcoin community. And then Michael Saylor created a new community all around paper Bitcoin. And so it's just Bitcoin became like separated in different things. It was like a divide and conquer almost happened underneath our nose to where now it's like the people that felt like the elders of Bitcoin or the anchors of Bitcoin, like I think I might be one of them or used to be.

[01:03:25] John Carvalho: It doesn't feel that way anymore. We feel disconnected. And so that's what I mean by the Bitcoin depression term. I hope that makes sense.

[01:03:33] Vlad Costea: It does. And I think the first time when I felt that was when I came to Nashville two years ago. And I felt like everyone's getting replaced by politicians or celebrities talking about Bitcoin. I was like, maybe that this is fine. This is this might be what mainstream adoption means, what winning might look like. But it turned out to be much worse than that.

[01:04:00] John Carvalho: Yeah, it doesn't feel like we're winning anymore. It feels like we're another toy for the finance world to play with. And I just I'm back to like looking at everything the way I looked at it before Bitcoin. But but looking at Bitcoin the same way, in other words, I see a tweet from JP Morgan or Jamie Dimon saying they think Bitcoin is going to the moon. I think, oh, shit, I'm bearish now. You know what I mean? Like that's that's... and the sad part is...

[01:04:28] Vlad Costea: Don't you think it's like a hipster thing? Like you did it before it was cool. And now that it's mainstream, you don't feel like it's cool anymore. Like finding the...

[01:04:37] John Carvalho: Well, I mean, even worse. Oh, I mean something more and more directly sinister. In other words, when Jamie Dimon is saying that it's a great time to buy something, it's because he's trying to sell it. You know what I mean? That's that's how it works. And it's blatant and obvious. But the clown world and the deception culture, the lying culture has become so acceptable that it's hard to tell. And so people want to like meme about who's that guy who was always the contraindicator, that mustache guy. They always want to joke about him.

[01:05:08] John Carvalho: Oh, yeah. How he's a contraindicator. How he's always wrong. Well, it's the same thing with somebody else always being wrong, but getting respect. In other words, like Jamie Dimon, they're just trying to manipulate the market. And I feel like a lot like now Bitcoin is more captured by the market than it used to be. And so I feel like they're going to they're going to they're going to milk us. You know what I mean? Like this thing where we believe in this four year cycle and where Bitcoin keeps going up forever, they're going to lock that down and triangulate it and they're going to take all the value out of it from us.

[01:05:40] John Carvalho: And they're just going to leave us there. And so we're going to have to figure out how to be happy with what Bitcoin actually does and what actually makes it valuable because they're going to gut the speculation from us. I think they already are. I think that's what Saylor did. When Saylor had everybody buying his paper Bitcoin and other paper Bitcoin, he was selling shares of his company on the side. He was creating more shares of his company to try to resell that Bitcoin to shareholders. So all of the momentum of this cycle got the liquidity got eaten by paper Bitcoin.

[01:06:14] John Carvalho: And that's super, super dangerous because not only are they going to cross leverage it and make a bunch of products, but eventually it's guaranteed to result in somebody not having the Bitcoin anymore. Which might be why gold has been going up, by the way. My theory there, without having any information at all, is that Tether actually did start buying gold and actually started making people accountable for the gold they didn't have. And so it's causing ripples because it's actually a big buyer in gold now. And so it's like the market's having to rebalance around, oh, shit, we actually do have to have the gold because now there's another party buying it.

[01:06:50] John Carvalho: Anyway, I'm ranting.

[01:06:53] Vlad Costea: Now, this is very good. I actually want to tell you my so based on what you said, I have this idea, which I started cooking in my mind, basically. But before I tell you that, let me finish with the sponsors and then I'll tell you why I feel like we've been abandoned. I guess this is the general feeling that I have. So SideShift is the place where if someone wants to pay you in stablecoins and you don't want to hold on to that, you basically put your Bitcoin address on SideShift and then you click the shift button.

[01:07:26] Vlad Costea: You send the stablecoin address to the person wanting to pay you and you're going to get Bitcoin directly to your address. No gas token required, no nonsense. It's just fast and it works and it has good liquidity. Check it out at SideShift, which is S-I-D-E-S-H-I-F-T dot A-I. And of course, it also works in reverse if you think that Bitcoin is going to go lower and you want to buy stablecoins for some reason, which I don't recommend.

[01:07:56] Vlad Costea: But anyway, you can use it for that. There is also Bitcoin.com News, which I like nowadays because they know the difference between BCH and BTC. And also they're like a middle ground between Bitcoin Magazine, which is too political and CoinDesk, which I think is too institutional. So they sort of strike a good middle ground and you might find some good journalism there every day. I check it out quite often and I find pieces on topics that I usually don't think about, but I find them interesting.

[01:08:26] Vlad Costea: So the URL is news.Bitcoin.com. And also John's favorite LayerTwo Labs. He's friends with Paul and he fully endorses drivechains. Is that right, John? I think you're muted.

[01:08:44] John Carvalho: Oh, sorry. I said, yeah, perfect. No, obviously I don't, but go ahead.

[01:08:50] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I know your criticism. I've listened to it on the stage of Baltic Honeybadger like a couple of times. And we spoke about it on the podcast.

[01:09:01] John Carvalho: I would probably have more now because I have a deeper understanding of Bitcoin's ability to scale than back then. But nonetheless, I wouldn't make... I'm not more of a supporter. I would be less of a supporter.

[01:09:10] Vlad Costea: Anyway, for people listening, you can try the software at layer2labs.com/download. It's in production now. You can test it. Anyway, the abandonment theory that I was going to mention is that I think it was also you who was very disappointed with Adam Back being basically a trader and posting trading memes and only being concerned with the price. And I guess we also share like a feeling of disappointment with Nick Szabo, who was this guy. I've learned a lot about Bitcoin from him. But nowadays he seems to be more concerned with fighting the culture wars or expressing views on immigration and some topics which are more or less controversial in the US.

[01:09:56] Vlad Costea: And also Greg Maxwell, who was the CTO of Blockstream. And when he left the company in 2017, he said he's going to focus on research to make Bitcoin better and stuff like this. And as far as I know, he hasn't shipped much. And nowadays he calls himself retired and he is an amateur ham radio communicator or whatever, like an enthusiast and talks with people. About astronomy. So it seems like he doesn't care about Bitcoin anymore and maybe that this is a part of decentralization and it's just growing up with this project that people are just gonna drop out and you're gonna be left holding the bag and also holding the responsibility to defend the project and teach others.

[01:10:47] Vlad Costea: But it does feel like a lot of these people I used to look up to are no longer involved or at least not in the same capacity.

[01:10:58] John Carvalho: Yeah, I don't want to shift the topic too much, but all of this stuff is also, is why I have led my research to be more oriented around digitizing trust and incorporating trust intentionally into systems, because when I keep asking questions about Bitcoin, what I wanted for Bitcoin, and then do the same thing with like self-sovereign identity or peer-to-peer web, you just keep asking questions until you're satisfied and you realize that there are not a lot of great answers to the way people kind of currently look at it and that what it always comes down to is trust and reputation for a lot, a lot of things, anything to do with the network, anything to do with society, and [unclear: vibes, social vibes], rules among multiple people.

[01:11:47] John Carvalho: And I think that that's... this is the tragedy for me at the moment. Another contributor to the Bitcoin Depression is that I actually feel like I've discovered something. I feel like I've discovered a whole new angle of looking at Bitcoin, of scaling Bitcoin, of freedom software through this lens of digitizing trust and making systems more about coordination and matching and less about trustlessness and privacy and things like this. Because there's a context for everything and we've applied all these ideas like a hammer. And I think that there's a nuanced way to apply them where you can have as much power and control over your life, your digital life especially, as you might want, but also be able to use centralized trusted providers in a way that kept them under control.

[01:12:44] John Carvalho: So they couldn't institutionalize essentially. They could commoditize the centralized providers and have all of the parameters and rules and everything be generated from the individual outward. And that's all I want to talk about. I want to share it with people. I want to show people how I'm trying to do it through the software building. But I can't even begin to have a conversation with somebody on Nostr about a different thing that isn't Nostr. I can't begin to have a conversation with a Bitcoiner about, like, I first have to get them to understand that lightning doesn't scale, Bitcoin doesn't scale.

[01:13:21] John Carvalho: Much of the complexity [unclear: he talks] about is just a total dead end wrong path. And then why the thing, don't trust verify, why I want to go totally against that idea and show how doing so will give them everything they want. And I can't do that because it's too many layers of learning. It's too deep of a conversation. It's too taboo of a topic is really one of the biggest things. Try to go to a Bitcoiner on Twitter. He wants to talk about BIP 110. I want to talk about how all of this is totally the wrong direction.

[01:13:54] John Carvalho: And we're just like neglecting the actual path to getting freedom into everyone's hands. And I want to talk about how, like, mutual credit system could fix everything and that layers are going to be, we're going to look back on layers as a total waste of time and a total regret, a lot of waste of money. And I can't do any of that. So it all contributes to my Bitcoin depression where it's like X takes your reach away. Your peers no longer are like, they're not evolving the conversation to where they can keep up with how you want to talk about it.

[01:14:23] John Carvalho: And they're all focused on things that are like, I don't know, like junk food, junk food science. You know what I mean? Junk food tech. And that's kind of, you know, another dimension to all of this for me, which I guess maybe we could, if you want, segue to the Lightning Derangement Syndrome thing, because it's very much the same topic, basically.

[01:14:48] Vlad Costea: So this is part of the Bitcoin depression, right?

[01:14:51] John Carvalho: Yeah. Lightning Derangement Syndrome is a term that Giacomo coined on me, and he thinks I have Lightning Derangement Syndrome because I talk too much about how lightning doesn't scale and how it won't work and this kind of thing. And so he is kind of like blacklisted me or something. I don't know. He just started treating me like an asshole, like I failed some sort of purity test and I'm out as far as he's concerned. I don't know what that means or why. I didn't do anything specifically to him, but his only coherent explanation was that I had Lightning Derangement Syndrome.

[01:15:28] John Carvalho: And this goes into how maybe, I don't know if you noticed or your listeners noticed, probably not, but there was a few weeks where I was really doubling down on it. I have a paper that I created that shows how lightning doesn't scale. I made little model toys, web pages where you can tweak all the numbers to show how no matter which way you try to do the math, it doesn't add up. And my peers just kind of hand-waved at me. Even in private, I tried to get some peers to pay more attention to it.

[01:16:00] John Carvalho: No response, disrespectful responses. It's like, I feel like everybody else has Lightning Derangement Syndrome. You know what I mean? In other words, to me, Giacomo calling that to me, accusing me of it, was a sign that he had it. You know what I mean? And I don't know if that's good evidence or what, but that's how it feels to me. It's like everybody else has Lightning Derangement Syndrome because they're trying to, it's like Weekend at Bernie's, is they're trying to hold up this dead thing for like six, seven years now.

[01:16:30] John Carvalho: And it looks the same. It doesn't... it's not getting more healthy. It's not... the complexity is not... The user experience is not reaching where we want it to reach. And everybody is just moving on to something else. They're using custodial. Now, Wallet of Satoshi is taking custodial away, so people are moving to pseudo-custodial, things like Spark and Ark. And it's just going to be this like, I don't know, musical chairs of complexity and trendy protocols. And none of them are actually solving the problems that we're trying to solve.

[01:17:05] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So on this topic, I just want to say that for context, I came to you before you moved out of Romania. And I remember I was talking to you about Giacomo for some reason, and you told me that he's like this Superman character. Like he's not real in the sense that he's honest about technical limitations or can have an intellectually honest conversation. He's like this cartoon character that represents something. But you should not look at him thinking that he's really smart or he knows exactly what the limitations of something are.

[01:17:47] Vlad Costea: And I remember when you said something along these lines to me that I felt like I'm disappointed in you because maybe you don't get Giacomo. But as I started learning more about how Bitcoin works, I realized that, yeah, you're right. I shouldn't look up to these people. 

[01:18:07] John Carvalho: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk too much shit about anybody. I don't think that's good.

[01:18:11] Vlad Costea: No, I am, because he blocked me. He's an asshole.

