Title: S17 E26: Steve Thurmond, Calin Culianu & The Phenomenal Big Blockers
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Calin Culianu (Bitcoin Cash developer: Bitcoin Cash Node, Fulcrum, Electron Cash), Steve Thurmond (Bitcoin Cash advocate, Cash Stamps), plus Bitcoin Cash community members joining the livestream: FiendishCrypto, Kyle (SayoshiNakamario; FundMe.cash / CashStarter, Bitcoin Cash University), Kallisti (Jerry; Selene Wallet), Joey and Rosco Kalis (CashScript)
Published: 2026-05-27
Duration: 8:14:44
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2026-05-27_s17_e26_steve_thurmond_calin_culianu_the_phenomenal_big_blockers_master.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-05-27_s17_e26_steve_thurmond_calin_culianu_the_phenomenal_big_blockers_master.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, given a full manual read-through (about 360 corrections), then reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream; three-way comparison over the whole 8-hour episode (1,183 disagreement spots reviewed). 167 doubtful, dropped or garbled stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD), including the whole unpunctuated stretch 01:20:20-01:31:25 (sponsor reads, Kyle and Fiendish joining). Restored passages the base transcript had dropped or garbled include Vlad's Peter Todd "Tail Emission Is Not Inflation" remark at 03:42:33, the fungibility / Silk Road / CashFusion passage at 04:00:09-04:00:53, the "three options: raise the block size, do tail emission, or confiscate Satoshi's coins" exchange at 05:17:32, the "no, there isn't... the whole crypto space has been sabotaged" answer at 02:41:28 (where the base had a "Thanks for watching!" hallucination) and the closing sponsor thanks at 08:13:41. Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (eight reference voices, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings, and short turns were re-attributed by hand where needed (e.g. 00:12:27, 00:37:02, 01:21:20, 01:28:20-01:28:28, 02:04:58, 02:24:25-02:24:39, 02:25:48-02:25:52, 05:17:32-05:17:40, 05:36:49, 05:46:48-05:46:50, 06:16:39, 07:43:24, 08:10:12). Sponsor reads (Cake Wallet, LayerTwo Labs, SideShift.ai, OrangeRock) are read live by Vlad and labelled as Vlad Costea. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the feed and the web (bliss.cash/2026 speakers and panels, Dr Bitcoin podcast / Faketoshi book): BCH Bliss (Ljubljana), Layla upgrade, CHIPs, ABLA (Adaptive Blocksize Limit Algorithm), CashTokens, CashScript (cashscript.org), CashFusion, Cash Stamps, Selene Wallet, Paytaca (Joemar Taganna), Cauldron DEX, ParyonUSD (Mathieu Geukens), BCH Bull, AnyHedge / General Protocols, BCH Guru, Moca, Riften Labs (Dagur Valberg, Halvor), Bitcoin Cash Node, Knuth, Fulcrum, ElectrumX, Electrs, Jason Dreyzehner (Quantum Root), Sal the Agorist, Joël (Dash), Amaury Séchet / XEC / Avalanche pre-consensus, CTOR, awemany and the 2018 inflation bug, Arthur van Pelt and Mark Hunter (Dr Bitcoin podcast, Faketoshi), Craig Wright / BSV / nChain / Calvin Ayre, Roger Ver, Gavin Andresen, Mike Hearn, Wladimir van der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Greg Maxwell, Peter Todd, Peter Rizun / Nexa, Luke Dashjr, Matt Corallo, Martti Malmi, Amir Taaki, Samson Mow, Jimmy Song, John Carvalho, Paolo Ardoino / Tether, Michael Saylor, Joi Ito, Mike Benz, Kaspa, Quai, LitVM, Citrea, eCash (Paul Sztorc's drivechain fork) and LayerTwo Labs. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; spoken phrasing kept. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:46] Vlad Costea: Welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 26. We are live with Calin Culianu, who is one of the biggest developers in BCH, and also Steve Thurmond, who is also one of the biggest advocates of BCH. The context of this interview is that it's been almost nine years since Bitcoin Cash had launched, since the fabled block size wars, and it seems like, especially if you've been following the show, there are a lot of Bitcoin BTC developers who are inspired by the work that the BCH developers have done over the years, especially the covenant stuff and the opcodes.

[00:01:23] Vlad Costea: And it seems like the BCH side, even though it's being said in lots of places that most of the developers stayed with BTC, and BCH only got the libertarian advocates and the wackos like Craig, right? Anyway, even though there's this narrative, it seems like there are some very competent developers there from which we can learn and from which Jeremy Rubin learned apparently when he proposed CSFS and whatever. So it's really good to have you guys. And also, I got to mention the sponsors of this episode, Cake Wallet, LayerTwo Labs, SideShift.ai, OrangeRock, which is a non-KYC trading platform by the Bitcoin.com people.

[00:02:05] Vlad Costea: And I think that's it. It's good to have you guys. Let's get started. Let's talk about Bitcoin Cash.

[00:02:14] Steve Thurmond: Yes, indeed. Thanks a lot for having us, Vlad. It seems like this has been a long time coming, so we appreciate the opportunity to kind of showcase Bitcoin Cash where we've been in our trajectory going forward. It would be nice to just kind of clear up a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions of BCH in general. We hear a lot of really dated talking points, especially on Twitter, that people are just kind of clueless. BCH isn't what you think it is in short. The technology has really evolved and adapted, grown multiple hard forks, backwards incompatible hard forks since 2017.

[00:02:59] Steve Thurmond: And we've built a lot of cool things on the UTXO protocol. So yeah, we appreciate the opportunity to kind of showcase what we've done. And I'm not a developer. That'll be very obvious in our communication here. I'm just a big enthusiast and advocate of hard sound money. So I appreciate people like Calin being on here and kind of giving more of the in-depth technical knowledge. You get pretty in-depth as well, Vlad. So I know there's questions you'll have that some of these devs will be able to answer a lot better than I. So yeah, take it away, man.

[00:03:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I do have some curiosities because like three or four episodes ago, that was last month, I had Amaury Séchet on the show and he's the creator of Bitcoin Cash. He's the one who actually forked off and said, OK, this is the big block version of Bitcoin and big blockers to join this. And then like three years later, he left. And you guys picked up the pieces. It's kind of interesting because Bitcoin Cash gets associated with Roger Ver, with Jihan Wu, with Amaury, and none of these guys are involved anymore. So who are you guys?

[00:04:17] Calin Culianu: Well, so Bitcoin Cash was created by, it was like a large effort. There was a lot of people there, right? It wasn't just Amaury. Amaury sort of, I guess, managed to get some financial backing and also had the courage to just finally do it. But there was talks about forking. You know, sort of how you see now in the Bitcoin world now, the BTC world, people are kind of upset and they're trying to create, some people are talking about a soft fork, you know, I mean, that was going on back then, too, in 2015, 2016.

[00:04:47] Calin Culianu: I mean, the hope was to sort of supplant Bitcoin, you know, not to have it take over. And I guess some of the people that were involved initially, I was involved in the first day as well. You know, I was there on Fork Day. I was involved in Bitcoin ABC. Some of the people that were involved then just haven't had the patience because it's been a rough ride since Fork Day, since August 1st, 2017, when Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin. Some of the people just, you know, attrition, you know, I mean, it's like a lot of us do this for free.

[00:05:18] Calin Culianu: What can you expect? I mean, it's an open source project. Some of us have funding, some of us don't. And yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, Roger, he can come up with conspiracy theories. But I mean, Roger, he still likes Bitcoin Cash. He's still on our team. But, you know, he's had sort of some other things to worry about. And in the meantime, other coins have grasped his attention. He doesn't like hate Bitcoin Cash. He's just, I mean, initially, he was funding some of the stuff that was going on in Bitcoin Cash. Through his Bitcoin.com business, he managed, he was sending funds some of our way.

[00:05:53] Calin Culianu: And, you know, these people are still around, like Roger, he's not like antagonistic to Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver. With Amaury Séchet, that's a specific case where he sort of tried to take over the coin and like charge a tax and sort of kick them out. And with Jihan, I don't know what's going on.

[00:06:11] Steve Thurmond: And to that point about Roger, Calin, it's a common misconception I hear all the time that people think Roger created BCH, and he was merely a vocal champion of blocks.

[00:06:23] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is narratives. So there are a lot of narratives that were spun back then, you know, like, you know, the Bitcoin core people like had like millions of dollars to throw at like narrative creation. And narrative creation is a phenomenon. Like, you know, psyops exist, even on large scales and small scales, you know, I mean, public relations has always existed, like since the 1920s, at least, advertising. I mean, a lot of this is like psyops stuff or narrative control. It's like, oh, it's Roger Ver's scam coin, you know.

[00:06:51] Calin Culianu: It doesn't acknowledge the actual problem we had with where Bitcoin was going. So yeah, it never really was Roger's coin to begin with. I mean, he threw some money at it, and so did Jihan and other people. But, you know, there's Bitprim, which was a company that was around from Argentina that threw money at it. I mean, there was a lot of people that were upset with what was going on. We felt it was an existential threat to not scale the blockchain, you know. People are getting around like a limited capacity chain that has high fees, which is what's happened.

[00:07:20] Steve Thurmond: I'd be curious as to your perception, Vlad, since you lived through it, obviously, what was your perception of being a maxi at that time?

[00:07:31] Vlad Costea: I was very confused at the time. Like, it was hard for me to pick sides because I mostly had no understanding of the phenomena. I just landed on BTC like most of the people, because if you're holding Bitcoin, you also got the BTC and you could also claim the BCH. So, I think what I didn't like about BCH initially was the fact that it was trying to claim that it's the real Bitcoin. Like that whole campaign, like if it just said, well, we're the large block version of Bitcoin and we're trying to do something different from the store of value narrative, I would be on board with that.

[00:08:09] Vlad Costea: But I just didn't like how there was a confusion for a while, where Bitcoin.com was a BCH website and r/btc on Reddit was and still is pro BCH. And I think it was like a nasty divorce, you know, where the two parties are separating and they're taking whatever and it's never nice. But it was also confusing for the people who just joining at the time because there was a massive bull market that year, which was really unexpected. A lot of people were thinking back in 2016 and early 2017 that Bitcoin is going to die as a project and there's not much left in it to accomplish.

[00:08:54] Vlad Costea: But we had that massive bull run for both BCH and BTC. I think November was just incredible. I remember at the time I was on exchange in Italy at the University of Bologna. I was walking to university every morning, seeing how the price goes up by like a thousand dollars every day. And I was like, what the hell, man? Where is this going? Should I drop out of university? Which I eventually did.

[00:09:20] Calin Culianu: Good choice, probably. Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, I remember I was in Prague, actually, I was visiting some friends in Prague and it was like November and BCH was at $4,500. And I forget what BTC was at. I had sold all my BTC at that point. But yeah, it was crazy. I remember that period. I mean, the conspiracy theory-minded people are like, all right, so now the money printer people sort of captured, you know, they captured the preeminent cryptocurrency, which I believe really what happened.

[00:09:46] Calin Culianu: Bitcoin was captured so it could never really replace fiat. It could just become an asset class, just let us become. But now that they captured it, they're going to pump the asset. I mean, the money printer people love pumping assets. It's one of their favorite things to do with the printed money.

[00:10:00] Steve Thurmond: That's just self-evident. It's just another speculative asset, which is exactly where they want it, hamstrung, crippled to actually work as it was intended, peer-to-peer electronic cash. And I think that's where the narrative and the confusion kind of sets in because we firmly believe that Bitcoin Cash is what Bitcoin was intended to be, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. So yeah, it's a little tongue-in-cheek to say Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin, because it is obviously a fork. But we think from a functionality perspective and an ethos and philosophy and economics perspective, it is what Bitcoin was intended to be.

[00:10:45] Steve Thurmond: A scalable blockchain that works as peer-to-peer electronic cash and freedom money for the world. So yeah, but I can completely see how it muddied the waters. Saying that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin for sure, especially with the Reddit and all of that narrative. But I'm curious as to now coming full circle, if you will, to present day, how your perspective has now changed for both BTC and BCH to present day?

[00:11:19] Vlad Costea: I like how you're taking over my job right now and you're the one asking the question.

[00:11:22] Calin Culianu: Yes, I was thinking that too. You're in my mind.

[00:11:25] Vlad Costea: Anyway, it's a very good question. I was going to mention this anyway. So even if you haven't asked me, I was going to mention that my naive perception up to very recently was that the disagreement wasn't on the fact that Bitcoin needed to scale. It was about how to scale, how to go forward. Because obviously, BTC also increased the block size with SegWit.

[00:11:46] Vlad Costea: They actually invented this thing which some people called like an accounting trick where you have the block weight that gets increased and you have this witness side Which is three megabytes and then the base layer, which was always one megabyte, since it was left like that. So my perception and the reason why I was so excited about BTC was that the promise was that Lightning is going to solve this and we're going to be able to pull this off without changing the base layer, which turned out to be a very naive and silly assumption on my behalf.

[00:12:27] Steve Thurmond: Just 18 more months.

[00:12:30] Vlad Costea: Exactly. And Bitcoin Cash, what it did was very conservative. It was exactly what people have been saying since Jeff Garzik in 2011, I think, when he created this client with seven megabyte blocks and Satoshi told him, you know, it's too early for this. Don't run that software because it's uncalled for at this point. So this was always the proven way to do it. Satoshi has increased it, I think, from like 250 kilobytes to 500 and then one megabyte. I think it was Hal Finney's idea to have a block size at all, like a cap on it.

[00:13:09] Calin Culianu: If I can point out the history, like initially there was, I think it was 32, it was a 32 megabyte limit initially, and then it became evident that you can DOS the network. And so, yeah, then you went really conservative. And then, yeah, anyway, just yeah, I'm sorry.

[00:13:22] Vlad Costea: Continue. My point is that I was excited about Lightning. I ran a Lightning node. I tried to balance channels and lost money doing so. I sipped the Kool-Aid of passive income using Lightning, which at the time was about opening channels and basically taking fees from people who were using them. And obviously there are not so many users and you're competing with data centers that were much faster. And that was on a Raspberry Pi, because once again, I was sipping the Kool-Aid that a Raspberry Pi is good enough. You have a great

[00:13:58] Calin Culianu: Deal of self-awareness, man. Okay. All right.

[00:14:00] Vlad Costea: It was an interesting experiment. But then when I started sort of becoming very skeptical of this was when they started saying, well, there is no way Lightning can scale with these small user nodes. We need to have data centers and we need to have professional grade gears and hardware. And I was like, okay, we're sort of losing the plot. How is this different from the argument that was used in increasing the block size? And they would say, well, this is a layer two. It can become centralized and it doesn't matter.

[00:14:32] Vlad Costea: And when they said, well, centralization means efficiency on Lightning, I sort of lost interest in it because for me it was exciting for a while. I was in groups where we were opening channels with each other and we're paying a lot of transaction fees on the base layer for doing it. And then I realized, okay, this is not going anywhere. It doesn't really scale as they promised. The only way it can possibly scale is what they eventually made, which is federations and these Cashu mints and whatever.

[00:15:05] Vlad Costea: And I remember like three years ago, there was the narrative floating around that Cashu, which is an implementation of Chaumian eCash on top of custodial Lightning, is exactly what Bitcoin should be, because it scales, it's private. How can you want more? Except that the issuer of the mint can steal the funds. And that's very much against the principles of Bitcoin. Like, why are we even here if not to minimize trust? And nowadays, I still see people trying to reinvent banking on Bitcoin. And to go back to one of the conspiracy theories that was being presented at the time on r/btc and by some Bitcoin Cash advocates, like you guys were right about Blockstream in some ways and wrong about it in others.

[00:15:58] Vlad Costea: Even in Roger Ver's book, like he was assuming that the business is the sidechain, which they always said, like we're going to launch Liquid as the sidechain. Of course, it turned out to be a major letdown. Now it's a federation. And people assumed that they were going to take transaction fees and that was their business.

[00:16:19] Vlad Costea: I think there is some merit to the conspiracy theory about the funding behind Blockstream, but not the one about, what was it, one of the Illuminati, I think, Bilderberg, whatever. I think the real conspiracy theory is behind, I think, Mastercard, which was one of the companies that funded Blockstream early on.

[00:16:40] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, AXA and I believe DCG Digital Currency Group and Mastercard were the three implicated there.

[00:16:49] Vlad Costea: I think Mastercard was investing in this, not because they saw the future of money in it, but they wanted to stop the future of money to become this. They just wanted to buy more time. Then we started having these crypto debit cards, which, I don't know, it feels like a defeat when you tap your card. It feels like, okay, the banks have won, maybe that we made some more US dollars, but once again, what's the point? Just a speculative investment? We got rich, that's it? That's enough.

[00:17:22] Calin Culianu: I mean, you know, the money printer people don't often have, you know, a lot of people got rich from the money printer. So it's better than nothing. I mean, if they can get away with doing whatever they want to do without giving anyone any money, they do that. So it's a small win. Sorry.

[00:17:37] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, I think it just always comes back to control, the control on all fronts, the money, the narrative, the technology, it's always going to come back to control. And Bitcoin was so revolutionary because it was a way to defang the banking system. And now all they've done is defang Bitcoin. At the end of the day, it has no teeth.

[00:18:00] Calin Culianu: They have an overpowered cheat, man. They can just print money. Of course, of course. That's an overpowered, that's an OP, you know, that's not, the game isn't balanced, man. They got to nerf that. Right.

[00:18:10] Vlad Costea: There's also the lunacy in Bitcoin right now with the security budget, which some people claim does not exist and is not a real thing. Where they say, well, the money printer will go burr in perpetuity and Bitcoin is secured because of that. Like all the money that gets printed will go into Bitcoin. That's the assumption. Yeah.

[00:18:32] Calin Culianu: If you have like a continually rising price that beats the block subsidy going, halving every four years, you know, the block subsidy halves every four years. So if the price of Bitcoin continues to rise and it beats that, then yeah, then there's no problem.

[00:18:47] Steve Thurmond: And that's all hunky-dory as long as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, but BRICS has entered the chat. There are other people that are seeing the writing on the wall and know the history of fiat currency, that every fiat currency that's ever existed throughout time has eventually failed in time. So I guess that as long as we have the biggest guns on the block, then we can force the US dollar down everyone's throat. But that dynamic can also change very quickly as you're seeing unfold on the global scale right now.

[00:19:17] Vlad Costea: So, yeah, ironically, the BRICS countries are actually using Bitcoin in the way that it's supposed to be used.

[00:19:25] Calin Culianu: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We saw like with the Iran thing, right? They were paying in Bitcoin.

[00:19:29] Vlad Costea: Also, the [unclear: Chinese spies] at some point were paid in Bitcoin. I remember reading that. And Russians also, I know that they do a lot of Bitcoin mining. So it seems like China used to be the largest miner and they still have some of the largest manufacturing businesses.

[00:19:50] Calin Culianu: Yeah. And there's always rumors that the CIA pays for some of its black ops in Bitcoin just because it's easier to move money illicitly that way.

[00:19:58] Steve Thurmond: There will definitely be a transitionary period from US dollars to whatever the new reserve currency and world reserve currency is. There's definitely going to be that transitionary period, but at the end of the day, your coin is only as good as what it's backed by, if you will. And if it's inextricably tied to fiat because BTC doesn't work as a medium of exchange, it creates this negative feedback loop, especially when transaction volume goes up. To me, it's just self-evident. Transaction volume spikes. Transaction fees spike. You then eliminate 99% of the global population from being able to transact in it, creating that negative feedback loop and knocking price back down.

[00:20:51] Steve Thurmond: Which is great for the 1%. They'll gladly spend $1,000 to send a billion dollars. They don't give a shit. But for the rest of the world, it completely neuters it as a medium of exchange, which is money's most essential quality at the end of the day.

[00:21:08] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, but then you're going to get Peter Todd being like, oh, here's the Lightning transaction. If it works for me and works for you, then it works. What are you talking about? And of course, it's a very small-scale, anecdotal example. It doesn't mean that it scales for the rest of the world, but he's like, oh, so why would the rest of the world want to join all at once right now?

[00:21:31] Calin Culianu: Even if you wanted to onboard, you know how that whole thing... If you wanted to onboard the whole world onto Lightning, you would need 888 megabyte blocks or something. Even if every person in the world had to do a channel opening transaction, even the Lightning whitepaper discusses this, you definitely need bigger blocks if you want it to be global.

[00:21:49] Steve Thurmond: The whitepaper itself says 133 megabyte blocks for everyone to complete two transactions per year.

[00:22:00] Steve Thurmond: Not to mention that it's not even Bitcoin at the end of the day. It's a Rube Goldberg IOU when you really come down to it. If somebody says, oh, look, I just bought my shake from Steak and Shake in Bitcoin. I'm like, show me the transaction on the blockchain. They can't show you the BTC transaction on the blockchain because it's not there. You have an IOU to get Bitcoin in the future. It's an unnecessarily Rube Goldberg project.

[00:22:29] Calin Culianu: The danger with IOUs like that is not necessarily that they might not be honored, they might be. Then you can introduce shenanigans, which is what the bankers have done historically. Gold was difficult to move, so everyone was passing out IOUs for gold. And then eventually there were more IOUs and there was gold. Basically, that's when the bankers started to get real power, when they could just create money out of thin air. That's the worry, that you end up, you end up replacing the fiat system with another fiat system.

[00:22:57] Vlad Costea: So are you saying that Lightning is the Bitcoin Cash?

[00:23:03] Calin Culianu: In what sense? Well, I mean Lightning's intention is to... I mean, that's the narrative behind Lightning, right? To have it as a form of cash for everyday payments like coffees and stuff, right?

[00:23:14] Vlad Costea: I was trying a bad pun. I'm sorry.

[00:23:18] Calin Culianu: Yeah, okay. Sorry.

[00:23:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so we are at this point right now where it's not clear whether or not Bitcoin is going to be the future of money. And it's very depressing when I realize all the effort that I put into this. And sometimes I feel like a fraud. And I'm saying this to you guys because you're going to claim the victory or whatever and be like, look, we have a Bitcoin maxi who acknowledges this, but I feel like a fraud for promoting. Especially I onboarded a bunch of people at conferences.

[00:23:53] Vlad Costea: I was going to restaurants or whatever, and then there was a waiter or waitress and I was like, hey, would you like to take your tip in Bitcoin? And I would be like, install Wallet of Satoshi or Blue Wallet or whatever, and here's $10. Look, you just received $10 in Bitcoin. Of course, it's not on the blockchain. Of course, if they wanted to close the channel and claim that on the blockchain, they would pay most of it as a transaction fee. I hope they spent it somehow like on gift cards with Bitrefill or whatever.

[00:24:23] Vlad Costea: But it's very depressing when you realize that you made all of this effort and you were believing in this system and it turned out to be not what you thought it would be. And now we have LightSpark, which is centralized and stupid, to be honest. Why would anyone want to use that? Of course, it's convenient and it's more reliable. But even in decentralized Lightning, sometimes I try to use it and I get failed transactions, which never happens on the base layer. So there are so many issues with reliability, with user experience, with all of the stuff that right now we're about 10 years since. No, it's more than 10 years since the Lightning white paper.

[00:25:08] Vlad Costea: It's almost 10 years since it got deployed on the mainnet. It was being tested 10 years ago on Litecoin, I think. And I don't know. It just feels like on one hand, we could never have this divide between BTC and BCH if people just spend more time talking. But on the other hand, it seems like the minds were set on doing something. I guess Blockstream, maybe that they honestly believed they were going to be successful with their federation. Whereas the industry at large, I think the biggest winner from this battle between which one is the real Bitcoin and how do we scale Bitcoin was actually Ethereum, which was this mess of a chain which had a nasty divorce also in 2016 with a bailout that they did for investors with the DAO hack.

[00:26:04] Vlad Costea: And it didn't seem to go anywhere like it seemed to be just another NXT or Mastercoin or whatever. And then in 2017, they had the ICO mania. That's when the price rose from like double digits to triple digits. And it's become like the de facto number two since then. Of course, it got flipped by Bitcoin Cash in November for a brief time. But that was the established number two since 2017. And I think it was mostly because of the block size wars. And I got to give them credit for the research that they funded over the years. Like that was incredible. They spent their money well to their credit.

[00:26:45] Calin Culianu: It's really very some of the smartest people in crypto are involved in Ethereum. They're coming up with good stuff. Yeah, totally. They're serious people, you know.

[00:26:55] Steve Thurmond: I just want to, we're not going to rub your nose in it, Vlad. I just want to applaud your self-awareness. As Calin pointed out earlier, most people, specifically Maxis, never have the level of self-awareness that you have and they just continue to parrot the Saylor talking points. So kudos to you and taking in an objective look at the past and looking for solutions. So yeah, I salute you, man, for sure.

[00:27:29] Calin Culianu: And I think that no one can really predict the future. It seemed plausible. These really smart people are like, this is the path forward. Some of the people that were involved in Bitcoin early, like Greg Maxwell or Pieter Wuille, it seemed plausible, right? Like, you know, let's scale the L2 and this is the path forward and we got this big company Blockstream behind it. I mean, I don't know, don't take it on yourself to like, dude, we all lost, man. Bitcoin Cash is like number 14 or something.

[00:28:02] Calin Culianu: People don't pay attention to it. You know, Bitcoin right now is kind of stuck as digital gold and it's not replacing fiat anytime soon. I mean, everyone lost, like the bankers won. That's the people that won, you know, like the money printer people got, they brought in their big guns. They were forced to because they saw a threat and they managed to do what they do really well. They've been doing this for centuries. Like, it's like, you know, there's no body count here, at least like as far as you know, no one's been assassinated by them.

[00:28:29] Calin Culianu: So, you know, it's been relatively clean. Their ability to stop peer to peer digital money from like taking hold right now is, you know, successful. It only costs them $400 million or something maybe initially, and then it probably they've been throwing money at it in other ways. But I mean, it's relatively good and like Bitcoin still exists, like it's being used to settle like stuff like, you know, like in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz thing, I heard that some of the ships are just paying in Bitcoin.

[00:28:55] Calin Culianu: So that's something like, you know, even if it's just digital gold for now, it's like parked as digital gold until the bankers like collapse or something. It's something like it's better than the status quo before. There's like another financial instrument that people can use that's completely outside their universe. Like, it's really cool. Like it is still kind of a victory. Like it could have been much worse. So, I mean, they're winning. The bankers are winning. We have a common enemy. I really do think we do. But we've gained some ground and like some of them bankers are sort of into the Bitcoin world or they're into Ethereum because they like the financial instruments they can create on them.

[00:29:31] Calin Culianu: You know, it could have been much worse. I still think it's a small victory. I'm still a little optimistic. You know, we have like really dangerous enemies, man. Like these people like founded the CIA and stuff like that. Like they're dangerous people. You know, they topple governments if they want to. Like, you know, I think it could have been worse. It's been pretty clean and pretty bloodless. And, you know, they haven't really won yet. Like cryptocurrency cannot be uninvented, man. Like it's there. The genie's out of the bottle for sure.

[00:30:03] Calin Culianu: Yeah. And then they had to throw money at it and they had to make sure Bitcoin is number one because the flagship cryptocurrency can't be one to use for payments. You know, like they still had to concede some ground. And in the meantime, they had to up their game. They made Venmo and Zelle and all these other payment apps. Now you can send money, like before you couldn't, there was so much friction in sending money, like from one bank account to another, you know, it's revolution.

[00:30:23] Calin Culianu: I was using that in Romania, super convenient. They were forced to sort of up their game a little bit and they were put on notice. So the glass is still half full, but yeah, you know, my sort of worldview on it is that like really dangerous, powerful people that have an OP cheat called the money printer noticed what was going on and went to war against it. And, you know, we're lucky they didn't kill everybody involved in that. We're still around and cryptocurrency still exists.

[00:30:51] Calin Culianu: So that's a victory. And then someone, in some sense, they couldn't beat us. They joined us a little bit. So. You know, if you want to see the glass half full that way, that's how I frame it.

[00:31:00] Steve Thurmond: But yeah, I think the saving grace is that we, for the first time in modern civilization have, an exit. We have a life raft. We have, the ability to make the current system irrelevant. It's just a matter of education and dissemination of information. And yeah, man, that's huge.

[00:31:21] Calin Culianu: That has not existed for most people. Like, well, you can just use a different financial instrument. Like, fuck you. Like that's amazing. Even if it's Bitcoin and it's slightly captured and it doesn't scale to everyday payments. It's still something, man. That's like, that's insanely liberating for a lot of people still. So yeah.

[00:31:38] Steve Thurmond: They say, often no one's coming to save us. It's just up to us to create that parallel economy. And we have the ability to do so at this point.

[00:31:49] Vlad Costea: Oh, you guys are actually bullish on Bitcoin. That's cool.

[00:31:52] Calin Culianu: I'm bullish on the cryptocurrency as, a challenge and an answer. Like it's another, it's like a leak in the system. You know, they can't do like a hermetically sealed thing where they just capture all of us financially fully. So. I'm bullish not on Bitcoin itself cause I still feel like it's captured and it's not living up to its potential. And it could, I really personally feel like you need to fire all those devs. And just like start again, you know, the, keep the blockchain, keep everything, stop running core.

[00:32:20] Calin Culianu: The Luke Jr. People with their BIP, whatever it's called 341 or 115 or I forget. Those people are also out of their minds. Like you need, I don't know, but I mean, Bitcoin is there and it's number one and it's like, everyone knows what it is. So. The, you know, it can still, the situation can still be salvaged to some degree. So fire core definitely. Those people are compromised.

[00:32:42] Vlad Costea: The frustrations have added up over the years. Like everyone supported this project with different expectations that they were going to be able to do something. And there were a lot of conferences and a lot of nice talks and the pauses and a lot of VC money that was thrown at projects. And then you end up in this stasis where people have built something, which they run on testnets and they show it at every conference and everyone is like, yeah, that's so cool. Let's bring it to Bitcoin. And then when it's about activation, like, can we get this opcode that helps me get to work and helps me onboard people?

[00:33:20] Vlad Costea: And then they hit against this wall of consensus. Like there's no consensus for this. What does that mean?

[00:33:29] Calin Culianu: Well, there just needs to be unanimity.

[00:33:34] Vlad Costea: If there is only one guy who thinks it's controversial or it's not good enough or whatever, they just do a process which is called bike shedding. And there are entire Telegram chats of developers who are just like sharing their work. And then they're like, yeah, we can't really get this on Bitcoin without OP_CAT or without OP_CTV or something really basic to be honest. Like it's not like a hard fork that makes drastic changes. It's not a block size increase, which apparently is very controversial. It's something which is only like a dev tool for people to be able to bring their software.

[00:34:13] Vlad Costea: But then it gets very political. And I think that the Knots people, the BIP 110 guys are the ones who have been notorious for being toxic and for being against anything and believing that any change to Bitcoin is an attack on Bitcoin. They became mentally deranged when they got the modern version of colored coins coming to Bitcoin with the Ordinals. And they're like, no, you shouldn't use Bitcoin for this. And they accomplished successfully this mission of driving away a lot of users who were paying for transaction fees that were going to the miners.

[00:34:48] Vlad Costea: That's not happening too much anymore. Now you can pay sub one sat per vbyte to get into the transactions to get into the next block, which is insane. Because the bet that people like Greg Maxwell made was that people were willing to pay $100 fees for Bitcoin to settle transactions and then everything is going to happen on a layer two. We don't have proper layer twos. We don't have a base layer that scales better. Maybe it scales better because we had SegWit, but that's debatable.

[00:35:19] Vlad Costea: And then you wonder, well, what's left of this? And then you see bankers investing in ETFs and you see people like Cathie Wood. Is that what her name is? Cathie, I think. And she's bullish on Bitcoin and Michael Saylor selling his IOU and his Stretch stock, whatever that is. I don't pay any attention at all, but it's all over my news feed on Twitter and it makes me feel concerned because this is not what I got, why I got here. I was a political philosophy student.

[00:35:54] Vlad Costea: I was studying Internet governance and I was writing about it. And then I discovered Bitcoin through my studies and I was like, man, this is mind blowing. This changes everything. Now you can make Internet payments to anyone. Of course, I had some naive assumptions about the privacy of it. But regardless of my assumptions, I had high hopes because what I saw in Bitcoin was this neutral objective system like a clock. You know, you can't really argue against it. It works. It serves this purpose. There were lots of narratives built around it, like banking, the unbanked. And what else?

[00:36:36] Calin Culianu: It still retains most of those properties. They haven't... The bankers, they don't know what to do with it, I feel like. They're just pumping it, which is fine. I don't know. Like, it's still not... Yeah, the hope isn't gone, man. It's still there. It still runs. It hasn't been desecrated irreparably in any way. Like, the bankers are forced to contend with it. They have to deal with it. What's that?

[00:36:57] Steve Thurmond: I said it still runs. It just runs on Bitcoin Cash, the initial narrative.

[00:37:02] Calin Culianu: Or it could be repaired. I mean, it's not like irreversible. The capture is not permanent.

[00:37:07] Steve Thurmond: It's not, but I think any other fork to it would pay a severe price. And why? When we have an alternative that actually scales and functions as peer-to-peer electronic cash. My trajectory was much like yours, Vlad, in that I was a BTC maxi from 2011 to 2023, roughly. And I had all of the, parroted all of the talking points, but I couldn't help but recognize the cognitive dissonance of this coin, BTC, not actually functioning in the way it was pitched to me originally. And having lived through the time where it was actually used as money, 2014 up to about 2017 when I could use it on Overstock, Newegg, Orbitz, you know, multiple vendors were actually accepting it as payment.

[00:38:02] Steve Thurmond: And then it just, the transaction fee spiked and it became a real pain to use. And so, when I found BCH and I was late to the game on BCH, I was very distracted. And during the split, I had two kids at the time, very busy hectic time of my life. Got sidetracked by Ethereum and all the ICO and shitcoinery and the rise of the crypto bros during that period of time. But when I came across BCH and realized that these guys had the original cypherpunk values and were pushing the Bitcoin that attracted me in the first place, freedom money, for me it was a fairly easy transition after doing a lot of due diligence and speaking with a lot of different people. So, join the dark side, Vlad. That's our olive branch to you.

[00:38:55] Vlad Costea: No, but I think if you spend enough time in the space, maybe your first two or three years are all about making friends. And that's your tribal phase because you join a community, you think that this is the best project ever. And then inevitably you're going to get humbled by the market. I think Bitcoin, BTC, Maxis are the ones who actually are humbled the least by the market because the price went up, they celebrated the most. And the problem is that you're going to discover sooner or later that no chain actually fulfills the mission that we have.

[00:39:34] Vlad Costea: Not in practice, like theoretically it could or technically it could. But we're not really replacing the banks, we're not really providing that alternative and we're not really reaching to that mass adoption that is like the promise that we never seem to achieve. So, you have to ask yourself, is the future in one project and is that project the one that you're supporting? And then once you expand your perception of what's going on, you're going to realize that we can either have a future where maybe we have 21 million coins of one project, be that Bitcoin Cash, Zcash or all of the forks.

[00:40:20] Vlad Costea: Or eCash, the one that's coming this year, which is going to be another hard fork of Bitcoin. Or is the future multi-coin, which means that maybe we're going to have a billion of these cryptocurrencies that are useful and we can swap in between them with various trade-offs. And you're going to have one for contracts, one for privacy, one for whatever. Or video games. I don't know how that makes sense, but apparently there is Web3 gaming. People play that. So are we going to have this multi-chain world where we're going to have multiple ones that compete on the free market?

[00:40:58] Vlad Costea: Or does it converge towards a single one that's going to do everything? I think that's the fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves. And right now, I'm not aware of any one project that is able to do everything.

[00:41:12] Calin Culianu: Correct. That's fair, I would say.

[00:41:14] Steve Thurmond: We often say that there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs. And Bitcoin Cash is not immune to that statement in any way, shape or form. I think, in doing my due diligence, that it checks the most boxes. You mentioned Ethereum earlier and its ability for massive utility. And we have that on the UTXO base chain with Bitcoin Cash. Rosco that hopped on earlier, which I'd like to bring on at some point. He spearheaded CashScript and has really opened up an entire new world for Bitcoin Cash in 2022 with smart contracts and building a lot of utility on the UTXO chain.

[00:41:57] Steve Thurmond: We can do everything that Ethereum can and faster and smoother without near the complexity that Ethereum has. So yes, there are no perfect solutions. And I do think the future is most likely multi-chain. But I think we check the most boxes by far. Again, everything has its drawbacks. There's pros and cons to every situation. But I think Bitcoin Cash checks the most boxes.

[00:42:25] Calin Culianu: Yeah, my philosophy as a Bitcoin Cash developer is to just sort of complete Satoshi's work. I know that sounds kind of like, you know, a little bit idealistic, but get it to a point where it can take the most boxes to realize Satoshi's initial vision of peer-to-peer permissionless decentralized money. And so I feel like my duty as a developer is just to make that as likely as possible. And I do acknowledge the point that there may be multiple coins. And that's great. I think probably a bad scenario for the world is if there was only one cryptocurrency, because then it could easily be captured.

[00:42:58] Calin Culianu: It could easily be sabotaged. The people running it could end up making insane decisions and they're all stuck with it. So an answer to capture is actually this decentralization even of the coins themselves, like have multiple coins that are competing. You know, that could be a sign of health actually for crypto. I feel it's certainly better than the banking system, which is just completely insanely fraudulent. I mean, you have a certain elite group of people that like set monetary policy, they basically decide how much money exists.

[00:43:26] Calin Culianu: I mean, if you try to do something like that, if you just try to print money, like you'd go to jail for a long time, but they can do it. They have like a special power. Like this is just not fair fundamentally. So, you know, this is certainly, I feel like it's much healthier if you don't have the bankers having like so much influence over the world and the decisions of the world. I mean, you know, what does money represent really for people? Like it really represents human will.

[00:43:48] Calin Culianu: Like if I decide, let's say I can print money, I can make it just about anybody do anything I want. Almost like I could have them waste three years of their life working at a company. I could, it's like, it's like a human will, like cheat code, man, if you can print money. And so if we take that power away or it becomes less powerful, like, you know, there's an answer to it. There's some other system, even if it's multiple coins fighting each other and everyone's in their tribe and everyone thinks their coins, the best that's still healthier than it's still an answer.

[00:44:14] Calin Culianu: It's something, it's ground that's been gained. So as far as Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin Cash doesn't suffer from some of the problems Bitcoin has culturally and technically even. And so I want to just get it to a point where like, if it needs to be switched on as global money or as some answer, it's ready, you know, like technically ready, can handle it. The culture of the coin is conducive and not toxic. That's sort of just my role in this, in this whole thing, or that's how I feel like Bitcoin Cash.

[00:44:44] Calin Culianu: I feel like Bitcoin Cash is the least right now, the least of the major coins is probably the one, like just Steve said. It ticks all the boxes. That's my opinion on it, but you know what I mean? Make sure that's the case. Yeah, sorry. This is a bit rambling, but to

[00:44:59] Steve Thurmond: Your point about a tribe, I think we are fairly unique in that when we see different tech, different utility working in other chains, there's nothing stopping us from adopting it, best we can. We have a proven and robust CHIP process that has been functioning very well thus far. It might not always in the future. There's always that argument for on chain governance, which I think just adds more friction, but we see things that we like in other ecosystems and we can adopt them on our chain.

[00:45:33] Steve Thurmond: So it's, we're not so ossified like BTC that it's not going to go through if it has merit and if it meets a consensus standards. So I think that makes us really unique. It's often like herding cats being decentralized as we are, but we've managed to forge ahead each and every year consistently with upgrading the tech and show me other chain that does that on a regular basis without sacrificing having a figurehead or a kingpin making the majority of the decisions. That's one thing that's also very nice about BCH is we are truly decentralized for better or worse.

[00:46:16] Steve Thurmond: It's often hard to move forward in that regard, but there is no figurehead to cut the head off of. I mean, look at what's happening with Cardano right now and the quasi fall out of Charles. If he goes down, so does that whole chain. That is that whole chain where BCH, we are decentralized enough that there is no figurehead. There is no one person pulling the strings. We do work as decentralized as possible and make decisions effectively and provably for the last nine years, pushing this tech forward.

[00:46:54] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I also want to say this to the listeners and the viewers that this is not an episode where you're encouraged to buy Bitcoin Cash. We're not trying to sell it to you. We're not trying to get you to swap your BTC for BCH. We're actually trying to get you to claim some free BCH by virtue of Stephen's will. And right now on the screen, you're going to see this. What should I call it? Is it like a business card with my avatar on it?

[00:47:23] Steve Thurmond: We call them Cash Stamps. So the left QR code installs the Selene wallet. The right QR code is essentially a Bitcoin Cash paper wallet loaded with about $1.50 in BCH. So install the Selene wallet on the left QR code and then open that wallet. And there's the first button right there in the bottom middle. It says scan, open the scan button and scan the right side. And you'll be able to collect some BCH off those. We use these as a very simple onboarding tool.

[00:47:56] Steve Thurmond: Yours is obviously customized. I handed you those in Vegas at the conference. And so it's just a really fun, neat, interactive engagement tool to onboard people to Bitcoin Cash. And it works really well. And it's a lot of fun to use.

[00:48:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So you have like 30 more seconds to claim this and then I'm going to make it disappear from the screen. Of course, if nobody claims it will also rerun on YouTube and whatever. So people can claim this later. But I believe we have quite a few people online right now watching this. There has to be someone who wants to get this free money. Free money, man.

[00:48:35] Calin Culianu: Convert it to BTC if you must. I can see the claim.

[00:48:39] Steve Thurmond: I can see the claim live and somebody already claimed it. So that one's [unclear: dead, bro].

[00:48:42] Vlad Costea: Oh, we're going to have more of them during the stream. Let me ask you something. So there is someone waiting to join right now and I'm going to let him in. But after this question, like Calin, you have been with the project since day one. As you said, you have been a developer. How did it feel during that awkward phase of one year and a half or something, almost two years, when Craig Wright was involved and some people found it convenient that this guy who claims to be Satoshi is on your side? It felt bad.

[00:49:19] Calin Culianu: It felt weird. I mean, I try not to think about it too much because we've been sort of through this trauma of the divorce of the block size war. And we were like a ragtag band of rebels, sort of trying to find our way, trying to find our identity, trying to figure out where we're going to go. And Craig Wright, you know, I think he's probably like a I mean, I never met the man, but he's probably like the sort of narcissistic personality kind of person where, you know, he's basically a shyster.

[00:49:48] Calin Culianu: He's a scammer, right? Like he's claimed to be Satoshi. And so he had like this sort of aura around him or like he had some gravitas initially. And he was like very vocal, vocally criticizing, you know, the core people. And so just because he was saying the right things, like I sort of ignored the fact that he's probably not Satoshi. I mean, at some point I was like, oh yeah, maybe he is Satoshi and he'll provide some proof. But I didn't really give that much weight. I was just like, well, he either is or isn't Satoshi and it doesn't really matter.

[00:50:20] Calin Culianu: You know, in retrospect, like I never believed he was Satoshi or anything. Like I just figured he was just he was like another one of the vocal rebels that was in our in our tribe. You know, and like initially when we broke away from Bitcoin, we were all very sort of angry and vocal and rebellious, you know, like we were all like an unruly bunch, you know, like a bunch of Vikings, you know, like. And so he was just another one of those people. Like it was it was a really odd collection of people, you know, that.

[00:50:44] Calin Culianu: I mean, you'll find this phenomenon throughout history whenever you have a group of people that break away, like whether it's revolutionaries breaking away from the parent country or something like there is a period of sort of trying to figure out, all right, what do we do now? Like we're used to being rebels. We're used to saying, fuck you. But now we've got to build something. And sort of Craig was useful in that he had kind of a cult following and then he was very vocal and charismatic.

[00:51:07] Calin Culianu: You know, he knew how to speak. So like, you know, I mean, I didn't really think about it too much. I felt like things will just sort themselves out. And they eventually did. Like there was, you know, he left. He went on. He went on to found Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.

[00:51:21] Steve Thurmond: So Craig's biggest problem is he doesn't know when the hell to shut up because of his egomaniacal approach. He might

[00:51:31] Calin Culianu: Have a drinking problem, but that's enough.

[00:51:34] Steve Thurmond: He hoodwinked a lot of people, Roger Ver, Gavin Andresen for a time. Everybody, most everybody except Kurt Wuckert Jr. Has recanted at this point. But there's a great pod, I don't know if you're familiar with Arthur van Pelt and Mark Hunter, the Dr. Bitcoin pod, and they just released, I think their second book called Faketoshi. Absolutely, absolutely eviscerating Craig from every angle, going all the way back to when he was where it started, when he was trying to avoid a tax liability in Australia in the mid 2000s. I mean, this guy, this guy's shystiness goes way, way back. And he's skillful.

[00:52:16] Calin Culianu: I mean, he's a skillful scammer, you know, skillful scammers.

[00:52:19] Steve Thurmond: The real con man is confident. So he comes across with a lot of confidence. So he's very easily easy to believe. And he's clearly intelligent. But show me a con man that isn't intelligent. Most of them are intelligent, which is why they they're so good at their con. But yeah, that Dr. Bitcoin podcast by Arthur van Pelt and Mark Hunter absolutely just destroys the man from every angle. Say, listen, if you're on the fence about Faketoshi, listen to the Dr. Bitcoin podcast. It's excellent.

[00:52:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah, to me, it was interesting because this guy and I've had this conversation with Peter Rizun also. I'm not sure if he's still working on Bitcoin Cash, but he was around.

[00:53:03] Calin Culianu: He's on Nexa, it's his Nexa chain right now. The Bitcoin Unlimited Nexa chain. But yeah, go on. He was, he still is involved somewhat in Bitcoin Cash, but mostly working on this other chain called Nexa. But yeah, go on.

[00:53:12] Vlad Costea: Basically, everything that Craig Wright touched ended up with a lot of drama and conflict. And it's like he is this wild, what do you call this? The wild card?

[00:53:24] Calin Culianu: Yeah, completely. And like a source of chaos.

[00:53:27] Vlad Costea: Everywhere he goes, he causes destruction. And I would not be surprised if he is an agent.

[00:53:33] Calin Culianu: I was thinking the same thing. I was gonna bring that up, but I'm glad you did. Could be.

[00:53:36] Steve Thurmond: Well, during the COPA trial, Miller called him a legal terrorist. I think that's the most accurate description of him because he just, well, he used to sue everybody into oblivion if they disagreed with him. But that's because yeah, there's sugar daddy, Calvin Ayre, who knows if he's still getting funding there or not. But you can't become a legal terrorist without a lot of backing financially. And that's what he was doing. He was using Calvin's money to just sue everyone into silence. They disagreed with him.

[00:54:12] Calin Culianu: Yeah, and again, if I could be like conspiracy minded, you know, like, let's say he is an agent, right? And Calvin was sort of funding him, but we don't know who's funding Calvin. Like, it could just be the money printer people again, like just, you know, these people are OP, man, they can do a lot.

[00:54:28] Vlad Costea: No, no, Calvin is like a poker legend. I'm sorry. He's one of the most successful gamblers in history and also owns a bunch of online casinos. I'm sure he's fine without Bitcoin. And to him, it was just like this sort of a plaything.

[00:54:44] Steve Thurmond: Like another money project.

[00:54:45] Calin Culianu: Yeah, a pet project kind of thing.

[00:54:48] Vlad Costea: Yeah, something that he can just throw money at and just have fun. There's that famous picture of Roger Ver and Calvin and Craig Wright holding glasses of wine, which has been used up until recently a lot just to discredit the big blockers. And I was thinking that if it wasn't for these guys getting involved, I think that maybe the big block version of Bitcoin would have a better fighting chance, at least in the early years. I see that now it has much more appeal because it became more decentralized and you guys are actually building the stuff that we wish we had on Bitcoin BTC.

[00:55:26] Vlad Costea: But early on, when the fight was very intense, I think just this association with these guys did a lot of harm to the community and discredited the whole movement for a while. And then they forked into BSV and the fact that they did fork, they also took away some developers and capital, and this only made it more difficult for BCH to compete. And then there was also the XEC fork from Amaury. And I spoke to some people who are telling me that they were very bullish about Bitcoin Cash up until the Amaury fork.

[00:56:04] Vlad Costea: And they said, OK, when that happened, it felt like it's over and nothing else is going on. But it seems like there's a new generation of developers who are joining and contributing. And I think this is the ultimate test for any open source decentralized project, whether or not there are still people joining after the big money leaves or after the most famous people are not involved anymore.

[00:56:31] Calin Culianu: Yeah, if anything, it could demonstrate some sort of seriousness or resilience on our part. So, you know, we've sort of had all this instability, you know, and then, yeah, I mean, yeah.

[00:56:44] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, these things are messy. Humans are messy. Forks are messy. You know, these things don't happen without consequences for certain. You know, anybody that that's still not to harp on BSV, but Craig Wright aside, forget Craig ever existed. NAR and DAR should make any objective thinker absolutely question BSV, specifically digital asset recovery. All you're doing is just letting the foxes into the henhouse in that regard. So how anybody can objectively look at digital asset recovery and not see it for another form of control? Top down control is beyond me.

[00:57:34] Steve Thurmond: So I think anyone can just easily discount BSV for that alone. They're smart people there, no doubt. I don't know how many are left, but, you know, we've extended our branches to many in that community to come back and help us build on BCH. Because at the end of the day, your tribe is only as good as those that are building on it. And if you've got an association at the top that's making these decisions, well, then it's no different than any other centralized organization. And you've got a lot of toxic people at the top there.

[00:58:07] Steve Thurmond: So I don't know how anybody still goes down that path. But, yeah, we've got battle scars. Absolutely. Since the fork in 2017. But show me any other coin just from a market cap perspective alone that was at number two, descended down to thirty five in market cap rank and rose back earlier this year. We hit number 10. No other coin, to my knowledge, has done that, which is a testament to our resilience and in my opinion, a testament that we're on the right track. We're on the right path and we're doing the right thing.

[00:58:45] Steve Thurmond: And if BTC and other coins keep sleeping, we'll just keep eating your lunch. That's that's it at the end of the day. But we're patient.

[00:58:53] Calin Culianu: We're in it for the long game. Exactly. Hopefully it doesn't. Hopefully things don't get too much more turbulent. I don't think they will in the short term. So we'll ride the waves, I guess, up and down as much as best we can. That's all you can do in life anyway.

[00:59:08] Vlad Costea: I think that Zcash did something similar, like the top three. I think at some point they were trading for like seven Bitcoin per one ZEC at the top. And then, of course, proof of work mining does its thing. So the supply was low, the demand was high. Then the demand started going lower and the supply was getting higher. I think at the lowest point, like three years ago, they were outside of the top 100. And now they're top 15, I think.

[00:59:37] Calin Culianu: They got like a rocket ship. They shot back up multiple times this year, actually. Yeah, number 11 right now on CoinMarketCap.

[00:59:44] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I have a lot of respect for people who are the remnants of these open source projects because it's so easy to give up and say OK, the market decided that this is the winner and I'm going to stop working on whatever it is that I'm doing or just move to this place that pays better, because at the end of the day, I think everyone can get paid better if they work for Ethereum or they become friends with Jack Dorsey and work on a Bitcoin project.

[01:00:15] Vlad Costea: But to be honest, like there is merit to being resilient and not caring too much about what the market thinks, because you understand that you have something in there and sooner or later you're going to be vindicated one way or the other. So I respect this. Well, thank you.

