S17 E46: Livestream from Tabconf 8, Part 1 (feat. Paul Sztorc, Andre Beganski, Alex Lewin, Janusz, Christopher Allen, Will & Michael Tidwell)

0:47Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast at TABConf. I'm Vlad, and I'm sitting next to the one and only Paul Sztorc, who's less than 20 days away from launching the masterpiece of his life.

0:58Paul SztorcThe worst? Well, okay. We'll see. That's for historians to judge, you know? But it's true, we have this giant poster here, so it's a perfect backdrop for a Bitcoin Takeover episode.

1:13Vlad CosteaAnd it's uncensored. It is Bitcoin Takeover. People here at the conference, they can just jump in and talk. And Paul is here to show us... like, I've seen you do a tech demo of the enforcer for drivechains.

1:24Paul SztorcOh, that's true. We were looking at CUSF 2. This is the Core Untouched Soft Fork software. We made one with BIP 300, and actually we have another one that does more cool stuff. Do I need the microphone for this, or no?

1:41Vlad CosteaNo, I mean, I'm just holding it just in case mine is louder and it picks up the sound. No one can see this, though. It's just a tiny screen.

1:48Paul SztorcSo we'll have to take screenshots of it. We'll take a video, we'll post a video. But you can see it.

1:55Vlad CosteaSo what am I looking at?

1:57Paul SztorcThis is the tab of the window at the top. You see the tabs. CUSF 2.

2:02Vlad CosteaCUSF 2.

2:03Paul SztorcSo CUSF is the Core Untouched Soft Fork, for those of you who don't know.

2:08Vlad CosteaThat's right.

2:09Paul SztorcThe first one we did was BIP 300/301. So you do soft forks without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin. And the first one was BIP 300/301. This is the second one. So this is like Gremlins... Trolls 2.

2:22Vlad CosteaOkay. Second edition.

2:25Paul SztorcAnd as you can see, it has four features. We have four different quantum-resistant signature options: two hash, two lattice. And we have OP_VAULT. You can seal your coins away. So if you live in France and you're at risk of dying as a result of your Bitcoin involvement, you could use that to protect your coins and dissuade people from coming to your house and killing you.

2:52Vlad CosteaTalk about uncensored.

2:54Paul SztorcThen we have OP_CTV, and we have OP_CAT.

2:57Vlad CosteaYeah. And, you know, Jeremy Rubin tried to get CTV into Bitcoin for so long.

3:01Paul SztorcBut we have it in this here, and we have OP_CAT. And we will take a video of this and then we'll post it so that people can see it. It looks kind of cool, right? See, you got the quantum... These are the quantum-vulnerable. See, this is vulnerable. These are the UTXOs you have. And if you go all the way to the bottom, it says, "Oh, you can sweep your coins into a quantum-resistant UTXO." You hear that? You hear that, Nic Carter, and other people who are into this? Problem solved right here.

3:40Vlad CosteaSo where is this running? Where can people check this out?

3:44Paul SztorcThis will be in the new version of BitWindow. And check out BitWindow right now to see the first CUSF. And then you just... it's like a little update button. And yes, so then people should be able to try it out. It will not work on the BTC network unless 51% of the hashrate over there uses it. And by "uses it," I just mean they just run the second piece of software next to Bitcoin Core. That should cost them basically nothing to do, which is why... when will they do it? Never. A million billion years. It'll never happen. Because they're all spineless. Spineless cowards with no leadership skills. Or some other reason, I'm sure.

4:28Vlad CosteaIsn't that like the point, to not have leaders?

4:33Paul SztorcIn this case, no. But in other cases, yes, sure. But in this case, I don't think it's that great. Well, I mean, you decide. A lot of people think this quantum thing is fake anyway, and that it will never happen. They say there will never be a Q-Day. That's what some people say.

4:50Vlad CosteaPeople have said that. You've heard these rumors. I did. And I did have people saying that this is all just FUD and it's a scam to support some sort of industry that's building vaporware, or vapor hardware, whatever. It's just that it's like Pascal's Wager, right? Like, if quantum is wrong and we're optimizing for something which does not exist, then maybe nothing will happen, right? But if quantum is real and we don't do anything, that's the worst kind of situation ever.

5:20Paul SztorcWell, no, you're wrong. The worst situation ever is if we contradict our dear leader, Supreme Lord Saylor, when he says that we don't need any development or any technical progress in Bitcoin.

5:33Vlad CosteaSo he doesn't want quantum signatures? But for the purpose of freezing Satoshi's coins?

5:39Paul SztorcHe doesn't know. Well, he's saying we don't need developers, but then when someone asks him, "What about quantum?", he says, "Well, there will be a fix." So he wants it both ways. But the point is, the quantum signatures, we could easily get them. It just requires this soft fork, in this case the Core Untouched Soft Fork. No lines of code changed in Bitcoin. But no one wants to do even that. So even to do that is too much. It's beyond the pale. So we have to find a way of doing it without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin and without asking anyone else on Earth to do anything. But it also has to work perfectly and stop a quantum computer. So it's a high bar. But I'm sure in 30 or 40 years we'll have another soft fork in Bitcoin that deals with it, maybe. But we could just do it all right now with CUSF 2. But we definitely won't. In Bitcoin we definitely won't, but on eCash we definitely will.

6:43Vlad CosteaI think this whole argument that we're going to do this in 2029, 2032, whatever, is super overconfident and cocky. It just implies that Bitcoin has no competition and nothing else can happen, and Bitcoin is going to be number one even if we do nothing, which I think is fundamentally wrong. And I see it, especially from the Zcash side right now, that they're taking some of the network effects. They have some of the VCs that used to support Bitcoin right now pushing it, from Naval all the way to the Winklevoss twins, and a bunch of other guys like Balaji from the network state. I was there in Singapore last week, and I've seen what's going on, and honestly, it's impressive.

7:23Paul SztorcWe used to have a monopoly on everything in Bitcoin. So we had 99% of the market cap, where all the smart people were Bitcoin. There was no altcoin. You know, until 2016, there was no altcoin market. Bitcoin was 95, 99, 98% of the market cap. There was no Ethereum. Really, it was in 2016 that Ethereum rocketed up from, like, nothing to, like, 30% of Bitcoin's market cap. So we used to have everything, and there used to be absolutely no projects. The altcoins didn't have any users or any projects. Completely different situation now. Most of the transaction fees paid are paid by altcoins, by a huge margin. And then when, you know, when you have Trump do his Trump coin, or Melania do the Melania coin, or Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, do his, those are all, like, on Pump.fun on Solana or something. Not saying that that's a super important thing, but you have Zcash for privacy. Darknet markets are Monero only. You can go down the list, basically everything. The stablecoin volume that was originally a Bitcoin project is now off Bitcoin.

8:38So I think now we've entered a period of increasingly quiet desperation, where people in Bitcoin are, you know, trying to ignore... You know, Zcash has this technology, has a use case, has users, has supporters, has media personalities. So yeah, we could have had all that on Bitcoin this whole time, but instead we have this belief in Bitcoin's infallibility. You and I both agree that that's a terrible way of looking at it. And even, like... so does basically everyone else. Like, even you can look at, like, Greg Maxwell, who has a famous quote. He says the most likely way that Bitcoin would fail would be, like, if people, you know, just kind of stop putting in the work or stop believing. I don't remember the exact quote. It was something like, if we believe that Bitcoin can't fail, that's probably the most likely way it fails, or something like that. And so yeah, join our club of Vlad, myself and Greg Maxwell. We all think that this idea is a terrible idea. But this idea is the mainstream view.

9:44Vlad CosteaI don't think I go to the same clubs as Greg Maxwell.

9:46Paul SztorcWell, in this case, we are.

9:48Vlad CosteaBut it does say here, "before it's too late." Like, what does that mean? What does too late mean?

9:55Paul SztorcWell, I mean, I think we could... in Bitcoin, we could still, like, turn over a new leaf, and we could just do all these soft forks, including CTV and OP_VAULT and TXHASH, and do all these different things. But we have to get over ourselves. But I don't think that we will. So if we continue on the path that we're on, it'll just be the empty mempool. Two, three years later, we'll be thinking, "Oh, it's been another three years and no soft fork."

10:31Vlad CosteaMy camera died. Just a second. This is what happens when you go live. Is this even working for charging? Anyway, I'm going to switch to the webcam from the laptop, which is a good backup. And we've been plunged into darkness. A lot of my effort has been in vain for setting up the camera, but it's fine, I'm used to it. Okay, this is horrible.

11:02Paul SztorcI like it. It's got that avant-garde... You know, this is like what great directors do. They tilt the camera. It's crooked, just like Bitcoin Core.

11:12Vlad CosteaYeah, that's true. At least it's interesting.

11:17Paul SztorcBut yeah, so later this month, eCash.com, hard fork of Bitcoin.

11:26Vlad CosteaNot mandatory. Just take free coins and do whatever you want.

11:31Paul SztorcYeah, that's the fun part, that you don't have to pay anything.

11:34Vlad CosteaIf you already have Bitcoin, you can claim your free eCash, and you can see what Bitcoin could have looked like if we didn't have so much of the bad culture, which is against changing anything, against supporting developers to build anything on Bitcoin. Everything is a scam. Every attempt to change Bitcoin is a scam. I think this is part of the creed.

11:58Paul SztorcYes. Unfortunately, yes. There's no reason for any of it, though, because all the soft forks have... they're all reversible, also. So they're opt-in, ignorable and reversible. And yet we can't do that. So, you know, what do you want? But I was on stage making this argument as well, and we don't hear... you don't hear any cogent pushback. You know, you go up on stage, and the table says you have 45 minutes to disagree with Paul. But we really don't... you know, people don't really. They agree with what I have to say. It's very bizarre.

12:31Vlad CosteaWait, so you were on a panel today, right?

12:33Paul SztorcYeah, I did, like, a 15-minute talk of, like, here's all the things we should be doing differently. And then 45 minutes for people to say, "Oh, that's not right, we shouldn't do it." But people don't really. People just sort of say, "Oh, you know..." People are just curious about, "Oh, maybe we should do it that way." So I don't know. To me, that seems like more evidence that it must be right. But there's no explanation for any of this. Like, there's no reason why we don't do more soft forks in Bitcoin. No one seems to know the reason. Or people just say it's a good thing that, you know, that we can't do the soft fork, which, again, that's the one that keeps the old network untouched. So you'd think that was the conservative one.

13:25Vlad CosteaWell, soft forks are optional. But if you ask Luke, he's going to say that every soft fork is a longer-time hard fork, meaning that eventually all the network, the entirety of the node network, is going to upgrade to the latest version. So they believe that essentially there is no difference, except for the activation way.

13:45Paul SztorcWell, I think that's ridiculous. Like, there's a big difference between eventually and immediately. Like, what if you said something like, "No one's forcing you to use this new word in the English language"? You invent a new word. You invent the word, like, "Kafkaesque." And then people say, "Well, over time, it's going to become mandatory." And it's like, well, kind of, like, only if it's a popular word, you know? Actually, you could come up with a word that everyone hates. That whole "eventually" part of it is doing a lot of work, because it's saying, well, actually, if people decide, as time goes on, they hate the word, then you won't be forced. You know, so it's perfect. It's exactly what we want.

14:27Vlad CosteaI'm actually realizing that the chair is in the shot, so it should be more like this. This is slightly better. It sucks, because I spent so much time setting up the tripod and the cables and whatever, and then the camera died and it's not charging. I need to figure out what's happening. But it's good that we're still live and we're still talking. I hope people can hear us. We can also take questions live.

14:54Paul SztorcYeah. What do you want to hear about?

14:57Vlad CosteaLet's see if we have any good... Do we have any comments at all? Oh, we have some.

15:05Someone is saying, "How can one claim the eCash? Crazy how Saylor gets more."

15:11Paul SztorcDownload the software. Well, Saylor doesn't self-custody, I bet. So he may not get any, because he just has it all in BitGo or whatever. I don't know if that's true, but I assume it's true. Right? I mean, does he actually know how private keys work? Maybe not. I assume so, but even that might not be true. He might just have it all at BitGo. I don't know.

15:35Vlad CosteaOr if it's not BitGo... I did have Mike Belshe on the show, and he was very secretive about his clients. I've asked him, "Isn't this ironic, that you started out as a company that offers self-custody solutions, and now you're like the largest bank in the space?" He said, "Well, we still have a free two-out-of-three multisig that you can get on BitGo.com," which is interesting. Like, I'm sure that some people use that, but it's not like the main source of revenue for the company. And it's also disappointing, that so much... like, the entire revolution of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is self-custody. The fact that nobody can take the money away from you. You can make transactions with whoever you want, whenever you want, in any amount that you want, without anyone being able to stop it. And if you go back to custodians, they're going to make lists. They're going to say, "Well, you can't do that. We don't like what you're doing, if you want to keep your account with us," or "You can't send money to your cousin in, I don't know, Russia," or whatever. And it's really unfortunate, because that's what started with the war on crypto, with PGP. It was a war on encryption. And the fact that at the time, encrypting your communications was considered to be an act of defying the post-World War II status quo in the world.

16:58Paul SztorcWell, there was this event called World War II, with the Enigma code-breaking project, where hundreds of millions of people's lives were at stake. Ever since then, governments and militaries around the world, they were more interested in cryptography. They were like, "Whoa, this cryptography thing, we got to get ahead of that." So I partially understand where they're coming from. But yeah, so Michael Saylor may not get any. But, you know, I didn't know what that person meant, which is, you know, they have, like, a huge amount. How do you get them? You just download our software. It will sync the blockchain, and it syncs the BTC blockchain as if it were eCash.com history. So your coins are waiting. An equal number of coins will be waiting for you there, that you have self-custody of now. And then from there, you can split the coins, send them independently of your BTC. You can send them, you can sell them, buy them, sell them, do anything you want with them.

18:06Vlad CosteaI also heard you yesterday making the case for DeFi with eCash, because people constantly ask you, "Where is this going to get listed? Which exchanges are going to support it?" And I sort of respect the fact that you don't want to pay for getting listed, which seems to be an industry standard. And instead you're looking for free ways to basically get the coin in lots of places. And there's a Solana memecoin. I think you have a deal with that one, like the top, I don't know, 20 or something, 15 holders are going to get some coins?

18:38Paul SztorcWe actually expanded upon that, because now there are a few. There's one for the beta network... there's this memecoin that exists independently, that people kind of... we didn't create, we had nothing to do with its creation. And then there is the beta one that is redeemable one-to-one for the beta test coin. And then there's already wrapped ECX, which is also on Solana. And the beauty of this is that you can just swap it for USDC. You can trade it whenever you want. You have liquidity immediately, a very high amount. So the question is... and these things have, like, a DeFi thing. You deposit coins and you deposit USDC. Why spend... could be $100,000, could be more, could be, you know, $50,000, $100,000, a million dollars. Why spend money to get listed on the exchange? You can add the liquidity to this thing. People can buy and sell over there. The people who front the cash, the financial capital, they get the transaction fees from that. So you basically loan money and you make money off of it, and then you can withdraw, take the money back out. Versus just spending one time to be listed on whatever exchange.

19:57But I think that that's definitely the way to go, in particular right now, because it lets you trade in advance, before the network even launches. So yeah, we kind of focus on that, and I kind of just want to see where that goes first, before I were to seriously recommend or... You know, let's just see who just lists it anyway, because whoever lists it will be able to make money off of the transaction fees. So we have a few.

20:29Vlad CosteaWe just got interrupted by Shinobi, who still thinks that using Coldcard is a good idea. And I'm wearing this Coldcard as a trophy, because I was right all along about it being such a bad device. Anyway... Now, what do they say? There's a town hall.

20:43Paul SztorcShould we go in there, or what should we do?

20:46Vlad CosteaI don't know. I'm not going to stop the livestream for that. I will just interview the people who don't go to the town hall. If you want to join the town hall, you're free to drop.