[01:18:14] John Carvalho: Well, he did. He did mistreat me as well. And that's that's the fact. And we talked it, you know, we agreed that that's what's happening and he agreed that's what he's going to continue doing. And that's it is what it is. And so there's not really more to say about it as far as I'm concerned. I would say my comments to you back then, I would probably make them differently today, but they probably I'm sure they were honest for back then. My views are more nuanced now, but not that dissimilar.

[01:18:40] John Carvalho: I think Giacomo is very educated. He knows a lot. He knows a lot about Bitcoin. He takes the time to be well read about topics related to Bitcoin. But that doesn't mean that necessarily he's going to also be the authority that you should be listening to for like creative or design decisions around, you know, designing protocols, designing systems. You need more experience working on them to, I think, do that. Like, I think only in the past year or two that I've become capable of actually working on the things I've been trying to work on for the three to five years prior.

[01:19:16] John Carvalho: And so it just takes time to do it. He has some experience working in RGB, so he probably isn't useless there. But I don't I'm not in touch with him anymore, so I don't really know how to judge him fairly. And so I'm going to avoid it. I'll just say he's definitely well read. He definitely knows a lot about Bitcoin. But I think that I could argue with him and refute him on, you know, anywhere where he and I disagree. I think I could rationally present a counterargument that was nearly impossible to refute.

[01:19:48] Vlad Costea: I also want to point out. OK, first of all, I think even though you disagree with Paul about drivechain, there is an article that he wrote which is called Bitcoin Derangements, and he sort of makes some of the points that you already presented.

[01:20:04] John Carvalho: Oh, me and Paul... I wish me and Paul weren't in a fight because we agree on so many things on this level. Like he's up there doing the same presentations as me trying to refute lightning. Like we're on the same wavelength on that. But unfortunately, the solution we are not. And how to discuss the solution. We're even further apart.

[01:20:23] Vlad Costea: Anyway, there is a point which I read and it really struck a chord inside me, which is called party loyalty versus truth. And in many times in Bitcoin, you feel like you're compelled to defend something because you want to be friends with these people. And maybe that you don't want to admit that this is potentially wrong. But at the same time, you don't want to feel like you're a fraud or something.

[01:20:54] John Carvalho: Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. He's right. That is a factor. I think you could even go a little bit deeper than that, though. I think that there's a reason why people do tribal behavior, and it's not an irrational reason. You could maybe argue it's a lazy reason, but you could also maybe argue it's like an instinctive or habitual reason. It could even be a personality type, you could say. Like some people think there are people that are alpha or beta or people that are sheep and leaders, things like this.

[01:21:24] John Carvalho: And so I would say that this tribal behavior is not irrational. It's just unfortunate or suboptimal. Because look at it this way. If I had behaved, I would feel more connected. I would still be friends with Giacomo. I would still be on... I would be on one of the BIP 110 sides, and I would be with those people. You know what I mean? And when I did something, because I support them in that, they might support me back. And so there are rewards to tribalism. There are rewards to loyalty, essentially. And so what they're trying to show is that they have a loyalty preference more than being right in this moment or arguing with you preference.

[01:22:09] John Carvalho: And so that's what's happening in the background of their heads is they're thinking, am I going to get more out of this if I just stay loyal? And do I really want to entertain not being loyal anymore? So they're not even asking themselves whether you're right or wrong. They're asking whether it's worth thinking about whether you're right or wrong. And so they're not even getting to that stage. But the answers they give you are as if they actually consider it. But they're not actually considering it. They're just trying to survive like everybody else, and they've opted for a strategy of hiding in a crowd.

[01:22:43] John Carvalho: You know what I mean? And so hiding in a crowd works for them. But if you're somebody like me that's always judging everything, criticizing everything, burning bridges when you know that you never want to walk over them again, your world becomes smaller. You know what I mean? And so I end up having to find new people outside. And so I have to find... like I said earlier, these aren't the people I thought I was helping. You know what I mean? And they don't want the help I'm trying to give. So I have to figure out who those people actually are, whether they exist, where they exist, and talk to them instead.

[01:23:15] John Carvalho: You know what I mean? Example, me being on your show. Some Bitcoiners think your show is maybe on the shitcoiner side and not a true Bitcoin maximalist show. But I don't care. You know what I mean? Maybe five years ago... I'm fine with that. I tell them I like shitcoins. What are they going to do about it? But my point is, if I were loyal, I wouldn't come on the show. You know what I mean? If I were a certain breed of Bitcoiner. You know what I mean?

[01:23:41] John Carvalho: I'd be loyal. And instead of having you as a friend, I would have those five guys as a friend. You know what I mean? Now what that means, I don't know. I like to believe in always be selecting. In other words, I think you should always be eliminating noise from your life. And you should always be heavily managing reputations and cutting people off and turning people on and maintaining valuable relationships and actively managing your social graph, you could say. And that's why... another reason why we work on what we work on, because I actually believe in it.

[01:24:16] John Carvalho: As far as like Web of Trust, tagging profiles, tagging data, that kind of thing. Anyway, that's my rant.

[01:24:26] Vlad Costea: I think that Bitcoin Uncensored and Chris DeRose are sort of recurring themes during this episode. But I do recall Chris DeRose saying before his exit from Bitcoin that Bitcoiners are communists. This was sort of the conclusion that he reached that these guys, there's so much against free markets, they're against competition. They sort of unite around the certain idea and then they become stagnant.

[01:25:04] John Carvalho: Yeah, I guess... Go ahead.

[01:25:06] Vlad Costea: What I'm trying to say is that sometimes I think that it would not be terrible if all of these factions had their own fork and then we let the market decide what is really valuable, because there are so many disagreements that are brewing underneath this large community.

[01:25:25] John Carvalho: No, you're right. It would not be terrible at all. In other words, the best possible outcome for BIP 110 is a BIP 110 hard fork. That's the best possible outcome.

[01:25:33] Vlad Costea: Also for Saylor, also for everyone else. Just have your own little toy and see if that one is the one that's valuable.

[01:25:41] John Carvalho: Well, you...

[01:25:42] Vlad Costea: If we believe in what Eric Voskuil says about black market money, it's actually going to be the one that is most useful on markets as opposed to the one that's most speculated on or the one that is deemed more pure.

[01:25:59] John Carvalho: There's just so many little things to pick apart. I think that people don't understand that there's actually a huge difference between trying to solve store of value problems for people and scaling payments problems. They're not the same thing. And that's one issue I see with that is that I just actually think solving scaled self-sovereign payments is a different problem than Bitcoin. And that's why we keep failing at it. And that's why we keep having all these tensions and this kind of thing. And that what we're going to end up with is we're going to end up leveraging trust instead and reputations instead.

[01:26:33] John Carvalho: We're going to end up with some kind of like digital hawala that actually coordinates all of the payments and then things like swapping and exchanging and settling once a month or whatever with the people that you trust. The scaling is going to come from trust. It's not going to come from technology. It's not going to come from many blockchains. People will store value in anything. And as long as you agree that you think that whatever they're storing value in is good enough to pay you back, you'll give them credit.

[01:27:02] John Carvalho: You'll take their credit. And that's the only way you're going to scale anything. But scaling is not a virtue either. Some people just want to be able to have, say, a private community or a private thing. But the issue that Bitcoiners don't understand, one issue, another issue is it's extremely expensive and difficult to bootstrap anything anymore, especially if you want to do it at some kind of scale. And we keep inventing new payment protocols for Bitcoin. And that means you have to start over every time. The day before Lightning exists, all the Bitcoin apps, all the Bitcoin merchants, all the Bitcoin users are using a certain type of payment format, a certain address format, a certain QR code format.

[01:27:44] John Carvalho: And then Lightning exists and we have a new one. We have to get everybody to use that one. Maybe also the old one. And then we make BOLT 12 and we get a new one. And what you're suggesting with everybody having niche blockchains for their own political persuasions results in low utility per blockchain. And so if you keep having to bootstrap every blockchain, how do you do it? Now, your idea is not crazy in the sense that it's already the way the world works. We have many stores of value, many payment protocols, many different networks that we somehow all connect to the Internet and through the real world.

[01:28:18] John Carvalho: It's true. But what you're suggesting does not help scale anything, doesn't help connect people, doesn't help solve problems other than isolating a bunch of different payment protocols and a bunch of different storage networks. I think

[01:28:34] Vlad Costea: It's going to help some ideas die because the market will actually express an opinion on them. Right now, they're sort of credible just because they're on this large network, which also has other purposes, which are raising the value of everyone else and everyone else's idea. So if they were on their own and they could actually experiment to see where this is going, they could see it's a bad idea. This would die out and then the capital would converge to the one that that's most valuable. And maybe that they would get humbled and maybe that they would come up with something different.

[01:29:10] Vlad Costea: I don't know what the outcome will be. All I know is...

[01:29:13] John Carvalho: I mean, you are right that if you can isolate [unclear: a test]...

[01:29:15] Vlad Costea: I used to think that the BCH hard fork was a bad idea and that we could prevent that from happening. Now I realize that it's actually pretty good that it happened and it was bound to happen and it was socially inevitable because these guys were not getting along. And there was no way to keep them in the same room.

[01:29:38] John Carvalho: It will happen again and it will happen in a much bigger way than it happened then. And maybe it won't... Whether it happens with BIP 110 doesn't really matter in my opinion. If it happens, it's going to be disappointing in my opinion. In other words, it'll be a bunch of people selling their BIP 110 coins the first week and then nobody will talk about it a month from then other than as an embarrassment. It's just not a big enough movement, not a big enough issue. But I think we'll have issues, for example. What happens if we keep on this path of institutional Bitcoin and we do really do start having paper Bitcoin problems and we started seeing two Bitcoin prices.

[01:30:12] John Carvalho: There's the street price and the market price. You know what I mean? We will probably see a fork becoming more palatable at that stage because what you're going to have is you're going to have the real block size wars, you're going to have the real corporate wars. It'll be that Saylor and Coinbase, the new Coinbase, the big huge Coinbase, not the old small tiny one that just started. Saylor, Coinbase, JP Morgan, blah, blah, blah, Trump, they all want this new Bitcoin soft fork or hard fork or whatever. But then all the people around like us that actually use Bitcoin for censorship resistance, holding your own money, all these qualities, these unique qualities, we're not going to be on board, right? We're just going to...

[01:30:58] John Carvalho: And if our only option is for us to fork off, we will. Now, will we fork actively? Maybe not. Maybe we'll just start using something else and it will be like an economic migration. But I think the problem doesn't go away because the problem is that money is social and people don't agree on anything. So eventually you're going to get huge disagreements that will express and something will happen.

[01:31:24] Vlad Costea: But I think that Saylor said this in one of his many talks. He said something along the lines of if you want black market money and you want to buy stuff online that might not be legal, you have Monero. Or I think he said maybe that you need a Monero for that. So, there are two aspects of it, that we're getting pushed away if we want to use Bitcoin for something else, which is not mainstream finance. And the other aspect is that Chris DeRose actually said this on the show, like 2021 or something, that they're paying us to leave.

[01:32:04] Vlad Costea: So the number go up factor when it happens without any adoption sustaining it and it's just institutions playing their game. We're sort of getting paid to leave. And I think also some of the people that I mentioned earlier, as in they sort of abandoned us and they left us fighting to figure out what's next with this project. I think they got paid to leave. I think they moved on.

[01:32:30] John Carvalho: I would argue, I would argue that the interesting way to look at that is it's a design flaw of Bitcoin. In other words, the assumption that we have that Bitcoin can be a thousand year money and unbreakable and unshakable is very, if you think about how humans behave in social systems and compare it, you'd say it's a pretty naive prediction for Bitcoin. That there's a pretty good chance that it's not going to play out that way.

[01:33:00] Vlad Costea: So are you saying that this can be a short-lived experiment?

[01:33:04] John Carvalho: Right. I'm saying we don't actually know how long we can maintain Bitcoin and that if anything, those examples you're giving are evidence of weakness in Bitcoin's theory and in its design. In other words, if what it takes to keep Bitcoin healthy is five or six altruistic, benevolent maintainers, and that's the only way we can keep it healthy and before corporations take over, then that's not sustainable. Because how do you maintain that? That's not much different than trying to maintain a government. You know what I mean? It ends up expressing other systems that look the same way.