[01:00:34] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, it's really the difference in the number go up group versus people that are focused on it for its utility and the revolutionary technology that it is and the possibility of freedom money for the world, which is where the BCH camp is for sure. You're going to have speculation all over the place. And we even have speculation utility on BCH with prediction markets, which is fun, but it's definitely not our focus. At the end of the day, I think we're very cohesive as a tribe, if you will, with cypherpunk values and wanting freedom money for the world.

[01:01:12] Steve Thurmond: That's really what motivates us and keeps us in this fight for no real profit of our own. I mean, the majority of this group in this space are doing this voluntarily. You know, we're keeping this thing alive and pushing it forward and trying to advocate for it on our own dime. There's very few, I think, apps and outfits that are actually turning a profit. I think General Protocols with BCH Bull is really the only one that's in profit in that regard. So we are truly in this to spread freedom money, which I think when you look at the whole scheme of crypto, absolutely sets us apart in that regard in a world full of number go up and pump and dump schemes.

[01:02:01] Steve Thurmond: We're not in it for that. We are in it for the utility of freedom money.

[01:02:09] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And to be honest, even if you're the most hardcore BTC maxi and you're listening to this, you can still acknowledge that the role that Bitcoin Cash has played is that on one hand, it proved to the bankers that it's very difficult to fork and be able to flip the the main chain like the original one. Like the fact that Bitcoin Cash was and still is an honest fork with community members behind it who are serious about this libertarian mission of replacing fiat or at least trying to lower the power of bankers.

[01:02:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah. The fact that there is this project which was not able to flip BTC proved to BlackRock and all the others that it's actually very difficult to coordinate a fork and be successful in this quest. And the other role that BCH has played has been in creating open source code, which Bitcoin BTC can just take and use if that will ever be the case or else get inspired by it. And there are at least two projects that I know of which were directly inspired by something that happened in BCH.

[01:03:24] Vlad Costea: The first one is called the WabiSabi paper that lays at the foundation of Wasabi Wallet 2.0, which used to be very hot until the US government arrested the Samourai Wallet developers. And then the talks about Bitcoin privacy have sort of toned down since then. But still, Wasabi Wallet was inspired by CashFusion, something that was developed on BCH first. And that's also quoted in the white paper of the project. Like if you actually look at the references, there's going to be something about CashFusion.

[01:03:57] Vlad Costea: Jeremy Rubin, he was on the show last month. Of course, you have people in your community who are going to be like, oh, that Jeremy Rubin who's in the Epstein files. Well, he was an MIT student emailing his department coordinator or something. It's not like he went to the island. But anyway, Jeremy Rubin, when he did the work for CSFS, which is CHECKSIGFROMSTACK. He said he was inspired by another opcode from BCH, which accomplishes the same thing. So there is merit to the work that was done in BCH.

[01:04:36] Vlad Costea: I'm happy that I get to acknowledge it publicly because it feels like I get like a rock off my chest. Yeah.

[01:04:44] Calin Culianu: Thank you very much. Yeah, totally.

[01:04:47] Vlad Costea: And it's also a reminder that this is open source software and you look at all the Linux distributions and you're going to be like, why is there another one? Like just because of this small parameter. But it matters a lot to some people. So the fact that you have that means that you get some testing and you get to see how it works with users and not just random testing among developers.

[01:05:12] Vlad Costea: And of course, there is money on the line in the cryptocurrency world. So there is a bounty for breaking it if you think it sucks and it's not going to work that way. Well, you can make a lot of money breaking it. So good luck with that. You guys have OP_CAT, which is something that people in BTC still claim with a straight face that it's going to destroy the chain. And Satoshi was right to remove it. Yeah.

[01:05:39] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, so Satoshi was like balancing like 20 plates at once, you know, like he was trying to solve all these problems. I believe he was a lone developer. You know, that's debatable, but I believe that. So some things he just got rid of because he couldn't deal with the sort of the consequences of like, you know, a cat bomb, you know, like he just at one point, at one point, he turned off a lot of opcodes because it was it was possible to just make like send poison blocks to nodes.

[01:06:08] Calin Culianu: I mean, this is early on. You know, we've come across we have a solution to that. We have like if you cost, we have like a VM limit system where you can cost operations correctly. And so then you can constrain the system in that way. You don't need to like turn off opcodes because you're afraid they're going to blow up. You can just constrain. You know, you can always guarantee that no one input that you evaluate is going to break some kind of execution limit. So, you know, Satoshi didn't have time to develop.

[01:06:32] Calin Culianu: I believe if he did, he might have come up with a VM limit system like we have. He had to sort of do ad hoc stuff, including turning off opcodes or other things like opcode limit or, you know, just ad hoc ways to constrain the execution of the scripts were done by Satoshi in a rush, sometimes as like stealth, you know, like stealth patches that no one even was aware of. And so in BCH, we just constrain it using VM limits, which you guys are free to copy in BTC or anybody.

[01:07:01] Calin Culianu: Or, you know, maybe you don't like the way we did something so you can do a better job. Yeah.

[01:07:09] Vlad Costea: I think I also had this quote from Michael Tidwell, who's organizing the Atlanta Bitcoin Conference, TabConf. Last year he was on my show and he said that the difference between him and Greg Maxwell in ideology is that him, as in Michael, does not mind if the future of money is going to be Bitcoin Cash as long as the mission gets accomplished. Like he's not monotheistic in this regard. He doesn't care too much which one is going to be the winner as long as the reach the goal gets reached.

[01:07:46] Vlad Costea: Whereas in the case of Greg Maxwell, I think he throws his entire reputation and he's trying to prove that this is going to be the one true project that succeeds. And he turned out to be wrong in many of his predictions, especially concerning Ethereum and proof of stake. Like if you read what he was saying like a decade ago about the whole thing, you would assume, and you also trusted him blindly, you would assume that, okay, this guy is a genius who has the foresight to understand that this is not going to work. And then they made it work.

[01:08:28] Calin Culianu: So it's almost like the free market has better mechanisms than this council of 10 people who are very smart.

[01:08:29] Calin Culianu: That's why I think it's actually kind of healthy that they're multiple coins and they're all sort of competing. That is healthier. Yeah, totally. Greg Maxwell, he's amazing. He's got this aura about him that he's a smart guy and he's really able to leverage that. So he'll be able to argue sometimes dishonestly, but really convincingly because he can leverage his aura. He'll make you feel like you're dumber than him. He's amazingly good at just convincing people of stuff that's not necessarily true. Hats off to that guy, dude.

[01:08:56] Calin Culianu: If I had that power, man. And if I were evil, I could probably be a lot farther in this world than I am, but I'm not evil. I actually consider him to be like an evil person, Greg Maxwell, but I don't know. Who knows?

[01:09:08] Vlad Costea: I think he came up with a lot of good ideas. For example, CoinJoin. That was his idea.

[01:09:17] Calin Culianu: Yeah, he came up with, yeah.

[01:09:18] Vlad Costea: He's the one who proposed that there were mixers before that, but he's the one who basically conceptualized how this can be made inside of a Bitcoin wallet. And he set up a bounty for that, which Amir Taaki tried to claim. And famously, he was deterred by this guy, Jon Dillon.

[01:09:37] Calin Culianu: Right. Who may or may not have been a CIA agent. Is that guy?

[01:09:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah, he was saying in private correspondence with Peter Todd that he works for intelligence. But there are still people who believe that it was actually Peter Todd talking to himself, just pretending that it's someone else.

[01:09:53] Calin Culianu: Yeah. No, I mean, Greg Maxwell is not like a universally destructive force, but I believe that, I mean, you can point to stuff he's done that's been good, but I think overall, I don't think he's got the right, I don't know. I think he's just a bad person, but whatever. I mean, you know, that's whatever. It's my opinion. I'm just one person.

[01:10:12] Vlad Costea: A lot of people look up to his opinion. So whenever he comes up with a long post on Reddit about something, people really pay attention and they believe that he has this vision or foresight to really understand what's good and what's not.

[01:10:27] Calin Culianu: He's incredibly good at leveraging his aura and confusing people with it. It's amazing. It's like a supernatural ability of reality distortion. So sometimes you use that for evil, sometimes for good.

[01:10:43] Steve Thurmond: As we've said multiple times, there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs. And there's certainly drawbacks to advocating for homogenous systems, whether it's a network, a civilization, etc. There's going to be drawbacks to having all your eggs in one basket. And I do think the future is multi-coin. But again, I see no reason to go elsewhere at this point because of all of the exciting stuff that we're building on BCH, but we need to be mindful of that as well. We are also susceptible to the same drawbacks and issues that come with homogenous systems.

[01:11:23] Steve Thurmond: So it's looking objectively, critically, having that self-awareness and trying to do the right thing moving forward.

[01:11:34] Vlad Costea: So, yeah, I got to plug my sponsors. It's been one hour and there's also someone waiting to join and I'm going to let him in after this segment. So I will start with LayerTwo Labs, which has been working on the drivechain to bring it to Bitcoin for longer than a decade. At least Paul personally has been. And they have this BIP, which is numbered 300 and the other one, 301. They spent a lot of time and money trying to bring this to Bitcoin. Now they want to launch their own hard fork of Bitcoin, which is coming out at block height 964,000.

[01:12:16] Vlad Costea: That's going to be sometime in August. And you can already test the software if you want. You go to layertwolabs.com slash download. They have a sidechain for pretty much everything that's interesting in the whole crypto space. They have a Zcash sidechain. They have a prediction market sidechain. A Uniswap inspired sidechain. Which basically lets you swap between the various assets on different chains. A quantum resistant sidechain. And also a big block sidechain, which they're going to be using for basically everything that BSV is doing already. To have that capacity of, as they say, giga meg blocks.

[01:13:02] Vlad Costea: That was Kelvin's tweet, giga megs. So check it out. It's layertwolabs.com. Slash download. If you want to claim your eCash tokens in August, you're also free to do that. If you're holding Bitcoin today, you're going to get the same amount in eCash. And you can also pay attention to the project at ecash.com. They actually bought that fabled domain, which I think used to be owned by David Chaum at some point. And actually, before I get to the next sponsors, what do you guys think about having another hard fork in Bitcoin? And what do you think about eCash in particular?

[01:13:42] Steve Thurmond: I'll let Calin discuss the technical aspects here. But I just think it was a dick move, for lack of a better way of saying it. Paul was fully aware that eCash was a thing that existed. And maybe he just thought he could steamroll eCash. But I don't think that's going to be the case. You know, there's already murmurs of litigation going on over the name alone. And fine, you know, have your pet software engineering art project, do whatever you want to do. Try to make a successful fork of BTC if you have the fortitude to do so.

[01:14:20] Steve Thurmond: But when you completely hijack a name that's already been established in the market, clearly, you're going to get resistance. And so I think it was a really stupid move to shoot himself in the foot right out of the gate. And that's all I'll say about Temu eCash.

[01:14:37] Calin Culianu: Temu eCash, yeah. I mean, I agree with Steve. I think that's kind of strange. Like, there is a coin named eCash already. Like, can't you come up with another name? Like, why are you doing it? And his explanation was like, oh, you know, that's like a good name for a coin, so I'm gonna use it. And like, eCash doesn't matter. That's like a red flag, like that shows like on some spiritual level or on some like core level that shows like a sort of haughtiness or arrogance, which is like, kind of stinky to me, kind of smells bad.

[01:15:08] Calin Culianu: But, you know, like, the thing is, like, so let's say he forks from BTC, and he has significant market interest. And, you know, and like, he comes up with some interesting tech. You know, that could be good for everybody for the ecosystem, he's going to try to compete with BTC and everybody else. And maybe that'll make some of the BTC people feel like they need to compete more. And so maybe BTC will end up like having to innovate a little bit more, maybe, I don't know, like, it's always good when people and there's more competition, you know, to an extent for the market, maybe not for the competitors.

[01:15:37] Calin Culianu: They have to sort of expend more energy. But for the market, like for humanity overall, like, maybe this would be a good thing, right? If he just picks another coin that explores a bunch of ideas, technically, even if like it starts off on the wrong foot. And I personally think it's a dick move that yes, like you should just pick pick an original name, dude, like, come on. Don't be a jerk.

[01:15:55] Steve Thurmond: But yeah, a fork is hard enough. David and Goliath scenario. And then you're gonna shit the bed right out of the gate by hijacking somebody else's name. I mean, it's just it's stupid. It's just a dumb business move, if nothing else.

[01:16:11] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah, it's just it's bizarre. It's like a red flag. It's like something like most people wouldn't do something like that. Most people would just be like, oh, that name exists. Like, I'll think of a better name. Like, I'll come up with my own name, you know, something to be proud of, you know, I don't know. Like, it's just bizarre. Like, why would you do that? And whatever.

[01:16:25] Vlad Costea: Well, wouldn't you say that it's just like Roger claiming that BCH is the real Bitcoin?

[01:16:30] Calin Culianu: No, not really. Because and I wanted to get to this when we were talking earlier, like from our point of view, what you guys did, what happened to Bitcoin was that it was captured that some nefarious forces and we wanted to sort of continue. We wanted to continue the vision. You know, our hope was that you guys would just die. The BTC would die because we didn't want like, you know, bankster coin. It's like, you know, and then, you know, at some point, like it looked like that might happen, like BTC was like 25 percent of I mean, BCH was 25 percent of BTC's price.

[01:17:02] Calin Culianu: Right. And 25 percent of its hash rate. And, you know, from our point of view, it's like we wanted to just fire the bad, the malicious government and install another government. Right. Like that was basically our whole shtick. Like that was the reason why we forked because we just could no longer abide by a chain that didn't have a scaling, a plausible scaling strategy. I mean, it was clear for the people that created BCH, it was clear that the strategy that the core had for the chain is like unrealistic and incompatible with like a good future.

[01:17:33] Calin Culianu: So, you know, we disagreed with that. And so we're like, hey, this is our coin.

[01:17:39] Steve Thurmond: You might hear it tongue in cheek every now and again, but it's certainly not the driving narrative. Nobody says on an ongoing basis BCH is Bitcoin, although we feel it absolutely adheres to the white paper far more than BTC does. We don't, that's not a driving narrative or mantra or ethos because there's enough market confusion as it is. And we don't vocalize that regularly other than in kind of a funny way, if you will.

[01:18:13] Calin Culianu: But yeah, and it's not called Bitcoin by the way, it's called Bitcoin Cash. This guy literally calls it eCash, which is another coin. He's not even calling it like eCash squared or eCash 2.0 or eCash Cash or eCash, you know, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not even the same thing. It's like, you know, we called ourselves Bitcoin Cash from basically day two. So at least there's that differentiation. Like this guy literally is like, I don't know, taking the exact same name.

[01:18:42] Calin Culianu: Like string compare in Python, does eCash equal, is eCash true? Does Bitcoin equal Bitcoin Cash string? False. So I don't know.

[01:18:53] Vlad Costea: Well, it is like a poetic situation where you have a guy forking Bitcoin, who claims that he created the real Bitcoin and then nine years, no, and the same guy then goes on to create eCash, and then someone else forks Bitcoin and calls it the real eCash. It comes full circle. It's like the punishment that comes to Amaury. I don't know. Yeah, he deserves it.

[01:19:16] Calin Culianu: He lost the plot long ago. He deserves it actually. You know what? Yeah, call it eCash.

[01:19:25] Vlad Costea: And also, I think there is a greater point to be made here that eCash is like a generic term. It's not what they claim to be like a brand or whatever. They don't really own it. You can own domains. You can own maybe account names. But it's like saying that you have a patent for the name blockchain. It's very Craig Wright-ish. ECash stands for electronic cash. It's been used, I think, even before this whole industry existed.

[01:19:58] Steve Thurmond: I'm just thinking from an optics and business perspective, it's going to create a lot of confusion. Why would you make a fork any more complicated than necessary by tagging on with a name that's already established? It just boggles my mind just from a business perspective alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:20:18] Calin Culianu: That's what he chose. What the hell are you doing? Yeah, I don't know.

[01:20:20] Vlad Costea: How you doing? Yeah, I don't know. No, I was also not happy with the name at first, but then I was like, you know, eCash, it's simple. There's another eCash. There's also eCash, which is custodial Lightning with privacy, which I never really liked. And I think there is something else called eCash that's floating around the space. So there's going to be a lot of confusion, but it's the only one that you can claim for holding Bitcoin right now. And also I'll present the rest of the sponsors and then let the poor guy waiting... He's been there for like 30 minutes, still waiting. Cake Wallet, which is something which I guess we'll be able to scan the QR codes to claim BCH, but not now, maybe when they update something, if I understand correctly. Oh, there's a message in the chat.

[01:21:20] Vlad Costea: Oh, you're right. Okay. Take the break. I'll be right back. I got to do something.

[01:21:27] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And Cake Wallet also has support for BCH if you want to use it for that, has support for BTC, is very convenient for swapping coins. And it's quite fascinating that nowadays wallets, which used to be known as this open source piece of software that you just download and it's merely an interface that works with SPV, now they've turned into bona fide exchanges where you can swap between coins and access different services. And it's really cool. Also has an integration to NanoGPT, so if you want to use LLMs by paying with your coins without any kind of registration or credit card or whatever, you can just use Cake Wallet for that. It's very cool. Check it out. They have 750,000 downloads, trying to get to 1 million, and really amazing how they were able to get to this point. Also, they support Lightning, but not in the ways in which I like Lightning, but whatever, they do that.

[01:22:26] Vlad Costea: And OrangeRock, which is a trading platform very much like something like Hyperliquid, except that it's privacy friendly. It's all in one app. You download that right now. It's available for iOS. It's orangerock.com and it's very cool. If you're into trading, you can use it. If you're into gambling, which means trading with leverage, I think you have like up to 25x. I don't recommend it. I'm just saying you can do it if you want, if you really believe that you can put that winning long or short on something, you can definitely do that. You can find it at orangerock.com. Check it out.

[01:23:06] Vlad Costea: And last but not least, SideShift, which is the place where I tell people to swap their stablecoins, because honestly, what's the point of holding something that can be confiscated? Just last month, Tether has frozen like millions of dollars in USDT because they came from the wrong place, whatever that means, or they were used for the wrong kind of activities. Don't hold on to something which can be confiscated from you. So check out SideShift. Use it to swap your USDT, USDC, any stablecoin for free market money. You have a selection of coins. You can use BTC, you can use BCH, you can use Litecoin, you can use a lot of the coins that they have. Just don't hold stablecoins. Use them or receive them if you have to, but swap them for something that actually is yours and nobody can take away from you. And you can use SideShift.ai for that. Check it out. And those were my ad plugs. And now I have to let the guy waiting... Is he still here? No, he's not. Okay. You can ask him to join, Steve.

[01:24:23] Steve Thurmond: Is it Rosco that's supposed to come in or... Maybe we can get Rosco back on. I don't know if he's in waiting or not, if Kyle bounced. Let me get in our thread here and see if anybody else...

[01:24:39] Vlad Costea: This is like a battle royale. More people join as we keep talking.

[01:24:51] Steve Thurmond: And we've got about six guys here that we're going to try to rotate through here, just highlighting, excuse me, different aspects of the ecosystem. Jerry said he's a wallet developer. You can hop on in a bit. Fiendish can hop on, actually. Yeah, let's get Fiendish on here, and I'm going to go take a quick break myself. I'll be back. But okay, there's Kyle. Okay. All right, Kyle, you made it.

[01:25:29] Kyle: Hello.

[01:25:29] Steve Thurmond: Hello. So I don't know if we want to do introductions or not, but I wanted Kyle to come on because he has built a few platforms and utilities in the space that have been very beneficial in our growth, specifically the fundme.cash campaign platform. And to my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong, Kyle, you're not a seasoned developer, you're fairly self-taught, and were able to contribute to our ecosystem in a massive way with this fundme.cash campaign creation tool. So yeah, I'm going to step away for just a moment, go relieve myself. I'll be right back, guys.

[01:26:12] Kyle: Yeah, no, I came from an IT background, so computers, servers, networking. So like, I knew of coding, but besides doing some basic scripts, I did absolutely nothing. So about six years ago, I decided to jump ship and try to be more involved in Bitcoin Cash and learn how to code. And so I basically went from almost nothing for coding to developing a bunch of random apps and smart contracts on UTXO, which is something I harp on now to try and get people involved into it, because I view everything that's happening on Bitcoin Cash right now as almost like another round of Ethereum, where Ethereum came out and all this weird smart contract stuff started coming out and new utility and apps and stuff. And everything I'm seeing is that this is the same thing, but it's on Bitcoin Cash now. And it's a different model, UTXO versus EVM. There's nothing really comparable to it. It seems kind of new and novel. And to rewind a little bit, I got into Bitcoin, or first learned of Bitcoin, in 2010, and I've been learning about it since then.

[01:27:33] Calin Culianu: I'm still learning about it too myself. Yeah, go on.

[01:27:36] Kyle: Oh yeah, it's never ending. But like, I remember when Ethereum came out and it was like, I'm very risk averse. I do not like taking risks. And like, I didn't trust it. I didn't understand coding back then much at all. So it's like, I don't really get it. So like, I watched it all happen, and now it's like, I'm not going to watch this time. I want to be involved. So FundMe is, if you know crowdfunding, it's like Kickstarter. That's all it is, but on chain. Yeah. So yeah, non-custodial. Nothing like this exists on BTC. Fiendish!

[01:28:20] FiendishCrypto: Hi. Hey, how's it going?

[01:28:22] Calin Culianu: How's it going? Like your glasses, dude. They're pretty sexy glasses.

[01:28:24] FiendishCrypto: I had to put them on for Vlad. Hey Vlad, how's it going?

[01:28:28] Vlad Costea: Hi. So we have two people coming around the same time. We have Kyle and Fiendish. As we established, Kyle is a smart contract developer. What do you do, Fiendish?

[01:28:39] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, that is a great question. So what I'm doing is basically working in the background, trying to create a lot of alignment within the community, helping people where they need help, and helping with some marketing and outreach. So there are a lot of companies out there that are looking to integrate BCH or do accept BCH, and they're looking for help and assistance with the community. And, you know, it's decentralized, there's no front door. So when someone's asking for help, I check them out and they look legit, I'm the guy that steps in and says, hey, let's have a chat. And then I help them and get them linked up to the right people within the ecosystem so they can get the integrations they need.

[01:29:17] Vlad Costea: That's cool. So you're like the connector within the community.

[01:29:23] FiendishCrypto: The connector, I like that. I'm going to put that as my official job title. Yeah, the oil, the oil in the machine. You know, it's a great machine, but you can't run a great machine without oil.

[01:29:36] Vlad Costea: I like how your sunglasses are green tinted.

[01:29:41] FiendishCrypto: That was purposely chosen, actually. So I got the original set. So this isn't the original. I've lost them several times, as is always the case when you have glasses that cost more than 10 bucks a pair. They just disappear, right? I got them at [unclear: BCH Bliss] conference, which started off actually a bit of a trend. That was back in 2022, and you might notice some BCHers still have green glasses, because the sort of the meme was there to protect us against the laser eyes of BTCers.

[01:30:11] Calin Culianu: Yeah, to reflect it back, you know. Reflect it back. Yeah, all that bullshit.

[01:30:15] FiendishCrypto: It just goes straight back.

[01:30:18] Vlad Costea: I was going to say that all you see is green flags. No red flags.

[01:30:25] FiendishCrypto: No red flags, that's true. That's green.

[01:30:28] Steve Thurmond: Fiendish, we were just talking with Kyle about building on BCH and how somebody, even with not an extensive background in coding, can build on our platform. Kyle, if you want to continue in that vein for a bit.

[01:30:47] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean... Oh yeah, Kyle. I thought you said Calin. Yeah, Kyle probably is better to answer this.

[01:30:53] Kyle: I don't remember where I was, which is okay. I would [unclear: slightly show] the Bitcoin Cash University YouTube channel as an example of what building on Bitcoin Cash is. I walked through some of the smart contracts that I've made, so the FundMe one, which is called CashStarter technically, thebadgers.cash, and there might be one or two others on there, I can't remember. But it goes like line by line how to do it. And it's... I come from not a coding background.

[01:31:23] Kyle: So I literally go line by line explaining absolutely everything in extremely verbose detail. So if you are not a coder, it will be dry, but you can, you can go through the exact, logic behind it and how it works. And, just talking about how it seems like a massive opportunity, because it's, I'm viewing it as like almost Ethereum again. It's a case of you can do anything and everybody's learning it for the first time. So like I used to follow BTC a massive amount because I've been in it a very long time and I want to know what's going on.

[01:32:02] Kyle: And if there's new stuff going on, I want to know, because if it might be good for BCH, then it would be good at it. I stopped following it a while ago because there just wasn't anything interesting. And like thinking from the technical coding side of like an app developer and the, I guess the most recent example would be, for the last Bitcoin Cash Bliss conference last year, not the most recent one. There was, I think BitVM or something was something that's going on in BTC for doing like contracts off chain, partially on chain or something.

[01:32:46] Kyle: Their demo app was chess where you could like run a game of chess on Bitcoin on BTC. But there's all these trust assumptions involved and it's technically running off chain. So as an example, I just, because the smart contract system on BCH is being developed so much, I thought, can we do that on Bitcoin Cash directly? And yes, I built some smart contracts and you can run chess on Bitcoin Cash. And it works just like Ethereum in a sense of like, everything's on chain.

[01:33:20] Kyle: So it's a case of, if you want to get into smart contract development on UTXO chains, there's not a lot of developers in it. Anybody can start doing it.

[01:33:32] Calin Culianu: Yeah, you can get it on the ground floor and have a huge impact, you know, try to do it again in Ethereum, it's more difficult, it's more developed. Exactly.

[01:33:39] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but what's wrong with Ethereum? Because a lot of chains are trying to redo smart contracts to simplify the whole process. And in spite of all this, it seems like there's still a lot of builders on Ethereum. So I'm trying to understand both sides.

[01:34:00] FiendishCrypto: Scalability, scalability. UTXO is insanely parallelized. Like, this is just totally underestimated. UTXO is insanely efficient to be running every single transaction, every single UTXO is its own thing, as opposed to account model, where everything has to be processed. So it's just hugely more scalable. So Ethereum running at the, you know, the bandwidth that you're at today, it's posed challenges, right? When when actually many people are look at that. Nice one. My one's around somewhere too, like trying to create some [unclear: babies of blankets] probably right now.

[01:34:39] FiendishCrypto: But very cool. Yeah, and this is something so Ethereum as soon as people are actually starting to use it basically choked, right? And so everyone went on to layer twos, and the layer twos grew, Ethereum withered. And you know, even though BTC is not developed and moved anywhere, it's still relative to Ethereum gone up while Ethereum has just stayed flat. Or decreased. And and that scalability was the Achilles heel. So yeah, from a very high level, it's just scalability. And UTXO comes with its own set of challenges, you know, because everything is a little bit more tricky to get your head around rather than an account model.

[01:35:17] FiendishCrypto: But that's something that now BCH is really improving on by getting the tools out there to make it really easier. So those, you know, the app builders, the entrepreneurs can actually start creating what they want. Ethereum like ideas, without that bottleneck on their business, because, you know, this is something that, you know, and Ethereum is feeling this, if you're, you know, you're creating an amazing business idea, and you basically, you want to get investment. The way you get investment is by showing the market audience you can reach, right?

[01:35:46] FiendishCrypto: And when you know that, hey, if we're using this chain, it collapses, that produces the investment. And it's kind of funny talking about some Bitcoin Cash, because they're probably the least invested in chain. Out there, certainly in the, in the top 20, for other reasons. But that's something that's super important. You want to make sure that the business can grow. And that's something that Bitcoin Cash absolutely affords, and it can grow to global scale. Whatever, you know, there's stuff out there that people say that's that's not the case.

[01:36:13] FiendishCrypto: And that's why we need to be everything's off chain. But that that really is the case with UTXO. So maybe you can get some more details from from the developers here to go into that. But really, I hope people got the takeaway scalability. That's it.

[01:36:26] Calin Culianu: Yeah, just from a, from a technical standpoint, like UTXO, just much more scalable, because they're parallelizable, you can process contracts, each UTXO sort of embodies some state. And you just you can just do the massively parallel, like there's no limit to parallelization. Whereas with the account model, you still have to order transactions, you have to figure out what the order is not as parallelizable, because you basically you just there's a shared state, like every single contract is modifying that one variable, let's say the account, right? So it matters what order you do them in.

[01:36:55] Calin Culianu: As with UTXO, you just parallelize them, and you don't really care about order so much.

[01:36:59] FiendishCrypto: Which is fantastic, because when Ethereum like you do your smart DeFi transaction, and it fails, you have a huge fee at the end. As in Bitcoin Cash, you wouldn't even have that. It doesn't fail. It doesn't affect, you know, someone else's problem doesn't affect you. So yeah, that's a huge advantage. It basically goes through or it doesn't. You don't pay for something that doesn't go through.

[01:37:18] Calin Culianu: Yeah, correct. Yeah, true. But it's a different model. So if you're a developer, you sort of have to think about how to architect your app in a slightly different way. But there are tools like we have like CashScript, which kind of looks a little bit like Solidity. I mean, there are tools that the developer that's from the EVM space can come in and sort of feel a little bit familiar.

[01:37:39] Kyle: There's at the last Bliss conference as well, just reinforcing the idea of this is like new and novel. Just being there and talking to developers and talking about all these different apps that are being created. But also, like, it's UTXO, it's different than EVM. It has different challenges. It has different limitations. We're exploring and learning it. But just talking to people. And it's like, hearing new terms, people are talking about four ideas and things and problems that I've never seen anywhere else. Like, it's a great example.

[01:38:08] Kyle: It's new and it seems so far ahead of everything else. And like BTC, just to me, and it's not a jab, but it seems so archaic, the stuff that they're doing on it compared to what we're working on in Bitcoin Cash.

[01:38:25] Vlad Costea: At the same time, I see at least three projects right now trying to bring EVM on Bitcoin or trying to build bridges to Ethereum. And I think it's interesting. They're trying to tap into the place where most of the liquidity is. But I think everyone agrees that Ethereum does not have the best way to do smart contracts.

[01:38:49] Kyle: Which comes down to that scalability. And all of those bridges and stuff, it's not using Bitcoin, BTC. It's not using the layer one. And that's kind of the whole point of the security model to have your long-term sustainability is for the layer one to be used or for price to go gigantic exponential and never drop. But this comes back down to BTC versus BCH, big blocks versus small blocks. Also, one reason why I'm on BCH is that many transactions, low fees, just seem sustainable to me, whereas the other side doesn't, just from a math point of view.

[01:39:27] Vlad Costea: Okay, so let me ask you a question which derives from an experience that I had while attending the Proof-of-Work Summit in Frankfurt two or three years ago. And I've seen a couple of Bitcoin Cash people showing up with BCH PLS T-shirts. And then there was the token Bitcoin Maxi went up to them and said, can you people run nodes? Because I heard you need like industrial grade machines with a lot of storage and it's impossible. It's very centralized.

[01:40:00] FiendishCrypto: That's not true. That's really not true. Maybe, of course, when the whole world is using BCH, you've got billions of people using it. Would someone be able to run a node on their toaster? Probably not. Would we want that? Probably not. Today, you can run your node on a Raspberry Pi. Not saying that's a good idea, but you can. And the entire blockchain right now, say about like 500 gigabytes, 600. Say if I'm wrong, Calin, you should know is, I guess you're looking into that, but if you can't afford one hard drive for what, 30 bucks?

[01:40:37] FiendishCrypto: Then yeah, sure. You can't run a node, but if you can't afford 30 bucks.

[01:40:43] Calin Culianu: So there's like, there was a lot of narrative pollution going on during the block size war that's remained as part of the BTC culture, because the whole thing was like, they had to have a reason why they're not going to scale. So the narrative given was that, oh, you need to be able to verify from block zero, like forever. So let's just not, you know, let's not have the chain grow too fast, because then it'll be prohibitively, you know, you can't run a node, basically. Can you guys run nodes?

[01:41:09] Calin Culianu: You know, the question you just asked. I think that narrative is incorrect. It's like artificial. It's like a poison that's installed in people's brains. And I can tell you, I can explain to you why it's incorrect. Like basically there are technical solutions for this, like even like the presupposition that you'd want every node in the world for the, until the end of time to verify from block zero, right? That, that axiom is not necessarily true, right? So.

[01:41:36] FiendishCrypto: Section eight in the white paper, right? Simplified payment verification. It was there right at the start.

[01:41:41] Calin Culianu: Satoshi talked about this when he was asked about how does this scale? Like from day one, he, you know, the strategy was like, yeah, you're not going to have, you know, there is SPV so that you can participate in the, in the network without having to verify blocks at all. But then even on top of that, let's say you want to have like a node that has a little bit more security behind it. You don't need to verify from block zero, you know, let's say, let's say it's the year 2546, right?

[01:42:05] Calin Culianu: Do, is anyone in 2546 going to want to block, verify from block zero, the whole chain? You know, maybe not.

[01:42:13] Steve Thurmond: Um, you bring up the point, Calin, often that it's as if these people don't believe in cryptography, right?

[01:42:18] Calin Culianu: And the reason why I say that is because what you can do is you can have UTXO commitments, right? So you can just download the whole UTXO set, and then there's like a proof of work on chain that, you know, it's like the hash of the UTXO set. So, you know, that the UTXO, so you downloaded it is the valid one. And then you can check against the UTXO commitment and then you can, you can just download from block, you know, 6,743,000, whatever.

[01:42:40] Calin Culianu: You know, you can start transacting from there. And then if you cared about history, you can start downloading historical blocks. Bitcoin Core, paradoxically enough is actually implementing some aspect of this in their full node software right now. They're doing it as part of their milestone goals is to support UTXO commitments. Bitcoin Cash has, is going to go on a similar strategy. So the whole thing is like, yeah, you don't need to verify history from the beginning. History doesn't scale. That's true, but you don't need all of history necessarily.

[01:43:05] FiendishCrypto: You don't need all of history. And the other thing is that not everyone needs to be a node runner, right? You want a healthy amount of nodes, but what are nodes? Like the idea that just, yeah, you're running a node, you're not actually transacting with the coin. You're just hodling it, right? You're not using it. You're not spending it. You don't have a business that accepts it. That's wild. It's wild to think that these people are in any way securing the network. They're not.

[01:43:25] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's part of the narrative pollution because they wanted everyone, the narrative was you gotta be able to run a small, you know, we can't, we can't scale the chain. You gotta be able to run a Raspberry Pi and yeah, everyone has to run nodes. That wasn't going to be able to

[01:43:34] FiendishCrypto: Run on your Siemens Fridge, right? You've got to be running on the lowest denominator. You're running a node because you have a shop, right? You're selling bikes and you know, mountain bikes and you're accepting Bitcoin Cash and you want to make sure that there's no double spend. You want to make sure that everything's kosher, you know, no one's, you run a node and there's part of your business costs, right? If you're not, if you're not able to afford, you know, the couple of hundred bucks that it costs to run that, you know, maybe you shouldn't, maybe you don't need a node actually, almost certainly you don't need a node.

[01:44:04] FiendishCrypto: And, and if you're that concerned about it, then don't accept a zero-conf transaction and walk away within the next five seconds. You know, thinking that you've got that money, that BCH for your Lamborghini. So I really, yeah, I think that that is definitely narrative pollution, but one thing's for sure. Vlad, I don't know how much money you've got, but let's assume you've got no money at all. You've literally just got like a couple of hundred bucks to your name. You can afford to run a node. Should you? Probably not, but you can.

[01:44:33] Calin Culianu: Yeah. And like for most cases, SPV is good enough. And then, yeah, if you need more security, you could run a node. So, yeah. I mean, one of the things you can say about the Bitcoin Cash chain is that it hasn't had the transaction volume that we had, you know, that we'd want. Like we haven't had 32 megabyte full blocks consistently for years. So right now our blockchain isn't that big, you know, it's actually even smaller than the Bitcoin Core chain. But you know, were it, if we get, especially if we get UTXO commitments implemented, we'd be, you know, we'd be ready for global money.

[01:44:58] Calin Culianu: Like, you know, there's no scaling ceiling. I mean, Satoshi literally said this in like 2010, there's no scaling limit. Like that's just an artificial narrative, man. Like that was just done to make the on-chain transactions not exist so that like the bankers could capture Bitcoin. And like the narrative still exists. People repeat it. Like they've internalized it. It's easy to understand, right? Small, better than big, you know, small is more handleable. Small is like, it's just an attractive, sexy narrative, but it's completely false. And it was like genius because people still repeat it to this day.

[01:45:25] Calin Culianu: I don't know what to say. Like if you want to repeat bankster talking points about why Bitcoin should remain not scalable, like fine, go ahead. You just, you really are just, you're like embodying this, like the spirit of your enemy when you do that, when you internalize that narrative, it's false. It's completely false, provably false. It's just technically false. It's everything false. Sorry. I get a little passionate about this.

[01:45:48] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I was going to mention that two years ago I ran this experiment and I was able to sync. So this was two years ago. Maybe I should try the experiment once again. I was able to sync a Bitcoin Core full node in seven hours and 40 minutes on a MacBook Pro with, I think, 64 gigabytes of RAM. And for the BCH node, I was able to do it in two hours and 20 minutes.

[01:46:14] FiendishCrypto: And it's even faster right now. I think you would be able to just get going with, what was the project's name? The node in Argentina? They've got, just try and find it out. But yeah, they've sped this up quite a bit as well to basically get people up and running.

[01:46:37] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, currently, and that's because Bitcoin Core right now is actually a larger blockchain. There's more transactions on it because it's got more volume. It's number one coin in the world. So the Bitcoin Cash chain is actually smaller, paradoxically. The opposite happened. But in theory, let's say Bitcoin Cash would have just get global adoption and you'd have like hundreds of gigabytes a year, terabytes a year of blockchain information. At that point, you wouldn't necessarily want to sync from block zero. If you want to start transacting, you'd use UTXO commit and then start from whatever block.

[01:47:10] Calin Culianu: That's the scaling strategy we have. Where forever, it should be possible to run a reasonably good node on commodity hardware forever. That's basically the thing where we, it's an engineering challenge. It's an engineering problem. History doesn't scale forever. That's true. That is true. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a chain that scales. You just can't have a chain that scales that requires everyone to download all of history forever.

[01:47:34] Steve Thurmond: And for the Eric Voskuils out there, I would imagine there'll be some kind of monoliths out there that will have all of the data from the Genesis block to reference as necessary. But it doesn't mean that everyone on the planet has to have that same setup.

[01:47:50] Calin Culianu: Yeah. And it doesn't mean that you sacrifice some sort of security properties in the chain to do that. I mean, either you believe in cryptography or you don't. Either you can do UTXO commitments as cryptographically secure things or you can't. And you can. As a side note, most nodes actually don't verify every block from block zero. You just download every block, but you don't actually verify it. There's something called assume valid in Bitcoin Core, which Bitcoin Cash also has. You don't actually verify all the signatures. The only thing you're verifying is chain of custody, but you don't verify signatures from the beginning of time.

[01:48:17] Calin Culianu: There's like internal checkpoints in Bitcoin Core, just like there isn't like most nodes out there. Most coins out there have this. So you're not even actually really verifying transactions from block zero, even on a full node in Bitcoin Core right now. Assume valid, you're skipping signature checks. Just so you know, FYI. Unless you do -assumevalid=0 when you start your node. Most people don't know this.

[01:48:37] FiendishCrypto: It would be interesting to do the test again though, Vlad. Yeah, so I looked it up. It's UTXOZ. So that's basically making the database much more efficient. So the download is very small, right? That won't take very long to download, but it's building up the database that takes the time for that initialization of your node. And it's been improved by about 3x.

[01:48:57] Calin Culianu: Yeah, because one of the bottlenecks, when you're IBD-ing, is the UTXO set update. So that's one of the bottlenecks. So you could theoretically have a faster syncing node.

[01:49:07] FiendishCrypto: And I think that's only in Knuth node right now, if I'm not mistaken. But it's really interesting. So that should shave that down. Even though obviously the entire blockchain has grown over the last two years, that won't be making as much difference, I think, as this speed up. And that's what the idea of getting nodes, if you can get your node set up in an hour or less, or even if it's two hours, that's not a very meaningful amount of time to spin up right from the beginning of Genesis, which as discussed, is not necessarily necessary.

[01:49:37] FiendishCrypto: As long as it's small, it's fine. In 20 years, 30 years, this is the crazy thing. Even in Bitcoin, at a certain point, if you think that this coin is going to last, hopefully if you're building a really sound money, it's going to last generations, even epochs, thousands of years. And you know, who gives a damn who bought a coffee this year, you know, in 100 years, in 200 years? Hey, who even cares once that, you know, in 20 years, once it's buried under some transactions. But still, there you can see the efforts gone into there, into Bitcoin Cash to ensure anyway, that it's smooth, it's fast, and anyone can just jump in on very, very lean machines.

[01:50:15] FiendishCrypto: You certainly wouldn't need a MacBook with 64 gigabytes of RAM, although that's a very nice machine.

[01:50:21] Steve Thurmond: These points aren't even taking into account Moore's law and the improvement of technology as we move forward. So it may very well be possible in the future that everybody can have the entire chain. Sure.

[01:50:39] Calin Culianu: So, yeah, it's just a poison narrative, man. Like you just use it to capture Bitcoin. So, yeah, it worked. Yeah, it's a dumb narrative. It's like Iraq has WMDs. It's like Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. And it's like, you know, whatever other dumb narrative has been used. Covid is going to kill you. So we've got to close the world for two years to take the vaccine. Even though you had Covid, you shouldn't need the vaccine to take it anyway. Like it's a dumb narrative tends to take root because they're repeated often. So what are you going to do? Yeah.

[01:51:07] Vlad Costea: There's also this famous quote by Satoshi, which is, if you don't believe me, I don't have to explain it to you. Sorry. Which was in response to Dan Larimer telling him that there is no way that merchants are going to be patient enough to wait for people to get 10 minute confirmation. I think that was let me look it up. I don't want to say something stupid

[01:51:30] FiendishCrypto: That his answer was not to that question. From what I remember, because I actually wrote about this this point for a quiz night for BCH Bliss in 2025. And I'm pretty sure it was to do with scaling to the world. But but I'm quite confident it wasn't to do with waiting 10 minutes. Zero-conf was there right from the word go. And and, you know, the whole point of waiting for 10 minutes for security is is something that the narrative, as I understand, has come much later.

[01:52:02] FiendishCrypto: So, of course, if the value of your transaction is is above what it would cost to to double spend in a reasonable sort of amount, then you would want to have some some some confirmations. You know, you're selling a Ferrari for for for a load of Bitcoin Cash. You don't want to don't want to go on zero-conf, right? You might want to wait for a transaction for a confirmation. So I would be surprised because, of course, and this is the critical thing, money cash cannot work if you have to wait for 10 minutes.

[01:52:30] FiendishCrypto: If you go to a grocery store, you can't wait for 10 minutes. You can't wait for one minute. Right. That's it. And that was never the plan. That was never the intention. That was never Satoshi's belief. And I've read through everything that he said. So I would be very surprised if I missed something there. But that was certainly never the narrative that he made. But I'm sure that others have made that afterwards again to dirty the water and make it seem like a ludicrous project and that crypto could never have worked in the first place, which isn't true. Crypto is cash, at least.

[01:53:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, my point is that one major difference between BTC and BCH is that BTC has gone full RBF. And also, we don't believe in zero-conf. We don't believe that [unclear: before freedom] you should accept a payment without waiting for one confirmation, which comes usually in 10 minutes. If you get lucky, it can come in a few seconds if you're in between.

[01:53:30] FiendishCrypto: What a perfect attack to think about it is just so super clever. So the make sure the blockchains capped, make sure that the demand basically you the demand will out supply outgrow the supply. So now people are basically getting their transactions frozen. So how do you solve that RBF? Right. And and then all of a sudden you just destroyed zero-conf. Now you've just destroyed the original properties of it being cash and anyone that doesn't think it's an attack. I it's just so perfect. Like looking looking at everything that happened.

[01:54:09] FiendishCrypto: There's just so many things that happened in a very correct order. Very perfect to suggest to think for me that this was just good people doing bad decisions. It seems incredibly naive, especially when looking at the Epstein files and what's come out there. And, you know, we've we've people that created very highly sexy videos about the fact Bitcoin doesn't work as cash, with despite the fact they were poor, pointless people. It's all for me. It's very clearly was hijacked. You know, there's there's no doubt about that for me.

[01:54:40] FiendishCrypto: But it's a shame for BTC. And it was a shame for BCH, too, right? But I'm I'm I would have bet my house if we could open up that curtain and look through into a world where where BTC, where Bitcoin grew the block size, as was always the plan continued on that mission. It would be worth one plus million per coin now. Maybe many, many multiples of that. It would be accepted by Steam, by Microsoft, by Apple. They wouldn't have given up on it. They wouldn't have given up because, you know, it wasn't about the high fees.

[01:55:11] FiendishCrypto: It was about the unpredictable fees. By the time they actually managed to get the transaction through, they may even owe money back to the customer. They need more money to cover it. That's why they canceled it all for no other reason. And a lot of people forget that that actually Bitcoin was exploding. It was on a huge exponential and we're all suffering for that. You know, everyone on the planet, even those that aren't into crypto at all today. So it's a it's a hard story, but lessons learned.

[01:55:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but technically, why do you think that the BTC people think that zero-conf is unsafe?

[01:55:45] FiendishCrypto: Because when you are the people that are against decentralized money have literally, by definition, unlimited money. They have huge amounts of machines that can print out money. You know, when you think about the type of situation. So there's a company that's producing virtual dollars, billions of it, and they're not getting arrested. This is this is there's no way that all of this is happening and being funded by the powers that be, by the banking institutions, by the by the Fed, by the by the government. And so there is a you're talking about a group of people who are very there, their funds are limited against a group of people whose funds are unlimited and also they're connected to the absolute most powerful entities on the planet.

[01:56:36] FiendishCrypto: Every single narrative that they can create has hundreds of times more impact than the truth. Truth will win in the end, because the truth just keeps on growing away and is in the darkness. Right. But that is a force to be reckoned with. So and this is why, you know, that that that narrative control is is just being absolutely huge when it comes to, you know, the question why what I love to ask people is if it's so dangerous, zero-conf, if this is such a if this is such an issue, forget about the techniques, because most people don't understand it.

[01:57:12] FiendishCrypto: They just argue what they've heard. Hey, I've heard this is dangerous. It's dangerous. Have you ever looked into it? I trust the other people that think it's dangerous. Just look at it pragmatically. How many people have suffered a double spend that you know of on Bitcoin Cash? I know this many people. All right.

[01:57:31] Calin Culianu: Zero. Yes, it's necessary to just create the perception that zero-conf is dangerous because that further erodes the cash use case, which is, you know, the fiat money printer. People are threatened by that. I mean, it had to, you know, they wrote it.

[01:57:42] FiendishCrypto: Decentralized money changes everything. It's one of the points like crypto is now just seen as this right wing thing and just nonsense and, you know, gambling. Crypto is actually the best thing for poor people because inflation is the most regressive tax. It hits the poor the hardest. Crypto allows crypto allows people to actually save. And, you know, it doesn't matter with inflation. You know, if you think about how that works, if you're poor and you're working, you can save for literally ever billions of years and never afford to buy a house because the price of the house always rises quicker than you can save.

[01:58:14] FiendishCrypto: You could literally work for infinite times as a slave. If you have some money at a certain point in time, it doesn't matter how little you save, you will be able to buy anything you want. And that changes everything. It flips the narrative. It takes away the power, the rent seekers from the top and the people at the bottom. So like cryptocurrency is a is a huge power changer. It's it's the ultimate in free markets. But actually, it benefits the poorest more when it's democratized. So actually helps those at the bottom go up.

[01:58:42] FiendishCrypto: And of course, those at the top, they don't want to lose their position. You know, the people that have got their hands on the money printer, they you know, if you own the money, you own the world.

[01:58:52] Calin Culianu: Really, it's like a shitty form of money. Like, you know, crypto is a superior form. So that would be obvious if, you know, if it started getting used by people and they had to sabotage the use of it. So it's it's crazy.

[01:59:02] FiendishCrypto: The paradigm shifts. You know, I don't think most people realize like a lot of the wars, virtually all of the wars that happen, it would become literally unaffordable to the idea that, you know, more crypto, less wars. And it there's there's some truth in there, because with with with money, you want to go to war. And in the past, you'd have to go and ask people, hey, please stop spending money. Give me your money. Give me your gold. Give me your silver. Give me your real dollars. That's backed by real value.

[01:59:30] FiendishCrypto: Today, you want to go to war? You print money. And it's no coincidence at all. People like look into this. The first World War and the creation of the Fed is none of this is just like in a vacuum, that nothing is in a vacuum. It's all linked. You cannot afford mass war without money printer. So these guys are powerful to

[01:59:49] Calin Culianu: Go back to your original question, Vlad. So zero-conf is pretty good. And you can get it's an engineering question about how good you can get it. You can get it to be like ninety nine point nine percent of the time. Awesome. Zero-conf using engineering, you know, using like there's Avalanche, for instance, that eCash is working on. And there's like there's like notions of pre-consensus where you can have like really high confidence that this transaction is going to be mine. There's no double spend.

[02:00:12] Calin Culianu: There's this engineering ways you can solve that problem. The money printer people didn't want that problem solved. So they pushed this narrative that zero-conf is dangerous. BTC has internalized this narrative because the BTC is captured.

[02:00:23] Steve Thurmond: So, yeah, Joe is just chiming in here from from telegram. Zero-conf doesn't work on BTC because of the restricted block size, the node policy. They change the node policy. So now it isn't safe and things get knocked out of the mempool. But if you have sensible node policy, which BTC did before the split and BCH still has, it's just not an issue. Like Fiendish said, that was when the excuse to that was then the excuse to add RBF, which was initially sold as an optional. But then, of course, they boiled the frog. And until it's now basically mandatory. Applies everywhere.

[02:00:59] Kyle: Yeah. So I just want to point out as well, this jogs some memories for me way back, that Satoshi directly talked about using Bitcoin for vending machines for transactions under 10 seconds. So it is on Bitcoin Talk. I just looked it up again. But this is something that was like the very beginning and Satoshi was fully behind. And also why, like when the fork happens between BTC and BCH, it was a very definite choice everybody had. And why I chose Bitcoin Cash was because that it was sticking more to like the original ethos, like everybody's mentioned here.

[02:01:34] Calin Culianu: So, yeah, we deleted RBF as soon as we could. And then we have something now called double spend proofs, where you can figure out if there is a double spend on the network, at least in the mempool,

[02:01:46] Kyle: Which is also exactly well, mostly what Satoshi is talking about looking for double spends under the 10 seconds.

[02:01:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. He was even alluding to the existence of them. So he hadn't actually done he hadn't created them yet.

[02:01:58] FiendishCrypto: And there's also there's been some interesting maths into this is the idea that like, it's a consistent linear security. So you have zero-conf, there's a certain level of difficult security, and then you have your one confirmation on the blockchain. By the way, I really do think that the zero-conf is just terrible naming, right? I think that's the theory. How can it be safe for zero-conf? But I believe it was Jason Dreyzehner, if I'm not, if I'm not mistaken, but did the maths into it, but basically showing that once the transaction is about five seconds old, because the that UTXO has been propagated through the system, that the security after five seconds is is almost basically impenetrable, not completely, but just like a MasterCard, but certainly safer than MasterCard.

[02:02:46] FiendishCrypto: And this is what's what's needed. And this is idea. And this is also like a narrative that's quite dangerous that you need 100% security. So MasterCard and Visa exist. There's American Express, right? These cards are used all around the world. They have a huge amount of fraud on them. But yet, the merchants like are willing to accept that, because that fraud as a percentage of overall transactions is so small. And that's exactly what you need. So you do not need like, of course, we can have perfect security and super fast.

