S17 E35: Vinny Lingham on Bitcoin Post-Maximalism, Scaling Regrets & Saylor's Endgame

0:39Vlad CosteaHello there, and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 35. This episode is sponsored by SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, Orange Rock, LayerTwo Labs, and Cake Wallet. And we are live with Vinny Lingham, who has been in Bitcoin for about 15 years, has built a lot of businesses, now he's the co-founder of Praxos Capital. And he has quite a lot of stories to tell. And the topic, I guess, is going to be Bitcoin Post-Maximalism. Because just like many of us, he became obsessed with Bitcoin around 2012.

1:17I guess many of us did not get obsessed in 2012, but came later. He's built a lot of stuff, he's experimented with the technology, he ran into every roadblock in terms of scaling and actual user base and whatever. And he's earned his grey hairs. There's a reason why he has them there. It's really good to have you, Vinny.

1:40Vinny LinghamHey Vlad, it's good to be on. Thank you, man.

1:42Vlad CosteaSo let's start with the beginning. Like, you co-founded a company that was called Gyft, or maybe founded. You're the only founder, I'm not sure.

1:52Vinny LinghamI co-founded nearly a dozen companies over my career.

1:58Vlad CosteaYeah, but this one called Gyft, with a Y, actually accepted Bitcoin for gift cards in 2012, which was huge.

2:05Vinny LinghamThat's how I got into the whole Bitcoin space. We had a problem with payments in the gift card world. So when you make a payment to a merchant online, there's a chargeback period that basically allows fraud to happen. So with gift cards, it's a digital purchase. So it's not like I ship the goods to your billing address and I can prove that you got the goods. It's a digital code that you get. Now you want to spend money on Amazon or Target or whatever else. And that opens it up to a lot of fraud.

2:35People were using stolen credit cards to buy from us. And we had very, very high rates of fraud. We got attacked by Vietnamese scammers, Ghanaian scammers. It was insane. And I was like, we need something better to do payments. Online payments can't be like this. I'm getting a lot of feedback on your side.

2:58Vlad CosteaWell, I know that nowadays gift cards are a big use case. And unfortunately...

3:03Vinny LinghamThere's like a sound feedback on your side. Do you want to mute?

3:07Vlad CosteaOh, you mean feedback from your own voice?

3:11Vinny LinghamNo, from your microphone.

3:13Vlad CosteaI'm muting myself when I'm not talking. So if you're hearing anything, I apologize.

3:18Vinny LinghamOkay, that's weird. All right, cool. No worries. So we got into the gift card payment space initially, because what we're trying to solve was how do you take transactions by untrusted people over the Internet? Now, we were trusted because we're a merchant. They know who we are. But the person buying the gift card, we didn't know where they're from. They give us credit card information, and that's about it. And it can be stolen. So chargebacks are terrible. So I started looking into Bitcoin. I was like, well, this is great for payments, because now it skips the credit card companies.

3:56I can save 3% merchant fees. I don't have these chargeback fees. This is the perfect payments platform. And so I felt that it was worth a shot. So we tried it out on our platform. And it worked great. People could pay instantly. Now, this is back in the days, 2013 era, where we literally didn't have any payment infrastructure, like Stripe and stuff. It was early days. It was tough.

4:29Vlad CosteaAlso, you could get a Bitcoin transaction in the next block without a fee. That was also a thing.

4:34Vinny LinghamNo, it was actually better than that. We could get payments instantly. So zero-conf payments, we accepted zero-conf payments. Now, with zero-conf, which basically means the moment the transaction enters the mempool, and it's not invalidated by it. We had the first-seen rule where the first time you see a transaction, the miners would accept it. They would disregard the second transaction. And the point of that was that for small value transactions, $5, $50, even $2,000, no one is going to try and double-spend back in the days.

5:09This is before we had RBF implemented by the Core team, which we were all up in arms about. A lot of people were, but in their greater wisdom, they felt that RBF in 2015, I think, was what Bitcoin needed. And it just shows the lack of a commercial sense. The same reason Starbucks did the math around this. And they stopped taking signatures on credit card payments, and so did McDonald's. Why? Because the amount of time they lost in terms of getting the lines through, they lost more sales than the 1 in 100 chargeback that a physical person would do on a $5 Starbucks coffee charge.

5:53And so they lost more money. And it was a pure economic decision. They were like, you know what? We will accept the 1 in 100 chargeback. It's OK. It's $5. We don't care. It costs us more to challenge it. And so they just went to accepting cards. The same principle applies online to payments. If I'm a merchant and I'm willing to accept a zero-conf payment from you, because I know that the cost for you to try and double-spend, this is pre-RBF, is so high that up to $2,000 we were doing, and then back in those days, it was probably like 5 BTC.

6:27It was a lot. We just didn't see it. We processed 100,000 payments, 100,000 Bitcoin transactions over the course of two and a half years with zero double spends until RBF came in. And they modified the protocol for that. And so that kind of pissed me off as well. But, you know, whatever. And then there was the scaling wars and debates in 2017. And that's when I just realized that when we started building Civic after Gyft, we were trying to build it on Bitcoin. We had all the patents filed.

7:00It was all Bitcoin-based. And then the fees just went nuts in 2017. And there was this big sort of block size wars. And then we realized that Bitcoin couldn't scale without having bigger blocks. The community didn't want to scale it. So they brought in SegWit. They started doing all this stuff to help Blockstream. And now when you look back, and you see what happened with Blockstream and Adam Back on Epstein's island and whatever else, you kind of realize that how even the MIT guys were all, this is all like, you know, they were in cahoots with Epstein.

7:30It kind of makes you understand what actually happened. It's actually a much deeper rabbit hole than that. He's looking through Blockstream and Reid Hoffman and Epstein and whatever else. It kind of makes me sick looking back right now. So I'm like, OK, well, now it explains why people were not acting, you know, in accordance with what I think Bitcoin's whitepaper was saying, etc. And it's quite funny now watching Luke Dashjr and the guys who, you know, the thing about Bitcoin Core is you keep pushing out the people that disagree with you.

7:59You're always going to have people who only agree with you left behind, but you just have fewer of them. And so Mike Hearn was kicked out. Gavin Andresen was kicked out. Effectively, Luke is kicked out now. And so the Core team just basically keeps pruning dissenting voices. So you never have diversity of thought in Core. And it's essentially run by Blockstream right now because they employ the Core developers. So, you know, highly centralized on one hand. But I'm just going, I'm just like kind of, you know, going all my random thoughts coming out right now.

8:30It's kind of funny just to sit back in 2026 and think about what happened nearly a decade ago and how, you know, Bitcoin still can't scale to be a massive payment system that was described in the whitepaper because of the block constraints and all the other, you know, Taproot and all the other crap that they've added on top of Bitcoin.

8:47Vlad CosteaNot only that, but it seems like we have the same OP_RETURN debate that was already had in 2014 when Counterparty and Mastercoin and other stuff was just starting to come out. And that's why we got Ethereum because people decided, OK, they want to move this stuff somewhere else.

9:05Vinny LinghamOh, that's why we have the whole crypto ecosystem right now. We have the crypto ecosystem because the block sizes on Bitcoin was constrained. Now, for better or worse. And, you know, you can argue like, Vinny, you're wrong. I'm like, yeah, OK, fine. What's the Bitcoin price today? 64,000. What was it five years ago at the peak? 66,000. You know, so nothing's happened in Bitcoin in five years. I mean, sure, we had a quick little tap to 120 and come all the way back down. But like something's broken and you can add in Saylor and all his leverage crap and all the Bitcoin he's bought and we're still at 60,000 range.

9:40So, you know, something that, you know, something is broken, I think, with the original vision of Bitcoin that I bought into. And so I just decided to go and back other projects like Solana that can scale at least to a decent level. And I got out of the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. I mean, I still comment on it. Something is interesting. Just watching the community kind of fight against each other right now with BIP 110 versus Core. And actually, I kind of sympathize with the BIP 110 guys because I kind of agree.

10:09If you took the direction 2017 to keep small blocks, you can't then now go and say, well, we need to enable all this other Ordinals and stuff on Bitcoin because it's kind of contrary to what the whole thesis was back then. And I know it benefits Blockstream. That's why they're trying to do it. But like I sympathize with BIP 110 because what they're trying to say is we're going to stick with the original 2017 vision, which is small blocks and Bitcoin is, now they're calling it money, but it was a store of value, which means it's for monetary transactions only.