[01:33:41] John Carvalho: And so if Bitcoin require... In other words, Bitcoin is human. It is people. And so if Bitcoin requires certain people to be in certain positions and those people to be trustworthy, then that's not sustainable because that creates a power vacuum where eventually it gets filled with power of money and power of violence. And that gets taken over. And so it needs to be something that the individual can enforce. And Bitcoin does have that. But unfortunately, it also is software and individuals are not capable, at least not yet, of enforcing through software and code and things like this.

[01:34:18] John Carvalho: They just run what you tell them to run and they trust they're running the right thing. So I think it's interesting to think about that problem. That, oh, if Gregory Maxwell is retiring and the elders of Bitcoin Core are seemingly becoming a little more corruptible or a little more of a different political persuasion than you, that's indicative. It's a symptom. It's not something to complain about and be mad. It's something to notice and decide whether you care and what to do about it. I think that the idea that we can keep Bitcoin safe through trust, through a Bitcoin Core repo is not rational.

[01:34:58] John Carvalho: I think that we need some other different kind of way to manage things. And that's why another reason, again, why I'm focusing more on trust research is because I don't think we're going to be able to coordinate anything together unless we know who we want to coordinate with, on what, etc. We have to have a coordination capability.

[01:35:16] Vlad Costea: I think I agree with you. But at the same time, there's this cypherpunk utopia, right, that everyone's going to become technically literate and is going to put. Now it's like a big meme that you need to listen to like 100 hours of Bitcoin podcasts every week and you need to spend at least 1000 hours trying to understand Bitcoin. But I think the quality of this content, which is being recommended and I don't want to insult my peers or whatever, but most of it is very low quality, like the lowest common denominator just to get people to understand Bitcoin through bad metaphors.

[01:35:52] Vlad Costea: And once you actually dive into the technical details, you realize that these metaphors are just there for talking to your grandma or something.

[01:36:04] John Carvalho: It's tough because even like I'll name some people in a positive way, even the people you want to name in a positive way, they end up corrupted by the memes, too. In other words, they have to try to balance both. They have to be popular, but also technically accurate and useful, educational. You can look at people like Stephan Livera, [unclear: BTC Sessions], who does a lot of demos and walkthroughs and things like this. These guys are sincerely trying to make normal, useful content most of the time, right? But they have to also understand the memes and they have to be able to speak the memes and they have to know the trends.

[01:36:37] John Carvalho: And they end up becoming part of them to some degree to where they're not as distinguishable as they used to be from other podcasters. And so a new Bitcoiner coming in, you can say to him, oh, go listen to the technical podcasters, go listen to some good podcast. And they don't know what a good podcast is. They listen to all of them, listen to a hundred thousand hours of bullshit. And now we have all these miseducated Bitcoiners running around saying dumb things and being toxic about it.

[01:37:03] John Carvalho: Like, it's so unhealthy. Like, it undermines you. If you think we need people like Gregory Maxwell and elders and stewards of Bitcoin, we're doing a horrible job. If we're feeding them all memes and metaphors and bullshit, because that's what they're going to feed. And we're going to end up with like, what is it? Brawndo has electrolytes and that's why we water the plants with it. It's an Idiocracy reference.

[01:37:33] Vlad Costea: I was just hoping that these guys, before retiring, they're going to at least leave someone competent in place.

[01:37:43] John Carvalho: Well, what is that? What does that mean, though? Am I supposed to create a clone of myself and train him? This is not the medieval... There's no journeyman apprentice thing anymore. It's not a thing. Actually, if anything, Bitcoin has it more than other things. They have like Chaincode Labs and these incubator sort of [unclear: Qala] training programs. They have systems in place, but that doesn't mean that we're going to be able to maintain it. It doesn't mean that the incentives are sustainable. In other words, what if it really is true that no matter what we do, eventually the banks buy out the devs and all the devs work for the banks because it costs $500,000 a year to hire a dev capable and only the banks can afford it.

[01:38:28] John Carvalho: And then all of these blockchains are just run by banks. It's a possibility. It can end up that way. But, you know, a hardcore Bitcoiner will say, well, that's why you run a node. That's why you run the code. That's why you choose which node to run, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what percentage of these people are reading node code or have any idea which side to take on even the 110 debate? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I think we have to get much better at managing trust and we have to do it much more intentionally.

[01:38:56] John Carvalho: The issue is we're all just ignoring that somewhere in our brain all the time we're creating patterns, we're remembering who did what, who didn't do what. We're just tracking it all in our head instead of tracking it on purpose. Whereas our antagonists or big tech, the government, etc., they're tracking everything everybody does and they are doing it. They're keeping a reputation on everybody and they're manipulating everybody and they have a full view. But we aren't taking the view. We aren't doing the same thing. We aren't intentionally saying, oh, well, all of my friends say this guy has scammed.

[01:39:34] John Carvalho: He probably is a scammer. All of my friends say this guy is a trustworthy source and I should probably trust him. We don't have an actual system for digitizing, like routing trust, coordinating trust on multiple dimensions, this kind of thing.

[01:39:54] Vlad Costea: I think the culture is also sort of corrupted in the sense that I think it's more morally acceptable at this point for a Bitcoin Core developer to be bought by banks than to be bought by... A quote-unquote shitcoin.

[01:40:10] John Carvalho: I mean, I don't know that a shitcoin would buy a Bitcoin devs, but yeah, you're probably...

[01:40:16] Vlad Costea: Let's say, for example, that some Solana team is going to decide for some reason that they want to finance the development of Bitcoin Core and they're going to get one of their devs in. I think that person is going to have a much worse reputation than someone who actually works for JP Morgan.

[01:40:34] John Carvalho: Yeah, maybe. We do have some of that. I would say there's not a lot of good evidence right now on either side because I can make examples of like, for example, like NYDIG is a bank funding some Bitcoin Core development speculatively. In other words, software development research, this kind of stuff, but they're not... It's not working. In other words, they're failing at it too. Like they're trying to do covenants and stuff and it's not taking. Maybe they're going to keep working on it and eventually it will take, but you can see it from both sides.

[01:41:04] John Carvalho: Another angle is nobody's going to work on Bitcoin Core for free forever. You know what I mean? There are a few people who may be independently wealthy who might work on it as a hobby and maybe we'll be lucky enough there are enough of those. But for the most part, people working on Core are going to be paid by somebody, which means you could always criticize the source if you really want to. If Tether does it, if Blockstream does it, if Saylor does it, if Binance does it, if Solana does it, whoever does it, whoever pays the people, that becomes like compromise of that person's individual reputation.

[01:41:37] John Carvalho: That person becomes two people and so that's where the real dynamic to worry about is. How much should you actually care who is funding the person and how do you gauge when to worry about the funding of a person? For example, I don't know how to tell this to people, but I'm funded by Tether and I think there's absolutely no reason anybody should be worried whatsoever about that. In other words, they should only see it as a positive because my relationship and the company's relationship with Tether is mostly on a funding level.

[01:42:06] John Carvalho: It's not that Tether is saying, you need to add DeFi to your ecosystem, you need to never do this, never work on that tech because we don't like those guys or don't help Bitcoiners or go manipulate Bitcoiners. All of these concepts are absolutely absurd, but there will be plenty of Bitcoiners in the comments very quick to say, oh, you mean that Tether project? You mean that Tether company? It's just basic, moronic, you know what I mean? There's nothing there, but how do I prove that to them?

[01:42:42] John Carvalho: How do they know? How do they know I'm not just saying bullshit? How do they know that I'm not really trying to kill Bitcoin somehow or something? I mean, and Tether's the one trying to pay me to do it and that's their vision. Nobody knows, you know what I mean? They have to just believe me. How can they believe me? Well, you can look at the history since 2012 of all of my behavior in Bitcoin. You can try to see if there's any reason you think that I'm lying.

[01:43:07] John Carvalho: That's all you can do. You can ask your friends if they know if there's any reason that I'm lying. That's all you can do. But in the end, even if I am worth the trust, I can still deceive you and be wrong that day. And that's how trust works, because it works until it doesn't. And we really need to rely on it. And I think the only way to leverage it is on purpose to be like, OK, I trust my dentist with my dental problems, my accountant with my accountant problems.

[01:43:33] John Carvalho: And this is how we manage things.

[01:43:36] Vlad Costea: It makes a lot of sense when you present it like this. But I do have to add that I have the same problem that you have in the sense that some people say, well, this is the podcast that's sponsored by, I don't know, Bitcoin dot com news, the BCashers or whatever. Yeah. And they're going to say, of course, he cannot talk about these topics or of course, he's bearish about lightning or whatever. But I never actually had a sponsor tell me what to do. Like the most they can do is say, hey, can you get us for an episode or whatever to talk about our latest, whatever.

[01:44:09] Vlad Costea: Even in that case, I ask them the hard questions. But

[01:44:14] John Carvalho: The tricky part is there is a world that does that. Yeah. There is a world that does that, though. It's the corrupt world. And it's much more related to the world that Bitcoiners trust than not. In other words, they're usually accusing the wrong people. They're usually worried about the wrong people. Like worrying about who you're sponsored by is not important. You know what I mean? Like you're on there giving your opinion.

[01:44:36] Vlad Costea: I say this literally, I'm worried about the people who have no sponsors like Matt Kratter or whatever who says, oh, I'm self-funded, I'm selling courses. Because it makes you wonder what are these people's actual intentions? Like where do they get their money from? They can't altruistically do everything like there has to be like some sort of. The issue is when you

[01:44:58] John Carvalho: Get to the high level, it's true. When you start thinking about things like, you know, banks, major banks, politicians, things on TV, these kinds of things, then that's where the skepticism becomes true again. So it's hard to know when to apply this bluntly and when not to, because I think the easiest thing is just to say, oh, if it's high level, like, you know, banking, elite government, elite tech that, yeah, you shouldn't trust any of it. They are all influenced and they're probably all ultimately influenced by the government.

[01:45:29] John Carvalho: But when you get low level, it's just nowhere near as interesting as people think. It's just like, oh, and so we have to think about whether to apply this. Like we want to be like, I think Blockstream was funded by AXA or something, and that used to be drama back in the day. But like, what did AXA ever do? Like, did AXA hurt Bitcoin? Did it hurt Blockstream? I don't know. If Blockstream made a bad decision, was it Adam Back's or was it Austin Hill's or was it AXA, and does it matter?

[01:45:56] John Carvalho: In the end, it was just all nonsense. In the end, what was really going on, when people say it to you and say it to me, what they're saying is, I'm worried that you're right about whatever I hate about what you just said. That's what they're saying. I say something and they don't like what I said. They say, oh, I'm really worried about people agreeing with him, or really worried about whatever. I'm worried about his meme growing. And so I have to say something to like hurt his meme.

[01:46:20] John Carvalho: You know what I mean? So if John goes out there and says lightning doesn't scale, I'm not going to reply with, well, technically, I think it does because if we do this and if we do that, then it might just work. No, I'm going to reply with you're funded by Tether. That's why you're saying that because my mission is not to have discourse. My mission is to compete our teams, our tribes. You know what I mean? My mission is that person judging [unclear: me].

[01:46:45] Vlad Costea: I think you're overthinking this because what they're actually trying to accomplish is to strip you of your agency and say that you're a puppet.

[01:46:53] John Carvalho: Well, they're trying to establish loyalties, right? They're trying to say your tribe is, you know, LayerTwo Labs. That's your tribe because they're the ones that pay you. And so I want to make sure everybody knows that when you say something, because let's put it this way, they're projecting. The way that they think is the people that pay them, which are the people that make the Bitcoin price go up, those are the people that they're loyal to. And so they're guilty of the behavior they're accusing you of. It's total projection. So they're just saying, because I behave this way, I have to assume you behave this way too.

[01:47:28] John Carvalho: And that means that I have to, anybody who's watching our conversation needs to know that I chose the right tribe and you chose the wrong one. And so I have to say something bad about your tribe. And it just becomes this primal thing, you know.

[01:47:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I also...

[01:47:42] John Carvalho: No, it's not, it's not scientific discourse. It's not an actual debate.

[01:47:49] Vlad Costea: I also want to add that we're sort of losing focus. And by we, I mean, Bitcoiners, we're losing focus on what the mission is and we accept whoever makes the number go up as our friend. And I think over the last year or so... two years ago I interviewed Roger Ver. I got excommunicated sort of, and that only gave me more freedom to do what I thought was interesting. And of course I was also limited because some people did not want to talk to me anymore and I wanted to keep the podcast going.