[02:03:13] FiendishCrypto: Fantastic. You know, there's no reason why you shouldn't go for that. But this idea that you need absolute security, otherwise, forget about it is also it's, it's just not correct. That's not how the world works. Zero, you know, going against that zero-conf, if you're using it for the groceries, what's the risk? That person basically tries to do a double spend for 50 bucks, that's going to cost them a lot of money. Where's the economic incentive? If they get away with it once in a while, okay, but it's costing them huge amounts of money, they're still losing money.

[02:03:37] FiendishCrypto: This is this is madness. And that business would eat that up, right? And it's gonna happen once in a billion times if that, you know, it's basically it's a big question mark. The other one is going for the Ferrari, you know, the house, you know, you purchase a house and you quickly run away with it. Well, who is buying a house and can't wait like 10 minutes or 20 minutes? You know, it doesn't that this is illogical. And so when thinking about that, like there's just, you know, again, thinking about more practicality, like how do you use money?

[02:04:05] FiendishCrypto: When you want to buy a big purchase? You're normally okay, waiting a certain amount of time because you're not just going to shop and saying, Hey, I'm going to pick up this Ferrari and you're able to walk out in 10 minutes anyway, right? It's just not that it's not possible.

[02:04:17] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean, like, it's just like the cost of doing business for like a retailer, like shoplifting is factored into the price of everything that you buy, right? Because they figure some number of people are going to shoplift no matter what they do.

[02:04:27] FiendishCrypto: [unclear: I'm going to be shocked if nothing will break.] There's going to be some credit card fraud. And credit card fraud is so much easier than basically any credit card fraud.

[02:04:36] Steve Thurmond: Some of you big brains here chime in on how our latest CHIP proposal of one minute blocks pertains to this topic of conversation. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[02:04:45] Calin Culianu: In BCH, we're thinking of lowering the block time to one minute, possibly next year. So, you know, you have the 10 minutes becomes one minute, whether or not it's good enough security for you on a 1% chain or whatever, you know, it's up to you to decide, but we are, we are lowering it to one minute. It helps DeFi, it helps the variance, so you will get that one confirmation sooner.

[02:05:06] FiendishCrypto: The big problem here, Vlad, or some of the pain points is for when you are waiting for confirmation, because of natural variation, even though it's an average is 10 minutes, what will actually happen is many of those will be just one or two minute blocks. And then you'll have that one block that's like waiting for 40 minutes. The idea is shortening that down, that will help that with that variance, along with helping [unclear: miner extractable value] issues by reducing that time.

[02:05:31] FiendishCrypto: But actually, from a security perspective, Steve, to answer your question, if you increase the or decrease the block time to one minute, you decrease the security of a block by 10, right? So actually, the security is is comparable.

[02:05:49] Vlad Costea: So how is it going to work with the supply? Like, are you also going to divide that by 10?

[02:05:56] FiendishCrypto: Because of rounding, there'll be slightly less supply than there would have been because of that.

[02:06:01] Calin Culianu: Oh, no, only if you do like an odd, like a 2.5 minute or something. If you divide evenly, if it's a number to divide evenly into 10, you know, into the 10 minutes. Yeah. Only if you change it to like 90 seconds or something, then you get slightly screwy.

[02:06:14] FiendishCrypto: That's a really important question though, Vlad, because there's, you know, there's all different questions and points about what makes Bitcoin, what makes, what's like the things you're not allowed to change. And BCH is quite pragmatic about that. Sound money needs to be working for a huge, you know, for the world, right? And I think there's a lot of things there that aren't sacred, they're not written in stone. There are two things that I think are really critical.

[02:06:38] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, speaking of Bitcoin, BCH is very aligned on these things. There's two things that are untouchable. One is that it's permissionless. If it's not permissionless money, then we've just recreated the banks. So it always has to be permissionless. Second, there is a set amount of coins, and that is a social contract right from the word go. And by changing that, you've basically, you're stealing the wealth of other people to give to someone else. So, you know, certainly today in the community, and this is, these two points to me, I think are the two points that are absolutely written in stone.

[02:07:11] FiendishCrypto: So the number of coins cannot, will not go up. So that's why to underline like what that means, the number of transactions, the number of real users, the number of BCH usage in the world is going to and has to scale radically as we grow into the world to ensure that the chain remains secure for the next 100, 200 years. And that's where our focus is going in.

[02:07:39] Vlad Costea: That's nice. In BTC, we say that the transaction is not final until it received six confirmations. That's like the conservative approach to it. Even in the Bitcoin Core client, if you're receiving a transaction, it's not gonna appear like it has an icon. And it's a bit gray or shady if it hasn't received six confirmations. Once it gets six confirmations, it becomes black. Is it the same in BCH?

[02:08:10] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean, we still have that. So we inherited that culture. Like, for instance, we use the Electron Cash wallet a lot, which is like a fork of Electrum wallet. And we still like, we still sort of like make it red, and then it turns to green once you get six confirmations. And then if we do one minute block time, it'll be 60. Yeah, I mean, we still have that culture a little bit where we consider like more finality, the more confirmations you have. We still have that.

[02:08:32] FiendishCrypto: But it really depends on the wallet, right? Because just thinking of...

[02:08:36] Calin Culianu: Some wallets don't bother with just one confirmation. Yeah, exactly.

[02:08:41] FiendishCrypto: So just thinking of Selene, you send the money, it receives automatically straight away, and it's just showing you've got the money.

[02:08:47] Calin Culianu: Because Selene wants to not confuse you with too many details about how the blockchain works. So it's like an easier, user friendly wallet. But yeah, I mean, that culture still does exist. We still have this notion of like, you know, the more confirmations, the better. We have that notion. Reorgs can't exist, right? You know, theoretically, at least.

[02:09:04] FiendishCrypto: So that's also true, right? More confirmations is better. And this is the thing. But I think this is a UX issue to solve. So one thing, Vlad, what you said, they're waiting for six confirmations to feel secure, regardless of value. It's a money killer. Yeah, go imagine, just again, just imagine you go, we're living in a world now, no credit cards, no cash. You go shopping, and you just sit there's a line of a few hundred people waiting for one hour, you know, to hear confirmations. It's ludicrous.

[02:09:36] FiendishCrypto: And going back to the white paper, it was so clear that that wasn't the intention, right? This is really cash. It was designed to be a cash replacement. You can't have a cash replacement where you're sitting in the queue, waiting for your money to transfer. So again, you know, I think this is very much a UI topic that, you know, we need to be very cautious of. And I'd love to see this more in wallets that, you know, if it's over a certain amount, you know, the wallet user, hey, Jerry, great to see you, man.

[02:10:00] FiendishCrypto: The wallet user could then decide what that amount of money is. And below that amount of money, zero-conf is just green, it's secure, as it should be.

[02:10:16] Steve Thurmond: I'm going to step back, guys, I'm going to make room for Jerry.

[02:10:19] Vlad Costea: Before you go, I just want to put another one of these tags on the screen. So anyone who wants to get some free BCH, you can scan this. I'm going to leave it on for like 30 seconds.

[02:10:30] FiendishCrypto: And then Let me go and get my phone.

[02:10:34] Calin Culianu: Defeat the purpose.

[02:10:37] Steve Thurmond: I can see in real time when it's been claimed on my end. But yeah, you've got you should have eight left right now.

[02:10:46] FiendishCrypto: Before you show them if anyone's into BCH that's watching this and you already have BCH, please don't scan. Please, if you love BCH, let someone who's new to BCH grab this money. And check it out for themselves.

[02:10:59] Steve Thurmond: So somebody just claimed it just now. So feel free to use the app. I'm going to step out. I've got appointments, guys. Thank you again so much. You've been a gracious host, Vlad. I really appreciate it. You're in more than capable hands than I with the rest of the crew here and some other guys should be hopping on. So I'll be tuning in.

[02:11:19] FiendishCrypto: Dave, it was wonderful. See you soon.

[02:11:22] Vlad Costea: Right now I'm like that meme with the blonde porn star who's like with six guys behind her.

[02:11:30] Calin Culianu: You feel like you're getting clusterfucked by us? Sorry.

[02:11:32] FiendishCrypto: Do you fancy a massage?

[02:11:35] Vlad Costea: Anyway, when Stephen said that I was going to debate a bunch of Bitcoin Cash people in my mind, or at least in my expectation, I was thinking of guys like Colin, the guy who was doing the podcast on CoinSpice. And I think that was like part of the early Bitcoin Cash culture. There was Colin, there was Vin Armani. I think sometimes MikeInSpace was collaborating with them. They had this, I don't know, it was pretty funny. They had their podcast. And it's kind of a shame that they're not around anymore or maybe not as interested as they were.

[02:12:13] Vlad Costea: And also, I think they did one of the coolest campaigns or at least I think it was them who did that. It was this YouTube video that was showing this guy who is explaining sound money to the clerk at the store being like, oh, bro, so you have to do this and that. And it is like digital energy and whatever. And then the cash comes in and he just spends it. He's like, oh, should I buy this or this? OK, I'm going to buy this. He pays and he walks out and he's like, it's just cash, bro.

[02:12:42] Vlad Costea: I think that was one of the best advertisements for any Bitcoin ever. And I also think about this a lot lately with AI, because in the case of AI, you don't have to explain how it works. You don't need to listen. There's a meme in Bitcoin that you need to spend like 60 hours per week or something listening to Bitcoin podcasts to really understand how this works. Like AI is very straightforward. You understand how it should be used. You figure it out. You use it. And in the case of Internet money, it should also be the same.

[02:13:16] Vlad Costea: You shouldn't need to read books. You shouldn't need to listen to a lot of podcasts to really get what this is and like strengthen your thesis or whatever. You should just be able to spend it somewhere. And that's it. And now you have that aha moment, that eureka or whatever you call it. That's it. And it's disappointing that we got to this point where in order to understand Bitcoin, like I remember I was on a date in 2020 with a girl and I was telling her about Bitcoin and she's like, oh, cool, so where can I spend it?

[02:13:48] Vlad Costea: And then I had to go for the whole conversation, like, well, you're not supposed to spend it. You're supposed to save in it and you're going to hold it and whatever. And so like so confused looking at me. And I will never forget that because I felt awkward and I realized, OK, she was kind of right. You're supposed to spend your money. You talk about your Internet money and people get excited and they're like, OK, what can you buy with this? You know, exactly, I used to be able to spend it at a lot of places, [unclear: Humble Bundle].

[02:14:19] FiendishCrypto: Spending money, spending money is the only reason that it has power, right? Money, at least with notes, if you're talking about cash, when, you know, there's a nuclear bombs going off, you could set fire to that cash and create a fire. But digital zeros and ones, it doesn't even offer that. It's literally like zeros and ones. So the only value that money has is what you can buy with it. And it's that, so if that buys you a nice holiday, if it buys you a car, if it buys, you know, you don't have to work, you don't, you can spend that money on your food without having to work.

[02:14:50] FiendishCrypto: That's fantastic. Right. But that's the real value. And so if and if you don't have that, then you've lost its main point. But, Vlad, you said something there which I think was really important, really absolutely nails on the head. It should be easy. It should be simple. You know, when we've made it, when your gran's able to just pick it up and there's not having to call you. And my parents, my dad especially, is so funny. He's just discovered AI and now he's creating loads of images and he's going wild of that.

[02:15:21] FiendishCrypto: And that's really destroying my WhatsApp group. There's no fun there, but it's good for him and it just works. For him, he just gets it. And, you know, he's pretty old. So learning new tech is hard at that point. Whereas crypto is still this quirky techie thing that you kind of, you know, have to watch a lot of podcasts to understand it. And I really think you hit the jackpot there because this is the thing that that needs to be solved is that whole UX to make it super easy.

[02:15:49] FiendishCrypto: It is just money, bro. It's a shame that we couldn't get. So the General Protocols team, they're on the flight back, they're flying back from Ljubljana from working there and they're building XO. I didn't catch earlier. I don't know if this is already mentioned. OK, so the idea of XO is right now there's quite a lot of security. When you sign a transaction, you sign something on DeFi. So on Ethereum, for example, it's just garbage what you're signing. No one knows, you know, what is this? And the actual contract is even done on the server side.

[02:16:22] FiendishCrypto: So there's a lot of trust there. It's not really DeFi, actually. It's very much centralized. And people sign a contract and hope that their money is sent to the right address or hope that they buy the right coin and it doesn't just disappear to a North Korean hacker. And the idea of XO is to turn all of that into building templates. So there's the trust model rather than you trust every single transaction you sign on every single DeFi platform and every time you sign it is to create templates that then you trust once.

[02:16:53] FiendishCrypto: But that template understands what's going on with the contract. So it'll put it back in a very easy human to read understanding. So you want to swap one BCH for 10 of this token or you want to lock up your BCH in a time lock for three months or, you know, whatever the contract is. And this is a lot of the abstraction that needs to be taken out. So it's just super easy. People understand what they're doing and in a way that is obviously safe. Right. But UX, this is the thing that excites me the most.

[02:17:24] FiendishCrypto: Making cryptocurrency super easy for anyone to use. And then, of course, super easy to use means super easy to spend.

[02:17:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So for the record, the name of the guy is Colin Enstad or Enstad. Enstad, yeah. And he's the one behind that advertisement that's called Bitcoin Cash. It's just money, bro. Like, it's really good. Check it out.

[02:17:50] Kyle: Jumping on the cash thing for a second. Bitcoin was designed around greed. That's why the miners work, because they want the coins. That's core fundamental of it. And then also people wanting to draw more people into the network. It's greed based. It's how Bitcoin was designed economically, which is part of why it's interesting. But the cash ecosystem worldwide is way bigger than gold or, you know, savings. So from a greed aspect, also why I think that the scaling transactions and trying to get the world using it, like it's just a bigger pie to take as well. Very good point.

[02:18:31] Calin Culianu: Yeah. And yeah, with Bitcoin cash, we have like a vision of how that should be. Like, it's not all these unknowns. It's just like, yeah, use the chain, bro. Like, we're going to scale the chain. It's going to be able to handle its capacity. We have like, you know, what happens when like the subsidy, the mining subsidy goes to zero, you know, in like, whatever, 50 years or whatever it is, you know, what then? What's Bitcoin going to do then?

[02:18:58] FiendishCrypto: It's actually one of the things I love with Jason is the fact that one of the main developers of Bitcoin Cash is really thinking of like hundreds of years and he's building. So he's already thinking of sub-satoshis and really making it so it's scalable to every single person, but not just the people on the planet, also AI and AI agents, which are going to cause a huge amount of traffic of sound money. And I love this thinking. So, you know, the long vision is absolutely secured. I feel very, very secure on that point.

[02:19:28] FiendishCrypto: But of course, like, you know, I definitely think this isn't just a Bitcoin Cash topic, but it's definitely a topic I think with virtually all crypto right now is the short term. What's the short term, mid term, right? You know, and that's where the focus needs to be in getting some real traction, getting real, you know, getting more normies, as you were, basically using this technology and excited by this and seeing utility. And that's where there's some real, you know, there's some traction issues just with crypto generally right now as, you know, going back to that soiling, dirtying the water and creating these bad narratives.

[02:20:00] FiendishCrypto: Crypto is a scam. Crypto is a jackpot machine where you pull and you make money. And people, that's how people feel about crypto. If you speak to the average person, it's just a Ponzi scheme. And that is a really, so I think that right now it's a harder place to have success than in 2009 when it all started. There's a lot of narrative to undo on that point.

[02:20:23] Kallisti: Yeah, if I could just add in, because you mentioned AI as well. One of the things that a lot of the AIs have current issues with is, you know, not revealing all the private keys, not just leaking out the seed phrase, so on and so forth. And Vlad, this is something that you might want to check out because, you know, in Bitcoin Core, people have always been talking about, you know, covenants, how do we enable it, blah, blah, blah. On Bitcoin Cash, there's been two iterations of, you know, covenants now, right?

[02:20:53] Kallisti: So we're able to see how all those are actually able to enable more use cases out of it. So what I mean by that is, you know, like, if you just look at, you know, cash transactions, whatever transactions, sure, you know, that's fairly straightforward. But if you're looking at it from more of a business perspective, you know, these kinds of legal terms, these kinds of conditions, so on and so forth, all these arbitrations and so on, right? On systems like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, one of the advantages compared to things like Ethereum is that there is no deployment cost for these contracts.

[02:21:27] Kallisti: So you can literally be negotiating, let's say, two AI agents, right? Just negotiate that exact, you know, escrow contracts to then say, hey, did you perform the tasks that people were requesting? And then just execute the payments out that way, right? They're very easy, very, very low cost. And because again, there's no deployment cost to transactions. It's super scalable just on the economic side of things.

[02:21:55] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's one advantage of UTXO chains in general, I guess. But yeah, specifically Bitcoin Cash and theoretically Bitcoin, if they did more contract stuff. Yeah.

[02:22:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I was thinking that right now there are some differences between even the clients, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core. And I was curious what kind of optimizations you guys made when you download the client. And by the way, I got to ask you, do you guys personally run nodes of Bitcoin Cash? In Bitcoin, it's like a cultural thing. It's like virtue signaling. You say, oh, I'm a node runner.

[02:22:33] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I run nodes. I mean, I develop servers, like I develop software that requires nodes. So I definitely run nodes. Yeah, I mean, and I'm one of the node developers, like I'm going to run my own dog food, right?

[02:22:44] FiendishCrypto: So my BCH there, if you answer differently, to be honest. I'm a node developer that doesn't run node.

[02:22:51] Kallisti: So I've developed my own wallets. And actually, I've developed a custom indexer for something called CashTokens on Bitcoin Cash. So on Bitcoin Core, there's all these Ordinals and stuff, which requires third party indexing. But CashTokens, it's natively, you know, miner validated, right? That said, however, there are still limitations. So one of the things that, you know, I was building was essentially just trying to track of a certain address, what kind of CashTokens a particular address has, and then vice versa, you know, of the cash token category, what kind of addresses actually has those tokens.

[02:23:31] Kallisti: So yeah, depending on like what you're actually using it for, you know, like I'm just running it mostly for my wallet and any other developers that might feel that this is useful. But yeah, I know other businesses, you know, like, I'm sure Paytaca is, you know, running their own service, and just openly providing it to people and stuff.

[02:23:50] Kyle: I run multiple apps on BCH, and I do not run a node, but it is something that I will be having to set up.

[02:24:00] FiendishCrypto: I do not run a node. And for sure, the very second that I have a business that is using the blockchain directly, you know, then that is the point where I have a node and up until that point, I won't and I advise everyone else as well. If you want to do it as a hobby thing, fantastic. That's great. You're not securing the network. So there's just no point. Secure your business. Makes sense.

[02:24:25] Kallisti: So yeah, I do run a node.

[02:24:29] Calin Culianu: Yeah, but you develop wallet software.

[02:24:32] Kallisti: Yeah, I develop stuff that needs the node, so I run my own.

[02:24:36] Vlad Costea: Can you turn up your microphone, Kallisti?

[02:24:39] Kallisti: Yeah, I could probably like bring my laptop closer to my face, too.

[02:24:44] FiendishCrypto: Way better. And we get to see your more beautiful face up close. That's good.

[02:24:52] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so what's different between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash? What do you call the client? Is it ABC? Is it unlimited? I'm not even sure.

[02:25:03] Calin Culianu: Yeah, well, it was Bitcoin ABC until Amaury decided to charge tax, and then we kicked them out. And then we renamed it to Bitcoin Cash Node, BCHN. This is the one that most people run, but there are other ones too. There's other nodes. There's BCHD. There's this other one called Knuth node, KTH, Knuth, like the computer scientist.

[02:25:29] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I guess the one that's derived from Bitcoin Core ultimately is Bitcoin Cash Node. It's like Satoshi lineage of codebase as Bitcoin Cash Node.

[02:25:39] Vlad Costea: So what is different about it compared to Bitcoin Core?

[02:25:43] Calin Culianu: Well, I mean, you know, it supports the Bitcoin Cash consensus rules, which Bitcoin Core does not.

[02:25:48] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, and there's been 15 CHIPs.

[02:25:50] Calin Culianu: What's that? Sorry.

[02:25:52] FiendishCrypto: I was going to say there's been 15 CHIPs implemented since the CHIPs was introduced in 2020, which is the Bitcoin Cash, you know, upgrades.

[02:26:06] Calin Culianu: Yeah, you guys have BIPs, we have CHIPs.

[02:26:08] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, so that in itself, that question there, I think, is quite an episode. And I'm sure that, you know, Jerry, Kyle and Calin can answer quite a bit about that. But we just had the recent Layla upgrade, which allows loops, is one of them, which offers quite a bit of difference to BTC making scripting much simpler. And, you know, bringing back that possibility.

[02:26:37] FiendishCrypto: One of the most important ones, I think, just from a cultural perspective is ABLA. That's the Adaptive Blocksize Limit algorithm. And this automatically adjusts the block size depending on usage. So many people think that the BCH has a limit of 8 megabytes or 32 megabytes. But actually, technically, BCH doesn't have an upper limit. Not hard fixed. 32 megabytes is the floor. What happens is that the algorithm actually changes. If there's huge amounts of, say if the blocks are completely full, day in, day out, then the chain would grow at about 2x per year.

[02:27:15] FiendishCrypto: That was an important one. And we also had Velma, which is the increase of the VM limits. But I'll let the developers speak a bit more to this. But to answer your question, just on a high level, Vlad, there's a lot of difference going on on the consensus level, which the nodes obviously ensuring is taking place.

[02:27:35] Kallisti: If I may just summarize, I would say, you know, we're basically now explicitly Turing complete on par with the likes of Ethereum and Solana and whatnot. So we really just need a lot more stress testing to actually see the performance that everyone's been talking about.

[02:27:53] Calin Culianu: Yeah. So basically at this point, like the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core chains, consensus rules have deviated significantly. Specifically, Bitcoin Cash has more opcodes, VM opcodes like the loops, like now we're sort of Turing complete within our contract system. So all of that is implemented in Bitcoin Cash Node, you know, as consensus rules, whereas in Bitcoin Core, all that's missing, I would say. So just to answer your question. Yeah.

[02:28:18] Vlad Costea: Right. So inside of the Bitcoin Core node, can you access CashTokens or can you do CashShuffle or any of the features that Bitcoin Cash does and you don't find them in Bitcoin? Or CashFusion. I'm not sure what it's called.

[02:28:35] Calin Culianu: Yeah, the node doesn't do that. Not like the node software doesn't do that stuff. It does enforce the consensus rules for CashTokens. But like stuff like asking higher level questions, like how many, you know, what, if you want to ask higher level questions about the chain, you'd need some other software to do it.

[02:28:52] Kallisti: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's on the consensus level, but let's say like everything that's off consensus. So things like compiling the opcodes, like CashScript, for example, the Solidity-like language. Early versions actually did work with Bitcoin as well, because the opcodes didn't deviate so much. So I'm sure, you know, people can still dig back into, you know, maybe version 0.1, 0.2 or something like that, compile it and it will probably still work, right? Other things like, for example, the new Wizard Connect by Riften Labs, the makers of the Cauldron DEX, they created something that's similar to WalletConnect, but doesn't rely on the central WalletConnect server, right?

[02:29:33] Kallisti: So it runs on Nostr, I believe, and it just does that relay basically peer to peer. So that I believe that implementation directly works with Bitcoin wallets as well.

[02:29:45] Vlad Costea: Jerry, are you playing with ham radio or something in the background?

[02:29:50] Calin Culianu: There's like an extra audio thing going on. Oh, I love that.

[02:29:56] Vlad Costea: It's almost like there's interference with your signal. You're getting jammed by the feds. Yeah, the feds, man.

[02:30:07] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So about the 32 megabyte number, like I understand that you have adaptive block size, but at the same time, what is so magical about 32 megabytes? Because you guys did not go full BSV and say, let's get one gigabyte. And I think Amaury presented this example of the block size increase being like a speed limit increase on the road. It doesn't mean that just because you increase the speed limit that the road is able to support that speed limit that you politically decided that is good.

[02:30:42] Vlad Costea: So what is your explanation for this? What is special about 32? And why did you decide that this is sort of the number where you should stop and just let I think this was the Bitcoin Unlimited idea to let the demand decide what the block size is in situations where there is a lot of transactions.

[02:31:04] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's a good question. So, you know, there's like a sweet spot with block size where there's less negatives than there's, yeah, there's fewer negatives, and they're more positives. So with 32 megabytes, you have like decent properties of like block propagation and block time validation, reduced orphan rate, you know, orphan rate acceptable. There's like, it's like an engineering question. It's like, you know, like, what's the optimal thing that you should have by default? So, like 32 megabytes has some of these magical properties, and you could like, you could look at a chart or a graph or some estimations or some simulations or some statistical work that can show this.

[02:31:44] Calin Culianu: So it's just like a sweet spot number. But the thing is, you don't want that to be like forever a point of contention on the chain. Like if you want there, if there's demand, right, then you really want to be able to grow with the demand because the demand is key. That means that you have like, you know, you have adoption. Like you have everything. If you have like actual organic demand, like for a long period of time, you want to be able to meet that capacity, to have the capacity to meet the demand.

[02:32:10] Calin Culianu: So that's why we decided to go with the block size adjustment algorithm, where it's no longer like a political question. It's like, it's part of the consensus rules. Like we decided this is what you get with this chain. This chain can scale. It's no longer going to have like that whole, the whole reason why we forked from Bitcoin was like they refuse to scale the blockchain. So, and then like the idea is that like, if we see that, like there's so much demand, like, you know, engineers are going to step up to the challenge and figure out ways to like, you know, to have their software run fast enough so they can meet the demand.

[02:32:44] Calin Culianu: But like the chain itself is promising you. Like if there's demand, we're going to, you know, the blocks capacity is going to scale. It's part of our contract. It's like the way 21 million is a part of the contract with Bitcoin, right?

[02:32:57] FiendishCrypto: If you go onto my social media profile, so FiendishCrypto, if you like search for Goldilocks blocks, I think the meme here sums it best. And I know BTC tried to try to steal this obviously. It definitely originates in BCH. And you know, the meme is just this block size is too small and it's BTC. This block size is too big for BSV and this block size is just right and there's BCH. And this is one of the most attractive things about Bitcoin Cash to me. And while looking into a lot of the chains before I came into Bitcoin Cash that I actually came around to just thinking this is the right sort of engineering thought process that's going in because it's very much the practical Bitcoin.

[02:33:45] FiendishCrypto: If blocks are too small, you can't scale. And that's, you know, and anyone that thinks otherwise, it's just it's just silly, right? The fees go up, they become unaffordable. People have gone into other chains. And you can really see that in Bitcoin. It reached its limit, everyone else flooded into other chains. And that was really bad for BTC. It's really dumb to create a product that the more people that use it, the worse the product gets, right? That's the opposite of what you want to create, right?

[02:34:08] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, so money is only useful if everyone accepts it. The more people that accept it, the more useful it becomes exponentially. So you want to have as many transactions as possible. And letting the free market decide that is like really nice on paper. But the reality is, okay, you get one miner that creates giga blocks. You can't even download the block before the next one comes in. And then, you know, you just can't keep up. And so basically all the world is cut off other than the centralized miner that's right next to the, you know, where the Internet's based.

[02:34:36] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, they've got the Internet cables and fiber optic cables, and that's the end of that coin. So that's obviously massively centralized. And then it's just a bank, you know, it's XRP or whatever. So it's a pragmatic approach. Okay, the block size. Well, how big should the block size be? Well, it should be big enough to allow as much transactions as is normally going on at that time, and not so much that only one computer can have that. So this idea that a chain is either decentralized or it's not is, again, like it's a false narrative.

[02:35:09] FiendishCrypto: It's not zero or one. It's a scale. And you have more components than just the block size that creates that. But the idea of BCH is to make sure that it's decentralized enough while still allowing to scale to the technology. And, you know, anyone that has an Internet connection or has bought a hard drive recently or, you know, looking at memory speeds and latency and works on that side, you know, everyone knows that the technology has improved dramatically, orders of magnitude since Bitcoin was first released. Why wouldn't it scale?

[02:35:43] FiendishCrypto: Why wouldn't those parameters increase? And as Calin said, the great thing about ABLA is like, what's special about 32? I don't think there was so much. There was research that went into this. It was basically a number that was comfortably large that allowed it to scale meaningfully without being so large that it would centralize the network in any sort of a sufficient manner. But ABLA basically gets rid of this conversation entirely in the future. So it scales in a certain way that allows it to grow with the network's needs.

[02:36:14] FiendishCrypto: So, you know, if someone wants to create some really full blocks and try and bring the network down, it doesn't work like that. It will move up a little bit. The block size will go from 32 megs to 32.1 megs and then it will come back down again if there's not sustained real usage that's happening on the chain. So the chain will just grow. And as Calin said also, I'll mention it, if there was a sudden rapid growth of Bitcoin Cash use, so all of a sudden we are seeing mass onboarding of countries and ABLA doesn't scale fast enough.

[02:36:45] FiendishCrypto: But we see, hey, but that centralization isn't a risk. You know, the chain can handle a higher throughput, then that could still be a consensus change. It's going to be a little bit harder, of course, but there's not something that's off the cards if, you know, and that would be a real luxury problem to have if all of a sudden we're talking about billions of transactions happening per day or, you know, whatever it would be.

[02:37:12] Kyle: Bitcoin also forked in the past the BTC and BCH because of this centralized planning of the block size. And that's also like Bitcoin Cash because of ABLA, it's no longer centrally planned. It's like the immune system of Bitcoin Cash has got better over time because now the developers are not in control of the block size. It will automatically go up over time.

[02:37:34] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's part of the consensus rules now that it can scale to meet demand. It was before that wasn't true. So, yeah, absolutely.

[02:37:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think it's time to put another one of these codes on the screen. So for anyone who wants to claim some free BCH and give it a try, maybe you can spend it on NanoGPT or whatever so you can get some Claude queries with this money. So I put this on the screen. I'm going to keep it for like 30 seconds and then it will disappear. You can claim it. I think on the left side you have a wallet you can download.

[02:38:11] FiendishCrypto: You can also go here. Cauldron, DEX. So this is the DEX you can go on. You can trade it for different tokens. You can even trade it if you want to stabilize your value. There's a great stablecoin, overcollateralized stablecoin called ParyonUSD. But there's lots of other things, you know, NanoGPT is fantastic and Milan, you know, a big shout out to him and the work he's did there. It's really, really a great way of using AI without KYC and giving value to crypto. Within the crypto, within BCH, there's also some great platforms to check out.

[02:38:42] FiendishCrypto: You know, if you get a little bit of BCH and you want to turn that into more, BCH Bull is another one. You get to leverage up to 7.77X and it's all KYC free and permissionless smart contracts. So check out the ecosystem and make sure to put that BCH to good use. I would say my advice is don't hodl it, you know, use it, use it or lose it. That's the important thing of crypto.

[02:39:11] Kyle: Or if you want to put your toe into DeFi for just a fun little project, there's Badgers.Cash, which was my first project for learning CashTokens and smart contracts, which lets you lock up the BCH and get some free Badger coins after the time locks up and the BCH back.

[02:39:26] FiendishCrypto: And then you can sell the Badger coins on Cauldron, if you want. They do the very pretty in your wallet. You can also hold them.

[02:39:36] Kallisti: Yeah, one interesting thing about the Bitcoin Cash DeFi is that quite honestly, it's not really that kind of like permission setup, even with the smart contract space in EVM. There's no like admin key to just shut everything off. It's literally like for Cauldron, for example, you have to run your own indexer or trust someone else's indexer. And then you're basically just constructing all of that transaction yourself, that swap yourself with the pools and all the conditions that's built into all of that stuff. So, yeah, like it's a lot.

[02:40:05] Kallisti: It's a different way of approaching all this blockchain interaction and stuff that we really experienced before.

[02:40:13] FiendishCrypto: Jerry, my man, that is a great point. Your microphone. Have you got another microphone you could maybe hop on to? It sounds like you're in a jumbo jet engine.

[02:40:24] Kallisti: Yeah, it's my room, unfortunately. I'll try to see if I can find another place.

[02:40:30] FiendishCrypto: Oh, OK. Is your room is in a jumbo jet engine? No, it's just small.

[02:40:36] Kallisti: It's just echoey, I guess. OK, yeah.

[02:40:39] Calin Culianu: It does sound like interference, though, like electromagnetic interference of something, some sort. Oh, OK.

[02:40:44] Kallisti: You know what? I do hear this light buzz all the time. I just figure it's because I have a computer, I have a light that's pretty fuzzy and whatnot. So I just kind of figure it out.

[02:40:55] FiendishCrypto: It sounds like the feds are on us, to be honest.

[02:40:57] Calin Culianu: Yeah, they're listening. I'll try to move.

[02:41:00] Vlad Costea: But they don't need to do that. They can just subscribe to the podcast. Yeah, I give them free information for free every week.

[02:41:08] Calin Culianu: Langley, Virginia. And then over a number of subscribers from there, yeah.

[02:41:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So what is it that you can buy with BCH that you cannot buy with BTC? Is there anything specific? Is there more adoption?

[02:41:28] Calin Culianu: No, there isn't. I mean, the whole crypto space has been sabotaged, like, for payments in most places, right? Like, be it regulators in Europe, like we were in Ljubljana, we were buying, we're paying for restaurants and stuff with BCH. And then like there was this, it's called GoCrypto, was the app that a lot of merchants had installed that supported various cryptos and supported BTC too, I think. And then they back out uninstalled from Ljubljana, from Slovenia and from all of Europe because of the regulations.

[02:41:57] Kyle: I think you can buy some Fiendish token and get Fiendish's time.

[02:42:02] FiendishCrypto: That is true. You can't get that on any other coin. You can't get that on BTC. There you go. Can't get [unclear: Pat token] either. Can't get Paryon. You know, of course, it's like when you look at the, there's things that you can get access to in BCH that aren't access to in BTC. Even just, you know, something like the permissionless leverage tool like BCH Bull. A lot of people talk about DeFi and it's mentioned by Jerry, you know, a lot of that DeFi isn't really actually decentralized. It's very much centralized.

[02:42:34] FiendishCrypto: There's keys to the back, you know, and BTC, I guess, you know, just doesn't really have that space anyway because of the costs that are involved. BCH has that. So Cauldron, on Cauldron, so this is a great website and people should check it out. They don't actually earn any money. It's all done by contracts. You can stake your tokens and you open up a liquidity pool. And then if people, you know, buying and selling, the price goes up and down, you're the one that gets the fees.

[02:43:06] FiendishCrypto: The fees are, if I'm not mistaken, 0.3 percent. It's certainly like some very low amount. And all of the fees go to the people in the pools. And so it's basically a set of lots of micro pools that have been set up. And this is something, and it's all with smart contracts. So there's nothing that, no one can take that money other than the people that are in those smart contracts. And this is something that's just not affordable on BTC. So all of those, every time you'd be interacting with those pools and every time, you know, you end up with loads and loads of UTXOs, there's all these micro pools set up and then people are buying and selling tokens all the time.

[02:43:47] FiendishCrypto: You end up with huge amounts of UTXOs and then you want to take your money off. What happens on BCH, you run it all through and you get all your money basically minus some negligible fees that even after leaving it in there for months might be a cent or two at most. And you do the same thing in BTC like, yeah, all my profits extracted, you've got no money. It's just all gone. So it wouldn't even be possible. So it's definitely worth it. Vlad, I highly recommend you and I do hope you've got a cash token for yourself.

[02:44:18] FiendishCrypto: If not, we'll have to arrange that. But for you just to check it out. So download Paytaca Wallet, which is for me the best CashTokens aware wallet out there right now, in my opinion. And to go and check that out, go on to Cauldron, go and buy a couple of random tokens just to see how that's working. Open up a staking. ParyonUSD is very interesting because, as I said, just this overcollateralized stablecoin that because it's backed by BCH, its value has really got a good peg.

[02:44:52] FiendishCrypto: And if you ever feel like, hey, you know, I'm not very comfortable in this, you can go and redeem it either at Cauldron or Paryon for BCH and get that back again. But it's good just to test it out because a lot of people, you know, it's easy to talk the talk. But until you've actually experienced that, it's a little hard to sort of imagine what the differences are between Bitcoin Cash and BTC. But they are there and there's a lot more things you can do in BCH today than you can in BTC.

[02:45:17] Vlad Costea: Aren't there like a bunch of shops in St. Kitts where you can only buy stuff with BCH or cash?

[02:45:25] FiendishCrypto: Yeah. So I was there back in 2022. There was a guy called Sunny Gahani who was a good friend of mine. And he was he lives on St. Kitts and Nevis. He's originally from India. And he was he onboarded basically a large part of the island. And so we had the conference there and it was an amazing experience. You know, you could go into a bar, you could go into a shop and you could spend your BCH. And it was only BCH that they accepted. But this is like a lot of so we've got a huge adoption in the Philippines and Argentina where we've got hundreds and hundreds of merchants that only accept Bitcoin Cash in Townsville too in Australia.

[02:46:13] FiendishCrypto: But the issue is St. Kitts and Nevis. So I think this happens quite often is there's too much focus on the merchants. And it's something, you know, how many people does a BCH users as a merchant need to make sure that they're still accepting it? Because if they're just getting one person every year to use BCH, by that time, they're going to forget how to how to accept it. You know, I had a wallet somewhere. So on St. Kitts and Nevis, for sure, there's not as many merchants that accept Bitcoin Cash as there was back in 2022.

[02:46:47] FiendishCrypto: Because that side of the equation wasn't signed, sealed and delivered. And this is a really important point. So there's a guy called Joemar Taganna, who's the CEO of Paytaca, and he's trying to solve this in the Philippines by a much more structured approach. Not just on boarding the merchants, but making sure there's easy on-ramps for people to get into Bitcoin Cash to make sure that those merchants are spending amongst themselves. Because if you're cashing, if you get Bitcoin Cash and you cash out to fiat, you're not gaining anything because you have all the trade fees and all of that.

[02:47:21] FiendishCrypto: Whereas if you're just accepting Bitcoin Cash and then spending it, then you get rid of all the, you know, the payment processing fees can range anywhere from 3% to 5, 6% in the Philippines. So we're seeing real adoption. So just as a bit of a shout out, there's a conference there called Cash 3.0, if I'm not mistaken, later this year in August, I believe. And this is something that I recommend anyone who wants to see real adoption of real crypto, they should check it out. Because that's the real focus of having real shops, brick and mortar shops, using BCH in a closed loop ecosystem. So very exciting.

[02:48:05] Vlad Costea: So you guys said that a core tenet of Bitcoin Cash is that it's permissionless and anyone can build. How would you react if tomorrow the Tether people said, well, let's put this on Bitcoin Cash, let's tokenize Tether? Would you be open to that? Would you make payments with Tether?

[02:48:24] Calin Culianu: I personally wouldn't. I think they're poison, but you know, can't stop them. But exactly.

[02:48:30] FiendishCrypto: This is the point. So none of us here are the kings of Bitcoin Cash and thank God, because if there were, we'd have to kill him. So, you know, even if all of us were against that, it doesn't matter. It's a permissionless network and they can do what they want. So do I think that Tether is a good thing? I think that Tether is literally the rocket fuel that was used by the feds to completely destroy crypto. And by pumping all of that money into BTC, that's what sucked all of the energy into the store of value narrative and not using it.

[02:49:09] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, everything's very linked to BTC. And the reason why crypto goes up and down with BTC is there's not enough liquidity in euros and dollars to get out of BTC. So they get out through all the other cryptocurrencies. So the entire market is completely puffed up by Tether. So what I want on BCH personally, I would rather see a native coin, an overcollateralized coin that's provable on chain such as ParyonUSD be hugely successful and for that to grow. But again, if Tether wants to come on Bitcoin Cash, no one can stop them and, you know, have some success, pull some people in and let decentralized finance destroy those. Yeah.

[02:49:50] Kallisti: So actually, I hope the audio is a bit better now.

[02:49:55] Calin Culianu: It's the same. You're getting jammed.

[02:49:57] Kallisti: Sorry, guys. It's fine. But yeah, like, so Tether is actually have been on Bitcoin Cash through the SLP tokens. So they've been since they've listed, right? Because no one's using SLP anymore. But again, they can do it. It's just that, you know, will people actually use it? I have no idea.

[02:50:21] Vlad Costea: Yeah. In the meantime, let me put up another one of these QR codes. I have nine of them and I was supposed to give them out more frequently or liberally. So scan this if you want to get some free BCH, use it for whatever you want or you may need. Left one is for downloading the wallet. Oh, I just thought. Sorry. You just thought what?

[02:50:45] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, I just thought of another shout out to do with the money. So one of the things you can do is quite interesting. There's a prediction markets on BCH Guru. It's in the beta phase, so you can't use Bitcoin Cash, but you can use Furu tokens. So again, you can go to Cauldron DEX, you can swap some BCH for some Furu tokens, and then you can go and place bets there. So people make speculations about will this thing happen or that happened? Is someone this? Is, you know, BCH recently sponsored a really famous Isle of Man motorcyclist, Dean, and you can bet if he's going to be placed on the podium over the Isle of Man champions.

[02:51:32] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, just a fun again, fun things that people can do with money or permission is all on smart contracts to have a bit of fun and make sure, you know, it's not just a buck or two of BCH that sits in your wallet. Never to be used and you forget about at some point.

[02:51:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, let me give out another one. This is number five, I think. It's still on the screen. I'm going to leave it for 10 seconds and then it's gone forever. I think I hope someone will grab this. And then I will present this paradox of layer twos, right? Because I think since its creation, Bitcoin Cash has been about scaling on chain. But I remember last year, at least, that there were plans. For a ZK roll up to get built on top of BCH. And I've also had a bunch of builders come to my podcast or at least talk to me in private and tell me that if they were going to do any of this BitVM or ZK rollup stuff that they're trying to do on Bitcoin, but move to Bitcoin Cash, it would be like 10 times better, faster.

[02:52:39] Vlad Costea: They would not have to trust these federations or, you know, ceremonies that they're doing when they launch. And they would be able to have like true covenants, make everything truly trust minimized. And it's kind of ironic, right? Because in the process of trying to scale on chain, but trying to be conservative at the same time, you laid the foundation for something that can be a much better base layer for Lightning, can be a better base layer for BitVM stuff with trust. You can have rollups, you can have drivechains with OP_CAT, you can have a lot of stuff. Like, do you think about this?

[02:53:17] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it is kind of paradoxical, right? Or like, no, you know, L1. But then I guess if you build a decent enough L1, it makes the L2s unleashed, you know, more possible.

[02:53:28] Kyle: The BCH community was never against the L2s. Yeah, that's true. Like, they're totally fine with L2s. We just don't want it to take away from the L1. The L1 shouldn't suffer because of the L2s. So things like payment channels, which is part of what Lightning is built up, like, totally fine. There's no issue with it. And if BCH is getting gigantic adoption, payment channels are probably going to be a thing that gets used quite often. In terms of Lightning, specifically, it's the routing between different people's payment channels when it's not yours is the part that we just, we don't need.

[02:54:01] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, this is so important. And this is a really important narrative. BCH absolutely never has been, never will be against any of that. The artificial crippling of layer one to make those things a necessity. We're very ferociously against that. And the way to imagine is like this little tiny tree is really thin and tiny with these branches that are hundreds of times thicker than it. It doesn't make sense. You have a really thick tree, right? That's the layer one. And of course, you can have loads of branches coming out of it.

[02:54:33] FiendishCrypto: And that's the layer two. But the branches can't be bigger than the tree. And that's what Lightning was trying to solve. And the founders of Lightning were even themselves saying, hey, you know, the base needs to be much bigger. I can't remember the exact size if it was a hundred... 133 megabyte blocks would be required to make Lightning work. You need the right foundation. And that's what Bitcoin Cash is building. And, you know, just to put it out there is a company right now that has been building for well over a decade.

[02:55:06] FiendishCrypto: They've been building a system that requires incredible throughput of a monetary system. And it requires, so and we chose Bitcoin, but unfortunately, because of what happened there, it was a bit lost and didn't know where to go. And then Bitcoin Cash happened. And so they can continue with this. And one of the main throughputs that they're using is the payment channels on Bitcoin Cash. And people are happy with that. There's no problem with that. And of course, there's still a lot of transactions that are happening as those channels close and all the money settled.

[02:55:46] FiendishCrypto: So the payment channels itself was never the issue. And I'm sure that when Bitcoin Cash has global adoption and acceptance, there will be huge amounts that is not happening on the chain. But that won't be at the cost of the chain. And the chain will have huge amounts of volume. It will have millions, billions of transactions per day. And all that throughput is going to be securing the network and ensuring that it is safe from any sort of attack, double spends or any of that nonsense. So I definitely don't think it's a paradox.

[02:56:21] FiendishCrypto: I think it's just seen as a paradox if that is the narrative that one believes that Bitcoin Cash was against layer two scaling.

[02:56:29] Kyle: One interesting little stat for that, if you get global adoption as well, is that if you have those millions or billions of transactions flowing, the price of the token of BCH could drop 99 percent and the miners would still be totally secure. But what's the chances of that happening?

[02:56:49] Calin Culianu: If you have that much demand, but somehow the price drops. It's been good.

[02:56:55] Vlad Costea: At the same time with the people that I was able to talk, they were sort of afraid because I've asked them, so why don't you build on Bitcoin Cash? Because you can test this, you can show to the BTC community how it works. You can even make them feel the FOMO, like, look, they have this cool tech on BCH. We've got to bring it to BTC. And it seems like there is a social stigma that's attached to it. And there's a lot of leftover PTSD or whatever.

[02:57:27] Kyle: There's stigma. If you seriously wanted to do it, I don't know how many, but there's like 15 hard fork upgrades or something that BTC would have to do. And I'm sure you could whittle that down to get the same functionality, but it is not a small ask.

[02:57:44] FiendishCrypto: Listen, that's only going to take a thousand years. There's no time. It will not happen.

[02:57:48] Kyle: So basically they have to switch to BCH outright. And it is small and there's not a lot of UTXO developers yet. Yeah.

[02:57:58] FiendishCrypto: And the stigma is changing, Vlad. So this is something, so I'm very keen on this. I'm going to tell a little story and I swear to God, this is true. When I had BTC, I was actually using BTC quite early, but I didn't really identify its properties until, I didn't think of it as an investment until quite later. And I had some number of UTXOs. It wasn't so many, but I transferred it. I think it was in 2021. It was really at the height of transaction fees.

[02:58:30] FiendishCrypto: But anyway, I transferred some BTC, just one transaction, and it was 80 euros worth. And that was when, and I was just, wow, this is, what the hell is this? This isn't the future of finance. And then I went on, I sort of thought, right, it's really time for me to understand this because loads of people investing money into this, I really should deeply understand this. And someone that comes from, studied economics, it is really shameful that I hadn't actually done this already. So I spent two weeks just really getting my head around Bitcoin and everything to do with it.

[02:59:00] FiendishCrypto: And everything clicked massively. Oh my God, this radically changes everything. This solves all the problems that we're seeing. Many of the problems we're seeing, [unclear: better said]. It's not going to make the world perfect or there'll be new problems. But anyway, and I was like, well, shit, you know, what's going on then? The Bitcoin project was completely destroyed. And this is someone that I didn't have any baggage. I had no skin in the game, but it's so clearly, Bitcoin has been destroyed. So what's the solution? Where do I go to?

[02:59:28] FiendishCrypto: And I was looking at like Ethereum and I was looking at all these different coins. And then I discovered like the fork was a bit more and it's like, OK, so there are these two forks. And I looked into them both and BSV, straight away, that this is an absolute scam, that this makes no sense. This is just centralization. It defies the entire benefits of permissionless decentralized sound money. And then I discovered like Bitcoin Cash and I just reading everything that it was doing, everything it stood for.

[02:59:54] FiendishCrypto: And I really came to the conclusion, this is absolutely it. This is from a pure paper point of view, from a technical point of view. I then went into the community and I basically found out where the community was. At that point, it was in Reddit. And I noped out of that so quick. It's like, whoa, there's some spicy, some spicy people in there. There is a lot of fighting, a lot of bitterness and sort of behavior that for me personally, I think like most people, it's like, no, no, I don't I don't need that in my life.

[03:00:22] FiendishCrypto: This is in 2021. And I continued looking through the top 20 or 30 chains and I was like, shit, that was by far the best. And it was that point I decided I'm going to go back. I'm going to open up that door, fill up my nuclear suit, wade in, and yeah, the hazmat suit and get stuck in. And and when I so that that the reputation so there was a lot there was like a lot of good people that were traumatized by everything that happened. And and I really feel sorry for them because they really believed in this project.

[03:00:54] FiendishCrypto: They were a lot of them were there right from from the start. And they saw the destruction of this is so obvious destruction of this in front of their eyes, the thing that they put all this energy into. And so they were like completely understandably traumatized in this. But it created an atmosphere that was kind of toxic, kind of, you know, very defensive. We've got the famous video of Roger Ver, you know, in the Bcash thing that sort of symbolized that and was used very much against Bitcoin Cash.

[03:01:23] FiendishCrypto: It was weaponized against Bitcoin Cash. But that that video sort of that that culture, it wasn't you know, it was wider than just that video. And but this is back in 2021.

[03:01:35] Vlad Costea: And no, no, that interview is from November of 2017.

[03:01:40] FiendishCrypto: And that's when I was in the culture. Yeah. John Carvalho interviewed Roger.

[03:01:46] Vlad Costea: And at the time, John was run Exotica, which was this cam girl website where you could only tip the girls with Bitcoin. And they were having this conversation about why Roger decided to support BCH. And the argument was, yeah, he was using Bcash all the time and Roger got triggered and he showed the middle finger. There are like exactly thousands of memes that came out of that one conversation.

[03:02:14] Vlad Costea: And there was also the debate from 2018, I think it was at the Deconomy in South Korea, where Roger said that babies are dying because Bitcoin is not scaling. And they just took that out of context. Like Roger was debating Samson Mow and in many ways, he was right, because Samson, I think at some point, Roger asked him, so what can you buy with Lightning? And Samson arrogantly said, well, you can buy hats on my store. And it's like, you know, that's not really a winning argument, but for some reason, everything that remained in culture from that debate was that Roger became very passionate. Babies are dying because we're not scaling.

[03:03:01] FiendishCrypto: And the thing is, Roger is a very passionate guy. And he's right. I mentioned it earlier in the podcast. The fear is what allows these mass wars to happen. So by getting rid of fear, we absolutely stop a lot of deaths. We stop a lot of a lot of murders. And so I don't think he's being hyperbolic, but I think it's a shame that happened. But the point is that that was all in the past.

[03:03:21] FiendishCrypto: And what I think is really there was there's a point, a turning point that happened in 2023 with the release of CashTokens. There was new people that came in and new energy. There was a lot of the old you know, there's a lot of OGs still in Bitcoin Cash and they're fantastic. And they've been the core and they built a lot of a lot of amazing things. But there's also been new energy, new ways. And everyone is so much more aligned on a positive, like rather than thinking of the problem, what's the solution?

[03:03:52] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, you can speak to we just had the BCH Bliss conference in Ljubljana and there were some people that we had. Sal the Agorist was there. We had Joël from Dash joined us. We had Ken, is it Bosak, from another Bitcoin Cash podcast. All of them said they're coming back next year. They said it was the best conference that they'd experienced. It's so different to any other conference. There was just this positivity, this fraternity. And this is something you'll really get in Bitcoin Cash. And I love this because you have different levels of like behavior.