10:42And so they're probably more right than wrong in this whole debate.

10:47Vlad CosteaWell, maybe they're right philosophically, but technically you can do inscriptions in lots of different ways. It doesn't have to be this one type.

10:57Vinny LinghamNo, when I say they're right, they're right in terms of like what they're saying for what the original, if we go back to 2017, 2017 was at a point where you said Bitcoin is for, you know, is not for non-monetary transactions. We're going to keep the blocksize small, we're going to make it for payments and a payments rail, etc. And you know, that's, you know, that's I think what they're trying to say. I'm not like picking a side, I'm just saying that they're more true to the 2017 block size wars than the core team right now.

11:30Vlad CosteaBut once again, that's not what I remember from 2017, maybe that I'm stupid or something, because I bought into this narrative that Bitcoin is not going to scale on the base layer, it's going to scale in layers. We're going to get a layer 2 and on top of that there's going to be a layer 3. And it's going to become a medium of exchange, it's going to become digital cash, just not on the base layer. And then we get something that's called the Lightning Network, and also something that's not really a sidechain that's called Liquid, and it turned out to be a federation.

12:00They're so bad, as in they have low liquidity.

12:05Vinny LinghamThis is what we fought about in 2015 to 20... Lightning has been in the works for 10 years, 11 years, and nothing's happened. It doesn't work. You know, we know this and like I had a tweet from 2019 saying you can retweet this forever, you know, Lightning will be ready in 18 months. That's the whole joke, because 18 months time it'll be ready. They promised Lightning, they never delivered it. It can't work.

12:25Vlad CosteaThat's why they call you the Oracle, right?

12:28Vinny LinghamYeah, well, maybe. But like, if you look at layer 2 on Ethereum, I also said that's not going to work. Layer 2 hasn't worked anyway, it doesn't work. You might as well use a fucking database. It doesn't work. And it doesn't work for an economic perspective more than anything, right? Like the moment you derive value at a layer 2 in any blockchain, you're depriving the layer 1 of fees for network security and a whole bunch of other things. And so it's just fundamentally not working. And yeah, you can argue all day long with me, but the point is let's just look back at the timelines. Nothing is actually working on layer 2 right now at scale.

13:05Vlad CosteaThat was going to be another question, because there is another hard fork that's launching in August, and that one is called eCash. It's going to have basically the same base layer, but sidechains for every use case, and every transaction on the sidechain pays transaction fees to the miners. This was actually a proposal for Bitcoin called drivechains, BIP 300. And it's the only one that I know of that actually aims to maximize mining revenue. All the other layer 2 proposals are just like, well, maybe you open a channel, and then when you close it, you're paying another transaction fee, but that's kind of it.

13:43But this one actually tries to pay transaction fees to the miners with every transaction that's happening anywhere. Did you ever look into that?

13:54Vinny LinghamI remember Paul's proposal back in the days, it's been around for a while, otherwise I'm making the assumption that layer 2s don't work until you show me proof that it actually works at scale. The UX is too clunky for average users. Yes, you'll get a small cohort of people going to a gateway and bridging things across and whatever else. You get that. It's just not a mainstream product. Like, I built companies that focus on consumer mainstream, like the average idiot out there using things which are idiot-proof. The moment you go to Bitcoin, actually, the UTXO model is pretty idiot-proof.

14:33Back in the days, people could just understand Bitcoin and use it and it was very simple. The more we complicated things, the more we do things like layer 2 and lightning, whatever, you're losing the mass population. So you basically go to more fringy groups, which tend to look like the developers, by the way, more than actual real users. And I saw a tweet that is quite funny. Someone was shocked that you could actually hold Bitcoin in a wallet and not through an ETF. This is the problem.

15:00We've conditioned people to not understand what Bitcoin is about. And it's kind of sad.

15:06Vlad CosteaBut maybe that ETF is the scaling layer, right? Except that it's not for normal people. It's just for people in suits and traditional finance.

15:16Vinny LinghamWell, suit coin is, yeah. I mean, again, then it's not really what I signed up for. I signed up for the original vision of Bitcoin, was the whitepaper, 2013. I read it. I loved it. Peer-to-peer electronic cash, you know, 50,000 transactions per second plus, compete with Visa, MasterCard. You can move money around the world in small microtransactions. And yes, you can do bigger volume as well. But liquidity pools everywhere. That's what I wanted out of it. But eventually, the community says, nope, we got to HODL and pump the price.

15:46And that's what's more important. And I just thought that was short term. And yeah, that's what happened. We pumped the price to 120 down to 60, looking 58 recently, looking a bit shaky. Who knows? But it's not. But, you know, everyone in 2017 thought that we'd be at a million dollar Bitcoin today. You know, we're not there.

16:08Vlad CosteaThere's Wayne Vaughan in the chat. And he says, it's always good to hear from you. Hi, Wayne. There's actually a website called waynechain.com that's still up. It's like a relic from another era where people were making jokes about how to scale stuff. Yeah. And I want to ask you something else, Vinny, because over the last week or so, we have seen announcements from Saylor and one of them is about the Bitcoin Security Consortium. We actually learned the new word, by the way, which comes from Latin consortium.

16:42It's not a council. It's not a foundation. It's a consortium. Very sophisticated language there. And it basically gathered $15 million from Blockstream, from BlackRock, from MicroStrategy and a bunch of other companies for Bitcoin security, whatever that means. And then Saylor came up like three days ago posting that increasing the block size makes it difficult to validate, adding covenants, adds complexity. And basically he made the case against most of the popular improvement proposals in Bitcoin, which means that we don't even know what that $15 million is going to go to or what it's going to be spent for.

17:25But on the other hand, I want to ask you, how is this different from how the Bitcoin Foundation was operating? Because you have been there, I think, since 2015 and maybe until 2017.

17:37Vinny LinghamYeah. I mean, we were trying to salvage the Bitcoin Foundation. Didn't really work. There was a lot of opposition by Blockstream and Adam. They felt it was a centralizing attack effect on Bitcoin. But it seems that they're fine with Saylor or MIT doing it. So whatever. But I think when you look back and you look at it now, as long as you're doing stuff which Core agrees with for Bitcoin, it's OK. If the moment you contest Core, it's not OK. And so that's just basically what it is.

18:09And I think that there's this, the centralizing decision makers in Core, it's what makes Bitcoin centralized. And so, you know, I think Saylor is creating a systemic risk to Bitcoin. He's centralizing a lot of coins. The control, like if there was a fork today, because the nodes decided, you know, you've got up to 25%, 35%, whatever, and there was a fork, he could just sell the other side of the coin if it was traded. And he could crash it. So he controls what happens in Bitcoin because he can actually crash a minority fork if it was traded. And so I just don't see how.

18:51Like, yeah, the foundation was very much community driven. Bitcoiners would donate money to the foundation to try and fund development or whatever else. This is more like funding what Core and Adam Back wants. And so, look, Bitcoin has been co-opted by big institutions now. It's not the peer-to-peer digital currency vision we had for it. And it'll suffer whatever fate is meant to suffer as a result. Maybe it goes to a million dollars. I don't know. But I just don't see how this becomes a mainstream tool, technology.

19:26Like, we've even lost SPV on Bitcoin, like simple payment verification. It was so easy just to verify payments. And the simplicity and beauty of Bitcoin from the early days has been eroded. It's just not a simple product anymore. Everybody can get their hands around.

19:44Vlad CosteaWell, I think SPV still works. It depends on which wallet you're using.

19:47Vinny LinghamNo one runs it. And because of RBF, it's not really used much.

19:56Vlad CosteaI don't know. I use it with Cake Wallet. I use it with Electrum. It's there. It's about you connecting to some server. It's not that difficult.

20:06Vinny LinghamRemember, with RBF, people can double spend pretty easily. So you have to wait for six confirmations as well.

20:13Vlad CosteaWell, yeah. But you can also connect to your own node, which I guess is not SPV anymore, because...

20:18Vinny LinghamI haven't done this in years. I'm like, whatever. But I remember a time when it was just convoluted.

20:27Vlad CosteaOh, I got to ask you this. When was the last time you tried Bitcoin?

20:31Vinny LinghamOh, I mean, I use it now and again for payments. If someone wants a payment, I got to pay someone in another country a couple of thousand bucks and I just use Bitcoin for it. It's easy. But, you know, it's still a pain. You have to wait for six confirmations and especially online payments. It doesn't work anymore. Like, if I want to make a payment online, I have to pay Bitcoin. I have to wait an hour for the six confirmations to come through. Back in the days, it was instant.