20:55Paul SztorcI think we probably should. But is it the closing ceremony? It's funny you did it on basically day one. It's like TABConf...

21:06Vlad CosteaI was going to ask you if you want to do an onboarding event for the people listening to this, like, to receive some free practice eCash. But you can do that... You're still mic'd up. You can go inside.

21:18Paul SztorcOkay. Should I just give the mic?

21:21Vlad CosteaThe magnet broke off. I'm not sure if I should interrupt this or just try to get someone. Oh, there's a legendary cypherpunk: Christopher Allen. Maybe I can get him to join.

21:33Paul SztorcI mean, you could just livestream it again. Just livestream it a second time.

21:39Vlad CosteaSure. But I don't want to break this streak, or the momentum. And I can watch this at home. I'm trying to create something unique.

21:48Paul SztorcWell, I'll be back.

21:49Vlad CosteaPaul will be back. Thanks to LayerTwo Labs for sponsoring the show. Did you hear that, Paul? Good. Let me ask Christopher Allen. He's right there, and maybe he will want to join the livestream. Check out the other sponsors, too: there's Cake Wallet, there's Braiins Hashpower, there's SideShift.ai, and there's also Orange Rock. Let me see.

22:16Mr. Allen? Later, when you're done, would you like to join my livestream to do an interview?

22:23Christopher AllenUm, okay.

22:24Vlad CosteaI guess now you want to join the town hall?

22:27Christopher AllenYeah.

22:28Vlad CosteaOkay. I'll be here.

22:29Christopher AllenAppreciate it.

22:30Vlad CosteaGreat. Do you want to join the interview, in front of this eCash.com banner? It's uncensored. You can say whatever you want.

22:42[unclear speaker]I have no opinion right now. I'm going to go check out Tidwell's sappy speech.

22:50Vlad CosteaOkay. Maybe I should go there, too. Maybe next time. Okay. Kruw, do you want to join the podcast for your second time?

23:00[unclear speaker]I got to jump on this right now, but afterwards? Is that okay?

23:04Vlad CosteaSure. I'm here. Okay. Okay, party people, we're searching for someone to join this livestream. And I think I see someone very interesting. I think he's working on something that's called Zark, which is a zero-knowledge-proof Ark. A shielded Ark, sort of like Zcash. So let's go to him. I wish I had a cameraman to carry the camera with me, to follow me around.

23:28You want to join the livestream?

23:30André BeganskiSure, I'll join the livestream.

23:31Vlad CosteaThis is your microphone, sir. Welcome to Bitcoin Takeover.

23:35André BeganskiHey, thank you. I'm a big fan, and I've followed you for, like, years at this point. So to see you at the conference and get the chance...

23:42Vlad CosteaWhat's your name? Tell the people watching.

23:44André BeganskiHey, I'm André Beganski, and I'm a senior content manager at MARA Foundation. Before that, a longtime journalist at Decrypt.

23:54Vlad CosteaDecrypt. I remember that. They had the nicest interface for scrolling. Like, before AI, whatever, you had, like, a progress bar that showed you exactly how much of the article you read.

24:04André BeganskiYeah.

24:05Vlad CosteaAnd it was gamified in a way that you felt it rewarding when you read the whole article. So I kind of respected that.

24:11André BeganskiYeah. I liked their focus on experimentation in media.

24:16Vlad CosteaYes. And I was super jealous. I was at Crypto Insider in 2018, and Decrypt was running in parallel, like a competitor. And there was also The Block.

24:25André BeganskiYep.

24:26Vlad CosteaAnd I think Decrypt, I respect it for keeping its integrity. The Block, not so much. No offense. I mean, yes offense. Get offended.

24:35André BeganskiYou're not going to get a hot take out of me on that. But yeah, no, various trade publications throughout the years. I think of DL News as being another one that was very, like, aligned on, you know, serving readers at the beginning.

24:48Vlad CosteaWhat is DL News?

24:49André BeganskiDL News. You know DefiLlama? Are you familiar with DeFi? Okay. So essentially, DefiLlama is, like, this public good in the Ethereum space that's viewed as, like, an objective source of data for, like, different L2s and rollups. One of the things that they emphasize most is just, like, the different stages of rollups on their path from centralization to decentralization, and really getting, like, super deep, deeper than anybody else, into the technicals of, like, okay, does it have an escape hatch where you can pull your funds directly onto L1 if something goes on with the sequencer? And so DL News was their attempt at creating a media arm associated with their public goods programs. So yeah, that's one of them. I mean, there's so many. Blockworks is another one that was big back in the day.

25:45Vlad CosteaI was actually contacted by Blockworks at some point, and they wanted me to give up on Bitcoin Takeover to do their... I think it was called Supply Shock podcast. And I was like, "I'm never going to do that." Like, I don't think there's an amount of money that you can pay me that's going to make me quit my dream project for something that maybe gets paid better, but you're going to shut it down in six months. And they actually did. They ran that with Pete Rizzo for a while, and I think he did a good job, but for some reason he left, and now he also went independent. And I'm like, I was going to end up there anyway.

26:20André BeganskiWell, isn't this like the economics of media in action? You know, I mean, like, I was never around for the days of print journalism, magazines and newspapers. Like, by the time I...

26:31Vlad CosteaI do a magazine.

26:33André BeganskiThat is so sick. Oh, my God.

26:36Vlad CosteaYou can also get this for free. You can scan this QR code on camera, or it's bitcoin-takeover.com/forksmag. F-O-R-K-S-M-A-G. Check it out. It's free to download. But if you want to print, it's going to cost you. But you can get it for free, because you're on the show.

26:55André BeganskiOh, wow. Thank you. This is my reading material for my flight home now.

27:00Vlad CosteaYes, sir.

27:01André BeganskiBut yeah, physical magazines feel great, right? I actually know that there's one called The Ledger that's starting up, which is like this crypto... sort of like, it wants to be like The New Yorker.

27:10Vlad CosteaI hope it's not sponsored by Ledger, because they're not doing well.

27:14André BeganskiNot to my knowledge. But, like, for example, Jeff Benson, who has, like, a prolific career in terms of crypto journalism, like, one of their... Oh, my God, don't get mad at me, I'm spoiling it. But one of the, like, first articles that is in this first issue is, like, "What can crypto people learn from sourdough bread bakers?" Because apparently, like, when you look at hobbies and you, like, get people's takes on hobbies, especially among men, for some reason, baking sourdough bread is, like, universally recognized as one of the coolest hobbies you can have.

27:49Vlad CosteaI don't think I can relate to that. Maybe there's something wrong with me.

27:53André BeganskiSo, like, he goes through and he just interviews people who bake sourdough bread, and they don't know anything about crypto, but he asks them about it. And it's just, like, it's really cool. It's not going to win a Pulitzer, but it's insightful and it's entertaining. And I just want to kind of, like, give you your flowers as, like, an independent media creator. Like, that is so hard. And I think for you, like, you're somebody who's been doing this for years at this point. I always see you in the replies of, like, different posts, like, "What are we doing, this podcast?" And, like, it's got to take a certain amount of hustle. And I hear what you're saying about this idea of, like, you've been independent from the beginning, if I understand things correctly, right?

28:36Vlad CosteaWell, sort of, because at one point I was doing my podcast and working for Bitcoin Magazine. And there wasn't quite a conflict of interest there.

28:44André BeganskiThere was this question, I bet, in terms of, like, okay, which one do I want to invest more time in, especially from your perspective, like, back then?

28:53Vlad CosteaOf course. But there was one that paid the bills, and there was another one that was making no money.

28:58André BeganskiWhich one was the one that was making no money?

29:00Vlad CosteaBitcoin Takeover. Like, in the first three, four seasons, I was making nothing.

29:04André BeganskiThat's incredible.

29:05Vlad CosteaIt was just a hobby.

29:06André BeganskiBut you, like, invested in it, and you stuck with it, and you grew it over time.

29:10Vlad CosteaIn the past years, like, whatever.

29:13André BeganskiAnd now it's, like, gotten to the point where it's like, how could I ever, like, step away from this?

29:17Vlad CosteaYou know, I love it. I don't see myself doing anything else. And I'm proud that, you know, I did computer science in high school, and I could have been a mediocre coder right now in C++. I'm happy that I did not pursue that, because this is going to be much harder to get replaced by AI, as opposed to mediocre coders. Like, people...

29:39André BeganskiStorytellers.

29:40Vlad CosteaStorytellers, entertainers, historians, whatever it is that makes people care about something. And I talked about this yesterday with some guys who are here. Anyway, I'm not going to interrupt them. But basically, if you can build anything in ten minutes with AI, nobody's going to care about it. You can make an identical version, or even a better version, of something that's already out there and is popular. Like, let's say you can make a better Facebook or whatever. But the hardest part is getting people to care about it.

30:15André BeganskiYeah.

30:16Vlad CosteaAnd if you hire people to work on something and you pay humans, you actually get some advocates who are going to be promoting it and saying, "Well, Mom, I'm working on this. Can you give it a try? What do you think?" Whatever. So that's, like, a good start for getting network effects. If everything is created with AI, nobody's going to care about it. There's no human that's going to look at it and appreciate it.

30:36André BeganskiCan we take a step back here?

30:39Vlad CosteaSure.

30:40André BeganskiBecause I feel like the people on the ground who are doing the work, they're often not the decision makers. With you, you're the boss. You are the CEO, you are the manager, right? And so, like, I think when we look at media broadly, we're seeing this idea where it's like upper management, you know, values... they're like, "Hey, this is the direction that things are going," right? But I think, like, one of the things that, like, really separates good publications from bad publications is original news. Like, it's so lost on... like, you go to Twitter and you open it up, everybody's saying the same stuff, same headlines and stuff. And so, like, this idea that, like, "Oh, I can let an employee, for a week, two weeks, a month, go off and investigate this thing"... Like, oftentimes I feel like journalists have to take that upon themselves in these trade publications, just because of this constant hamster wheel for clicks. And I think, like, I think maybe perceptions are starting to shift when it comes to local journalism. Like, you don't want to... like, if nobody's there going to town hall meetings and asking hard questions, like, that can make it very difficult in terms of living within your sort of locale. But, like, when we translate that to, like, crypto, I feel like crypto being this arena of information and consensus, like, I think journalism is a public good, if it's done the right way, right? And, like, you know, the synonymous sort of, like, hypey, get-rich-quick sort of, like, auspice that has taken over in the crypto space, like, really just, like, this product of financial nihilism, in my opinion. I'm getting very philosophical here.

32:32Vlad CosteaNo, I like it. I agree with you.

32:34André BeganskiI just think that, like, people like you do... I think there's, like, this trust in independent media now, because, like, you don't answer to anybody. It's very clear. And so, like...

32:47Vlad CosteaI mean, I do have some sponsors. They're rolling at the bottom. But they never tell us what to do. So I do answer, in the sense that I send the report with the statistics every month, and I'm like, "This is how many clicks I got. This is how the podcast is doing. If you like it, you can keep going. If you don't like it, you can drop out."

33:05André BeganskiThat's the reality of, like, running a business, right? And so you're transparent about it. I do... My phone is kind of blowing up, so I think I got to go step aside and address that. But again, like...

33:17Vlad CosteaWhat do you mean, blowing up? Like getting messages?

33:21So I do like your camera, though. Is that the X-T5?

33:25André BeganskiThis is my X-T30.

33:27Vlad CosteaI have the Blackmagic there. You see it? The battery died and I couldn't charge it. And right now I reverted to the webcam, which is very defeating, because I spent like 30 minutes setting up the tripod and everything else, and then it stopped working.

33:44André BeganskiHave you looked into battery packs for that one? They have battery packs for that model.

33:48Vlad CosteaThey're awful. They last for like 20 minutes and then they die. My problem is that I could connect it to power, but I need an adapter for this European plug.

34:00André BeganskiOh, interesting. Cool. Well, anyway, it was nice getting the chance to actually say hi to you.

34:05Vlad CosteaSo, once again, Andrew... what's the best... André, I'm sorry, I misheard.

34:10André BeganskiNo, it's okay. It's a very similar name.

34:12Vlad CosteaHow can people follow you or keep up with you? Like, whatever. They just got introduced to your work, and I feel like they should find out more.

34:19André BeganskiWell, @AndreBeganski, that's A-N-D-R-E B-E-G-A-N-S-K-I, on X. And also make sure to follow the MARA Foundation, where I am now working. So yeah.

34:31Vlad CosteaI wish all the best to you, André.

34:35André BeganskiYeah, same here, man. Just cool to say hi.

34:38Vlad CosteaAndré the Giant.

34:39André BeganskiSee how big I am when I get off stage. Okay, take care.

34:43Vlad CosteaCan you ping Janusz, the guy with the hat who's sitting there, that he's invited here? So thank you all for being here. It's a very unusual Bitcoin Takeover episode, and we are live, with people commenting in the chat. And I'm going to call another sponsor right now. So how about Orange Rock, the place where you can trade without limits, without KYC?

35:10He's coming? Two minutes? Okay, so I'm going to show some ads in the meantime. There is this guy, Janusz, who used to work on Zcash, and he's very smart. And now he's doing this layer two on Bitcoin, which uses zero-knowledge proofs and is called Zark. And I do want to get some insights from him. So I was talking about Orange Rock before this. It's the place where you can trade without KYC, without limits, with leverage if you want, but I don't recommend that. You can be smarter than I am and make all the right calls. But once again, I don't recommend people to gamble. If you want to make a bet or an investment into something and you think it's going to succeed in the long term, feel free to do that. But don't roll the dice and be like, "Well, it's all or nothing right now." So you can use Orange Rock in any way that you want, but I don't recommend gambling. I would not be able to endorse it, even if, you know, it's up to the individual to choose what they like, what they think is good for them and whatever. I think gambling is potentially problematic.

36:20I see Janusz walking. I'm not sure if he's walking towards me or he's going somewhere else. But yeah, I think he's going to be the next guest. I have the microphone here, which is set up for him and ready for him to go. He's walking down the hallway. I hope he's not leaving. Will I be able to find another guest in the meantime? You want to join the livestream?

36:47Hello, sir. Introduce yourself, and tell the people in the livestream who you are and what you do in Bitcoin. We're here at TABConf 8, which is the last TABConf ever. There is like a funeral of TABConf happening in the room behind me, and I'm not attending it, because I'm talking with people who also don't attend it, because they don't want to acknowledge that it's dead.

37:09Alex LewinIt might not be dead. It's like a 50-50 shot whether Tidwell gets bored and then does it again at some point. But hello, my name is Alex. I work at a company called Finite. We do privacy-focused AI agents for privacy-focused orgs, and training and such. Before that, I worked in Bitcoin for seven years.

37:30Vlad CosteaThat's amazing. What did you do? What do you mean, you're not working in Bitcoin anymore because you're doing this privacy stuff? And what did you do in Bitcoin before that?

37:40Alex LewinI started a new job two and a half months ago at a company called Finite that's working with organizations like HRF to help them with their sovereign AI strategies. And we're building privacy-preserving agents and doing training and stuff like that with activists. So I'm still at the freedom tech angle. Before this, two and a half months ago, I was working at Fedi for two and a half years. Before that, I worked at a company called BlockSpaces. And before that, I worked at a company called NCR, on their Lightning stuff. So yeah, it's been a long journey.

38:14Vlad CosteaAre you from Atlanta, or are you just a fan of TABConf? You can join us. Grab a chair.

38:20Alex LewinYeah, I'm from Atlanta. This is my home. It's an honor that everybody comes to our home to hang out and talk about Bitcoin.

38:29Vlad CosteaSo what are you doing here, more specifically? Are you attending, like, your eighth TABConf? Are you supporting Michael Tidwell? I've seen you spending a lot of time with Michael.

38:39Alex LewinYeah, I mean, Tidwell's a close friend of the Atlanta community. This is definitely showing up, coming and supporting the local community. This is my favorite event of the year. It's a lot of fun. I moderate BitDevs in Atlanta. So that was my first responsibility. Then I gave a talk earlier today. But otherwise, no, just enjoying the conference and doing the Capture the Bitcoin and such.