[03:04:26] FiendishCrypto: One is you just you're defensive and you don't trust each other and you don't dare say anything different to the other person. Then there's the next level that, OK, we've got some sort of friendship. I have a controversial opinion. I'll keep it to myself. But when you get really deep, like when you're like brothers, then you start basically heckling each other in a good way, right? Someone is against the one minute blocks. Hey, we're going to take you out after the conference and we're going to, you know, give you a seeing to.

[03:04:51] FiendishCrypto: But because there's none of that, the tension there, you know, it wasn't we had like there was about 80 people there and everyone was just aligned in the vision, in the big picture. Hugely different personalities, hugely different takes on many important things, but nevertheless could talk about that in a truly positive, constructive, funny camaraderie. And so the Bitcoin Cash community today is just worlds apart from where it was. So I think a lot of that, you know, there's a lot of propaganda that's been used against Bitcoin Cash, but I also believe that some of it was really fair.

[03:05:29] FiendishCrypto: So I noped out of Bitcoin Cash, right? I absolutely did straight away, but I came back because I thought, no, it's more important than this. And I know Kallisti is here. Kallisti was also someone with me that worked, saw this, the potential and worked very hard, too, in trying to change people a little bit from less defensive to more optimistic, more positive. And that's the community today. So if anyone is thinking about the [unclear: taboo-ness] of being a BCHer, check it out. Come join us.

[03:06:01] FiendishCrypto: You know, come to come to a BCH conference, come to Bliss next year, because you can go and speak to Joao, go and speak to Sal, like, how are we? They're going to they're going to tell you straight. I can tell you now they're going to be very, very positive. These are cool guys because I feel it like very intelligent, very smart, very people that really believe in what they're doing. A lot of builders, a lot of dreamers and lots going on in the ecosystem. And, you know, getting that reputation out there and making it clear, you know, what the culture is like today.

[03:06:34] FiendishCrypto: This is, I think, an important thing that can mark a good milestone in BCH's journey towards mass adoption.

[03:06:44] Kyle: And if you want to get into coding, smart contracts on BCH and you want like private one on one just to dive into it from somebody that learned coding themselves a few years ago. Seyoshi Nakamari on Telegram and Seyoshi helped me on X slash Twitter.

[03:06:59] FiendishCrypto: Yes, we're loving it, plugging it. Go and check him out. This is the most wonderful man. Super smart, super great. And, you know, the Bitcoin Cash University is a fantastic place to get started. Check out some videos from Kyle's and then give him a ping him and get hooked up with him. I like it.

[03:07:14] Vlad Costea: I hope it's not as boring as the Bitcoin University.

[03:07:19] Kyle: Very technically minded. That's awesome.

[03:07:24] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if you guys follow the Bitcoin University, but I haven't.

[03:07:28] Calin Culianu: Is it boring or something? Is it dry?

[03:07:30] Kyle: I've seen some of it.

[03:07:31] Vlad Costea: It's spicy to be honest.

[03:07:33] Joey: Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, I go to Hong Kong quite a lot and obviously there's a lot of BTC activity. So I sort of, I sort of not 100% follow it, but I, yeah, I was going to say to about regarding Fiendish's point is that I have been to a lot of crypto conferences. I was out of, I was out of BCH for a couple of years. I've been working on stuff on like Arbitrum, NEAR, you know, like the broader crypto, you know, I guess you guys will call it shitcoins.

[03:07:59] Joey: I don't know what they're called in BTC. And it's quite interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting that Bliss has a really unique vibe I've never really experienced in like almost all my years of, I haven't been to like every conference, but I've been to enough. Over, I don't know, the past like seven years, I was there when BCH first started. I was actually there when I think the first BCH was mined and it showed off like the miner in Hong Kong, like, Oh, this is the miner that we used to mine like the first block.

[03:08:31] Joey: It was a Genesis block place in Hong Kong. And Bliss really does like Fiendish is talking about. It does. It was like, it's like, they're trying to do something completely different. Like it's fun. It's engaging. They have activities. It didn't feel like, I mean, I'm sure Vlad, you've gone to a couple of these conferences, right? It's always like, Oh, you know, you try to, you know, get on the side events and, you know, there's a wait list and you hope you get in.

[03:08:56] Joey: And then there's a booth, there's a main area. And it was like, it's not, it's not really, it's really kind of like just everyone like shilling and try to promote their own thing. This is like a really different thing where it w it was like the vibe of it was like, you know, we're really trying to do decentralized money here. We really try to, you know, solve problems and it, and then, you know, there's like engaging activities. Like one night we had a dance night.

[03:09:23] Joey: There was a, there was a, conference that was next to us. It was, they're clinical psychologists, I think, right. And then the guy just goes, come dance with us. And then we were just like dancing with these girls and they were all like, kind of like nervous wrecks, which was kind of funny considering though. Yeah, they were, they were, but it just, it just kind of shows like, you know, you don't really, in other, in other cryptos, you don't really have this energy where it's just, you know, it's just for normal people.

[03:09:51] Joey: You know, we just try to do things just, you know, try to build parallel economies and decentralized money and, you know, freedom and all that good stuff. And, and it's, it's really, it's small, you know, but I really feel like that is like the template that can really grow. And if BCH grows that template, wow, like what a, what a, what a wonderful, what a wonderful thing that would be. Yeah.

[03:10:13] Kyle: And how many of those conferences use, used NFTs for their tickets?

[03:10:19] Joey: I don't, I've never, yeah, I've never done one where I had to, I don't know about, Vlad, have you, have you guys done a BTC conference where you guys use NFTs as tickets, or I don't know, Ordinals or anything like that?

[03:10:32] Vlad Costea: I'm sure that there were Ordinal events, but I've never attended one of them. Usually it's Lightning, they virtue signal like, look, you can pay for this with Lightning, but I'm in a position where I don't really pay for conference tickets because people just invite me. Or if they give me a free ticket sometimes. Like I have friends who have companies and they're like, oh, Vlad, you can have one of these because I received like 10 of them for having a booth or whatever. So that's how I got into the Las Vegas conference last month. I didn't pay for the ticket. I had someone just hand me one.

[03:11:13] Joey: And what are your, I'm just curious, what are, what are your feelings on Ordinals? I mean, I think that was a little bit of a, there was a little bit of contention there, right? About, about, you know, I was like one of

[03:11:25] Vlad Costea: The first people to inscribe Ordinals from amongst my circles and I thought it was just fun. Like, oh, so this is, I think it actually accomplished to kill the momentum for NFTs on Ethereum. There were actually Ethereum users were burning their NFTs on the ETH chain to mint them on Bitcoin, which I thought was amazing. I was like, oh, it's happening. We found a good use case. There is actual demand for block space. We're paying the miners. Maybe that Satoshi was right that we're going to find the use case.

[03:11:59] Vlad Costea: Maybe it's not money, but this is cool. It's just that the backlash was very silly. And what's happening right now with people calling it spam. I just don't know how you can have spam in a decentralized permissionless network where you have consensus rules that everyone agrees to and are very like extremely conservative. They've been the same for many years. And it's not like I think Luke Dashjr Played a big role in this calling it. I think he reported it as a vulnerability.

[03:12:33] Joey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Remember, I remember you guys did, there was a really cool, Ordinals, project. It was just like, you guys just did an orange square. Do you remember that? It was just like selling orange squares and it was like, okay, okay. Okay. Yeah. That was like a big thing on Ordinals. But you, but you do generally agree with the idea that, Hey, if you, I mean, you're, you're paying for block space, right? I mean, so you're paying for transaction. So, like you're generally on that side. I don't know much. I mean, this first time I've,

[03:13:05] Vlad Costea: I think Bitcoin is the only network in the world that kicked out users for using the thing. I'm not sure how many of you remember Satoshi Dice, but some of the same arguments were being presented at the time. Like, Hey, it's spamming the chain. This is supposed to be used for payments. We shouldn't have full blocks. I think Satoshi Dice actually started the scaling debate, the fact that it existed and people were paying high fees to use it. And there was some congestion, like.

[03:13:36] FiendishCrypto: I think that should be where the warning signs come in. If you're, if anyone's really honest to themselves is just thinking, okay, so the more that people use this, the more people are angry, the more people that use this, the higher the fees, the more people are unhappy. And then people are using this in various different ways. And then people that are very powerful are saying, we've got to stop this. Like to me, these are the ultimate warnings. Like something isn't, isn't right here. This isn't scalable as a business idea.

[03:14:07] FiendishCrypto: This isn't scalable as money. And it also seems to be incredibly permissioned. It seems to be incredibly centralized actually. You know, because this is one of the arguments that BTC has used is how it's so decentralized. Is it? And I think really, you know, if you just pull out of all of the sort of block scale war stuff and propaganda, just actually look at it just on its own, on its own merits. Forget about BCH, forget about all the other cryptos, just BTC on its own and just think about how it's actually being run.

[03:14:39] FiendishCrypto: Yeah. And, and just ask that question because that, you know, I think your point is spot on. How can it be spam if there's, if you're paying for the, your transaction on the blockchain?

[03:14:54] Vlad Costea: But that's the spam filter, right? The transaction fee is the spam filter. You're paying a fee, which means that you're getting through.

[03:15:00] Kyle: At the beginning, there was no fee for transactions. Miners were including them for free.

[03:15:04] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Coin days. We had, it was the concept of coin days where if the UTXO was sufficiently old, you just get in for free.

[03:15:11] Kyle: A good cause and effect thing, little trivia thing is that Vitalik of Ethereum originally said that he wanted to develop Ethereum, like some sort of contracting language thing on Bitcoin. And he didn't because the developer seemed to be taking a stance against doing anything on chains like that. Satoshi Dice was created in 2012, looking it up, Vitalik started working on Ethereum in 2013. And I think that's a good little cause and effect thing of the Satoshi Dice might've started the arguments and then it started driving away utility.

[03:15:46] Vlad Costea: It was Counterparty. It was Mastercoin, which became Omni later. Ironically, so Omni is where USDT was born. Tether. It started out on Bitcoin and people were complaining, I think up to 2018, like 20% of the block space was being taken by Tether. And that's when after Bitcoiners complained, they moved to Ethereum and then Tron and Solana and whatever. So we could have had USDT on the Bitcoin blockchain paying fees.

[03:16:19] Joey: It's actually quite ironic because Bitfinex was a huge driver of Tether and then Bitfinex has always been strong BTC maxis.

[03:16:30] Joey: And then obviously they came to the point where they just realized, OK, we just have to move. So that's quite interesting because I actually forgot about that part of the history completely.

[03:16:42] Vlad Costea: I also like the mental gymnastics that people use when they justify that Bitfinex is the best Bitcoin exchange. But at the same time, they also have Tether and they support a bunch of altcoins and they have their own Ethereum L2, which is called Polygon. And they're like, oh, but it doesn't matter because there are such good Bitcoin supporters.

[03:17:02] Vlad Costea: And I'm like, really? So you get a free pass, right? Everyone else is a shitcoiner if they touch something else. But these guys, like they're fueling the whole economy and they're basically giving people a way to route around Bitcoin to not have to use it ever. And a pretty good one at that. Like, I think USDT on Tron is bigger than Bitcoin today for payments. And they're still the good guys and you still like them and you're still like, yeah, that's fine. But let me put up another one of these codes on the screen for people to get some free BCH.

[03:17:41] Vlad Costea: And in the meantime, I want you guys to think about this. Like, let's say that tomorrow morning, Michael Saylor wakes up and says, I think BCH is the real Bitcoin. I should buy more of this. And then Paolo Ardoino of Tether decides, OK, I think that this is where we should have USDT on BCH. OK, so I hope you claim this on the screen. I'm going to make it disappear. And then you're going to get the perfect storm of these guys putting a lot of money into BCH, getting the price to one hundred thousand per coin.

[03:18:16] Vlad Costea: And my question is, after this happens or as it happens, are you going to maintain the same vibe, the same dev culture, the same schedule with upgrades? Because I'm pretty sure that at that point you're going to get people who will say maybe it's not a good idea to try to do this, because maybe if you have this kind of privacy or this kind of smart contracts, these big investors are not going to be interested anymore. And you're going to make them sell their bags and move to something else.

[03:18:45] Vlad Costea: And I've seen this in Zcash, for example, because for a long time they agreed to a degree that they can have shielded assets, which means basically stablecoins and whatever, using the same privacy primitives as their ZEC token, which is the base layer asset. And they have been working on that. They built it. It was ready to get shipped. And then suddenly when the price started going up, they had people coming in, buying up a lot of coins and saying, I don't think this is a good idea. You should stop working on it.

[03:19:16] FiendishCrypto: That is a great question, Vlad. The last point you just said about buying a lot of coins, and this is one of the ones that on-chain governance is just set up for destruction. Because then someone gets a lot of coins, they can signal, hey, I want this, and then it's game over. And this is something that I think events like BCH Bliss and the tight knit community can have a good amount of weight against that. Because there is a lot of people across all of the world, with Argentina, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Europe and many other countries and areas have got relationships that go on actually at a personal level.

[03:20:01] FiendishCrypto: And so there's a very strong alignment of what Bitcoin Cash is supposed to be, which is permissionless sound money. So going back, you know, if it's on the blockchain, if it's allowed, there's no spam, it's paying the fees. And when this alignment, and we've seen this actually with some more vocal people that have come in, have had some clout, that have found that they didn't get the footing, but because of that they wanted. So of course, if Michael Saylor was to come in and all these other people, first of all, I think this would be fantastic.

[03:20:30] FiendishCrypto: Not because I think Michael Saylor... He's a good person, a great person. I don't think that he's a champion of P2P Cash, but I think that more interest on Bitcoin Cash and some money can only be a good thing, right? And it will come with some caveats. But the core narrative of Bitcoin Cash has gone through so many things since 2017. And as I said, at BCH Bliss, you've got lots of contrarian people, lots of very sort of libertarian leaning, you know, everyone has their own independent way of thinking and arguing on this and that.

[03:21:00] FiendishCrypto: But when it comes to actually alignment on sound money, I've never seen so many different people come together like that. So I actually think that Bitcoin Cash is quite a force. It's small, but it's incredibly powerful. And so I would be... I think that the CHIP process has been established on Bitcoin Cash will handle exactly that kind of interests incredibly well, better than any other chain and better than any other consensus mechanism out there. Will it, of course, like, will there be some more contention because of that?

[03:21:34] FiendishCrypto: Sure. As soon as there's huge amounts of money in the system that are able to pay and fund things that is going to cause more contention and more, you know, sway things a little bit. But I'm absolutely 100% confident that the that contention will be quite quickly solved by the consensus model and that the Bitcoin Cash community will continue moving in the same direction, which is to global finance, global money and all of the apps and products that will enable them.

[03:22:05] Kallisti: Yeah, it's kind of funny because the BSV and the eCash fork basically showed if you don't agree, just fork off. And it's not like your chain is just going to die. Right. Just fork off and just let the market decide. So, yeah, I don't think that's an issue to begin with.

[03:22:22] Kyle: And I'll just reiterate the fact of taking governance or central planning away from developers and putting it into the actual network itself. Hence the block size. So if BCH never increased the block size again because of it got too contentious, it's I can't remember what this has been, Fiendish trivia night, but it's like two gigabyte blocks or something like that is technically the where the limit is and before you need another hard fork.

[03:22:46] Calin Culianu: So not even just a soft fork. Oh, yeah.

[03:22:49] FiendishCrypto: Yeah. It's just because, yeah, the limit in 32 bit architecture.

[03:22:55] Kyle: And also, just randomly at the Bliss conference, I started talking to a few people about and this is way above my technical area of expertise and probably not feasible, but doing an algorithm for the block time as well. So it could be the same sense where it'll automatically go up and down rather than be centrally planned.

[03:23:13] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Yeah. And I believe there's some chains that do that. But yeah, that is possible. I can provide like the I think the culture in BCH is very strong. Like the immune system is very strong and like weeding out bad actors currently because we've had like several iterations of just massive toxicity that like exploded. So there's a sort of ethos now about, you know, we're more resistant than other communities to the sort of thing. But I think I mean, theoretically, like these people, the money printer people, they topple governments.

[03:23:46] Calin Culianu: So, you know, if they're motivated sufficiently, they can destroy anything. They can destroy Bitcoin Cash. They can destroy Turkey. They can destroy Thailand. I mean, it's a question of whether they will be so motivated or whether they'll be busy fighting other fires. Like my theory of victory for BCH involves the money printer people being busy fighting other fires and then sort of BCH sort of just rises while they're, they're busy doing other things. I think that's probably the most popular.

[03:24:10] FiendishCrypto: Just war with Iran and, you know, and debasing the US dollar and all of that, you know, all this chaos.

[03:24:15] Calin Culianu: And attempting to install CBDC against the will of most people and all these other things at the same time. And then I feel like, I don't know, in that chaos that BCH is ready, just like, hey, we're sound money. We're here. Like a weed that won't stop. Yeah. I mean, that's my theory of victory for BCH. Because it's, yeah, if Michael Saylor shows up and like other people show up and the money printer and the CIA shows up, you know, these people ultimately can kill people. So they've got a lot of power.

[03:24:39] Calin Culianu: They can torture people. They can kill people. I mean, this thing, this kind of stuff happens even in the US. I mean, it's, no one talks about it, but, you know, they're very powerful. So, but like, I think we're very resistant to it as a culture. But yeah, you know, my theory of victory involves them just being too busy to.

[03:24:55] Kyle: Which is why I think it's so important or bullish, in my opinion, why BCH has locked down scalable money and massive smart contract utility already. And it can't be.

[03:25:05] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Before the, before the saboteurs show up and sort of throw the wrench in the works. And, you know, like there's like this old CIA book on how to sabotage. One of them is just, you know, never like agree to do anything. It's like, let's have more meetings. That's like, you know, like you. Exactly.

[03:25:19] FiendishCrypto: And that is something where I think, again, just looking at the longevity of BCH. So the split happened in 2017. There were some upgrades between that and like 2021, but they were kind of smaller things since 2021. And now that we have had some significant upgrades that have really supercharged the chain, there is a culture not only of, you know, doing those upgrades very carefully. And there is a lot of time to check that, to test that, to really, you know, make sure that's a firebomb upgrade and go through that consensus mechanism to be implemented.

[03:25:55] FiendishCrypto: But that longevity of yearly upgrades and as a culture of, you know, how can we make this better? How can we improve this? Genuinely move the needle actually helps again against people that bring in, hey, let's talk about this. Let's set up a committee, you know, to block this. There is cultural inertia there. You know, on the opposite side, BTC has the complete opposite, right? So all these years of not upgrading actually makes upgrading even harder because there is that inertia. It's ossified. And this is something, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Jason Dreyzehner, he is working on CHIPs and protocols that take it even further.

[03:26:35] FiendishCrypto: It's really looking, you know, really, I'd say hundreds of years or thousands of years potentially into the future, creating a chain that could outlast the pyramids. And so that's also, you know, that sort of thinking means that you end up with a chain that is so robust, so scalable and can do all the things that are required for, you know, the world today. So it's not just dumb money, you know, but half the things we're doing actually requires quite a lot of sophistication, whether it's subscriptions, direct debits, you know, if you want to make sure you're paying for your Disney Channel, Netflix or whatever subject you're on.

[03:27:10] FiendishCrypto: As well as the whole loaning, mortgages and that side of things, that all needs to happen. If you want to have a true change from the banking system, that has to happen in a way that is permissionless, decentralized and controlled by code and not by people. And that's, you know, that's all happening now in Bitcoin Cash. A lot of that's already unlocked. There's more coming up. So when someone comes in to try and stop that, first of all, I think it's probably too late. We've got enough there.

[03:27:38] FiendishCrypto: There's still stuff to improve. But even if we didn't, it's going to be good enough for a few hundred years, I'd say. But I think they would really take a lot of effort, a lot of money now to stop that inertia that we've got, that positive movement.

[03:27:50] Vlad Costea: Aren't you guys concerned about quantum computing, like on this statement that you're ready for a few hundred years? We've already got a solution.

[03:28:00] FiendishCrypto: So we're not only worried, we're ahead of the curve. We've created a solution. It's already there. You can use Quantum Vault and secure your coins in a quantum secure location today on Bitcoin Cash. Jerry, you can speak a little bit more to that.

[03:28:15] Kallisti: Yeah, I mean, like the solution is already there because you've expanded the computational capabilities. But even then, like even in the BCH Blaze hackathon, I think it was moonsettler, he created his own Lamport signature quantum resistant stuff. So, yeah, there's like many different solutions and people just come up with them. It's not just like one solution fit for everyone. And I guess the other thing is that we're not really trying to seize anyone's money. You know, Satoshi's funds, like if they never move and Quantum gets it, they get it. Like, we can't do anything about that. Sorry.

[03:28:49] Kyle: I don't think people realize just how powerful the CashVM on Bitcoin Cash is. It's super underutilized right now. It's just waiting for people to build on it.

[03:29:04] Vlad Costea: OK, so how does it work more specifically? Like, did you guys hard fork for this? We hard fork every year.

[03:29:14] Calin Culianu: In a matter of speaking, we unlocked some more opcodes that make more sophisticated contracts possible. So we did hard fork for it to answer your question, but it wasn't specifically for the Quantum stuff just came later. Oh, hey, we can do this on our smart contract system now.

[03:29:29] Kyle: And the native tokens and NFTs through CashTokens, which allows you to have local state. Whereas Ethereum has global state. So we can accomplish the same things just as it takes a different mindset.

[03:29:40] Kallisti: Yes, I think the main thing is that this is more so of an opt in solution and not forced onto the entire network. Right. So you still have to, you know, shift your funds over. But, you know, that's still cheap enough. And with some of these solutions, it's actually more efficient than the current setup. Right. Especially if you're getting a lot of payments coming in.

[03:30:00] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I was just thinking about. Basically, so what's going to happen with Satoshi's coins? Did you guys have this conversation? Like, are you just going to leave them to the first quantum computer to get grabbed? You have a conversation about freezing them?

[03:30:23] FiendishCrypto: This is a real contentious point. So there are multiple opinions in Bitcoin Cash. And I think this is great. This is the whole point of a decentralized community. And you'll hear the other side. So myself and several other key people also, they're doing the research into this. So there was some quiet discussions on this. And I was like, guys, like, what's the maths here? What are you actually looking at? And using the Google white paper for the costs. Is that okay? So the costs are just, even when it does become possible, the costs to unlock an address is huge.

[03:30:58] FiendishCrypto: There's about 50 BCH per address, right? So the idea that it can just unlock all of these coins at once is not true. You would take a significant amount of time to unlock a coin at costs of dozens of millions or billions. So you know, the cost to unlock all of these is billions and billions. It's just a huge amount of money, even if that's possible, which is still a question mark, even if people really believe it will happen. Because it's not unlocked yet. So my thinking on this, okay, so there is a question mark.

[03:31:30] FiendishCrypto: So we've already got a solution. There is quantum secure vaults that people can put their money in today if they are concerned about a quantum. And as soon as any of Satoshi's, you know, the Satoshi era better said, because we don't know it's actually Satoshi's money. As soon as any of them move, someone might make the decision, okay, that is a sign that quantum computing is a problem. That is now real. So I'm going to move my coins to a quantum secure vault. So that means you're left with about 1.8 million coins, roughly, from that era that are dormant.

[03:32:03] FiendishCrypto: And the question is, okay, what do you do with those coins? So, you know, you could freeze them. You could make an upgrade so that they're no longer accessible. But, you know, and there are some good minds that think this is a possible solution, because there's enough warning and chance to move them into a secure address. And if they're not, okay, they're gone. So my personal take on this is, you know, not your keys, not your coin. Satoshi has either left those coins, maybe he left them as a treasure fund for someone to scoop up at some point, I don't know, and no one should try and guess what someone wanted to do or didn't want to do with their money.

[03:32:44] FiendishCrypto: And the other thing, you know, 1.8 million coins, it sounds like a lot. There's only 21 million in total. And if 1.8 million coins were to just dump on the market today, it's going to hurt BCH. It's going to hurt the price. We've been there before, right, with the split. We've been there with several splits. And this is with zero liquidity. So my argument from this comes from a more economical point of view. This isn't going to happen probably for 10, maybe 20 years, if at all.

[03:33:17] FiendishCrypto: And in which time Bitcoin Cash needs to simply focus. If we put all the efforts right now, we've got a solution, so you can already move your coins to a secure place. There'll be better solutions coming. But you can already do that today. But rather than thinking of that, if all of the effort goes into getting mass adoption, so focusing on the apps, the products, the businesses, the entrepreneurialism that actually gets the whole ecosystem going, you're going to end up with huge amounts of liquidity. So all of a sudden, Satoshi's coins start moving.

[03:33:46] FiendishCrypto: Okay, people are going to be a bit jittery. Maybe there's going to be a dump. The price will slowly come down. But the thing is, people are already hedging in that price. So that person can't hack all these coins at once. They're doing it slowly, but surely. They want to put it on the market. They would have to wait maybe a year or two. Maybe they wouldn't even be able to get them all before another person starts getting them. But at that point, BCH, you can spend it anywhere.

[03:34:07] FiendishCrypto: That has to be the goal. Because if not, we're failing. And if you can spend it anywhere, if you've all of a sudden got money at a discount, what do you do? You start converting some of your assets, some of your share prices, some of your shares, some of your property into that currency, knowing for well, this is some money. This is accepted everywhere. That liquidity will eat those coins for breakfast if it's thick enough. And then the problem goes away. And the important thing about this, and I can't stress enough, what we're building here isn't just some money for today.

[03:34:35] FiendishCrypto: It's not money for tomorrow. It's sound money for generations to come. Hopefully, if we do a really good job, maybe for thousands of years, anything we do today sets a precedent. And if we say, hey, there's a reason, there's a really good reason why we should freeze some of these coins, or we should take away some of these coins and use them to spread around, you know, to pay miners fee. That's setting a precedent that will be used by other people. Hey, what about this reason? You know, it will always come down.

[03:34:59] FiendishCrypto: Any government or any sort of centralized decision comes, hey, they've done this before. Now we know that this person is dealing drugs, you should also freeze their coins. You know, for this reason, that reason, until all of a sudden you've got the same sort of led by committee coin that you've got with a banking system. And so for me, that setting the precedent is the reason why I personally think building liquidity is the most important thing for Bitcoin Cash and leaves Satoshi's coins alone.

[03:35:28] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's a good point you raised. I mean, it opens up the door where governments could just come and be like, hey, you did this for Satoshi's coins, do it for this. And if you never did it before, you can just say like, you know, that would destroy our coin. You did it, you froze coin.

[03:35:39] FiendishCrypto: Think about this, the narrative. You froze coins to save your pocket for money, but you won't freeze coins to stop child abuse material on the coin.

[03:35:48] Calin Culianu: It just gives governments more leverage, whereas if it's never done before, it's like, you know, they can sort of accept the argument that we just don't do this.

[03:35:55] FiendishCrypto: And that narrative is also really strong for anyone that wants to come into Bitcoin Cash. So, OK, there's a sort of a slight sword hanging above the head in one respect, but the other one, OK, this is the real deal. This is decentralized money for the world without central planning and people to make decisions about taking people's coins. I think, yeah, there's a lot there at stake.

[03:36:16] Kallisti: The other thing, too, especially with the covenants, is that it really shifts the dynamic of whether or not the private keys really do matter at all. Because you can set it up so that the covenants itself would just lock in all the outcomes and you can literally just give all your private keys to everyone. Right. So they can only still pay to, let's say, you, Vlad, but, you know, the U.S. Government could get it. North Korea could get it. Hell, every single one of us here can get it, but they can only still only pay to you because of these kind of restrictions.

[03:36:47] Kallisti: So, yeah, you know, it's like if if all this quantum stuff like they get access to the keys, so be it. So what?

[03:36:54] Kyle: Another thing that flows into one of our last points is whether it's quantum or something else that causes like a huge dump of coins onto the network. For BTC's economic model, that could be chain destroying depending on the situation and cause like a death spiral bank run almost. If users confidence in the chain goes down to cause like a loss of miners over time, that causes it to get worse and worse. If you have millions or billions of transactions happening all the time, as mentioned before, you could have a ninety nine percent price drop and the network would keep going.

[03:37:32] FiendishCrypto: Liquidity is king. The important thing is for anyone listening to BCH takes quantum seriously. We have the solution. So for anyone out there who's interested on the topic, check out Quantum Root. You can search Jason Dreyzehner on X, and he's got some great articles about this and is working on all kinds of exotic solutions, but also his AK proofs. But Quantum Root is available on Bitcoin Cash and it is already quantum secure. So, you know, Bitcoin Cash is already ahead of the game here. It's already it's already very, very far ahead of BTC.

[03:38:09] FiendishCrypto: But maybe we're just taking a slightly more decentralized and less centralized thought process to how we solve Satoshi's era coins.

[03:38:19] Vlad Costea: Something that I think about a lot is that one way to intervene to basically right now, they're up for grabs for Google or whoever it is that's going to build the most powerful quantum computer that's able to crack ECDSA. So an approach that leads to an actually wholesome precedent is that you give these coins to the miners to be mined once again, to be reissued into circulation.

[03:38:49] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean, for BTC, like so BTC has this problem that because they don't have volume, they have a security budget issue in the future. So you can see them sort of doing this someday, like just because you need to be able to secure the chain and their strategy is not. Our strategy is that hopefully we get enough volume that fees pay, you know, like three whatever three BCH per block. So, you know, that solves itself through volume. But for BTC, you can see them doing this someday.

[03:39:15] Calin Culianu: Like maybe they'll do it. I don't know. That would be weird, man. Like that's just like, wow, like you're really violating like the original rules, you know, but, you know, stranger things have happened. So, yeah, BTC particularly has this as an acute problem because they're constrained. They can only have like two thousand or four thousand transactions per block. So and people don't seem to be wanting to pay a thousand dollars per transaction. Like right now, the world pays like the Bitcoin network, something like two hundred dollars per transaction.

[03:39:39] Calin Culianu: But we don't see that because it's all like the block subsidy. So between two hundred and a thousand dollars per transaction, like it's kind of nuts. So, yeah, like that money has to come from somewhere. And like you can see the BTC people doing that eventually, just like raiding Satoshi's stash and justifying it that way. I don't know.

[03:39:56] Kyle: Maybe that'll happen.

[03:39:57] Calin Culianu: Or a tail emission, just flat inflation. Yeah.

[03:40:00] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, which would be another, that'd be a really a huge social contract violation. I'm not sure if you saw Vlad, there was a guy recently, he had lost his keys to his wallet, or at least he thought he did. And he tried getting into his wallet for I think a decade. It was a long period of time. And he used Claude to basically go through all of his files to try and unlock it. And basically what it found was that in his key, there was an error that had been made, a bug.

[03:40:29] FiendishCrypto: When generating the seed and he basically, it corrected for that bug. And he got access to his BTC. I can't remember how much it was, you know, don't quote me on it, but it was a significant amount. It was like, you know, whether it was 10 BTC or something. So something that would really change the life of many people on this planet. And he got access to that.

[03:40:50] Vlad Costea: He had a passphrase on top of his BIP39 seed phrase. That's it. Yeah. And he had a typo or something in the passphrase. And he could not remember exactly what it was. So he had to basically type context into Claude and explain to him maybe what kind of mindset he was on and what he was thinking about and what password he was setting at the time. And he, I guess he just tried a bunch of passwords until I guess Claude made the right suggestion. Like you should try this one.

[03:41:21] Vlad Costea: Maybe you would think like this. It speaks more to the way in which Claude is able to think as a human. Then anything related to Bitcoin. That was a human error. Like when you set a passphrase to your wallet, you're supposed to write that down or make sure you're never going to forget it.

[03:41:40] FiendishCrypto: Imagine now in the context of this poor guy. He's lost his money. He's trying to get it back. He's trying for years to get it back. And now all of a sudden the committee decides, hey, we're going to take this money and we're going to go and give it to the miners. By all definitions, that right there is theft. No one can prove that the coins belong to Satoshi. And even if they could, they're his coins. And I do agree with Calin. I imagine that this will happen because BTC has a security budget problem that cannot be solved unless block sizes are increased or they have a tail emission or they take money from people and steal money from people.

[03:42:17] FiendishCrypto: And I think each one of those decisions is equally as awful as the other. And I think each one of those decisions helps BCH massively. So I hope that they take them. Maybe take all three. I hope, yes, they should do it.

[03:42:27] Calin Culianu: You guys should totally take Satoshi's money. Yeah, they're sitting around not doing anything. It's a waste of time. You know, you guys should totally do it.

[03:42:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but at the same time, I think the assumption of tail emission is silly. There's a paper by Peter Todd, I think 2022 or 2023, it's called "Tail Emission Is Not Inflation", and he explained that basically the emission would make up for the lost coins and it could take hundreds of years until you actually have inflation on top of the 21 million coins and more coins will get lost by then. So his rationale is basically that even though you have new coins coming into the system.

[03:43:09] FiendishCrypto: The Fed argues something absolutely identical. Basically, as the economy grows, there's more people and there's no inflation. You're just pumping out money because you need that. You've increased the money supply.

[03:43:24] Joey: But that's brilliant. We lost so many coins anyway, so we'll just add more coins to rebalance the 21.

[03:43:31] FiendishCrypto: Do we know how many coins we've got? No. But it's basically, by definition, it's inflation. You've increased the money supply, full stop. So you can try and argue why that would be a good thing, but it is by the very definition inflation.

[03:43:50] Calin Culianu: If you don't fire Core, you're going to have this happen. You've got to fire Core, man. They're going to make this happen at some point. It's going to be the ultimate humiliation ritual and the BTC world is going to just swallow that pill. You've got to fire this motherfucker seriously. If you don't have enough coins

[03:44:01] Kallisti: To actually use, I think, Calin, you were speaking about sub-Satoshi transactions as well, right? You get more zeros and then just like, hey, the price went up.

[03:44:15] Calin Culianu: You can use fractional satoshis, but that's a different question. If our price gets really high in BCH, like a billion dollars a coin, you might need more precision than the 10 to the minus eight. So it might be some fractional, but that's sort of a different conversation.

[03:44:27] FiendishCrypto: But it's a really interesting technical distinction. So in the code, there's only satoshis, right? There's no Bitcoin Cash, there's no Bitcoin. And so if you were to increase basically a decimal, all you're doing is you're increasing the number of satoshis. Technically it's inflation. But what you've done is you've given everyone the equilibrium, everyone that's holding Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, the equal amounts. So their purchasing power has not changed at all. Yeah, the fractional satoshis is not...

[03:44:52] Joey: It's just like an integer. So it's just like an integer, right?

[03:44:58] FiendishCrypto: Yeah, but if you think about it...

[03:44:59] Joey: It's a decimal point.

[03:45:00] FiendishCrypto: It's only in satoshis that's being shown. If you put in more numbers, yeah, you'd call it a decimal point. But at the end of the day, there's more coins, there's more whatever you want to call those things.

[03:45:16] Calin Culianu: But economically it won't have an inflationary effect.

[03:45:20] FiendishCrypto: It won't have any inflation. The idea of tail emissions, so it's really easy to think about it. So your Bitcoin is worth, let's call it 100,000, so it's a nice round number. And now all of a sudden you start printing out new Bitcoin and it's on the market to sell.

[03:45:38] FiendishCrypto: Nothing else changes. There's no extra demand. What happens to the price of your Bitcoin when there's more Bitcoin available in the market to buy? It goes down.

[03:45:46] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's like an inflation effect.

[03:45:49] Joey: I guess it's more like a sort of value slippery slope, in my opinion, that once you open that door, then it's like, you know, that opens up other ways. You know, you've lost the whole, you know, hard cap like argument, basically, the moment you... It's not about like the level of tail emissions. But then once you do it, then it's like a justification for like another thing in the future to be like, OK, we need more tail emissions. We just keep extending that argument. And then now you've kind of lost the ethos of, you know, basically what Bitcoin should be.

[03:46:28] Joey: I do want to kind of go back to an earlier discussion about what he said about like, you know, the Saylors come and so on. So my thing with Bitcoin Cash and BTC is I think the main thing is that BTC is kind of stuck like culturally. You know, like BCH culture will protect from, you know, the Saylors and the Tethers come. Yeah, let them come because, you know, our core culture is strong. And, you know, this comes down to the technical level where because BTC has that one megabyte limit.

[03:47:06] Joey: It's sort of like limited itself. And it's built this entire ecosystem, entire layer twos, entire companies based around the fact that you can't upgrade the block size. And so all these companies have like these incentives for the block size to not increase. Right. And so you're going to be perpetually stuck on this thing where there is a layer two. And then as long as you have the layer two, my whole thing with Bitcoin is that I think that they were kind of sold a lie. In a sense, everyone has bought in that it's not, you know, you're offloading trust right to to the layers two.

[03:47:39] Joey: And the moment you have layer twos, you can charge fees. And that's why you have custodial wallets. That's why you have these institutions. Right. Because they can make money off that. So if you don't have that, which is the case on BCH, if you have ABLA and we have hard forks that allow that, you know, L1 to grow, you remove a lot of those incentives automatically. So I don't really see how unless you guys do fire Core and then, you know, you know, a bunch of things like literally like rollback, you know, Taproot, you know, all the little things that basically is constructed around this idea of building an L2 and offloading that trust to L2 layer where these companies, you know, built by like Jack Mallers and all these people come in and then go, OK, now we will take a fee.

[03:48:21] Joey: Right. Which completely eliminates the point of, you know, the white paper, which is, you know, peer to peer transaction without a third party. Right. Now you have a third party. That's a company. So you can argue in some ways that's good because, you know, you get to, you know, fit in with the regulators and the regulators get to, you know, watch and, you know, the bankers get to make money by charging their fees. You're kind of like the Visa network, you know, MasterCard and, you know, whatever.

[03:48:46] Joey: Right. But then the the main argument I would I would go with that is that's why we haven't seen those companies come in because they kind of come in and they kind of go, OK, like you can't like how do you make you know, how do you arbitrage that? Right. And as long as that one megabyte block size limit exists, basically you can arbitrage that by just going, OK, I'll build a company on top of that and basically I'll just charge fees. And that's basically, I think, where I really see BTC kind of being stuck because you guys, BTC will always need like layer twos and companies building on layer twos. And I think we're heading in very different directions in that. Yeah. Sorry, did I call autistic?

[03:49:40] Calin Culianu: Well said, well said, man.

[03:49:42] Joey: Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. Sorry, it's not an autistic thing, it just goes off.

[03:49:45] Calin Culianu: Well said, yeah, I'm thinking of what you said, yeah.

[03:49:49] Joey: But yeah, like I think, I think like if, yeah, and I think this is actually a really interesting thing. Like if BCH was to, receive the amount of attention BTC does have, basically with the big guys will come in, it's inevitable, you know, like people will come in and they'll try to, you know, like, you know, finance stuff and you know, the big money will come in and you're gonna, you're gonna have like a Saylor.

[03:50:11] Joey: If it's not Saylor, it'll be some other guy trying to do DATs. The, the core defense is I always say like, I say like, actually like social engineering is way harder than technical engineering. You know, culture is harder, way harder to do than, you know, just solving it by code. So I think with BCH is like, we got the culture correct. And so I see that as like the, almost like the ultimate like defense against those kinds of moves. And, you know, if VCs or external capital, they want to come in. Yeah. Great. Let them come in. But our core culture is the defense.

[03:50:47] FiendishCrypto: BCH has the culture correct. And you know, that is the soundbite and anyone that doesn't believe that, anyone that's still hung up on that, like come and join us, come and join us. Vlad, I'd love to see you at Bliss next year. Ljubljana, right? Slovenia, it's really not that far away from you. But it'd be great for you to see that you get to meet, you know, some other people that aren't in Bitcoin Cash directly sort of on the periphery. But the culture is there and that is the winning strategy.

[03:51:17] Joey: I think it's also, I think it's also really important to remember that we are part of the same tribe. Like a lot of the people that are in BTC basically, you know, we literally were the same group. We, we split off, but we believe in the same thing. And I think it's, it's important to realize that, you know, like it, you know, like just invite them and they explore and then they can always, you know, change their mind, make up their own minds and, you know, just, you know, these guys just be like, wow.

[03:51:51] Joey: Like, you know, these guys are all like, you know, like we've lost their minds years ago and then like back out. But I think it is, it is really, it is really worth going for. Cause I do think, especially the older, the older Bitcoiners, like a lot of them, you know, we were literally aligned on the same thing. We just believed in, you know, different narratives or I guess in the sense, I guess in the, in the Bitcoin Cash community, we believe that actually, well, I know there's a lot of censorship, you know, back on r/Bitcoin and so on and so forth.

[03:52:22] Joey: So I feel like there's kind of like a lot of information in history that's obscured to a lot of the BTC community in terms of exactly what happened, you know, in terms of, you know, what happened to the block size debate and how that kind of got hijacked. And, you know, that I think a lot of the BTC people I read on Twitter now they kind of go like, hey, you know, you know, we don't agree with big blocks, but maybe these guys were actually like figuring some things out that we didn't see at the time.

[03:52:53] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, that's a healthy mindset on the topic of what you said about Bitcoin always needing layer twos. I was always disappointed to see this argument coming even from people like Adam Back that it's fine if layer twos are centralized as long as we keep the layer one small and decentralized. And I'm like, okay, so who's going to use that? Because that's basically the first class experience that you can get on the base layer, the highest security.

[03:53:23] FiendishCrypto: Just for the bankers, just for the ones that can afford the thousands of dollars per transaction that the fees will end up having to get to, right? It's not for you, Vlad. It's not for you. It's not for me. You just build it up until it's so expensive. It's just for the bankers. You use a centralized layer two because you're not worth decentralized. That's the message.

[03:53:46] Kyle: Then why would the bankers use it when there's alternative solutions that are cheaper that do the same thing?

[03:53:52] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah, that's the fallacy. People assume that anyone who holds a lot of Bitcoin will be willing to pay those transaction fees. Well, guess what? You have DeFi solutions. You can wrap your Bitcoin, you can swap it so that it's not going to be you who's going to pay for that transaction fee or passing that on to someone else. There are tricks you can do. But my point is that using the base layer, I remember there are tweets like four or five years ago where people were saying, we're going to tell our grandchildren that we use the Bitcoin blockchain because they will not.

[03:54:26] Vlad Costea: It will be unaffordable by then. It will be like this fabled grandpa story where you say, well, I used to do this and nobody does it anymore because it's too expensive. On this topic, I've also noticed that I think even the Human Rights Foundation invests in these federations, which are basically ways for people to use Bitcoin on the Lightning Network in small communities. And they take that to El Salvador, they take that to Africa and they virtue signal a lot. And they're like, we're onboarding people to Bitcoin and we're letting them do scalable, affordable payments with Bitcoin.

[03:55:04] Vlad Costea: And I'm like, that's not Bitcoin. You can have and they will say, yeah, but it's not us controlling the federation or the mint. They have local leaders. I'm like, you think that their local leaders cannot steal and they cannot just take everyone's money and run away from the country? Like, you're not going to solve human greed and all of these problems that we're trying to fix by eliminating trust, because that was basically the whole point of this without trusted third parties. If you look at the white paper, I'm pretty sure it mentions trusted third parties as something that we need to fix with Bitcoin.

[03:55:40] Vlad Costea: And it seems like we're just trying to reinvent trust around this limited base layer. And it's super frustrating.

[03:55:47] FiendishCrypto: I just want to just want to take that, sorry, just to make sure in the white papers in the first paragraph, the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. So basically, if a third party is involved, that's the main benefit of Bitcoin, to not have trusted third parties.

[03:56:06] Vlad Costea: I think before it was called Bitcoin, Satoshi was circulating this paper that was called ecash.pdf and it was called electronic cash internet money without a trusted third party. Don't quote me on this. Maybe it was called something else, but I'm sure that trusted third party was a big part of the defense for this technology to exist to eliminate that. And it's just disappointing to get to a point where, okay, we're reinventing trust, but we're saying that, well, at least it uses Bitcoin, which is sound money and it's better.

[03:56:45] FiendishCrypto: The fiat system is literally built on this, right? So there was gold. And then, and then, and this is the thing going back to your point Vlad, and just to make sure like anyone that's listening, the tail emission is all the same scam and it's been run multiple times, even the Romans had, it just makes a little bit of alloy into the silver until there's no silver left. And fiat was built on that. So you had a note in the end, once you got rid of the silver coins and sound money, and then you had a note, which is basically, you could swap or had the value of the gold, right?

[03:57:18] FiendishCrypto: And then they decoupled that and it's all the same steps and they're doing the exact same thing for Bitcoin. We've seen this happen literally in living memory and people that can't see it happening again, it just makes me think like, just read a history book. Like this is not new where we're at. And, and so I'm really, really glad you're like, you're putting out those things, Vlad, because those are the important things. Like that's for me, what I recognized in 2021, why BTC just doesn't have a future on the current path it's on.

[03:57:49] FiendishCrypto: Here's my question to you, like, what is it? So I know, you know, anything but BCH is a great name. What is it from your perspective? What is it that Bitcoin Cash would need to offer you to be able to say, yeah, like, I'm a fan of Bitcoin Cash, right? I want to be involved in this or I want to buy some. It's on sale right now.

[03:58:09] Calin Culianu: It's only 350 a coin. It is on sale.

[03:58:12] FiendishCrypto: Dammit.

[03:58:12] Vlad Costea: Well, to answer your question, I would love to see Zerocash being deployed. I think it has the best privacy and they were able to make it so that you don't need the ceremony and the trusted setup anymore with Halo 2. So for like three or four years, it's been truly trust minimized and it was built for Bitcoin, but for some reason in between 2016 and 2026, Bitcoin forgot completely about this. So I would love to see that technology and maybe try drivechains, which I think are a good way to build other chains that use the same features from altcoins, but pay fees to the same miners.

[03:59:03] FiendishCrypto: So privacy is very important to you. This is one that I fully understand. So without privacy, you don't have a secure money. If the government knows exactly whose money's whose, then you've actually built a CBDC. It goes beyond that.

[03:59:24] Vlad Costea: So it's not just ideological. It's also technical. Maybe you guys can figure it out without adding privacy. But how do you make the currency fungible and how do you make sure that the miners are not able to censor certain transactions? Like ideally, there should be no distinction between a transaction that's sent in my country and one that's sent in Iran and one that's sent in Russia and one that's sent in the US, Australia, whatever. So if you want this to be sound money and you want it to be censorship resistant right now, Bitcoin's censorship resistance relies on game theory, which means that if one miner does not like your transaction, he can not pick it up and maybe some other miner has the incentive to collect the transaction fee. But it's not perfect. It's not like the currency is truly fungible. You can also make a distinction between a coin that was used on the Silk Road and one that was mined 10 minutes ago. And if you really want to have real internet money, this should not be a distinction that you can make. And this public ledger, you know, we used to not be too concerned about it because it's pseudonymous, but right now anyone with access to an LLM can just type an address and ask about the whole history and just make a series of queries, and that gets them pretty close to the software that blockchain analysis has. And I know that you're going to tell me about CashFusion and stuff like this, which is a version of the CoinJoin.

[04:00:50] FiendishCrypto: No, actually, I wasn't. I'm going to tell you something better, but yeah, carry on.

[04:00:53] Vlad Costea: You're still not able to hide the amounts, and that's one of the problems, because you can do as many mixes as you want. Chainalysis can see them between inputs and outputs when you enter these CoinJoins. So let's say you have one Bitcoin, you're going to mix that and pay some fees. At the end, if you consolidate all of that, and you still have one Bitcoin minus the fees, it's kind of obvious that it was you. Or if you join KYC exchanges, well, you're still going to have to register and there's going to be more information attached to UTXOs. And if that information gets shared across exchanges, which I guess it does, or if the government collects from all exchanges...

[04:01:34] FiendishCrypto: It certainly gets exchanged across, like in Europe, for example, with MiCA, it gets exchanged across all the different tax offices and goes to the home country of the tax office. And the thing is that with that, a privacy coin isn't even allowed on that. So it makes that [unclear: null and void]. So one of the things I give a lot of thought like to the I know there's a big thought here with transparent chains and pros and cons. So I gave a lot of thought on that, because I was looking at Monero at the time.

[04:02:02] FiendishCrypto: Monero was also very interesting, and I do think for a pure privacy coin, very, very interesting and an interesting one to use is that the only way you can truly make sure that the chain is auditable is through being a transparent layer. So having transparent layer one for me, after all the research that I did, to the best of my understanding is absolutely the foundation of global sound money. So you can see there's no funny business going on. And Monero, I've heard it so many Monero people saying, you know, it is accountable.

[04:02:37] FiendishCrypto: No, it's not. There's so many ways that there could be bugs in there and hacks to basically generate coins that no one would be able to easily find. But when it comes to like privacy, so you're right, there is some challenges there. So you can use CashFusion. I wasn't going to talk about it, but you mentioned it. But I agree, you know, there's some challenges there. So from a UX point of view, it's not so not so easy. It's certainly not for a new person. You have to be careful because if you say if you take the one BCH, you use CashFusion and then you make a spend or change, you know, if you so if it's one BCH or over or just use all of those transactions, they'll come together.

[04:03:11] FiendishCrypto: And with chain analysis, you know, it's probably not too difficult with today's computing power to put that and link that to the person in those cases. And privacy needs to be a thoughtless thing, right? You just need to be able to use your wallet and not think two seconds about it. And it just does its privacy thing that it has to be at that level if you switch on privacy. But the points that I wanted to discuss was where the direction that BCH is going is truly innovative.

[04:03:39] FiendishCrypto: So talking about layer two solutions, here is actually a possibility that's actually very interesting. With all the new components that have been unlocked on BCH, there's a lot of work again, Jason Dreyzehner is going to check it out on zero knowledge proofs, is to actually create the copies, whether it's Monero or Zcash or whatever, you know, it could be the most modern, exciting, exotic privacy tech that's out there. And that's possible. And this allows for a lot more free free market. So, for example, Monero, perhaps there is a backdoor.

[04:04:12] FiendishCrypto: There could be. Maybe there's a backdoor for Zcash. Maybe they're all backdoored, but by certain different agencies, no one knows. But if you know, but Monero can't just change its, you know, to change its privacy thing is to change its entire chain, whereas Bitcoin Cash, the direction it's going is to basically offer what privacy do you want? That's what you can have. And then you can tap into the same thing. And then, of course, your transactions. So on the blockchain, nothing's happening. You've got a load of, you've got money, they're all together.

[04:04:43] FiendishCrypto: Things are happening. But from an outside perspective, nothing's changing. The value of how much BCH you've got in there is changing. But nothing is visible from outside. So all that people would be able to see is money going into that. And then finally, when you want to leave that privacy realm, the money coming out. But that's exactly the same as any privacy tech today. So you've got to get money onto Zcash or Monero or some way. Right. It's got to get. And that's the point that's transparent.

[04:05:11] FiendishCrypto: It gets in. It's in the system. It does its thing. And then you exit it at some point if you exit that system. And then they can see that, too. So there'd be no difference there. And this is something I think it's like the options that are going to plan to be possible on Bitcoin Cash is for me vastly more superior, because I do imagine that especially with AI, with Mythos, and there'll be backdoors found, there'll be hacks found. And probably all the privacy tech that's out there, it wouldn't surprise me if it's all sort of a compromise at a certain point.

[04:05:40] FiendishCrypto: And that'll be hugely damaging for those chains. But for a chain where you get to choose your privacy, that's just, hey, let me move from this one. We move from this solution to another one.