20:57So I just use a credit card now.

21:01Vlad CosteaThat's the other side of the debate because online services and banks and these Venmo type of whatever and PayPal, they used to suck back in the day. Like a decade ago, they're not so developed. But now you have Apple Pay, which is so convenient. You just double tap on your phone and then you make a payment.

21:20Vinny LinghamWell, for the merchants, I think the harder part is when we ran Gyft, it was a global service. So you could buy gift cards from Africa, but we couldn't accept credit cards from Africa. And with Gyft, it basically bridged the gap. So now we actually had a lot of sales coming from international with people who didn't have credit cards and they had Bitcoin. And it was quick and easy and no chargebacks and low fees. And so we really encouraged that in the day. But the Bitcoin is a store of value narrative is kind of not really working really well right now.

21:53I mean, maybe it is, but you look at it against the NASDAQ, you look at it against gold, it's underperformed the past couple of years. So it's not really storing value. I look at Bitcoin as a store of liquidity, not value. So people store liquidity in Bitcoin and therefore it's also very subject to big liquidity swings. If there's a big sell off in the stock market or people need liquidity in a hurry, they sell Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes down. Or if liquidity starts pouring in because the Fed's printing money, liquidity goes up, Bitcoin will go up.

22:25So it's not really a store of value. It's a store of liquidity in my mind.

22:30Vlad CosteaYeah. If you say this to the average cult member within the Bitcoin community, he's going to say, well, zoom out because it's up like 100,000x since this arbitrary date.

22:42Vinny LinghamLook at that. I mean, you can't look at the starting point from 15 years ago. So much has changed. You got to say, well, what's happened the past five years, the past seven, eight, nine years. I mean, whatever. People are very selective about data. They're very like, let's cherry pick the data that validates my case.

23:03Vlad CosteaBut what is a store of value? Because I don't think we ever gave this a good definition other than every four years you should expect to get a bull market. Gold is a store of value. For a long time, gold sort of underperformed the dollar because it kept the same price for like a decade or something. And then it went up.

23:26Vinny LinghamYeah. But we're finding out, we're finding now that a lot of that is, you know, when the US was not in as much debt as it is right now. And so they were able to use laws and manipulate, effectively, the gold price, and people weren't storing. What's really changed is the IMF's upgrade of gold as a liquid asset. It's a tier one asset now. So central banks can hold it as tier one assets when they couldn't really in the past. And so there's a bunch of changes happening in gold.

24:00And as the US debt burden grows and grows, you know, gold becomes the neutral reserve asset of the world and central banks are able to buy it in mass right now. And that's why we've seen this big run up in gold.

24:15Vlad CosteaYeah, I suppose that's the reason. But what I mean is that I think a good definition for a store of value is something that beats inflation every year consistently.

24:25Vinny LinghamIt doesn't. You have to look, you know, there's so many swings. I mean, think about how complex the world economy is. It's 180 plus countries with different printing presses, rates of printing, inflation, economic growth rates, and they're all competing. So you look at like a neutral reserve asset like gold, you'll have a year where maybe it doesn't because of certain rebalancing in certain treasuries or central banking deposit. So year by year, you can't look at. I think the most appropriate is probably a five-year, 10-year view on any particular asset and how it's holding against inflation because that balances out the ebbs and flows.

25:01Because you could have a year where there's a crisis in the country and they can just dump their gold and the price goes down. I mean, you kind of had it now where gold had this big run. And then I think it was Turkey who just dumped a whole bunch of gold in the market because they needed the cash. Doesn't mean that gold is not a store of value. It just means that the liquidity for gold was diminished because one of the participants in this 180 plus global economy in terms of central banks needed cash.

25:26And so gold traded down. You know, I just think that it's short timeframes of global economic action is just not a good way to measure things. But you measure gold over a hundred years. The hundred year gold measurement is fantastic for me because one of the things they say is, let me ask you this question. A hundred years ago, if you walked in, you were in New York and you went into a tailor to buy a suit, a finely tailored suit, how much gold would it cost?

25:59Vlad CosteaThat's a good question.

26:03Vinny LinghamI'll tell you the answer.

26:04Vlad CosteaOkay, tell me.

26:06Vinny LinghamIt's one ounce of gold. One ounce. So for one ounce of gold a hundred years ago, you could get a finely tailored suit. If you walk into a tailor today to get a finely tailored suit, it's about one ounce of gold. $4,000 for a tailored suit. So in a hundred years, the purchasing power of gold has not been eroded. You get the same value a hundred years than you did back then.

26:32Vlad CosteaThat's a good way to define store of value.

26:35Vinny LinghamThis is goods and services. So gold purchases the same goods and services over a hundred year timeframe. The dollar is not even close, as you well know.

26:47Vlad CosteaBut coming back to our digital gold, Satoshi defined Bitcoin as digital gold only in the context that it's being mined and that it's scarce.

26:57Vinny LinghamI don't think, I mean, the whitepaper doesn't mention digital gold once.

27:01Vlad CosteaIt does say gold. It doesn't say digital gold. When it refers to mining, let me bring that up. I'll take a look. It does say something about gold in the context of mining.

27:16Yeah, so the steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. This is what Satoshi says in the whitepaper. Chapter six, which is incentive. But what I want to say is that Michael Saylor is now defining Bitcoin as digital gold in the sense that it's expensive to move around and it should be stored by institutions.

27:47Vinny LinghamYeah, I mean, again, I think that when you centralize Bitcoin, you have way more systemic risks and you have a lack of privacy. I'd love a world where Bitcoin was used for millions of small transactions every day, which the governments didn't really care about, just paying a buck for this, two bucks for coffee, three bucks for whatever. And when you have that much liquidity and that many transactions going through, the price actually would become very stable because it's just lots of buy and selling of small volume value.

28:22But I've always looked at exchanges as layer two. So the layer two for Bitcoin is exchanges, layer three is really lightning, which I think makes it a little wonky. But if you want to move stuff on exchanges, you can use it. But ultimately, being able to do high volumes of transactions, more than the seven transactions per second Bitcoin can currently handle is what is the goal. This is why Solana is taking up so much of the slack. I mean, you can do 3,000 transactions per second on Solana, you can do seven on Bitcoin.

28:53And so a lot of Solana sponsored the World Series of Poker. So many poker players are using Solana to buy in for poker and play poker and settle their bets and staking and stuff using Solana. And it can handle volume. No one uses Bitcoin for it. It's too slow. When I bought in for the World Series of Poker, like you want to go and sit down and play, I just pay with Solana and you got my ticket instantly within one second, I could sit down, there was no confirmation, there was no waits.

29:28It was instant up and you're paying with USDC on Solana. So Solana solved that problem. Can it scale to 50,000, 100,000 transactions per second when we need it? I don't know. It looks like it can. I trust the team, but no other blockchain has gotten close to that sort of scale. I mean, I think BSV is touting like a million transactions per second on the Teranode software that they've got, but it's still not out there like mass use. But that's about it. It's kind of Solana and BSV for large volumes.

29:59And BSV uses the UTXO model. And so you look at BSV and BCH. BCH wants to be a more faster version of Bitcoin. So basically like the Bitcoin Cash, the original vision of the cash. Solana kind of filled that gap now because it's instant transactions. Yeah. So we'll see how that plays out. And then you've got BSV, which is trying to do like micro payments and large volumes of it and more centralized because you have to have bigger servers and data centers and whatever. But I think this whole, like everyone has to run a node thing is kind of silly.

30:39Like not everyone needs to run a node. You can just run SPV or whatever it is. But not every participant in the network needs to run a node. And what's funny is like, I said this at the time, like nine years ago, like there were like five or 10 or 20,000 nodes. And there were like millions of users. I'm like, if the first 100 million Bitcoin users only yield us 20,000 nodes or 10,000 nodes, do you really think that the next 8 billion are going to be as much even as a ratio?

31:06No. You're never going to get to a point where there's like 5 million Bitcoin nodes or even a million Bitcoin nodes. And this is like the fight I kind of had with Luke Dashjr online back in 2017. There was some research that came out that showed that Bitcoin blocks could be stable up to 16 megabytes. I think between 8 and 16 megabytes, there was like no risk, no stability issue. We put the research out there and showed him on X. And his argument was you can't scale Bitcoin to 50 billion people on Earth.