39:05Vlad CosteaWe also have... yeah, he's going to bring his own chair. We have Janusz, or Janusz... I'm not sure how you pronounce that.

39:13JanuszI don't know either.

39:14Vlad CosteaZark. And someone was commenting that we are exhausting the Ark names. Let's put him in the frame. I keep making the mistake thinking that it's, like, private Ark, not private Spark, because it's called Zark. But it's private statechains.

39:32JanuszYeah, so it's not an Ark. It's kind of a joke. This is the funny thing. I wanted to change it, because I was scared of, like, people getting mad or upset that we're exhausting the name. But I actually think it's kind of funny. I, like, talked to my kind of, like, co-founder about it, and he was like, "No, let's keep it. Like, it's funny. Someone will bite on Twitter." And, you know, a few people did. They nibbled on it, and it was a really good joke, and we were laughing. And so the name, when we first came up with the idea, was, like... it was based on, like, Mercury Layer. But when we were thinking about the name, it was just like, "Oh, yeah: Zcash plus Spark equals Zark." So that's the reason that we picked it. So if you combine Zcash and Spark, basically you get Zark. So that was the idea.

40:14[unclear speaker]The park?

40:15JanuszYeah, that's what other people said. But then the... no, the Facebook meme. Justin Timberlake, I think, was the actor, but it's like, "Drop the P. It's cleaner." So that's why it's Zark.

40:24Vlad CosteaThe Social Network.

40:25JanuszYeah, The Social Network. That one.

40:33Vlad CosteaOkay. So we have someone who's working on private AI and someone who's working on private money. What's your common ground? Can we find some intersection here?

40:41Alex LewinI mean, we both like privacy. We both like Bitcoin a lot.

40:45Vlad CosteaYou have a mic.

40:46Alex LewinYeah. So go for it.

40:48JanuszIs it working?

40:49Alex LewinYeah. I mean, we both like privacy, we both like Bitcoin. Those are, I think, common grounds. And I used to work at Fedi and Fedimint, so we both are fans of that project, too.

41:00JanuszI mean, I think the biggest common ground is, like, for us, I feel relatively comfortable using, like, the frontier labs and just giving them all my prompts, because all of our code is open source. Like, we release it all under the MIT license. And, you know, if we have to, maybe, like, based on the dependency, release some parts under different licenses, but we strictly only use very permissive licenses for our code. But maybe there is a day that I might want to ask a question about go-to-market or something of that nature, that, because privacy within Bitcoin is a scrutinized area, I might want to use, like, a private LLM to get some, like, assistance before I have to go to whoever on my team to ask that question, to get confirmation on, or whatever. But I think it's starting to become... The other thing, too, I think, is, like, you want to ensure... like, for example, I have a lot of friends, and I don't think many of my, like, friends in real life have, like, bought into the Bitcoin thing. But, like, I think that idea of being able to control your money is very crucial. So now when I think about AI, it's like you want the ability to control your data and control your prompts and control, like, the information you're getting. So, like, having those things that people like Alex are working on is super crucial, because I can go to my normie friends now...

42:18No, go ahead. Yeah, I think my normie friends, like, with private AI, it's like when they're getting pilled, it's like, "Oh, I can give them these applications that exist." So that's another cool thing.

42:25Alex LewinYeah. I mean, for at least my, like, take on, like, why privacy is important as well, like, related to basically what you said: privacy is not that important to me personally, as much as it's an important, like, ingredient for liberty. Like, in order to be free, you have to have privacy. If you don't have privacy, then people get exploited. And it turns out that if you're living in a place with a less free government, then privacy is a heck of a lot more important. So that's at least my motivation for caring about privacy: less about me personally, but more so for other people.

42:56Vlad CosteaWell, in the case of Bitcoin, privacy is a prerequisite for having fungibility. There's no other way for this to be good money, and, you know, enable it for payments, if you can still discriminate between coins based on their origin. Like, if you're going to have an open and inclusive internet currency, you cannot actually discriminate and say, "Well, this person comes from Russia, this one comes from South Africa," or whatever, "and these are BRICS countries, and they're enemies of NATO," or whatever, "and therefore we're going to find a way to fragment the internet so that these people can transact only with these people, and those other people can only have their own networks." I think Bitcoin should be something universal. And this whole division goes all the way back to that meme, I'm not sure if you know it, with the two castles, which are mirrored, basically. And one of them is like "our holy leader," and the other one is like "the horrible tyrant." The ships are like, "Oh, the mighty sailors of our nation," and the other ones are like, "Oh, those treacherous scum," or whatever.

44:01Alex LewinIt's like happy path, sad path, kind of like hell versus heaven, kind of.

44:06JanuszYeah, no. Yeah. A world without privacy is a dim world.

44:10Alex LewinYeah. Privacy is important, especially for Bitcoin.

44:14Vlad CosteaSo, Janusz... this is going to get clipped, I guess... so why is it that you're bringing Zcash privacy to Bitcoin, and not Monero privacy to Bitcoin?

44:26Alex LewinThat's a great question.

44:27JanuszOh, man. Well, I think I'm also, like, a fan of Monero. I never really got sniped into being a part of, like, an individual cryptocurrency community and/or cult, depending on how far you get into it. I just think Zcash is super useful technology, and probably, like, within a specific pool... like, if you stay in there and you don't do any, like, moving in and out, or transacting between different blockchains or whatever, and not doing things that make you susceptible to things like timing analysis and timing attacks, stuff like that, probably is the highest level of privacy that you'd get within, like, a blockchain transaction environment.

45:04And I think, like, with regards to Monero... like, this is the thing about Monero: it has much better privacy than Bitcoin at, like, a transaction level. And they're going to be adding full-chain membership proofs to improve the anonymity set for kind of the chain itself. So it's not necessarily... I think I actually tweeted this recently: we don't really want to bring Zcash per se to Bitcoin. I think we want to take the primitives that were developed in that ecosystem that are very useful and can be applied to Bitcoin transactions, and build them in a way that is compatible with Bitcoin, and allow Bitcoin to have a free market of different privacy solutions, and teams making things with different trade-offs, to provide users with different ways to use their money. So I think that's probably the way that I like to frame it: that we're just taking technology that we think is very useful and just trying to apply it to specific systems.

45:58Alex LewinYeah. I mean, could you maybe expand a little bit more specifically about, like, the mental model behind Zcash and how it's different from Monero? Like, Zcash, my understanding is, it offers this thing called shielded pools, which puts your money in a bucket that makes it indistinguishable from everybody else in that bucket. Monero's a bit different.

46:15JanuszYeah. So I'm not, like, a Monero transaction expert, so if I butcher this, I apologize. But, like, effectively with Monero right now, they have zero-knowledge proofs as a part of the transaction, but those are specifically hiding the amounts. Similar to, like, Liquid; it actually uses, like, the same primitive of zero-knowledge proof, called Bulletproofs. And then on top of that, Monero does this, like, ring signatures and kind of decoy mechanism, where, if you do a transaction, then of the addresses involved in kind of a batch of transactions, you're, like, one of 16, or one of some number. It used to be one of 16. Maybe it's different now. It might be higher. So you get, like, all the amounts are shielded, and then, of the people within that specific, like, group of transactions, you're one of those people. And then if you continually just continue to transact, then your anonymity set continues to grow.

47:09Zcash is a little bit different, in the sense that what's actually, like, published and available to, like, validating nodes and users is just, like, a complete black box of unlinkable hashes. So this is with regards to, like, the Orchard pool. Like, in Sapling, for example, the transactions did show if it had, like, multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Within the newer pools, that doesn't happen. So it just literally looks like the entire transaction is a single input, a single output. And then all of these, like, hashes that are part of the transaction are, like, unlinkable. There's no way to discern who it is, what the amounts are, what type of transaction they've been involved in. So your entire anonymity set is the amount of money and people that are within the pool, and you can't distinguish kind of anyone from anyone. And that is only if you stay within the pool.

48:00So if you apply that to, like, Bitcoin, think of it as, like, Bitcoin, as, like, an L1 protocol, could be, like, your savings account, and then this type of transaction protocol could be your spending account. Or, like, let's say you have, like, 10% of your money in there preemptively, and then that is the money that you use to, like, send around or whatever. Like, using it as, like, a mixing service, or a way to kind of move money in and out to anonymize funds, is really bad. It's still susceptible to surveillance. So I think that that's probably, like, the framing. And I think Monero, with their upcoming upgrade with regards to full-chain membership proofs, is going to be very similar to Zcash in that regard. Different trade-offs, different designs, probably. But yeah, so that's kind of the model, I would say.

48:37Vlad CosteaBut there's the other argument, right? Because Zcash, for a long time... so they started with the best kind of privacy that you can have, which basically reveals the least amount of data, and they tried to make it scale. And right now, with Tachyon, which I understand you're not a fan of, they're going to be able to do many more transactions per second than Bitcoin does, and they will have much smaller signatures and whatever. In the case of Monero, when they're going to add the full-chain membership proofs... they're already scaling much worse than Bitcoin. With FCMP++ it's going to be even worse. The transaction fees are going to go higher. The block space is going to be more limited. They'll have to increase the block size or something to be able to fit the new transactions and signatures. So in the case of Monero, they don't seem to have a plan for scaling it. They just have a plan for bloating it and maintaining the same properties. They don't seem to care as much about scalability. I think the only value proposition is that it has privacy by default. And if you're going to bring something to Bitcoin, I think it's better to bring the technology that actually scales and is also built on the same code base. Because Zcash started out as Bitcoin with Zerocash on top, whereas Monero is an entirely different code base that's called... so it was Bytecoin, and it's CryptoNote, the name of the code base. Do you know any more about this? Because I know you've worked with Zcash for many years.

50:10JanuszSo I think there's, like, a couple points here. I think, to be very honest, in terms of, like, the scalability and, like, how much we can get, in, like, the world where everyone is using these things all the time, like, we're in the first inning of research. Like, we're not anywhere close to being done figuring out how we can make these things accessible to everyone who wants to use it, like, let's say, all of humanity, for example. So I would say, like, to kind of maybe... maybe not from a technical perspective, but look at, like, Tachyon and the Zcash upgrade.

50:45Like, this is a very recent kind of, like, proposal and idea, and it's only been within, like, the last year that people have been talking about this kind of proposal. I see no reason for Monero not to, as a community and as a developer ecosystem, look at different ways to scale their own protocol that is best for their trade-offs in their system. Like, I would expect that. Like, I have seen chatter around, like, kind of the Twitterverse, of people acknowledging, like, "Yeah, we might have to do some, like, L2 system or whatever on top of Monero."

51:11With the rest of Bitcoin, maybe I agree with your point. Like, maybe there is kind of that... we look at Zcash because it is, like, a legacy code base fork of Bitcoin Core, and it's like, "Oh, that's a very natural progression to the next step." But I also don't think it matters, because if you can build the primitives... like, for example, there's no reason that you couldn't build a Monero-esque sidechain with a bridge, as you would with Zcash. And that's what I meant by the free market of privacy protocols: let the users and the free market determine which is the one that they want to use.

51:42With regards to scalability, yeah, we're in the first inning, and I think Tachyon's cool. I think it does some really cool things with regards to, like, transaction aggregation and kind of making consensus more lightweight. But you still have this issue of, like, this historical set. The thing with these protocols is that what they produce to prevent double spending is this thing called a nullifier. And even in things like Tachyon or other proposals, you have to have this historical set forever. Like, you can't get rid of it.

52:12So that then gets offloaded to another part of the protocol, which would be an archive node, I guess, in Zcash. And then your data availability assumption is that of the archive nodes, at least one of them being online to make it available to all the services and providers that need that data. So again, it's great. And I think there are people even in Bitcoin now that are applying those types of things to the new wave of shielded protocols coming to Bitcoin. But yeah, I still think we're in the first inning. We haven't solved every problem. And I think as long as we incrementally get better, then I think that's the best thing that anyone can do.

52:49Vlad CosteaLet me ask something of both of you, because I think over the last year Bitcoin has been very bearish, and we've seen many incidents and moments when, on one hand, we don't have any significant upgrade to make us feel excited about Bitcoin. On the other hand, we have all of these situations with Coldcard, with Liquid, with people losing coins and also losing hope in self-custody, which is, I think, very bad, because that's kind of the whole point of having decentralized internet money: that you're going to be in control of your own keys. And what gets you excited about Bitcoin? What makes you feel bullish? What makes you believe that this is going to be the project that becomes the global money, or at least the currency of the internet?

53:33Alex LewinYeah, I mean, despite all of the problems, Bitcoin is still by far the only, I think, cryptocurrency that's incredibly decentralized, truly. The only one that really can't be changed by a single-digit number of people is Bitcoin. And that is fundamentally very, very valuable. So basically, Bitcoin's value proposition has not changed, despite the landscape getting more complicated. So I'm still bullish overall on Bitcoin. But yeah, we're living in spooky times. It's hard to write open-source software when all the bugs that are in the software will be found and exploited. So, yeah, I mean, it's going to be tough, but it doesn't change my strong conviction for Bitcoin.

54:14JanuszYeah, personally, I ebb and flow. Like, there are days I wake up and I'm like, "Man, this sucks." Like, a couple of people I work with on a pretty regular basis were in the red team effort, and they were kind of just relaying how bad things were. Like the fire meme of, "This is fine." But at the same time, I still think the idea of what Alex just mentioned here, like, hey, a completely globally distributed, censorship-resistant money that anyone can have access to, and also anyone can fully validate the network themselves... I think that still gets me fired up in the morning, with all these problems.

54:52Like, it's also fun to work on. Even with, like, the age of LLMs, there's so many problems that we have to solve that they can't solve, like social problems and coordination problems. And those are really fun to solve, and they give you something to do in a day where a lot of things are getting commoditized. So I get really excited about being able to work on an open-source project and be a part of it, and just get to work on cool things and meet cool people. And it's really fun. So I get fired up.

55:16Alex LewinYeah, I mean, long term, AI is going to make Bitcoin better, not worse. That's, I think... I believe I'm parroting Rob Hamilton, who was on stage talking about this. But AI is going to make Bitcoin better, not worse. Like, I had a bit of an existential crisis when I started to realize that my hard skills that I'd won over the past... Am I using this or not?

55:37Vlad CosteaI'm just doubling it, because this is softer. If you look at the levels, they're not very loud, and this one is louder. So I'm just trying to level it.

55:44Alex LewinOkay. Anyway, so I had a bit of an existential crisis as a software engineer when I realized that the hard skills I'd won over, you know, my entire career were becoming obsoleted, and it was kind of all a waste. What completely changed my opinion about it was something that, I think, Marc Andreessen said. He asked: is a software engineer more valuable or less valuable now that AI exists? Like, now that we have AI tools, is a software engineer able to produce more or less? Obviously it's more. It's arguably 100 times more valuable. So that kind of mindset shift is like, no, I'm actually much more valuable as a human now that I have these tools. It's not replacing me, per se. It's allowing me to be more productive. So I kind of think that that transfers roughly to Bitcoin as well. Even though it'll point out all of our flaws, it'll also let us grow.

56:39Vlad CosteaI have a question for Janusz. I know that you are here right now and you're not attending the funeral of TABConf, which is happening in the room behind us. I want to ask you: why are you still here? Why don't you want to go to the funeral? Like, you're actually dressed like you could be at a funeral.

56:57JanuszNah, I'm a fan of the show and a fan of all your work. And yeah, it's just an honor to be, like, sitting here. Be on here, sit here and rip with you. But I've seen you sitting there, so... No, but I did want to... we talked about this yesterday. I think the other thing, too, and this is just a very candid thing: this is my first TABConf, right? So for me, there's not this historical... just because I've never been to one. So for me, it doesn't necessarily feel like a funeral. It just feels like a really cool opportunity. And my goodness, man, what an awesome conference. And the people, and the amount of people that I want to speak to and be able to get feedback from and ask questions and learn from, is just super high. So it's been really dope. So definitely a cool decision to come out. But for me, it's not a funeral, because it's my first one.