[04:05:49] Kallisti: Yeah. The main thing, again, is like right now, everyone associating private keys with individuals, whereas with these kinds of contracts and covenant logics and whatnot, we're really breaking it up. And this is such a way that, you know, you can have one address receive everything, but have multiple different conditions to actually unlock them, depending on how you actually set everything up. So you won't even know who or what conditions are allowing everything to go through, right? So there's still a secondary break in terms of identifying people and the actual authorization of whatever.

[04:06:28] Calin Culianu: Yeah. So basically, like we're thinking of like imagine like a giant obfuscated coin join as a big smart contract, and then people could extract funds from it. So, I mean, you can think of privacy solutions in that direction. Like Don, you're just using the Bitcoin Cash script and the VM where it's sort of like, you know, it's just like a user. It's in user space, as it were. It's not like enforced by the chain itself. So that's one potential thing in the future that people can build.

[04:06:54] Calin Culianu: But, you know, I got a message from Jeremy of the Bitcoin Cash podcast. He was asking me like just back to the original question of like, what would it take to bring you specifically Vlad to BCH? You know, like he said, basically, BTC doesn't have any of those things that you're talking about. But I guess, did you have you abandoned BTC? And are you sort of thinking of Zcash as your preferred thing or?

[04:07:18] Vlad Costea: No, I was hoping that we're going to get BIP 300. And I'm more hopeful now that there's going to be a hard fork of BIP 300 launching that maybe it's going to push like there's some... What is BIP 300?

[04:07:31] Calin Culianu: I'm not keeping track of your BIPs, man. Like what's going on here?

[04:07:34] Vlad Costea: Like this thing where you have merge-mined sidechains for every possible use case. And there's also a Zcash sidechain in there, which is updated to the latest version of Zerocoin and Zerocash, not Zerocoin. And yeah, I mean, I was hoping we're going to get that.

[04:07:55] Kallisti: Well, is it possible to just have drivechains implemented on Bitcoin Cash? I think probably right now.

[04:08:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you can do it with OP_CAT, I think.

[04:08:06] Calin Culianu: So why are you still in BTC then? Is it because it's, you know, it's the one higher hash rate, more security. I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be. I shouldn't be directing your podcast. I apologize.

[04:08:15] Vlad Costea: No, that's a good question. Like maybe it's social, but at the same time, it's also the fact that, you know, it's my first love in a way. So also the way that I understand Bitcoin nowadays has more to do with a code base than it does to do with a specific coin. So I see this as software, not just a token that has an exchange ticker attached to it. So if you ask me, like there are a lot of projects that are Bitcoin because they specifically do the same thing or share the code base.

[04:08:51] Vlad Costea: Litecoin is a Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a Bitcoin. Zcash is a version of Bitcoin that has this privacy optimization.

[04:08:58] Calin Culianu: I think of it that way too. Dogecoin. Yeah, I think of it that way too.

[04:09:00] Vlad Costea: Dogecoin is a Bitcoin, yeah. Dash is a Bitcoin, even though they made some changes which make it different. Monero is not a Bitcoin because it's a different protocol. It's crypto. No, it's not borrowing Satoshi's code. Maybe it borrows ideas from Satoshi regarding technology, but it's very different. So the way that I see it is that you have this.

[04:09:26] Calin Culianu: The Bitcoin's multiple plural, right?

[04:09:28] Vlad Costea: Exactly. Or Bitcoin is like Linux. Like, would you say that Debian is a Linux, but Fedora is not or something?

[04:09:39] Calin Culianu: Well, that's interesting. That's a pretty open minded point of view. I think that's a healthy point of view from my perspective. So, cool.

[04:09:44] Vlad Costea: Like, what is a Linux? Something that has Linux in its name or something that shares the code base?

[04:09:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I guess you can see with Linux, you can restrict it, like, oh, if it runs a Linux kernel, which is like a canonical kernel. But even that can have forks. We'd still call it Linux. So, yeah, it's the technology. Yeah, that is Linux. Yeah, it's a good way to think of it.

[04:10:09] Joey: So, so you mentioned, you mentioned, you mentioned that basically if BCH can say that we have opt-in privacy and it's at, I haven't, I haven't looked at, I actually wrote down zero cash. That sounds really interesting. So I'm going to look into that. But if we, if we manage to do that, you think that that would actually bring a good section of people that are in BTC or, I don't know, I'm just curious, like, you know, whether that would be like a thing, that would attract a lot of people in terms of that.

[04:10:41] Joey: Okay. Now we have, you can opt out and by default, the chain is always going to be transparent, but now we also have a solution that, you know, if you want to do, you know, you want to do like completely private transactions, you know, on BCH, here's the, here's the specialized wallet to do it. And we make it easy.

[04:11:00] Vlad Costea: No, I don't think you should look at me as like being representative for a group of people. I'm very weird in this way. Even my podcast audience is divided and weird, but I love them all because they're very smart. Like, I don't know what it is about my show. It's not super popular. I don't go viral too often. Maybe once or twice a year. Two years ago I got canceled because I had Roger Ver on my show. But anyway, I'm really proud of my audience.

[04:11:28] Calin Culianu: What happened? On YouTube or what? How'd you get canceled? What happened?

[04:11:31] Vlad Costea: What? No, canceled as an excommunicated from the BTC church or whatever. I'm not cool anymore. I'm not one of them. When I go to conferences, they look at me like, oh, it's that guy. Oh, you're the guy who interviewed Roger.

[04:11:46] Joey: See, that's like the culture, right? I mean, this is the world I was talking about. You know, like I don't, I don't think I, you know, I figure everyone should be able to speak their minds.

[04:11:54] Vlad Costea: No, the way that you win is when you make it useful. And to my earlier point about AI, when you're using ChatGPT, you don't have to spend like entire hours explaining the technology behind it like you do in Bitcoin, where you're like, oh, it's the blockchain and it works like this. And it sends a block every 10 minutes and blah, blah, blah. And this is the transaction fee and whatever. You just use it. OK, it should get to the point where people figure out natively that this is useful for them and they can use it for something.

[04:12:25] Vlad Costea: I think the first kind of moment, like eureka moment in Bitcoin was Silk Road, where a lot of people were like, OK, this is it. You buy drugs. You get on the phone. You get on this marketplace. You get these coins that you can mine with your GPU at the time and you can get whatever delivered to this pickup point. So for better and for worse, that was the first killer app for Bitcoin. It was the first time when people were like, huh, this this is what it's for.

[04:12:53] Vlad Costea: You cannot do this with your bank account. It's more difficult to do it with cash, much less convenient. You have like this reputation system where you can see where the vendor, whether or not they're serious and they deliver. And whatever. So quality as well.

[04:13:09] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, it's really interesting because even people that are against drugs and things that should be illegal. Silk Road basically enabled a way for ensuring the quality so you weren't getting cut. So, you know, at least if you if even if you're against it, you would hopefully rather it to be pure rather than a mix of all kinds of crap. And the other thing is that it took away all the drug selling and dealing off the streets and put it into people's homes, transacting with people online.

[04:13:32] FiendishCrypto: So it actually sanitized that whole thing. So I think even if people are like. Really against drugs, they, you know, and think they should be it should be illegal, like surely would be rather that it was done like that, then sort of done on street corners, you know, in front of schools and whatever. So, you know, Silk Road is a great example of utility. And of course, for something like that, you need robust privacy. It needs to it needs to be needs to be there. So utility, we've got to win out on utility. That's what I like to hear because that's the only thing.

[04:14:05] Vlad Costea: I mean, I'm not sure what the next killer use case is going to be. Maybe prediction markets, maybe something else. But I think to their credit, the Ethereum people were able to not just anticipate what the hype is going to be about, but create it like the ICO mania, the NFT, whatever. That was the DeFi summer. They spearheaded these movements and they made everyone else follow whatever it is that they're doing. The fact that we had Ordinals on Bitcoin was a consequence of the NFT. That was the era that was happening on Ethereum. So, of course, these use cases were silly.

[04:14:41] Vlad Costea: They did not scale, but they fuel the momentum, which brought enough money for them to keep going. And I'm not sure if in the case of something which is basically a fork of Bitcoin, you can have this excitement. I don't think you have the funding that the Ethereum Foundation has or the resources. But at the same time, they were able somehow to invent. I think Solana sort of was the leader when it came to meme coins. And that's where most of the action happened. But there has to be something that people want and generates an influx of users somehow.

[04:15:29] FiendishCrypto: Generates revenue too. Generates income. And this is because revenue is the ultimate indicator of value. If you're getting paid for something, someone's finding it valuable, so valuable they'd rather pay for it and give you their money than not. And this is like the crux of success. And Bitcoin Cash has a market cap of, it was 7 billion, like maybe it's one now. I don't know how much is correct.

[04:15:55] Joey: At this time it was like, oh yeah, we have a market cap of like 8 or something. And I'm like, have you checked? I don't know who said 8 anymore.

[04:16:05] FiendishCrypto: Every time I look, we've lost some.

[04:16:09] Joey: But going on that point, I think that's really interesting. And it also goes back to what you said earlier about Tether being on Omni, Counterparty. Counterparty was already on BTC and then Vitalik came and he had this idea and he got kind of pushed away and ended up building Ethereum. And they were ahead of the game in so many ways in terms of Bancor, automated market making, Algos and all this stuff. And at the end of the day, I think there's two things. Number one is that I think we have to sort of acknowledge what the market wants.

[04:16:43] Joey: I mean, we're supposed libertarians. We have to acknowledge that people kind of want to pay for this. For example, right now, perp DEXes are really big, the prediction markets are really big. That's kind of where the money is. That's where people want to actually pay their fees and spend their money. NFTs are gone. People are just doing these different things. So every site was kind of identified a different way. But what they have successfully done is actually bring users in, which is actually really hard. And not just bring users in, but bring people that are willing to spend money.

[04:17:15] Joey: I mean, in the NFT mania, Jesus, what were they spending for one Bored Ape Yacht Club token? I think, yeah, a lot of people lost money.

[04:17:24] FiendishCrypto: Justin Bieber spent, I'm pretty sure, 13 million if I'm not mistaken.

[04:17:27] Joey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some crazy money. There's some argument to that. And I actually had a recent, I was just thinking about that today, and I've had this thought in various sort of fragments, like over maybe the past year. I think in some ways, you know, you can kind of, you know, as long as the ecosystem is maturing and things are growing, eventually we'll just arrive back at P2P cash. Eventually we'll just arrive back at utility. But if we don't have those intermediate steps, like what's funding the, you know, like AI is a great example.

[04:17:57] Joey: They had a lot of years where, you know, nothing was kind of like, everyone was like, well, you know, nothing's going to happen. And, you know, something just went like that. So, you know, we could just be, we could just be early. I hope we're early. I hope we're not like, I hope there's not the end stage of crypto, you know.

[04:18:12] FiendishCrypto: This is late. We've got to go to McDonald's and get our jobs back.

[04:18:16] Kallisti: Bitcoin Cash has really focused on is getting those basic building blocks and those tools in place. So that all these things like privacy, like DeFi, like, you know, these kinds of vaults and so on and so forth are actually possible without having, you know, like systemic changes, you know, like on the entire protocols. So this way, you know, again, it's opting in, you're not forcing anyone onto these kinds of changes and choices that you want. You're basically just allowing people the option to seek it out if they want to.

[04:18:48] Kallisti: I think that's the main thing. And yeah, unfortunately, I do also have to drop out soon, but it was great to be chatting with you guys and stuff.

[04:18:55] Vlad Costea: Well, thank you for coming.

[04:18:59] Kallisti: Thanks for joining, man.

[04:19:00] Joey: Yeah, thanks for letting me in the room.

[04:19:04] Vlad Costea: So for people listening to this on Spotify tomorrow, this was Jerry who's dropping out. He's the one with the jet plane sound or the radio intermission.

[04:19:16] FiendishCrypto: He's flying in a first class, he's flying his private jet. So if you're not watching, you're just listening.

[04:19:24] Joey: That's how the BCH guys travel. He's a fan of the frequencies. They're like lasers in his house. I try to figure out what he's saying because he's in BCH so long. These guys are like laser guns.

[04:19:37] Kallisti: Anyways, thanks for having me, guys. See you later. Thanks for having me.

[04:19:40] FiendishCrypto: Take care, Jerry.

[04:19:43] Vlad Costea: I was looking at the chat and I realized that we don't really have questions. It's just people commenting, but nobody asking any question.

[04:19:52] FiendishCrypto: Oh, could you read some comments out? Like, what's the feedback? How are people finding it? Is there lots of BCH's trash? You know, that's the sort of the vibe that we used to have in the past.

[04:20:02] Vlad Costea: No, I don't think these people are listening. What a shame. Someone said that my shirt is on point. I mean, it's green, it has the pizza on it, because it was pizza day last week.

[04:20:20] Joey: Yeah, it's a really cool shirt.

[04:20:22] Calin Culianu: I'll be right back, I'll just step away for a second, let's turn off the camera.

[04:20:29] Vlad Costea: I do want to have a conversation about wallets, but before that let me put on another one of these codes that you can scan. If you want to claim, I don't even know how much this is. Like $1.50 of BCH, you just scan this and you're gonna be able to claim it.

[04:20:47] FiendishCrypto: It's probably $10 when they filled it up like 10 minutes ago.

[04:20:50] Vlad Costea: I have two more codes after this one, so be fast, think fast, claim this. And my recommendation is that you can use it for NanoGPT and maybe ask Claude some questions. Claude is amazing. If you asked me last year, not last year, a year ago, if you told me, you know, one day you're gonna go on one of these NanoGPT platforms or whatever, and you're gonna pay $100 just for building a website with Claude. I would be like, that's stupid, I can use ChatGPT and Grok for free or whatever.

[04:21:30] Vlad Costea: But now I'm like, man, it's so worth it's so cool. I didn't have like the click, the aha moment with AI until there was Claude. And we have to remember that at some point, ChatGPT was struggling so much to find like a proper use case or justification that people were making Studio Ghibli images with it. Because usually I think it was just a novelty for a while and people were just asking questions like, hey, what is this or whatever, some facts, and they were trying to get information from it, but they were not using it for building stuff or for actually doing something productive.

[04:22:14] Vlad Costea: And I think Claude, and I'm happy it's not ChatGPT, that's the leader right now, because I don't like these guys. They give me very bad vibes like Sam Altman or whatever.

[04:22:27] FiendishCrypto: Sam Altman has definitely got some weird vibes and that guy that just killed himself, like the, I don't know, like, yeah, definitely some creepy vibes.

[04:22:38] Joey: You can sort of dig into it like when OpenAI had that thing where they're going to split with Microsoft and then they rejigged it but now it's all these people that used to work in the government there's so much that goes into it that's super interesting if you really dive into it. Well, I think OpenAI is struggling, because I've been noticing that they're not Codex, but if you use their main chat app, the responses have degraded like dramatically. From like, you know, ChatGPT 4 to 5, they used to get, they're limiting the token output, like for sure. Like You can actually, you try now and you do more complex things, but you can actually see it isn't actually performing as well as it used to.

[04:23:21] Joey: So I think there's this thing coming where the real cost of AI, and as you know, if you used a NanoGPT, you can see the balance just, you know, you're like put $200 in a NanoGPT or you could just kind of see like, wow, it's a real AI. It's actually kind of expensive, but you kind of go like disabled and you go out, but it's also worth it, right? Cause I'm getting so much from it. So I feel like OpenAI and you haven't seen this thing with Anthropic as much.

[04:23:44] Joey: So I think what's happening internally in OpenAI probably is like, they're really dealing with these massive costs and they're going like, okay, like how do we, how do we, you know, rein in these costs? So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI turns out to be like the Netscape Navigator of the dotcom era that they were like the first guys to really, you know, do it. But then it's like, now they've run into a problem where they can't solve.

[04:24:13] Joey: And, you know, from every, I wouldn't say for specific agentic stuff, but I think for everything I've seen so far from Anthropic just seems to be like always like one step ahead. You know, I play around with a lot of local models. I've got my own local setup with, you know, my phone ID, like running all these models and so on and so forth. Like, like Anthropic is the one that can like connect, like really like disconnected things. And there's, there's like one step ahead of everyone else.

[04:24:42] Joey: So Claude is despite all the recent criticisms of, you know, they're charging more, you know, for that. Cause everyone was using that max $200 plan run and trying to like milk it. Basically I figured there's still the frontier right now. Yeah.

[04:24:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And what I like about it, and I know we're supposed to talk about BCH. We'll get to that eventually. What I like about it is that it, Claude tells me when I'm wrong. He's like, no, that's a bad idea. You shouldn't do that. And with ChatGPT or Grok, they're providing me more assurance. Like, oh, that's a good, yeah, let's try that. But Claude is like, no, from a design perspective, like if I'm coding a website, let's say tells me, you know, that you shouldn't do that.

[04:25:28] Vlad Costea: It's a bad choice. It's not a good idea. Let me give you another suggestion. It's like having an engineer friend who's next to you. And she's like, yeah, we can do it like this.

[04:25:39] FiendishCrypto: I hear people saying the exact opposite with Claude and this is what I love with the AI is that, so I think that's also great. I think that's really good because, it's giving you that guidance actually that if you had a real engineer friend that would do that, it's like, Hey, that's a, that's a really bad idea. Let's do it like this. And you would pay good money for that. And you can just see that the flavors of AI are just like he was on, he would be, the first one to say, you know, he got really fed up with being told what was a bad idea or what to do or go to bed, for example, and say, Hey, you're just a tool to shut up. Do what I tell you.

[04:26:15] Joey: I would, I would actually, so I play a lot with different models. I would argue that if you, if you play with all the models, so Codex is really like precise, right? And Qwen is really precise, but actually that higher level thing of going like, Hey, stop, like, think about this. That's actually, I think harder in AI than to use a smaller auto, a smaller model and tell it the exact and that that's synthesis or does have where it is. It is. I mean, if you use it both, I think you'll find it's a little bit more creative.

[04:26:47] Joey: That's kind of like the edge, the Chinese AI models don't seem to like hit that. You don't get that. Like, and apparently Anthropic is engineering it for that it's supposed to kind of be more like you say, like a, like a, like a personal engineer friend, they're actually like, you know, calibrating and tuning and training for that. But I actually feel like that if you think about like your own work, that is for like the hard thing, right? Like you throw an idea out and you get criticized and then you throw it back and it maybe just, maybe it just goes, Hey, go to sleep.

[04:27:22] Joey: You know, like you're just overthinking that, you know? So I think if you think about in terms of like cognitive ability, that's actually like the harder thing to reach than an agent or a model that, you know, follows your, commands precisely. And okay, like Claude's obviously not perfect, but I'm saying in the, in the, in the full range of models, okay, like Claude's degraded their, like Claude Code a little bit. Their APIs are still really good, which is still probably why Vlad doesn't feel it if he's using a NanoGPT, which is direct API access, but it does have that little extra thing where it connects things that feel disconnected, like together, which is like the real frontier.

[04:28:02] Joey: So that's like, sort of like the extra three or 4% you see on the benchmark it has. And then benchmarks are bullshit by the way, like, you know, you read benchmarks and supposedly MiniMax is like smarter than Claude, right? You'd use both. That's definitely not true.

[04:28:15] FiendishCrypto: Get out there guys, you're missing one important thing. So you guys are using Claude, yeah, for building stuff. Do you know what really amazes me is the fact that when I was a kid, I used to watch Knight Rider and you know, you had KITT, the car, and you could talk to the car and all these things. So I drive a Tesla and I say, okay, hey, Grok and it's coming on. And I can literally sit and have very deep conversations with Grok.

[04:28:41] FiendishCrypto: I can run through, business, ideas to strategy. I can run through all kinds of things. I can even speak to it in German and tell me, Hey, Ben, be nitpicky. Tell me all the grammatical errors and, you know, just, so I'm having quite deep conversations in the car. And that is just crazy to think, you know, a year ago that was just not possible, not at that level. And today I'm having conversations where it's really funny. Like on some points I'm getting, it's telling me something and I'm thinking, Hey, I really don't agree with that.

[04:29:10] FiendishCrypto: And if anyone that knows me, I, you know, I have some strong points and you have to have a pretty convincing argument to make me change my opinion. And I will, but it needs to be convincing. And I've gone into situations where I've been arguing with AI and by the end of the argument is like, okay, shit, you've won. Your point actually makes more sense. And that that's wild. I think that, you know, what a crazy time when you think the acceleration of AI and that growth, that exponential growth over the last couple of years, it has been insane.

[04:29:37] FiendishCrypto: And, you know, when did, when did Claude come out? When did [unclear: Grok 4] come out? Like a lot of this stuff is only really 2025 where it was just like, okay, this is really powerful now. And just this year alone for me, it's, or the last sort of six months it's, it's been growing still. So hopefully we see that sort of exponential with crypto usage adoption. And all the sort of wonderful utility that you're looking for Vlad to be a BCH. It's a nice exponential.

[04:30:07] FiendishCrypto: By the way, guys, I got to go. It's really late. It was really fantastic talking with you, Vlad. Really, really appreciate being on here, and appreciate your show. I can't say I've watched them all, but I've seen several of your, probably ones that have gone more viral. And no, I really hope that you, would love to see you at some point, you know, as I said, Slovenia is not that far away every year. We have the BCH Bliss conference.

[04:30:32] FiendishCrypto: It'd be great to, great to have you there because I think there's a lot going on in this, chain that is unaware of for many people, probably including yourself. Hopefully today we've highlighted some of the things that are interesting and might intrigue you to come and check that out. One thing for sure is that the culture, like for people that are, I, you know, I don't, I'm going to say this, don't want to come arrogant because when I go to Bliss, I was the most stupid person in the room.

[04:30:57] FiendishCrypto: So when you join, you're surrounded by very, intelligent people, but also very, you know, the average BCH is pretty humble, pretty smart, but very humble. So I think you would find yourself very, very like just fitting in actually. And there's, you know, I love the BCH community. They're also, you know, they're, they're kind of geeky and I, you know, I get that vibe with you, but you love, you know, you didn't go with the trend, right? You, you're quite, you really love the technicals.

[04:31:22] FiendishCrypto: You like the geeky side. I think you would be like a pea in a pod to be honest. You'd be like, shit, this is, this is my family. I'm, I'm home. And you'd be more than welcome. And even if you ended up saying, Hey, BCH is shit. You'd be like, Hey, that's fine. You know, we love you. Even if you're a retard, that's fine.

[04:31:39] Vlad Costea: I appreciate it. Thank you. But to be honest, like there's so much interesting stuff that you can do on a chain like BCH, and it gives a lot of information about what's possible on Satoshi's design. Like on top of it, what we could have had on Bitcoin. If we did not have that social and political context with it, and it's part of decentralization and it's permissionless, it's beautiful. And I want to see more of this, to be honest. Like I look forward to the eCash fork, which is launching in August.

[04:32:14] Vlad Costea: It's maybe the Bitcoin Cash of the decade. And we're going to see more. Yeah. We're going to see more of the community leaving for that one. And maybe that they're able to figure out something else. And who knows when we're going to finally get to the Claude of crypto, you know, something that everyone agrees that is really great. This is awesome.

[04:32:35] FiendishCrypto: Yeah. That's what we want to get to. This is really great. This genuinely improves my life. This helps me achieve to do more. You know, that's where we want to get to. So cheers to that. That's a pretty cool way of ending it. Great talking and hopefully we get to see each other soon. And take care.

[04:32:56] Kyle: I am probably going to bounce as well, unfortunately.

[04:33:01] Joey: I guess I joined like too late. Yeah. If I knew I would have come earlier.

[04:33:04] Joey: I actually saw it on the thing. I was like, wow, it's really interesting. And then, yeah, there's a

[04:33:11] Kyle: Chance more people join. There's a couple of people trying to get back home.

[04:33:15] Joey: So these like, are these like marathons? Yeah.

[04:33:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's kind of the concept I'm supposed to take on the Bitcoin Cash Army.

[04:33:25] Joey: It's so funny that actually I was joking with Calin on the first day of Bliss. You know, ironically, when I first got there, which was like two days before the actual conference, the first four or five hours was literally just talking about the new eCash fork. With Paul and you know, the drivechains and you know, like what's actually going to happen? Like, are they actually going to, like how high is it going to go? You know, it was just, it was just fascinating. Like, like just, you know, it's just that open discussion of like, you know, you can talk about anything like in Bitcoin Cash and that people even talk about maybe we should, maybe some of us should buy it because maybe this thing will like go up.

[04:34:02] Joey: So, you know, you know, like I think, I think, you know, I think there'll probably be, Amaury's, what's Amaury's, Amaury's also called eCash. I forgot. So basically I think they have a good chance. I think they have a good chance of beating XEC. I didn't know how to define, do we call it eCash drivechain and eCash Amaury? I'm not really sure how to, but I actually do. I actually do think the name thing, I do think he's like a little egotistical, but I think the name thing, it was quite a good marketing, like rage marketing thing.

[04:34:41] Joey: Like maybe he actually thought he kind of realized, Hey, if I go for eCash, I'm going to, it's going to like make this whole social media thing. I don't know. But I think, I think they probably will get funding for their funding. I'm pretty sure. And you know, these sides. So yeah, I'm, I'm actually pretty like going to watch out for like, how that goes.

[04:35:03] Kyle: I just want to jump in real quick. Say I go, I got to go, but Vlad, thanks for having me on. And I will echo everything [unclear: Fiendish] just said about Bliss. It'd be great to see you there next year and you can join our 4 AM poker games.

[04:35:16] Vlad Costea: Oh, I'm not sure if it's a good idea because I'm going to lose at 4 AM.

[04:35:20] Kyle: I did. All right. Have a good one.

[04:35:26] Vlad Costea: Once again, so Kyle is behind the BCH University, right? For people listening on Spotify, not seeing us. Yeah.

[04:35:34] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's right.

[04:35:36] Vlad Costea: So I feel like I've missed the opportunity and we're about four hours, 36 minutes into the live stream. I wanted to ask more about Fulcrum because that's something that's really big. It's being used by Cake Wallet for SPV. It's something which is sort of like Electrum, but I don't understand what is different about it compared to Electrum. And it works with BTC. I think Litecoin also.

[04:36:05] Calin Culianu: BTC, Litecoin and BCH. Yeah. Correct.

[04:36:08] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So tell me more about it.

[04:36:10] Calin Culianu: Okay. So it's middleware software that indexes aspects of the blockchain and aspects of the blockchain, which would be relevant to a wallet like Electrum. And so there's this thing called the Electrum protocol, which is what the Electrum wallet speaks and it expects an Electrum server that speaks that protocol. And Fulcrum does this job. It's speaking the Electrum protocol. It acts like middleware between the Bitcoin node and the wallet.

[04:36:36] Calin Culianu: And it's very popular now. So there's several such software packages that do this. There's ElectrumX, there's Electrs and there's Fulcrum. There's one from Blockstream called Electrs Esplora or something. There's a bunch of different implementations that do this. It's basically just software that knows how to talk to the Electrum wallets. And the Fulcrum is very popular because it's one of the faster ones. For the hardware requirements and disk space requirements it has, it's very fast. It's faster than ElectrumX or Electrs. And so it's gained popularity. I initially wrote it for BCH because I wanted something.

[04:37:19] Calin Culianu: I didn't like the existing options that we had on BCH. And so I just wrote it in C++ and it's really fast. And so I'm happy with it. And then I added Bitcoin BTC support later because I figured it would get a lot more stress testing on BTC because you guys have different problems on the BTC chain. You often have a full mempool. For example, we don't on BCH. So that code path for the mempool code wasn't being exercised on BCH, but on BTC it is. So I was like, oh, let me just port this over to BTC.

[04:37:49] Calin Culianu: I'll see if my mempool code in Fulcrum is good. And so I ported it over to BTC. And initially when I did, when I had it support BTC, people were kind of against it. They're like, oh man, they don't let the BTC people get this good software that we have. I was like, dude, this is just going to help us anyway. Because if they find bugs or whatever, or if they ask for features, it'll help BCH. So yeah, Fulcrum is running on BTC Litecoin. The Litecoin support, I don't use Litecoin much.

[04:38:13] Calin Culianu: There's actually, I got paid to do that. Some company paid me just to add Litecoin because they wanted to use it on Litecoin. So I don't actually personally use Litecoin much at all. Yeah, so that's Fulcrum. Yeah, it's like middleware software that knows how to talk to the Electrum wallets.

[04:38:31] Vlad Costea: I was actually curious, what is the general consensus about Litecoin in the Bitcoin Cash community? Because there is sort of an overlap in terms of purpose and also adoption for payments.

[04:38:46] Calin Culianu: Yeah, Litecoin has a 2.5 minute block time. It's got also that optional privacy layer, which isn't used as much as people would have hoped. We see it as a competitor. We consider Litecoin semi-evil because they've adopted some of the narratives that BTC has, which I believe originate from the banksters and the CIA and all that. So they've adopted some of those. They've internalized some of the values, like no hard forks and shit like this. They want to keep the block. Their scaling strategy seems like a non-strategy to me.

[04:39:22] Calin Culianu: They've adopted SegWit. So we see them as kind of slightly evil in that they've internalized some of the values that Bitcoin has that are toxic. But at the same token, they have 2.5 minute block times. A lot of people use them to just move between exchanges because they have faster confirmation times. Then they have this privacy layer too. So we see them as competition and we see them as like, yeah, we want to be better than Litecoin in every possible use case, or at least most of them.

[04:39:55] Calin Culianu: Namely, that's one of the motivations why maybe reducing the block time on Bitcoin Cash might be a good idea, because then like, why would you use Litecoin? I don't know. Hope that answered the question?

[04:40:07] Vlad Costea: I think they're also building something like a virtual machine, which they call LitVM, sort of like a fork of BitVM. I'm just surprised. So for a long time, Litecoin was like the test chain for Bitcoin. Like the place that has...

[04:40:24] Joey: Right, and you guys called it the silver, right?

[04:40:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the silver to gold to Bitcoin, whatever. That was the narrative. But SegWit was activated in April on Litecoin, and then it came in August, I think, on Bitcoin. There was also the Lightning Network that was first tested on Litecoin for a live network. And I'm not sure how it went with Taproot, but it also had that. I think the issue is that they had so many opportunities to spearhead some stuff that's being discussed in Bitcoin and show that it's safe, or just get some developers to work on their chain, have that brain drain happening. Because it was more socially acceptable for developers to work on Litecoin than Bitcoin Cash, for reasons which I don't understand fully, but I think it has more to do with the funding that they're getting, or the source of their funding. But I'm just not sure why they didn't do anything.

[04:41:24] Calin Culianu: I mean, they're captured. For my point of view, they're captured. That's why they're part of the problem. It's like the same people captured them, they captured Bitcoin. I mean, that's my honest answer. I mean, you can argue with me, maybe some of my facts are wrong.

[04:41:35] Vlad Costea: But the number is not going up, so it doesn't follow the same pattern.

[04:41:40] Calin Culianu: It wasn't necessary. So why would you want... If they're captured anyway, why would you want the number to go up necessarily? Bitcoin is the... BTC is the one you pump.

[04:41:49] Vlad Costea: I think the issue with Litecoin, and the reason why the price does not pump, is the merge mining with Dogecoin. So it's possible that Elon Musk destroyed Litecoin by pumping Dogecoin, which is still top 10, I think. And the miners are incentivized to sell the Litecoin and keep the Dogecoin.

[04:42:12] Calin Culianu: Oh yeah, it's not merge mining, but it's the same hardware, right? Mines both? Is that what it is? Yeah.

[04:42:18] Joey: If my memory serves, it was also like... How long does this go by? I remember Charlie Lee sort of dumped all his coins at some point. There was this thing, and then they had the issue of the foundation, and he was going around saying there's no money to develop anything on Litecoin. I remember there was some political stuff on Litecoin that kind of made them move slower than they would have. But my sort of exact memory is a little...

[04:42:47] Vlad Costea: Oh, I have very good memory of that. That was December 2017, very close to Christmas, like one week before Christmas, I think. And Charlie Lee announced that he dumped his coins. He was the best trader for the whole cycle. Like he anticipated. Yes, I remember that.

[04:43:03] Joey: He literally... It was the peak, right? This was the peak. He sold exactly... Was it that cycle? Was it the top of BTC? Was it 20,000? I think it was very short. Was it a very short time?

[04:43:16] Vlad Costea: For when it was like $350.

[04:43:19] Joey: Right, and he literally timed it exactly where it was. And then I think after that, it feels like Litecoin never really came back as the full Litecoin. I remember they tried to do games. I'm not talking to people that are into Litecoin, but it seemed like after that, for whatever reason, Litecoin sort of...

[04:43:43] Joey: Maybe it's like a loss of faith or something after that. And then I remember... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't think the BCH... I mean, I can't speak for the BCH community, but I don't remember the early BCH community to be like, oh, you know, Litecoin is... Like we don't... I think we were actually advocating, in my memory, like very much for, you know, multi-currency and, you know, currencies should compete. And then we were also dealing with our internal issues, right? Like you said earlier in the chat of like Craig Wright and so on and so forth.

[04:44:17] Joey: So I don't remember... I just remember a lot about BTC. Well, we were pissed off early on.

[04:44:21] Calin Culianu: I mean, they were about like not... Also not increasing the block size. And also they implemented SegWit, which you thought was kind of a mistake.

[04:44:27] Joey: I think they were the same... They were kind of like the same tribe, if I remember correctly. Like Vlad said, it was sold as... It was sold as like the silver to Bitcoin at the time. I don't think Lightning was like fully there. Lightning was still very early. And then it was so... I remember like people going like, okay, use Bitcoin, use Bitcoin Cash. And then they would be like, okay, like we got... Just use Litecoin. Don't use Bitcoin Cash because Litecoin is like the silver. And then there was that. So like Goku is like BTC and then Vegeta is like Litecoin.

[04:44:55] Joey: And we were like, you know, high-fiving each other. That was like the meme, you know. And then so I felt like they were very much, yeah, part of the same tribe. But I don't remember anyone in BCH saying like, oh, you know, like, you know, don't use Litecoin. It always felt like to me that, oh, like you say, they were like competitors. And it felt... It feels like to me like now we've got sort of like more data in terms of how much time has passed.

[04:45:22] Joey: That over time, you know, BCH just kind of stuck around and survived all these battle-tested and we were continually upgrading. You know, we just upgraded in May and we have all the... We have functions, we have bounded loops, a bunch of, you know, other things that'll...

[04:45:36] Calin Culianu: Yeah, and Litecoin is doing like LitVM, right, which is basically an Ethereum thing. It's like account-based. Is that what it is? So I don't know. Do you know, Vlad? No, it's not account-based.

[04:45:53] Calin Culianu: Oh, because they're marketing it as like just like super compatible with Ethereum. I don't know. I have to look into it. I really haven't paid attention. Are they actually upgrading the opcodes to do more smart contract stuff or...

[04:46:01] Vlad Costea: I haven't seen any of that, so I'm not sure.

[04:46:04] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it seems like from the market, I mean, it's hard, you know, it's marketing material. It seems like they're marketing it as like a Web3, blah, blah, blah. So that to me just speaks like an Ethereum Solidity contracts. I don't know. We'll see.

[04:46:15] Vlad Costea: I still don't know what the Web3 is. When I was in university doing my research 10 years ago, Web3 was about decentralizing servers. So being able to self-host your content and interact with the rest of the network without using centralized services. That was the definition of Web3. Now it's like, oh, Web3, where you can wrap your data into tokens and sell your data to whoever you want. And you have the freedom to choose who gets your data. And I'm like, really? That's what it means to you right now?

[04:46:49] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that term has been co-opted. So I don't know. What I'm looking at is like they claim like it's compatible with Solidity. It's like Ethereum compatible. So I don't know, LitVM sounds like another extension that's kind of just in its own sub-universe of Litecoin, just like the way their MWEB is, their Mimblewimble. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah.

[04:47:14] Vlad Costea: Do you guys have any opinion about stuff like Kaspa or Quai, which are like these avant-garde proof-of-work chains that are designed to scale?

[04:47:25] Calin Culianu: I haven't looked into them at all. I should probably formulate it more if I'm going to inform the opinion on that. I don't know. I don't know much about them.

[04:47:33] Vlad Costea: They're very different in design, like they don't share anything in terms of code base with Bitcoin. They are made specifically with this idea that they should push proof-of-work to its absolute highest scaling limits and prove that in Ethereum there was this argument that they need proof-of-stake for finality in DeFi. And they want to prove that you never actually needed that. And it was a false promise. OK.

[04:48:04] Calin Culianu: So by pushing it to its limits, what do you mean? What do you mean by pushing it to its limits?

[04:48:11] Vlad Costea: They have 10 -second blocks and they say they have instant finality in Kaspa. They mine, I think, 10 blocks per second or whatever. OK. And they don't orphan any blocks. I mean, all blocks are included, even the orphan ones.

[04:48:28] Calin Culianu: OK. Like uncles or whatever, like in Ethereum. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'd have to look into it. I mean, some of these designs, they sound like pie in the sky and they might have technical holes in them, you know, where it's like it's too good to be true. And it sometimes is, you know, you have to see, you have to look at the design, you have to look at the white paper. I'm not familiar with them in detail. Yeah. Sorry to cut you off, Joey.

[04:48:50] Joey: You know, I was going to say, like, yeah, I have looked into them like a little bit. And, you know, you know, one of the key things I think I do and, you know, I do agree heavily with BTC maxis is that it's really hard to recreate Bitcoin. And I always go whenever someone goes, oh, we should do like a new chain and, you know, not follow. And it's like it's really hard to read. It's almost impossible. Right. Like if you think about I think it's actually in the Bitcoin standard, it's almost so whenever you try to do proof of work again, all the incentives have changed.

[04:49:28] Joey: Everything has changed because now you're launching in a market where everyone's going to jump in and start mining the tokens because tokens immediately have value. And so whenever there is a new proof of work chain, you know, like it's so hard to recreate that exact condition of, you know, what Satoshi did. And I think that is basically unrecreatable because you can't go back in time when exchanges didn't exist. You can't go back in time when nobody understands cryptocurrency. And I think that is, you know, if we want to argue about Bitcoin Cash, that's why we hung on to like the Genesis block.

[04:50:06] Joey: Right. And we did a fork otherwise. You know, you look at, for example, like what's it called? Is it Nexa chain or Kaspa? And yeah, you can do proof of chain. You can do proof of work again. But I think the reason why it's so hard is because you can't recreate those conditions that Bitcoin was made like again. And that's one thing I really agree with, you know, the BTC argument of that. You know, the Genesis block is really important because you can't go back in time and recreate those conditions.

[04:50:42] Joey: You know, mining tokens, the moment they appear, now people just, well, you don't call it a pre-mine. You just, you just like, you know, have a plan to pay an exchange. And then, you know, you tell a group of friends that you can mine it on CPU. And like, how do you, like, you can't go back to when none of this was liquid, right? And that was the genesis of Bitcoin. So, you know, however they do it, I think it's, yeah, I made my point.

[04:51:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Is there any ongoing conversation or was there any conversation about changing the mining algorithm to not compete with Bitcoin for hashrate anymore? Or is Bitcoin Cash this long-term bet that the miners will eventually come to BCH? Long-term bet, yes. Long-term, yeah.

[04:51:35] Joey: I haven't heard anyone say that we would move away from SHA256. I'll go, yeah. Yeah, I think the long-term bet is that I think if you look at the entire history, like BCH is pretty much the only successful fork of Bitcoin. Like, well, what did you have? You had Bitcoin Gold, we had all the other forks, whatever, right? Like everyone. And we are the only one. And by the way, I think BCH, the difference between someone just forking and trying to make a new Bitcoin to what happened with Bitcoin Cash is that Bitcoin Cash was formed genuinely from a debate on BTC.

[04:52:14] Joey: We actually were forked genuinely because we had the block size debate and a bunch of people decided to go a different way. So the genesis of the fork is really different. You're just going like, oh, I'm going to just like do a Bitcoin Gold. And so I think it is a long-term bet that if we can, you know, build up the ecosystem and build up the demand and people start realizing, you know, all these upgrades are adding up and dApps are being built and apps and businesses are starting to like come onto Bitcoin Cash and, you know, modeling their things.

[04:52:47] Joey: Now we have the technological primitives to do so that eventually we will just slowly get a little bit more of that hash rate. And maybe at 10 percent, people will kind of go like, OK, you know, this is this is something that can really like, you know, challenge Bitcoin a little bit. At least that's what I think. I don't know. Obviously, I don't speak for the community. So we were right.

[04:53:13] Calin Culianu: Damn it. And the world's going to recognize this eventually.

[04:53:15] Joey: [unclear: Smoke more.] And basically, yeah, eventually it will happen.

[04:53:20] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Or at least we'll die trying. Because, like, yeah, the debate was, yeah, it was about a technical debate. So we'll carry this much forward as far as it goes.

[04:53:30] Vlad Costea: My cat wants to go outside and I got to take him out because I can't fight with the forces of nature. Is it fine if we take a five minute break and then we come back and continue the conversation? Sure, I'll be around, yeah.

[04:53:41] Calin Culianu: I actually got to eat something a little bit, so I need a bite. A snack. Yeah, sure.

[04:53:45] Vlad Costea: Someone someone came. Someone showed up. So this is like a teaser of what's coming. There's Rosco Kalis who's joining.

[04:53:56] Calin Culianu: Oh, no way. Hello, Rosco.

[04:54:01] Vlad Costea: Hi, Rosco. I guess you're the unlucky one because you showed up like five hours ago. Yeah. Yeah. And then you said you were going to come back later. And now I was just telling him that we're taking a five minute break so I can take my cat. Outside and then be back and continue the conversation. Sounds good. But you coming is like fresh blood pumping into this conversation, which has been going for almost five hours now. And I can still keep going. It's a marathon. You sure? Yeah, I'm sure.

[04:54:34] Rosco Kalis: I wouldn't be able to do that for sure.

[04:54:38] Vlad Costea: It's my job. I love it. Sounds good. So let me put this on the screen. You can claim some free BCH by scanning. This now I'm going to go take my cat outside. You guys still have the microphones on. So if you want to talk in my absence, like behind my back, you can actually do it. But I'll be back in five minutes. I got to do what my cat wants because apparently he's the master of the house. The boss will be back. Nice. Okay.

[04:55:07] Calin Culianu: Wait, are we still live and stuff? Yeah. Are we? Are we? Yes. Are we? Are we on? What did I miss the screen?

[04:55:13] Rosco Kalis: Yeah, I think so. I'm checking it now. There's a QR code over our heads. So what did I miss? I haven't caught up with the last five hours.

[04:55:34] Calin Culianu: Well, yeah, he asked us a bunch of questions about like the history of Bitcoin Cash and like, sort of, I feel like Vlad sort of is kind of disillusioned with where BTC has gone. And sort of is giving us a forum here to, you know, to say our piece about why BCH is good. Vlad seems very open minded about it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I can't remember what we talked about. It's been five hours. Yes.

[04:55:58] Rosco Kalis: It's also been five hours for you, hasn't it?

[04:56:01] Calin Culianu: For me, I was here since the beginning. Yeah.

[04:56:04] Joey: Oh, wow. Yeah, I joined pretty late. So no, I haven't been here five hours.

[04:56:10] Rosco Kalis: You Romanians are hardcore. Yeah, yeah.

[04:56:15] Calin Culianu: I mean, I feel more like an American, but yeah. Fair enough. [unclear: I'm ethnically Romanian.] True. Fair enough.

[04:56:22] Joey: But yeah, I find it so interesting that it's so hard to, you know, the BTC community have so many like force fields against it. You have to sort of, it's like a starship and there's like five layers and you have to like sort of like fire the phasers and just be like, okay, like, you know, this layer, you've been told like this thing, you know, you've been told like this thing is not true. They just like restored the shields and then, yeah, eventually maybe you'll get to the actual like hull.

[04:56:53] Joey: But it's really interesting to me that it's almost like the discussion, even though like everything circles around BCH basically being the solution or solving a lot of these things. It's like, okay, but there's some other thing that's like starting to do this. But I find that really fascinating. It actually goes to show you how much of that, I wouldn't call it propaganda, but yeah, like, you know, the centralized censorship, like how much that dictated how people think about the BCH brand. And that's something that I think we really need to work to sort of change the image of BCH to let more people know, you know, what we're about.

[04:57:39] Calin Culianu: They've internalized narratives, yeah, completely. And I guess all we can do is be open and patient and they want to come and ask questions just to answer them. You know, they've internalized a bunch of narratives that I would argue are kind of false or kind of distorted or skewed. I mean, just the other day I was on Twitter and like, you know, Bitcoin Mechanic. He's that guy like Grassfed Bitcoin or whatever. He's that guy who partnered with Luke to make Bitcoin Knots, I guess. They want to do that bit, bit something. I don't know. They're all like, they're like,

[04:58:09] Joey: I mean, there's like seven. I don't. I've lost track.

[04:58:12] Calin Culianu: They want to do that. Where they sense like where they don't allow the inscriptions on the blockchain.

[04:58:18] Joey: And yeah, they're like BIPs. They're BIPs that basically have no chance of passing. So it just basically gets really confusing.

[04:58:24] Calin Culianu: Yeah. So and he wants a bunch of other stuff like opcodes and stuff. And I was like, dude, that's like Bitcoin Cash, man. Come on. He's like, no, you guys are dumb because you did the block because big blocks are dumb. I'm like, does that, is that your argument? Like, dude, Satoshi talked about bigger blocks, like, but then, but then they're the same guy.

[04:58:41] Joey: I mean, Luke is the guy that went like, ideally, like, you know, it goes down to 300 KB. They're definitely like completely opposite. They're definitely completely opposite. Yeah.

[04:58:51] Calin Culianu: So are they a bunch of clowns? Are they controlled opposition? Like what's going on with those people with their BIP 354 or whatever it's called? BIP 357. I don't even know what it's called. Do you guys know?

[04:59:03] Rosco Kalis: I'm not sure what number it is.

[04:59:06] Joey: I'm not sure either.

[04:59:07] Rosco Kalis: That doesn't really have like widespread support, right? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I can't imagine.

[04:59:14] Calin Culianu: Let me see. What was his name again? The rest of Bitcoin. Oh, it doesn't have widespread support. Yeah. I guess.

[04:59:21] Rosco Kalis: I don't know. It doesn't sound like something that would have like, and also I feel like.

[04:59:27] Calin Culianu: BIP 110 is what he's talking about. Oh, that's the one. Okay. BIP 110.

[04:59:32] Joey: It's going to be quite interesting because if they, if they find out that, you know, they do successfully, like when the node consensus, right. They'll just find we were right all along that, you know, the, you know, cause the, all the, all the little nodes don't matter, you know, to the proof of work. So that'd be quite funny, but I don't think, I don't think they would get the support just cause like, you know, Core has so much influence and it doesn't seem like they would have the, you know, you know, like it's not easy to execute a fork, right.

[05:00:02] Joey: And we know there's some Bitcoin hash, like, you know, we had tons of resources and tons of people like putting money into early BCH to basically make that happen. And that's why we are the only surviving, you know, Bitcoin successful Bitcoin hash is like Bitcoin fork. So I think, I think a lot of people don't realize, like in the early BCH days, how much money basically went, I mean, you might, you probably know like how much money Amaury got and so on and so forth. But it wasn't like we did have money like in the first one or two years, like there was definitely.

[05:00:35] Calin Culianu: The miners hash, the hash rate, like they mined at a loss sometimes and a bunch of things that they got paid for development. Yeah.

[05:00:43] Joey: So it's, it's almost like, yeah, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think, you know, maybe there'll be like a minority fork, you know, that could be a thing. But then if you look at the chances of that becoming a thing where they get like the degen crowd investing in it, right. With a degen crowd, which one would you go for? If you're a degen, would you put your money on, would you put your money on Paul's Ecash or would you put your money on Luke, right?

[05:01:08] Joey: I think I'd put my money on Paul. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just from the pure incentives of like, I, you know, probably Paul has a bunch of guys going to him and going like, Oh, we'll fund this cause we'll make money off the exchanges and whatnot. Right. Maybe that's also happening to the Ocean mining guys, but they, yeah. I would, I would think that from what I've seen that they don't, they don't have the support, but you never know. You know, but I also, you know, also, you know, it's just great watching them, watching them finally like realize, like watching, the, their mind just kind of going like, Oh wow.

[05:01:44] Joey: Like core really is. Core is everything that we said eight, nine years ago, right. Like, you know.

[05:01:50] Calin Culianu: But for some reason, but still big blocks are bad.

[05:01:53] Joey: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are retarded. It's so fascinating, right? Cause right now they're turning against like Greg. Now he's a infiltrator and this has been their like figure for so long. Yeah. No, not Greg Maxwell. Now they're going, now they're going, Greg Maxwell is, you know, yeah. They, they're like, Oh, he's, he's compromised. Wow. Like that's, that's really something to watch, right.

[05:02:21] Joey: For, for someone that's like, you know, they, he would call people out for being compromised and now he's the one getting.

[05:02:30] Calin Culianu: Like I said, on the latest BTC drama. So wait, are there two people threatening to fork? There's that [unclear: Steve Storzak] guy, right? Is there three guys, right? Is the two different groups that don't want to fork off or how does that, what's going on in BTC land, man, Bitcoin, the crazy what's going on in crazy land.

[05:02:49] Vlad Costea: So there is Paul who has been trying to push drivechains for almost a decade and he's going to fork off in August. By the way, I'm back. So I'm good to go for another five hours now.

[05:03:03] Calin Culianu: Oh my God.

[05:03:04] Joey: Wow. Do we have a dominant BCH people like coming in to like do the marathon? Oh yeah. Sorry. I cut, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

[05:03:13] Vlad Costea: Oh, it's all good. I, it's my fault for changing the topic, but there's going to be Paul and it's possible. That's two other people will surprise us with a fork. I give it like a 70% chance that Luke Dashjr is gonna fork off with his cult because he basically has a mining pool. He has his own implementation of the client. He has a cult around a particular idea. I'm sure that he has everything in place to create a hard fork and it's possible that also Jimmy Song and Samson Mow they recently, no way. Really?

[05:03:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Yeah. They announced something that's called production ready, which is their nonprofit where you can donate money. And they say that they're going to basically use the code that's created by Bitcoin Core and maintain something that's like an older version just in case core decides to make contentious changes, whatever that means.

[05:04:09] Calin Culianu: I think that's a good safe bet in principle. That's, that's a good safe bet.

[05:04:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah. But the way in which they speak about it almost alludes that they're testing the water to do a hard fork. And I give that like a 10% chance.

[05:04:21] Joey: We've seen, we've seen on a Bitcoin Cash before it starts of like, Oh, we're doing an experiment and it's not an experiment. I mean, that's what happened with, you know, Nexa, is it called Nexa? I've forgotten. Yeah. Basically we had our own version of that where it starts off with going like, Oh, we'll just, we just want to do this like test chain and, you know, like kind of like. Play around with it, but everyone kind of, kind of, kind of can like sort of intuit that you want to do your own token basically.

[05:04:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Nexa. So, yeah, but they were polite about it. They forked off, they just started a new chain.

[05:04:57] Rosco Kalis: Yeah. There was no contention there, I think. Right. But I mean, I guess, that was, that was, that was from the Bitcoin Unlimited guys, right?

[05:05:08] Vlad Costea: Oh, Peter Rizun.

[05:05:10] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Yeah. Nexa. Yeah. They started their own chain so they could do more of their ideas over there. Cause I guess they felt we weren't being experimental fast enough. So.