31:35And I was like, what do you mean 50 billion people? There's like eight. And Hans Rosling, and by the way, these tweets are all public. You can go check it. I think I took screenshots of it. But Hans Rosling, he was a social scientist, he predicted that the human population taps out at 10 billion people on Earth, which is 25% more than we have right now. And so I was like, well, Luke, how do you reconcile like building a system for 50 billion people? And then he posts back some religious Catholic texts.

32:01And the text basically says that the heathens who use contraception, like us, are going to not have kids as fast as Catholics, and therefore, Catholics will overpopulate the world. And in 20 years or 30 years, we have 40 billion Catholics out there. And so he's building a blockchain that can scale to 50 billion people, of which 80% of Catholics because he's a religious nut and he believes that that's what's going to happen. And so he was unwilling to even discuss bigger block size increase because of his religious bent.

32:32And this is the number one contributor of all time to Bitcoin. So I'm just putting it out there like this is crazy shit, dude.

32:38Vlad CosteaI don't think he's the number one contributor. That might be Gavin or Wladimir van der Laan.

32:43Vinny LinghamIn terms of commits, I think he was number one, number two, number three at one point.

32:50Vlad CosteaNo, I think he's top 10, but not number one.

32:53Vinny LinghamI'm pretty sure at one point he was number two or three. I remember seeing that. But anyway, whatever, top 10. He was a big contributor to Bitcoin. But my point is, he is the guy who is obviously in the middle of the conversations around this. And this is his religious bent being overlaid onto Bitcoin.

33:13Vlad CosteaYeah, he still does this. And something interesting about Luke and I don't want to talk about him too much. I feel like we're wasting our time if we do. But he uses words in a way that they mean something else than what they mean to you. And then he calls you a liar because according to his logic, if his statement means something else than what you understand, and then you respond to what you understand from what he said, then you're a liar because you're not interpreting the words in the right way.

33:41So he sort of has his own language in which he speaks. And you've got to walk circles around the whole debate just to be able to, first of all, understand what he means and then try to challenge. But then he will change the meaning. It's like a waste of time.

33:57Yeah, I'm not saying he's not smart and he did not write good code. I'm just saying that personally, he's a pain to deal with. Yeah, but let me ask you something else. How did we end up? You were in the Bitcoin Foundation in 2015 and you knew lots of these developers because they were getting funded by the foundation. How did we end up with Blockstream being such a powerful political entity? And to this day, like I know that the big blocker side really hates Adam Back personally.

34:35And they think he's this guy who showed up in 2013 with no skin in the game and then just raised money with his company and took control. The small blocker side seems to hold him in very high regard. And they're like, oh, this is like someone who might be Satoshi. But the question is, how did he go from this guy who landed on the scene in 2013? And he was like, oh, I received some email from Satoshi and I ignored the network for like four years and now I'm back and look at me.

35:04I'm going to raise, I don't know how much money it was for Blockstream, but maybe like 20 million or something.

35:11Vinny LinghamIt was millions. It was all funded by Reid Hoffman as well.

35:16Vlad CosteaSo for context, who's Reid Hoffman?

35:19Vinny LinghamHe's the founder of LinkedIn.

35:21Vlad CosteaOh, interesting.

35:23Vinny LinghamAnd a very left wing guy. So, you know, this is why we have, I mean, Blockstream was on its last legs in 2016, I think, or 2015. And I think Reid put like $20 million in and he basically is the biggest funder of Blockstream. And it was all about, you know, Liquid or whatever and, you know, Layer 2 and the whole thing. So it's, but this goes back, I mean, you can go read the Epstein files, you know, Reid Hoffman was in it. And so was Adam Back and the MIT guys.

35:59And, you know, this is all Epstein funded in some way.

36:04Vlad CosteaOn the topic of Epstein stuff, I still think that we only scratched the surface and there's so much more that we should get.

36:13Vinny LinghamWe won't get it, though. There's too many other people's names to be dragged through the mud. So they basically gave some of it so that, you know, everyone, like, calms down.

36:23Vlad CosteaBut how does it make you feel when you realize that we spent so much time trying to make Bitcoin successful for lots of use cases and then someone comes up with Tether, USDT, and that one ends up becoming like the default currency of the Global South? You get people in Africa, Middle East and South America.

36:48Vinny LinghamI wanted Bitcoin to be global money for everyone in the world. I already thought that it had a chance to be something that bypasses all the payments companies. It allows people to participate in global commerce. You can sell, you can receive payments, you can do lots of micropayments. There's so much you can do with Bitcoin as a global sort of currency if it's very distributed in terms of usage and easy to use. And that was my vision for Bitcoin. But again, I'm just one person who had a view of what things should happen.

37:18The community decided otherwise. And so, you know, the problem with the community is a bunch of people have never really done anything with their lives as well. You have a bunch of people who just got rich owning Bitcoin. They've never built companies, they've never built products and services. They're not entrepreneurs. They're just speculators and whatever else. And they've got their own philosophical views on things and they work a 9-to-5 job. And so it's very different when you have someone with a view of like, let's build shit that people can use.

37:41And this is why Elon, by the way, has no interest in Bitcoin. Elon, like the smartest, richest guy in the world, has no interest in Bitcoin, never. And since like the 2021 era, he basically, you know, after he spoke to Adam Back and a few other guys, I think he just realized these guys had just lost the plot. And he just pulled out of Bitcoin, totally. I mean, you could look from the Twitter threads and whatever else. He just basically totally disengages Bitcoin. I mean, has he said the word Bitcoin in five years?

38:08So when you can't convince probably the smartest human that's ever lived...

38:13Vlad CosteaBut his companies are still holding Bitcoin. So SpaceX and Tesla.

38:17Vinny LinghamBut they're not accumulating more, but they kind of just pacified the market and said, we'll just hold it and see what happens. It's so de minimus relative to everything else he's got. He doesn't care. When's the last time you heard Elon talk about Bitcoin?

38:31Vlad CosteaI don't know. I got to look it up. But you have a point there. Five years ago, he was very involved, but he was also trying to manipulate the market. I remember that he first of all listed BTC on the Tesla shop as a way of paying for the new Cybertruck.

38:47Vinny LinghamI think he was experimenting and then he realized that this thing is not going to go anywhere.

38:52Vlad CosteaBut you remember why he decided to remove Bitcoin?

38:57Vinny LinghamI don't know exactly why, but it...

39:01Vlad CosteaIt was all made up bullshit. He said it's ESG concerns that, you know, the mining is not green enough and whatever. I don't know exactly who dragged him into this and why he decided to remove Bitcoin. Really, because this is just made up excuse to not support it anymore. But that's what he said. And ever since he never came around. And I remember the response to the fact that he said, well, it's not ESG compliant and it's bad for the environment. People were trying so hard to please him. And Saylor created the Bitcoin Mining Council in the US, which basically put together some mining companies.

39:44Vinny LinghamI think Elon posted something which is interesting. He said back in 2021, you know, Bitcoin was conceived at a time of relatively low bandwidth and high latency. If both continue to improve substantially, we will reach a point where no second layer is needed. So he was very against the whole Lightning Network stuff as well. And he posted stuff like how many Macs it take to screen a rifle.

40:06Vlad CosteaBut I think Tesla accepted Lightning. Maybe he was against it, but they had an integration with BTCPay Server.

40:18Vinny LinghamI don't know about that, but I would love someone to go interview Elon and ask him his views on Bitcoin now. Because, you know, it's very, very clearly, if we can't convince Elon that Bitcoin is a good idea, you have to ask yourself, you know, what's going on.

40:34Vlad CosteaWell, if you're listening to this Elon, you know where to find me. Let's schedule a call.

40:42But yeah, let's talk about some of the stuff you built and the companies that you worked on, why you, first of all, wanted to do Civic on Bitcoin. And then you did it on Ethereum and you realized that it doesn't scale even in that place. And then maybe that identity was too early, just like Namecoin, a good idea that came out in a time when most people did not really understand why this is necessary.

41:09Vinny LinghamYeah, I mean, I was a Bitcoin maxi back in the days. I wrote articles about it. I was like, this is the only way to do it. This is before, obviously, Ethereum took off and Solana and everything else. And this is when the block size got constrained, then the activity went elsewhere. And I thought you could build everything on Bitcoin. You should. It's the most secure blockchain in the world. You should do it. We owe it to ourselves to do it. I patented a whole bunch of stuff on Bitcoin for Civic.