57:43Vlad CosteaIt's just a party.

57:44Alex LewinYeah, it's a party. And an after-party.

57:48Vlad CosteaYeah. What I want to tell people who are listening to this is that when you go to a conference, most likely what's happening on stage is recorded, and you can watch that when you get home. But what's happening outside of the conference room, like people talking in the hallway, meeting someone that you know from some Twitter thread or whatever... you can't download that. You can't get that online. You can't get the experience of interviewing or talking with someone face to face. And I think this is something that AI will never be able to replace: just us being able to project meaning onto something, which is maybe made by AI, but we acknowledge that it's useful and it's good for us. Because AI in and of itself is just a tool. It has no feelings. It does not attribute any emotions or whatever to anything.

58:34Alex LewinPreach.

58:35Vlad CosteaYou can basically create anything in 15 minutes and make it just as good as something that's already out there, and it's open source. But just the fact that you made it doesn't mean that anyone will care. It's showing up to events that actually gets people to care about your work. So if you're listening to this, come to a conference. Unless I see your face here, I'm going to assume that you're AI on Twitter.

59:01[unclear speaker]Come to a conference, but don't go to any of the talks.

59:04Alex LewinThat's the moral of the story.

59:05[unclear speaker]No, unless they're my talks, okay? I want to see a full auditorium.

59:10Alex LewinIn all sincerity, your first couple of conferences, all of the talks blow your mind, and it's a life-changing thing. Your 20th conference, there's diminishing returns on the educational content. So it's mainly about connecting with people and exploring together in the lobby.

59:26Vlad CosteaI remember when I went to Baltic Honeybadger, I think it was 2018, I was sitting in the chair, taking notes in a notebook about all the talks.

59:36Alex LewinIncredible. You're a great student.

59:38Vlad CosteaI don't do that anymore.

59:40JanuszYeah, for me, it's also nice to, you know, go to a different place, get out of the house, and, you know, have an excuse to drink a few beers every evening. So that's always fun, too. But I think, to the point, I think it makes it more important now, because now we're all in AI psychosis and we're just clanking all day, prompting our clankers and just going for it. And it's really hard to get a hold of people. Like, if you're in that mode of, "I need to get these things done, and I'm now 100x productive," you become 100x busier in terms of what you're thinking about. It's really hard to context switch and, like, answer a Signal or answer your email or get on a call. I haven't done a meeting in, like, three weeks. I'm just async with my teammates, and we're all in AI psychosis. So I think doing stuff like this is going to be more important over the next little bit.

1:00:28Vlad CosteaI think this reminds me of what I learned in university about the moment when Europeans got access to coffee and tobacco: how much of their lifestyle actually changed, and how much their productivity changed, because suddenly they had these drugs, basically, to boost their ability to work. And yeah, I guess with AI it's sort of similar. Right now we're addicted to it. I feel like I should be prompting and I should be doing something all the time. And the AI is sort of bossing me around right now. Like, it's telling me, "Hey, you didn't change this on your website. You still have this bug. This page is broken," whatever. I set up a schedule where every day I get advice for, like, 15 minutes on how to fix my website. And sometimes I don't have those 15 minutes and I don't do it. And I've taught it to actually make a backlog of stuff and just keep reminding me of what I should be doing. And that's where it gets to the point where I'm wondering: am I working with AI, or am I working for AI?

1:01:29Alex LewinYeah, I think you're working with AI. Like, I don't know, it's not a person. It's serving you. And you can turn off the alerts if they're annoying. Like, yeah, I mean, in all of the philosophical talks, it's easy to forget just how much productivity goes up with these tools, and just how much more powerful we are with them. Like, I'm every day just in awe of the moment we're living in. It feels like we're living in the future, where we can all command armies of our own to go do whatever we want. So, yeah. Very bullish.

1:02:01Vlad CosteaYou guys have copies of the Forks magazine, which is right here. You can have one, Alex.

1:02:06Alex LewinThank you.

1:02:07Vlad CosteaIt's on me. If I'd asked you for money... you can have another one.

1:02:11JanuszI have one. Okay. It's beautiful. I think I sent you a Zcash address. I'll send it to you.

1:02:16Vlad CosteaYou don't have to, because you're on the show, and you gave your time to me and everyone else listening, and you provided some useful insights. For everyone watching this, you can download the free digital edition at bitcoin-takeover.com/forksmag. That's F-O-R-K-S-M-A-G. And yeah, what else do you want to talk about?

1:02:41Alex LewinI mean, Atlanta is a pretty cool city. Everyone should come to Atlanta. I feel very honored that everyone's here.

1:02:46JanuszWhat's the loop around... the BeltLine? Yeah, the BeltLine. So I went running this morning, and it was one of the coolest runs I've been on in, like, a long time. Just tons of different restaurants and coffee shops and bars and stuff that kind of just keep going.

1:03:04Alex LewinAnd it's like this 25 miles, right? Like, 25. Yeah, it doesn't completely connect yet, but the plan is it'll connect, and when it does, it'll be 25 miles. So there's, like, a loop around the city. So I'd say Atlanta's dope. You should come visit. And it's a fun time to be alive. Yeah, for the first several years of the conference, up until maybe three years ago, the conference was in downtown Atlanta. So everybody in the world had this, like, bad impression of Atlanta, because downtown is the worst part of the city by far. But now we're at Georgia Tech, so it's a bit closer to the cool neighborhoods. So people are starting to come around on the city. So yes, Atlanta is a cool place. You should join.

1:03:46Vlad CosteaWhat are the other conferences that you like and you'll be attending this year or next year? Are you going to the David Bailey ones, which are the very large ones, or do you like smaller, nerdy, hacker-centric events?

1:04:00Alex LewinYeah, I mean, my travel schedule is not set for next year, but I like going to the David Bailey ones, not because of the content, but because it's a nice reminder of how big the industry is. Like, it's cool to remember just how many people think that Bitcoin is rad, and that's exciting for me. But this funeral is, like, a very happy something funeral. But otherwise, Bitcoin++ is an amazing conference series all over the world. Love Bitcoin++. It's definitely, as far as content and signal, my favorite conference.

1:04:37JanuszYeah, I'm going to take a break for a while. I've had a pretty long few years of traveling and conferences. So I think I'm going to take a break for a while.

1:04:45[unclear speaker]That's what they all say.

1:04:46JanuszYeah, take a break. But I will be at the David Bailey one, because I think it's in Nashville this upcoming year. And Nashville is the funnest place to go out in the United States, like, go out on the strip of bars. It's probably the best. So yeah, I'm going to be going to the Nashville one.

1:05:00[unclear speaker]Right on.

1:05:01Paul Sztorc...on and on in there for thousands and thousands of hours.

1:05:04Vlad CosteaCan you say that again?

1:05:05Paul SztorcOh, well, we had Tidwell's, you know, closing ceremony. It just went on and on and on. You know, try watching it. I won't need to take a sleeping pill later tonight, I'll tell you that. No, I'm just kidding. It was great.

1:05:15Alex LewinWhy did they have the closing ceremony on the second to last day?

1:05:19Paul SztorcOn the second to last day. Yeah. And this is like, we had two fake days, then this is the first real day, question mark, asterisk, then another day. I don't know. Yeah, he had a couple of slides about that, though. He's like, "Here's some weird ideas I had once. Remember the Tabbies?" And it was like, "Not really. I don't."

1:05:38Alex LewinHow many TABConfs have you been to?

1:05:40Paul SztorcEvery single one. I think I've spoken at every single one. I think I did the keynote maybe twice.

1:05:46Alex LewinThat's awesome. There's probably not that many people that have been to all eight, you know?

1:05:51Paul SztorcI think I've been to all. I'm pretty sure I've spoken at all eight.

1:05:54Alex LewinGood for you. You're a true diehard Atlanta fan.

1:05:57Paul SztorcThat's how you kill the conference: you get Paul Sztorc to speak too often. Like, "What is this, the Paul Sztorc conference?"

1:06:03Alex LewinEvidently not. Yeah, it keeps going.

1:06:05Paul SztorcI think it'll keep going. We're going to work it out. So that's it. We made it. I made it back in. I made it back into the frame.

1:06:17Vlad CosteaIt does sound like the Bitcoin Takeover podcast, right? Just when you think it's over, it keeps going and keeps going. And it's been almost eight years, and I'm still not tired, for some reason.

1:06:27Alex LewinYou're inspiring, man. It's inspiring to do something for this long and still have energy at the end. Big fan of you.

1:06:37Vlad CosteaWhat's your favorite fork? I have a magazine about forks. Of course, BTC is something that you like, but is there anything else that you might look up to, or be like, "I wish we had this in Bitcoin"?

1:06:48Alex LewinI mean, the privacy stuff is amazing. But yeah, I mean, the reason why I care about Bitcoin, and not some much cooler, more interesting technological invention since Bitcoin, is because of the point of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency, in my opinion, is only valuable if it's incredibly decentralized, incredibly incorruptible. And Bitcoin is the only one, in my opinion, that has that property to a degree at which I believe in it. So yeah, despite the cooler technological things I admire about other projects, Bitcoin is still what I'm bullish on.

1:07:26JanuszYeah, man. I mean, I have to say Zcash, right? I used to work on Zcash, so I think I have to say that. So probably Zcash, from a technical perspective, and I still have a lot of friends who are working on it. So yeah, my favorite fork of Bitcoin is Zcash.

1:07:44Vlad CosteaYeah. And to be honest, last week I attended a presentation by Sean Bowe and the other guy, I think he goes by the name of ZKDev. And the kind of optimizations that they're doing, all the energy that the project has... like, they have a very good momentum for improving things, which I think they haven't had in a long time. And it just makes me jealous, because I look at it and I'm like, "This is what I wish we had in Bitcoin. This is what I signed up for."

1:08:14JanuszSo, again, not to be critical, because I've never been in a situation where I would have to make this type of decision. But, for example, let's say with the Orchard bug recently, that was most likely not exploited, but again, we'll never know. The soft fork was coordinated to pause the Orchard transactions in the Orchard pool. And there were a lot of major wallet providers that weren't aware that that was being done. So while it is really nice that you can have this very... I don't want to say centralized, because there is a larger number of teams working on Zcash now. It's obviously not as many as Bitcoin, but there's a growing number of development teams. But if you can all coordinate and do things very quickly like that, what's to say about coordinating and doing something to, for example, just shut off a pool for whatever reason, because some person used it? Right. Again, it's extrapolating on these hypotheticals. But in Bitcoin, if something like that happened, every user and every person working on that specific technology would be shit out of luck. And unfortunately, I think that's the way that these things should be.

1:09:21Like, we are signing up for, again, censorship-resistant, kind of unfuckable-with money. And you have to bear some personal responsibility to understand the trade-offs of the things that you're using. And if you don't do that, and something like that happens and you're kind of caught holding the bag, then that's just part of... these are the choices that we're making when working with these systems. So while I agree that there are elements of the research and things that I find very interesting from a lot of different ecosystems, there is a way that that could go badly. So I wake up every day and think, "Wow, those things are cool. What do I think we should apply to Bitcoin, and how can I make that work within these really limited constraints that are available?" And I think that's so fun. I think it's just a fun thing to do. And I think we get to have all these interesting discussions around things like BitVM and witness encryption, because if there was, for example, a native SNARK verifier, we would never even have these discussions. And it's a while... it's just a lot of fun. So that would be my response to that.

1:10:17Alex LewinWell, I agree. I agree, but there are some nuances. Yeah, it's like the old adage: only Bitcoin is stubborn enough that, rather than upgrade itself with something simple, we force ourselves to invent witness encryption to get a feature we want. Like, I mean, I'm saying "we" as if some of us could take credit for that. But now brilliant people come, and Bitcoin is important enough to warrant working obnoxiously hard to make it do things that we, six months ago, thought would be impossible. So yeah, it's still a wild blast. It's all exciting, despite it being boring from an outside perspective.

1:10:54Vlad CosteaJust this year, we had two Bitcoin hard forks. One of them trades for like $500 right now, and it's the Lukecoin. The other one is launching on the 31st of October, which is Halloween day and also Bitcoin's 18th birthday. And I want to ask you guys if you have, like, a fork strategy, meaning that you do plan to claim your free airdrop and maybe dump it on the market, or hold it just in case it becomes worth something or worth more one day. Did you think about this, or did you just choose not to care and not look into it?

1:11:27Alex LewinI actively choose neglect.

1:11:31I mean, I think there's real dangers in touching your cold storage stack of Bitcoin, and that is required in order to cash in on these chains. Yeah, so I do not think it's worth the quick buck to touch your cold storage.

1:11:44Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of risks. Like, if you mess it up slightly, then you lose your life savings. You can also do everything right with the Coldcard and still lose your life savings. That's possible. But yeah, I try to reduce the number of things that could make me lose my life savings, not increase that. And, you know, it's not worth the, whatever, 500 bucks a coin that I would be getting for that. So no plans.

1:12:13JanuszYeah, it's kind of echoing the same sentiment: no plans. But I probably will try to acquire some tokens within Paul's fork and play around with it and test it out. There seem to be some applications coming onto his stuff that I think are interesting, and I want to try them out. So I'll probably end up using it, but touching my own alleged stack, probably not.

1:12:35Alex LewinYeah. I mean, I'm curious, how do you feel about, like, seeing... is it, like, uplifting to see Paul so excited about Zcash as a BIP 300 drivechain? Like, I mean, that's been his canonical example for what a drivechain could do: Zcash.

1:12:50JanuszYeah, that's the main one. Like, just looking into how the experience would be, how it compares to, you know, using Zcash, just monitoring and learning more about the trust assumptions, the trade-offs, understanding it. Yeah, I think it's just really cool. And, you know, I may not agree with everything about Paul's fork strategy, but I think there should be some more encouragement to try things like this. And he's tried for a long time to activate drivechains on Bitcoin, and this seems like a natural step: to hard fork and do your own chain. And I'm here for it. And I think it's going to be pretty cool, and it's going to give us examples of things people can do. So yeah, I think it's a cool thing. So probably the Zcash one is the one I'm most excited about testing out and using. But there's other things, like things you've mentioned, like prediction markets and stuff like that, that I'm not personally interested in, but want to see people's feedback on. So yeah.

1:13:46Vlad CosteaSo let me ask you something else. If Bitcoin goes to zero tomorrow because of some catastrophic event, what's your backup plan?

1:13:58[unclear speaker]Pivot to AI.

1:14:01JanuszMy backup plan would be... yeah, we could squeeze in a bit. I'm not sure what the frame is. Where are we going? How are we doing this? I can scoot out a little bit.

1:14:12Alex LewinHonestly, I can just give him my chair. I feel like I've gotten plenty of airtime.

1:14:17JanuszYou got airtime? We can tag-team it.

1:14:19Alex LewinYeah, no worries. Vlad, it's been an honor. Thank you for having me here. It's such a pleasure.

1:14:26Vlad CosteaJust give the microphones.

1:14:27Alex LewinNow I'm honored to give my mic to this legend. It's so ridiculous. It's completely like a fraud just standing around.

1:14:35Vlad CosteaNo, don't say that. You're great, Alex. Yeah, see you tonight. Or you're leaving too?

1:14:41JanuszYeah, I'll leave too. Again, it was an honor to be on the show.

1:14:45[unclear speaker]You didn't answer the question.

1:14:47JanuszMy question? If Bitcoin went to zero, I would take a break from my professional life for a little bit and then figure out what to do next. I don't know what I would do. So that's my answer: I have no idea. Yeah, so that's it.

1:15:02Vlad CosteaThank you, Janusz.

1:15:04JanuszSee you guys. Thank you.

1:15:06Vlad CosteaWe are now joined by the legendary cypherpunk Christopher Allen, who's also with Blockchain Commons.