[01:48:20] Vlad Costea: So I interviewed some people outside of my usual comfort zone over the last year, I went to like three or four Ethereum conferences. And I want to say that I've made some interesting observations about the crowd there and the overall spirit. Like they have more hackathons. They're more focused on building stuff, good or bad. They don't care. They just want people to build stuff and they're younger and more idealistic and they don't care if the network's going to break or whatever they're like, whatever, we're just going to fix it back.

[01:48:54] Vlad Costea: But what matters is that we do something interesting. We build something that's worthwhile and you don't get that in Bitcoin. Everyone's very concerned about, I think I've heard this term for the first time in the context of Bitcoin, unknown unknowns, like something so outlandish that nobody even knows about it. Nobody can actually think about it, but maybe in the future there's going to be this one person who gets born and comes up with the idea and that's going to break Bitcoin because we don't know what we don't know.

[01:49:32] John Carvalho: Well, I guess I'm not too worried about that perspective, but I would repackage it as, I think a lot of the things we do to change Bitcoin have been much less important than we think they are. And so other than maybe the block size increase that came with SegWit and the malleability fix, I think SegWit basically is maybe the only change that helped Bitcoin and then Taproot and all the soft forks, all the mempool complexity, all this stuff, this is just not actually going to affect much and more likely to make things worse than better.

[01:50:04] John Carvalho: I think every time we edit the mempool behavior in some way, we actually just make it worse.

[01:50:10] Vlad Costea: I agree. If anything, so I think even [unclear: I'm not]...

[01:50:17] John Carvalho: Don't misinterpret that to mean that I'm against hackathons, that I'm against research, that I'm against experimentation. That's not what I mean so much as that, well, I think that we've glorified it and we've taken it to a whole other level and we've turned it into like a religion and, you know, a reputation system and a tribe. And all of that is way too far because it's not actually as consequential like Satoshi and the original people that made Bitcoin did the consequential stuff. And the rest has just been kind of cleanup.

[01:50:45] John Carvalho: And then SegWit was one little nice, real notable cleanup in the middle. But everything else has been, you know, just noise, really, probably will continue to be. So I think there is a lot of interesting research to be done. I just think it's in areas Bitcoiners are incapable of discovering because of the way they think, because they're not actually as curious as the people you saw in the Ethereum conferences and things like this. Bitcoiners do do hackathons and stuff. But the core community is very tribal. And so if you go to like a one European conference, you've been to all of them.

[01:51:23] John Carvalho: The overlap in attendees, especially speakers, is extremely high. My peers, when I go to a conference, it's mostly the same people, you know what I mean, rotating in and out. And so it just doesn't feel as new. It doesn't feel as alive. It doesn't feel as growing when that happens.

[01:51:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And something else that I want to add is that for some reason, after we decided that Bitcoin is going to go forward with soft forks, which are optional upgrades, we started treating soft forks in the same way as hard forks, meaning that they required the same amount of consensus. And to me, it's a bit weird because there was this argument that Theymos had in 2015 on Reddit when he started censoring everything related to XT at the time and was saying that it's an altcoin. And that was his rationale for acting in this way.

[01:52:22] Vlad Costea: And he was saying that there is no consensus for XT. And in the way that he defined consensus was that nobody within his circle of trust of developers is against it. And that would be consensus that everyone agrees that it's a good idea. But once we switched to soft forks, which is something that miners can activate with a majority or even nodes can do. We sort of decided that we need to apply the same criteria. And it's very strange.

[01:52:57] John Carvalho: It's probably a good thing. I can kind of... I can shed some light, at least on how I would look at it. The issue there is that the honest truth is because everybody trusts Bitcoin Core and because it is the primary, Bitcoin Core and the miners decide what gets into Bitcoin. Truly. They're the ones that decide. And so it's not the individual, the node that decides. The individual, the node could decide. That's interesting because I

[01:53:24] Vlad Costea: Remember one of your articles, which was super popular, like I think it was called Who's in Control of Bitcoin or something like this. And you were presenting nodes as the absolute source of power.

[01:53:37] John Carvalho: Well, they still are. It's just I would probably rewrite the article a little bit differently to cover some errors. But you still are fundamentally. But functionally, practically, you're only ever going to be able to express yourself by disagreeing, you know, either by selling your Bitcoin or running different rules than the Bitcoin that you disagree with. And so you ultimately would have to express your disagreement as a fork as well. And you need devs to help you do that. And you need miners to help you do that to make it true.

[01:54:11] John Carvalho: And so the reason that I think that you see soft forks being treated not that much differently than you might treat a hard fork is a passive acknowledgement of this power. In other words, what Bitcoin Core knows is all they can really do is arbitrarily decide some level of rough consensus of their peers. In other words, the people they know in Bitcoin Core, the people they talk to about Bitcoin Core, they can do a personal assessment as to what the sentiment is on a certain soft fork.

[01:54:45] John Carvalho: And they can decide as a group, oh, among the 20 people I know that work on Bitcoin Core that I trust, they think that this is a good soft fork. And so then you will see that person will say, I think this has rough consensus. All that really means is that from his view, the people he talks to, it seems like that they would approve this. But that's obviously nothing. What percentage of Bitcoiners is that? How do you justify this level of power? Because what happens is you end up having, ultimately between the miners and the devs, maybe 20 people deciding on whether to formally introduce a soft fork.

[01:55:30] John Carvalho: Because that's what it actually takes to do it successfully. It has to have the rough consensus of the core team promoting it as a real soft fork they're going to support and include in their software, and then miners to actually support it as well. And that's why a soft fork actually is oppressive. The soft forks eventually become effectively hard over time once they're adopted. And so they are serious business. And they're serious business and they're a serious exploitation of the trust of users in Bitcoin Core. And so it is an extremely speculative thing for Bitcoin Core to add.

[01:56:07] John Carvalho: A complexity to add a soft fork, to speculatively change the code of Bitcoin. Because it's ultimately a very small quantity of people giving it the real chance that it needs to bootstrap. And so when new people go on, when lazy people go on, which would be most people, they're just going to install the latest Bitcoin Core node and just keep rolling with it. It takes an actual pain point, an actual problem for people to defend Bitcoin in the way that you're implying with that article that I wrote.

[01:56:38] John Carvalho: In other words, take ownership of their node. But it ultimately would have to express as either a disagreeing fork or selling that Bitcoin or both. So that's where the power comes in. It's not that you have the power to make other people do stuff. It's that you have the power over what you do.

[01:56:57] Vlad Costea: I think it was you who was saying that you are always two or three versions of Bitcoin Core behind the latest update.

[01:57:07] John Carvalho: Yeah, much more versions behind on some nodes. Just because I think you need... there needs to be people that show the Core devs that this is a problem. In other words, there's no guarantee that people will upgrade their nodes and which node they're going to run and this kind of thing. And they need to be designing it in that environment. Also, just a security measure. You should never run the latest version of Core. At least wait six months. This is why the whole [unclear: soft fork] thing is crazy. It's a bunch of people immediately trying to run a new version of software.

[01:57:38] John Carvalho: All do it together and convince everybody to do it and make it a new rule. It's like, no, you need a long time before you can prove something. I liked the idea that we used to say, oh, people will invent things on shitcoins and then we'll port them over to Bitcoin. That's a great strategy. That's a safe strategy. That's like when you have a product and you put it in staging. You take the website, your new website product, and you put it in staging environment. You test it and use it for a while.

[01:58:04] John Carvalho: And then when you know that you feel confident, you move it to production environment for the real users. And so that made sense to me. But the truth is that not a lot of stuff came out of shitcoins. And there wasn't an actual lot of interest in Bitcoiners adopting the things that shitcoiners came up with as a developer community. And so it didn't pan out that way. But I would certainly rather like when you saw, I think it was Litecoin added SegWit first, right? Like, that was nice.

[01:58:33] John Carvalho: Like, I want to see, oh, if covenants are so great, show me covenants. Put them on, you know, Bcash. Put them on, you know, just fork Bitcoin and make a fake Bitcoin.

[01:58:43] Vlad Costea: They do have them on Bcash. That's the annoying part. They do have them on Bcash. They have OP_CAT. They have something which is similar to CTV. Like, if you actually want to break something and you know how to do it, you can break Bcash. Go ahead.

[01:58:58] John Carvalho: Sure. But that also proves that there's not a lot of demand for the tech itself, right? Because Bcash having covenants didn't make a bunch of people use Bcash or a bunch of people use covenants. So what does that say about covenants? They don't want to say that. That covenants aren't actually a big deal. They're only a big deal to NYDIG and companies like this who had some sort of plan for them.

[01:59:22] Vlad Costea: No, I think it speaks for the network effects, because I remember having a conversation with someone from Citrea and they told me that if they deployed their software on Bitcoin Cash, it would be much faster. And it would work better with better trust assumptions compared to what they did to make it work on Bitcoin. But it's just that they don't have any users there.

[01:59:50] John Carvalho: Yeah. Well, they're not going to have any users here probably.

[01:59:54] Vlad Costea: Because they raised some money to be able to build this and ship it. And they do have to launch it on the biggest network.

[02:00:05] John Carvalho: Yeah, that's the theory. I can't say whether it's wrong or right. I would say it's not the theory I would go with. But I don't know.

[02:00:13] Vlad Costea: Anyway, what you described is like a beautiful explanation of the original Bitcoin maximalist thesis, which was that we're going to be conservative. Of course, we want to have privacy. We want to have scaling. We want to have everything. But we're not sure that this is the right way to go forward. We don't want to break Bitcoin because of this. Let's create this Litecoin or Zcash or Monero or something else. Let's test stuff on it. But the problem is that it never came back to Bitcoin.

[02:00:46] John Carvalho: And the thing is, even forking Bitcoin just for this is not that crazy. It's just so taboo. Like, in other words, if it was 2013, shitcoins were innocent back then. They weren't shitcoins yet. They were just altcoins. And it was not a constant thing to make Bitcoin look bad. That's why we started calling them shitcoins. They started lying about Bitcoin and lying about their own capabilities. It was just other versions of Bitcoin that people played with. And now imagine if we still had that culture. If somebody, Jeremy Rubin or whoever, wants to have covenants, he could literally just fork Bitcoin.

[02:01:25] John Carvalho: He could just say, this is another Bitcoin. Me and my friends are mining it. The difference is, it has these parameters for the block size and it has covenants and it does this, come try it out. And then people would use that coin and it might gain a little bit of money. And if he was right, it might even grow to be the size of Bcash or whatever. You know what I mean? That is all honest, normal science to me. But the problem is that you can't do that without it becoming shilling that shitcoin, talking shit about Bitcoin, and blah, blah, blah.

[02:01:57] John Carvalho: It can't just be science. It has to be money, too. And so it corrupts everybody. And so you can't actually do that anymore. But that's, I think, an honest, it shouldn't be crazy. If I said to you, oh, Bitcoin is broken. I know exactly what's wrong with it. I'm going to fork it and here I'm going to show you how my Bitcoin works. That should not be something that gets me ostracized from the Bitcoin community. It's just demonstration. I'm not saying Bitcoin is evil. Bitcoiners are stupid. You chose the wrong Bitcoin.

[02:02:26] John Carvalho: All I'm saying is, here's another software that I developed that demonstrates my point. You know what I mean? But nobody ever only does that. They do that and then they also say, buy my shitcoin, let me get funded by these people, blah, blah, blah. And the whole thing becomes corrupt.

[02:02:45] Vlad Costea: I know what you mean, but there's a fine line. And if we built a culture around just trying software, like it doesn't cost you anything to download the wallet or try the client of an altcoin or something, claim some coins from a faucet, see how it works, and then make your own opinion if it's useful or not. But instead, I think it's much worse. And I say this a lot. It's much worse to try Ethereum for some, I don't know, crypto kitties or whatever they use than to pay with your Visa card.

[02:03:23] Vlad Costea: For a while, it was actually very cool among the toxic maximalist crowds to brag about earning points because you bought your steak with your MasterCard or something. Samson Mow was bragging about it. Jimmy Song was saying that it's a good idea. And all of this started out for the purpose of payments. I don't want to turn into Roger or something, but if you go to the Bitcoin whitepaper and you read the abstract, it talks about e-commerce, it talks about Internet payments that are irreversible, and it talks about eliminating trust from this situation.

[02:03:59] Vlad Costea: This was the original goal, to make payments on the Internet easier without trusted third parties.

[02:04:06] John Carvalho: I think that the goal of self-sovereign payments at scale, like I said earlier in the call, is just a totally separate goal from digital store of value as a concept. And that's where a lot of the problems come in. It's a clear tension. You know what I mean? Like you mentioned with BCash, prioritizing payments over prioritizing store of value is going to result in conflicting decisions. And so I think the problem is we need to stop trying to make Bitcoin a scaled form of payment. I don't think it's meant for that at all.

[02:04:45] Vlad Costea: Okay, but if there are no payments and we just use it for speculation, then it's just a decentralized Ponzi. It's not something that's really useful. It's useful if you think that money is useful.

[02:04:58] John Carvalho: No, no, no. Money is a use case. Nothing is money. Money is how you use an object. And so I can say bananas are money. If we use them as money, they're money. If I say I want your cow and I give you five bananas and you give me the cow, and then you say, hey, I want your lawnmower and you give me five bananas back and I give you lawnmower, that's bananas as money. That's it. That's the only requirement, is just using it as a proxy for value.

[02:05:29] John Carvalho: Now, when you start mixing everything in there and you say, I also want to be able to do that at scale with anybody, what you will learn is that nothing scales without trust. Absolutely nothing. And so the problem that you end up trying to solve, that's why I keep adding this at scale qualifier to it or requirement to it, is if you're happy with Bitcoin in a community, it works fine. It already does what it needs to do. You know what I mean? If you only have, say, a million people in a chain, they're always going to be able to send a transaction affordably on chain and they're going to be able to use Bitcoin the way that we want them to be able to use it.

[02:06:09] John Carvalho: But that Bitcoin won't be worth two trillion dollars. You know what I mean? It'll be worth a million dollars or whatever the people inside of it attribute as value in that smaller blockchain. And so this is the tension, is people want both Bitcoin to grow their value over time. They want scarcity. They want digital gold. They want to be able to know that they want the Ponzi scheme. They want it. That's a use case of Bitcoin to most Bitcoiners, whether they admit it or not. They want the Ponzi scheme.

[02:06:40] John Carvalho: But they also want some sort of narrative that lets them say, I want the Ponzi scheme, but I also want the freedom. And the freedom is what powers the Ponzi scheme. And so they want everybody to just come here for the freedom and the Ponzi scheme. But you can't accomplish all these things in one elegant swoop. It's just not how it works. And so I would say if you want, what you want to do is you want to optimize the quantity of people that could be holding Bitcoin.

[02:07:08] John Carvalho: And there are various ways to do that. And then you want to separately optimize how you can coordinate people to make payments, both with Bitcoin or anything, anything that you would accept, at least as an individual. Like you today, I'm sure you're not going to say, I will only accept Bitcoin. I will only accept Ethereum. I will only accept fiat. Anybody who is blockchain enlightened, they're going to accept more than one type of money, whether it just be Bitcoin and fiat or many altcoins. And so if you actually want to approach solving this, actually want to approach this as a community, we have to become much more nuanced about these differences.

[02:07:46] John Carvalho: That if they really want everybody being able to use Bitcoin as a payment, they're going to have to attach broader scale payment rails to that. And it's not going to be lightning. It's more likely to be Visa or something like this. And so the conversation ends up changing to, oh, but I don't want it to be Visa. That's why we invented Bitcoin. We don't want banks to be in control. Oh, so the problem you want to fix is banks. It's not Bitcoin. It's not store of value. It's not payments at scale.

[02:08:15] John Carvalho: You don't like banks now, which is another different problem, which is also a trust problem that you solve. If you like, for example, today when you choose a bank, it's chosen by this legacy reputation, this implied reputation. The bank seems to exist. It seems to have a lot of money. It seems to be large. It seems to be trusted, so I will trust it. Well, how do you decentralize that? Well, you have to make more of it. There has to be more banks. And what is the most quantity of banks you could possibly have?

[02:08:45] John Carvalho: Everybody being a bank. So if you want to say Bitcoin is a bank in your pocket, that was such an ignorant, incorrect statement. It's not a bank at all. It's a digital commodity in your pocket. Having a bank in your pocket would be having a credit system in your pocket, where you are a credit issuer to all the people that want credit from you and all the people you want credit from, a credit issuer is back to you. And that's the only way you can fix banking and decentralizing banking is by doing it yourself.

[02:09:14] John Carvalho: The same way you fix big tech in walled gardens, hosting it yourself. It's like the ultimate solution to all these problems of scale is trust and self-responsibility. And most people don't want... most people don't want to be responsible for running their own shit, hosting their own money, hosting their own bank, hosting their own website. Most people don't want that. So we end up back to the other side.

[02:09:40] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I guess it's very unfortunate because I had a different set of expectations when I landed here. And it just seems...

[02:09:51] John Carvalho: Well, [unclear: they want it when it's a real problem]. The problem is that it's not a real problem. The incentives aren't actually there. If we were actually having our bank accounts seized, there would be much more love for Bitcoin. You know what I mean? If we were actually getting censored from all, more people were having their payments censored, there would be more value in Bitcoin. More value in altcoins. It's just a question of- The product market has a size, right? Everything has a size. There's only so many bananas people will want to eat in one day, right?

[02:10:22] John Carvalho: And that's just how it is. No matter what you want, there's just no more people that want more bananas. And that's the same thing with digital freedom, the same thing with censorship-resistant payments, etc. Like there's a certain quantity the market actually needs, and it's not bigger than that. And even though you want it to be bigger, it isn't right now.

[02:10:44] Vlad Costea: I remember reading, there's an article by Nick Szabo. It's called Blockchains and Social Scalability.

[02:10:55] Vlad Costea: No, I think it's called Bitcoin Blockchains and Social Scalability. And the expectation for this technology as a whole was that it's going to enable us to remove some of the trust that enabled societies to scale. Because the trust element, which was placed in money and rare metals, and the fact that they came from the right source and they had the right purity to enable a certain type of exchange, is what led us here. But the expectation with blockchains was that part of this trust is going to be replaced by just running a piece of software on your phone or computer or whatever.

[02:11:35] Vlad Costea: And it seems like even in Bitcoin, which is the most puritan when it comes to self-validation, there is a trend with, I remember a custodial lightning when it first came out. It was considered to be just this gateway drug, just this way of trying it before you give the technology a more serious look. But now we have entire protocols built on top of custodial lightning, like Cashu and whatever, all of these e-cash ideas that are coming to Bitcoin and mints and federations. And that's disappointing.

[02:12:11] Vlad Costea: Also from Nick Szabo, you have the article about God protocols, which is this idea that you have something like a clock that tells you what time it is, except that it's for finance and it's for universal truths to which people or with which people can agree when they look at it. Instead of having to trust politicians and banks and bureaucrats and whatever, the idea would be to have contracts or something which is out there in the open that anyone can agree with. That is true. And we sort of organize our daily lives around that.

[02:12:49] Vlad Costea: I was thinking about a lot of this, but it seems like we're heading into a future where, first of all, we have more trust. Secondly, Bitcoin is like 50-something percent of the market and most of the crypto market is stablecoins. And this is sort of the future. It's not even experiments or forks of Bitcoin or other ideas that have maybe better scaling or better privacy. It all comes down to putting the U.S. Dollar on the blockchain and having some bank issuer. And it seems like even the European Union is into this, the U.S.

[02:13:27] Vlad Costea: Is into this. We're going to have a bunch of stablecoins. And that's what this revolution led to.

[02:13:35] John Carvalho: I would take a more favorable view than that. I would say what Szabo maybe missed in the first article you mentioned or what's not being addressed clearly is trust is amazing. Trust is awesome. Society is trust. In other words, you're not going to do social things and remove trust. That's not how it works. Trust is other humans cooperating with other humans. That's what trust is. Trust is society. It's being a citizen. It's being part of a community. It's people instead of person. Privacy, for example, is the opposite.

[02:14:14] John Carvalho: It's antisocial. When you want to be alone, when you want nobody to see you, nobody to know what you do, this is not to say privacy is a bad concept. It's just to say that there's a contrast here. For example, when you design it for privacy, you have to keep in mind that you're designing against society, against social behavior. It's antisocial. If you appreciate this, when you come to realize as well, when Szabo was saying those things, what he's not maybe acknowledging, I don't remember the article, I think I read it a long time ago, is that the only way you are ever going to get scale is through trust.

[02:14:53] John Carvalho: And that Bitcoin doesn't scale, so its ability to provide this idea that we would be able to remove trust is limited to its size. And even then, we've identified in this conversation how we didn't really get rid of trust. We just kind of moved it somewhere else, didn't we? We moved it to the miners, we moved it to the Bitcoin Core devs, we moved it to our ability to audit code, these kinds of things. And so there's trust all over Bitcoin. It's everywhere in Bitcoin. And there's people everywhere in Bitcoin.

[02:15:27] John Carvalho: It's not just people using it. And so what I would say is there's hope that if what we're acknowledging is that what actually happened after Bitcoin is we started using trust more, and that what seems to be having more momentum, or at least comparable momentum to Bitcoin, is stablecoins, which are trusted. So you have a trusted entity providing trusted money from trusted government, even more trusted blockchains than Bitcoin because they're centralized. It's just trust everywhere. What's going on? Why is it working? Why does trust keep working?

[02:16:01] John Carvalho: It's because that's what society is. It's trust. It's applying trust. It's leveraging trust. It's competing with the people you don't trust. It's all trust. It's all made out of trust.

[02:16:13] Vlad Costea: Okay, but the follow-up question is, why are we even here? What are we even doing? If it's all trust and we're building these systems which are supposed to minimize trust, what's the point?

[02:16:26] John Carvalho: I can't speak for other people, but I can tell you what I'm doing. And this isn't just... This is meant to be a kind of interesting answer. I only figured out kind of what I'm doing more clearly recently when I looked at, like I said earlier that I kept asking questions about, well, people say Lightning does this, but then when I look at my research and do the math, it doesn't do that. It does something else. People say Bitcoin is for this. It's for that. They say, well, fix this and fix that.

[02:16:56] John Carvalho: And the more you dig in, the more you criticize and question everything and try to establish your own judgment. What's left is you realize what people actually wanted out of Bitcoin and what we were trying to do is we were trying to once again deal with violence in society. And so ultimately the big limitation in society and trust is that at some moment anybody can become violent. They can hit you. They can steal from you. They can imprison you. They can do something physical to you, which transcends any logic.

[02:17:30] John Carvalho: In other words, it doesn't matter what I told you. It doesn't matter if I lied to you. It doesn't matter if I told you the truth. It doesn't matter how much money you paid me. At some point I can just become distrustful. And at some point I can just become violently distrustful. And so society over and over again always invents ways to manage and regulate violence in order to have society. That's what being civil is, having a civilized society, having a trust-based society or high-trust society.

[02:18:02] John Carvalho: That's what it looks like. It looks like we see a lot of people on Twitter lately bragging about Japan and how civilized they are and how famous people can just go on the train and how it's clean and how they're picking out people that are bad or whatever. That's what society is. The goal here is to figure out how much trust we can actually create and how long we can actually maintain it and thus how much violence we can prevent. And so the work that I do at Synonym, I think, ultimately comes down to me not being satisfied with the level of degree that trust and violence are attempted to be managed in systems that are designed before.

[02:18:42] John Carvalho: And so the system that I'm trying to design, the system that my team researches and works on, ultimately is trying to find a way to manage violence that maximizes harmony, basically. Alignment, coordination, matching, maximizes these things in order to minimize violent outcomes, in order to minimize reliance on government. Because no matter what you do, you ultimately need some way to regulate violence, and violence works like this. I'm one man, and then there are two men, and those two men can beat me up. So I get three men, and then they get four men, and we just keep escalating until we have a government and an organized society and an organized government that deploys violence and regulates violence.

[02:19:24] John Carvalho: But because violence is so powerful, it can kill you, this ends up always turning into a concentration of power that becomes corruptible. And so society has this cycle where it grows. It's like we say, great men create good times, good times create weak men, blah, blah, blah. This cycle happens, and it's real, I think. It's a natural cycle. It's not something to complain about people. It's just a natural cycle that goes toward, we find optimal trust, and then it starts to get exploited. In other words, this is why we can't have nice things.

[02:20:00] John Carvalho: And then it falls again until people learn how to trust each other again in new ways, and it grows and we coordinate again. And I think that's all this is. And so in Synonym and the work that we do, what I'm trying to say is that I don't think Bitcoin fixes it. I don't think that Bitcoin clearly does not remove institutional power, government power. They're participating. They're in on it too now. You know what I mean? Like, there's all those kind of promises. Bitcoin didn't actually provide a solution to deal with violence, to deal with trust.

[02:20:31] John Carvalho: It provided a way to hide from it, right? And so it's not a useless tool. It's not like it's a failure. It's just that we have to scope it properly and say, oh, when we use this thing together, it makes it harder for people that are not trustworthy to bother us. But unfortunately, it doesn't scale. It doesn't have any way of dealing with wrench attacks or violence. It doesn't have any way of dealing with accomplishing scaled payments and coordinating trust, essentially. And those are the areas we need to focus on to get what we want.

[02:21:06] John Carvalho: We have to give people ways to express trust intentionally, to decide to coordinate intentionally and create what I might call like a harmony in the moment, where you have dynamic alignment always happening, where the people that want to be working on this, working on that together, and believe this together, know how to find each other, and they know how to coordinate and work on things together. But there's this happening across many, many dimensions of concepts, where you have people that are coordinating over golf, people that are coordinating over racism, whatever it may be, but they're figuring out who their people are and how to be together and how to work together, instead of everybody competing in the Wild West, open on X, which is just like this abstraction.

[02:21:51] John Carvalho: It's like, oh, you tweet something, you tweet an idea, people make fun of you for it, people glorify you for it, and then we move on to the next one. It's like this constant trend making process, which is not, it's just not going to fix anything either, right? It's just a way of, it's like a viral delivery system, you know? Sorry, I probably ranted long enough for the moment.

[02:22:14] Vlad Costea: No, that's good. I think you're finally talking about what you're building with Synonym, because we had the opportunity to talk about your wallet earlier, and you did not want to get into many details. Let me put up the QR code. I think it only works like 10 times, and it's been two hours, 20 minutes. I think people who listened up to this point deserve to scan the QR code and try again. There was actually someone in the chat was saying that it doesn't work from the Bitkit wallet, and someone replied to him that he has to scan with the regular camera app.

[02:22:51] Vlad Costea: I hope it works for everyone.

[02:22:55] Vlad Costea: But yeah, tell me more about the Bitkit wallet. Tell me more about the social media platform that you have been working on and to which I've been one of the first users. And what else are you building with Synonym? 

[02:23:12] John Carvalho: I guess I'll start zoomed out, because it's a good segue from what I was just talking about. What I call that stuff I was just explaining and how we work on it is the Atomic Economy. I probably brought this up in the past. And what that means is in trying to solve all these problems and trying to actually design a cohesive system that dealt with all of these problems, you end up realizing that you need a sort of engine, a flow of how things go through all the people and through society, which means you need actual economies.

[02:23:49] John Carvalho: You need things moving in a feedback loop so things keep evolving and changing. And so the Atomic Economy is a way of demonstrating both all the research related to trying to solve these problems and the minimum set of products and features required to achieve them. And so by the end of, say, the first version of the Atomic Economy, you're going to have all the pieces you would need to be able to coordinate with others in a self-sovereign way, make payments with others in a self-sovereign way at scale, and to be able to have the ideals that a Bitcoiner wants in practice, like being able to find anybody that will sell whatever you want, being able to make payments directly to people, coordinate those payments directly, whether they're using Bitcoin or not, be able to switch through all the different payment methods, be able to have a wallet that supports this stuff, have a payment protocol that supports this stuff, have a web app that supports this stuff, be able to do actual e-commerce within a key-based self-sovereign system that is superior to anything, in my opinion, that you would compare it to.

[02:25:00] John Carvalho: So we're not just building a bunch of incidental products related to what Bitcoiners care about. We're actually doing a civic engineering project where I'm trying to say this whole system design is what society needs to fix its problems. And here's how it works, and here is the pieces and how they work together. And so Bitkit is just the wallet in that plan. So when people look at Bitkit, if you look at it, oh, is Bitkit trying to be the number one Lightning wallet? Is Bitkit trying to be the number one Bitcoin wallet?

[02:25:33] John Carvalho: Is Bitkit trying to be the payments wallet, blah, blah, blah? It's trying to be the Atomic Economy wallet. It's trying to be the wallet in our system that supports all the features and protocols in our system in order to demonstrate it. If that means it turns into the most popular Lightning wallet or whatever, great. But I'm more concerned with it being the most popular Atomic Economy wallet than anything else. And getting people to try the entire ecosystem and live within the ecosystem than anything else. And so in addition to that, we have Pubky, P-U-B-K-Y, which is both a protocol and a product.

[02:26:09] John Carvalho: The protocol itself is a key-based system similar to other key-based systems. But the major difference is that it uses mainline DHT as a discovery system, which would place it as literally the most decentralized network in the world. In other words, mainline DHT is, depending on how you measure and what things they support, roughly 5 to 20 million nodes, depending on the spec you're comparing. And you can have... that's way bigger than Bitcoin, way bigger than Bitcoin nodes by orders of magnitude, probably. And that means that your identity lives there and nobody can take it from you.

[02:26:48] John Carvalho: So we use keys as domain names, which is different than any other system. We have this system called PKDNS, which allows you to literally make DNS records for your key. And so when people want to look you up, you always decide what they see. So whether you use a hosting service or you self-host or whatever, it doesn't matter. Whether you use our Pubky app or somebody else's, it doesn't matter. You're always in control of where your data lives and where people are told your data lives, trusted or not.

[02:27:20] John Carvalho: And that, we found, is an important basis for this whole design. And then we have the Pubky app, which is that pubky.app, where you can try the first stages and features that we do have working over this idea, which includes things like social semantic graphs, which is like this tagging feature you currently see in the app, which is a decentralized way of creating a social graph. And so now, within this ecosystem, you don't need to have a centralized algorithm in order to find things. You can have an algorithm that's made out of the semantics of all of your peers or any specific peers that you care about.

[02:27:58] John Carvalho: So you create the algorithm based off of the activity and how you trust other people. And then the next phase that we're beginning now and what we want to ship this year is related to adding the payment features into the Pubky ecosystem. So you can have this social semantic graph acting in ways to help connect people to sell and buy things. So Paykit is going to be a payment protocol interface, a universal payment protocol interface, a superficial payment protocol, where it's the payment protocol for coordinating payments, but the settlements are a separate thing underneath it.

[02:28:37] John Carvalho: And so it basically routes to different settlement methods. And then the final kind of piece that we're going to be working on later in the year, but we have completed the research as far as like a white paper or whatever, is Atomicity. And this is a mutual credit system. And this is a way of basically establishing payment coordination and payments like a credit card, kind of, except every individual is the one running it. And you can, instead of routing through channels like Lightning does, it does a step routing process one person at a time.

[02:29:11] John Carvalho: And so it removes a lot of the complexity and increases the stability a lot because each separate transaction is separated. So it's like if I want to route from, say you're at the end of the route and I'm trying to pay you and there's three people in between us in the credit system, it doesn't send it from me to Alice, to Bob, to you. It sends it from, I do a deal with Alice, then I do a deal with Bob, then I do a deal with you.

[02:29:39] John Carvalho: And so it keeps updating along the path. And so this allows things to be, to stay trusted and still remain safe. So I glossed over and skipped detail on a lot of this stuff. It's a big vision. There's a lot of aspects to it, but that's the kind of broad strokes. It's Bitkit, Pubky protocol, Pubky app, Paykit, payment protocol, and Atomicity mutual credit protocol. I think I missed one thing in there. Pubky Ring, which is a keychain app for holding the keys.

[02:30:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think I tried three of these, which is the Pubky protocol, the Pubky ring, and the Bitkit wallet. And something that I do like about the Bitkit wallet, for example, is that it's designed to be very basic and simple. It's an abstractization of a lot of complex elements that are happening in the background.

[02:30:43] John Carvalho: Yeah, you mean... I guess... I'm guessing you're referring to, like, we don't, we don't even know if we say Lightning. We say it a few times where we have to, but mostly it's referred to as the spending Bitcoin balance, whereas the on-chain is referred to as the savings Bitcoin balance.

[02:30:59] Vlad Costea: There's some debate about that.

[02:31:01] John Carvalho: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't use Satoshis anywhere.

[02:31:05] Vlad Costea: You have your own BIP around this concept, right?

[02:31:08] John Carvalho: Yes, for those who don't know, last year I released BIP 177 and it was accepted into the BIPs. And this is an aesthetic BIP on just how to display Bitcoin correctly. And by correctly, I mean that it actually doesn't have a decimal place in the protocol. It's not a decimal-based system. It's not a floating point. It's integral. And so that we have... and so for a while before, maybe even a year before that, we displayed it this way in Bitkit, almost nobody even noticed. It's just that people got used to sats as the numbers, in other words, without the decimal.

[02:31:43] John Carvalho: And so the only kind of leap here is just to just say, to call it Bitcoin instead of sats.

[02:31:51] Vlad Costea: That's beautiful, to be honest.

[02:31:54] John Carvalho: I mean, I always thought it was corrupting. It's like, Satoshi didn't want that. He didn't want it to be named. I'm almost certain he didn't want it to be named. And then it's like, it is Bitcoin. Like, it's all Bitcoin. And this 21 million thing is actually 2.1 quadrillion and both numbers are stupid. It's like, just like, get it at the price that you want it. If you want to speculate on it, speculate on it. But the quantity of the units is not actually that important.

[02:32:21] Vlad Costea: What's funny is that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to only have two decimals. So in the original design, which was circulating in 2008, it only had, just like the US dollar, it had the whole unit and cents.

[02:32:35] John Carvalho: Yeah, [unclear: that's the lore] I learned from Adam Back. Adam Back told me this and I think I told you that. And the other detail is it was Hal Finney that added the extra six places. And so if you want to be, what's the word...

[02:32:53] Vlad Costea: I think it's provocative. Oh, extra six because it's eight in total. Okay.

[02:32:59] John Carvalho: Yeah, yeah. So if you want to be provocative, you can say that he increased, he multiplied the supply of Bitcoin by six orders of magnitude. Hal Finney, that's his contribution. Hal Finney's contribution to Bitcoin, if I want to be very provocative, I can say his contribution was inflating the Bitcoin supply by six orders of magnitude and convincing everybody that banks was where Bitcoin should be held. But those are two big contributions that live to this day from Hal Finney that I disagree with.

[02:33:25] Vlad Costea: No, but what Hal Finney describes is banks...

[02:33:29] John Carvalho: Actually, I don't disagree with the...

[02:33:30] Vlad Costea: ...issuing their own digital currency against Bitcoin. So it's not describing them as custodians in the way that we have them today. So what Hal Finney means is very different from the misinterpretation that has been propagated and popularized to justify the fact that people keep their Bitcoin with custodians.

[02:33:51] John Carvalho: Yeah, I don't actually disagree with the change in quantity either.

[02:33:54] Vlad Costea: Super, super, super unpopular. Like you just implied that adding more decimals to Bitcoin is inflation.

[02:34:02] John Carvalho: It is. That's not implied.

[02:34:04] Vlad Costea: People will say, wait a second, you can divide a pizza in a hundred slices.

[02:34:08] John Carvalho: Yeah, the problem with the pizza debate is it was embarrassing for both sides because both sides were wrong. When, what's her name, Frances Coppola said that she was concerned because it's divisible, the correct reply to her was, no, it is not divisible. End of conversation. The reply to her was, don't worry, Frances, it's not actually divisible. You have it wrong. That's it. That's the reply and then end of conversation. But instead it was, oh, you think you can cut a pizza into more slices to feed more people?

[02:34:38] John Carvalho: No, that's not- In other words, both people misunderstood each other severely. And the point is that it's all stupid because Bitcoin isn't actually divisible. That incident is a huge influence. It contributes to why I made BIP 177. They kept saying over and over, people misunderstand the whole concept. Yes, Bitcoin is a pie, but how many, and yes, how many slices doesn't matter, but no, you can't divide it. You can't actually have more slices. And if you do, you have to actually multiply it. That's how it actually works.