41:36And, you know, it just didn't scale. It was simple as that. And, you know, I went on and built other things. I was like, well, you know, I joined Multicoin as a GP, led the Solana seed round for Multicoin. So we became the biggest investors in Solana. I started Praxos Capital a few years ago and I co-founded that. And, you know, something more like, yeah, the world wants other solutions. So it was worth experimenting and exploring.

42:08Vlad CosteaRight. So why did you call it Civic and not Supra?

42:11Vinny LinghamSupra?

42:14Vlad CosteaIt's like a car joke, you know, the Honda Civic, Toyota Supra.

42:19Vinny LinghamNo, I think we called it Civic because like we're trying to build identity and voting solutions and, you know, civic responsibility. But then we realized after a couple of years of trying this out, nobody wants the identity. Like people who use crypto want to be anonymous because of what they're doing with crypto for the most part. Or, I mean, the number one use case with crypto for most people is tax evasion. You know, it's money that they don't want the government to know about. And that is literally the number one use case for the average person using Bitcoin or crypto in anonymous wallets.

42:52So then identity doesn't work because they don't want to be identified. Then, you know, there's like some savings and other use cases, but a lot of the people use it. They just don't want their, like I track everything and I'm very meticulous about it. But most people I know were like, oh, can you send me, you know, we want payments. They kind of want Tether or they want like Zcash or anonymous payments. It's because it's just people, it's the same as like why Europe is in such a mess when it comes to taxes.

43:21Like you go to European countries, a lot of guys just want cash. They don't want, why do people always want cash? Because they don't want to basically declare their income. Like cash is the best solution for tax evasion in any economy. And digital cash is probably the same use case.

43:41Vlad CosteaYou said something about Zcash there, and I'm curious what you think about the fact that it sort of came back from the dead over the last year. And this week it had the Ironwood upgrade, which created the first shielded pool with auditable supply. And the fact that I think the store of value narrative is sort of also happening on Zcash right now.

44:04Vinny LinghamYeah, I don't know what, and they figured out that bug situation where they had, you know, there's an unknown amount of Zcash out there. I don't know. Have they figured that out yet? I haven't been following.

44:15Vlad CosteaWell, so that was a bug that they found, I think, with Claude Mythos. Possibly. So when they had access to the most advanced AI, they audited their code and one of their developers found that bug and they fixed it immediately. And they assumed that nobody had found it before. But just to be sure, they created this new shielded pool that was Orchard and now they moved on to Ironwood. And in Ironwood, they can actually audit the supply to make sure that there is no inflation. And they also have a mechanism called the turnstile.

44:47When you're migrating from one pool to the other, you cannot withdraw more coins than there are officially. So if there was any inflation, the inflation will not be able to move or the person who created inflation should move very fast so that somebody else will not be able to move. But in the end, the amount of coins cannot exceed like the legit amount of coins that was supposed to be in the pool.

45:13Vinny LinghamOK, so, yeah, I mean, Zcash. One of the biggest problems with Zcash and Monero is lack of exchange support. So even if you accept a lot of the US exchanges just won't touch these things. Maybe the rest of the world's OK, I guess. But the U.S., and you see, even in like the Middle Eastern countries, they're banning it. So I think it's only headwinds of these privacy coins.

45:41Vlad CosteaSomething that I respect about Zcash in terms of integrations and user experience is that instead of pursuing the merchant adoption routes like Monero, where they have their own community and their own network of merchants that accept it, they decided to go the DeFi way with Zcash, meaning that they use Maya Protocol, they use NEAR Intents so that you send your Zcash shielded transaction to this DeFi service. This DeFi service is going to do a swap and the person who gets paid is going to get their USDT or BTC or ETH or whatever without even knowing where this comes from.

46:21They can see that it comes from a liquidity pool from a DeFi service. They don't know that the other person paid in Zcash. And this is sort of a big reason to be holding Zcash because you can pay into any other popular cryptocurrency out there.

46:38Vinny LinghamYeah, I think it's interesting. Again, crypto is not it's just not going mainstream. I mean, obviously, we're in a bear market now and mainstream users don't give a shit about crypto. Yeah, it's I know we're in a bull cycle when everyone's texting me and asking for advice and what to buy. And I haven't had any crypto texts for about a year now. People just they're just not interested.

47:04Vlad CosteaThere is someone in the chat. He says, ask him about Lorien Gamaroff, countryman, if he is still around.

47:13Vinny LinghamI don't know. He had this like Centbee project, wallet thing. I think it disappeared. South African guy. Yeah, it was a BSV project. It's funny, I went to high school with his brother. That's how I know him.

47:33Vlad CosteaIt's a really small world. Like when I find out what kind of connections exist between people, like someone is married to somebody else's sister or whatever. It's really scary when you realize how many connections are in this space. But I also want to ask you more specifically about where you stand right now in terms of what's your favorite coin and what you think really works, because even Solana has its own issues. It does halt. Sometimes it does require hard forks and network upgrades, which means that for a couple of hours, maybe during this process, you will not be able to use the network.

48:14Vinny LinghamI don't really have a favorite coin right now. I'm kind of out of crypto. I don't really have a ton of crypto these days. I still think Filecoin is interesting. I mean, obviously, the price is in the toilet right now, but the guys are still building. It's still interesting to see what could happen over time there. It's a very interesting use case. It's a high utility use case, which I like. But other than that, I don't really have a favorite coin. And obviously, I think Solana is great.

48:49So like Filecoin and Solana. And then there's Render as well, which is, you know, the guys are working on some stuff. But to be honest, I've just been out of crypto for a while now. I'm more of an observer than an actual participant.

49:06Vlad CosteaWell, I tend to disagree because of your participation in Praxos, which is the other topic that we have to get into. Because first of all, you took all the risks and now with Praxos, you're trying to do risk management.

49:20Vinny LinghamWell, that's different, right? We it doesn't matter as long as the so we do delta neutral funds and we do some risk-on funds as well. But a lot of it is just trading. It's just instruments, right? So we could swap those instruments out for any set of high volatile assets on a stock market and do the same, run the same trade book. It's not, it doesn't matter, like for the main fund, we trade Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, it's delta neutral. We don't care whether they go up or down.

49:51It doesn't matter to us. We look at the funding rates, we look at a whole bunch of other things, the liquidity pools, and we trade those out. So if Bitcoin has a month where it's up 20%, we don't necessarily make 20%. We maybe make 5% or 3% or whatever it is. But if Bitcoin goes down 20%, we might only make 3% again or 4%. We don't take directional risk. So as much as I'm out of crypto from a direction perspective, I'm kind of delta neutral on crypto right now, personally as well.

50:22It just goes up, doesn't bother me, goes down and doesn't bother me. But the volatility is where you make your money.

50:28Vlad CosteaYeah, always. I gotta announce, so we have had quite a few people joining the chat so far, and I want to tell them that there is going to be a contest during this episode, and you have to guess a number from 1 to 150, and Vinny is going to reveal it at the end of the episode. I don't know the number. I don't want to know the number. He's gonna be the one showing it on camera. I've asked him to write it down. You can type your numbers right now in the chat, and please don't spam it.

50:59Like, you only get one choice. Pick a number, and then stick to it. If you have more than one, I'm just gonna disqualify you. So thank you very much for this. I also need to plug my sponsors at this point. It's been about 50 minutes into the interview. And after this, I also have to pick some questions that you have in the chat, also from Wayne Vaughn, who's still listening. Really cool. First of all, there's gonna be two hard forks of Bitcoin. We're stuck in eternal 2017 here.

51:29One of them is about BIP 110, and it's coming in about eight days or something, and the other one is about BIP 300, and it's coming possibly after the 20th of August. And if you really want to mine them, or you want to speculate on the lower difficulty that they're going to have at launch, or you want to 51% attack them, it's part of the Nakamoto consensus, why not? Use Braiins Hashpower, which is a service that lets you rent hash power. So if you don't have a lot of ASICs or whatever, you just rent it.

52:03I think for $100 you can get a few hours of SHA-256 hashrate, and you can direct it anywhere you want for any purpose that you want. Check it out. It's hashpower.braiins.com, Braiins with a double I. Also Cake Wallet, they're the ones doing the giveaway, and they have a wallet that supports everything that Vinny likes. They also support Solana. They also support Ethereum. They support Bitcoin with some privacy features like silent payments and pay joins. They support Zcash, Monero, you name it. It's really cool.