1:15:11Christopher AllenThank you. Do we have a sound check?

1:15:14Vlad CosteaYes, I want to be sure.

1:15:15Christopher AllenDo you see the green bar there?

1:15:17Vlad CosteaI see a couple of green bars, and it looks like it's working. Yeah, it's working. You're loud enough. Okay. It's really good to have you. I've been trying to get you on the show for, like, three years or something. It never worked out, but I finally met you in person here in Atlanta. I want to ask you: what are you into these days, and what do you think about Bitcoin nowadays, the state of the project?

1:15:40Christopher AllenI mean, Bitcoin is still my, you know, financial reserve and all of that. I have been moving more down the stack, so a lot of the Bitcoin work that I've been doing is not at the layer one and consensus and all of that, but: how do we secure our keys? How do we create systems that are more reliable? A lot of the kind of things that have been happening in the last year, security-wise, have been things that I've been warning people about for a while. And I guess I'm kind of a little sad that the lack of cooperation has allowed some of this type of stuff to happen.

1:16:32Vlad CosteaSo what is something that you have been warning people about that actually happened over the last year?

1:16:39Christopher AllenWell, I mean, I think that I've been talking about sources of randomness and issues with that, and security reviews. Yeah, I mean, it goes back, you know, to '94, or maybe it was '93, when we first started doing SSL for Netscape, the original SSL. We needed, you know, some method of being able to have a certificate authority, and the only certificate authority was VeriSign at the time. And they basically decided that they would not issue certificates for servers unless the servers had a security review of how their randomness was done.

1:17:30And we were the only company in the world that was willing to do those security reviews. And over half of the software servers that were submitted to us, we, in an hour or two, found fundamental problems with randomness. And, you know, this was kind of irritating to VeriSign, because these were all potential customers for their product. And at some point, after six, nine months of us, in very short security reviews, discovering major problems with randomness, they basically said, "Well, we understand this problem now. We're going to do self-certification, allow you to self-certify." And they stopped the program.

1:18:12And I think I've been warning about, you know, entropy and randomness and various security... you know, really, you've got to do it right, ever since. To the extent that, for instance, we came out with a thing in, like, 2019 or so, called LetheKit, which allowed you to very quickly create your seed words offline with dice, and verify different implementations of their sources of randomness and such.

1:18:51But ultimately, you can only do so much security on chips, especially as we're having more and more hardware attacks on chips. The real solution is not to rely on any single key. And there are a lot of different approaches to that. There's the old-fashioned legacy multisig, but there's also newer things like MuSig and FROST. That means you basically have heterogeneity, meaning multiple ways of actually generating the keys. You have to break multiple of them for those protocols to be broken. We wrote about this in a study in 2022 that basically walked through all the... you know, what are the processes that you can do to make multisig very safe? And it takes, you know, an hour of your time to save your assets for the future, but people wouldn't take the time to do the hour and do the checklist. And it's really the fault of the wallet companies, of being very narrow. And I think we could have solved these problems years ago, and we could have had multisig be much more ubiquitous. And it wouldn't have mattered that Coldcard had a bug, because you would have been using a multisig with, you know, a Passport and maybe an offline key and all of that.

1:20:22Vlad CosteaThat's really unfortunate, because the people who got hacked, essentially, or robbed, did everything according to what they had been told. And the issue was not their mistake. Maybe you can argue that they could have done a much more sophisticated setup in the beginning, and they could have had a multisig, or they could have generated their own entropy. But that's too much to ask of people, especially if you're selling a commodified product that's supposed to get everything right out of the box. I think they... especially this one was super paranoid in some ways. Like, people did not connect it to their computer, and they would use 9V batteries to power it up and sign transactions with something that's called a PSBT, Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction, so that they would separate the signing from the broadcasting: do the signing offline and then broadcast online. So I feel bad for these people, because they spent so many years trying to learn how to navigate these steps, and then they realized that their funds were gone for a reason which was very stupid.

1:21:28Christopher AllenI have a couple of different things. I felt like the Coldcard/Coinkite team kind of pulled away from the open-source community and kind of went their own way on a lot of different types of things. We were very frustrated at Blockchain Commons that they were not supporting... not only not supporting some of the things that 14, 15 other wallets were using, but they ended up writing their own code for that and their own approach to that. And then, you know, they got their start using open-source code, and then later they were basically saying, "Oh, well, other people are using our code now, and thus we're going to close our code."

1:22:14And although technically it was inspectable... I mean, it was visible... there was no incentive for any of the other companies to consider reviewing the code, taking the time that was necessary. I mean, I'm not absolutely sure that that particular bug would have been spotted. That could have been in another code base. But the combination of the security theater, and the lack of other people who really know how to do these kinds of reviews having any real interest in looking at it early and looking at it hard...

1:22:53And in general, at least here at Blockchain Commons, we've been saying pretty much since 2020, or 2019, that everybody needs to be moving to multisig, and that would have also just solved the problem. We want no single points of failure, no single points of compromise. Also important is no single points of denial. Like, it can also be a bad thing that it can't be stolen but nobody can get it, which is the other thing that can happen. This is why we don't, for instance, recommend BIP 38, because we've just seen too many examples of people losing funds because of that. So, like I said, it's still my reserve asset, and I did spend the hour, and I don't have my keys at home, and I practice all the best practices myself, and for my friends and colleagues the same. But I do want to make it easier. I want to make the level one easier, and we're continuing to work on that.

1:23:59Vlad CosteaI don't want to spend the rest of the interview talking about Coldcard, but there's something else that they did. So they didn't just change the license. They've also been hostile to reviewers and hackers and everyone else who was finding vulnerabilities. They're not paying out bounties. The most they would do is maybe send the mug and the t-shirt and say that this is your acknowledgement or whatever. They always downplayed the severity of the issue. So if there was something, they would try to claim that it's no big deal, and they patched it, and nobody should be concerned about it.

1:24:33And this led to an attitude where... there's this guy, Rashid something. I think it's Rashid. Some very bright Indian teenager who was able to hack some hardware wallets at some point. And he found the vulnerability in pretty much every model of every manufacturer. It was a SegWit issue, I think. And he disclosed it to everyone except for Coldcard, because he knew that Coldcard is not going to pay for it. And I think that moment was pivotal towards revealing that security researchers don't want to deal with Coldcard. They want to collaborate with Trezor or whatever, but they don't really want to deal with a company that, first of all, doesn't pay, and secondly is hostile to any disclosure. So it's not just the code itself. It's the way that they treated anyone looking at the code.

1:25:19Christopher AllenAbsolutely. I have some sympathy on some types of things. There's certainly, especially now with LLMs, a big rise in CVEs being created that are obscure. There's a lot of weirdness in the whole bounty side of the world. Often some of these organizations are communities that can't afford to do a bounty. So I have sympathy for all of those. What I don't have sympathy for is just sort of the withdrawal from the fact that we're all in this together. We all learn from each other. We learn from others. Bitcoin started as open source. Satoshi believed in it, and there are good reasons for it. And they just sort of lost that. And in my particular case, there's a certain point where it's like, I'm not going to spend my time even keeping up with what they're doing, because it's not worth my time. So I put the resources into the kinds of organizations that are cooperative, that do listen, that do try, and also support others. And that's where I want to do it in the future as well.

1:26:43Vlad CosteaI'm sort of proud of the fact that you are part of the cypherpunks who decided to embrace Bitcoin. Because there is the other side of cypherpunks, who think that it's not interesting enough, because they're too focused on encryption and privacy. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. It's just that there are some people who chose to be oblivious of it, including David Chaum for a few years. In the first 10 years of Bitcoin's existence, he was not involved at all, and he didn't care about it. And I want to ask you: what is it that you found interesting about Bitcoin in the beginning, and what got you involved in the space? Because you said you were working on SSL for Netscape. Most people listening don't even remember Netscape. But I know what that is. It evolved into Mozilla Firefox. At first it was Mozilla, whatever, browser, and then it became Firefox. And I think the people behind Firefox created Brave.

1:27:35Christopher AllenIt's a little more complicated than that. But yeah, I mean, the bottom line is that Netscape came out with SSL 2, which was the first, for their first commerce server. SSL 1, I think, was broken in one day at Crypto in Santa Barbara. So they got together some people to give it a better look for SSL 2. But even SSL 2 clearly had some weaknesses and concerns. And I kind of got involved. I was the only organization in the United States, other than RSA Data Security, that could license the RSA patent, through something called RSAREF.

1:28:17And so DigiCash, Red Hat, PGP, everybody was doing anything with crypto... again, open source wasn't even an invented term at the time, but as shareware, as free products, as other types of things.

1:28:36[unclear speaker]Copyleft, I think.

1:28:38Christopher AllenWell, no, copyleft was not even really a term yet. But basically, the way RSAREF was, as long as you didn't make more than half a million dollars, you didn't owe any royalties. And so PGP was free, so they never owed any royalties. But that enabled that entire industry to kind of take off. And that put us on the ground floor with Netscape when they basically said, "Well, we've got to do SSL right, and we're going to call it SSL 3." So I led the community around creating that standard, writing the reference implementation, and then kind of leading it through the IETF process, where it ultimately got renamed TLS. So TLS 1.0 is the culmination of that. And then, of course, now TLS is the world's dominant security protocol.

1:29:30But back to, I think, your original question, as far as cypherpunks and their relationship with Bitcoin, and where did I fit in. I had worked with David, before he moved to the Netherlands, on DigiCash.

1:29:42Vlad CosteaDavid Chaum, right?

1:29:43Christopher AllenYeah. And, you know, there were a lot of interesting things going on there, but when we were doing it, they were really reputation tokens. They didn't actually have any kind of financial backing on them. But he was able to do a deal with a bank in the Netherlands, and I wasn't really interested in moving to the Netherlands at the time. But I stayed involved in cryptocurrency. And later, when I became CTO of Certicom, which invented the elliptic curve stuff, you know, I tried to create a micro-currency in the 2000-2001 timeframe. But the patents were, you know, a total challenge. And I have a whole article on this.

1:30:41The Merkle patent basically prevented us from doing Merkle trees, which, of course, is a fundamental of Bitcoin. And that also meant all kinds of timestamping-type things couldn't be done. And then I really wanted to use the Schnorr signature, which I thought had a lot of power, and I was very interested in its aggregation capabilities, et cetera. And most people don't realize that ECDSA, which is what Bitcoin used originally, and what is in Ethereum, et cetera...

1:31:14Vlad CosteaSorry, I think that's Elliptic Curve Digital Signature... what does the A stand for?

1:31:20Christopher AllenAlgorithm.

1:31:21Vlad CosteaAlgorithm. Okay. I just wanted, for the people who are not familiar with this, to pause for a second and tell them what this is about. Anyway.

1:31:30Christopher AllenYeah. So basically, because there was a patent for Schnorr, which I thought was the most elegant way of doing things, and this is ultimately what we later added with Taproot, the ability to do Schnorr... in order to work around the patent, they did kind of a hack. And the hack was ECDSA, which, of course, is what was adopted by NIST, and is in all of your hardware chips and all your TrustZones, and whatever, they're doing ECDSA.

1:32:04And they use a particular construction called secp256r1. But the problem is that the numbers that were used for that, there's been a lot of suspicion about where they came from. So Satoshi chose an alternative one, which was not part of the international standards, which was K1. And the reason why is that it's what we call a "nothing up my sleeve" number. So the little numbers that are inside the algorithm: they chose the number seven, which is a low prime number, and then they chose the highest prime number short of two to the 32. So those are the two numbers that are built into secp256k1. And so since those are kind of obvious, you know, that's what he felt was the better choice among the different algorithms. But NIST chose a different set of numbers, and there's always been some suspicion. Bernstein and other cryptographers have been concerned that there might be some kind of algorithmic trick that allows the NSA to break the ECDSA family of stuff. There's been no evidence that it actually is breakable, but there's always been the suspicion, because we just don't know.

1:33:30So I tried to do micro-currencies in the early 2000s, got stymied by patents and such. And then there was just a rise in the late aughts of various people doing... you know, there was e-gold, and a number of other different types of things that came out. And yeah, there was a bunch of things. Some of them, you know, there were some improvements on some of the Chaumian-type mechanisms. There was an interesting hash-based one for micro-currencies from Ron Rivest.

1:34:13And at some point, I kind of got saturated by it. So I remember when the Bitcoin paper got sort of circulated around, and, you know, it just was another one of these proposals of many. But it wasn't until 2013 that I got more interested in it and felt like there was something more real here. I dived into it more. And what really was the appeal to me was not its investment possibilities or things of that nature. It was its ability to do censorship resistance. And in fact, the very first project I ever did on Bitcoin was to use UTXOs to do revocation on X.509 certificates for SSL/TLS, which was a problem. In all those years between, you know, '94... TLS became standardized in '99... the whole revocation of a certificate just never really worked. And in 2013, I wrote a thing that basically... if you associated a certificate with a UTXO, and if the UTXO was spent, that meant that the certificate was no longer valid.

1:35:40And the wonderful thing about that was, basically, in five minutes the world would know that particular UTXO was spent, and thus the certificate is no longer valid. And ultimately, that became kind of the first prototype of the decentralized identifier, which I did through the W3C. You know, we started work on that in 2015, with the Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure paper that we did in 2016. We started calling it DID, and it ultimately became an international standard in 2019.

1:36:28Vlad CosteaYeah. I brought Paul on because he's much smarter than me. I'm not sure if the two of you know each other.

1:36:33Paul SztorcOh, yeah. Rebooting the Web of Trust. Are you one of the...? A few times. Yeah. It was a long time ago, I think. Yeah, so... the years just go by.

1:36:46Christopher AllenWere you part of the first DPKI paper? I don't remember.

1:36:50Paul SztorcI don't think so. No, it doesn't ring a bell.

1:36:52Christopher AllenWe had Vitalik and a lot of the Bitcoin Core people all involved in the original paper, which basically said, you know, the decentralization problem is more than just for money. It's also for identity. And then we basically had twice-a-year conferences, until COVID basically, on trying to solve these problems and how to bring human dignity to the internet.

1:37:24Paul SztorcNamecoin, the first altcoin, co-invented by Satoshi. So what did he know? Yeah. Quite a bit, actually, I think. And it's one of the first things that a new coin will do. Like, when you have Ethereum, and the Ethereum Name Service. And so it's like a thing that people... there is actual real demand, I think. It's one of the few things that reliably shows up.

1:37:50Christopher AllenSo I have a question for you. I felt like I've got, you know, kind of a beef, which is that we've been saying since 2005 or earlier: don't reuse keys. Use them once. Don't use the public key for other things. Keep every key usage different. You know, use one key for signing, one key for certifying, et cetera. And clearly Satoshi believed this and built it in as kind of one of the central concepts of Bitcoin. And yet Ethereum basically uses one private key derivation. And then Nostr uses one private key derivation. And I would really love for, you know, it not to do that, because it's really hard to pry that out of the bottom of Nostr. Why is that lesson not getting learned?

1:38:53Paul SztorcI think... my guess is this: that it's easier for people. Like, what I would prefer is you have, like, one key pair per identity. And so you reuse the key... this is what you hate, but just wait till I finish... because it's like, you reuse the key, you have the key and you have the HD-like subkeys. So you reuse it. So you have, like, "Oh, I'm Paul Sztorc on YouTube and on Instagram and on Telegram. I'm, like, the same identity."

1:39:20Christopher AllenRight. So the bag of keys... I mean, this was the original... Bitcoin Core basically created a bag of random keys, and clearly that became unmanageable. So that's when BIP 32 was invented.

1:39:30Paul SztorcPeople loved the HD wallets and all this stuff.

1:39:34Christopher AllenAnd so that basically allowed you to not reuse the key, because you could generate multiple keys. And then technically, you know, you don't even have to keep the original entropy around anymore. You can do that offline, or use some other service or whatever, or at least protect it differently.