[05:05:21] Joey: Oh, so you're saying that you think Samson, you kind of think Samson and Jimmy Song, they're, they're also leaning towards that you think that there's a possibility that they will, they'll also like try to, that's kind of crazy, man. That's like, there's a very

[05:05:37] Vlad Costea: Strong and weird mental derangement happening where people say, well, we're not happy with these other guys, being around and using Bitcoin in ways that we don't approve of. And they got to the point where they created filters, which don't work. And then they said, well, we got to activate this BIP, which is going to disable this type of transactions for being made. And that also happens to coincide with some multisigs and it's really messed up. But the problem is that they built this cult around an idea of what Bitcoin should be, which is not rooted in the technicals of Bitcoin.

[05:06:18] Vlad Costea: And if you listen to their arguments, but don't understand how Bitcoin works, you're going to agree on principle. You're going to be like, yeah, that's reasonable.

[05:06:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah. I do want Bitcoin to be used for transactions. But if you don't understand the whole concept of Bitcoin needing to pay the miners and the security budget, and the fact that it's a permissionless network, that like these guys argue with a straight face that OP_RETURN messages like arbitrary data on Bitcoin is evil. When Satoshi actually put Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks in the first block.

[05:06:52] Joey: Right. That's, that's, that's a really good point. I actually never thought about that. That's a, yeah. Like, like he was using the OP_RETURN right at the start. Wow.

[05:07:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Like he showed us that you can put data into Bitcoin from the beginning and there's more of this, like people were larping about CSAM. I'm not sure what you pronounce, like Sam, CSAM, whatever, like child porn on the blockchain. This was last year. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that this existed since the beginning because people were playing with embedding data very early on. Someone put WikiLeaks documents in the Bitcoin blockchain, like 2011 or whatever. Luke Dashjr, who is the leader of this anti-spam movement was putting Bible verses in the blockchain. So it's not like, Ironic.

[05:07:41] Joey: Yeah.

[05:07:42] Calin Culianu: I mean, from my point of view, from like a thousand hundred thousand miles away, like it looks like you guys are just doing infighting rather than solving the actual problem, which is to like replace fiat. I mean, I feel like all these divisions are just, it's further degrading. It's degrading. I mean, in some sense it's like the bankers winning all over again.

[05:08:00] Calin Culianu: Like from my point of view, I'm sorry to say that. It's just like, you know, maybe if you want to be conspiracy theory minded, maybe like some of these fissures in Bitcoin are being funded or being pushed by money printer people. Maybe, I don't know. I mean, cause it's like from a thousand thousand people away or whatever it looks like, you know, it's like, it's like the British before they left India, they made sure that India was fighting itself.

[05:08:23] Joey: But why would they have incentive to break or divide the protocol that basically they've made pretty much like all these rails and with institutional financing?

[05:08:38] Calin Culianu: Because they haven't really solved the full problem for themselves, which is that like at any moment, Bitcoin could just turn around and decide to become a global cash. It just has to scale on the chain or fix a few minor technical problems. The fundamental threat is still there. Just degrade it and ruin it and embarrass it. And you know, we're like five years from now, we can all laugh and be like, haha, crypto is kind of dumb. You know, that's what they want. Like it's, it's, it's so existential to them, man.

[05:09:03] Calin Culianu: Like they've got a human history going, like it's been going for a while. They don't want that to end. I don't know. That's my point of view. I'm very subjective on this. This is a lot of this is just me being suspicious.

[05:09:14] Vlad Costea: So yeah, I do believe that there are some agents involved. There is a situation where I think someone posted a very funny, but it's not really funny. It's more like reflective meme on what's going on because Jack Dorsey is funding Ocean, which is the mining pool behind the whole spam debate. But he's also funding Lightning and some companies which are actually doing stuff on the Bitcoin blockchain. And the meme was going that these are the missiles coming from Israel hitting the missiles coming from Iran. And on one side it said Jack's money and the other side says also Jack's money.

[05:09:54] Calin Culianu: Yeah, controlled, you know, you control the debate, you control both sides of the argument and then people are arguing about something that's not a threat to you. You know, like the political class in the United States, in my country over here.

[05:10:04] Joey: It's like a lobbying, sending lobbying money to both sides.

[05:10:08] Calin Culianu: Yeah, and then they're arguing about something. Over here they were arguing about transgender stuff or whatever, like stuff that's like ridiculous, you know. But they were just doing it and the population was totally captured, totally in this synthesized debate. What we weren't arguing about is like how the hell the political class and the elites are robbing us. We weren't arguing about that. We were arguing about what they told us to argue about. Maybe the same thing is going on Bitcoin. I don't know. This is a pattern. It's a pattern that's been deployed like throughout history.

[05:10:34] Calin Culianu: It's not new. You know, we just don't live in those circles. We don't think in this way. We're just normal people. We're not elite. We're not that close to power. We don't think the way they do, but they know how to hold on to power. They know how to control narratives, get people arguing about bullshit. I don't know.

[05:10:51] Joey: Actually, you heard what's like a really good concept. Like when you're that powerful and you have all this time and you want to all you spend about all the time you spend about is just thinking about is just how to how to keep it and how to how to get more like basically keep the status quo. Right.

[05:11:08] Calin Culianu: And there's families that have done this generation, like the Rothschilds or whatever, or like the royal families in Europe, you know, like these people live on a different plane of existence, man. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like, this is just textbook. Like, let's just keep a community divided, arguing about nothing so that they don't actually like, you know, so they're not a threat. Like the British did this when they left India. They're like got the Indians to argue about stuff and, you know, hoping, you know, this is a classic tactic.

[05:11:32] Calin Culianu: Like, I don't know. Maybe that's what's going on, BTC. Maybe it's organic. I don't know. From far away, it looks like suspicious because one of the people like Luke Jr. Is like, obviously he's just ridiculous. Like he's a ridiculous human being. He's like insane. Like, why does he have so much gravitas? Like why are people paying attention to him?

[05:11:46] Vlad Costea: Well, there's an aura that floats around him because they say that he saved Bitcoin when he was able to figure out how to do SegWit without the hard fork.

[05:11:58] Calin Culianu: I would say he sabotaged Bitcoin. I would say from the beginning he was working for the wrong people. I don't know. That's my point of view on it. I mean, I don't know. I saw what you saw. You were around the same time I was. I started in like 2012 or whatever. You started before me. I mean, my point of view is Luke Jr. Is just a useful idiot. At best, he's a useful idiot. No, he's very Dogmatic.

[05:12:22] Vlad Costea: Like at one point he said that he would harm Bitcoin if his pastor told him to, which is very weird. He said that?

[05:12:29] Rosco Kalis: Who else can tell him to?

[05:12:33] Calin Culianu: Who else can tell him to? Oh, he's also said that he would listen to the government. Like you have to obey your government. It's like a sin. Oh, did he? Because his branch of Catholicism, which I never heard of before, apparently says this.

[05:12:44] Rosco Kalis: I guess, respect the rule of the country you live in.

[05:12:49] Calin Culianu: Like that quote from the Bible, whatever is Caesar should be Caesar's. He takes that literally. I don't know.

[05:12:58] Rosco Kalis: Interesting philosophy to have in crypto.

[05:13:02] Calin Culianu: Yeah, right. It's like the opposite. Very top down. Like, let's listen to this.

[05:13:09] Rosco Kalis: Does he have much support for like his ideas like that you're saying he might fork off with?

[05:13:18] Joey: He seems to have a huge following. Yeah, he does.

[05:13:23] Vlad Costea: It's funny because they rent hash rates to make it look like they have more support than they have and they deploy a lot of nodes which are from rented servers and whatever. And it's just in key moments when they get more social media traction that more nodes show up and they're like, look, we have the dominant node implementation and we're running 20,000 nodes and Bitcoin Core only has, I don't know, 15,000 or whatever. And they're just trying to prove that they have consensus and that they're the biggest.

[05:13:52] Vlad Costea: And then people point out that, look, you had a spike and then it went down a few days later. Like, how is this even real?

[05:14:01] Joey: What's their absolute hash rate on how much of BTC hash rate have they got? Like obviously you can, you know, it's the same thing with Ethereum, right? You can like spam as many VPSs as you want and just run a node and you can just make that number as long as you've just read those nodes. But are they a big part of the actual hash rate? Actually, I can probably just check. Do they like signal?

[05:14:28] Rosco Kalis: So Vlad, it sounds like you don't agree

[05:14:31] Vlad Costea: With- I looked it up. It's 3.47%.

[05:14:35] Rosco Kalis: 3.47%. It's not a lot, I guess. But it sounds like you don't agree with his ideas, right? Of like this, what he wants to fork off with.

[05:14:48] Vlad Costea: No, I think that's stupid. Like if you want to fork off, at least that's something that's technologically interesting. He's going backwards. He wants to decrease the block size, if anything.

[05:14:59] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah. Oh, he's still on that narrative? OK, interesting. Yeah, yeah.

[05:15:03] Vlad Costea: He wants 333 kilobytes.

[05:15:06] Calin Culianu: This is your like your contender for firing core, this motherfucker? Seriously, like what's going on? Guys, you got to step up your game. This is the number one cryptocurrency in the world and it's like a clown show. Your number one most competitive node is this guy? Really? Like, come on, guys, you can do better than this. Like, really? I'm sorry. No, so I guess you're right.

[05:15:29] Joey: It's just anyone that disagrees with core, their only option is to go with Knots. And that's the crazy 300KB thing that he's been on.

[05:15:41] Calin Culianu: There's so many. Like you guys, both sides are just controlled. It's awesome. Like if I was a banker, I'd be laughing. You guys can do better. It's not that hard. I can fork Bitcoin Core tomorrow. It's not that hard. I mean, I already maintained BCHN. It's like 95% the same code anyway. Like what's so hard about this? Just get like a team together and be like some serious people, not these clowns that have some serious ideology that's like decent. Like just you guys can do it.

[05:16:05] Calin Culianu: Like fire those motherfuckers. Maybe you can save the world. I don't know. Or join Bitcoin Cash. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you.

[05:16:11] Vlad Costea: It's very hard to fire them. Like when you think about it, like someone like Peter Todd was never officially part of the core dev team. He was like a contributor. He's one of the most prolific ones. He's like top 10 or something in terms of commits on GitHub. But he was never officially part of that team. He does not wear that badge. He's never saying I'm a Bitcoin Core developer. But he's a politician. He's able to influence what other core developers are doing by virtue of being there since 2011 or something.

[05:16:44] Calin Culianu: He got RBF in or full mempool RBF. He got that in as a political... Oh, he did? It wasn't him, Peter Todd.

[05:16:51] Vlad Costea: And also more recently, like he was the person who was advocating for the increase in the OP_RETURN size, which isn't that contentious. But people accuse him of being paid by Citrea, which he was not because I actually spoke with the Citrea people. They're doing a ZK rollup on Bitcoin. But he's very powerful politically. Like when he says something, people actually pay attention and listen and they consider it. Except for the tail emission thing, which I actually had him on my podcast like three or four years ago talking about it.

[05:17:24] Vlad Costea: And people were just laughing, being like, this guy is insane. We're never going to get that. But anyway...

[05:17:32] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah. You have three options. Yeah, raise the block size and get more volume, do tail emission, or confiscate Satoshi's coins, or something else, proof of stake, I don't know.

[05:17:40] Vlad Costea: Or sidechains. We never actually had sidechains.

[05:17:46] Calin Culianu: Right. But how are you going to secure the base layer, even with sidechains?

[05:17:49] Vlad Costea: With merged mining.

[05:17:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you're still going to need those assets to come from somewhere. Transaction fees. Like really high fee transactions, you're saying?

[05:18:01] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So you have sidechains with a lot of transactions that pay the same miners. That's what BIP-300 is about. That's why I'm excited about the eCash fork.

[05:18:12] Calin Culianu: And so the sidechains have their own coin on them or whatever? Their own inflation?

[05:18:16] Vlad Costea: No, they have the same coin.

[05:18:19] Calin Culianu: Well, let's just do it on the first layer then. Exactly. Why are you scratching your head like this? It needs a bit of software.

[05:18:27] Calin Culianu: Oh, I see. All right. So you pay into these sidechains and they do all the high volume and then...

[05:18:32] Vlad Costea: Okay. Yeah, basically they're miner-enforced sidechains. The miners become the custodians.

[05:18:38] Calin Culianu: Yeah, that's called a blockchain. Exactly. You can just do it on... Yeah, like what are you doing? You can prune a blockchain, by the way. You don't have to store all of it. Anyway. Sorry. Maybe Rosco can use the energy here. I'm getting a little conspiracy theory angry.

[05:18:57] Rosco Kalis: Pretty good. Pretty good. I mean, you guys have been going for five hours, right? So that's kind of where it's at. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[05:19:04] Calin Culianu: It's getting nutty for me.

[05:19:05] Rosco Kalis: No, but I guess... So it sounds like you do agree with sort of like Paul's ideas and his fork. Is that right, Vlad?

[05:19:24] Vlad Costea: I'm just saying that I wish this was on Bitcoin and I do support the fork because from a game theory point of view, it proves that there's a market for this. And also surveys the market to see basically who's going to use this. Are any developers going to onboard this new chain? The assumption is that we're going to get... So if there's going to be a Zcash sidechain, you're going to get privacy advocates joining it. If there's going to be a big block sidechain, Paul's idea is to unite the whole Bitcoin community on his chain, which is a very difficult task.

[05:20:00] Vlad Costea: But I do see in Telegram chats that he has some BSV people joining, which at first had me triggered. I was like, I don't want to be on the same chain as these guys. But then again, I'm like, maybe it's good because

[05:20:13] Joey: This is the healing that's required. Be careful. Be careful of those BSV guys. I'm just going to tell you, like, you know, they're a double edged sword, right? They've got all this energy, but you know, when it goes... Yeah.

[05:20:26] Rosco Kalis: I guess it almost only makes sense to have this on Bitcoin because otherwise it kind of really defeats the purpose because then you have... A new chain, which is going to have sort of this ecosystem of sidechains, but all of those sidechains then might as well just be their own chains because if they're not sort of connected to Bitcoin in any way, then what's really the point, right?

[05:20:57] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah but there are some assumptions regarding it which have to do with game theory and reputation because a lot of not a lot like three or four people including Peter Todd and Greg Maxwell they dislike the idea they think that if let's say that the miners secured this sidechain, which has like a thousand bitcoin on it and they make like half a bitcoin per month in transaction fees. The incentive for them is to steal the 1000 Bitcoin and run away with it because they can like this is what some critics of the drivechains idea are saying that the miners will steal that they're not honest players you should not give them any extra incentives outside of base layer block reward and transaction fee.

[05:21:52] Vlad Costea: They will refer even if, for example, a mining pool is selling t-shirts and people buy them in large numbers, they will call that like a MEV attack, M-E-V. Which comes from Ethereum, it used to be called maximally extracted value, but in the Bitcoin context, it means miners extracting value.

[05:22:13] Joey: Well, that makes no sense. Okay, okay.

[05:22:20] Vlad Costea: Like any extra revenue that the miners are making outside of the Bitcoin blockchain, like the fact that you can buy. I'm not sure if you're following the Ordinals thing, but at some point in 2022, there was this four megabyte block containing one JPEG that was mined by a miner called Marathon Holdings. And they got paid like outside of the Bitcoin blockchain. So someone paid them for that transaction to get included into a block and they made it happen. They had like 5% of the hash rate and maybe that means one in 20 blocks, they were able to mine it.

[05:23:05] Vlad Costea: And that was like a huge scandal at the time and they call this MEV and I think also around the halving time.

[05:23:13] Rosco Kalis: It kind of is, right? But what are you going to do about it? I think most people kind of agree also in Ethereum that it's not a great thing to have a lot of MEV-able things going on. But there's no technical way to disallow people from mining blocks that they want to mine and getting paid on their bank accounts, right? So it feels weird to have scandals around that or to have drama around that.

[05:23:50] Rosco Kalis: For those kind of cases, it doesn't really sound like there is a real solution except for not having any kind of transactions where there is an economic incentive to want to have a specific transaction mined outside of the mempool, I guess. But then if that's your goal, then there's just not that much interesting things going on on the chain, right? Anytime there's anything interesting that's also sort of contentious, there's going to be MEV.

[05:24:23] Vlad Costea: Look, I'm trying to explain to you how deranged he is. I have a friend, I still consider him a friend. He did some graphic design for me. He likes Bitcoin so much that he thinks twice before using it. Which means that if the amount is lower than $1,000, he does not transact on the base layer and he specifically asks you to use Lightning or Liquid for that transaction. If you're going to pay him and it's $100… It's like climate change.

[05:24:56] Calin Culianu: It's like you're producing too much carbon footprint.

[05:24:58] Vlad Costea: No, he thinks that you shouldn't have small UTXOs.

[05:25:04] Rosco Kalis: He's doing his part as a good member of the community by

[05:25:08] Vlad Costea: Not using the blockchain. Because if you go back to 2017 and the block size debate, there is this famous segment that I guess was also used like a gotcha moment by the BCH people. Where Adam Back is on stage talking, I think it was Scaling Bitcoin but I'm not sure which one of them.

[05:25:28] Calin Culianu: I use IOUs. Tabs, yes.

[05:25:32] Vlad Costea: The tabs moment. When Adam Back was asked, so there are a bunch of businesses which cannot deal with these high transaction fees. How can they manage this? And they cannot wait for Lightning because they're handling transactions now, not next month or in 18 months or whatever. And Adam Back said, well, they can use tabs which means they shouldn't use the Bitcoin blockchain for every transaction. Maybe wait until they have like 10 transactions, write them on a piece of paper and just settle it at the end. I was thinking, okay, at the time I had no opinion on this but right now I realize this is where it started.

[05:26:12] Vlad Costea: This whole idea that you should not use Bitcoin. You shouldn't touch it. This is another argument. You're making it harder for people in Africa to run a node because you run your transactions on Bitcoin.

[05:26:26] Calin Culianu: If you're a banker, which reality or which axiom would you prefer? Use Bitcoin or don't use Bitcoin? If you're a banker, it's the same narrative.

[05:26:38] Vlad Costea: But think about the people in El Salvador. They want to validate their own transactions and it's going to become more expensive if they have to buy the two terabyte SSD because of you.

[05:26:51] Vlad Costea: Because they cannot prune, right? They cannot press that one button that says prune blockchain to five gigabytes or something.

[05:26:59] Calin Culianu: Yeah, you can prune always. I don't know. This is the banker's narrative, man. Don't use Bitcoin because if you do, the fiat scam is no longer possible.

[05:27:09] Joey: And it goes back to what I was saying earlier. You asked about what happens if we do get big and Saylor or these guys come into Bitcoin Cash, right? What's the mental development or the next sort of fault pattern that naturally occurs when he says you're going to need Tabs? It's like, oh, now you need a layer to do the Tabs, right? And now you can charge fees on doing the Tabs. And then you can do

[05:27:39] Calin Culianu: Fractional reserve Bitcoin. Right, right.

[05:27:42] Joey: And it's like building these, it's like sort of like setting up for all these TradFi layers to sort of do something that Bitcoin was originally meant to eliminate. Which is, you know, you're meant to reduce the trust on third party and do the trust on just peer to peer, right? So you sort of extrapolate that. That was what I was talking about like, okay, like BTC is a little bit stuck because all these companies have built themselves on, you know, the one megabyte block cap and, you know, not being able to scale.

[05:28:18] Joey: So it's all, it's all, it's all related to that. Like, like I don't want to go down the, I don't want to go down the [unclear: kook] conspiracy thing. But if you think about like, what's the, if I was, if I was, you know, JP Morgan, if I was HSBC, like what is the most monetizable like move I can do on Bitcoin? It probably is to restrict the block size for you is to go, okay, you guys should just use tabs and then use cash app and, you know, use Square and just do it on top of Bitcoin. So we can get a little bit of it.

[05:28:47] Calin Culianu: Just have it behave like an asset. None of it actually. Cause the fiat, that's the base of everything, man. If people stop, if people start preferring Bitcoin to like dollars, like it's the end of the scam. The scam's over. It's got, the clock is ticking on the scam. Let's say it's got an expiration date at that point. So, and that, so they stopped that completely. You're not, you're very unlikely to find someone that even has a Bitcoin wallet, let alone is going to accept it over dollars.

[05:29:12] Calin Culianu: Like, and that used to not be the case. The trend used to be that people were accepting payments and that's a huge threat to the whole scam.

[05:29:19] Vlad Costea: It's also hard for me to compute how these people who are held in very high regards, like Samson Mow and Jimmy Song back in 2017, 18, 19, they were repeating this mantra. Like I remember Samson was bragging about paying for dinner with his credit card. And he was saying, I've actually earned points and I can save some money and buy more Bitcoin. I remember that.

[05:29:41] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Yeah. That was ridiculous. Yeah. Just use Visa. Yeah. Yeah.

[05:29:46] Joey: Yeah. I remember that.

[05:29:47] Calin Culianu: Sometimes they mock you into your face. Like after they've won, they just humiliate you and then you just accept it. And that's part of it. Like really that's a humiliation ritual. The fact that he said that and the whole Bitcoin community just let it go. And these are your, these are your thought leaders.

[05:30:00] Vlad Costea: Let it go. He's like a hero. Yeah. Right now he's pioneering nation state adoption, whatever that means. I haven't heard of a single success story from this company

[05:30:11] Calin Culianu: Because you can't do it on chain, but he hired Nick Szabo.

[05:30:13] Vlad Costea: He hired Nick Szabo. He's like the chief scientist, whatever that means for his company.

[05:30:22] Calin Culianu: I don't know, man. We have a formidable foe and like they've got a cheat. So the devs need to nerf that shit, man. The money printer.

[05:30:34] Vlad Costea: I think the smartest quotes regarding this whole situation that I ever got on my podcast, and I know that this is like demeaning everyone else's, but it's very memorable to me. I think it was five or six years ago I got Chris DeRose, the guy who was doing Bitcoin Uncensored. And in the context of Saylor buying a lot of Bitcoin, which had just started at the time, he told me, watch out because they're paying us to leave. And I've been thinking about this. Over the years, like what does this mean that they're paying us to leave?

[05:31:08] Vlad Costea: And I think it's true. Like people who have been very early in Bitcoin are getting paid to leave. They're getting rich. They have other problems. And once they buy their Lambo in their nice house, they're not going to care too much about it.

[05:31:23] Calin Culianu: It's a success. The money printer people sometimes don't give you anything. They just take everything. And they were forced to pay off the whole Bitcoin community. Yeah, it's something. You made them print some more money. It's something. And you know, like I said, crypto can't be uninvented. Like they can sabotage Bitcoin. They can sabotage Bitcoin Cash. They can sabotage the world. Like the technology exists. Like if there's the need for it's going to come back. Because at some point, people are going to want to have self-sovereign money for some purpose.

[05:31:50] Calin Culianu: So, you know, if Silk Road is able to do it, you know, the early days, just selling drugs or whatever, like it's going to, it's here to stay, man. But it's just, yeah, which one will it be? Like, I think it'll be, you know, I want Bitcoin Cash to be in a position to be it if it needs to be. But in some case, in some way, I find it fortunate that Bitcoin Cash is kind of still under the radar. Because I feel like these people aren't attacking right now.

[05:32:12] Calin Culianu: And I feel like if they started, you know, if big finance showed up or whatever, like, I don't know, they can sabotage Bitcoin Cash too. Like, I don't know. I'm sorry to say this, but this is like just really black pill shit. Maybe I should just get off. You know, that's true, though.

[05:32:27] Rosco Kalis: I mean, so I guess the hope is to be further on along with development by the time the interest gets there.

[05:32:34] Calin Culianu: Yeah, just get the technology to a point where it's like as un-sabotageable as possible, just because the consensus layer is strong and like the culture is there. Just get it. That's my sort of personal mission. Just get the technology to the point where it should be. Dude, these people topple governments, man. They start wars. Like, they could do, you know, they're a bunch of nerds in their basement coding. Come on. Easy, easy peasy. Send them a couple Epstein's and I don't know, some money. You win.

[05:33:07] Joey: I do have a joke that I sort of throw around. It was kind of, I kind of go like, maybe it's a good thing BTC exists. They're kind of like the fall guy, right? Basically, like, basically no one's like really like, you know, it's like, it's like they like protecting us from like the rest of them. You want to capture like the biggest one, right? You want to capture like the OG coin. So, you know, maybe it's good that we're like actually kind of like not very well known.

[05:33:37] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah. In this current climate, I find that a good thing. And then maybe in the future, there will be opportunity. If the bankers fuck things up bad enough where they're not under control anymore, like things are just kind of getting chaotic, then I think BCH could rise. It would be actually really dangerous. If BCH got to number two right now, I think we'd just be a target. So I don't know.

[05:33:55] Calin Culianu: This is the way I think. Sorry, you don't have to agree with me. I'm just one person. Like, I don't even, I don't have necessarily that much influence in this community. Like it's just people can choose to ignore me or listen to me. It's my opinion. These are entirely my opinions. They're not the whole, they don't represent the Bitcoin Cash community. Most people are not as like black-pilled as I am, or cynical.

[05:34:17] Vlad Costea: Well, you know, at least you're not of the mindset that everything is good for your coin. Like this mean that everything is good for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is for enemies and whatever. This has helped a lot of bad actors co-opt the movement and enter the space, even if they have tainted reputations. Like, what's the name of the Libra guy? David Marcus, I think. The guy who was trying to do the Facebook stablecoin. And then he just came to Bitcoin and everyone was like, oh, it's that guy from Facebook.

[05:34:48] Vlad Costea: We're hitting mainstream adoption, whatever. Now he's doing something which is called LightSpark, that centralized Lightning network. And I think there's also like a backdoor in there to confiscate funds.

[05:35:00] Vlad Costea: Oh, wow. Decentralized money like happening. But they say, well, it's more private than the base layer and it's instant, so you should use it.

[05:35:11] Vlad Costea: I don't know. So many people like when you think about it, we have such a low threshold for just saying, well, this is a bad actor. Maybe we shouldn't have this. Instead, we do this to developers, like people who actually come up with smart ideas to do stuff. They're the bad actors. They're the spooks. They're the agents. But these guys who basically come in and throw money at people and they're like, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. You should try that. And you should try that, too, if you think that it sucks.

[05:35:44] Vlad Costea: So the two of you can spend the rest of your days while I'm paying you just fighting each other and not accomplishing anything productive.

[05:35:57] Joey: Yeah. That's why it's really important to have a strong core culture. I do feel like BCH has developed that over many years. Otherwise, it's just like, hey, Mr. Facebook appears.

[05:36:15] Calin Culianu: We'd be very skeptical naturally of those motherfuckers, probably.

[05:36:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but when you think about it, you, calin, have been in Bitcoin Cash since day one, or at least since the early days. You said you were part of the group and stuff like this. Can you think of any Bitcoin core developer right now who is so OG, who has been with the project for such a long time? Because as far as I know, most of them retired. If you go to Greg Maxwell's website, he's going to see that he's a retired software engineer. And is it...

[05:36:49] Calin Culianu: Does Pieter Wuille still contribute code? He still does stuff.

[05:36:51] Vlad Costea: Oh, he does, but I think he's not one of the first. He's not as OG as Gavin or Mike Hearn or Wladimir van der Laan.

[05:37:01] Calin Culianu: Yeah, those guys are all gone.

[05:37:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah, these are all gone. They're not contributing anymore. It makes you wonder. We had all of these cycles where developers just disappeared, and it makes you wonder what happened to them.

[05:37:14] Calin Culianu: Maybe they just got rich and then got lazy.

[05:37:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's a possibility.

[05:37:18] Calin Culianu: It's hard to develop.

[05:37:20] Vlad Costea: If someone made me super rich today, if anything, I would do more of what I do, and I would not have to worry about other stuff. I don't see myself just riding into the sunset and disappearing. There's something here that we don't know. Could be.

[05:37:40] Vlad Costea: I do have a lot of respect for people who get rich, and then they use that money to do the things that they always wanted. Instead of just sitting on a beach somewhere and doing nothing for the rest of their days because they don't have to work, they start businesses, they fund projects, and they actually try to project their vision of a better world into the imperfect world that they see. For example, Slush, the guy who created Slush Pool, the first Bitcoin mining pool in 2010. I think it was first called mining.bitcoin.cz.

[05:38:17] Vlad Costea: He also started Trezor, and after he started Trezor, he started something that's called Tropic Square that built the first open source security chip. It seems like he's on a permanent quest to build stuff, so I respect people like this. That makes sense, yeah. Also, Zooko, he was very early into Bitcoin, wrote the first paper, not paper, first blog post about Bitcoin. Satoshi put that on the webpage.

[05:38:49] Vlad Costea: I guess he could comfortably retire at some point and be like, okay, I'm done with this. He's still working. Of course, he has this backstory that at some point he was broke and he was sleeping in his car. But after he created Zcash, I'm sure that there was at least one moment when he was comfortable financially and he could say, okay, I'm done. I'm out of here.

[05:39:15] Calin Culianu: But all the original Bitcoin guys are gone, huh? Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.

[05:39:19] Rosco Kalis: Are they all not doing other things in the space as well, even if they're not developing core anymore? No. Just completely exited?

[05:39:30] Vlad Costea: What does Gavin Andresen do right now? Nobody knows. Exactly. What does Mike Hearn do? I think he went back to software engineering for something unrelated to Bitcoin.

[05:39:47] Vlad Costea: Mike Hearn, so he gets vilified a lot, and he's also the reason why I didn't buy Bitcoin in January of 2016. I felt smart for not buying it, but then I regretted the moment because he said that Bitcoin is a failed project and he left.

[05:40:04] Calin Culianu: He sold all his Bitcoin at like two grand or whatever it was, one grand.

[05:40:09] Vlad Costea: No, it was below that. It was below that? Okay. Or maybe it was one grand. Anyway, he built the first SPV implementation, which is something that Satoshi could not complete. And he also created some interesting, what was it called? Bloom filters?

[05:40:29] Calin Culianu: Yeah, we still have those in Bitcoin Cash. Yeah, on the node.

[05:40:34] Vlad Costea: So, he did make some major contributions, but he's mostly remembered for ragequitting and also for the hard fork that happened in 2013, like

[05:40:55] Calin Culianu: The accidental one with Berkeley DB. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, because there was some bug or something, yeah.

[05:40:59] Vlad Costea: And what's Gavin remembered for?

[05:41:02] Calin Culianu: Like saying that Satoshi was Craig Wright.

[05:41:05] Vlad Costea: Exactly. But what did he do for Bitcoin? His legacy.

[05:41:08] Calin Culianu: Like almost everything. He was number two, like behind Satoshi.

[05:41:13] Vlad Costea: He created multisigs, for example.

[05:41:15] Calin Culianu: Yeah, P2SH, I think, as well.

[05:41:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And he onboarded so many people. Like he went on every show at the time. Podcasts were not such a big thing. So, there were these libertarian radio shows, and that's where I think he went on Free Talk Live. Yeah, he did. Early on, yeah. I think Roger, that's where he heard about Bitcoin. That's where Roger found out about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you can't really understate his contributions. But unfortunately, he sort of burned his reputation when he acknowledged Craig Wright as Satoshi. And then I don't know what happened to him. He was never the same.

[05:41:56] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's really Mysterious because he was contributing to Bitcoin Classic for a while, I think, or Bitcoin XT or Classic. Like he was a big blocker, basically. And then he dropped out even from that.

[05:42:08] Vlad Costea: I remember like in the... Did he get a threat?

[05:42:11] Calin Culianu: Did the CIA show up and be like, listen, just walk away.

[05:42:15] Vlad Costea: No, he's the one who went to the CIA. I know, officially.

[05:42:18] Calin Culianu: He did give a presentation to the CIA. But then did he get some threats later? Like he just suspiciously just disappeared. Like completely has not a word to say about anything. One of the greatest inventions in the world, you know, that may change history. And he was involved in it. He has not one word to say publicly about it. Strange.

[05:42:40] Vlad Costea: Maybe he signed some NDA with Craig Wright or whatever, and he's like legally bound right now to not talk about it.

[05:42:49] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, who knows? We may never know the answer to these questions.

[05:42:54] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but it is strange. Like when you think about it, why wouldn't you want to be part of this beautiful system that is right now like $70,000 or whatever per coin?

[05:43:07] Calin Culianu: Yeah, truly a dollar asset. Yeah.

[05:43:09] Vlad Costea: And you were there before it was worth anything. Like why wouldn't you want to wear this badge of honor? Like some people say, okay, maybe that they're too rich and they're afraid of wrench attacks or whatever. I did meet Martti Malmi. Like he was at a conference two years ago and I did an interview with him and I'm very proud of that.

[05:43:30] Vlad Costea: But he's very secretive. Like he doesn't talk much. I understand why. He did publish the entire history of his emails with Satoshi. For those of you listening to this who don't know, Martti Malmi was like Satoshi's first contributor or collaborator. He created Bitcoin. I think he, no, he did not. Satoshi registered Bitcoin.org, but Martti Malmi created Bitcoin Talk. And I think he was also in charge of Bitcoin.org for a while. Like he had custody of the domain. And right now I think it's Cobra who owns that.

[05:44:12] Vlad Costea: Another interesting character, like Cobra for most of 2017 and 2018 was going back and forth between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Like he wasn't sure which side he's on. Yeah, true.

[05:44:25] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I remember that. And he sort of was critical of the, yeah, he was critical of the small blockers. What happened to him? Did he disappear or is he still around?

[05:44:37] Vlad Costea: Sometimes he likes my tweets, but I don't see him posting anymore. He got sued by Craig Wright. He lost because he couldn't represent himself in court. And then it was this crazy moment when a UK court ruled that Craig Wright owns like the copyright for the white paper. So every website has to take down the white paper in the UK. Oh, wow.

[05:45:07] Calin Culianu: That's crazy. And that guy's a good scammer, man. He got the UK court system to like agree with him.

[05:45:15] Vlad Costea: Well, it was a very easy win for him because it was a hard choice for Cobra. Like, is he going to show up and defend himself but reveal his identity just to defend the white paper or what's going to happen?

[05:45:30] Calin Culianu: Oh, so I guess he won by default or something. Yeah. Hey man, I got to go soon because it's getting later. It's like three, four. I got to go pick up my wife. So I've been here all day, man. It's good hanging out with you guys. There's a lot of people that showed up. Yeah.

[05:45:47] Vlad Costea: So for people listening to this, check out Fulcrum. F-U-L-C-R-U-M. I think it's really beautiful. It's a good way. So if you're running Bitcoin Core or Bitcoin Cash Node or whatever, Fulcrum is for connecting your mobile wallet to that node. Yeah.

[05:46:04] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Of course you need a, yeah, it's a good, it's a service software, so you need a wallet. But yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the plug, man. Fulcrum's the best.

[05:46:14] Joey: Yeah. I think I got to go too because I see some trading alerts on my screen. So I have to do some stuff on whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Really, really nice meeting you, Vlad. You seem really, really cool. Thanks for, thanks for having us, which I joined earlier. So I think, yeah, it was a lot of interesting discussions. I was just watching like from the sidelines. I was doing like, you know, you know, like make my, make my thoughts heard. Yeah. But thank you.

[05:46:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Thank you for being here, Joey. Is there anything that you want to promote or how people can follow you?

[05:46:48] Calin Culianu: I'm going to go, guys. I'll see you guys.

[05:46:50] Joey: No, not really. [unclear: Not about CashScript and the compiler and everything.] No, not really anything specific.

[05:46:52] Joey: Well, if people, if people are listening, I would, you know, cause if there are people listening, I would really recommend checking out Paryon. Like, you know, cause I think it's, you know, when I talk to people, I do sort of venture out a little bit to Hyperliquid and Ethereum and so on. When I talk to people I always throw like, Hey, you know, someone's actually done a Liquity V2 on Bitcoin Cash. So that's kind of the example you can see of what future products on Bitcoin Cash can like look like.

[05:47:27] Joey: And, you know, there's like, I think, great yield on it. You can like stake your tokens in liquidity pools and earn yield. And yeah, I would recommend people take a look at that if people are interested in, you know, what kind of capabilities Bitcoin Cash has in terms of building like dApps on L1, you know, under Bitcoin's model without having to do L2s or drivechains and so on and so forth. But yeah, thanks for, thanks for having me. Yeah. Bye.

[05:47:57] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Okay, Rosco. So we haven't had the chance to do any introductions. Can you, can you stick around for a bit longer?

[05:48:06] Rosco Kalis: Yeah, I'll stick around for a little bit longer for sure.

[05:48:10] Vlad Costea: So what do you do in the Bitcoin Cash space?

[05:48:13] Rosco Kalis: So I develop CashScript, a high level language for writing smart contracts. So I'm actually more active in the Ethereum space than in Bitcoin Cash. But I, together with Mathieu, I spend some like time, part time every week to improve on the smart contract language and basically that. And it's kind of cool to see because CashScript in 2019 kind of was a university project of mine. And, and just kind of over the years, it's, it became used by people.

[05:48:57] Rosco Kalis: So now it's kind of cool to see that people are actually building some pretty complex DeFi systems like Paryon that was mentioned and AnyHedge and Moria stablecoin as well. So it's like nowadays, it took quite a long time for sort of DeFi to take off on BCH. But I think now it's kind of happening.

[05:49:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So what kind of smart contracts are you building? Like, give me an example of something that you can do with them.

[05:49:34] Rosco Kalis: Sure. Yeah. So, well, one of the, one of the systems that, or let's say the first sort of real smart contracts systems or DeFi that was built on BCH, I would say is AnyHedge. I don't think, I think you had anyone from General Protocols on today, right? But they, yeah, they're really sort of the original DeFi explorers of BCH in that, in that sense. And back then this was developed in 2020, I think. And back then, there weren't a lot of like, advanced scripting things yet in BCH.

[05:50:31] Rosco Kalis: I mean, you probably talked a bit about smart contracts on BCH before I joined. But in the past couple of years, there have been a lot of pretty interesting developments. Like, just recently, loops and reusable functions were added to the VM. Then, in the years before that, CashTokens and native introspection. But back in 2020, all of that didn't really exist yet. And the only thing that kind of was there that really did enable interesting smart contracts on BCH was CheckDataSig. Because with CheckDataSig, you were basically able to do covenants, because you could do a CheckSig and a CheckDataSig with the same signature, and pass in sort of the entire transaction object as now a verified transaction object.

[05:51:35] Rosco Kalis: So you could see, you could basically enforce inputs, outputs, anything about the transaction object. And that's kind of what was used to build AnyHedge. So, what AnyHedge is a, like a sort of a simple long shorts system where, you know, you take two parties, one of them thinks basically the price of BCH is going to go up, the other one thinks it's going to go down, like compared to let's say USD. And one side of the contracts basically kind of stabilizes their USD value. So they put in USD $100 worth of BCH, and unless there's like some liquidation event, they can redeem that USD $100 at the time the contract ends, which can be like a month from now, two months, whatever you set.

[05:52:35] Rosco Kalis: And the other side basically gets to use their BCH as leverage. So if the price of BCH goes up in the time, they are like leveraged, let's say 2x. But then if the price goes down, I guess you know how leverage works. But so you're basically able to do, you're connecting these two needs of users. Like some people want to have stability in USD terms, like merchants, for example, that want to accept crypto. But aren't able to convert that through centralized exchanges. And then on the other side, you have speculators.

[05:53:23] Rosco Kalis: And yeah, with the smart contracts, you're able to kind of connect those two use cases together. And that was really like the first DeFi on BCH, I guess now already like five, six years ago. And then since then, there's now been a few other developments, like decentralized exchanges for CashTokens, and now it's also a collateralized stablecoins. And the fact that you can do all this on chain is kind of, I think, the deal breaker. Because I think, I think the important thing with crypto is, yes, one, we're using it for transactions for just sending and paying and whatever.

[05:54:18] Rosco Kalis: But people want to do more with their crypto than just that. And if you need to take your money into a center, or take your crypto into a centralized application to do things like leverage, or to do things like trading for for other tokens, then I feel like that that's kind of a weakness of the entire system, because then you're going to force to use centralized services for those kinds of use cases. So yeah, I think that's kind of a bit of a rundown of the smart contract history, I guess, of BCH.

[05:54:59] Vlad Costea: Well, that's cool. I've asked the question before, but I haven't heard the answer from you. So how would you say that Bitcoin Cash smart contracts are different from the Ethereum ones with trade offs, like better and worse in what ways?

[05:55:16] Rosco Kalis: Yeah, I think, I think the biggest drawback is that they're a lot harder to develop and a lot harder to work with, mostly because of the mental model. Because with with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, you have UTXOs and Ethereum just has accounts. And I think already, if you're just thinking about regular user wallets without any DeFi, without any smart contracts, it is already harder to explain to someone what UTXOs are and how UTXOs work and what change outputs are. And all of that compared to having an account where it's just, OK, well, you have this amount in your balance, you send some money, your account balance changes, that changes.

[05:56:05] Rosco Kalis: Like that's a lot closer to what people think about when they think about digital currency. If you have a bank account, you don't have to think about UTXOs. And that's also that's already sort of a point of friction in the UTXO model compared to the account model. But with smart contracts, that kind of becomes more apparent, I would say, even because now with just a normal wallet, it is kind of easy to abstract all of that complexity away. It's like, OK, well, a user doesn't usually really have to know about change outputs or about which UTXOs they're using in a lot of cases.

[05:56:53] Rosco Kalis: But then for smart contracts, especially if you're developing it, you really have to be very, very aware of the UTXO model, of how those things work together. So I think that's one of the big drawbacks and I think also probably why I spend more time on Ethereum than on BCH. But I think the benefits are just sort of the benefits of the UTXO model in general, which is for me mostly in sort of the scalability of it. Like UTXOs can be very easily parallelized and so the stateless execution is just a lot more efficient than having this huge global state that needs to be tracked, needs to be taken into account.

[05:57:51] Rosco Kalis: So I think if you would have to scale a platform for the entire world, that would be a lot easier to do on a UTXO based chain. So that's sort of the trade off there. Like it makes a lot of things in terms of development a lot harder. But then if we need to scale something now, I don't see how now we would do that on an account based chain. But yeah, at the same time, I do think that Ethereum is also not standing still. Right. So hopefully by the time that it is time to scale to the entire world, there are solutions to either the scalability of Ethereum or the sort of UX or developer experience of UTXO based chains.

[05:58:46] Rosco Kalis: Like I guess BCH in particular, because I do think BCH has the most extensive scripting capabilities and smart contract capabilities out of UTXO chains or like big UTXO chains.

[05:59:00] Rosco Kalis: But yeah, so I think that's kind of the trade off that I see. And I think one of them will have to fix something in order, like neither of them are currently in the stage where they can kind of offer smart contracts and DeFi for the entire world.

[05:59:23] Vlad Costea: Oh, that's interesting. So how do you define the situation where you can offer smart contracts and DeFi to the entire world? What would it take for that?

[05:59:36] Rosco Kalis: Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not entirely sure. I think currently there's just not enough throughput on ETH or probably even on BCH as well. If everyone would do sort of like that, let's just think of DeFi or like think of sort of financial applications like trading tokens or like leveraging or those kind of things, loans, all of those things.

[06:00:22] Rosco Kalis: Then I think if you would take all of those sort of financial. Applications from the like off-chain world, from the normal world and you would have you would want to do all of those things on-chain.

[06:00:42] Rosco Kalis: I don't think there's enough throughput in all blockchains combined to kind of support that transaction volume. So I don't have the numbers sort of, I guess, clear in my head of like what that would have to look like. But I think that's the biggest issue. And then like, I guess on the and I think for BCH, it's probably easier to scale to a level where you would be able to at least do enough transactions. But then currently, it's just really hard to develop these kind of systems.

[06:01:29] Rosco Kalis: So then you would kind of run with BCH, you would kind of run into the issue that people still need to be able to develop all of the systems that are required to do these like financial transactions on-chain.

[06:01:45] Rosco Kalis: Which, yeah, I think we're making good progress. Like, I mean, I guess, CashScript is sort of the project in BCH that is working towards making those things easier.

[06:02:00] Rosco Kalis: And it's, but yeah, that takes time as well. Yeah, like there's, I think, on one hand, you have the VM updates that make things easier. And then on the other side, there's just kind of another layer of abstraction that needs to be built on top of just the on-chain contracts. So for example, one project that is being worked on now is the XO stack, which you might have talked about before as well in the past five hours. No, I don't think so. Okay, it's also developed by General Protocols, so the same company that built AnyHedge that I talked about before.

[06:02:50] Rosco Kalis: And this is kind of a system to sort of declaratively document everything around on-chain transactions and like these on-chain applications. Because it's never just the smart contracts, because you have the smart contract which governs sort of what can happen in on-chain transactions. But then you still need to know what off-chain data do I need for that? Which transaction inputs am I expecting? What's actually the format of the transaction that we're trying to build? Because smart contracts on BCH and on, I guess, like UTXO chains mostly are, or let's say covenants in general, are putting restrictions on what can happen inside the transaction, what the outputs can be, what the inputs can be.

[06:03:51] Rosco Kalis: And that is not actually making those transactions themselves, right? They're only saying this money can only go there or it can only do this. But then the whole creation of the transaction, matching the UTXOs, creating the inputs and outputs and all that, is happening by a transaction builder like off-chain. And knowing which UTXOs are what in the system is sort of a higher layer of abstraction on top of just the scripts. So for example, with the Paryon stablecoin, how that project works is you essentially lock up BCH and you're able to mint new stablecoins with that BCH as collateral. So it's similar to how DAI worked on Ethereum.

[06:04:56] Rosco Kalis: And then if the price of the underlying collateral drops, then there can be liquidations and there's a whole system around that. But for example, that system has 27 separate smart contracts that all perform some function in the system to do certain things. And how those 26 or 27 contracts work together is sort of like domain information. It's not written in code. It's written in the surrounding code, like the backend and the frontend of the application that you use to mint those tokens, for example, to lock up your BCH.

[06:05:52] Rosco Kalis: And the XO stack is essentially providing a way to document all of that in a single sort of data structure, which then kind of also allows you to have wallets that consume this documentation, this template, as they call it. So you don't need to then build this entire JavaScript code around all of these contracts. Yeah, so I think that's the biggest challenge in BCH smart contract development.

[06:06:39] Rosco Kalis: But I think in any kind of UTXO, smart contract development is the fact that it's not just the smart contracts that you need to write, but these entire things around it.

[06:06:49] Rosco Kalis: And having a higher level of abstraction to kind of abstract away the complexity there, I think that is sort of what is needed for BCH smart contract development to sort of thrive, I think.

[06:07:11] Vlad Costea: At this point, I want to announce that more than 1,300 people have tuned into this live stream. I'm not sure how many of you are actually listening right now, so leave a message in the comments, write something in the chat to let me know that you're still here with us. And you didn't just leave your computer on and left the room or whatever, or went to sleep. And yeah, we've also crossed the six hour mark, which means that this is the longest episode of this season so far.

[06:07:41] Vlad Costea: My record from the previous season, which was last year, was 10 hours with a single person. And it was moonsettler, I guess you know that guy. Oh yeah. It was like his letter to the Bitcoin community, like why he is so frustrated and why he spent so many years trying to get covenants to work, and he was also working on Lightning, and he has like an entire story about this. And he decided, I think right now he's working on Bitcoin Cash, right? Is he?

[06:08:18] Rosco Kalis: It might be, I'm not sure actually.

[06:08:22] Vlad Costea: He did propose something for Bitcoin Cash at a hackathon or whatever. Oh, cool.

[06:08:28] Rosco Kalis: I haven't kept up with the latest, but that would make sense, because the whole covenants thing doesn't seem like it's going to be happening anytime soon on BTC, right?

[06:08:41] Vlad Costea: Well, we were like this close, and then people started fighting about spam. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. It seems like there's always a distraction that gets on the way of making any meaningful progress.

[06:08:56] Rosco Kalis: Yeah, I think so. So would you say then that, what do you think the chances are of covenants or some sort of covenant system being deployed on BTC, let's say in the next three years are?

[06:09:19] Vlad Costea: Very low. But at the same time, I've seen some very smart research papers from people. For example, there's something that's called ColliderScript. It was written by the StarkWare team, and basically they figured out how to do OP_CAT without actually having the OP_CAT software, but it's very expensive. You need millions of dollars to be able to do that.

[06:09:42] Rosco Kalis: Oh, yeah, I saw this.

[06:09:43] Vlad Costea: But I think it's in tune with the whole long-term philosophy of the chain, which is that it's supposed to become expensive and unaffordable for the average person to use. Yeah, fair.

[06:09:55] Rosco Kalis: I mean, it's cool to see those kind of experiments, even if it's just not really viable. But yeah, I think it's kind of nice as well. Probably, let's say if BCH didn't split in 2017, let's say BTC was just like, OK, cool, let's go for bigger blocks. That's the way forward. I'm not sure if we ever would have had covenants on that sort of chain either, because that's, so maybe kind of the whole, like having another UTXO based chain has kind of allowed that to become possible because it is needed to have a UTXO based chain that can do complex smart contracts and these kind of DeFi systems that Ethereum can do.

[06:10:56] Rosco Kalis: Even if it's just to demonstrate that, even if it's just to kind of like see what is possible to kind of test the limits of UTXO model in that regard. So I think it's, I'm pretty happy with how all of those developments have progressed in BCH. Like I said, the past couple of years, especially, there have been a lot of improvements on the VM side that really enable some super sophisticated use cases like the systems that we talked about, like those collateralized stablecoins.

[06:11:41] Rosco Kalis: I'm not sure those, I don't think those could have existed, or at least not in any practical way, let's say three, four years ago.

[06:11:50] Rosco Kalis: So yeah, there's a lot of cool developments in that regard. Hi, Calin. Yeah, Calin is back.

[06:11:59] Vlad Costea: He can't stay away. You're supposed to go pick up your wife, man. I did.

[06:12:02] Calin Culianu: I picked her up and I dropped. It's not far. [unclear: She's a UTXO.] It's like 15 minutes each way or whatever, 10 minutes. Welcome back.

[06:12:11] Calin Culianu: Every point in Austin is like 20 minutes away from every other point, like my car. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about the podcast, I came back and I was like, yeah, I'm glad you guys.

[06:12:23] Vlad Costea: I'm glad you're back. The conversation is going to get more colorful now.

[06:12:28] Calin Culianu: Probably it's going to get nuts as long as you go. So yeah, we've been nimble, like we've been lean and mean, you know, it's kind of, I'm glad Rosco mentioned this, like it's like fortunate that we've been able to do our own thing, but still like we've got that conservative, the conservative hardcore tech values, you know, we don't do like crazy stuff. And we've had some OGs, like even Jason Dreyzehner, you know, who designed some of the virtual machine extensions. He's like an OG from BitPay, you know, like he was around like years ago at BitPay and you know, it's a lot of passionate people that have been in Bitcoin forever that just want to do things right.

[06:13:03] Calin Culianu: So it's kind of cool. It's kind of fortunate. I mean, we have, you have to always count your blessings, but some of the blessings with BCH or this, that's just like, yeah, a lot of OG hardcore people, you know, smart people and new people, young people, like, you know, a lot of good stuff going on.

[06:13:23] Rosco Kalis: Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

[06:13:25] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So I want to tell you a funny story from two years ago after I interviewed Roger. People wanted to send me BCH and I wasn't very comfortable. I was still trying to defend myself against the people I thought were my friends.

[06:13:40] Calin Culianu: Oh, cause you knew that some reputational savaging would come. Yeah, of course.

[06:13:44] Vlad Costea: They were accusing me of getting paid by Roger. And maybe if I posted a BCH address, they would say, Oh, of course this is like the hidden way of you receiving payment from Roger. So what I did at the time was go to the freeross.org website and I took the BCH donation address from there and I tweeted out, Hey, this is my BCH address. You can send me this. I think I raised like a thousand bucks for Ross.