[02:35:11] Vlad Costea: But if I recall correctly, when Lightning launched, we got a new unit called the millisatoshi.

[02:35:19] John Carvalho: It's even worse because it's fake. That one doesn't even exist. In other words, not only is it not another decimal place or more decimal places, three more or whatever, thousands, they actually don't even exist. There's not an actual protocol for it. The Bitcoin protocol doesn't see it at all. It's literally just a tracked credit number by your counterparty in your channel. It's just credit. You're basically trusting the person in that channel that when you do get a whole Satoshi, that they will render it to you in a signed transaction.

[02:35:51] John Carvalho: That's all you're doing. millisatoshis do not even exist. And even worse, nobody in Lightning actually needs or uses them. All they do is cause developer experience problems, where sometimes when you're trying to find some really annoying bug, it's all because of the denomination needing to be in millisats instead of that. And that's the only contribution millisats has made.

[02:36:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah, weird.

[02:36:20] Vlad Costea: But you're saying that if we add more decimals to Bitcoin, and it's going to be nine instead of eight, then that's inflation, right?

[02:36:29] John Carvalho: Well, now we have to get into defining inflation. Yes, it is monetary inflation. You would literally have to create ten times more units to add a decimal place. But then people will argue, like Adam Back would argue very quickly, if it's proportional, it doesn't matter. That's mostly true. There are nuances to it, though. When you have more units, you certainly can't create more UTXOs, for example, because you can split it into more pieces. And so the real question will become, can I create UTXOs that are less than one Satoshi?

[02:37:03] John Carvalho: Because that actually changes economic dynamics and inflates my capability to create UTXOs. Whether that's good or bad, you could have a separate argument. But it is a dynamic that is new if you add units. Another one is how you add them. Are you adding them through mining rewards? Because if so, now you're extending the amount of mining time that people get rewards. And that's an effect. So there are a lot of little decisions in how you would design it if you did do it, and whether you could do it without a hard fork.

[02:37:33] John Carvalho: But those are all nuanced things, and Bitcoiners are incapable of nuance. So they won't get this guy.

[02:37:41] Vlad Costea: That hurts. That last part about Bitcoiners being incapable of nuance.

[02:37:47] John Carvalho: Well, nuance, as Sergej from Bitrefill taught me some years ago, nuance is antiviral. And so when nuance is required, it means you're actually reducing the bootstrap ability of your thing. And so when you have nuance, it requires people to care. It requires people to have incentives to learn deeper, to defend the nuance, to learn it. And so, yeah, nuance is definitely antiviral. If you want something to go fast and go hard, remove the nuance.

[02:38:22] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but to go back to the argument that we had before, there used to be a time in my life when I was thinking that Bitcoiners are some of the smartest people in the world, and I can't wait for the day when they're going to be in charge of stuff like running countries, running.

[02:38:39] John Carvalho: I'd be so scared now. Like, to think of all the current Bitcoin elders in charge.

[02:38:46] Vlad Costea: I know. I used to think, oh, my God, if this person was the president of the country or something, that there would be so much good stuff happening. But now I'm happy with the political class. I'm happy that these guys are professionals in what they're doing, and we don't put Luke Dashjr Or someone like him in charge of anything.

[02:39:11] John Carvalho: I think part of it is that was true back then, and that's just not true now. In other words, back then, the quality of the people was a little higher, and your ignorance in mind was higher as well. In other words, we were less people, and so our standards were lower, and what we were being shown by these people was impressive to old Vlad, to old John, to previous versions of ourselves. That's where this Bitcoin depression and this dissonance comes from, is that for the first four years, I was like, oh, my God, Bitcoin, put it in my brain, inject it in my veins.

[02:39:49] John Carvalho: Teach me everything. I want game theory. I want cryptography. I'm going to learn it all. Give it to me. Get podcasters. Speak more. And you see this echo today with people saying, listen to 100 hours, 1,000 hours, et cetera. But back then… The overall hive mind was less educated, too. And so we were new. We were the earliest ones, and we didn't know shit about shit. And so we learned. We were learning. And we were learning from people that, to us, were better than us and smarter and more experienced than us.

[02:40:21] John Carvalho: But after some amount of years, that ends up evening out, at least some degree, right? You end up being more educated than the old version of yourself. You end up having more opinions that are your own and conflicting with old opinions. And you just become your own thing. So it's that both are right. You were right back then to glorify these people and be thankful for them and look up to them. But you're also right today to not think that way because maybe you grew past it.

[02:40:50] John Carvalho: Maybe you grew away from it. Whatever.

[02:40:54] Vlad Costea: Yes, but something that I respect a lot about you, John, is that you keep learning and evolving. And you always have something new to say. Like, I can think of at least 10 guys off the top of my head who are going to be saying the same stuff that they were saying 10 years ago. And they don't seek to learn anything. They just seek like-mindedness. They want to find someone who agrees with them, and they form clubs, and they eat steaks. And they don't even read books or study anything new anymore.

[02:41:30] Vlad Costea: They just feel like they were so smart and so right that they don't have to do anything else in this life. And somehow they also project being right about Bitcoin to being right about something else like lifestyle and diet. 

[02:41:45] John Carvalho: Well, I'm glad that you appreciate it, because I don't think it means something to most people, honestly. That's part of the Bitcoin depression thing, too, is that, like I said earlier in the call, I sincerely feel like we've discovered something. Like, we've figured something out that every Bitcoiner needs to understand and know about. They need to at least try on how I look at these things and understand them so they can use it in their mental model for when they talk about Bitcoin or build things for Bitcoin or whatever. Whether they disagree with me or not.

[02:42:12] John Carvalho: Whether they disagree with the speculative parts or not, especially. But they really do need to like... I think it's important. But what I'll say is, like I said earlier in the conversation as well, their behavior is not irrational. It's a strategy. It's how they choose to approach things. And what I can tell you is that my strategy has resulted in... Well, yes, I do have a company that has funding to create the things I want. That part's extremely positive and awesome.

[02:42:41] John Carvalho: But I don't have the support of my peers. I don't have the support of Bitcoiners. I don't have the interest of the intellectual [unclear: greed of Bitcoiners].

[02:42:49] Vlad Costea: Okay, but let me interrupt you here, and I'm sorry for that. Nobody does have that support. Okay? Yeah. I've seen dozens of projects announcing that they're going to launch this on Bitcoin, like Spiderchain from Botanix Labs, like Citrea and whatever. A lot of money was put into these projects. They seem to be doing something amazing. And then when they finally came into the mainnet, Bitcoiners don't care because these guys, they're super spoiled. They get everything for free.

[02:43:25] John Carvalho: Well, this is my point about the strategy.

[02:43:26] Vlad Costea: They just want to HODL and do nothing.

[02:43:29] John Carvalho: Their strategy results probably in more happiness than my strategy. My strategy is extremely unhappy, extremely discontent. In other words, I'm always seeing the problem in everything. I'm always saying, oh, that's wrong. That's not really true. That's not quite what he's saying. That's not quite good enough. And that's why I always have new things to say to you is because I'm never happy with anything. I'm always drilling down further. It doesn't feel good to be that way. It's stressful to be that way. People don't like people who behave that way.

[02:44:01] John Carvalho: And so I do it because I'm compelled. I do it because I have no choice. It's not even strategy. It's just who I am. And so I can't tell your listeners that my strategy worked. I can just tell them that my strategy, in my view, is at least respectable and pure and science or whatever from how I look at it. But does it work? Is it worth doing? I don't know. That's for you to decide because those guys who are trusting each other and agreeing and not saying new things, they have more friends.

[02:44:39] John Carvalho: They might even have more money. They have more people to try to bootstrap their products. You know what I mean? They have more gravity when they behave that way for now. Are they using that gravity? Is it worth what they think it's worth? Does it compare? Maybe they're also unhappy and they're just not saying so. There's a lot of other nuances to dive into. But in the end, I have to say that being this way is not fun. I know a lot of people think I'm arrogant and think I know everything, whatever.

[02:45:11] John Carvalho: Being looked at that way is not fun either. Feeling that way is not fun. So there's not a lot of reward to this. It's more that it's my own personal standard and I can't help it.

[02:45:23] Vlad Costea: I can relate to that. And I also have a lot of respect for people like you because if we just accepted the norms, we would never discover anything new or evolve past certain phases. So it takes people to constantly be unhappy to reach a higher degree of happiness, if that makes any sense. And I'm pretty sure that you're happy yourself because you get to learn new stuff like that's how you get your dopamine kicks. You don't get it...

[02:45:52] John Carvalho: Well, yeah, I had to retreat to work, right? In other words, when Bitcoin feedback was not giving me what I felt like I wanted from it, I did adjust. I did adjust and I just said, OK, I'm just going even harder into work. I'm just going to double down and just work instead of being instead of working eight hours a day and being on Twitter two or three hours, I'm going to work 10 to 12 hours a day and just not use it. And that's that's the result.

[02:46:18] John Carvalho: Is it good? Is it bad? Is it temporary? Probably whatever.

[02:46:24] Vlad Costea: But at least you're building something. You're you're doing something with your life. You're employing people to work on a vision that you have, which is more than these guys will ever accomplish. Like, no offense to anyone. It's just that if your strategy is to just sit on your Bitcoin stash and do nothing, I mean, of course, you're you're going to enjoy a lot of the nice stuff in this life, but nobody will remember you. Nobody will actually assign value to anything that you're doing. You're just the rich guy who's paying for stuff.

[02:47:01] John Carvalho: My hope at this point is that the theory or the design of the system that we're creating is it's so out of left field compared to these cultures, these people that my hope is that our time will come. In other words, sometime in the next year or two, there will be a culmination of events where people notice that, oh, this system actually is interesting and worth looking at because now I have problems the system solves. Whereas maybe I didn't have those problems before. Or now that system is mature enough to where it can do and solve the problems I am interested, whereas it couldn't do but solve those problems before.

[02:47:36] John Carvalho: My hope is just people realize that the algorithm is shit. Elon is not actually that much better than Jack at managing a For You feed. It's just different tradeoffs, but ultimately outsourcing all of your trust to very institutionalized sources is going to come at a price. Now it's like you go on X and if you follow AI stuff, it's all a bunch of secretly paid promo to try to hype one AI thing over another AI thing. It's just trend, trend, trend, trend, trend. It's like everything in X is just trend now.

[02:48:17] John Carvalho: Anyway.

[02:48:18] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there's something else that I want to say about AI. I did notice that there's like an industry-wide pivot towards creating stuff because they realized somewhere along the lines that they're going to have AI agents to solve problems and automate some jobs. And these AI agents might need money or might need access to some sort of financial service and they cannot have their own bank accounts. So they're going to be using Bitcoin or stablecoins or whatever. I see a lot of people moving into this concept of creating an economy for the agents and saying that these systems will be highly appreciated by AIs.

[02:49:07] Vlad Costea: I've also heard a wild theory by someone who said it's very unlikely that some AI agents will decide that we built the best technology for themselves. And it's likely that the AI will just create their own blockchain or whatever and just settle their own transactions in the way that they want.

[02:49:28] John Carvalho: So there's [unclear: a few] things going on there. I think one of them is that Bitcoiners see AI taking the air out of the room, right? The same way shitcoiners see the latest shitcoin taking air out of the room, right? Like Ethereum comes along and then Solana comes along and Ethereum is worrying about all the attention Solana is getting. And so Ethereum starts doing the same things that Solana does and they all start having feature parity across chains, etc. With AI, I think Bitcoiners are guilty of the same thing.

[02:49:58] John Carvalho: In other words, we want the bonds and we don't want to see the value go away. We don't want stablecoins to take the value from Bitcoin because of AI. We don't want shitcoins to take the value because of Bitcoin through AI. We don't want AI to take the value from Bitcoin through VC investment, etc. We want relevance and that's part of the keeping the price up thing. And so you're going to see narratives once again. You're going to see memes used. You're going to see narratives twisted and you're going to see nuance left aside once again with this topic as well.

[02:50:34] John Carvalho: I don't have a hard feeling yet about this, but my instinct is saying the AI is using Bitcoin is kind of just not a thing and that it won't be a thing. AI is using money. The problem you mentioned, AI is not having an account, is sort of real. The reason I say sort of is the AIs are not entities. The AIs are computers owned by people. My AI that's spending Bitcoin is spending my Bitcoin. It's not spending its Bitcoin. It's spending my Bitcoin. And I do have a bank account, which means the AI can also have a bank account.

[02:51:17] John Carvalho: And so the problem is a little more nuanced than as you've presented it and as Bitcoiners present it. The AI is ultimately limited by what the user can provide to it, not what technology can provide to it when it comes to resources. The user provides its electricity. The user provides its hardware. The user provides its money. The user provides its account. You know what I mean? Everything comes from and is ultimately responsible to and the privilege of the user that's facilitating that AI. And so does the AI have money problems if it has everything the user has?

[02:51:52] John Carvalho: No. It has the same problems the user has. And so if the user has Bitcoin problems, the AI has Bitcoin problems. If the user has fiat problems, the AI has fiat problems. There's no AI citizen that we need to be able to make independent and so we need to be able to make sure he can have a bank account even though he's not a real person. This is a narrative. This is not the actual topographical or logistic situation, right? Because the AIs are all just humans behind them.

[02:52:22] John Carvalho: They're computers behind them. And people own the computers. They're physical. They can also suffer violence, et cetera. And so I think that what's more likely, and I think what's more interesting for AI, and which, again, I'm self-serving here, but if you look at how Pubky, our platform, uses social semantic graphs and what that means for algorithms, you will quickly realize AI would love this shit. I would much prefer to be operating in this paradigm where it can get the metadata about every single entity and every single, you know what I mean, where it can accumulate metadata.

[02:52:56] John Carvalho: It can decide how to make decisions. That is going to be much more relevant to AI because it works similarly to how AI works with weights and things like this. There's a lot of parallel, you know, complementary behavior there. So then I would say more likely the AIs, you're right when you said they're probably going to invent their own way to interact with each other. I think more likely they're going to use reputation. They're going to say, whenever I deal with this other thing or this other AI, if it behaves how I expect it to, I'm going to keep track of that.

[02:53:31] John Carvalho: If it behaves in a way I don't expect, I'm going to keep track of that. And they're probably going to deal in favors. They're probably going to deal in favors, in reputation, in credit. I don't think they're going to deal in Bitcoin because Bitcoin doesn't scale. Bitcoin's expensive. Bitcoin's slow. You know what I mean? Like, AI doesn't have Bitcoin problems. AIs aren't censored any differently than their user is censored. So I'm painting the contrast picture. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in the other side at all.

[02:54:03] John Carvalho: I'm just showing how you have to think of it both ways sincerely. Yeah, it is true that there is something also to the idea that AI is entirely digital. Thus, dealing with a bank account will come with problems. In other words, it literally can't create a bank account for you. You have to do it. You have to do the facial recognition or whatever. So there are actual limits. Using digital only money does unlock certain conveniences. But I just think it's going to be much more practical than the ones that Bitcoiners are going to gravitate towards.

[02:54:38] Vlad Costea: At the same time, to me, it feels like capitulation, where this technology was always promoted as something that is making humans more sovereign, more resistant to censorship from governments, more in charge of their own money. And now we're saying, well, the humans don't want it. Let's build for AI.

[02:55:08] John Carvalho: Yeah, could be. I guess that complements what I said. It's capitulation similarly to what I said in that it's like shitcoiners. They see a new trend and they have to hop on the trend. It's FOMO. It's trying to protect the gravity of Bitcoin, trying to retract the relevance of Bitcoin. They don't quite know if the product fit or the solution is real or not. So much as they're ready to go ahead and hype it to give it a fair chance, if it is true.

[02:55:44] John Carvalho: But yeah, I need to get going soon. So I don't know if you have a final topic or question. I also need to go in the bathroom.

[02:55:53] Vlad Costea: I'm also super hungry. But let me think of something that we can use for closing. I've been meaning to ask you about your fashion brand, which is Tar and Feathers. You sent me some T-shirts, which I think are very cool. I've even worn a couple of them during the podcast in the previous season. Now that I moved places, I need to open boxes and see where I have these T-shirts, which is also the reason why I did not order more because I didn't spend too much time in the same place.

[02:56:24] Vlad Costea: But I want you to tell me more about your vision and why you decided to get into fashion.

[02:56:31] John Carvalho: I am a designer on every level. In other words, I've always made things, whether it be a product, a picture, a drawing, a logo, a brand, or a fashion design. So my interest was just that I noticed that AI was getting to a place where it could really make trying to design things a lot faster when it came to patterns or when it came to even to illustrations as well. And these are things that there are certain kinds of T-shirts and styles that people wouldn't normally do because they're too much expense or too much work or too hard.

[02:57:08] John Carvalho: So last year, not this winter, but the winter before, I spent a while on my vacation and on the weekends making thousands and thousands of different patterns and designs just to try to see where the latest state of the drop shipping print world was. And it's pretty nice. You can get custom made sweatshirts and socks and T-shirts and button shirts even, like the kind I like to wear, like this. They're not Tar and Feathers by the way, but you can make stuff like this and it's actually pretty good quality.

[02:57:43] John Carvalho: Even arguably better quality than a lot of things you might get on Etsy or whatever if you choose the right vendors. And so I just noticed that I have a eclectic kind of style. I really like crazy loud patterns and wild colors and I have my own kind of aesthetic of designs that I like. And I just made the whole thing for me. I was like, I want a shirt that looks like this. I want jogging pants that look like that. And I'm just going to experiment and just make all the things I want.

[02:58:15] John Carvalho: And then as I made them, I started thinking, you know, some of these are actually pretty cool, even if I try to step outside myself. Some of these are pretty cool and other people would like them. And I remember saying to you after I was wearing them, I don't know, they just make me feel better. Like, when I wear, like, this crazy... like, I have T-shirts that are crazier than this and it's just a T-shirt. It's just a crazy pattern. And when I wear it, I just feel good. I just like having that on.

[02:58:42] John Carvalho: I like how it looks. I like looking at it. And that's the whole thing with Tar and Feathers. The website is tf.style if anybody's interested. But it's just like empowering clothing, I guess. It's like being not scared of whatever other people think about what fashion choices you make and just wearing some stuff that's kind of crazy. I also have like the anti-surveillance stuff in there I was playing with where there are these hooded sweatshirts in there that the AI was trying to make patterns that would make it hard for AI to tell what was happening.

[02:59:13] John Carvalho: And so there are some like really strange out of left field kind of patterns you can look at that are just meant to make it harder for certain types of video surveillance and recording. They're not tested or anything. It's not like actual science going on there. But it's just an interesting concept, [unclear: like an interesting] conversation starter. But yeah, I like wearing crazy button shirts and so I have a nice collection at home and now I can kind of make my own. So that's the whole thing with Tar and Feathers.

[02:59:41] John Carvalho: I would love to be able to do more. I haven't touched it in probably nine months or more as far as making new designs. But the store is up. The store still works. People still order stuff from it. I think if I actually promoted it might actually potentially be successful. I just can't. I just don't have time. By the way, I got engaged recently, and so I'm trying to convince my fiancé, I think you met Bia at some point, to maybe pick up the work on Tar and Feathers and try to make something out of it, but I don't know if that will happen either.

[03:00:14] John Carvalho: So, yeah, if your listeners want to check it out, there's some interesting stuff on there. There's some cool Bitcoin t-shirts on there, too, that are different than what you'd normally see. But, yeah, I would love to have some time to get back into that again. I just don't know when.

[03:00:28] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so first of all, congratulations on the engagement. Secondly, you have a very nice Cancel Cancel Culture hat and some t-shirts like the demon ones, which I think are really nice, and they cost like $35 or something. I don't know, because it's...

[03:00:49] John Carvalho: Probably less for the T-shirts.

[03:00:51] Vlad Costea: The Romanian currency.

[03:00:55] John Carvalho: A lot of the shirts are very low profit margin because the cost to do them, print them one at a time is expensive, and so it's not a profitable venture. It's just the prices on there are meant to prevent me losing money by mistake on shipping, basically.

[03:01:14] Vlad Costea: So I really like some of these t-shirts, especially the demon ones. They look very heavy metal.

[03:01:21] John Carvalho: That was the goal. I really like the Bitcoin one, just red Bitcoin logo and heavy metal lettering. I think that one looks cool. But it's hard, man, to market anymore. It used to be where I could just tweet something and tweet it a few times, and if it was interesting, it would actually carry through the [unclear: Bitcoin]. Three years ago, it used to be like this. But now, I don't even know, man. It's really hard to get more than 2,000 views on a tweet. Never mind likes and interactions.

[03:01:53] Vlad Costea: I know. It's like you have to play a game where you learn what's the latest rule, and then you follow along with the latest punctuation or how you're supposed to space your words and whatever. I remember playing with this. You have to reply

[03:02:09] John Carvalho: To everybody who replies to you in the first 10 minutes or it won't carry. Stupid little things like this. I don't have time for that shit. I don't have time to hire somebody to do that shit for Synonym. They're doing something wrong, in my opinion. They're going in this whole inference. They keep doubling down on inferring what you want to see instead of asking people what they want to see. I saw recently they actually did a thing similar to Pubky where they added tags for different categories of tweets where they were rolling out a feature where people could filter out politics or sports or whatever.

[03:02:45] John Carvalho: That's interesting, but what's interesting and what I predicted about it is that they would walk it back immediately, and they already did start walking it back, which is because it reduces virality. If people are blocking politics, Twitter is bragging the past few days about how it's the busiest days ever. It's probably because of the Iran war and Twitter being a good resource to see random news of it. But if people turn off politics, then there's no more virality for the Iran war, and that's not something X wants.

[03:03:16] John Carvalho: X is still looking out for itself more than its users, and so you're going to keep seeing little trip-ups with how to properly give people what they want.

[03:03:27] Vlad Costea: I think their business model is just to induce rage bait and make you angry all the time, so you react to stuff. The literal business model is advertising and

[03:03:39] John Carvalho: Selling accounts. So if they're selling accounts, they need it to be addictive. Advertising, they need it to be high frequency. In other words, there must be many views, much virality. So their incentive has become trends. Trend-making, trend-creating, trend-sharing. It's just a trend system. It's a way to say if something is viral and get it moving through the system. It's not a match you with the data you're the most interested in system. It seems like it's that, but it's not that.

[03:04:13] Vlad Costea: Unfortunately, no. Yeah, it's pretty bad, but I still use it. For example, this stream is still broadcast on Twitter, and I think like 800 people...

[03:04:24] John Carvalho: I'm not saying there are better options. I'm just complaining. It's true. X compared to a lot of things is vastly superior. You know, if you want to compare X to Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or almost any social media probably, it's just way better. Nostr, whatever. And so, yeah, my goals with Pubky app and what we're doing with Semantic Graph stuff is to give people new abilities that they can't have in these systems to show why they might use another system.

[03:04:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah. To everyone watching this, I hope that you clicked – not clicked – I hope that you scanned this QR code and got the Bitkit wallet, test it out. I think the rewards ran out after the 10th person, but I wanted to keep this. Just in case more people want to download the wallet, check it out, see if you like it. Thank you very much, John, for your time. I think it's unfortunate that the first hour was a bit awkward, and then we really kicked off. The thing is

[03:05:26] John Carvalho: That one of the things I like about you is the awkwardness. You have these little awkward moments. I watch your videos sometimes, and there's an awkward moment, and I smile so big. I don't know what it is, but it's like I like the awkwardness. I know that between you and I, yeah, we had an awkward advertising business. But it's not as important as anybody wants it to be. I will say what's on my mind, and that's it, and that's why I said it. That's why I like your awkwardness.

[03:05:52] Vlad Costea: ...angry or upset about it.

[03:05:55] John Carvalho: It's... yeah, I'm not angry or upset. It's all okay. But yeah, again, thank you so much for having me. The audience, like you said, please try Bitkit. You can search it in the app stores. You can try Pubky by going to pubky.app, and you can sign up there and try that app as well. We really appreciate the support and any kind of interaction with our vision because it's a lot of work. It's hard work. We're proud of it, and it's not easy getting people to pay attention to it. Thanks again, Vlad.

[03:06:27] Vlad Costea: Thanks, John. Bye, guys. Bye, party people.