1:39:51Paul SztorcSo you have one key pair per identity, but you have multiple identities. So you have, like, Dread Pirate Roberts, and then you have Ross Ulbricht. Two of them. But that's why we have this great... we have a great guest, Will, here. He was in there talking about freeing the crypto six. So you guys should have him on. It's a very important message.

1:40:10Christopher AllenIt's very important. I'll go ahead and head out, but we'll try to get another one scheduled in. And I'll also be here tomorrow.

1:40:17[unclear speaker]Okay. He wants to do a part two.

1:40:20Paul SztorcA part two, good idea. The after-party's at seven, I think. Hopefully we'll see everyone there.

1:40:28Vlad CosteaSo it's a magnetic microphone. Okay. Thank you very much, Christopher. ...

1:40:52[unclear speaker]Don't worry...

1:41:00Vlad CosteaI wanted to know more about their background, but in this setting, it's hard to get the people to figure out which one. Thanks. See you.

1:41:19Paul SztorcOkay, great. Sorry, what? Okay. Let's see if my mic is... I don't think it's on yet. And I think this mic is the better mic. Oh, okay. Oh, it works now? Oh, there! I was looking up at the laptop screen. Okay. Well, it's a very important message. We absolutely should do this. Time is of the essence. We only have, like, 21 days before the midterm election, after which all bets are that Trump will not care as much about this. We need to get this signature. We care more about the issue than they do, so we just have to make this clear. And you had a lot of stuff to say with this Aaron Day thing. It's very interesting. So why don't you just go through the six, you know, for people who don't know, really quickly, and then this Aaron Day thing. And we need this pardon. All the judicial routes have been exhausted, or they're just too slow and inefficient to make a big difference. So it's very political. But I'll give you this microphone. Okay. And maybe I'll just... okay, I'll stick around for a little while. Here, take this mic.

1:42:29WillThanks, Paul. Hi, I'm Will. And I've been concerned about the grotesque injustice that has been foisted on a number of our privacy stalwarts, as I've given to calling them. There are six cases that I'm aware of. I'll start kind of chronologically. Larry McDonald [likely Larry Harmon, of the Helix mixer], I believe, is still in federal prison for operating a custodial mixer long ago. This would have been maybe even 10 years ago. I'm not sure much about the details of his case. The next person who is still in prison is Larry Freeman, who operated a few Bitcoin ATMs in New Hampshire. Ian Freeman, excuse me. I knew that was wrong. I knew that was wrong.

1:43:24Paul Sztorc...right in the big room. Yeah. You don't have a microphone.

1:43:30WillIan Freeman of New Hampshire, who operated a few Bitcoin ATMs in New Hampshire. And then after that is Roman Sterlingov, of whom very few people know, because the Roman Storm of Tornado Cash is big in the news. So let me begin. Roman Sterlingov is a dual national, born in Russia, and in childhood he and his mom emigrated to Sweden after the fall of the Soviet Union. So he's got Swedish citizenship and Russian. He was falsely accused by the feds of being the operator of the Bitcoin Fog mixing service.

1:44:20And the feds were real upset about the Bitcoin Fog mixer, because they had evidence that North Korean hackers had used it a lot to launder their ill-gotten gains. And that's very likely true. There's no contesting that. The problem is that Roman Sterlingov was only a user of Bitcoin Fog. He was not its operator. The prosecutors, the feds, have never produced a single shred of evidence indicating that Roman Sterlingov ever operated Bitcoin Fog. The only evidence they were able to produce at trial was this crap from Chainalysis clustering that somehow linked, in their view, Roman Sterlingov to the Bitcoin Fog mixer as operator of it.

1:45:20He was arrested in April of 2021 on arrival at LAX for his second visit to the United States, and he's been in prison ever since. They denied him bail because he held four passports. He was a Russian citizen, and Russia gives their citizens an internal passport and one for international travel. And Sweden, like several other countries, including, I think, Germany, offers its citizens two passports in case they want to go to Israel and Saudi Arabia, since they can't go to both places with one passport. Okay. So he had four valid passports, but they used that as an excuse to deny him bail. That's just one of the injustices in Roman Sterlingov's case.

1:46:12All right. Then we've got the two... no, Roman Storm is next, chronologically. He was co-developer of the Tornado Cash mixer. It's non-custodial. So by FinCEN's own guidance, which is the most authoritative guidance we have, even to this day, Tornado Cash was not a money transmitter and could not even get a money transmission license. So how the hell is he guilty of operating an unlicensed money transmission business? He is not. But they convicted him on that charge, and the jury was hung on the two more serious charges, each carrying 25-year prison sentences, for money laundering and related charges like that. Okay. That's Roman Storm.

1:47:20The last two, most recent, are the two Samourai devs, Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill, Bill Hill. They are the founders and operators of the Samourai Wallet mixing service. It is also non-custodial. And when they were setting it up, they sought opinions from qualified lawyers as to its status, and those lawyers confirmed to them that it was not a money transmission business according to FinCEN's rules. The feds wanted to take it down anyway. And actually the feds, the prosecutors, before they sought the indictment in the spring of 2024... in the fall of 2023, the Southern District of New York, which was handling the case, asked FinCEN if Samourai Wallet was a money transmission service. FinCEN answered the prosecutors that it was not, and they withheld that from the defense. And the two Samourai devs were arrested in SWAT team raids. They have no criminal record and no history of violence. There was no need to waste taxpayer money on such theater.

1:49:13All right. Then...

1:49:15Paul SztorcYeah.

1:49:18WillBill Hill is older, and he's very private. We don't know anything about how he's doing in prison. Keonne Rodriguez periodically releases letters, and they are available on The Rage, and they're highly recommended, to get a glimpse of the hellholes that prison, even a prison camp, a relatively low-security prison camp, is. Okay. So the Samourai devs' defense team had submitted a number of motions to help their case, and there was to be a hearing before the judge that had been assigned to their case, later in 2024, like maybe May, I think it was. And a few days before the hearing was scheduled to hear arguments by the prosecution and defense on whether or not to grant these motions, the judge in the case was changed.

1:50:30Now, it's very unusual in federal procedure for a judge to change. Usually only in cases of incapacity, or some sort of reason that they need to recuse themselves. It's very rare for it to happen. The judge in that case originally was Judge Berman, and he was replaced by a judge who had been the lead prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and she had become known as a hanging judge because of the harsh sentences that she routinely gave out in cases before her. She was the one who was reassigned, somehow, to the case. Judge Berman continues to hear cases, so he's not incapacitated. Do with that what you will. But the point is...

1:51:28Paul SztorcWe need the pardon.

1:51:30WillYeah, okay. We need the pardon. Because they pled guilty. See, when they saw what had happened to them... oh, so, the judge, when they had the hearing on these motions, the judge at the start of the hearing said, "I have reviewed all of these submissions. They are all denied." And it's customary, though not required, that a judge give at least oral reasons for their decision. She declined to give anything, let alone written reasons. They realized at that point that there was no chance of a fair trial. And the prosecutors were worried about having an adverse verdict in the Tornado Cash case, which was then before the jury, and they offered the Samourai devs a relatively lenient plea, actually fairly lenient in terms of prison time, of only five and four years. Hill got four because he's older and has some health problems. But there were severe financial penalties and seizure of all their bitcoin. In addition, they were fined cash money of some $200,000 each, which will go with them for life until it's paid, unless they are pardoned and given their bitcoin back. So we need to apply pressure on Trump, who has pardoned far less deserving people, to issue full pardons with restitution of the monies seized from them. And there is a campaign afoot to encourage, incent, Trump to issue this pardon. And it's...

1:53:50Paul SztorcDo you mind if I explain? Yeah. Okay. You have the other microphone, I think, also. So I think, yeah, we have to get the pardon. And how can we do that? The midterms are coming up. Trump wants to maintain control for the red party, the Republican Party, as much as possible. It will be seen as a rebuke of Trump if he does not, you know, win, get a lot of votes, even though Trump himself is not running. Election day is coming up. It's in a few... you know, it's like three weeks or so. So it's November 5th, I think. I can't remember. Or the third. It might be the third. Maybe. I don't know.

1:54:30WillIt's sort of a vote on his presidency.

1:54:32Paul SztorcIt is a referendum on Trump. It is. And there is this thing: Aaron Day has created this site. And the site is, I can't remember what it is, something Freedom PAC or something? No, it's StarkFreedom.

1:54:44[unclear speaker]StarkFreedom PAC? I've never heard of this, but it's interesting.

1:54:47Paul SztorcWe're going to try to look it up again. starkfreedom.org. Oh, starkfreedom.org is the website. It's very interesting. And what he's done is he's funded third-party candidates in a number of... to, like, split the vote, in tight races, to split the vote. And the impression I got, and we have to check with Mr. Aaron Day himself, but it seems as though he had done this because Ian Freeman wasn't freed, as per a deal, similar to... so this is conjecture, we should say. We don't really know if this is the case. But I think this is, like, a revenge against Trump for not...

1:55:25WillNot following through on his deal.

1:55:27Paul SztorcNot following through on his deal. And we need Trump, and anyone on the left also... if Trump wants this project killed, he should free the crypto six. We could probably get this project killed, I think, very likely, if he frees the crypto six. And furthermore, people on the left, if they want to make sure that this does not get killed, if they could give us any assurance that they, you know, will use their things, because they have lots of power as well, even though they are the opposition...

1:56:01WillMinority opposition party.

1:56:02Paul SztorcFor now. That's what we need to do. So if people can spread this word, that would be great. And if we can... I think we have to make sure this gets out to people. If people know anyone at whatever, Fox News, or Tucker Carlson, or whatever you've got... Yeah. Please help. If we've got Victor Davis Hanson listening, or whatever you've got, we need to get more on this. So we only have 21 days or whatever. I'm just making that number up, but we only have a few days. We don't have that much time. So, two weeks? A little over two weeks. After the election, people will not care very much. They won't care anywhere near as much as they would care now. So that's the message, I think. So yeah.

1:56:45WillThank you, Paul.

1:56:46Paul SztorcI'll see you guys at the after-party. What time is it? It's at seven?

1:56:51Will7:30, I think. It's not too far from here. It's fine.

1:56:59Paul SztorcThanks. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Okay. And we'll see everyone there. And he'll be here tomorrow, too. Okay. Great.

1:57:09Vlad CosteaDon't forget the mic. Oh, yes, the magnet mic. Let's see if there's anyone else who wants to get interviewed here.

1:57:19[unclear speaker]I think I saw Roast Beef here.

1:57:22Vlad CosteaRoast Beef? He's a very fast talker.

1:57:25[unclear speaker]Yes, he is. I can barely understand him, even if I slow it down to 75%. Oh, it's between shirts. You should record him. Let's edit that out.

1:57:37Vlad CosteaOkay. It's livestreamed, actually. Okay. Michael, come join the livestream.

1:57:50We have Michael Tidwell, the legendary organizer of TABConf, who's joining the livestream right now to talk about the funeral of TABConf, what just happened in the room behind us, where he announced... about Tabby or something, which used to be a thing. Sorry, Tab-what? You had, like, a list of old ideas that you never used again. I've heard that from Paul.

1:58:21Oh, he's a busy man. He's on the phone.

1:58:24[unclear speaker]So, sorry, you said we could use it? Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. All right, bye.

1:58:32Michael TidwellAll right, what's up?

1:58:33Vlad CosteaHi, Michael.

1:58:34Michael TidwellAll right. What did you say? Tab-what now? Tabby or whatever? Oh, the Tabbies.

1:58:38Vlad CosteaYes, the Tabbies.

1:58:39Michael TidwellSo the Tabbies were... it's kind of a funny story. So yeah, bye. So the Tabbies were, like the Tonys, the Oscars, you know, it was kind of like an awards sort of thing, like an award ceremony. So the idea was, "Oh, every year let's do the Tabbies, and this will be the official..." Like, if you have a Tabbie, you're legit, because TABConf is, like, the brand of excellence for tech in Bitcoin. So if you've got a Tabbie, it's like a big deal. And it only lasted one year.

1:59:17Vlad CosteaSo who were the winners of the Tabbies?

1:59:19Michael TidwellSo I can't quite remember who we gave Tabbies to. I would have to look back. Robin Linus got one. Trying to remember who else. We gave out two of them, or three of them. So we gave out three of them, and we had different categories, and we were thinking about letting people vote, and, you know, doing runners-up, like where you reveal the top four for, like, privacy, and then you'd be like, "And the winner is..." and you have an envelope and you open it up. So we did that three years, and you'd have guest presenters, like Andrew Poelstra, Paul Sztorc. I would give them envelopes, and they would read it off, and it was kind of funny. It was great. It was a good time. But yeah, I mean, it's a lot of work. Is this, like, double recording? What is this?

2:00:12Vlad CosteaYeah, I guess so, because this one is a bit louder, and that one sometimes is not as loud. You can see here that the levels are a bit different. But anyway, okay. Why would you say that this is the last TABConf? It's the eighth annual edition. Are you tired of doing TABConf, or is Bitcoin dying, or something?

2:00:30Michael TidwellIt's just saturation. That's, like, the number one reason. There's just too many Bitcoin conferences.

2:00:35Vlad CosteaYeah, but this one has been around since before there were too many Bitcoin conferences.

2:00:39Michael TidwellCorrect. But people still go to the other ones, and then they get tired, and then it's hard to get them to come to TABConf, and it's begging and pleading people to come every year.

2:00:47Vlad CosteaSo would you say that TABConf got killed by David Bailey or something?

2:00:53Michael TidwellNo, not really. It's death by a thousand cuts: Bitcoin++, OPNEXT, Prague, Lugano, like, all these little things that take people away, especially people in their own hometown. You could arguably say the Bitcoin Conference contributes to death by a thousand cuts. But the thing about the Bitcoin Conference is, you know, Bitcoin Magazine's thing wasn't really all that technical. It was more like just the big event. So it actually didn't compete as much as... it competed as much as Bitcoin++ competed. You know what I mean? Like, all these conferences, regardless of their size, usually compete at some level, because there's people in those countries and those hometowns, and they're like, "Oh, I can't miss my hometown one," you know?

2:01:44And then October, which is when we normally have it, is just always like... apparently there's, like, five events in this week even. And I announce my conferences, historically, a year in advance. Obviously this year I didn't, but normally I always announce one year in advance. So there's no excuse for other people to not know, or to book over. And yet every year, the conferences that need to make their money, because they're paying staff and they're paying themselves, don't care whether or not TABConf is that week. And I'm not, like, sad about that. I'm not sad about them. I'm just sad that, well, it's the people that are deciding to go that really make those things even viable and possible for those other people. And I'm also a hypocrite, because I like going to those conferences, too. So it's like, some of these conferences are great.

2:02:39Vlad CosteaI went for the first time in Nashville two years ago.

2:02:43Michael TidwellYeah. And these events are great, right? And how many times have you been to TABConf?

2:02:49Vlad CosteaThis is my first one. And I almost came two times. And four other times, I think, I sent magazines.

2:02:57Michael TidwellRight. And would you say that the other times you didn't go were because of financial reasons, travel fatigue, et cetera? Like, there's so many kinds of things going on.

2:03:06Vlad CosteaMaybe four years ago... no. When was the first time? Five years ago. It was when I first sent my magazines. And then the next year, I wanted to come, but I didn't have enough money. And then the next year, you said I could apply for some sort of grant or whatever, but I never did. And then the next year, I don't know, I was doing something with my girlfriend. And then the next year I almost came. And then I finally came here. I said there's no excuse for me not to attend this.

2:03:33Michael TidwellSo if it wasn't the final TABConf, would you have come?

2:03:37Vlad CosteaNo, I would have come.

2:03:38Michael TidwellOkay. You would have come even if it wasn't the final one.

2:03:40Vlad CosteaLook at these sponsors right there. Okay: SideShift, thank you very much, you paid for my plane ticket. What else is there? Braiins Hashpower, thank you very much, you paid for my hotel.

2:03:48Michael TidwellOh, Braiins. Braiins with a double I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know those people. At one point I thought Braiins was going to sponsor TABConf. I like those people.