[06:14:10] Calin Culianu: Okay. Did people that tried to do reputational savaging not realize that was the Ross address and be like, Hey, this guy got paid millions of dollars or whatever.

[06:14:19] Vlad Costea: No, because that address I think was changed at some point and there was nothing in it when I posted it or maybe it was like $10 or something. And then people started donating, you know, I was just laughing. I had no idea that the following year Ross was going to get freed or that Donald Trump was going to win the elections or whatever. I think this was April and it felt wholesome in some way. I'm able to make some libertarian positive change, but some people, some BCH people were actually upset. They're like, Oh, you should have told me because I sent from an exchange address or whatever and I don't want to have my identity tied to donating to this person who went to jail for this case and that situation.

[06:15:05] Calin Culianu: It's funny how people see Ross Ulbricht, you know, it's very divisive even among crypto people. Some people think he's a criminal. Some people think this is ridiculous.

[06:15:12] Vlad Costea: Maybe that in that case they didn't care much about their own opinion, but what they want to

[06:15:18] Calin Culianu: Be like, yeah, they don't want to be investigated or something.

[06:15:27] Rosco Kalis: It's getting close to my bedtime, so I'm going to drop off chatting with you guys.

[06:15:34] Vlad Costea: So did you have anything to promote or to tell people to follow?

[06:15:39] Rosco Kalis: I mean, CashScript would be the thing, I guess, to promote. So if you like the things I said, I guess, about smart contracts and BCH, you can go to cashscript.org. We just released the latest update, which has support for loops. And that's a pretty big enabler of even more sophisticated smart contracts. So if you have any ideas of cool DeFi projects and you want to play around, yeah, cashscript.org and the online playground.cashscript.org to just try it out without installing anything. We'd love to see some more cool projects.

[06:16:24] Calin Culianu: Yeah I'm highly impressed by the work you do, Rosco, like, you know, writing a compiler is no joke and the language design itself is elegant and yeah, it's cool, like, I love it. I love the tools. The tools Rosco works on are awesome.

[06:16:39] Rosco Kalis: Thank you so much.

[06:16:39] Calin Culianu: Much respect.

[06:16:42] Rosco Kalis: Well, you too. I love what you're working on.

[06:16:45] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. All right.

[06:16:50] Rosco Kalis: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for organizing, Vlad. And see you guys next time.

[06:16:57] Vlad Costea: Bye Rosco. Thank you for joining. Bye bye. I just put another one of these cash tags on the screen. Is that what they're called? Cash tags. Cash Stamps. Cash Stamps. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So you can claim some more BCH. I guess this is the last one for today or maybe there is another one that was unclaimed. I got to ask Stephen how this went. So yeah, you scan the QR code on the right to get an amount of BCH, which is like $1.50 and then you're going to see that you pay very small fee for that transaction.

[06:17:30] Vlad Costea: You can do whatever. You can try to buy a gift card. I'm not sure if you can buy much. One way you can use it is to try it on one of these LLM aggregators like NanoGPT or ppq.ai. And you can try Claude or you can generate a few images with this. I think it can be useful for that. Is there anything about Bitcoin Cash that we haven't discussed? I'm still thinking. Why is it not following BIP101 by Gavin, which was about doubling the block size every two years, I think?

[06:18:09] Calin Culianu: It could very well have, right? Well, let me look exactly at BIP101. You guys have too many BIPs, man.

[06:18:16] Vlad Costea: No, but that was the first one that proposed the block size increase. It was 2015. That's what led to Bitcoin XT.

[06:18:26] Calin Culianu: So it will double every 63 million seconds, two years until 2022. 2015. The Maximum block size would be eight gigabytes after 2036. I wasn't aware of this, but the details of it, I'm reading it really quickly. I know I'd heard of this before, but why didn't it follow it? The history of the block size wars was such that this BIP is the most obvious thing you could do, right? And it's probably really reasonable, really good. But the core people were constantly introducing doubt and whatever into the narrative. And so we're always trying to like, the big blockers are always trying to cope with compromise solutions that seem to plug enough holes in the core argument.

[06:19:24] Calin Culianu: I mean, this is the most reasonable thing. People should just do what Gavin said, honestly.

[06:19:30] Vlad Costea: So are you saying that Bitcoin Cash is like reactionary to the narratives in Bitcoin Core?

[06:19:37] Calin Culianu: It was initially, at least. I feel like now we're doing our own thing, but yeah, I mean, any group of rebels is going to be reacting to the thing they rebelled against, and it's going to influence the culture for a while and the thinking, right, because you fought this noble fight or ignoble fight, depending on which side of the fight you're on. And so that's going to affect, you know, because before you end up winning the fight, you actually try to compromise. You're trying to gain mindshare, right, because there's a debate going on and you're trying to gain mindshare.

[06:20:10] Calin Culianu: So maybe you have like a purist position, oh, the block size should just increase, like the way Gavin proposed. I think that's the most pure position. Have a set schedule where it increases, just like we have a set schedule for inflation until we reach some limit, you know. Seems reasonable, seems simple to implement. But then people sort of find holes in that argument. They're like, oh, no, you can't do this because of that. And you can't guarantee. And people introduced doubt, right? And so you try to meet them halfway.

[06:20:34] Calin Culianu: You're like, all right, we won't do that. But we'll do like, you know, so the Bitcoin, the big blockers at one point came up with like a compromise. I don't know if you remember this, but like, you can signal your block size preferences as a miner. And then if enough nodes, that was the Bitcoin Unlimited sort of approach where like, if enough nodes signal that they accept blocks this big, then miners can start mining them that big if they want. Like the adaptive block size done in that way, sort of as an emergent thing, but like miner signaling, which is, you know, the standard with stuff often works in Bitcoin with miner signaling.

[06:21:11] Vlad Costea: So Bitcoiners are so afraid of anything political, like they would just follow the rules, which I think is going to take until the moment when they have to shut down. I see some of it happening because a lot of miners, I don't think this was mentioned in this six hour podcast. But a lot of mining companies are pivoting to AI because it pays better. They have access to the electricity. And they give up on the ASICs, in which they invested a lot of money. But then again, they can make that back if they just provide that service to AI companies.

[06:21:51] Vlad Costea: And it's difficult. I don't know. I'm not sure if there is any resolution for this, maybe more fees for them, or maybe the price needs to go up a lot. And this, I'm not even sure if we're in a bear market. It's very strange.

[06:22:06] Calin Culianu: It's a strange bear market, right? It's sort of like, yeah, it hasn't really been a collapse. You know, you're in a bear market where like you just lose all hope. Right.

[06:22:16] Vlad Costea: There was no Capitulation moment. There was no, I don't know. There wasn't Barry Silbert tweeting that this is the lowest point or whatever, which was like a recurring theme in every cycle. I haven't seen too many, I lost everything stories.

[06:22:34] Calin Culianu: Yeah, not yet. So maybe we're not quite in the bear market yet. Maybe we're not. Maybe we should all be. Yeah, who knows?

[06:22:41] Vlad Costea: But also think that we're not going to get significant improvements in BTC until Saylor gets liquidated or something.

[06:22:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I don't know much about, see I don't follow that kind of stuff. I know Saylor, like he's holding a lot of, he's got that MicroStrategy or whatever it's called, and he's holding a lot of BTC and he kept accumulating. I don't really know what's going on with that. If you don't mind, maybe you can fill me in. I don't know. Maybe some of your viewers would appreciate it. Maybe they all know.

[06:23:06] Vlad Costea: I think it's very interesting how he was able to step into this community. And the first thing he did after announcing that he's buying a lot and saying that he has this Bitcoin strategy. He bought or used a bunch of his domains because it seems like he was very big into domain brokerage. And he, for example, turned hope.com into a Bitcoin education web page. And then he started funding Bitcoin education websites that were promoting Bitcoin as a store of value. And it's very obvious in hindsight that what he did was to capture the narrative.

[06:23:44] Vlad Costea: He went on every podcast, except for mine, I never invited him, but he went on every damn podcast in 2020 and 2021 talking about the fact that Bitcoin is king. There is no second best. The number will go up forever, Laura and stuff like this. I'm not sure if you saw the memes. I'm not sure if you follow, but

[06:24:03] Calin Culianu: I remember seeing some of them on Twitter, but I sort of stopped, because for me, every example of this is just like this pouring more salt into the old wound, which is like I realized something fishy is going on. So seeing this stuff happen just is like, oh, you know what I mean?

[06:24:18] Calin Culianu: I remember seeing some of these memes, like the little clips of him talking about it being a store of value. So I guess his big thing is he pushes the store of value stuff, right?

[06:24:26] Vlad Costea: Right now, it seems like MicroStrategy holds approximately 850,000 Bitcoins, which is a lot.

[06:24:34] Calin Culianu: That's a lot. Even if it was Bitcoin Cash, that'd be a lot. But for Bitcoins, that's ridiculous.

[06:24:38] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah. But he's becoming this point of failure. He's trying to be like the spokesperson for the project. I remember as early as 2021 when Elon Musk briefly announced that Tesla is going to accept Bitcoin for payments for the new Cybertruck and for the Tesla [unclear: car, and] online shop. A month later, he backed down from it and said that mining is not green enough and whatever. It doesn't follow the ESG standards, which later he admitted that they were bullshit. But after Bitcoin was removed as a method of payment from the Tesla Web Store, some people decided that they should establish this council.

[06:25:23] Vlad Costea: And Saylor became the president, like he elected himself the president of the North American Mining Council. And then he went on to negotiate with Elon and they had a talk and they were trying to get him to accept Bitcoin once again. And this made me suspicious very early on. I was like, why is this guy like the head of the council? And everyone just acknowledges that, yeah, that's where he should be. And then he went to the White House last year and he was telling Trump about Bitcoin and whatever.

[06:25:55] Calin Culianu: So he's like, maybe to certain politicians even, he might credibly be like representing Bitcoin, right? He holds so much Bitcoin. He goes on all these shows. You know, the president wants to talk to him. It's like he's like an important person now, like self-appointed, important person.

[06:26:11] Vlad Costea: He's like the biggest voice that speaks against privacy in Bitcoin. And he explains why it's a bad idea and why he basically he didn't say this directly that he would sell his coins. But he's saying that Bitcoin will be less useful for institutions and blah, blah, blah. So a lot of developers, I guess they were deterred from deploying anything. And two years ago, I like to think that two years ago is the year.

[06:26:41] Calin Culianu: His Commentary affects the culture, like developers. It does. OK, yeah, go on. Yeah, sorry to catch up.

[06:26:46] Vlad Costea: Two years ago, I think, was when Bitcoin really died, when they arrested the Samourai Wallet developers and ETFs started becoming a thing.

[06:26:56] Calin Culianu: Very fucked moment, man. Agreed.

[06:26:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it felt like so. I remember I was in Nashville at the Bitcoin conference there and I was looking around, seeing politicians on stage, and I felt like I'm in the wrong place for the first time ever.

[06:27:11] Calin Culianu: Was this during the was this during the president two years ago?

[06:27:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it was during the campaign. I think it was also for Congress.

[06:27:19] Calin Culianu: And so politicians were there, like Catering to you guys, like trying to kiss up to the Bitcoin community.

[06:27:24] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah. Like RFK, he was still a candidate at the time. He spent 30 minutes kissing our asses and saying that he's going to buy Bitcoin every month with the taxpayers money and that he's going to make Bitcoin tax free. And you're not going to pay any income tax or you're going to be able to spend it without having to.

[06:27:48] Vlad Costea: But it was all wrapped in a speech that sounded exactly like a cult Bitcoin podcast. Like he was using terms like I fell down the rabbit hole and I became a Bitcoiner and I took the orange pill. And

[06:28:08] Calin Culianu: He's an effective politician. He is like the

[06:28:12] Vlad Costea: Speech that he was presenting was like a Bitcoin podcast. And I was thinking, OK, I don't trust this guy. He's an outsider coming to show us that he can talk in our lingo, in our slang. And I don't know, I got very bad vibes from it. And the very next day, Trump showed up on stage and he spoke about anything else except for Bitcoin. And he was also late.

[06:28:36] Calin Culianu: And also Trump was there, too. OK, I think I think I remember seeing this film, this like on video. Yeah. Yeah. OK. And you were there. You were at Nashville. I was there, but somewhere, guys, there was

[06:28:48] Vlad Costea: Like a queue or a huge waiting line outside of the room to be inside when Trump is speaking. I think they started around. So they lined up around eight in the morning just to get a seat inside those like, screw this, I can watch it on screen. I don't care. I was outside. When I go to conferences, I don't spend too much time watching the talks. I just walk around. I talk to people at booths. I think that that's where it gets more interesting, where you get to meet people and learn what else is happening in the space. The stuff on stage, you can watch it on YouTube when you get home. Yeah, true.

[06:29:29] Calin Culianu: But what you're saying, you're saying you had the feeling that you're in the wrong place. Like you feel threatened for the first time because you're in the United States. You're in the belly of the beast. Or is it because of...

[06:29:37] Vlad Costea: No, it was my first time in the U.S., so I got to acknowledge that. It was my first time at a U.S. Bitcoin conference. But looking around and seeing all these suits and hearing people like that was also when Saylor made the famous speech about what it means to be a triple maxi. Like you're a maxi if you hold more than 90 percent of your net worth in Bitcoin and 10 percent is fiat. You're a double maxi if you hold 100 percent of your net worth in Bitcoin.

[06:30:09] Vlad Costea: And I don't even know what that means. I don't know how you feed yourself anyway. And you're a triple maxi if you take on loans from everyone you know, from institutions, from... Whatever, you leverage your entire future to be able to buy more Bitcoin.

[06:30:29] Vlad Costea: And also last year, I saw him on stage telling people to get into debt. Like he was like, if you can borrow a million dollars and buy Bitcoin, do that. Take money from your parents, take money from your close friends, take money from anyone who may not ask for the money back and buy Bitcoin with it. And you're gonna thank me later.

[06:30:51] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, in some ways, like, so this is like a pot, let's say you're a bag holder of Bitcoin, right? Let's say, you know, you bought Bitcoin at 30k. And so you're doing okay now, but you still want your bags to go up. And you sort of don't know too much about the space. And then you see this high profile guy like Sailor, like, you know, sort of promoting Bitcoin, promoting more buying, promoting basically positive price pressure. You're very likely to like agree with him.

[06:31:15] Calin Culianu: You're like, oh, yeah, I mean, if everyone does what this guy says, my bags go up. You know? It's like, it's almost like a populist message in a sense. It's like a politician saying what people like, what like a dumb person wants to hear in a way, you know, like high information.

[06:31:30] Vlad Costea: Politicians will tell you to vote for them and that you should follow whatever, but they don't ask you to borrow a million dollars and buy something. Yeah, true.

[06:31:38] Vlad Costea: Like, they don't ask you to leverage your entire financial future. And to be honest, this sounds very desperate. Like when you go on stage and make speeches like that, it means like, you need more liquidity very quickly.

[06:31:54] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it could be a sign that he just wants to get more liquidity and so he could rug everybody, right? So currently he's got, if you see 850,000 Bitcoin, that's like 59.5 billion dollars. That's a lot, man. Yeah, 59. That's crazy, dude. Dude, Twitter was 40 billion and that was overpriced. That's a lot of money, man. That's like one payment for the Ukraine war.

[06:32:23] Vlad Costea: Okay, it's not that much.

[06:32:26] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's not that much in those terms, but those guys steal a lot of money. At one point, the US gave the Ukraine like a 60 billion dollar payment, which is the entire stash of Michael Saylor.

[06:32:38] Vlad Costea: When you think about it in these terms, it's not a lot, but Bitcoin is not a proof of stake system. So if you have more coins, you don't get more votes. But it seems like if you do have more coins, you have more influence. You can tell people.

[06:32:52] Calin Culianu: You can, because if you're such a big whale, you can crash markets at least temporarily, right? Like if Saylor gets pissed off, he can just be like, all right, I'm going to sell like fucking 100,000 Bitcoins. See how you like that. And people are going to be afraid, like, oh, no, don't sell. No, no, no, wait. What do you want? I want this and this. Okay. You know, you start to have leverage, right, when you have 100,000 Bitcoin, right? You can threaten everybody. You can, you know, because you can like affect the price at least temporarily.

[06:33:19] Vlad Costea: And it seems like the price is the only narrative. Like, that's all we got.

[06:33:25] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, and your price is good, dude. Like, I mean, a lot of people got very rich and like, it's more than, it's more than, you know, the bankers were forced to, minimally, I can say the bankers are forced to pay out significantly and let this thing exist and let people get rich off of it. So that's, that's a small win.

[06:33:41] Vlad Costea: You have any regrets for selling your BTC?

[06:33:44] Calin Culianu: Yeah, so I would be like a multimillionaire now. So I liquidated when, like after the fork happened and after I was in Bitcoin Cash, I was like, I can't hold this coin. So I sold all of it. I actually traded it for BCH. No, I'd be a multimillionaire now. Like I'd live in a nice big house in Austin. I'm like, I wouldn't give a fuck. You know, I'd probably have to, even if I paid tax on it, I'd pay tax on it. You know, I get half of that money.

[06:34:06] Calin Culianu: I can still afford it. Yeah. I mean, but I don't regret that at all because I just didn't believe in it. I was like, I can't be a part of this. I was like, to me, it was so clear that like, what's happening is this thing is being sabotaged. And I couldn't believe it was happening. It was like going against everything. Like the whole thing that happened. That I understood Bitcoin to be like, I was like, I can't participate in this man. Like, so I sold all of it and discussed, but yeah, I'd be, I'd be very wealthy.

[06:34:32] Calin Culianu: I'd be a very wealthy man right now. Like, but I'm fine. Like I'm happy. I'm not poor.

[06:34:38] Vlad Costea: Have fun staying poor. That was like the last cycle.

[06:34:43] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, the thing is even now, like, I don't know, I wouldn't be a multimillionaire cause I probably wouldn't have, I wouldn't have known to hold it till a hundred thousand. Like I probably would have sold it on the way up. So I'd probably even break even anyway.

[06:34:55] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I mean, some people are ridiculously wealthy and they're in the Bitcoin Cash community. They were OG Bitcoiners. You know, they used to mine, you know, 50 blocks, like 50, 50 BTC per block. You know, they'd mine on their, on their GPUs and whatever. Like there are guys like that that are still in the BCH space now. You know, good for those guys that they're wealthy.

[06:35:17] Vlad Costea: Like are they contributing with something, at least financing development or whatever?

[06:35:23] Calin Culianu: Yeah. Yeah. There have been some whales that have, that have financed, on the, yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to give out their names, but there are some, yes.

[06:35:33] Vlad Costea: No, that's fine because a lot of people perceive BCH still as being Roger's toy coin.

[06:35:41] Calin Culianu: Like Roger's scam coin, right? Cause he had Bitcoin.com, right. And he was sort of sending customers over to Bitcoin Cash. And so that was perceived as being like deceptive. Just to defend, like, the thing is in our mind, you were like, you guys captured Bitcoin, right? We, we consider it for a while. We consider ourselves the real Bitcoin until it became clear that like, you know, the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. Right. Like in our minds, you know, it's like, you know, like Taiwan and China, like Taiwan still insists that they're the official government of China and China still insists that Taiwan is not a country.

[06:36:17] Calin Culianu: It's like, you know, these endless battle, like this war that was fought, right? Like, you know, both sides think from their point of view that they're right. That they're, you know, that they were, they were trying to save the Republic or save the, you know, so it wasn't like an intentional scam to call Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Cash. You know, it's like, yeah, motherfuckers, we're Bitcoin. Who are you? Like, you know, and then we're forced to pick a name or I'll pick Bitcoin Cash. Initially it was called like user activated hard fork.

[06:36:47] Calin Culianu: Bitcoin user activated hard fork. Like you can think of a name and it very quickly like crystallized around Bitcoin Cash. So.

[06:36:53] Vlad Costea: Was that reactionary to the user activated software?

[06:36:56] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. Yeah. And I think the name crystallized before the actual fork day. I think by July we decided that it's called, it should be called Bitcoin Cash. And then we forked in August. But yeah, it was as a reaction to the UASF. Yeah.

[06:37:12] Vlad Costea: I do remember the hats.

[06:37:14] Calin Culianu: Yeah, the hat campaign. Do you remember like the New York, was it the New York agreement or the Hong Kong agreement? Like SegWit2x?

[06:37:22] Vlad Costea: I was going to get to that because some people conflate Bitcoin Cash with SegWit2x and they think, well, I think this was a very convenient narrative for Blockstream and the rest of the small blockers who wrote the history that you guys were financed by the largest companies in the space, BitPay and whatever. Barry Silbert. Well, what's his name? Anyway, my point is that there were the signatories of the New York agreement, which you can still find online. Maybe I should look them up. And they were backing SegWit2x as a hard fork that was supposed to happen, I think, in November of 2017.

[06:38:07] Vlad Costea: But when they told the story, they referred to this as the New York agreement that was backing the big blockers, which today are Bitcoin Cash, which is not entirely wrong because after SegWit2x did not happen, the once wanted big blocks in Bitcoin came to Bitcoin Cash. But it's not really what happened. It's not like when Bitcoin Cash was created in August, you already had that backing. That's right.

[06:38:36] Calin Culianu: I mean, I think, yeah, that's correct. It's not the full story. In some ways, Bitcoin Cash was like a hedge against the fear that something would happen and SegWit2x wouldn't get activated. And so at least we have this. You got to understand a large part of the industry saw the problem. We've got to scale this thing on chain. What are we doing? Especially people like BitPay. BitPay was like, dude, BitPay was a payment processor at the time. It was used everywhere. The fact that the unpredictable fee market would just create so much chaos for them and for the customer experience, where, like, adoption was going negative.

[06:39:18] Calin Culianu: So there were people in the space that were worried about the fact that Bitcoin Core didn't want to scale on chain. And so Bitcoin Cash was sort of an answer to that. It was like sort of a fuck you and like a hedge. We still have this other chain just in case you guys don't end up doing SegWit2x, at least as Bitcoin Cash, as sort of a hedge.

[06:39:45] Calin Culianu: We really believe that maybe we would end up supplanting Bitcoin because we really believe that the correct thing to do is scale on chain.

[06:39:52] Vlad Costea: Sometimes I think about BCH as this blackmail chain, which is telling BTC like, get your shit together or we're going to take your miners and we're going to take your users and market share.

[06:40:06] Calin Culianu: I think there are probably people that contributed to Bitcoin Cash in the early days in terms of money that were thinking in those terms and were wanting to leverage, like as a leverage point. It's like, hey, listen, if you don't listen, if you don't do what you agreed to already, like months ago. You signed on the paper, you should do what you agreed to. Like, we're going to just fund Bitcoin Cash, you know. There were people in this space that were probably thinking in those terms. I wouldn't call it blackmail, I would call it leverage, but you can call it blackmail if you like.

[06:40:34] Calin Culianu: Like as a hedge, you know, it was like, you know, because people are really worried. They're like, hey, if we don't have enough on-chain traffic, like, you know, what's going to happen to crypto? Like right now, this is the moment. Like, we got to ensure that adoption grows, that people start accepting payments. And, you know, there was this fear that was happening at the time.

[06:40:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I think 2017 was a very confusing year.

[06:41:02] Calin Culianu: Yeah, very much so, in some ways. But I mean, I don't know.

[06:41:08] Vlad Costea: But also the years that followed, like 2018 was also weird. There was new hope in Bitcoin that Lightning is going to be the one true solution to scale. And Bitcoin Cash was pushing like full force ahead to claim the title of the real Bitcoin.

[06:41:30] Calin Culianu: Yeah, we were still thinking in those terms. We're still vying for that.

[06:41:33] Vlad Costea: I remember the meme wars that were happening at the time with Dan Darkpill and there was the CoinSpice guys on the other side. It's kind of unfortunate that they're not around anymore.

[06:41:49] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean, so we suffered so many forks within Bitcoin Cash. Like we suffered two major ones, like when the BSV people left and then what Amaury decided to do was tax support and he took all the CoinSpice people with him. So like the community got really fragmented in the Bitcoin Cash side. Like we just like suffered a thousand cuts. So yeah, those guys aren't around anymore. And then like a lot of people lost hope because they were really hoping they could supplant Bitcoin. And they sort of they gave up, you know, years and years past.

[06:42:17] Calin Culianu: Two hard forks later of Bitcoin Cash, like two contentious hard forks later, communities divided, prices aren't going anywhere. You know, they just like sort of just lost interest. A lot of people just left. Or they went to BSV or they went to Amaury's coin, Taxcoin or whatever you call it, eCash 1.0. I don't know what we can even call it. So this is ambiguous from the new eCash that's coming. But we jokingly call it Taxcoin. I still call it Taxcoin to this day.

[06:42:46] Vlad Costea: I've been meaning to ask you this, but before that, I got to acknowledge that [unclear: Sel Diego] just retweeted this. He has 278,000 followers and we just gained like 200 views just like that. Poof. Yeah, he's huge. I feel like I should dance right now to please the newcomers or whatever. Oh, that's awesome.

[06:43:07] Vlad Costea: Anyway, how come you haven't activated the avalanche pre-consensus, which is the only technological claim that Amaury's fork has compared to BCH?

[06:43:23] Calin Culianu: We have a different approach to that. There are other things we would want to do.

[06:43:30] Calin Culianu: Pre-consensus is something interesting to look at, and we've done research on that. There's something that we're working on that's different. Long story short. There's been one proposal called Sunlight, which is just a different sort of scheme, but it gives all the nodes an idea of what's about to be mined without this proof of stake component or whatever. I don't know, the latest iteration of Avalanche is kind of weird. It's got kind of a proof of stake component to it.

[06:44:04] Calin Culianu: There are other solutions. Avalanche isn't the only way, despite whatever Amaury or other people have told you.

[06:44:12] Vlad Costea: Oh, no. I don't think he said that it's the only way. He did say it's his preferred way, which is what he believed was the best solution at the time. Right now, he's trying to scale with something that's called subnets, which is sort of like sidechains.

[06:44:31] Calin Culianu: There are ways you can do this. It all depends on weak subjectivity. There are ways you can do this. It's not exactly Avalanche. The whole idea is to just have a picture of what the network's mining, what the next block's going to look like with some reasonable confidence or some really high confidence, and then punish disfavored blocks that disagree with that. If some miner doesn't mine exactly what it seems like should be the next block, punish them in some way. Disfavor him. And you could do that in a subjective way, like you sort of just don't switch that tip for a while.

[06:45:07] Calin Culianu: Or you could do it in some objective way, which I guess, I don't know. It's the same problem, really, but it's like Bitcoin Cash is a different sort of proposal regarding it. But we're not going to implement it anytime soon.

[06:45:19] Vlad Costea: So how did you guys get to the conversation about taxing miners to pay the developers? Was that entirely Amaury? Yeah, just Amaury. I could announce it one day. Was it a consequence of Bitcoin Cash not gaining the expected traction or not being able to pay the developers? Or did he just want more money?

[06:45:42] Calin Culianu: You gotta ask him, man. It wasn't something that anybody really discussed. He'd sort of bitched about his dev team not having enough money and that the funding's drying up. And then he proposed the consensus chains to just pay to his own wallet address out of the block subsidy one day, the 11th hour.

[06:46:07] Calin Culianu: And then that was, as you can imagine, contentious. And we quickly scrambled to just farm another dev team, have another node that people should install. We told all the miners to install this node software. And, you know, he got the boot. He forked off into his own chain. It was not something. It was like by fiat. It was like fiat meaning by his own will. It wasn't like a community consensus thing. Just like one day he like slunk it in there. He's like, by the way, we're gonna have this consensus rule. I get 8%.

[06:46:39] Vlad Costea: Oh, that's crazy.

[06:46:40] Calin Culianu: Yeah, he's kind of fucked up, dude. Not cool.

[06:46:45] Vlad Costea: I mean, when he was on my podcast, he was nice. I had him twice.

[06:46:51] Calin Culianu: He's like a, I think he's like a sociopath, dude. Seriously, like I've worked with a guy. He's like a narcissistic sociopath. Like I don't, he's not a normal person, dude. Extremely toxic to work with, like really difficult, insulting, manipulative. You know, he feels like, you know, if you could even look on maybe his Twitter still says this, like benevolent dictator. Like, dude, the guy's like an anarchist, but he wants to be a dictator. Like there's something in his brain that's like not, you know what I mean?

[06:47:22] Vlad Costea: You know, he's pretty smart. You got to give him credit for that. And I guess this is why he's referred to as the Greg Maxwell of big blockers.

[06:47:32] Calin Culianu: He's the Greg Maxwell of big blockers. Yeah. I would say. Did a lot of damage, man. Betrayed a lot of people. Can make convincing arguments, can be very persuasive.

[06:47:45] Calin Culianu: I mean, at the end of the day, I think Amaury Séchet is not a good person. I think he's like a bad person. I think he's done evil in this world. He's betrayed a lot of people for his own ego or whatever. Like you don't do shit like that. You don't like take Satoshi's invention and like add a tax to it because you can't fucking fund your dev team. If you can't fund your dev team, then like, you know, close up shop and like, you know, you don't change it.

[06:48:07] Calin Culianu: You know, another dev team will step up. Volunteers will step up. Satoshi worked for free, right? I mean, Gavin Andresen worked for free initially until the Bitcoin Foundation.

[06:48:19] Calin Culianu: Like you don't tax the chain. Like this is not sound money. It's just like arbitrary. The devs just start taxing. I mean, you can do it. Some chains are structured that way from day one. Like, you know what you're getting into. You don't just slap it on at the end, right? Like Zcash, you know, like that's okay if that's, you know, you're getting into.

[06:48:35] Vlad Costea: That was there since day one. Yeah.

[06:48:36] Calin Culianu: And there's there since day one. You don't just slap it on, you know, haphazardly without any consensus around it. It's like the final nail in the coffin to like kill Bitcoin Cash. Like someone cynically minded might say maybe he got paid off by Blockstream to do that. Who knows? There were like some forum posts on Reddit where like, and then this could just be trolling. Like, what's his face? Greg Maxwell, you know, nullc on Reddit. He's like, ah, ha ha. I think you guys think Amaury Séchet works for me now.

[06:49:08] Calin Culianu: Ha ha ha. Like he was like sort of, Greg Maxwell was kind of boasting that Amaury Séchet works for him now. During the whole tax coin, during the whole Bitcoin ABC split from Bitcoin Cash. I mean, it could just be him trolling because that's something Greg Maxwell would do.

[06:49:25] Vlad Costea: Playing 4D chess. Yeah.

[06:49:27] Calin Culianu: I mean, I don't know.

[06:49:33] Vlad Costea: I still have some respect for the stuff that they both made, like Amaury and Greg. I'm not sure if I like them too much as people. I wish I would interview Greg Maxwell on my show, but he hasn't done any podcasts, I think since 2014.

[06:49:50] Vlad Costea: There's an old one called Epicenter where he did an interview with Adam Back. I think that was the only podcast appearance that he did. I wish I would pick his brain on the current state of Bitcoin because intellectually, Bitcoin right now is sort of following his thought process about what it should be and how it should function. He was the original guy who said that Bitcoin should sync on a Raspberry Pi.

[06:50:23] Calin Culianu: I mean, my summary of him is that he's a very persuasive arguer. He's a very intelligent person, highly intelligent. He's not a genuine person. Like Gregory Maxwell is not trying to find the truth, right? That's the difference between, like most people are just like, oh, I want to find out what's true. No, Gregory Maxwell wants to be right. And so he's going to just like distort reality. And he's very smart. You can do it very effectively. He can create an aura around himself. But like, you know, rather than explain things, you know, to find truth, like he'll just like distort.

[06:50:56] Calin Culianu: He's a manipulative person, man. Like, I don't know. It would be interesting to see, like, yeah, what do you have to say for yourself? What's your strategy? You know, this is we did everything you said. Look at Bitcoin now. What do you have to say for yourself? I don't know. What would he say? He'd probably declare victory or something. I don't know what he'd say.

[06:51:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, he will say he made everyone rich or something.

[06:51:16] Calin Culianu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he'll find some reason and some argument. And Amaury Séchet as well, like if you ask him to this day, like, what did you do to Bitcoin Cash? He'll be like, well, you know, he'll have like, oh, you need to have a dev fund. And like, you know, we're the best dev team and the people running Bitcoin Cash now, like they can't code for shit. And like, that's why you need funding. And like Bitcoin Cash is being is like negligent chain. And like they don't, you know, he's got all these arguments because he's got to justify the reality he's in right now.

[06:51:39] Calin Culianu: I mean, he's basically charging tax on like the number 154 coin on the blockchain, charging 33 percent tax.

[06:51:48] Calin Culianu: He's got to justify that, right? Like, oh, we're the best dev team. And, you know, Greg Maxwell is going to have some rationalization for everything that's happened because he's never going to be like, oh, I was wrong. You're never going to hear Greg Maxwell ever say I was wrong. Like, you're never going to hear him apologize for anything. Is there any human being on this planet that can't apologize? That's a normal person. These are narcissistic personalities, man. Like both Amaury and Greg similar in that regard.

[06:52:18] Vlad Costea: The moment when I sort of lost respect for Greg Maxwell was when he was engaging with someone from the Grin community, building Mimblewimble. And the way in which he dismissed a technical argument was by posting a price chart like Grin compared to BTC.

[06:52:37] Calin Culianu: He's like, yeah, like resort to tactics like that if he needs to. And if he has if he has a technical argument, he'll like he'll try to confuse you with like a lot of technical mumbo jumbo and sophistry. And if he doesn't, he'll just he'll resort to just making fun of you. Yeah, he's not a genuine person, man. Like, does a genuine person argue like this is trying to find truth? No. You try to stick to the point. You try to concede points. Yeah, no, I mean, he's just a manipulative person.

[06:53:04] Vlad Costea: But I do have to ask you, do you think Bitcoin Cash would be ranked much higher today or have more success if Amaury was still around and he never asked for a tax? It might be.

[06:53:16] Calin Culianu: I mean, you never know.

[06:53:18] Vlad Costea: It might be because it seems like you have a lot of young blood right now with young developers who have no past in the block size wars. Yeah. They just want to build cool stuff.

[06:53:27] Calin Culianu: So I think that Amaury was had tendencies towards being a dictator in the Bitcoin Cash space. He didn't allow room for anybody but his ideas. And like, he's very difficult to work with. And I think his toxicity pushed a lot of smart people away and a lot of good ideas away. I think Bitcoin Cash, technically speaking, would be shittier today if he were still around and still leading. Let's say he hadn't asked for a stupid tax. Right. And let's say he remained. He was like, basically, he positioned himself to be the dictator of Bitcoin Cash.

[06:53:56] Calin Culianu: It was like his coin. It was like his way or the highway. Right. So like, innovation wouldn't have happened in such a structure, like that.

[06:54:03] Vlad Costea: How did he get there? Because you're part of the chat that led to the creation of the fork. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So was it just because he forked or did he also have the most contributions?

[06:54:15] Calin Culianu: No, I mean, he had the client that everybody ran, Bitcoin ABC. I mean, he played the same play as Core, just like on Bitcoin Cash. He had the client, everybody ran so he can run through his changes. People were begrudgingly go along with what he wanted. Some people were treated away and were like, fuck you and left. You know, there was a guy, the guy that ran Bitcoin Classic, Tom Zander, and he stopped supporting Bitcoin Cash. He's like, fuck this. You know, like other people are treated away. Like, he managed to push all the nChain people away. You know, like the whole Bitcoin SV fork didn't need to happen, maybe.

[06:54:49] Vlad Costea: Well, are you sure about that? Because it seems like the plan all along was for Craig Wright to do some stuff like they added some coin confiscation feature.

[06:54:58] Calin Culianu: Yeah, but that was after. So the initial reason, I mean, you know why Bitcoin SV forked off, right? No. The initial contention was that like Amaury Séchet wanted all the transactions to be sorted in the block by their transaction ID, rather than, you know, like in Bitcoin currently, they're in natural order or in topological order.

[06:55:20] Calin Culianu: And for some technical reasons, he wanted them sorted so that you could do this thing called Graphene a little bit faster, which is like a faster compact blocks.

[06:55:30] Calin Culianu: And that was the reason. The nChain people came up with research. They're like, oh, you don't really need to do this right now. Like, why are you pushing this through right now? And Amaury was like, you know, my way or the highway, we're sorting. And the nChain people got really pissed off and they forked off. So, you know, a lot of that didn't need to happen. It was like Amaury's toxic personality pushing people away, you know? And some people were like, oh, fuck you. We're going to, yeah, we'll go. I mean, Steve is back.

[06:55:58] Steve Thurmond: Figured I'd rejoin the fold here for the last bit. You guys are still going strong. Yeah, man. Nothing less from the BTC takeover podcast. You're notorious for the marathon pods, Vlad.

[06:56:12] Calin Culianu: But you're saying this is the longest one he's ever done, I think. No, it's not.

[06:56:17] Steve Thurmond: No, no. He's had like an eight hour one or something.

[06:56:19] Vlad Costea: Ten hour. With one guy. Oh, wow.

[06:56:24] Steve Thurmond: That's insane.

[06:56:26] Vlad Costea: It was moonsettler. I guess you guys know him now. Yeah.

[06:56:29] Calin Culianu: Yeah, he contributed this. What was it? It was like another quantum resistant scheme for Bitcoin Cash. He wrote some stuff there.

[06:56:39] Vlad Costea: Yeah, he was working on covenants on Bitcoin for a long time and he just kept hoping that something's going to happen and he's going to be able to get to work. And it hasn't happened.

[06:56:55] Calin Culianu: Is he one of the disillusioned Bitcoin people that's been waiting for opcodes forever?

[06:56:59] Vlad Costea: But let me tell you about the coolest psyop in Bitcoin. You don't need to change Bitcoin. You need to change yourself. That's a good one.

[06:57:10] Vlad Costea: Like if you think you need to change Bitcoin, you really need to take a break, reflect and realize that it cannot be changed and therefore you should change yourself, like your expectations, your way of living and whatever it is that you are planning to do after making a change to Bitcoin.

[06:57:29] Steve Thurmond: You've just not read enough. You need to read more. You need to study Bitcoin more.

[06:57:34] Vlad Costea: No, no, that's not it. It's lower your time preference. Okay. Like, oh, you want this? Oh, maybe in 10 years. Yeah. I've actually had like expectations. Andrew Poelstra was on my show. He's the chief scientist or head of research at Blockstream. And he was telling me that so it was incredible how he was planning ahead in his speech. He was saying, and he's a very nice guy, like I'm friends with him when we meet, we say hello and stuff like this, but he blew my mind when he said maybe that next year we're going to get OP_CAT and maybe in four to eight years we can also get CTV.

[06:58:13] Vlad Costea: And then in the 2030s we're going to maybe have like a ZK verifier. I was thinking it's how and why, like why this timeframe? Why that specific choice? Is he trying to like central plan what's going to happen to Bitcoin or is he pushing the narrative so that, you know, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes if you put something out there and enough people listen and believe in what you're saying, they're going to make it happen. I don't know. It was just weird how he was able to say this by himself.

[06:58:48] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if it was his personal opinion or it reflects what Blockstream thinks, but none of that happened anyway.

[06:58:54] Steve Thurmond: It sounds like varying levels of cope to me is what it sounds like. You can paint it however you want, but it sounds like a bunch of mental gymnastics to cope is what it sounds like. It sounded like I came in the middle of you guys talking about CTOR.

[06:59:14] Calin Culianu: We're just shooting the shit. We're talking about CTOR and Amaury Séchet, how he pushed that through and then that scared the BSV people away.

[06:59:24] Steve Thurmond: He didn't like me calling out the humiliation ritual that you coined, Calin. He promptly blocked me on Twitter. I have no beef with him. I don't care. I was parroting what you had said about the humiliation ritual, but he didn't take kindly to that, apparently.

[06:59:48] Calin Culianu: Yeah, a completely unnecessary change. Didn't need to hard fork over it.

[06:59:55] Steve Thurmond: I guess if you want to expound on that a little bit, Calin, from what I understand, it could potentially have some payoff and benefit down the road as block size increases.

[07:00:06] Calin Culianu: Yeah, for the graphene, which is a more efficient way of relaying blocks. If the transactions are sorted, then you can leverage some performance out of that.

[07:00:19] Calin Culianu: You don't need to do it now. You don't need to scare away half the community. I don't know. I feel like the CTOR was not like the thing. The thing was getting those BSV people to leave, so you can have more control.

[07:00:31] Steve Thurmond: And they'd love to use that as a cudgel CTOR, because it's not in the white paper, while conveniently ignoring that [unclear: SegWit] is not in the white paper either. It's just hilarious to me.

[07:00:46] Calin Culianu: Yeah, true. I mean, yeah, in my opinion, CTOR is dumb. We should have never done it, but now it's there, so whatever.

[07:00:59] Vlad Costea: It's kind of nice that I started with you guys, and you're back seven hours into the interview.

[07:01:05] Steve Thurmond: I can't stay long. Dinner's on the stove, and I'm probably going to bounce here to head home at some point, but just wanted to pop back in. I did get to listen in between appointments. It looks like you guys had a full house there for a bit. Rosco, Joey, a whole bunch of people. I bet you covered a ton of topics. Anything that you haven't covered, Vlad, that is pressing?

[07:01:32] Vlad Costea: Yes, yes, yes. It just came to my mind. So, there's nobody else joining from this point on? I don't know.

[07:01:40] Steve Thurmond: I mean, they all have the stream link, so if anybody wants to hop on that's watching this in our community, I absolutely welcome it. Let's go for the 11-hour mark if we can.

[07:01:54] Vlad Costea: Jeremy, the BCH podcast guy, he can join too. He's been sending messages from the sidelines like, maybe I'm not invited to his show, but he can join right now. I don't have any beef with him.

[07:02:06] Steve Thurmond: We invited him from the get-go. He had a bunch of work to catch up on. Everybody's been playing catch-up since Bliss last weekend, and I don't know if he's traveling or what, but I think he said he's got work to catch up on, and he's calling it a night on his end. But who knows? We'll see. It would have been great if Jonathan or John, Emergent Reasons, could have popped on to discuss the XO stack a little bit. I was hoping for that, or maybe somebody from Riften Labs with Cauldron and Moria, the other stablecoin. I don't know if you guys covered Moria at all.

[07:02:43] Vlad Costea: Is that the thing just like DAI on Ethereum? Like the algorithmic stablecoin that you can use for taking loans?

[07:02:52] Steve Thurmond: We have two stablecoins in the ecosystem. Moria was the first that launched a little over a year ago, and then Paryon USD, which just launched last weekend officially. As far as the similarity to DAI, again, I don't want to get in over my skis here on the technical side of things, but to my understanding, that is an accurate description there. Correct me if I'm wrong, Calin, but yes, it's completely BCH-backed stablecoin. Did you talk about the attack last weekend, Calin, at all?

[07:03:43] Calin Culianu: Yeah, so we got hacked, or there was a hack attempt. We did the upgrade, it was upgrade day, May 15th. We're all in Ljubljana, you know.

[07:03:55] Calin Culianu: I don't know if you're aware of this, but there was a Bitcoin Core disclosure on May 5th about some bug, a long-standing bug on Bitcoin Core before version 29.

[07:04:03] Vlad Costea: I did see that you were parading a bit, saying that this is not on Bitcoin Cash, and you also blamed Pieter Wuille, I think, for introducing that.

[07:04:13] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I think you were going to talk about that, we never got to talk about it.

[07:04:19] Vlad Costea: Five hours ago, yeah.

[07:04:20] Calin Culianu: Yeah, Pieter Wuille introduced this change, and it was like a dangling pointer kind of thing. He wasn't taking account object lifetimes properly in C++. There have been a number of bugs that he's introduced, this isn't the first.

[07:04:38] Vlad Costea: But there's a web page of him, like PieterWuilleFacts.com, or he's like the Chuck Norris of Bitcoin. He mines Bitcoin with pen and paper, and consensus is reached every time you look into his eyes, you know, stuff like this.

[07:04:52] Calin Culianu: Yeah, he does have some sort of legendary status, which I feel like is perhaps over-attributed.

[07:04:59] Vlad Costea: He has most contributions, I think, that's why, and he's the oldest active contributor.

[07:05:04] Calin Culianu: Yeah, and he's prolific, I mean, and he wrote libsecp, like the elliptic curve library that's used. He wrote that. So, yeah.

[07:05:18] Vlad Costea: But you're saying about the attack.

[07:05:21] Calin Culianu: Yeah, oh, so there was this bug introduced by Pieter Wuille a long time ago that no one had figured out exists as a bug until like a couple of weeks ago, I guess, or actually 2024 is when this was discovered. But coincidentally, Bitcoin Cash had fixed this years ago, just because it was a code smell, that one line of code was a code smell. So like long ago, this has been fixed. But it's a crash bug, like if you send a certain like a poison block to any node, like it would crash it.

[07:05:45] Calin Culianu: So you could theoretically crash, you know, you could crash in exchanges nodes, you could crash mining nodes, you could crash the whole network just by sending this poison block out.

[07:05:57] Calin Culianu: And someone probably, someone tried to do that to the Bitcoin Cash network, they tried to send out this poison block. So it's a plot, it's a block that's crafted in a specific way. I mean, that's invalid, but we'll get the node to crash. And so that happened on Bitcoin Cash, someone mined two blocks within 30 minutes that were poisoned in this way, but like the Bitcoin Cash nodes don't have this bug. So they just, you know, they're just like, oh, this is an invalid block, bye. But someone had actually spent money to mine, you know, like, I guess they spent the equivalent between three to $10,000 to mine these two blocks as an attempt to attack.

[07:06:33] Calin Culianu: But you'd think that before they do that, they would check the code or something like, you know, does Bitcoin Cash have this bug? But I think they just assume like, oh, Bitcoin Cash, haha, it's copy paste, copy paste of Bitcoin Core, you know, like, they just assume that we'd have the bug without checking. But yeah, it was kind of funny because it was like, we just upgraded like our network on May 15th. So and then they did these poison blocks. I guess the person probably wanted to crash the network and like discredit Bitcoin Cash, like, haha, upgrades are, you know, hard fork upgrades are bad.

[07:07:03] Calin Culianu: Like, I don't know what the intention was, but it was like timed for fork day, for May 15th.

[07:07:09] Steve Thurmond: They just ended up with egg on their face to the tune of 10 grand. Yeah.

[07:07:13] Calin Culianu: But then all of a sudden, like all these short positions open, then two days later or a day later, Bitcoin Cash crashed by 30%. So I guess maybe some people decided that they're just going to they're going to fuck with this the old fashioned way, using their money, using money printer. I don't know. We went from like number 11 or whatever. It's a 15 where we are now.

[07:07:31] Vlad Costea: Oh, that's crazy.

[07:07:33] Calin Culianu: Like all these shorts opened right after that. I don't know if the shorts were open because they anticipated to crash the network. But yeah, we lost like 25% of our coin price since then, or 20%. You know, they failed to attack us, to hack us, but I don't know what's going on, dude.

[07:07:48] Vlad Costea: I was looking at the price now.

[07:07:53] Calin Culianu: Yeah, we were like at $4.50 like two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, we were at $4.50, now we're at $3.50. Yeah, it's painful.

[07:08:03] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, it's almost everything is red right now. That's true. We're looking at it.

[07:08:07] Calin Culianu: We're redder than others, but yeah, everything is red.

[07:08:11] Vlad Costea: I hope not red as in communist. But it seems like in the US red means Republican, so it's confusing.

[07:08:25] Steve Thurmond: In this context, it means blood. There's blood in the water.

[07:08:27] Calin Culianu: Yeah, loss. Like if you're in the black, you know, you're okay. If you're in the red, you're losing money.

[07:08:33] Vlad Costea: So the topic that I really wanted to start, and I guess I failed for about seven hours now, but it's very significant in Bitcoin. And it concerns the 2018 inflation bug that was found by a Bitcoin Cash developer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's very significant because that was at the height, maybe the highest point of the conflict between the two chains trying to claim that they're the true Bitcoin. And that was exploitable. It was, I think it was revealed later that the bug was introduced by Matt Corallo, who is trying to do like a 5% optimization on something. Yeah, yeah, on block validation.

[07:09:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And it was a Bitcoin Cash developer. I'm not sure exactly what his name is, to my shame. It seems like you guys don't have as many rockstars, like we have all the big names.

[07:09:29] Calin Culianu: Awemany, I think awemany was his name. Awemany. Yeah.

[07:09:33] Vlad Costea: And that was a significant moment because it proved that maybe developers are operating at a higher level where they cooperate and they disclose to each other what's going on.

[07:09:45] Calin Culianu: That's usually the, that's the understanding, the gentleman's agreement that when it comes to bugs like this, you won't disclose responsibly.

[07:09:51] Vlad Costea: Because someone could exploit that and maybe point fingers at Bitcoin Core and be like, huh, you guys are incompetent, you don't deserve to be number one. But that never happened.

[07:10:02] Calin Culianu: Yeah, maybe it should have, in retrospect.

[07:10:06] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, I was just looking it up. It was awemany, A-W-E-M-A-N-Y. Yeah, awemany, yeah. On September 17. 2018.

[07:10:19] Vlad Costea: I remember exactly where I was when that was happening. David Jensen.

[07:10:23] Steve Thurmond: David Jensen independently discovered it and reported on September 20 of 2018. I guess awemany disclosed it. David Jensen reported it.

[07:10:37] Vlad Costea: And then it was fixed. And we owe that to you guys. Like, I can't imagine what would happen if someone actually used that, exploited it in any way. Like, of course, we would have to hard fork. And that sort of defeats the whole narrative of how Bitcoin currently operates. And especially back then, it was still in the aftermath of the scaling wars.

[07:11:05] Steve Thurmond: That was in the same quarter. We hit our all-time low of $75 per BCH later that year in December. Oh, really?

[07:11:18] Calin Culianu: That was after the BSV people, yeah.

[07:11:21] Steve Thurmond: Correct. Yeah, right after we booted Faketoshi and his Kool-Aid cult, we hit an all-time low in poor timing the very next month, December 15 of 2018. Number 35 in market cap rank and $75 per BCH.

[07:11:40] Steve Thurmond: Now, if you'd have bought then, you'd be sitting pretty now, from an investment perspective.

[07:11:46] Vlad Costea: Like an easy 10x right now.

[07:11:49] Calin Culianu: I think another low was COVID, right, during the pandemic. At some point, I remember we're at $70 per BCH again.

[07:11:56] Steve Thurmond: I don't think it got that low. It got really close to $100. I know that. But I don't think it would ever get down to $75.

[07:12:07] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I don't know. Honestly, probably if there was another inflation bug like that, I probably would disclose it responsibly. But I don't know, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe if I found another one, I should just fix it on Bitcoin Cash. I don't know. We've been Mr. Nice Guy for so many times. What did it get us? We're still discredited. We're still attacked. We still are getting hack attacks on our network. We still get people shorting us. I don't know, man. I don't know.

[07:12:37] Vlad Costea: I also remember I was at a table at one point with a developer from Dogecoin and he was pissed off at Bitcoin Core for disclosing some of the issues too late.

[07:12:51] Calin Culianu: Yeah, they'll sit on stuff for a long time because with Bitcoin Core, you have a heterogeneous set of nodes. People don't necessarily update right away. You'll have version 25 running at the same time as version 30. So Bitcoin Core tends to wait until a majority of the nodes on the network have upgraded when they fix the bug. So yeah, they wait a long time as a result. Yeah, I get that. That's reasonable. I don't blame them for that.