52:37They also have a swapping feature, and you can buy gift cards and other stuff inside of Cake Wallet without any other friction. Download the app today. They want to get to 1 million users, and I think they're doing a pretty good job. Also SideShift, which is the place where I recommend that you swap your stablecoins. These are not censorship resistant money, so if someone wants to pay you in stablecoins, just use SideShift for the purpose of swapping. Put your Bitcoin address into SideShift, and then the person wanting to pay you in stablecoins will send it to SideShift.

53:13You don't need to deal with gas tokens or whatever. You're gonna get what you want directly to your wallet. Check it out. SideShift.ai. And last but not least, we have LayerTwo Labs, and they're launching eCash next month. It's one of the hard forks, and for the longest time, for almost a decade, they tried to get this on Bitcoin. They could not. Now they're gonna have their own hard fork. It's ecash.com. If you're holding Bitcoin today, you're gonna get eCash one-to-one to whatever, or the amount of Bitcoin that you're holding.

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54:18So orangerock.com. Thank you for sitting through my ads. And now, let's ask Wayne Vaughn's question, which is, what do you think about the CLARITY Act, Vinny?

54:30Vinny LinghamI don't think it's gonna pass. I think it's gonna be deferred over to next year or whenever. And they're trying to get it past the midterms. The Democrats don't want it, or they want a whole bunch of conditions that Republicans don't want to give. And so I just don't see it happening. I mean, they're pushing for it, but I'm skeptical it passes.

54:54Vlad CosteaFor context, if there are people outside of the US who don't know why this is important and what this is, what is your very short definition of the CLARITY Act?

55:05Vinny LinghamIt's basically the act that brings crypto legally into the mainstream for banks and financial services to be able to touch it, use it, use it for mortgages, deposits, hold it. It's basically, it's like a market CLARITY Act. What are you allowed to do with crypto as a regulated entity, like a bank?

55:32Vlad CosteaSo how does this impact the average user? If you're someone who maybe wants to use their Bitcoin or Litecoin or Ethereum or whatever to make payments, is this going to make it easier to accept for merchants?

55:47Vinny LinghamYeah, it'll make it easier for merchants to accept it for sure. But again, you still have to deal with some of the scaling issues around that and UX issues as well.

56:00Vlad CosteaRight. So there's not just like this interest from banks to pass it. There's also a utility point of view from, or for those who are actually planning to use their coins for something in the US. Yeah.

56:17Vinny LinghamYes. I mean, it'll make it easier to, I mean, I need to spend more time looking at the actual act itself. There's so many changes. Like I said, I haven't spent that much time on all this stuff. The one thing I'm focusing on right now is MicroStrategy.

56:34Vlad CosteaI did see your interview with Laura Shin about MicroStrategy and I'm not trying to copy that, but I do want to get your perspective on it because I know that your opinions are already out there. I'm trying to get something unique from you, but you believe that Saylor's stretch is going to implode, right?

56:53Vinny LinghamI believe that it may not make, when we say implode, I think it gets to the point where it looks like GBTC back in the days, where it's just trades at a massive discount. No one wants to touch it. It spends years trying to get out of that. Eventually maybe a Bitcoin cycle or halving cycle gets him out of it. But I think that he's piled on so much debt into MicroStrategy. And the one thing I think is interesting is given that he's not been buying Bitcoin these past few weeks, the Bitcoin price is holding up pretty well.

57:25I don't know how long that lasts. I don't know who's busy buying it at scale. But he's pumped up his reserve now, and he's got more than two years with the reserve. But STRC is still trading at $88. So his prefs are still 11% below the target. So he has to raise interest rates at some point to get it back up there. Raising interest rates drains his reserves. The people who pay the price for this is going to be MicroStrategy A-class shareholders because he has to dilute them every time he needs to raise cash.

57:55I think August is potentially a bit of a bloodbath month for MicroStrategy if for some reason BIP 110 activates with even 10%, 15%, 20% hash power, and you have some network disruption. That's one. The eCash fork happens. There's some disruption there. Maybe it's just, you know, Saylor trying to short the coin. I don't know. Also, we haven't had proof of reserves from MicroStrategy ever. And Saylor is famous for blowing up MicroStrategy one time 26 years ago. And so I'd like to see if in the event of a fork happening and they go, oh, we have 850,000 of the fork coins.

58:38We're going to sell it. And then they realize they only have 750,000 of the fork coins because there's some accounting error issue at MicroStrategy. Because he's not publishing proof of reserves, it's just trust us. We have the coins. I just don't like that.

58:54Vlad CosteaWell, yeah. And he gave a very good, actually very bad explanation for it on stage when he was asked about it. Someone tried to press him like, when are you going to publish proof of reserves? And he tried to explain, well, it's bad for our privacy because we want to whatever. Bitcoin doesn't have any privacy, man. It should be kind of obvious. It has deniability, but not privacy. But my point is that for someone who has been so quiet about the politics of Bitcoin for a few years, now he's coming, taking swings and being like, I'm on this side and I think that this is a bad idea and this is a good idea.

59:33And this is the security consortium that's going to fund development and whatever. So maybe that you're right. August is really a big month for him. And he's trying to make things not happen so that his STRC Doesn't take another blow.

59:52Vinny LinghamI think that's exactly right. And I think he's panicking right now. Because look, Jimmy Song wrote a nice tweet thread the other day, didn't he? We saw it a couple of days ago. He wrote a tweet thread about what happens with this whole fork situation and where he thinks things are going to be. It's called "The Messy Middle." What happens if BIP 110 splits the chain? And, you know, he goes through a whole process there. It's actually very well written. What happens if the BIP 110 chain gets 0% hashrate versus 50% or the hard forks or URSF gets mass adoption.

1:00:33And he said why he thinks those are unlikely. And so he goes through a lot of detail about what can happen. And let's just be honest. Nobody knows what's going to happen here. Like we don't know. I mean, we didn't know at the time in 2017 that we'd have a fork with Bitcoin Cash and then Bitcoin SV as well. And so there's like three forks of Bitcoin effectively or two additional forks of Bitcoin. Like none of this stuff was predictable at the start of the year. I think next month can be an absolute shit show.

1:01:01And I think that Saylor is stepping up right now to defend, you know, his position. And I don't know why he's doing it now. This has been debated for a year. You know, the BIP 110 was released last year. Only in the past two weeks, I think the Core guys are riling him up. He's obviously very close to Core. So Adam Back and the guys are getting him to like do some sort of, you know, some surfing. But I don't know. And I haven't seen the latest numbers for 110. Do you know what it is?

1:01:35Vlad CosteaWell, they only count node counts. And you can basically do a Sybil attack. Rent a lot of computer farms and make them run your version of the code.

1:01:47Vinny LinghamThat's what they did in 2017. That's exactly what they did. They had this Sybil, like, showing you this is where the whole miners standoff versus... which is interesting now, because now it's like, what matters more, hashrate or nodes? And that was the whole debate from 2017. And what we're doing right now is going, oh, no, nodes matter more, which is the BIP 110 argument. And if they fail, then guess what? Nodes don't run the network.

1:02:12Vlad CosteaThey don't have too much hashrate. I think they have less than 10% in terms of support.

1:02:18Vinny LinghamIt looks like 2% signaling right now.

1:02:20Vlad CosteaYeah. So they claim that it's going to be 100% by the end of the signaling time. And it's very weird.

1:02:30Vinny LinghamYeah, but it's kind of ridiculous because like the whole Luke argument back in the days, the user-activated soft fork, is that users are in control, users choose. But they can't get hash power to activate it. The users aren't in control. But I think they're going to go nuclear and just try to orphan blocks using or rather reject blocks using nodes. And see what happens. I don't know. Who knows what happens.

1:02:55Vlad CosteaI think that there was this massive rewriting of history and PSYOP regarding how SegWit was activated. And we do have to remember that SegWit was massively agreed upon. Like there was even SegWit2x at the time. So everyone sort of agreed that SegWit is necessary.

1:03:14Vinny LinghamMiners activated the SegWit2x and then they didn't increase the block size. So there was a two step process that everyone agreed to do it. And then they backed off on the 2x side. So I think it was BIP 147. It was BIP 141, 147 and 148. And I can't remember the exact sequence. This is like nine years ago. But there was a situation where the miners were hoodwinked into activating SegWit. And then at the last minute, Jihan Wu was so focused on Bitcoin Cash that everyone else kind of pulled out of actually doing the fork in the end.

1:03:52And that's what happened. That's what saved the whole fork, the 2x side of it.

1:03:57Vlad CosteaYeah. And also people have a distorted memory of what happened with Bitcoin Cash. I think that was the first of August. That one was not popular until SegWit2x did not happen. All the eyes were set on SegWit2x at the time. And they were saying this is going to be the hard fork coming from the New York agreement and all of these exchanges and all of these businesses. And then when it did not happen, they just said, well, we already have a big block version of Bitcoin.

1:04:28We can just join this one.

1:04:32Vinny LinghamYeah, I agree. There's a lot of history writing for sure.

1:04:37Vlad CosteaBut this is something that Bitcoin is very bad at. Like, if you ask the average person today in Bitcoin, who's Gavin Andresen, they're going to be like, oh, that's the guy who got bamboozled by Craig Wright. And that's kind of the greatest extent of their knowledge. That's all they know.

1:04:53Vinny LinghamI spoke to Gavin a couple of years ago, maybe five, six, seven years ago. And he was like, you know, he doesn't think he got bamboozled. And he said to me, he's never recanted. He's never actually said I was bamboozled. He's never recanted it.

1:05:10Vlad CosteaI think he did. That's actually his own word, bamboozled.

1:05:18Vinny LinghamWhen was this? Recently?

1:05:21Vlad CosteaNo, it was a few years ago.

1:05:28Vinny LinghamI don't know. This is why I said, this is so painful. This whole like back and forth. This is what happens. I just think that someone's going to screw something up at some point.

1:05:38Vlad CosteaSo what's your take on the whole Craig Wright situation? Did you ever think that he might be Satoshi?

1:05:45Vinny LinghamI think Craig was, first of all, I'll make it very clear. I don't think Satoshi was one person. I think it was a group of three people, probably. The fourth being Hal Finney. But I don't think Hal was part of the original Bitcoin crew. I think he joined, probably he was the fourth guy. And so who are the three people? Not sure. But I'm damn sure it's not Adam Back. So, you know, Adam Back or what's the other guy?

1:06:18Todd. You know, what's his name? Peter. Peter Todd.

1:06:24Vlad CosteaYou think Peter was one of the Satoshi people?

1:06:28Vinny LinghamNo, absolutely not. So I don't believe that. Do I think Craig was involved? I think he probably was. You know, he was in the first, maybe the first three, maybe the first 10. Who knows? But he was definitely early on.

1:06:45And I think that the interesting thing with the whole sort of, you know, Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman is like, you know, maybe Kleiman was Satoshi. You know, maybe he was the guy. I don't know. And maybe, you know, maybe Craig is just was close to him and part of the team. I don't know. It's hard to say. We don't have any data. The other guy who is interesting is a guy named, well, his nickname was Scronty. What's his name? Paul/Phil Wilson. I've had some chats with him and a bunch of people have.

1:07:17And, you know, he's a candidate as well. But he's kind of like, I mean, he fits the mold for what Satoshi could look like. If you ever meet the guy, he was at the Satoshi Roundtable one year and he has very deep insight into Bitcoin, which is great. But, you know, so he's a candidate. I think he's a bunch of candidates for it. I don't think anyone would know. I think that if anyone could have had it, same for it by now, they would have, they could have, would have done it, maybe. But maybe we'll know. I don't know.

1:07:44Vlad CosteaThere's also this information from Hal Finney's logs where his node connected to Satoshi's node. And Satoshi had this public IP address, which so supposedly Satoshi was running two miners. One of them was on Tor and the other one was on ClearNet. The one that was on ClearNet was operating on an ISP from California. So Satoshi had this IP address from his miner that was based in California.

1:08:16Vinny LinghamYeah, but you could have a VPN doing that.

1:08:19Vlad CosteaSure, but that's not from a data center. It's from actually a residential Internet company. Of course, you can set up a proxy, which is...

1:08:28Vinny LinghamI can tell you who knows. Who knows who Satoshi is, probably, is GMX, who had the email account. But the German privacy laws are so strong, you'll never get that out of them.

1:08:42Vlad CosteaWell, that's interesting, but I think GMX required no information other than your IP. So I'm not sure if they store logs.

1:08:49Vinny LinghamAnd didn't he pay for it? The other one is, yeah, there's a couple of ISPs that probably knew. Whoever bought the domain name as well, whoever paid for that, there's a credit card bill, I'm sure, for that.

1:09:06Vlad CosteaYeah, supposedly. So people have speculated that Satoshi might have used Liberty Reserve or whatever to pay for the domain name, maybe. I don't know.

1:09:14Vinny LinghamIt was a long time ago.

1:09:18Vlad CosteaIt was. But this is maybe the biggest leak in the whole information that we know. There was this IP address that Satoshi was using, and it comes from California. And it's like a residential Internet company, an ISP that was bought out twice since then.

1:09:37Vinny LinghamIt's possible. I think the records are gone. I don't think they'll figure it out.

1:09:44Vlad CosteaYeah, but I don't think it was someone from Australia. That's what I'm trying to point out, that there's definitely something there, like Hal Finney had a neighbor called...

1:09:53Vinny LinghamI still think that Satoshi was Australian. Just from the timelines, the way he spoke, the way he wrote, his verbiage, what he said. I think it's probably Australian or maybe New Zealander.

1:10:11Vlad CosteaIf you look at the Satoshi patterns, and I think Jameson Lopp did that. He was basically working around the US time, meaning that when he was posting on the forums and whatever, it's almost like he was based in US. He had a very clear work and sleep schedule.

1:10:30Vinny LinghamYeah, but his writing style and his double spaces and stuff. I'm from South Africa, it's very similar.

1:10:40Vlad CosteaYeah, I don't know. Just like you can say that he could have been able to fake his IP address, he could also fake his writing style.

1:10:51Vinny LinghamIt's possible.

1:10:55Vlad CosteaI'm not sold on anything regarding Craig Wright. Like, the whole claim is bogus to me. And I think Roger Ver was able to sue him and win in court, because he actually gave him the benefit of the doubt until one day when they were talking about the Bitcoin addresses containing a checksum, which Roger knew that they do, and Craig apparently had no idea. This was maybe 2018, and that's when Roger realized that.

1:11:25Vinny LinghamRoger is absolutely convinced it's not Craig, so that's fine. And I mean, I would definitely take Roger's view seriously, because he was… Him and I got along well, because I think we had the same intentions with Bitcoin, or we saw the future of Bitcoin in the same way. I'm not saying Craig is Satoshi, I'm just saying there's an argument for him to have been involved at some stage early on. So I've seen some old videos of his interviews and stuff, and it looks… I always thought it was kind of strange how he was able to pay those legal bills like $30 million so quickly as well in the UK.

1:12:04You know about that, right? Like he got fined, he had a $30 million judgment against him, the wire came straight there, same day. I don't think it was Calvin paying it, but who knows?

1:12:13Vlad CosteaI don't know. Maybe it was his quote-unquote full billionaire mode, which he claimed to be unleashing eight years ago or whatever. But yeah, it's quite interesting when you start putting the pieces together and speculating a bit, like the amount of information that we have. We definitely have something, but we don't have anything conclusive.

1:12:39Vinny LinghamHave you tried asking Claude who Satoshi is?

1:12:42Vlad CosteaAsking who? Claude? I think it's just going to quote from the recent documentaries and be like, oh, possibly Peter Todd or Adam Back.

1:12:57Vinny LinghamI'm asking it now.

1:12:59Vlad CosteaWhich version of Claude is it, for the record?

1:13:02Vinny LinghamFable 5. Fable 5. Who is Satoshi? Yeah, who is Satoshi? What's your best guess based on all the data you have?

1:13:12Vlad CosteaOkay, I'm curious to see the answer. I never tried Fable, I've only used Opus.

1:13:17Vinny LinghamNick Szabo is 30%. Hal Finney is 20%. Len Sassaman, 10%. Adam Back, 5%. Peter Todd, 2%. Craig Wright, 0%. And a small team, someone we never heard of, is 30%.

1:13:36Okay. And it says Craig Wright, 0% because of the forged evidence, as Justice Mellor said. Ignore the court case.

1:13:45And then for Craig Wright, Henry Lake.

1:13:50Vlad CosteaI think there's a strong case for Nick Szabo, to be honest.

1:14:01Satoshi's code was not great. It was not production level. He didn't look like a professional C++ coder. He looked more like someone who pieced together this thing. And there are lots of similarities with BitGold, which is something that Nick Szabo was working on.

1:14:17Vinny LinghamI've met Szabo. I'd be disappointed with him.

1:14:24What it does say here is the counter argument is that Szabo is a lawyer, economist, cryptographer, and Satoshi's code reads like a working systems engineer, not a theorist.

1:14:39Vlad CosteaBut the whitepaper does sound like something that he could write. Like if you read Szabo's works about God protocols and smart contracts, he's obsessed with minimizing trusted third parties. And if you look for trusted third parties in the whitepaper, you're going to see that it's mentioned quite a few times. Trusted. Yeah.

1:15:05Vinny LinghamOkay, we've got a few minutes to wrap up here. What else would you like to cover?

1:15:10Vlad CosteaWell, let's talk about your projection. Let's say that if the block size wars went differently and we actually scaled Bitcoin and maybe that Blockstream was not there to obstruct the process, where do you think Bitcoin would be? You said you were a massive maximalist. It was possibly easy to be a maximalist when the dominance of Bitcoin was 90% or something.

1:15:36Vinny LinghamWell, if you remember that Ethereum was really co-founded on the principle that, you know, what they were trying to build on Bitcoin, the core developers wouldn't allow them to do, right? So they took out a script, they took out a bunch of opcodes. And so, you know, it was just, you remember these stories, right?

1:16:01Vlad CosteaI was there, but I was more of a passive observer. I was not involved in any way. I was just a broke student.

1:16:08Vinny LinghamYeah, Vitalik went to the Core developers and tried to like pitch building effectively what Ethereum is on top of Bitcoin. And they were just like, absolutely no way. They took out a whole bunch of opcodes. And so he built Ethereum. Bitcoin wouldn't scale blocks for transaction throughput. So Solana came along and a whole bunch of others. And we just got into a world where, you know, it's like The Man in the High Castle, right? Like this is a post-core small block sort of vision of the world.

1:16:37And so all that demand went elsewhere. And we created a whole industry of altcoins that could solve the problems that Bitcoin couldn't solve. If we hadn't done that, you could have a situation where Bitcoin was running at, and I think BSV does gigabyte blocks, but even if you just did like 48 meg or 128 meg blocks, whatever, you could have a much bigger Bitcoin that's being used as a global settlement layer for transactions. And it would be used for monetary uses and non-monetary uses right now.

1:17:08And people would be building on top of it. You'd have identity, you'd have everything built on a singular blockchain that just works and it's fast. And you have zero-conf and simple payments. And it would just be a consensus layer for the world. And you'd have miners, you know, running. You have so many data centers out there mining Bitcoin because the transaction fees would be more than the block rewards potentially. And maybe Bitcoin's price wouldn't be as high as it is today, but the volume would be there.

1:17:36Maybe it could be higher, who knows? But the volume would be there. And so you'd make money on transaction volume payments and not block rewards, which are going to run out over time. I mean, the whole point, if you look at the whitepaper and Satoshi's writing, the whole point of the block rewards was it's a way of using a short-term inflation to kickstart and bootstrap the network. But ultimately, transaction fees were supposed to replace that. And so that's the vision I had for Bitcoin was sticking to the whitepaper and saying, do we get to a world where transaction fees are what covers it sustainably? So when you run out of the inflation rewards, the fees generate the value of the network.

1:18:16Vlad CosteaI very much agree with that. What's the price prediction? Like, do you think Bitcoin would be much higher right now if we did not fight so much? I think so. I think so.

1:18:28Vinny LinghamI mean, I think Bitcoin would be over 100,000, but it would be a very slow ascent, you know, because we have all these volume of transactions going through and so much deep liquidity would be very hard to move the price by more than, you know, like 1% in a day or even a half percent a day. So it would just require constant growth in transaction volumes and speculation itself wouldn't be, it would be a very stable asset, which would be like, hey, this thing's growing at 12% a year, 15% a year.

1:18:55You know, we get rid of the whole boom bust cycle probably as well.

1:18:59Vlad CosteaWait, so if we actually used Bitcoin as cash, it would be an actual store of value today? Yes. That's interesting.

1:19:12That's something we should think about. Something that I see on the market right now is Tron. And of course, you can argue that there is manipulation there and there is the insider trading and whatever. But ever since Tron added USDT, it has outperformed Bitcoin. Like if you look at the chart, Tron against BTC over the last five years has been constantly outperforming. And it's almost like, you know, when it's something that's used and people use the token for gas and they stake it and whatever, it has actual economic activity and the market demands it.

1:19:48Bitcoiners are so good at understanding limited supply, but they are so bad at understanding why there needs to be demand for it and how to create demand and how to sustain the demand for it. Because we're here 17 years later not knowing how to use the Bitcoin block space. We're like, well, we don't like these people. We should filter them out. Then how are you going to get people to pay the miners? And nobody knows.

1:20:14Vinny LinghamI agree. My biggest concern for Bitcoin is when there's a lot of hand waviness over like what happens when the block rewards run out and everyone thinks, oh, we still have years to go. No, actually, we don't. Twelve years, eight years, maybe. And then you have a problem. The biggest problem you have is if the price doesn't keep going up. And look where it is now. I mean, the miners can't really handle a world where Bitcoin sits under 100k for another five years. And you say, well, the difficulty will just readjust and whatever else.

1:20:47When you have competing SHA-256 chains and you have two others with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and now you can have eCash potentially, whatever, the hash power can go elsewhere. Also, if all the hash power for SHA-256 is not concentrated on Bitcoin and it can be rented out, then that's how you get attacks. I mean, it's trivial. It's trivial for someone to go and borrow and rent out enough hash power for a day and just overpay for it and attack the network. So, you know, the security risk of Bitcoin is not all the ASIC power is pointed at Bitcoin at any point in time.

1:21:26If you get to a point where the Bitcoin price drops down to 30k or 20k right now and then hash power goes offline and someone, a malicious state actor wants to attack Bitcoin, they can. Don't say that, oh, well, it's not profitable. State actors don't give a shit. Korea doesn't care. You know, Iran doesn't care. People don't understand how these guys think. They don't care about losing a billion dollars renting Bitcoin hash power. If they can rent the hash power and attack the network, they'll do it.

1:21:54Vlad CosteaYeah, that's true. Last question for you before I let you go. Actually, there are two of them. The first one is a request that you reveal your number so that we can determine if there's any winner in the chat.

1:22:08Vinny LinghamOkay, my number is 121.

1:22:12Vlad CosteaIt's from 1 to 150, but I think most people post it from 1 to 100, so I don't think we have a winner here.

1:22:21Vinny LinghamOkay, then I'll do the square root of that, 11.

1:22:24Vlad Costea11. Okay, I'll search. Oh, there is an 11 from Archive Jap. Congratulations. And if there is another one, let me know. The other question for you before I let you go. Will you be claiming any of the airdrops coming from the BIP 110 or the BIP 300 hard forks that we're going to have in August? And if so, are you planning to dump them on the market immediately or do you want to test whatever they have to provide? Or will you hold them just in case?

1:22:59Vinny LinghamI mean, I don't have a lot of Bitcoin that's not in cold storage. And even my cold storage number is very low. It's not a lot. So I just leave it. It's not worth doing something with it. I guess I've been out of crypto for a while. I'm not very exposed to crypto. So I'm just leaving it.

1:23:20Vlad CosteaOkay, thank you very much, Vinny. If you also want to claim a prize from Cake Wallet, you can download Cake Wallet and I'll send you $100 of Zcash from them. I forgot to tell you this. So you don't feel like you didn't get paid for this, even though I don't directly pay my guests. Nobody should have that expectation. But thank you very much for your time. Send me a Zcash address if you want. And I look forward to seeing what's happening with your predictions because you're the oracle and you said that it's going to be a hard month for Saylor.

1:23:54Vinny LinghamYeah, I think so. I think August will be tough. I think earnings call comes out tomorrow. So let's see what happens afterwards.

1:24:04Vlad CosteaOkay, thank you very much. And thanks to the sponsors. Once again, SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, Orange Rock, LayerTwo Labs and Cake Wallet. And there's another winner that I found in the chat, Zach Mooner, who also won. So I guess I'm going to have to split the reward. I'll take a better look tomorrow when YouTube processes the video to actually determine how many people actually won. But yeah, it's 11. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, Vinny. Follow him at @VinnyLingham on Twitter and everywhere else. And I'll see you in the next one.

1:24:41Vinny LinghamThanks, man. See you later. Bye.