2:03:57Vlad CosteaDo that, Christian. They're going to drop the sponsorship for this podcast anyway, because they said they've sort of exhausted the resources for campaigns. They wanted to advertise the Hashpower service, which is where you can rent hashrate, and now it's sort of successful already and they don't need promotion anymore, so they're going to drop the sponsorship. Come to TABConf, give these people money. Actually, I was pointing to ecash.com.

2:04:23Michael TidwellIt's like, "Buy eCash." That's what you're doing.

2:04:26Vlad CosteaAnd you can claim it for free on the first of November, I guess. 31st of October, whatever.

2:04:33Michael TidwellYeah. So the real question is: how much will people vote with their feet? Because I would say this is the least dramatized hard fork. This is the most kosher, calm hard fork in recent memory. This doesn't have a lot of emotional stigma related to it. So I wonder, what does it look like for a hard fork that isn't antagonistically emotional in the space? What happens with that fork? Because I haven't seen that hard fork. I've only seen the hard forks that have deep emotional involvement, you know?

2:05:08Vlad CosteaI'm not sure. I mean, I'm trying to think of a counterexample. I'm pretty sure that there was a time in 2013 when someone kept running the old blockchain.

2:05:19Michael TidwellOh, come on. That's not a real example. That's just, like, a technical example.

2:05:23Vlad CosteaIt is. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, Paul's fork. Paul Sztorc's fork. Paul Sztorc's fork. Try to say that three times quickly. Paul Sztorc's fork. Paul Sztorc's fork.

2:05:33Michael TidwellYou've got to make it like a chant, and then you can do it.

2:05:35Vlad CosteaYeah. Although I only said it twice. It's really unfortunate that it's happening like this, because it was supposed to be the thing that makes Bitcoin actually useful for everything and drains the entire altcoin market of their use cases. And now it's going to launch on a different network, which is not Bitcoin, but is a continuation of Bitcoin. I mean, I'm sort of disappointed it's happening, but I'm also happy that it's happening, because finally we get to see... like, I was talking with, I don't remember exactly who told me... the Wasabi guy. I'm not going to mention his name. Maybe he joins the podcast tomorrow. I'm going to do another livestream tomorrow, Michael. You can join again. But he was saying that he's convinced that the miners will steal, and this extension of the incentive system is only going to make miners just steal everything and destroy the network.

2:06:24Michael TidwellSo I think that's good. So this is game theory that Paul would argue hasn't been proven out. And if it turns out that this is just a total sham and miners are constantly stealing, I would say: experiment resolved, to some degree. Now, whether or not Paul gives up at that point, I don't know. But I know Paul's sentiment was, if this was ever to activate on the main chain, and it just turns out that miners would just be constantly stealing, and you couldn't get people to rally behind it logically and economically, like how we thought it would work, then it would be a finished experiment. So I don't know if he has that same opinion with a hard fork version of drivechain. But I remember him having this sort of sentiment towards Bitcoin.

2:07:07Vlad CosteaYou're also responsible for some of the most amazing debates at TABConf. The first year, you had Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin SV.

2:07:15Michael TidwellYeah. So back then, I was very sympathetic to Bitcoin Cash, not so much Bitcoin SV, but still, I wanted to...

2:07:24Vlad CosteaBut you still brought Kevin Pham.

2:07:26Michael TidwellWell, I still wanted to bring people into the fold, because I cared about Bitcoiners, and I don't want to shrink the Bitcoin community. I want to grow the Bitcoin community. And I felt like us fracturing like that is not conducive to a healthy sort of growth movement. And, you know, I wanted to bring even the Dash people into the fold, and the Monero people into the fold. And I would say the Monero people are probably the most reasonable, after Fluffy kind of took charge.

2:08:05Vlad CosteaBut he's not in charge anymore.

2:08:06Michael TidwellI know. But when he got in charge, they became super likable. And that whole community was essentially a Bitcoiner community slash Monero community. I feel like all the Monero people were also pretty warm to Bitcoin. Not like "Bitcoin's shit," you know, like some other projects.

2:08:24Vlad CosteaLike what? Name them.

2:08:25Michael TidwellI think Dash was a bit more like "Dash, and no Bitcoin." I feel like there's plenty of projects that were a bit more... I don't know. And then, you know, it's funny, when I said Dash, what I'm remembering is when it was still called Darkcoin. Remember Amanda B. Johnson?

2:08:49Vlad CosteaI do. Oh, my gosh.

2:08:51Michael TidwellWhatever happened to her, I wonder?

2:08:53Vlad CosteaShe's still going to events, apparently.

2:08:55Michael TidwellReally?

2:08:56Vlad CosteaI've seen people taking pictures of her. She's, like, Bitcoin lore, even though it's not Bitcoin.

2:09:01Michael TidwellIt's like Bitcoin lore, somehow.

2:09:03Vlad CosteaIt was like a 7-out-of-10 lady who was just hot enough to get your attention, and intriguing enough, because she was talking in the right language, for you to keep listening.

2:09:14Michael TidwellBut also, if that happened now, you would probably think that she was AI, based on the way that she talked.

2:09:21Vlad CosteaThat's possible. I mean, I can think of other podcasters in Bitcoin who are female, and they're successful right now, and they're sort of the modern-day Amanda B. Johnson in some ways. I hope they stick around for longer than Amanda, and they have a much better record. I've been doing this podcast for almost eight years, and I see people coming and going all the time. And it's kind of unfortunate.

2:09:42Michael TidwellSo Evan and Amanda, the two people with Darkcoin... I can't remember if it was Darkcoin or Dash back then, but they came to TAB to present. They were presenters at one of the monthly meetups, because the monthly meetups were big, so people flew in for them. I still remember them presenting. I can't remember if they came to the 2018 TABConf. I think they might have. It's possible.

2:10:06Vlad CosteaThat was the first one, right? Yeah, I think they came to the 2018 one. The BTC versus BCH versus BSV debate?

2:10:12Michael TidwellNo, that was 2019.

2:10:13Vlad CosteaReally? Okay, so I'm remembering it wrong?

2:10:17Michael TidwellYeah, because the Bitcoin SV thing was a bit later. It was in November. That forked off probably after the 2018 TABConf. Yes. But even still, the community was strong enough for me to foster it in 2019. And I still was like, "Let's not push people away. Let's bring them into the fold." So we were very friendly to any coins doing privacy, any coins doing anything interesting with scale, any coins that wanted to talk about tech. And we just kept it about tech, and not about price action, and politics and drama, and, like, shilling. One of the things, during the ICO craze, was that the shilling became insane. So we really promoted ourselves with "no shill" kind of verbiage.

2:11:14Vlad CosteaYes. So they came here, they wouldn't tell anyone what to buy, but they would try to prove that their tech is interesting, right?

2:11:22Michael TidwellYeah. It was like, you can have stage time, you have to answer questions, you're not allowed to shill. No shilling. And I would promise that to attendees. I would promise it couldn't be a sales pitch. It couldn't be just, like, a marketing thing. It would have to be, like, "We're going to talk about some technical thing that's interesting about it."

2:11:41Vlad CosteaNow, every year at TABConf, it was sort of Paul who was, like, the main event, almost. He was always debating someone, and that turned out to be super popular. He had an amazing debate, like, four years ago, with Peter Todd, the one that I moderated, kind of, in the middle. Yes. He was super nervous, and he kept rubbing his knee.

2:12:04Michael TidwellI didn't notice that.

2:12:05Vlad CosteaI've heard some stories that he received some media training before that, just to be able to face Peter Todd more calmly or something. And he fucked up.

2:12:13Michael TidwellOh, interesting.

2:12:14Vlad CosteaBut that's just Paul. You can't control him. You can't tell him what to do. He's going to just be himself.

2:12:22Michael TidwellYeah. That's... you know, when I made the promo tweet about Paul...

2:12:26Vlad CosteaHe's not here anymore, but he was on the show earlier. And now we're just talking behind his back, because he's not listening to the show. I know it.

2:12:33Michael TidwellYeah. Well, we're sitting right in front of his website. I don't think he's going to mind. But, oh gosh, what was I saying about Paul? I don't remember.

2:12:44Vlad CosteaI mentioned the debate and how he was nervous.

2:12:49Michael TidwellIt'll come back to me. Maybe.

2:12:51Vlad CosteaOkay. Well, I don't know. What else do you want to talk about? Maybe do a quick history of the funniest moments from TABConf? Like, you did the funeral, the obituary.

2:13:04Michael TidwellSo I have some trivia. It's kind of funny in hindsight, but it's not funny; it's an interesting story. I think it'd be better than just saying a random funny thing. So one year... let me think about the year. It was either 2019 or 2021. I think 2019. Yeah, 2019. TABConf got scammed. Scammed hard. So we got scammed because I was trying to save money. So I didn't want to use the caterer that was part of the venue. They let me use an outside caterer. And one of the people that was coming to the meetup was in the food industry or whatever. I decided, "Oh, this is great. We get to use one of the community members' companies, and we get to do catering through him. This is great. And he's been coming for, like, a year. This is awesome."

2:14:05So we used him, and he needs the money up front. And me paying him was all sketchy. It was kind of weird. I had to pay, like, this random name or something. It wasn't his name. I was like, "That's weird." He's like, "Yeah, it's my business name or something. Don't worry about it." So I wire this money to him. And I wanted to ACH it to him at first, and he's like, "No, this has to be a wire." Anyways, I give him $10,000 for the food for the event, for three... it's like a three-day event, and we're going to have lunch provided to some degree. And the people get there, and they're giving us, like, a piece of bread with a slice of cheese and one slice of turkey. And that's it. And, like, folded, as the sandwich.

2:14:58Vlad CosteaMaybe it was, like, a chef thing, right? Were they French or something?

2:15:02Michael TidwellNo, they were scammers. Well, one of them was a scammer.

2:15:05Vlad CosteaAny Michelin stars or whatever?

2:15:07Michael TidwellNo. So then everyone's kind of pissed about the food being terrible. And then I'm like, "Yeah, I guess this is what $10,000 gets you." That was back when I was young and had just started the conference. I didn't really know.

2:15:25Vlad CosteaYou were still young. You were 30-something.

2:15:26Michael TidwellYeah, but this is when I was younger, so even more naive. And so the lady that came and delivered the food and did all the stuff, who I thought worked with the guy that I paid, she called me, and she's like, "Hey, are you ever going to pay me for the lunch that I provided? Because I never got paid." I was like, "What are you talking about? I paid Bobby. What do you mean?" And she's like, "Yeah, Bobby was supposed to give me $1,000 for the food for the three days." I was like, "$1,000 for those sandwiches?" And I said, "I gave him $10,000." And she's like, "If you'd given me $10,000, I could actually have given you real lunches." Wow. And I was like, "Well, he did." So not only did he not pay her the $1,000, but he pocketed everything, apparently. And that's how TABConf got scammed in 2019.

2:16:29Vlad CosteaIt's not just crypto that has the scams, right? It's not just the ICOs or the meme coins. It's also the food people. I hope your mom is proud of you, Robert.

2:16:41Michael TidwellOkay, what is that from?

2:16:42Vlad CosteaI was trying to be condescending. I don't know.

2:16:45Michael TidwellWho's Robert? Oh, Bobby. Okay.

2:16:47Vlad CosteaThat might be his real name, Robert.

2:16:49Michael TidwellYeah, who knows? Well, anyways, man.

2:16:51Vlad CosteaWait, is there anyone who hasn't come to TABConf that you really wanted to get on stage?

2:16:57Michael TidwellSo I never want anyone to come to TABConf just to be on stage. Typically, I just want people to come as attendees, because high-quality attendees have chances to debate and come up on stage anyway, if they have questions. Like, I would love just a room full of really highly qualified people that can then vet what is actually happening, and actually provide better Q&A, or come up and debate and dispute what's being said. But I mean, I've always wanted Greg Maxwell to come. You know, he hasn't come.

2:17:34Vlad CosteaWas he close to coming? Like, did he ever say, "Well, I might show up," or whatever?

2:17:41Michael TidwellYou know, I don't know if I ever really even got close, but I know he at least knew that I wanted him to come.

2:17:47Vlad CosteaAt least that's what I've been told. I just, like, almost had Nick Szabo a couple of times on the podcast.

2:17:54Michael TidwellYeah, I would not... Dude, Nick Szabo, I could care less if he ever came to TABConf.

2:17:59Vlad CosteaWhy not?

2:18:00Michael TidwellBecause he is such an asshole sometimes.

2:18:02Vlad CosteaWe all are, sometimes.

2:18:03Michael TidwellI like nice people. You know, what's funny is, all these people might be nicer in person. When I saw Nick Szabo in person, I never talked to him, so I don't know if he's nicer or not. But dude, online, he never gave me the time of day. And I don't know if that's because he was probably getting bombarded. But because I wasn't getting bombarded, I didn't think about other people probably getting bombarded. So maybe that's why he never, you know, gave TABConf a chance early on. I only reached out to him early on.

2:18:36Vlad CosteaBut we still have a full conference day tomorrow, right?

2:18:39Michael TidwellYeah.

2:18:40Vlad CosteaBut you chose to do the obituary today.

2:18:42Michael TidwellYeah, as an experiment. So every year I do experiments with the format, and I wanted to do this format. So it was before people would leave, because there's probably going to be, like, 100 people that leave tonight. So I just wanted to make sure we had as many people as possible.

2:18:56Vlad CosteaI feel sorry for them. This is so much fun. Yeah, I just wish I had shown up earlier today, because I went to Best Buy to buy some stuff, which I'm using here, and they did not have it at Best Buy. So I went to Target, and they didn't have it either. So I went back to Best Buy and tried to improvise. This setup is the result of that. And yeah, I'm really happy to be here. I'm really proud that I got to do this livestream. And two days ago I was on stage, and I launched this new magazine at TABConf this year. Do you have a copy? I'll give you one if you don't have it.

2:19:33Michael TidwellI think I tried to buy one from you at the free dinner the other night.

2:19:37Vlad CosteaOh, right. So you do have a copy.

2:19:39Michael TidwellI don't know if I picked one up. I don't think I picked one up.

2:19:41Vlad CosteaOkay, I'll give you another one.

2:19:43Michael TidwellI think it's because you were asking for money. I didn't have any cash on me. I didn't have any money on me at the time.

2:19:50Vlad CosteaThat's fine. I'm not asking for money. Dude, you're a nice guy. I like you. I like you more than Nick Szabo.

2:19:56Michael TidwellWell, nobody's going to remember my name after I die, except for my kids, maybe. Anyway.

2:20:02Vlad CosteaDude, I'll remember you.

2:20:03Michael TidwellOh, that's so sweet. I can't wait for us to die so we can remember each other.

2:20:07Vlad CosteaNo, don't say that. Don't say that. So, top three highlights of TABConf over the years. No pressure there. Just go. Off the top of your head.

2:20:21Michael TidwellHighlights would be... so, trivia for BitDevs, where people are debating very technical concepts, and arguing, and arguments going along the lines of, "No, I wrote that BIP. I know what this is. This answer is wrong." Like this crypto seminar from last night... no, we called it... I forget what it was called. It was called, like, Hardcore Trivia or something. And it was very technical, like, "Who was the person?" or "What was the byte of this sighash flag?" Stuff like that. That's one.

2:21:04I would say this: that damn standing ovation at the end blew my mind. That was a lot. That was a lot to take in. I was like, "Whoa." So I would say the last TABConf, that was pretty crazy. Man, I was not expecting that. Dude, everyone was on their feet.

2:21:24Vlad CosteaI wasn't there, because I was doing the livestream, but I'm going to watch the YouTube video when I get home. I did hear it. It was very loud.

2:21:34Michael TidwellDude, they just kept going. I was like, "What do I do? Do I just stand here, or do I walk off? Like, do I wave?" I'm not used to this. I'm used to people clapping, but now I know how they feel when you do some sort of musical or play, or, I don't know, something with arts and music. There's always, like, a drama play or something where there's usually a standing ovation.