[07:13:18] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it makes sense now.

[07:13:20] Calin Culianu: But for instance, they don't have a disclosure agreement with us, with Bitcoin Cash Node. If they find a bug, they're not going to announce. We might have the same bug. They're not going to tell us. We get to find out as everyone else does when there's a bug. Recently, on May 5th, they released an announcement that they had that crash bug. They didn't tell us about it. Maybe you could argue they looked at our code and saw we don't have the bug. But should we disclose to them when they don't have a relationship?

[07:13:45] Calin Culianu: They don't have a reciprocal agreement with us. We've never once gotten a bug report from them. We have to find out like everybody else. That's not cool. In the future, if I find a bug in Bitcoin Core, should I tell them? They wouldn't tell me if they found a bug in Bitcoin Cash. Is that cool? What should I do? What would you do in my shoes?

[07:14:11] Vlad Costea: Well, I've heard some people have this argument that if BTC goes down, the whole industry collapses. Maybe it should collapse.

[07:14:19] Calin Culianu: You know, recessions are good things, right?

[07:14:26] Vlad Costea: I guess finally, Peter Todd would be vindicated if there's an inflation bug. He's going to be like, oh, I told you guys all along, like just 2% a year.

[07:14:35] Calin Culianu: Yeah, 21 million is a meme. I told you.

[07:14:39] Vlad Costea: You'd get vindicated.

[07:14:40] Steve Thurmond: There's no doubt that BTC crashing would infect the entire market, crypto market specifically. But I think you would see people scatter to other chains pretty quickly, as many have stated on this pod thus far. The genie's out of the bottle. There's no putting it back in. But could the king of crypto, BTC recover from a blow like that? I'd say it would be really hard because they're showing no upward mobility as is and haven't for over a decade at this point. So it would almost be the nail in the coffin, I would think.

[07:15:25] Calin Culianu: Wouldn't you love to see Michael Saylor have his bags wiped? He's got 850,000 BTC. He's got $60 billion. That's one Ukraine war payment. Wouldn't you like to see him wiped out?

[07:15:36] Steve Thurmond: For the second time in 20 years, let him get completely wiped out.

[07:15:41] Calin Culianu: Wasn't he with Enron or something? Wasn't there another thing he was involved in?

[07:15:50] Steve Thurmond: It was really big in the dotcom boom. He got cleaned out in the early 2000s.

[07:15:57] Vlad Costea: There's a newspaper headline with him, like his face on the front page that he lost. Let me look that up. Michael Saylor lost $6 billion in a day.

[07:16:12] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, most of one day.

[07:16:15] Vlad Costea: That's insane. But now he can lose $60 billion in a day. Yeah, it's like 10x that.

[07:16:26] Calin Culianu: I mean, I don't want to see Bitcoin crash because that would be bad for everybody. But at the same token, maybe that would be the kind of reality check moment where people start to realize. I don't know. You've got to wonder though. There's money printer people heavily in Bitcoin, like Howard Lutnick and all these other people you don't know. Maybe they'll just bring out the money printer and you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe they won't let it crash.

[07:16:54] Steve Thurmond: That's essentially what they're doing with Tether now, isn't it?

[07:16:57] Calin Culianu: Yeah, and you can do so much manipulation with Tether. You can manipulate markets with it. It's like fiat-ception. You have fiat, which is USD, and then you have Tether. It's supposed to be backed by USD, but it's probably not. USD was once supposedly backed by gold, but it isn't anymore. It's like, how many levels of China doll, like in direction? It's like insane, you know? You believe Tether is backed one-to-one by dollars? I don't. Do you, Vlad? Maybe you do. I don't know.

[07:17:22] Vlad Costea: But they don't even claim that anymore.

[07:17:24] Calin Culianu: Yeah, they don't bother claiming it.

[07:17:27] Vlad Costea: So the smart play that they did, which you can also argue that is their infiltration in the system, is that they bought a lot of treasury bonds. Like, they're in bed with the US government. I think they might be one of the largest private holders of US treasury bonds.

[07:17:45] Calin Culianu: Yeah, so in a way, like, they're a big player. So, like, the government's going to look the other way.

[07:17:51] Steve Thurmond: And yet they've still never had an official third-party audit.

[07:17:55] Vlad Costea: I think they did. Recently. Like, very recently. Like, a few months ago. Tether full audit. I remember reading about it. Okay, so in March of this year, Tether signed a big four-firm contract to complete the first full audit. So, they hired the firm. I don't know when the report is going to get published.

[07:18:22] Calin Culianu: You know, we have that happen, like, ten years ago or five years ago, where they hired a firm and then nothing ever happened. I feel like you do this periodically. You hire a firm and then there's no actual audit. I remember they did this in, like, 2018 too.

[07:18:35] Vlad Costea: It's above my pay grade, but I do remember that Tether FUD in 2018. It was off the charts. In 2019 also, I remember when it de-pegged and it was, like, 80 cents.

[07:18:46] Steve Thurmond: Mike Benz, I don't know if you've watched any of his stuff. He's gone pretty deep down that rabbit hole with Tether.

[07:18:55] Calin Culianu: I like Mike Benz. I feel like he's really thorough. What has he said? Is it all [unclear: smoke and mirrors]?

[07:19:00] Steve Thurmond: Well, I was at the conference in Nashville in 24, and it was Mike Benz and somebody else on stage, and they were going back and forth. Kallisti was in the audience with me as well, a few other guys, and I can't remember who he was talking to, but it started to get heated. And he point blank asked, you know, what if Tether implodes, what happens to BTC? And the guy got completely deflected. I forget who it was. It was Booth? Was it Booth? Jeff Booth?

[07:19:42] Steve Thurmond: It may have been. Don't quote me on that. I forget. It was two of them on stage. I think it might have been Booth, but it really got awkward for a few minutes, and then suddenly they just ran out of time, and they couldn't continue the conversation. I thought it was kind of funny, but he was starting to hold his feet to the fire about the connection, the strong connection to Tether, and the price of BTC at the time, which was, at that point, nearing record highs.

[07:20:14] Steve Thurmond: But... Yeah. Interesting. You can't tell me there's not a very strong correlation there with the equivalent of the Fed. You've got a crypto money printer with Tether. You can't tell me it's not being used and manipulated in nefarious ways. And yeah, they can buy all the Treasury bonds they want to put lipstick on that pig, but that's all it is at the end of the day.

[07:20:39] Vlad Costea: You know, it's very different between communities how different the opinions on Tether are. Because in BTC, like, you get Adam Back defending it, saying, Tether is fine. It's good. But coincidentally, the Tether company gave a lot of money to Blockstream a few years ago. I think they bailed them out at some point.

[07:21:02] Steve Thurmond: All of the money every time, especially coming from a Lolita Express, Andy Back, plane rider, I mean, break.

[07:21:10] Calin Culianu: So is that is that definitely Adam Back, the Andy Back thing from Epstein files? I mean, probably right. Because it's in context. Yeah, that's gotta be him.

[07:21:25] Vlad Costea: What's funny is that Epstein was asking, like, specifically, if he's coming, like, Oh, I want to hang out with that guy. Right. But Saylor is also in the Epstein files, in a way that's curious, because Epstein is like, he's this lunatic, I want to hang out with him. I don't like him. I'm not sure if it's good to be not liked by Epstein or it's bad. Because it can go both ways like

[07:21:53] Calin Culianu: So Saylor was quoted in the Epstein files was quoted as saying, I don't want to hang out with Epstein is the lunatic. Is that?

[07:21:58] Vlad Costea: No, no, no. Epstein said this about Saylor. Oh, about Saylor?

[07:22:03] Calin Culianu: He said he's very weird. And he thinks Saylor is too much of a lunatic. That's pretty funny.

[07:22:10] Steve Thurmond: And then Andreessen, I guess, was was contacted shortly after in that thread of emails. And I guess he just kind of ignored it or said, I'm not available. Yeah.

[07:22:23] Vlad Costea: No, but the main island guy was Austin Hill, who was the CEO of Blockstream at the time when they were fundraising. And he's the one who sent Epstein a message like, Oh, I had a really good time, whatever. Thank you for inviting me. In the case of Adam Back, he was also there. He was referred to as Andy Back a couple of times. I'm not sure why. Yeah. But also Epstein's emailing style was like he was on a blackberry sitting on a beach or something. And he didn't care too much about punctuation or proper grammar. He made a lot of typos.

[07:23:08] Steve Thurmond: Aaron. Aaron Day has done a really good job of going down that rabbit hole with Joi Ito and Epstein and the ties and connections during that time. There's a specific part that he did a while back. I can't remember whose pod it was on, but excellent. A pretty deep dive down that zone because

[07:23:33] Vlad Costea: He does have his own show.

[07:23:37] Steve Thurmond: Now he was a guest on another show. I know he's got his own. He's he's prolific content creator. But it was this was somebody else's show. I'll find the link and send it to you.

[07:23:48] Calin Culianu: So to me, like the whole Epstein revelations just sort of further adds to my. It's like another data point to my hypothesis that Bitcoin has been captured long ago by banking interests. To me, it just makes it really clear. Like, yeah, Bitcoin became of concern to like. I mean, I think Epstein was like a representative of the Rothschild family. I don't even think he worked. I think he worked for the boss. He worked for the CIA's boss, which is the Rothschilds. He worked for the boss of the Mossad.

[07:24:16] Calin Culianu: Right. So, you know, like Bitcoin became visible, became of interest. And then like, OK, how do we work to like capture this thing? How do we put it on the payroll? Like once you put something on the payroll, like you have a lot of influence over it already. You don't have to do much anymore. So Epstein was involved in that, making sure that happened. You know, it's pretty clear to me. And then like once once the bankers get the ball rolling, you're on their payroll. Like, you know, people tend to align their mentality with whoever's paying their paychecks or whoever's giving the money. It's just human nature.

[07:24:44] Steve Thurmond: Follow the money every time.

[07:24:46] Calin Culianu: You take on the values of the people giving you money, man, especially if they give you a lot of money, especially if they give you know, 70 million dollars in seed one, round one funding and then 400 million dollars later. And, you know, to me, it's pretty clear, man, the bankers figured out that we've got to capture this thing. And they did. And it's even in the Epstein files. It's like this is how things work sometimes.

[07:25:07] Steve Thurmond: Show me who controls the nation's money supply and I'll tell you who controls the nation.

[07:25:12] Calin Culianu: Yeah, exactly. Just to think they did it relatively cheaply, right? Like 70 million dollars of initial seed one funding and they captured Bitcoin. Probably they had to throw some more money into the market to pump up the price. So we don't know how much they threw in. But they didn't have to kill anybody, didn't have to get the military involved, didn't have to pass any laws. I feel like they captured Bitcoin relatively on the cheap, you know, like it was like an easy operation. Like, I don't know, like, you know, because like they must be patting themselves on the back. Well, that was easy. You know what I mean?

[07:25:48] Vlad Costea: But even before Blockstream, so you're referring to the seed rounds in which Blockstream was involved, but there is an email from Epstein. I think Joi Ito messaged him and said, hey, the Bitcoin Foundation is about to shut down. And this is our opportunity to step in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get some developers. So before Blockstream, they actually got Gavin and Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields. And I think Jeremy Rubin was there as a student at MIT. So all of them basically received grants from MIT to keep working on Bitcoin development.

[07:26:27] Vlad Costea: Something that was happening in parallel was Project Hamilton, which is the CBDC pilot by MIT. And that one is actually... The Joi Ito connection.

[07:26:38] Steve Thurmond: That's a strong Joi Ito connection because he spearheaded that, to my knowledge.

[07:26:43] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So Project Hamilton is actually using Bitcoin technology. If you read the white paper, you're going to see a lot of Bitcoin related references. They're even using Schnorr signatures, which was part of the research that was meant to come to Bitcoin. I don't know how we didn't even get proper Schnorr.

[07:27:01] Calin Culianu: Wait, you don't have proper Schnorr yet? I thought you did.

[07:27:03] Vlad Costea: No, we don't. We got Taproot, which is like half-assed Schnorr. We're supposed to get it in two parts. And the second part was called cross-input signature aggregation. Everyone forgot about that like five, six years ago. We got Taproot and then, okay, we're fine.

[07:27:21] Steve Thurmond: I just sent the link in Telegram. It was an interview with Steve Patterson, Aaron Day, and Bret Weinstein on the DarkHorse pod.

[07:27:32] Calin Culianu: Oh, I think I saw that was an excellent episode. I saw that on the DarkHorse. I was driving through Texas. I listened to the whole thing on my drive. It was awesome. It's a really good episode.

[07:27:40] Vlad Costea: I feel like I should interview Steve Patterson because he does need to update his book, which many people are not aware, but he co-wrote Hijacking Bitcoin. Maybe Roger provided some ideas and Steve did some of the writing or editing. I think now that the Epstein revelations are out and we only have a small part of the emails. We're not even sure what else is out there, what we're going to discover. Yeah, yeah. But I think there's enough material to add at least one more chapter to put everything in context.

[07:28:19] Calin Culianu: Yeah, totally. Totally. Like, oh, hey, this is more pointing to our hypothesis that there was a capture going on, a hijack. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I don't know, like as soon as Hijacking Bitcoin came out, like the US IRS or whatever, like fucking wanted to destroy Roger Ver. So maybe it'd be wiser if Steve Patterson and Roger Ver just stayed quiet for a while. I don't know. Like, you know about that, right? Like he was like under house arrest for like a year and a half.

[07:28:47] Vlad Costea: That's how I actually met him.

[07:28:49] Calin Culianu: Yeah, because you had him on your show, I guess, like during that period probably or after.

[07:28:53] Vlad Costea: No, I had him on my show in April and I think he got arrested in May.

[07:28:57] Calin Culianu: Okay, so you had him on the show before. Yeah, he got arrested in May 2024.

[07:29:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and then I went to a conference in Majorca, which I was attending since 2021 or 2021. That's when I went for the first time. And I went there and he was also on the island. And at the time I was under a lot of scrutiny from the high priests of the Church of Bitcoin. They were telling me that I got paid by Roger and I even told him, you know, how can I even prove that I didn't get paid? And he was like, oh, if you need me to put out a tweet and say I didn't pay you, maybe I can help.

[07:29:32] Vlad Costea: And I was like, no, please. That only makes it worse. Makes people think more about it. And I don't want that kind of attention. I just want to keep going with my podcast. I don't want to get more drama. And I met him for the first time in person and we had lunch one time and we were talking. And I realized that he was very humble from the fact that at one point he decided that my glass needed a refill and he just refilled my glass.

[07:30:03] Vlad Costea: And I was looking at him thinking, I'm having this potentially multibillion dollar guy serving me with water right now. And then he offered to drive me to the airport. I was thinking nobody will ever believe me if I told him that Roger drove me to the airport.

[07:30:21] Calin Culianu: Did you end up accepting his offer, his invitation? Yeah.

[07:30:25] Vlad Costea: I mean, why not? He was there. He seemed to be happy to have a road trip because his life was kind of monotonous at that point. He was just going every morning or something to the police to report that he's still there. And then I guess he had calls or whatever, business meetings. But he felt, I guess he was very lonely. He spent like two years there.

[07:30:50] Calin Culianu: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Sounds about right.

[07:30:52] Steve Thurmond: I think it was under a year. I want to say maybe a little over a year. I forget the exact amount. Yeah. I talked to Mark Edge. In fact, I got a 30-minute interview with Mark Edge in Ljubljana last weekend. He was good friends with Roger. In fact, Mark is who told Roger via Free Talk Live about Bitcoin back in, I guess, it was early 2010.

[07:31:18] Calin Culianu: When Gavin Andresen got on the show, right? Yeah, correct.

[07:31:25] Steve Thurmond: He was talking about Roger because he's spoken with him since all of this shitstorm has kind of calmed down now. And he doesn't even know where you are. He's like, I don't want to know where you are because I can have plausible deniability. He's like, I can say he's somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere with 90% accuracy. But he didn't even know where he was, but he has spoken with him. And it's funny because he has a three-year gag order right now from all of this fiasco with the IRS.

[07:31:54] Steve Thurmond: And so, he can't even talk about what's happened for another three years. In fact, the fact that he even mentioned the gag order, the attorney tried to issue another gag order on top of the gag order, he said. So, he can't even talk about the gag order. It's pretty absurd. But I've got about a 30-minute interview I'll be posting here hopefully this week with Mark, who had some insider baseball on everything and how it went down.

[07:32:23] Calin Culianu: Yeah, I mean, it's like lawfare, a clear example of just lawfare. It's like abuse.

[07:32:28] Vlad Costea: What's funny is that Trump ran on this campaign that he's going to put an end to the lawfare, but it seems like he only helped those who. So, Roger was very ideological and he was very much living and breathing what he was preaching. Other guys, like, I don't want to shit on the CEO of Binance, but he sort of got away by paying for it. And there were a bunch of other guys in this situation too, like the BitMEX guys and whatever, they got full presidential pardons.

[07:33:04] Vlad Costea: And it seemed like there was a window of opportunity for anyone who could afford it to get a presidential pardon from Trump, at least last year. This year it seems like he's busy fighting wars.

[07:33:17] Calin Culianu: Fighting off the deep state. Yeah. So there was a thing on Twitter, like Elon Musk saw that everyone was making noise about Roger Ver. And then Elon Musk was like, hey, I'll ask. At the time, Elon Musk was in DOGE. He was at the White House every day. He was like, hey, I'll ask the president about it. And then, do you guys remember seeing this? And then Elon Musk came back and was like, oh, this guy renounces citizenship. So membership has its privileges. It's like, what the fuck, dude?

[07:33:42] Calin Culianu: He renounced it because he knew you guys would do this to him. And he did it anyway.

[07:33:46] Steve Thurmond: He's no longer a member. Why are you extorting him for 50 million?

[07:33:50] Calin Culianu: You fucking retards. And when he actually paid you like what he thought he owed. And then usually if there's a disagreement, you can just give him an opportunity to pay again. Like the whole thing is insane.

[07:34:00] Steve Thurmond: And it clearly had its intent of having a chilling effect. Using him as an example. It can't be pure coincidence that one month before the end of the statute of limitations on his exit tax and three weeks after his book comes out, they nab him in Majorca. You can't tell me that's just pure coincidence.

[07:34:24] Calin Culianu: So the book came out and there was a lot of narrative management that people from Blockstream and others were doing. And I feel like someone just like Adam Back made a phone call. Like, hey, this guy, what can you do? I don't know. Like, I just I think that's really what went down. I think literally Adam Back made a phone call.

[07:34:38] Vlad Costea: But to be honest, like he was actively tagging Adam Back on Twitter saying, I'm going to debate you about the contents of my book and we can donate a million dollars to charity or something. So he put a stake to this conversation. And I was also trying at the time to get him to debate Saylor, which I think would be much more interesting than having the debate with Adam Back.

[07:35:04] Calin Culianu: It would be much more interesting.

[07:35:05] Vlad Costea: Because in a parallel universe, Roger could be the Michael Saylor of Bitcoin, basically. I'm pretty sure that he owned much more Bitcoin than Saylor will ever touch.

[07:35:17] Calin Culianu: At one point, probably. Yeah. He mined, you know, early on. Yeah.

[07:35:22] Vlad Costea: Also in that parallel universe, maybe that the split never happened and maybe that the community maintained a degree of sanity and just found a way to compromise without splitting.

[07:35:34] Calin Culianu: In that parallel universe, the Rothschild family doesn't exist as the representative Jeffrey Epstein. But yeah. And then and then maybe even Bitcoin wouldn't need to exist because they wouldn't bail out the banks in 2008. So I don't know. It's a very parallel universe. A lot of things would be different. I mean, because one of the things is like Satoshi was upset about the bailout. Like, you know, that's in the Genesis block. That's one of the things. Right. Like if the bailout in 2008 hadn't happened, maybe like Satoshi wouldn't have been motivated enough to actually finish and do Bitcoin. Like, who knows?

[07:36:12] Vlad Costea: And then I think in twenty three in January, we got Biden bailing out Silicon Valley Bank, which was one of the banks that was holding a lot of Bitcoin or serving customers that deal with Bitcoin. So in a way, there was a bailout for Bitcoin.

[07:36:29] Calin Culianu: Yay. Come full circle.

[07:36:34] Vlad Costea: But nobody called it that because. So there is this approach in the cult where you're not supposed to say something that's not bullish. That's the term for it. You got to find the bullish angle.

[07:36:48] Calin Culianu: Is the narrative like you really want just more people to buy Bitcoin? Do people think of adoption? I've heard Bitcoiners say adoption and they just mean people buying Bitcoin and holding it. Is that true?

[07:36:58] Vlad Costea: No, that's that's only for the El Salvador people. It's only for Africa. It's for the places where you convert to signal data. Adoption is happening. It's not for Europe. It's not for the US. I think Jack Dorsey did something with Square where he integrated Bitcoin into terminals where you can make payments. I think. Haven't tried it. I'm not in the US.

[07:37:23] Calin Culianu: Yeah. I haven't used Square. I'm in the US.

[07:37:26] Vlad Costea: But I do remember. So this year at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, that's where I meet. I met Stephen and Kallisti and a bunch of other guys. OK, awesome. There were a bunch of booths there where you could claim, for example, they would say, we're going to give you 50 dollars of Bitcoin. That would be nice. What do I have to do? Well, you have to KYC to our app and sign up with an account. And this was Square also. And then they said, well, you need to have a US bank account.

[07:37:53] Vlad Costea: And I was like, why? Well, that's a requirement. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm I'm out. Yeah, I can't participate. Even if I wanted, I can't.

[07:38:03] Calin Culianu: And then you saw Steve giving out Cash Stamps. You know, you know.

[07:38:07] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I met him the same day. Yeah.

[07:38:08] Steve Thurmond: I bought his beautiful collection of takeover podcast guests. Really cool. I want to do something similar in our ecosystem. I love collectibles. I think there's definitely a market for it. Tangibles and collectibles. So the idea is to kind of turn these Cash Stamps into more collectible items. And now we can load not only BCH on these wallets, we can load NFTs and CashTokens on these paper wallets as well. We should be able to do that on our cash stamp creation tool soon. That'd be really cool.

[07:38:45] Calin Culianu: I think that's that's a real opportunity. You can just sell merchandise that way. That's like collectible nice objects that represent, you know, maybe they have a private key inside of them or they're represented by an NFT somewhere or I don't know.

[07:38:53] Steve Thurmond: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I've always liked collectibles. So if nothing else.

[07:38:58] Calin Culianu: Like the original BTC Casascius coins, you know.

[07:39:05] Steve Thurmond: I think people like that. And there's a market outside of crypto altogether, just for collectibles in general. I mean, you saw half of the tables there in Vegas were Pokemon and Magic the Gathering tables, you know, so there's definitely a market market for that. I'm curious, Vlad, though, you've correct me if I'm wrong, you've globetrotted quite a bit. What has been your experience in actually trying to spend and replace BTC on the national stage?

[07:39:37] Vlad Costea: Well, I can tell you that during the Bitcoin conference last month, I was actually going to Chipotle spending Zcash. Oh, that's awesome.

[07:39:48] Steve Thurmond: Directly at Chipotle.

[07:39:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, they have this integration with Flexa, which is I'm not even sure if it's a payments processor or something more, but it is like an institution that's handling payments. And basically, all you have to do is register with an email. And I used so I have this feature on my iPhone, which is called hide my email. So it generates a new email address for every service that I use.

[07:40:16] Vlad Costea: So I basically presented a redirect dummy for my Flexa account. And then I paid directly with shielded Zcash to Flexa. They do zero-conf. So that's sort of convenient. I got something which resembles a gift card. And it felt much more cypherpunk than what the rest of the guys were doing, just tapping their cards.

[07:40:40] Calin Culianu: Oh yeah, I see Flexa supports a whole bunch of cryptos. That's pretty cool. I'm looking at it now.

[07:40:44] Steve Thurmond: But just to be clear, you're purchasing a gift card in Zcash and then spending that gift card, correct?

[07:40:50] Vlad Costea: I think that's how it works.

[07:40:52] Steve Thurmond: Okay. It seems to be the standard right now. I know Dash has had a lot of activity this last year, and I think we need to do the same in our wallets. They have the ability to buy gift cards right in their wallet, which is really convenient. So when you're at a store, you spend your Dash, you get your gift card, you scan the card, and you're going. It's not purely peer-to-peer, obviously, because you've got a proxy there in the middle, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

[07:41:20] Steve Thurmond: And you've got that ability to spend your crypto. I hope to see that in our ecosystem with the various wallets that we have as well. Moca, we had a gentleman at Bliss last weekend with the Moca app, who's spearheading point-of-sale systems and payment systems for all crypto, so merchants don't have to pick and choose. They essentially will accept all crypto. There's an exchange through their AnyWallet platform, where basically you choose what you want to spend, and it uses the merchant's QR code. And they receive whatever you are wanting to spend, and they have the ability to immediately swap it for a stablecoin of their choice if they don't want to be exposed to price volatility.

[07:42:09] Steve Thurmond: Or they can immediately exit to a gift card, a Visa card or a Mastercard, so they can spend it immediately as well. Again, a bit of a proxy situation there, but I think it's a real big step in the right direction, where all of us in this broader ecosystem can spend the coin of our choice. And the merchant can accept that coin while still maintaining a stablecoin and avoiding volatility if they want to. Of course, they can keep it native if they'd like as well. But Moca is doing a really good job.

[07:42:44] Steve Thurmond: They'd be an excellent, if I could suggest, an excellent podcast guest for you. The guys at Moca are doing big things. They're out of Guadalajara, Mexico. Really solid group there. And their vision is absolutely aligned. They were at Bliss because they prefer BCH in their process because of SPV, because they have that instant payment verification there, which is essential in any kind of point-of-sale system. So, if I could throw a nod their way for a podcast guest, I think that'd be a good one for you.

[07:43:22] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Also, something very...

[07:43:24] Steve Thurmond: We were in... I'm sorry. I was just going to say we were in Bliss two years ago, and we were able to spend in 2024. Crypto was still very prominent in that area. In fact, my first trip there to Bliss was in 2024, and I did the entire trip, start to finish, no cutting corners, spending nothing but BCH. And it was really neat to actually spend there at merchants using the GoCrypto point-of-sale systems. Was that prolific across Europe, or was that just kind of in pockets and areas? I hadn't seen it anywhere.

[07:43:59] Calin Culianu: I'd spent some time in Europe. I'd only seen it there. It was also in the Czech Republic.

[07:44:05] Vlad Costea: There was something called [unclear: Querco], a payment service where you could pay at restaurants. And the waiters had no idea that you were paying in Bitcoin or whatever. So, it was very cool from this point of view. There were a lot of companies and shops accepting Bitcoin. There were a few in Romania. So, I bought the laptop that I used for this live stream with Bitcoin, this microphone. A lot of the gears that I used for my podcast were bought directly with Bitcoin, my phone. Good, yeah. It's awesome.

[07:44:36] Vlad Costea: But this was before MiCA, which is this regulation that came into effect last year. And companies have to apply for a license if they want to accept coins. And the license is like 10,000 euro or whatever, and they need to pay lawyers fees. And it's a very sophisticated process. And most companies are like, screw this, I'm not going to waste my time with this bureaucracy, which is also very expensive. It's probably cheaper to just drop Bitcoin as a mean of payment.

[07:45:11] Calin Culianu: Which is what happened with the GoCrypto. I mean, they're killing it by regulation in Europe, yeah.

[07:45:16] Vlad Costea: They are. So, it's very sad to see these places go. It was also sad to see there was Paralelní Polis in Prague, which was like a shrine of Bitcoin and cypherpunk culture. You could go there and pay for everything with Bitcoin, and they would brag about not accepting credit cards. Over the last year, they started accepting credit cards because they realized that they want more normies to come and spend. And they shut down this year. They say it's because the landlord decided to kick them out. And it's very weird because they've been there since 2013 or 14.

[07:45:54] Vlad Costea: And they have been operating there, and the landlord was aware of what's happening there. So, it's not like it was a novelty that they're accepting crypto. But the landlord told them that he doesn't want anything related to crypto in the building anymore. So, they had to pack up and leave. It's very sad because it was the first cafe that accepted a Bitcoin payment back in 2013. And it was also a great place where you could hang out with people who were very like-minded. So, the Czech Republic during communism had this idea of parallel societies, of places where you could get together and imagine what life would be like without communism.

[07:46:36] Vlad Costea: And it was not legal, but it was tolerated by the regime. I think Czechoslovakia actually had one of the lightest forms of communism. Like, it wasn't as bad as Romania or the USSR.

[07:46:51] Calin Culianu: In Romania, in certain periods, you wouldn't dare discuss what it would be like without – because that just shows that you're – yeah, you get the original.

[07:47:00] Vlad Costea: In the beginning, they would send you to jail in Romania for doing that, like in the 50s. Or they'd ruin your life otherwise. But then they realized that they can actually use you for forced labor. So, a lot of bridges and salt mines and grand projects were built with slave labor, basically.

[07:47:17] Steve Thurmond: You're in Romania, right Vlad? Yeah. And you've got ties there, don't you, Calin?

[07:47:23] Calin Culianu: Yeah, man. My mom was Romanian, and I'm scarred by communism to this day. Like, that leaves its fingerprints on your soul, man.

[07:47:29] Vlad Costea: He has a very famous uncle.

[07:47:32] Calin Culianu: Yeah, one of my uncles is somewhat renowned. He's an academic. He ended up going to the University of Chicago from Romania.

[07:47:38] Vlad Costea: And he was shot in the toilet.

[07:47:40] Calin Culianu: He was assassinated there, possibly by the Romanian Security Service. Oh my god, wow. They shot him with a low-caliber weapon right behind the ear, which is the classic execution tactic of the Romanian secret police.

[07:47:52] Calin Culianu: They like found him in Chicago and killed him because he was like a dissident. But we don't know. Nobody knows who killed him.

[07:48:00] Vlad Costea: He had like [unclear: radio fights] with the Romanian president, criticizing him and whatever. So, it's likely what happened. But his uncle was the disciple of Mircea Eliade, who is like possibly the biggest researcher that compared religions.

[07:48:16] Calin Culianu: Yeah, like religious studies. A lot of people in the U.S. Here, people that are in the religious studies world know who Mircea Eliade is. And they even heard of Culianu, but people outside of that haven't heard of him. So, you can't expect Steve to know about it unless he's in the humanities studying literature. It's not a well-known thing who Mircea Eliade is. In Romania, of course, that's a well-known thing.

[07:48:37] Vlad Costea: I have some of your uncle's books in the living room. I wish I would get up. I wish I was smarter and prepare them for this interview. But my dad was a big fan.

[07:48:49] Calin Culianu: I've never met him. I never met him. He died when I was a child. I think it was like 11 or 12 when he died.

[07:49:00] Calin Culianu: I'm into religion a little bit, but I'm not into that on that level. I'm a computer programmer.

[07:49:09] Vlad Costea: I'm into religion. It's called Bitcoin.

[07:49:13] Calin Culianu: Yeah, there are aspects of that in the crypto world. It's interesting. Actually, I've got to get dinner soon, too. Are you saying you've got to go, Steve?

[07:49:21] Steve Thurmond: Yeah, I was about to call. I was just about to bounce here. I don't know if anybody else will hop on. The link is out there in at least our community threads. So, if somebody hops on, feel free to carry on.

[07:49:34] Vlad Costea: I just want to say that we're ten minutes away from breaking the eight-hour mark. Oh, man.

[07:49:39] Steve Thurmond: We've got to keep going, man. We've got to at least ten minutes.

[07:49:43] Calin Culianu: I do have to eat dinner. I'm starving, man. Ten minutes.

[07:49:46] Steve Thurmond: I'll stay on with you, Vlad. If you've got to go, Calin, I'll stay on with you.

[07:49:50] Vlad Costea: Ten minutes, that's it.

[07:49:51] Steve Thurmond: We've got to at least break the record. It's not a record.

[07:49:54] Calin Culianu: Let me just heat up my leftovers and come back.

[07:49:57] Vlad Costea: It's the record for this season, but not the all-time record. The record's 11 hours?

[07:50:02] Steve Thurmond: Oh, my God. That's insane. What is somebody sitting right now, I was going to say, sitting in a diaper talking all day? That's pretty vile.

[07:50:09] Vlad Costea: I'm not in a diaper. I took advantage of my cat wanting to go out to use the toilet. I came back. Oh, there's someone else. Yeah, someone else is there.

[07:50:19] Steve Thurmond: Hey, Joey. Joey, I was going to say...

[07:50:23] Joey: I'm here. I'm here to break through whatever barrier.

[07:50:28] Steve Thurmond: I'll get a snack.

[07:50:29] Calin Culianu: I'll be back.

[07:50:30] Joey: Is this like a record?

[07:50:32] Steve Thurmond: Are we doing a record?

[07:50:34] Vlad Costea: For this year, yes.

[07:50:37] Steve Thurmond: The record is 10 hours, so we still have two more hours to go if we're going to break a record. I will not be around for it, but if you want to stick around, that would be awesome. I'm hoping that at some point we go long enough here that somebody from Riften Labs or General Protocols can hop on for a bit. They've been traveling all day, but we've been on long enough that we might be able to catch them here end of the day.

[07:51:00] Joey: What time zone are they? I guess technically they could, in theory.

[07:51:09] Steve Thurmond: I don't know. Jonathan and John are both traveling. I don't know if they're going to be able to hop on or not, but it would be cool if we could get Dagur and Halvor on here. That would be awesome.

[07:51:20] Steve Thurmond: I'm going to go to dinner, but I just wanted to plug a few things. I don't know if you're aware of that, but are you a sports guy at all? Do you watch any kind of motorsports or any sports at all?

[07:51:43] Vlad Costea: I do like cars, but I find it boring to watch that on TV.

[07:51:49] Steve Thurmond: We've got a sponsored rider. Are you familiar with the Isle of Man TT motorcycle race? No. It's the most dangerous motorcycle race in the world. There's been 270 deaths in this race since 1907. On average, 2.5 riders die every year. It's the pinnacle of all racing, at least known to man. We've got a sponsored rider in there. He's a fan favorite and a top contender. This guy has won it five times and he's had 45 podiums going for his 36th podium coming up here. It's this coming Sunday, the 31st of May.

[07:52:36] Steve Thurmond: He's riding six different races, but the main event is the superbike race. These guys average 136 miles an hour around a rural road course. It's not even a track. It's just country roads with deformities and road disfigurations.

[07:53:02] Steve Thurmond: It's completely mental. But we have a BCH sponsored rider there this year. A few of us got together from the community and sponsored Dean Harrison, which is a top three contender and arguably the fan favorite this year. The reason I mention this is we have prediction markets on Bitcoin Cash under BCH Guru. If you go to app.bch.guru, you can actually bet yes or no on whether Dean Harrison will podium, so podium being first, second, or third place in Sunday's race. If anybody's a betting individual out there, check it out.

[07:53:48] Steve Thurmond: Even if you're not a sports fan, if your palms aren't sweating watching these guys go literally 200 miles an hour on country roads, it's insanity, absolute insanity. Sounds nuts. It is. It's completely nuts, but these guys make it their life, if you will. They study this mountain course their entire life. It's a different kind of mentality to ride this race, but really, really fascinating stuff. My father, when I was a kid in the 80s, he turned me on to this as a kid, so it's always been one of my dreams and it's definitely my bucket list to attend this race, but being able to actually sponsor a rider this year in Bitcoin Cash is extra special.

[07:54:38] Steve Thurmond: He's got the Bitcoin Cash logo on his helmet on both sides. Dean Harrison is who you're looking for. If you want to follow the race and anybody out there listening, feel free to tune in to that race. If you want to join the prediction market, BCH Guru, which is app.bch.guru, you can join the prediction market there on Dean's race and several other prediction markets that are live on there as well.

[07:55:05] Steve Thurmond: I'm going to go and check out here. I'm going to go to the house and get dinner, but Cash Stamps, if you want any more of those, Vlad, I give this to the entire community. Anybody that wants to get out in their community and onboard people to Bitcoin Cash, I'll fund your first 20. I put approximately two bucks on each one. If you want some Cash Stamps, we can create custom Cash Stamps. We're about to launch our first big update in a year, which will allow you to be able to create your own and customize them to your liking.

[07:55:38] Steve Thurmond: That should be rolling out here fairly soon, but I'll fund your first 20 if you're willing to get out in the community and onboard merchants or customers. I leave these things everywhere. I leave them as tips. I'll put them in the bathroom on the top of the urinal. I've actually had people join our Telegram group saying that they found a cash stamp in the bathroom, so they do work as easy onboarding tools. Just giving that plug for Cash Stamps. We have a token tied to it as well if you're into shitcoins.

[07:56:12] Steve Thurmond: There's a stamp token that we try to use some tokenomics to fund some of these campaigns that we use them for. That's neither here nor there. Again, I appreciate you allowing us to take eight hours of your day, Vlad. You've been a very gracious, knowledgeable host. We really do hope to see you in Ljubljana next year, if nothing else. I propose a prediction market as to whether or not you're going to show up in Ljubljana next year, so we'll see if that gets any wings.

[07:56:44] Vlad Costea: Are you sure it's going to be Ljubljana? I heard some people saying that they don't want to go to the same place because they don't accept BCH anymore, and it doesn't make sense.

[07:56:55] Steve Thurmond: There's that sentiment, but there's also the sentiment that we've kind of rooted down there. It's not that hard to get to. Especially if you're in Europe, it's usually just one flight from wherever you are. From the States and Asia, it's definitely harder to get to, but there's really no easy place if you're too far away anyway. The hotel is great. The food is incredible. You get fed all you can eat for three days in a row. The rooms are comfortable. The city is beautiful. I don't know if you saw my AI clip that I posted on one of your posts about Slovenia. It's really pretty.

[07:57:33] Joey: It's really postcard. I couldn't have imagined it. Take all those good things you can think about in Europe and just put them in a place that's all walkable. There's so much stuff I didn't even see. I didn't even see the lake. There's apparently casinos on the [unclear: Riviera]. For people that do criticize on that, I feel like if they want to fly over to the Philippines, we've got Cash 3.0 happening over at Cebu in Asia. It's just that a lot of people say, we want to spend cash.

[07:58:10] Joey: I challenge them to fly over there if you want to experience 250 merchants in one city. Everywhere they go, they can spend Bitcoin Cash. I'm sure Paytaca will be basically doing everything they do with the peer-to-peer economy there and doing a lot of speeches. I'm going. They asked me to do a speech and I'm like, I've never done one. That would be a first for me. There's no perfect place to host it. It's sort of triaged into this location. Originally, they had GoCrypto and that was great.

[07:58:51] Joey: But now it feels like the right place where everyone can get to. It's also not super expensive. That's a concern for some people. If I did it in Hong Kong or something, who can afford that? But then all the routes. It seems like this middle ground that everyone's happy with.

[07:59:13] Steve Thurmond: It would be a simple direct flight for you, Vlad. I don't even know how far we'd be to drive. I was just searching for that.

[07:59:21] Vlad Costea: Maybe it could be an enjoyable ride, but it's 14 hours by car.

[07:59:25] Joey: You said you like fast cars, right? You said you like fast cars.

[07:59:34] Steve Thurmond: A lot of people will stay the week after because you're one hour from Venice and you're literally 30 minutes from the Croatian border. A lot of people will visit Croatia and Italy while they're there the week after. That's our plan. I'm going to try to bring my family next year and hopefully we're going to do some traveling south of Slovenia next year. It's gorgeous. I hope we stay there. I hope we continue to have other conferences elsewhere like in the Philippines. I'd love to see something again in Townsville.

[08:00:06] Steve Thurmond: I don't know if you're familiar with Bitcoin Cash City in Townsville, Australia. That's still a very prolific area that uses and spends BCH on a daily basis. We've got some good community members down there still nurturing that market. That's obviously going to be the hardest to get to for everyone unless you're in Australia. It'd be nice to see more things popping up. You are seeing them. You are seeing more BCH events in Argentina. In the Philippines, we have our developer and builder focused event in Ljubljana. So, we're on the right path.

[08:00:48] Steve Thurmond: I think the growth is going to start happening. We've laid a lot of track, if you will, the last nine years. Been through a lot of shit and come out the other side and we're still standing. So, we're all anxiously awaiting a boom, if you will, some big growth here. But it's going to take an effort and it's not something you can sleep on. We've got to keep showing up at the end of the day. But anyway, I'll quit bothering. I'll let you guys take it on to the 12th hour.

[08:01:20] Steve Thurmond: Thank you again so much, Vlad. And keep in touch. I sent you some links in our Telegram thread. So, reach out at any time if you need anything, man.

[08:01:28] Vlad Costea: Congratulations for crossing the eight-hour mark. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your invitation to BCH Bliss. I will consider it. The reason why I didn't come this year is that I wanted to spend time with my father because it happened around the same time as his birthday. And, yeah, what else is there to say? I can't get up to close my window, but there is this car that's spraying pesticides to kill bugs outside. So, I might get gassed soon.

[08:02:03] Joey: Is this car just like driving past, like in your entire neighborhood?

[08:02:14] Vlad Costea: I think it's spraying on trees.

[08:02:17] Joey: Oh, right. I see. Yeah, Romanian problems. It would be wonderful to see you at an [unclear: in-person] event. I do think it's so interesting that Steve and Kallisti basically just going to a few conferences, they meet people that are actually very open-minded. So, I think that's a real factor we should really consider that we need to do more outreach in BCH outside of our ecosystem and really get out there and talk to people. And I think also, you know, Bitcoin Cash's OG Twitter account basically just kind of shows there are people interested in Bitcoin Cash and we just get out there.

[08:03:06] Joey: We have to get out there and spread the message and do more coordination layer stuff where we actually come across like an entire ecosystem to the outside world instead of being like, hey, you know, I remember Bitcoin Cash from 2020 and some people out there are like Craig Wright and Roger used to own the coin. I think we kind of get over that. I think people are mostly over with that. I don't really get this thing where, you know, it's quite interesting because I saw you guys talk about the sabotage, the attacks on Bitcoin Cash.

[08:03:47] Joey: In my most early years, I used to do the Bitcoin Cash meetups and, you know, actually Bitcoin people would actually show up and like point fingers at me and go like, you're running a scam coin, you know, you're just owned by Roger and you're paid by Roger. And I was like, I wish I was paid by Roger. So it's actually quite a common story in a lot of early Bitcoin Cash people that it's like you get accused that you're getting paid by like Roger, but it's like, well, I'm doing this for free.

[08:04:15] Joey: I'm just volunteering. Wow. It's like kind of crazy. So it kind of shows you the scale of things we had to overcome, especially in those 30 years, you know, and some of it is internal, like some of it we have to acknowledge is internal. Like you brought up about Craig Wright and I do believe that we should have had that defense mechanism to basically, you know, [unclear: sting you into the scammer]. But we didn't do that. The top people in BCH are the biggest influencers welcomed him. It was like [unclear: Calin] said, like we were just a ragtag, a bunch of people, like different feathers on a bird and then we just kind of go like, you know, he's saying the right things.

[08:04:52] Joey: And yeah, yeah. And I think, I think that that was a mistake. And through all those, through all those, through all those things, like every time the community came back and it came back stronger. So I think, like I was saying at Bliss to someone, that I think culturally we're like in the best position like BCH has ever been. And it's probably culturally one of the strongest like coins on the MCAP table, like in terms of culture. The next part is really like, you know, doing this thing like, you know, like Kallisti and Steve like coming out and just really talking to people and being really open minded.

[08:05:26] Joey: Also not being antagonistic. I feel like, you know, in earlier BCH it was like people are a lot more spicy. And then I guess we're all younger back then. We're just like, we just wanted to go and just be like, oh, you know, you guys are like basically like all like brainwashed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that doesn't really work because you don't really get through to people like that. They just double down on like, okay, I remember like the whole, remember the whole like Roger Ver and you know, this is just like, I think like now BCH, we sort of arrived at a much nicer vibe instead of that.

[08:05:56] Joey: That like, hey, you know, like it's like, as Talon pointed out, I think every group that splits off in the first year, there is that thing where it's okay, now we have to build it. Like we're just an angry mob. And I think, you know, especially after being out of BCH for a few years and coming back, the vibe, I think the BCH community just doesn't really see how much they've improved.

[08:06:19] Calin Culianu: Yeah, it's been improved. Yeah. And then people that have come in that have tried to improve the vibe, like Fiendish, he came in and Jeremy and other people are just like, hey, let's get, you know, let's be more positive. Let's get the vibe positive. Let's not be so bitter. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's not be toxic, you know, fish rots at the head. We had like the self-appointed dictator Amaury, you know, so you didn't help the culture either. Cause he was a toxic motherfucker. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.

[08:06:46] Steve Thurmond: I mean, to that point about building inroads last plug and I'm going to bounce. There's actually a Cash Stamps challenge right now, [unclear: New rain]. One of our community members in Nigeria spearheading this, but it's a national, initiative, $150 to, whomever creates the best onboarding content. I will fund your Cash Stamps. Everybody gets three Cash Stamps. You create three videos and we get to decide on who's, who's the best $150 to the winner, 75 to second place, $50 to third place in BCH. And we'll actually fund the Cash Stamps for you.

[08:07:25] Steve Thurmond: So if anybody is outgoing, and wants to create content and onboard people to Bitcoin Cash, the telegram group is Cash Stamps challenge and, I can get a link to you, Vlad, if you want or your community, but, yeah, if you want to earn some BCH and create some cool content and get paid in BCH to do so, that's out there for some of you more outgoing individuals. I'm going to go eat dinner guys. Thanks again.

[08:07:54] Vlad Costea: Before you go, let me just say something because it's important. So I want to say that you made all of these mentions about the community getting better. And I also think that the fundamentals are more interesting because in the beginning Bitcoin Cash was just like Bitcoin with eight megabyte blocks. So it wasn't that interesting to be honest. It wasn't that much of a leap. Bitcoin did four megabytes with SegWit and then you guys did 16, 32. Anyway, I got a message just now from Robin Linus. He's the creator of BitVM and he's also a PhD student at Stanford.

[08:08:30] Vlad Costea: And he said, tell the BCH guys that I, the officially crowned king of Bitcoin script wizards, am fucking jealous of all your neat opcodes and wish we had them too. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[08:08:45] Steve Thurmond: BCH is for everyone. Come join us. BCH is for everyone.

[08:08:51] Calin Culianu: A lot of these opcodes came from Jason Dreyzehner, who's got a lot of insight into the VM. So thanks to him.

[08:08:58] Steve Thurmond: Yeah. If you can get him on a pod. My God, you want to go deep down the rabbit hole. He's an absolute big brain in this space for sure. I did text him, but he's not much one for public appearances. I think Jerry gets him every now and again. So but he'd be a great, a great guest for sure. But yeah, again, thanks a lot, man. Appreciate it. I'm going to bounce. I'll keep listening. I got to bounce too, man. I follow up on this.

[08:09:24] Calin Culianu: I got to hang out with my wife.

[08:09:27] Vlad Costea: Thanks for putting this together. Is this the end? This is the end, right? We passed the eight hour mark. I guess we reached the goal. Cool.

[08:09:40] Steve Thurmond: So we set the record for 26, right? Yes. Awesome. Awesome.

[08:09:46] Joey: That's just one season. So is it like we set the record for like the entire history? I guess not. I mean, the season 17.

[08:09:54] Vlad Costea: So, yeah, in season 16, I've had two other people who did eight hours and one who did 10 hours. So, oh, wow. It all started with Amir Taaki, who joined the show and spoke for seven hours. And that was mind blown. I was like, how can this guy on his own talk so much? And after people saw him, they were like, no, I can do better than Amir. OK. And I was cursed to sit sometimes for five hours. And after five hours, they would say, oh, my God, this is hard. I think it would be easy to talk for seven hours. But I ran out of topics. I was like, I'm sorry, man.

[08:10:29] Vlad Costea: I guess it's not for everyone. But for me, it's not hard, you know, to engage in conversation. It's not like I have to prepare seven or eight hours of talk. I just most of the time. Just listen, absorb and try to ask questions off of that. I don't make plans before the conversation, because if you make plans, they're going to break anyway.

[08:10:52] Steve Thurmond: You're a great host for sure.

[08:10:55] Vlad Costea: I appreciate it. And if anyone wants to send me Bitcoin Cash, you can find my address at bitcoin-takeover.com slash donate. I think that's the URL. I can tweet that. If you want.

[08:11:09] Calin Culianu: I'll send you a tip. Yeah. What is it again, Vlad?

[08:11:16] Vlad Costea: Bitcoin-takeover.com slash donate. You know, Jeremy was making fun of me saying, well, you never support Bitcoin Cash or whatever. I actually put a donation address for people who visit that page. So let's see.

[08:11:31] Steve Thurmond: I'm trying to find it here. Bitcoin Takeover Donate.

[08:11:35] Joey: Can you send me the link? I have for Bitcoin.

[08:11:40] Calin Culianu: What? I'll put in the channel.

[08:11:42] Vlad Costea: I can type this. I'm not begging for donations, by the way. Bitcoin.

[08:11:47] Steve Thurmond: People in BCH love spending their BCH, so I don't think we'll have any problems sending you a tip.

[08:11:54] Calin Culianu: You accept CashTokens as well? I can send you some Fulcrum coins. Counterparty is still alive?

[08:12:00] Joey: Is it? Interesting. I suppose they never died, right? What is BTCTKVR tokens?

[08:12:13] Vlad Costea: Oh, yeah. That's a Counterparty. Yeah. It is still alive. It's kind of something that comes back every six, seven years and then dies and then comes back. It's like hard to describe why that's such a big thing. But at some point, I figured, OK, I can make 21 million Bitcoin Takeover tokens on Bitcoin and sell them for a dollar or something. And then I can claim that I had a much fairer distribution than Bitcoin. Of course, it didn't land. It was not successful.

[08:12:48] Calin Culianu: You could do this on CashTokens, man. Create some tokens on CashTokens.

[08:12:53] Vlad Costea: Because I put it in a dispenser. So it's not like I can send it to whoever wants. It's like everyone can get one for a dollar. I think now it's more than a dollar because it was a dollar in '21.

[08:13:04] Steve Thurmond: Is that a legacy address What else do you have on your site there Vlad?

[08:13:08] Calin Culianu: No, he just doesn't have the Bitcoin Cash colon.

[08:13:11] Joey: Oh, it's not like I see it. It's not like it.

[08:13:14] Calin Culianu: Yeah. [unclear: QZW SAS 6 CAC.] I don't know, whatever. Should I change it? You might want to put Bitcoin Cash colon before it. But yeah, it's fine. You can leave it like that. That'll work. All wallets will understand that. That's fine. All right.

[08:13:30] Steve Thurmond: I'm out. Thanks, guys. I got to go.

[08:13:32] Calin Culianu: Eight hours, 14 minutes.

[08:13:34] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much. Thanks to the sponsors.

[08:13:36] Joey: I'll go too. Really nice meeting you, Vlad. See you.

[08:13:40] Vlad Costea: Bye. Likewise. Bye. Once again, thanks to the sponsors: OrangeRock, the place where you can trade without KYC, and also they have support for privacy coins; LayerTwo Labs, building the drivechain, also launching the eCash fork this summer; Cake Wallet, offering also support for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, privacy features, privacy coins, it's really cool; and SideShift.ai, which is the place where you swap your stablecoins for sound money. Thank you very much. I'll see you in the next one. If anyone listened up to this point, you're a hero, leave a comment and say anything but BCH. Write that in the comments and I will know that you listened up to this point. Thank you very much. Good night. It's almost 2 a.m. Here. It's crazy. But I have the best audience. Bye.