2:21:59Vlad CosteaDid you get flowers or something?

2:22:01Michael TidwellDude, people were throwing bras and panties, and I was like, "Wait, there's a bunch of rooms. Guys, what's going on? Whose are these?" I don't know. I'm just kidding. Jockstrap. I can make a guess. I was wearing a bra. Anyway. Yeah, that's two. I don't have a third yet. I would have to think, or we just keep it at two. It's fine.

2:22:24Vlad CosteaWe can do this tomorrow, also, if you're available. Because this is not the death of TABConf. It's the evolution of TABConf. And last thing: what are you going to do with your eCash airdrop on the 31st of October? Are you going to ignore it, or are you going to dump?

2:22:39Michael TidwellOkay. No, I'm not going to... I'll sit on it. I didn't dump my Bitcoin Cash. I'm not going to dump this.

2:22:49Vlad CosteaYou're a nice guy. No... And I know that you watch Kill Tony. I've heard you talk about it. You're the Tony of Bitcoin.

2:22:57Michael TidwellWell, you know, what I was thinking of doing is a Kill Tidwell. Kill Tidwell. And doing, like, just comedy. Like, Bitcoin comedy. And you get one minute. How fun would that be?

2:23:07Vlad CosteaAnd I think the jokes are going to run out in the first month, and hold it up.

2:23:11Michael TidwellNo, dude, there's so much material. Okay, I mean, dude, you have to think about it. Bitcoin has so much drama and memes, and people that are constantly online, that the memes never stop. There's always new material every single week. I would join that. Like, think about it: like the Clearcase joke that I've cracked a couple of times. These jokes write themselves. Like, anyways, did you watch the red team panel? We cracked a lot of jokes.

2:23:41Vlad CosteaNo, I did not watch anything. I'm going to watch it when I go home, because you can't download the interactions that you have with people outside of the conference rooms. I'm not saying people should not attend whatever is happening inside. I'm just saying that sometimes the people outside are very interesting.

2:23:57Michael TidwellI would say the... let me give a quick thing, because it's just coming to my mind. The one person I was really surprised never came to TABConf...

2:24:06Vlad CosteaAndreas Antonopoulos?

2:24:07Michael TidwellNo, I could care less about him. Also, I have respect for him. I'm not saying I don't like him. I'm just saying I could care less about him coming to TABConf. But Matt Odell. I was really surprised Matt Odell never came to TABConf, just because he's really close, geographically. I was really surprised about that.

2:24:34Vlad CosteaHe does seem like the kind of guy who would show up. Does he go to BTC++?

2:24:38Michael TidwellNo, I don't think he does. I don't think he does.

2:24:43Vlad CosteaHe might, if they're in Nashville.

2:24:45Michael TidwellTo pull a joke out of the Bitcoin++ hat, maybe that he's a Bitcoin LARP. That's a game that they play. Yeah, a lot of people haven't come, but I was really surprised that he didn't come to any of them.

2:25:00Vlad CosteaMan, I've flown 17 hours for this, and I would do it once again. Like, there's the guy here, I'm not sure if I should mention him... Art. And he owns the first Bitcoin car in the world. I took a drive in that one yesterday.

2:25:13Michael TidwellYeah, so Rassah's old Prius, bought for a thousand bitcoin. The Mycelium guy. You want to hear a funny story about Rassah real quick?

2:25:22Vlad CosteaOf course.

2:25:23Michael TidwellHe flew into Bitcoin Atlanta's meetup, and it's at an airport, and we were having, like, a barbecue outside. And he lands his plane, and we're like, "Oh, cool, Rassah's here. This is awesome." It's like, you know you've made it when Bitcoiners fly into your meetup, you know what I mean? That's how you know you made it.

2:25:41Vlad CosteaDoes he have, like, a landing pad or something?

2:25:43Michael TidwellWell, there's an airstrip. We're at an airport. So he landed, and then he turned his plane, and the propellers are going, and it blows all the food off the table, all this shit. It just blows everything.

2:25:55Vlad CosteaThe propellers are so strong. That's a weird flex.

2:26:01Michael TidwellI don't think he did it on purpose. He was just parking the airplane, you know? But it was just really funny. I don't know, I thought it was funny. Too bad about the food. But it was more just, like, empty plates flying, like we were putting out... anyways, it's not a big deal. It was just funny that his plane took the picnic off, like, three or four tables and just blew it like crazy.

2:26:26Vlad CosteaThere's also so much happening in Atlanta, I learned from you. I was not aware that BitPay is from here, and that Jeff Garzik was living here for a long time.

2:26:35Michael TidwellYeah. Jeff Garzik never came to TABConf. I don't really care about that one all too much. Stephen Pair has come to TABConf. That was pretty cool.

2:26:43Vlad CosteaWhich Stephen?

2:26:44Michael TidwellStephen Pair.

2:26:45Vlad CosteaPair?

2:26:46Michael TidwellHe's the CEO of BitPay. Founder and CEO. So I thought that was pretty cool. He's come to TABConf.

2:26:51Vlad CosteaYou were sponsored by BitPay a couple of times.

2:26:53Michael TidwellA couple of times BitPay has sponsored TABConf. But I have not necessarily been super engaged with BitPay. I don't know if they like me or not. I'm not sure if there's, like, "Oh, he's not really friendly to Bitcoin Cash," or whatever. I know, because BitPay was really pro... Yeah. And I think they sort of got tired of sponsoring Bitcoin conferences or something. I'm not sure exactly.

2:27:27Vlad CosteaI don't think that's the case, because they did sponsor the Litecoin Summit in Nashville.

2:27:32Michael TidwellWhat year?

2:27:33Vlad CosteaTwo years ago.

2:27:36Michael TidwellBut they might have sponsored TABConf two years ago. Okay. Yeah, because it's only the last two years that they haven't sponsored TABConf, I think. Yeah. Well, Paul did, I think. Yeah, yeah. No, but BitPay's been supportive over the years. I think they just decided not to make it a priority to sponsor Bitcoin events. I think they're also smaller now than they were a few years ago.

2:28:01Vlad CosteaI'm not sure how many payments they process anymore.

2:28:04Michael TidwellYeah, I've got to be honest, I'm not really sure what's going on, because I used to always have at least three or four friends that worked there, and now I don't have any friends that work there.

2:28:13Vlad CosteaIs it because they're no longer your friends, or because they left the company?

2:28:17Michael TidwellNo, because they left or got fired or something. I keep most of my friends regardless of their thoughts on altcoins, shitcoins, Bitcoin, you know what I mean? That's not going to end a friendship.

2:28:33Vlad CosteaBecause I have people who are...

2:28:35Michael TidwellBitcoin's not my religion. People have mistakenly made Bitcoin their religion, in my opinion. And I don't agree with that at all. Because when you say that you love gold, as an example, and you're like, "I love gold," and then I show you a metal that is yellow, that is, we'll say, 19 grams per cubic centimeter, is shiny, has the same metallic properties, and it has one extra property that's better than gold, you're like, "Yeah, but it's not gold." And then you're like, "Well, okay, but what about gold do you like that this doesn't have?" And if you can't say it, then it's like, okay. Well, what I'm trying to say is, you can make something your religion without any reason, and it doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. And when you start making anything, like a technology, a religion to you, then it makes you irrational in evaluating alternatives.

2:29:38Vlad CosteaI do have this magazine about Bitcoin forks, which I'm happy got a good reception, and people were actually applauding my speech. I was expecting tomatoes and eggs, but I hear eggs are expensive in the US, so I take that back. Well, what's your favorite fork? And you can't say BTC. Like, what's your favorite Bitcoin fork? It can be a UTXO fork, a code-base fork, it can be some fork, like a soft fork that was not activated on Bitcoin. Okay. You don't like the question.

2:30:13Michael TidwellWhat's my favorite hard fork of Bitcoin? Like, what's my favorite coin that isn't Bitcoin? Like, soft fork?

2:30:19Vlad CosteaCan be a soft fork. Can be a hard fork.

2:30:21Michael TidwellI mean, I would say the Taproot soft fork was my favorite, then.

2:30:24Vlad CosteaReally?

2:30:25Michael TidwellYeah. I mean, I love using Taproot. I think it's great. I think it's super underutilized. I mean, all the puzzles that we do at TABConf are, like, Taproot-related now. And it's absolutely enabled... it's enabled so many cool-style transactions, and so many opportunities to do really cool things.

2:30:45Vlad CosteaIf someone is smart, you can crack this, whatever it says on the sides. I'm not sure if you can see it. If you can record it, maybe you can ask your AI.

2:30:53Michael TidwellNo way. There's no way they're going to be able to see that.

2:30:56Vlad CosteaI'm sorry. I tried. I tried. I'm trying to make you some money, but I don't think this is enough for you to get there, to solve the puzzle. I think you need more stuff.

2:31:05Michael TidwellThat's all you need to start. This is what you need just to get started. Yeah. But, you know, if you really wanted to, wouldn't it be nicer if you wrote down all those hex characters and just gave it to your community, if you really want them to look at it? I'm actually curious who's watching right now.

2:31:21Vlad CosteaOh, there are comments. Okay. "Hi, Vlad." Hi, Arup B. There are people watching. I hope you're going to retweet this so people see it, too. Is there any hard fork of Bitcoin that you like?

2:31:39Michael TidwellI like all the hard forks.

2:31:41Vlad CosteaAll of them?

2:31:42Michael TidwellYeah. I like all the hard forks.

2:31:43Vlad CosteaBut is there any one that you use and you're like, "Oh, this is neat"?

2:31:46Michael TidwellOh, use? I don't use any of the hard forks. I just like the idea that if people are not happy, they can hard fork. I love that. I don't think that diminishes the value of the original coin, like Bitcoin, if you hard fork Bitcoin, because you're allowing people to vote with their feet. And great, that's awesome. That's actually, in my opinion, how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin works by voting with your feet, as the nuclear option. And if we don't... it's like, I don't know, I want to make some analogy that's probably wrong about voting or something. But you have to have a nuclear option. So you don't need to use the nuclear option, but if you don't have the nuclear option available...

2:32:38Vlad CosteaEven as a threat, or a deterrent.

2:32:40Michael TidwellYeah. Then it's kind of like you're screwed. But you want the nuclear threat, so you never have to use the nuclear option. You know what I mean? It's hard to... the policy of the longest stick. I think it was Benjamin Franklin or something that came up with that. Something where it's, like, mutual destruction or something. Yeah. So you need hard forks in order to keep everyone in line with the right incentives. And if you never have a hard fork, and hard forks are impossible for some odd reason, then you're in big trouble, because then you have no nuclear option to hold people accountable. And I am not scared of hard forks. And anyone who is scared of hard forks, you have to check your own... like, what is that? Like your own security? Like, abstractly saying you're not secure with yourself.

2:33:36Vlad CosteaYou're basically gay if you're afraid of hard forks.

2:33:39Michael TidwellYou're blockchain gay. And you're in the closet. Yeah. It's like, you think your Bitcoin is so fragile that someone can start a project that hard forks it, and it'll kill it. Like, then are you really a Bitcoiner? Because I am way more of a Bitcoiner, because I don't think any of these hard forks are going to kill Bitcoin, unless they're better than Bitcoin. In which case, guess what? Bitcoin is not my religion. And guess what? I think the chances are very slim. But you don't want to use the inferior technology that is valued less, that everyone is using. Because who the hell cares about your tech religion?

2:34:13Vlad CosteaAre you saying you're not here to pump your own bags? Because at the end of the day, everyone is trying to pump their own bags and finds the justification for it.

2:34:21Michael TidwellThat's why I'm not selling or buying any of this shit. You know what I mean? That's why I'm just sitting on my hands. I would say not being ignorant, or trying not to be ignorant, but being observant. And I think you can do a lot of things in Bitcoin to earn 10%. Let's say you want to sell forks here and there, and you want to sell Luke Dashjr coins, you want to sell eCash coins. You can sell all these coins. You might get marginal little benefits. But guess what happens if you ever get any of those bets wrong? You lose everything.

2:35:00Vlad CosteaBut you only do that with, like, 10% or whatever. So whatever you're comfortable losing.

2:35:07Michael TidwellBut for me, if you do it with 10%, why not 100%?

2:35:10Vlad CosteaYou've got to manage risk, right? You're not going to go all in. It's like playing poker.

2:35:16Michael TidwellSure, but the managed risk is: you have the airdrop.

2:35:21Vlad CosteaYes.

2:35:22Michael TidwellSo you're already diversified.

2:35:23Vlad CosteaYes, you are.

2:35:24Michael TidwellSo then what risk are you actually managing?

2:35:29Vlad CosteaWell, maybe you feel like you don't have enough Luke Dashjr coin or enough eCash or whatever, and you feel like they have a very strong community, and you're like, "I'm not going to lose this hand. I'm going to put 5% in it."

2:35:40Michael TidwellSo that's what I was saying: you can increase your stack by 10% every time you sell correctly. If you do this thing where you're always mitigating risk and always diversifying, to some degree, like 10% or whatever, then you're just losing 10% of your stack every time. And this is the trap of...

2:35:59Vlad CosteaBut you're losing on one hand to gain on the other.

2:36:03Michael TidwellOnly if it works.

2:36:04Vlad CosteaIf it works, yeah.

2:36:06Michael TidwellBut what I'm saying is, I think we're just cutting it... it's the same idea, but just cutting in the opposite direction. So it's still, what I'm saying, a bad idea. Opinionated, probably. I'm probably speaking from opinion. I don't know. Maybe there's math that supports what you're saying. I don't know. And there are people who are more willing to take on risks. Yeah. But what I'm saying is, the risk/reward there, I think, is a wash. You're not actually diversifying risk, is what I'm saying. But, my opinion... this is my opinion. I don't have a strong enough background in math to actually know if the math is correct. But I think it's a wash.

2:36:51Vlad CosteaAll the math you need to understand is that people look for a 100x, and Bitcoin is less likely to do a 100x than the new fork by Luke or Paul. And then they're going to be like, "If I put $1,000 into this and maybe it does a 100x, it will be $100,000, and I will buy myself a fancy new car or something."

2:37:12Michael TidwellThat's the worst. Right. That's the worst take to have. That's the absolute worst take to have. Because then you just start dwindling your stack over time, and you're trying to be this version of a VC. And instead of a VC already having extreme risk, you decided you wanted to 10x that risk for the same amount of upside that a VC takes on. So you're becoming the most irrational VC possible. I've got to take this phone call.

2:37:38Vlad CosteaYeah. Dude, it was nice to chat. Thank you very much, Michael. I hope I'll see you tomorrow again. As I told everyone, you are my third favorite Michael, after Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Really great guy. I'm happy that he allowed me to do this, and I'm thankful for everything, for the opportunity and for being on stage. I will have to give him also one of these Forks magazines. To those of you who stuck around and listened... oh, there's someone playing with the microphone. We have to evacuate the building.

2:38:10Thank you very much for watching this. I'm going to be back tomorrow with another livestream, with more people that I will be interviewing. Thanks to the sponsors. Once again, Cake Wallet: download that one. It has 2 million users already, but the network effects are strong, and you can do a lot with it, from swapping all the way to using privacy coins. SideShift, which is the place where I recommend you swap your stablecoins for sound money that cannot be taken away from you. Orange Rock, the place where you can trade without KYC or any limits. LayerTwo Labs, launching eCash, which has the logo behind me. And Braiins Hashpower, where you can rent hashrate to mine eCash, which is behind me, or Bitcoin, if you want a lottery ticket.

2:38:51Thank you very much for watching. It's been about 2 hours 40 minutes. Not that bad. Hi, Chris from Mallorca. I see that you wrote a message in the chat. There's Huddle Tarantula. There's Dollar Crypto. Shoutout to you guys. Thank you for sticking around. I have to go pack my stuff and go to the after-party or dinner or whatever is happening. I'm not even aware. Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow.