Title: S17 E8: Riccardo Spagni on Bitcoin, Monero & Privacy
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Riccardo Spagni ("fluffypony"; former Monero lead maintainer, Tari)
Published: 2026-02-17
Duration: 2:04:48
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2026-02-17_s17_e8_riccardo_spagni_on_bitcoin_monero_privacy_v2.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-02-17_s17_e8_riccardo_spagni_on_bitcoin_monero_privacy_v2.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, given a full manual read-through (about 130 corrections), then reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream; three-way comparison over the whole episode (131 disagreement spots reviewed). 29 doubtful or dropped stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD), including the WhalePanda / paper-Bitcoin exchange at 00:52:24-00:53:14, the Knots "broad consensus" remark at 00:39:52, the Mircea Popescu / The Bitcoin Foundation / Ascii passage at 01:33:40-01:35:00, the Monerotopia and Nick Spanos / Tatiana Moroz passage at 01:25:21, the watch and suit chat at 01:38:19-01:42:16 and the sign-off. Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (two reference voices, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings, and short turns were re-attributed by hand where needed (e.g. 00:16:24, 00:41:35, 00:46:31, 00:52:29, 01:12:46-01:12:49, 01:27:01, 01:43:58, 02:04:36). Sponsor reads (Braiins Hashpower, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes, SideShift.ai) are read live by Vlad. Names and jargon were checked against the title, the feed and the web (monerotopia.com: Monerotopia 2024 was held 14-17 November 2024 in Mexico City, so Vlad's "November of 2014" is a slip): Magical Crypto Friends, Craig Wright / COPA trial, Daniel Krawisz, Nicolas van Saberhagen / CryptoNote, Bitcoin Wizards IRC, LayerTwo Labs / drivechains, Bitcoin Uncensored (Chris DeRose, Junseth), Greg Maxwell / RingCT, Gloria Zhao, Casey Rodarmor / Ordinals, Counterparty, colored coins, BIP110, Knots, Cuprate, Pieter Hintjens / ZeroMQ / nanomsg, Matt Corallo, Chainalysis, Samourai, Ray Youssef / NoOnes, WhalePanda, Paolo Ardoino / Tether, Justin Sun / Tron, Udi Wertheimer / Satoshi Roundtable, Doug Tuman, Mircea Popescu / Trilema / The Bitcoin Foundation, Saifedean Ammous, Nassim Taleb, Zooko, Slush, Litecoin MWEB, Tari, Yat, Blink (blinktheweb.com). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; spoken phrasing kept. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:48] Vlad Costea: Welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 8. This episode is sponsored by Braiins Hashpower, Bitcoin.com newsletter, LayerTwo Labs, NoOnes.com, and SideShift.ai. And we are live with Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni. I have a surprise for you, Riccardo. It's this one. I have this Magical Crypto Friends t-shirt, which someone brought to me from Consensus in 2018. I guess you guys were handing them out. It's around the time when I started, I think I watched the first episode of MCF, and I have been a fan of the show, I guess until it ended very abruptly.

[00:01:32] Vlad Costea: And it was very fun. And I think it reflected a time in the Bitcoin community when people were less toxic and more open to having conversations, especially about technical topics. I think one of your arguments around the time when toxic maximalism was spreading, like when you compared Bitcoin to Linux and you said that it's very stupid to say you shouldn't fork Ubuntu to build something else on top of it just because some people are dogmatic about it. I really liked that one. And I wish we had more of this spirit.

[00:02:05] Vlad Costea: So I wanted to start with this one. You're this, by the way. That's awesome.

[00:02:13] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, that's very cool. I think it's a unique piece of memorabilia. I'm sad that we couldn't find time to continue with it, but we were four people living in different time zones, just trying to coordinate our schedules to do an episode once a month was nearly impossible. We also wanted to make these really cool animated shorts and we made one, plus the intro. I think there's a part of me that wishes that the show was getting off the ground now because with AI, we could have done all those animated shorts, made them timely and not just done it ourselves.

[00:03:05] Riccardo Spagni: But obviously at the time we had to have actual animators do it. So yeah, it was a fun time. I think it was a time when there was a greater degree of innocence. It was before ETFs. It was before Michael Saylor. The biggest threat to Bitcoin was Craig Wright. That was like the arch nemesis and everything else was just like cannon fodder along the way.

[00:03:41] Vlad Costea: If I recall correctly, your short clip, like the animation that you made about or involving the magical crypto friends characters was actually about Craig Wright, but it wasn't. So the name of the character, I guess you guys did not want to get sued or something, was not Craig Wright and you made fun of his rented Lambo.

[00:04:02] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, that was the one. He still is actually just like such an easy target. It's hard not to make fun of him, to be honest.

[00:04:16] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I've actually had Daniel Krawisz last year on the show and it was very strange for me to have someone who is so educated and he wrote some of the best articles about Bitcoin out there. He came up with the term hyperbitcoinization and then now he acknowledges Craig Wright as being Satoshi and he's like, oh, he taught me so much about Bitcoin. I'm like what, Daniel? Tell me exactly. What did he teach you about Bitcoin?

[00:04:44] Riccardo Spagni: Name the thing. Name the thing that like he taught you. Just name anything.

[00:04:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's baffling, but I guess I don't want to talk too much about Craig Wright. It's a waste of time, but it's weird to me that he got exposed as a fraud in a court of law, which he always claimed that that's his battlefield, right? Where he can prove that he's Satoshi. He got absolutely destroyed in the COPA trial. COPA? No... That was it.

[00:05:12] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, yeah, it was COPA, yeah.

[00:05:15] Vlad Costea: And then people started denouncing him being like, oh, I got fooled. I'm sorry, but BSV is not Craig Wright. But then they realized that the movement makes no sense without their leader. So in a few months they just did a U-turn and said, okay, Craig Wright is Satoshi. Why? Because we believe so. You don't believe us? Well, just read his writings or whatever and think for yourself. It's just a cult.

[00:05:42] Riccardo Spagni: It is. And I think the thing that always fascinated me about the sort of backpedaling was then they changed their tune as well to go, well, actually, you know, Craig Wright doesn't matter. BSV is what matters. And it's like, how does that make any sense? If BSV is Bitcoin, but it's all engineered by Craig Wright, then it's the same as Ethereum. You can't say that Vitalik doesn't matter to Ethereum. He engineered it. He's the architect. He's still like a key figure in Ethereum's world. He's part of the Ethereum Foundation.

[00:06:24] Riccardo Spagni: He's the main part of the Ethereum Foundation. I think it's silly to try and like walk that back just because in the case of Craig Wright, he's an outright scammer and liar.

[00:06:37] Vlad Costea: It's very weird to me that the year is 2026. He got destroyed in court like two, three years ago. And people still believe that he's Satoshi and keep him somehow relevant. But it was funny. The funniest part was when he came back to Twitter and he mentioned something about his garden where he grows pumpkins. And that reminded me of the crazy lady at the conference who stood up and started screaming pumpkin Craig, go back to your pumpkins. It was hilarious. Yeah. Anyway, the reason why I wanted to have you on is that I came up with this theory that the best generation of Bitcoiners is those who joined in 2011 and those who wanted Bitcoin to work as money.

[00:07:31] Vlad Costea: You guys were before the Austrian economists even cared. I know that you were working in e-commerce before Bitcoin and you saw Bitcoin as something that you can integrate into the platform that you were building at the time. Instead of building, I don't know, HODL websites where you tell people how rich they're going to get or price models. You actually built payments processors in South Africa, which is really amazing. And in spite of all this, you're known as the Monero guy. And some people actually think that you're Nicolas van Saberhagen. Yeah.

[00:08:06] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, it's so I think, I think like, you know, two distinct things there. The first is in 2011, things like where Satoshi said, you know, something along the lines of like, you may as well get some just in case it catches on. Like that was not an impactful statement. Like no one was going, oh wow, I better get some Bitcoin in case it catches on, you know, and then I'll be rich. Like there's a later inference there. My read at the time of stuff like that was that it was like sarcastic, you know, it was a little bit like lighthearted, sarcastic, a bit flippant, which was his nature and his or hers or whatever their nature and some of the things they said.

[00:08:56] Riccardo Spagni: I don't think that at any point in anything that he wrote, did he genuinely think that this is designed to make people millionaires and billionaires. And I think part of that is because he didn't realize how rapidly the financial system would devolve again. You know, I think it was like 2009 was something of like the start of the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and things did get better from there for a lot of people. And it's devolved subsequently in some ways and it's gotten better for other people in other ways.

[00:09:45] Riccardo Spagni: But, you know, I never really took Satoshi at the time and we were just off the backs of like when he left, you know, so like I never read his writings as being like, oh, Bitcoin's going to make you rich, better grab it. The government's going to collapse, better make sure you've got a backup plan. You know, I'm a bit of a prepper and I don't recall there being a lot of prepper style conversations on Bitcointalk, you know, and I was on IRC mostly more than Bitcointalk at the time.

[00:10:18] Riccardo Spagni: And I was a little paranoid. I was like, not paranoid in like a really bad way, but paranoid that like Bitcoin was just going to be stomped out. You know, it was like, once I'd proven to myself that it had value, then I was like, this is really cool. But then along with that comes the, if I think it's cool and I realize and recognize that it's something that can't easily be controlled by a government, is it something that's likely to be stamped out? Yes, it is.

[00:10:46] Riccardo Spagni: So maybe that's like, you know, something I should be concerned about. Maybe I should change my identity periodically. Maybe I shouldn't be publicly associated with Bitcoin. You know, it took a year or two before I was confident enough to like, tweet about Bitcoin under my own account and that sort of thing. I think my first tweets on Bitcoin were like 2013. So it was probably like two years where I was like on the edge of my seat waiting for it to be stomped out. But it felt like a counterculture technology.

[00:11:17] Riccardo Spagni: You know, it didn't feel like an anti-government economic system. It didn't feel like anything much like that. And it felt more like really cool technology. Like, wow, you know, this is awesome. And to that end, I think, you know, when you go back and read a lot of the discussions that happened, but especially like 2010 to 2012, there were a lot of discussions that were just hyper technical in nature. And it's kind of been my pet peeve when some of this stuff comes up again in more recent years.

[00:11:57] Riccardo Spagni: And it's like, I wish that I wish that there was like an AI trained on Bitcointalk posts and like Bitcoin Wizards IRC chats and that sort of thing. That I could just be like, and then it stopped in like 2018 or something. I could be like, go ask the magical Bitcoin AI if we've ever discussed this. Oh, yes, we have. We've discussed this like three times in a 10 year period. Why are we discussing it again? You know, like, it's not to say that that things shouldn't be revisited, but it's just like, it's crazy to see people derive things from first principles when the first principles are there.

[00:12:31] Riccardo Spagni: So that's been, I guess, my view on things. Like, it was a golden age for technical discussion. It was a golden age for there are no stupid questions. There are no stupid suggestions. I think one of the things that I strongly remember at the time was Bitcoin Core developers, you know, like people like Peter Todd, especially at 2013, 2014, people like Greg Maxwell, not being afraid to say like, oh, yeah, I've played with this or I've played with that, or I've, you know, contributed to this or that.

[00:13:14] Riccardo Spagni: I remember famously, and my memory might be blurred by the sands of time, but I think Greg Maxwell had a Monero address in his Bitcointalk profile for ages, you might say. That's possible.

[00:13:30] Vlad Costea: I've also listened during Christmas time because LayerTwo Labs, which by the way, is the sponsor of the show and they're doing the sidechains and stuff. They have this stream on their Twitter page with Bitcoin Uncensored shows. And I've listened to your interview from 2016. With Chris DeRose and Junseth, and at the time you were mentioning that you're working with Greg Maxwell to implement RingCT on Monero. And that was a big deal.

[00:13:58] Riccardo Spagni: He was so open to it. He was like, super engaging, always happy to talk. I mean, you know, Greg and I still talk now, but like, you know, I can't, I can't imagine, let's not even get get into the Bitcoin Core developer culture from the outside and like how hostile people have made it to like, even tweet publicly. But, you know, it's, it's really, it's fascinating to see how at the time, like, no one said, oh, you know, you know, all you do is like, get involved in alts or you're a scam coin or anything like that.

[00:14:33] Riccardo Spagni: Those terms weren't really mentioned, you know, they were mentioned like jokingly, but, you know, Greg weighing in on RingCT stuff wasn't considered bad. Like Peter Todd going and taking a paid gig to contribute to an altcoin was neither considered an endorsement of the altcoin, nor was it considered a negative thing. You know, it was like, man's got to eat.

[00:14:56] Vlad Costea: Oh yeah, but he still does it, but he doesn't talk about it. That's the fun part.

[00:15:01] Riccardo Spagni: Right. And that, and that I think is really sad because like, I think if you, if you as a project are able to do something that's cool enough to entice a Bitcoin Core developer to contribute to it, paid or otherwise, like that should be something to talk about, you know, and it shouldn't mean that there, that doesn't imply that they're endorsing your financial economic model. It just means I think the tech is cool. And I almost wish, I wish there was like a really strong bifurcation, like, you know, that the scientists were left in the lab doing science and talking about science.

[00:15:41] Riccardo Spagni: And then all the people that want to get rich and the economists were shoved on the other end and they can go talk about how rich Wafflecoin is going to make them. And, and there was like a wall between the two. And there sadly isn't, you know, the two have become intertwined and it's become this thing of like, if a, if a Bitcoin Core developer doesn't say the thing I like, then they might affect my bag. And the bag bias is I think the biggest destroyer of tangible technological value in this space.

[00:16:16] Vlad Costea: I guess you're referencing what happened recently with Gloria Zhao, who had to step down as a core maintainer.

[00:16:24] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, I found that... Man, I found that debacle so disgusting, you know, like... People picking apart everything that she said, which, you know, I've been a core maintainer, a lead maintainer on Monero. I know what it's like to have everything you say picked apart. But, you know, like, I don't know, I just, it was so off-putting to see, to see her hung out to dry and like to have her politics called into question as if your politics make any difference to the code that you're reviewing.

[00:17:01] Riccardo Spagni: I'm not even talking about the code you write, but the code you review as if as a reviewer and maintainer, you somehow need to have the best grasp of C++, you know, like you're the only one. You're the, you're the one holding back the winds of destruction with your knowledge of C++ as if AI review tools don't exist, as if other reviewers don't exist. It's absurd. And some of the comments that I saw particularly, about her that were like sexist or, you know, racist or whatever, I just thought to myself, like, for what?

[00:17:40] Riccardo Spagni: Like, I don't understand the value in that. The person's doing a volunteer job, whether she's paid externally, like a salary to continue contributing is irrelevant. Like, and this just goes to prove my point, that it is, it's kind of like the death of, Bitcoin, the open source technology mirrors to some degree, the death of open source in general, you know, where like you would create an open source library. And, some company would consume that and they would rely on it intrinsically for what they're building.

[00:18:28] Riccardo Spagni: And so then they would start contributing some pull requests back and then eventually they might have one, two, even three full-time employees whose sole job is to contribute back to the project. And, and we see a little bit of that still like with FFmpeg, which is, you know, a video library, an open source video library. We're seeing, staff at organizations like Tencent and ByteDance that are like hand coding assembler to improve, certain things in FFmpeg and they're contributing it back to the open source library.

[00:19:04] Riccardo Spagni: But like that whole culture seems to have largely died, you know, and I don't think it gets any better with the advent of AI coding tools. I think it gets worse, you know, and that's just, I think a sad summation of where we are and the fate of Gloria is I think, a canary in a coal mine, you know, but it's one that we're going to ignore and pretend that everything's fine and normal.

[00:19:33] Vlad Costea: To me, it's very strange because this person is objectively competent. She's had more contribution to the code than Luke Dashjr has had in 14 years or something. And of course, this is a very shallow analysis. Quantity does not mean quality. And maybe that Luke was always weird. So he was, I'm not sure if he was ever a maintainer. I don't think so because he's a bit crazy.

[00:20:05] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, he wasn't a maintainer.

[00:20:08] Vlad Costea: But still, I don't know. It's very strange to me that people can't even look and analyze what she's been doing. And the ultimate argument is that she's bad for people's bags because she makes statements about Bitcoin working for other use cases which don't pump the bags. And also, people argue that she's responsible for spam or whatever. They sort of turned her into the poster child of this Ordinals movement. And I think Casey Rodarmor, when he invented the Ordinal inscriptions, he destroyed the Bitcoin culture. And it was not by design or it was not intended by him.

[00:20:50] Vlad Costea: Nobody knew this was going to blow up. But for some reason, a lot of people became angry and they never recovered from that. And Luke seemed to be like this savior, the guy who shows up and says, I can fix it. I'm going to give you the filters. You just run my code and Bitcoin is going to be fine. And people just got behind him. The same guys were wearing Don't Trust, Verify t-shirts and were saying that they don't like single points of failure and stuff like this.

[00:21:18] Vlad Costea: They went to Luke and they were like, yeah, your code is really great. We're going to run it.

[00:21:23] Riccardo Spagni: You're totally not a single point of failure.

[00:21:26] Vlad Costea: You totally don't have a bad record with losing Bitcoin and having your server compromised and still are using the same setup. It's very strange to me.

[00:21:40] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. I guess my only sort of counter example and the thing that fascinates me about Ordinals and inscriptions and all that is we had this stuff with Counterparty. And Counterparty was fine. And colored coins before it. Yeah, and colored coins before that.

[00:22:03] Riccardo Spagni: No one was going like, oh, my God, Counterparty is the worst thing to happen to Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong, there was some negativity. There were some people who complained about Counterparty. It's not like it existed in a vacuum and no one ever said anything negative about it.

[00:22:20] Riccardo Spagni: But by and large, it just wasn't considered impactful enough. And I think even if Counterparty had grown in its stature and popped off during the NFT movement in a very large way, I still think the monetary use of Bitcoin outweighed the let's embed some stuff into Bitcoin use. And I don't know, I mean, I guess the question is there like a magic number? You know, if 10% of Bitcoin's use is people embedding random junk, is that fine? Probably. If it's 40%, is that still fine?

[00:23:04] Riccardo Spagni: You know, like where's the magic number where people start to get infatuated with spam and anti-spam and whatever? You know, and I think maybe a very nominal view of it that if someone's paying for a transaction, you should not stop them from having that transaction. Because the...

[00:23:25] Vlad Costea: Exactly, the transaction fee is the filter.

[00:23:28] Riccardo Spagni: Exactly. And frankly, like, if you think about like, and I don't want to do like a reductio ad absurdum of the filterer argument, but I think very simply, their argument is we have let the spam run amok and so now there is too much spam and we must filter it. And so we must prevent people who are paying, legitimately paying for transactions to transact that way. And so I guess my counterargument here to them is, let's say that Lazarus, which is the hacking arm of the North Koreans, let's say that they decide they're very tired of hacking Ethereum and so on and they really firmly believe in Bitcoin and so they start transacting on Bitcoin a lot.

[00:24:22] Riccardo Spagni: And it's very, you know, it's traceable, Chainalysis publishes a blog and say, this is how you can trace the Lazarus transactions and all the exchanges block transactions to and from the addresses and the list of addresses continues to grow. At what point do we go, well, you know, crime is bad and North Korea is bad. So now we're going to run a filter to prevent the North Koreans from trading with anyone. You know, it's not enough that the exchanges block it, we must block it too. Like, I feel like if you position it that way, they would probably go, no, you can't do that.

[00:25:04] Riccardo Spagni: You can't censor the North Koreans. We don't agree with what the North Koreans are doing, but we respect their right to use Bitcoin. And even if they're paying a lot, that's still okay. Like, you know, even if they are the bulk of transactions, that's still okay. Even if the only way for them to get their transactions through is to overpay miners because some mining farms or pools or whatever have blocked them, that's okay. We need to respect the sanctity of the Bitcoin blockchain. We need to allow the North Koreans to send their transactions.

[00:25:39] Riccardo Spagni: But the minute somebody wants to send an NFT of like a kung fu panda, then everyone's up in arms. Not everyone, but like a bunch of people are up in arms and they're like, oh, we must stop this. How dare they? And I just find that like dichotomy to be abhorrent. Like, why? Like, that just makes no sense to me. Like, both should be equally true. You know, you allow the one, you allow the other. And I think it's disgusting to try and like, to try and shut anyone's access to Bitcoin down merely because you don't agree with what they're doing.

[00:26:20] Vlad Costea: It's very strange. And these people are not aware that we've had, as you said, Counterparty and we also had Mastercoin, which is something of which Peter Todd was like the chief scientist at one point. And it's also the place where USDT was born. Like first emerged on Bitcoin as a token. And that could still be on Bitcoin as a token. That the culture sort of decided that it's spam. And I do recall there was something of a debate concerning Satoshi Dice at one point, and that was considered spam.

[00:26:59] Vlad Costea: And some people still look back on that moment and they say, well, that was a bad idea and it was a bad design. It should not have bloated Bitcoin. It might be the reason why the scaling debate first emerged.

[00:27:15] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, I guess the counterpoint to that is, like, I don't disagree that Satoshi Dice created that scenario to some degree. But at the end of the day, Bitcoin is just a database. And if we are to assume that a database for a specific purpose can't be used for another purpose, that just seems absurd to me. Like it's a database for transactions, that's true. But it's supposed to be permissionless. So if somebody wants to use the transactional database to do something that isn't transactional and it's permissionless, who are we to stop them?

[00:28:10] Riccardo Spagni: You know, and that I think is where I just have a fundamental disagreement with. And this is not even, don't even get me started on how technically broken BIP 110 and a lot of the other ideas are. Let's just not even go down that road, because that's a whole level of absurdity. But just the functional stance of the permissionless database needs to be permissioned is just silly.

[00:28:39] Vlad Costea: It's very strange how in this situation, people decide that they give up on censorship resistance or this narrative that the network is permissionless just because they want to feel holy and pure. And they feel like they're going through this crusade where they're stopping bad people from using the network that they love in the name of purity or whatever. But I also, so the reason why I think that Bitcoin should have privacy on the base layer is exactly this, because the miners should not be able to discriminate between transactions.

[00:29:16] Vlad Costea: It's never going to be truly censorship resistant unless we have some privacy. Right now, the reason why it's censorship resistant is that there's this geopolitical arbitrage where it's possible for a miner from another jurisdiction which does not respect some regulations or does not use some sort of blacklisting system to pick up the transaction. So it's possible for you to wait maybe more blocks until someone decides to pick up your North Korean transaction or something. But this should not be the design. It should be that the highest fee wins and the miners are not able to know who's sending and from where.

[00:29:56] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's one area where... Privacy really helps is a truly permissionless, in a truly permissionless system, a miner shouldn't have enough information to be able to prevent this thing. Now, you know, I recognize that Bitcoin does not have privacy, but that means that permissionlessness is a social construct. That's the only reason that Bitcoin remains permissionless is because there is a social contract and a social construct around that. And, you know, we have successfully as a community pushed back against mining pools that are regulatory compliant.

[00:30:50] Riccardo Spagni: You know, I mean, that's been tried and it's been like the community's fought back and said, no, that's nonsense. So why would we allow mining pools to have any other sort of permission system? No, we shouldn't. We should push back on that. And we should also just allow people to do whatever they want with their nodes. If you personally want to filter all transactions and only receive blocks on your node, go wild. Like no one should stop you. But the biggest issue here, and, you know, this isn't the biggest, but like the funniest issue here is until they successfully fork off the network, because that's what's going to happen ultimately, as long as they remain on network, then filters are actually a net negative.

[00:31:43] Riccardo Spagni: Because the design of Bitcoin, of modern Bitcoin is such that your node receives a transaction and it caches that transaction. And so later on, when that transaction is included in a block, it doesn't need to re-receive the transaction. It gets the block header and the block header says, these are the 30 transactions in this block. And it says, oh, I've already got all 30 of those. You don't need to send anything else. I've got them. They're in my cache. Cool. And so, you know, your node uses less bandwidth.

[00:32:17] Riccardo Spagni: By filtering those, what you're effectively saying is, I reject them. I do not want them in my cache. I don't want them tainting my system. My system is sacred. It shall not store spam, not even temporarily in memory. And then you receive a block with spam and you go, yes, I'd like to receive that transaction I already received all over again, because it turns out it's a valid transaction and now it's in a block. And so there, you know, now look, you could design around that and go like, my system is allowed to keep spam in memory, but not on disk until it's in disk.

[00:32:49] Riccardo Spagni: But like, it's still a stupid design because you're not stopping anything except the relay. And, you know, in a flood-fill system like Bitcoin, unless you have like 90% of nodes that aren't relaying, you're really not helping anything. You're actually just doing more harm than good. But I think that's the whole point of this movement is like, let's do as much harm as possible. And I'll say something else. Like, you know, you spoke earlier on about Craig Wright being like the de facto leader of BSV. We spoke about Luke being, you know, the single point of failure and the de facto leader of Knots and the movement.

[00:33:37] Riccardo Spagni: There's a case that I always like to point to. It's not the first time I pointed to it, but I'll point to it again. But I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with Pieter Hintjens, who was the guy that started ZeroMQ, which is an open source messaging queue. And Peter, unfortunately, got very ill and elected to end his life, which is legal in the Netherlands. Years ago, was he in Belgium, whichever. And I had the privilege in the last year of his life to spend a lot of time with him understanding his view on software development, on open source and so on.

[00:34:21] Riccardo Spagni: And he told me a really interesting story. There was a fork of ZeroMQ called nanomsg, which lasted for a while and then like died. And they tried to resurrect it more recently, but no one uses it. And there's this great post-mortem that one of the nanomsg contributors wrote up. And it's on the web. It's still archived somewhere. They've tried to like, you know, almost like walk back to post-mortem themselves. But it doesn't change the fact that the post-mortem was valid then and it's valid now.

[00:34:57] Riccardo Spagni: And effectively, what the post-mortem said is the reason nanomsg was forked from ZeroMQ was because there were a bunch of people that disagreed with some of the decisions, both architecturally and ideologically that Peter made around ZeroMQ. They didn't like his stance on some of the contributor stuff. They didn't like his stance on some of the technical decisions. And so they forked ZeroMQ and created nanomsg. Cool. Lovely. And all the contributors to nanomsg agreed on one thing, and that was that they didn't agree on the path that ZeroMQ was taking.

[00:35:34] Riccardo Spagni: But they couldn't agree on exactly what they didn't agree on. So some of them didn't like Peter as a person. Some of them didn't like architectural decision X. Some of them didn't like architectural decision Y. Some of them didn't like C4, which was the collaborative code construction contract, which was kind of like Peter's take on an agreement that all contributors had to agree to contribute to the project, which basically boils down to like, don't be an idiot. And so people disagreed with different things, but because they forked on the basis of disagreement, instead of forking on the basis of agreement, there was no unified vision.

[00:36:17] Riccardo Spagni: So they would have these like weekly meetings or, you know, like discussions on IRC. And the discussions were mostly just filled with hate for ZeroMQ or hate for Peter personally. And very little was, hey guys, like, so what's our roadmap or what are we doing next? And I see exactly the same thing with the filter proponents. They, they are unified in their, hatred of Bitcoin Core. They're unified in this idea that like spam is bad. But let's say that they had to create a magical anti-spam system that is impervious to all other attempts at circumventing it.

[00:37:01] Riccardo Spagni: Then what? Because I can tell you, like Bitcoin Core contributors have a laundry list of things that need to be done to Bitcoin. Like they've got a bunch of things, some of which are micro-optimizations, some of which are, you know, rewrites or security enhancements or whatever. There is a laundry list of GitHub issues, from Bitcoin Core contributors and BIPs that are focused on improving Bitcoin and the anti-spam crowd. What happens if they achieve their goal? They won't know what to do next and they won't be unified in what to do next because the only thing they've unified on is their hatred of a single thing.

[00:37:46] Riccardo Spagni: Their hatred of Bitcoin Core. And that's a silly, pointless foundation for an open source project, especially for a fork. Nanomsg proves it. It has never succeeded. You need to be unified in a positive vision. And so a great example of this is like Mint, which is a Linux distribution. Ubuntu does a great job in being really easy to use. But a bunch of people were like, we think we can do better. We think we can create a Linux distribution that is so easy to use that like someone can come from Windows and use it and not struggle.

[00:38:20] Riccardo Spagni: And Ubuntu is not really targeting that. So they forked Ubuntu, and they made that. And it's awesome. Like anytime someone says, what Linux should I use? I'm new to Linux. I'm like, use Mint. I don't tell them to use Ubuntu because the

[00:38:34] Vlad Costea: Two things can live in parallel. It's so easy, but my mom could transition from Windows to Mint with no problem.

[00:38:40] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, it's the easiest Linux for a newcomer to use. And they live in parallel to Debian and Ubuntu because they're not trying to, like, they don't hate each other. They live in harmony. And so if there was like, and a great example of this is, in Monero. So in Monero, there's a re-implementation of Monero in Rust called Cuprate. Nobody is going like, oh, Cuprate bad. You know, how dare they? The Cuprate contributors aren't unified in hatred of Monero's core C++ implementation. The only thing they're unified in is we want this Rust implementation to be compatible with the C++ implementation, including compatible with its bugs.

[00:39:27] Riccardo Spagni: And that is a very heavy lift, and it's going to take a long time still to reach that level of maturity. But anyone who wants to contribute to one or either or both is totally welcome to, and they live in harmony with each other. And that's a positive, like, fork or parallel implementation. And Knots, I think, to some degree used to be that. It used to be an opinionated fork of Bitcoin Core, adding things that Bitcoin Core was just not going to add because there wasn't broad consensus on it.

[00:40:06] Riccardo Spagni: But the minute it became unified on hatred, it honestly lost ground and lost the point of its existence in the first place.

[00:40:18] Vlad Costea: I think they should also look into the history of Bitcoin Cash and the reason why it did not succeed. Because honestly, right now Bitcoin Cash is much more interesting than it was back in 2017. Because they activated all of the Satoshi-era opcodes and they can multiply, they can concatenate and they can do stuff which ironically enables better layer 2s than Bitcoin does. But back in 2017, they were just united around this idea that they should increase the block size and that was it. And this is also the reason why it was not successful.

[00:40:54] Vlad Costea: It was not much of a distinction. It was not different enough to justify its existence. And if Knots is going to succeed and they just say, well, we're the pure version of Bitcoin and we don't allow spam and people are going to be like, okay, whatever. They're going to fork off, I think, with that BIP 110, which used to be called 444. For some reason, politics, whatever, they changed the number. But it's insane to me. They don't think beyond just this small goal. Maybe they do accomplish that with their fork, but then what?

[00:41:35] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I tend to think that there's probably not much value in that fork in general. And the only time that I will change my mind and think that BIP 110 is valuable is if it does cause a chain fork and they go off on their own. That would be super valuable. And in fact, I think Bitcoin Cash is probably a great example of this in a way because there was disagreement around the block size. And there was a lot of what if and what if and what if and proponents on both sides.

[00:42:29] Riccardo Spagni: And I will say this, I feel like with Bitcoin Cash, they were more technically competent proponents on the Bitcoin Cash side.

[00:42:42] Vlad Costea: That's funny because for a long time, the Core side was saying that, well, Bitcoin Cash is just a bunch of marketers and advocates who are very passionate about onboarding people to Bitcoin, but they don't understand fundamentals. They're not technical. It's just Roger Ver and a bunch of friends and Jihan. But actually, it was a Bitcoin Cash developer who found an inflation bug that was put there by Matt Corallo in 2018. Yeah. So they're not stupid. That's something that we assumed very wrongly. And they turned out to be right about building a good base layer for layer twos, which they're doing right now. And it's very ironic because their philosophy was that they don't need layer twos.

[00:43:29] Riccardo Spagni: Exactly. Yeah, I think you're right. From my perspective, I tend to agree that they are more technically competent. And that's not to say that Luke isn't technically competent, but he's just like any technical competence that he has is so clouded by his divisive nature, which frankly does him no good at all. And I think the Bitcoin Cash thing played out in a very interesting way because there was almost this like realization at some point. And I don't know what surfaced it exactly, but there was a realization that the change that they were looking for in Bitcoin was never going to happen.

[00:44:16] Riccardo Spagni: And the only way to make it happen is to acknowledge that and fork. And I don't really understand why they haven't done the same thing. Yeah. You know, why they continue to insist that the only possible solution is to change Bitcoin itself. Just go. Shoo. You know, like go do that on your own. Like let Bitcoin become the spam chain. No problem. Go be the anti-spam chain. Like that's totally fine. No one's going to judge you for it. You can go and do anti-spam Bitcoin all you want.

[00:45:00] Riccardo Spagni: Like call it Bitcoin, not call it Bitcoin, you know, Luke's vision, whatever you want to call it. Just go away.

[00:45:12] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but a lot of people don't understand the open source nature of Bitcoin or open source software in general. They just have strong opinions about economics. And I don't mean like Hayek type of economics or Austrian economics that take a thousand pages to read and understand. I mean, they're not readers of Rothbard or something even more extensive. They did not get into Human Action or Man, Economy, and State or whatever. They just read 50 pages. I think this example comes from Bitcoin Uncensored also. They were talking about 50 page libertarians and they have very strong opinions about those 50 pages.

[00:45:57] Vlad Costea: And they shape their entire understanding of something which is technical around these principles that they inherited. They read from The Bitcoin Standard or whatever. And they think that Bitcoin should be exactly what it says in there. But to be honest, if I was dogmatic about books or whatever, you go to Andreas Antonopoulos. I think it's in The Internet of Money Volume 1 where he talks about Bitcoin being free to transfer. Like at the time, people were barely ever paying any transaction fees.

[00:46:31] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's, you know, the thing that I find fascinating is there's a desire on both sides for Bitcoin to be a good money. Now, setting aside my personal view that it is impossible for Bitcoin to be a good money without privacy, and there's lots of arguments for that. I think it's also impossible for Bitcoin to be a good money if the only way to transact is on chain. And so I have a lot of criticisms of Lightning, like more criticisms than we can count. But I do genuinely think...

[00:47:10] Vlad Costea: And you also run a payments processor that supports Lightning, right? Right. You had to deal with all the technical challenges and updates to the latest version of LND and whatever.

[00:47:20] Riccardo Spagni: Exactly. So at the same time, I do feel very strongly that Bitcoin payments on an L2 of some sort, whether it's Lightning, Ark, whatever, are valuable. And I think that they're valuable for two reasons. The first is, at scale, they are cheaper than on-chain Bitcoin whilst having a similar degree of finality if it's architected correctly. But secondly, temporal flash-in-the-pan transactions that are not stored permanently on-chain have some privacy benefits. Now, I'm not suggesting they provide super strong privacy, but I think that's a better approach than let's store everything on-chain for anyone to analyze, not just Chainalysis, but anyone.

[00:48:10] Riccardo Spagni: So I think that there's value in an L2. I don't know how they can reconcile the view that Bitcoin should not have anything but transactional data, which means on-chain transactions, with Bitcoin should never have any spam and should also never have any metadata, which means no L2 at all. Because that's where it's going to lead. They might be able to preserve most Lightning functionality with BIP 110, but they're going to have to get more aggressive, and that means no Lightning.

[00:48:51] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so let me ask you this. If you had a magic wand right now and you could change something about Bitcoin, and it's sort of obvious that it's going to be privacy, but what specifically would you add to it, or what kind of technology do you think is optimal for Bitcoin?

[00:49:09] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, that's a good question. I think if I had a magic wand, I think that the thing that I would add is probably threefold privacy. So something like stealth addresses where you don't know who's being paid, something like confidential transactions where you don't know the amount being transacted, and something like FCMP++ on Monero or Zcash z-to-z transactions where you don't know the transaction graph.

[00:49:55] Riccardo Spagni: If you can do all three of those. And combine that with quantum-resistant cryptography that would make Bitcoin a very real contender for a strong money. Now that still doesn't mean you don't want to have a temporal layer 2, but it just means that at least the base layer is strong enough. Obviously, I think we can all agree that that's not going to happen, but in an ideal world, that conversation would have started 15 years ago. And we would be heading towards a soft fork of some sort that makes old-style transactions impossible.

[00:50:39] Riccardo Spagni: Not impossible, but valid, but not relayed. Similar to any soft fork, constrain it so that you can still do those old-style transactions, but they're just harder and harder to do. So you don't prevent people from moving money. If they haven't touched Bitcoin in 15 years, they can still do that, but they have to move it into this new mechanism. This segwit-style soft fork thing. But that's not where we're at.

[00:51:15] Riccardo Spagni: It saddens me, but I suspect that as we eventually take some sort of post-quantum cryptography move in Bitcoin, it's probably not going to include privacy. Because it's a little bit like that ship has sailed, you know, and the ETFs and the regulators and the Michael Saylors of this world won't want privacy on Bitcoin in any meaningful way.

[00:51:46] Vlad Costea: But I do believe that they would want it because they're the whales and they're the ones trading with very large amounts. If anything, they should be the ones concerned that their transactions would influence the market sentiment. Yes, you would think that.

[00:52:25] Riccardo Spagni: But since they are mostly trading paper Bitcoin, it really doesn't matter. And that's not to say that they're trading paper Bitcoin like they're trading Bitcoin that doesn't exist or anything like that. I don't want to add fuel to that particular tinfoil theory.

[00:52:29] Vlad Costea: Tinfoil hat theory? I mean, your friend WhalePanda is very much into it.

[00:52:30] Riccardo Spagni: Yes. And I love him for that. And he might even be 100% right. I don't know enough to be able to say one way or the other, but I will say this. They are trading IOUs and hopefully those IOUs are 100% backed. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But either way, their trades are already obscured by a custodian holding that. So, you know.

[00:52:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but they do have some legal documents that sooner or later will become news. So it's not like it's being broadcast on a blockchain immediately, but there's going to be a piece of news about someone selling large amounts. A lot of these institutions are publicly traded, so they do have to reveal.

[00:53:14] Riccardo Spagni: Right. So look, first the ETFs. If you're trading within an ETF, then nothing gets revealed on chain, right?

[00:53:27] Riccardo Spagni: If you're trading between ETFs or corporate treasuries or whatever, and everyone uses Coinbase as the whatever it's called, the custodian, there we go. Then nothing gets represented on chain. And I feel like that's probably the issue, you know, that it's just not going to make much of a difference ultimately to our visibility.

[00:54:00] Vlad Costea: You're probably right. And it's also ironic that the scaling and privacy solution that we were expecting for Bitcoin turned out to be the ETF. Yes.

[00:54:11] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, it kind of did.

[00:54:15] Vlad Costea: That's sad, man. Anyway, I got to plug some ads. I hope you don't mind. I can also get interactive and just ask you what you think. You can be honest. You don't have to try to be nice. For example, there is NoOnes.com. The CEO of NoOnes is Ray Youssef, who used to run Paxful, and he decided that being based in the US is a bad idea for his business model.

[00:54:38] Vlad Costea: And now he's mostly focusing on onboarding the global south to Bitcoin, to Monero, to I think he also has Litecoin as an option and a bunch of stablecoins. And I do like this humanitarian side of it. And I tell people on the show that if they choose to trade on NoOnes on the peer to peer marketplace or the spot marketplace or even the debit card that they have, which I'm not a fan of, but I'm not going to tell people what to do. You're also giving these people access to coins, which is sort of a noble pursuit.

[00:55:13] Vlad Costea: They're going to hustle their way into making more money, which is fine. But it sort of used to be like a narrative for Bitcoin of banking the unbanked or getting people out of oppressive regimes. And I sort of like it. The URL is NoOnes.com. Do you know Ray Youssef, Riccardo?

[00:55:34] Riccardo Spagni: Yes. Yeah, he's great.

[00:55:37] Vlad Costea: A bit on the wacky side, like he's like the WWE version of Roger Ver, I think. Yeah. But very nice guy.

[00:55:46] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, really nice guy. And look, firstly, I think being ordinary is overrated. I'd rather be extraordinary. So I don't begrudge anyone being a bit wacky. And I'll also highlight that some of the people that I have had incredible amounts of respect for have got very odd world views and, you know, even like political views and whatever, religious views, whatever, that I certainly don't agree with or even frankly understand sometimes. And that's fine. Like, that's totally chilled. And I still have mad respect for the thing that they're good at.

[00:56:37] Riccardo Spagni: In a way, I kind of feel it's like, if you are a really good tennis player, if you're like top 10 in the world, you're like Roger Federer, Andre Agassi, like, you're just an incredible tennis player. But you believe that the entire universe is ruled by a fish. Cool, bro. I don't care. I'm here to watch you play tennis. I'm not here to like question our fish overlords. As long as that doesn't result in you doing anything weird and like, you know, inhumane or whatever. Like, I'm certainly not going to judge what goes on in your head.

[00:57:15] Riccardo Spagni: Go wild. And I think that that's sort of the way that we should be viewing people who are building cool things, you know, and people that are doing cool things. Like, let's support the cool things that they're doing instead of going like, they don't have the exact same worldview that I do. Okay.

[00:57:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Another sponsor, interestingly, is news.bitcoin.com. They used to be that green website that was saying that Bitcoin Cash is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. And now they rebranded and I kind of like it. And it was my idea to reach out to them and say, hey, you guys are different. Do you need some advertisement for it? And they're like, sure. And now I think they're like a middle ground between Bitcoin Magazine, which is very political, and CoinDesk, which is very institutional. So they sort of have both worlds and also the occasional piece on gold and whatever, which you don't find on either of these websites.

[00:58:15] Vlad Costea: And I kind of like it. They do solid journalism. People are still butthurt because of what happened like a decade ago. Just move on. I think it's a bad idea to get stuck in your PTSD. Just reevaluate things every once in a while.

[00:58:33] Vlad Costea: The other one is SideShift, which used to support Monero, as far as I know. And there was a time when ShapeShift was going to do KYC. So a lot of payments processors and a lot of businesses switched from ShapeShift to SideShift. Today's SideShift is still, I guess, one of the top five swapping services. And the way in which I've been telling people to use it is if someone wants to pay you in stablecoins, which are not censorship resistant, they're not private, they're not very interesting. You can just put your Bitcoin address in there and you send the stablecoin address to the person wanting to pay you.

[00:59:12] Vlad Costea: And there's going to be a swap that sends Bitcoin directly to your wallet and you do whatever you want with that. And it also doesn't, it's not tied to the identity of the sender, which you can argue is a privacy benefit. It looks like it comes from SideShift. So to blockchain analysis, it looks, quote unquote, cleaner. And that's a Bitcoin issue. Also got to give a shout out to someone whose name is Digital Nomad, hashtag Free Samourai. One topic that we need to discuss during this interview is Samourai and the fact that they're in jail for trying to build privacy tools and having, I guess the part about having political opinions is a bigger reason of why they got arrested.

[00:59:58] Vlad Costea: And I'll finish with the sponsor plugs and then we can talk about Samourai. LayerTwo Labs, I love their tech. They're building, I like their philosophy also to build a sidechain for every interesting altcoin out there. There's a sidechain for Ethereum, there's one for prediction markets, there's one for Namecoin stuff, there's one for fungibility, which I like. So the idea would be to maintain the small block size and just have miner-enforced sidechains. I think it's an idea that deserves to be tried. And you can also try their software at layertwolabs.com/download, where you're going to run the software on a Bitcoin signet, unfortunately, but it's still fun.

[01:00:45] Vlad Costea: And also Braiins Hashpower, they launched this service. It's the oldest Bitcoin company in the world. It's been around since 2010 as bitcoinmining.cz and it got rebranded into Slush Pool and then Braiins. And now they have their own sort of cloud mining service where you can rent hashrate. And it sort of makes sense if you're going to buy one of these tiny home mining machines. With the same money, you can rent a lot of hashrate of like a hundred of these machines for like $5 an hour. And it might be just the cost of your electric bill.

[01:01:23] Vlad Costea: So if you want to try lottery tickets, you can use this one and maybe you can claim the whole reward. Maybe you can mine with a pool. Maybe you can try to 51% a Bitcoin fork that's also SHA-256 mined. It's your choice how you use this hashrate. I'm not saying how you should use it. I'm just saying that you can use it. And it's available at hashpower.braiins.com. And I think I'm done with the ads. Thank you very much for sitting through them.

[01:01:53] Vlad Costea: Let's talk about Samourai. Yeah. I know that for a while you were actually very vocal about it that, so the way in which Samourai worked was that they had these pools of equal UTXOs. And whenever someone was entering these pools, there was this toxic change that was generated. And your input to this was to suggest that they can swap that toxic change for Monero. Yeah.

[01:02:25] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if like it obviously depends, but like if you're getting massively dusted in order to try and reveal your transactions, then you could wait for a low fee period, which happens like, you know, with some frequency with Bitcoin. And you could sweep those. Obviously, the point of a dust attack is to reveal like which outputs are owned by the same wallet. So you wouldn't want to sweep them all in a single transaction.

[01:03:11] Riccardo Spagni: But if fees are low enough, you could sweep them all into a single, or not into a single, but to a single change provider, you know, so like a swap provider, so like a SideShift or whatever.

[01:03:26] Riccardo Spagni: It would require a little bit of cleverness on their part to generate like a batch of addresses that you can sweep to, one for each output, and you sweep them all and, you know, get your 10 bucks or whatever it is Monero. I think that if that's like, I guess it depends as well because like today's dust is tomorrow's value. So, you know, if Bitcoin was worth a million or $10 million a coin, the dust attacks of today might be worth sweeping. I guess it just depends.

[01:04:08] Vlad Costea: Well, yeah, but to be honest, if people actually swapped their Bitcoin dust for Monero a couple of years ago, now they would be outperforming because Monero went up, at least over the last year, it went up much more than Bitcoin did. There was an all-time high like two months ago.

[01:04:32] Riccardo Spagni: I feel like, you know, it's very easy to look at price increases and say that that value accrual is due to, I don't know, people finally realizing that they need privacy or whatever. But it's, and I do think that there's a part of that there, but I think it's probably a bit of a misnomer. And like, for the most part, people are generally in crypto to make money. And maybe some people saw an opportunity to improve their privacy and other people piled on to that. And maybe there was coordinated pumps left and right, and this is just the net effect of it.

[01:05:21] Riccardo Spagni: Either way, I generally don't view any sort of price change positively or negatively as indicative of anything. I don't think people are rational enough for that. And I think it's delusional for us to believe that the market is rational on any level, certainly not rational enough to actually go and figure out like, oh, I need privacy. And so I'm going to like use Monero extensively. That's just unrealistic. But...

[01:05:54] Vlad Costea: You can see some trends over the last year. Like the talk about privacy has become more serious, even at the regulatory level. And you see the whole privacy coin, quote unquote, sector blowing up. You see people buying stuff just because it advertises privacy. Even Dash went up. And I think I don't want to be negative. I still hope I'm going to interview someone from Dash. But during the Magical Crypto Friends show, and I'm going to keep showing this T-shirt until the end of the interview. At one point, you criticized Dash for having booth babes at a conference.

[01:06:35] Vlad Costea: And you said that anyway, Dash is trash. And since I heard that one, it just keeps coming to my mind. Every time I hear the name Dash, I remember Dash is trash.

[01:06:47] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And yeah, so my point is that even Dash, which markets having some privacy, even though I think it only does CoinJoin or something. So it's not much different from Bitcoin. Went up because of this marketing. Zcash went up, but we can both agree that it's better now than it was 10 years ago in terms of technical capability and scaling. What else? Firo went up, even though it's like the lesser powerful cousin of Zcash.

[01:07:21] Riccardo Spagni: But doesn't that just, I mean, like, as you're describing it, doesn't that just go to the point that it feels like bandwagoning, you know? Like, I would agree if it was like, and don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that people aren't becoming more aware. Like, they absolutely are becoming more aware of what's happening with respect to their privacy. And a great example of this is the Ring partnership with Flock, where there was so much pushback from people that Ring abandoned their partnership with Flock. You know, they did that whole Super Bowl ad for like, oh, you know, we're going to help rescue your dogs with our partnership with Flock.

[01:08:10] Riccardo Spagni: And everyone was just like, we love dogs, but that's nonsense. And just like pushback across the board, which I thought was wonderful, to the point where Ring walked that back. So yes, people are becoming way more aware of privacy and the implications of a lack of privacy. But I don't know that that necessarily equates to an increase in price, you know, like some sort of accrual of value to the token. Like, it could be that, you know, there's more usage of the token, you see an increase in the number of transactions, and that's great.

[01:09:01] Riccardo Spagni: But that also can even out from a price perspective, you know, like more people use it, the price goes up a bit. Some old hands and miners who have been waiting for a particular point sell, price evens out. So yeah, I mean, I just feel like there is some bandwagoning there, and that doesn't detract from any increase in the recognition of how important privacy is. That is happening, for real. I just don't know that the price accrual is indicative of it or unrelated, like unrelated in a direct linear fashion, if I'm making sense there.

[01:09:46] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but once again, once you see a movement forming and the narrative changing a bit, because two or three years ago, there was like the bottom of privacy. It seemed like a lot of these projects are dead. I think even you tweeted out that Zcash was an interesting experiment, but it died. The price was like $20 per coin. It was like the absolute low. But then it had a comeback. And now there's a lot of hope, especially because there is Tachyon on the roadmap. Some people hope that there's gonna be shielded assets, which is similar to what you're doing with Tari.

[01:10:24] Vlad Costea: And there's also something which Roger Ver is promoting nowadays. And he's not allowed to talk publicly for like three years after he settled with the IRS. But he seems to like something which is also a code-based sibling of Monero, which is called Zano. And it does tokens. So DeFi is big. People seem to like the idea of bringing privacy to DeFi. Ethereum has a bunch of these ideas also floating around. It does seem like privacy is getting big and more people care about it. And I think the legitimation, which is very silly, but whatever, everything needs a narrative.

[01:11:06] Vlad Costea: They say that it's AI that's pushing the adoption of privacy, because now you can just type a Bitcoin address or Ethereum address into ChatGPT. And then it's gonna do the blockchain analysis for you. And it's so accessible for everyone that we need to counter it by adding privacy, which once again is silly, but it works.

[01:11:27] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with you that people are gonna run with a narrative. Of course, I'm curious to see what happens. But I do think at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter much what people imagine the narrative is. I think that AI agents are interesting. And there is gonna be a point where agents will have to make a rational choice about what to transact with. I think the idea that they're only gonna transact with crypto is silly. I don't agree with that.

[01:12:12] Riccardo Spagni: I think that, you know, maybe right now in this moment, that might be a rational choice that they make. But within the next 12 months, I can absolutely see banks providing financial institutions, providing like MCP servers that issue one time use cards and have in-app approval. And it'll start with neobanks, you know.

[01:12:38] Vlad Costea: I already see people using Stripe with their Claude instances that they're running on Mac Minis.

[01:12:46] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, but I'm talking about paying for stuff.

[01:12:48] Vlad Costea: They're not using Bitcoin or something else, they're using Stripe.

[01:12:49] Riccardo Spagni: I'm talking about paying for stuff, not just receiving, right? So that would require some sort of API or whatever with your neobank and like, of course, like Revolut and whatever will probably do this fast and soon. And, you know, your Claude bots or OpenClaw, whatever it's called now, will hit an API or use an MCP server. It'll get a one time use credit card. It'll pay for the thing it needs using that card in a browser use agent. You will get a little pop up saying, OpenClaw is trying to spend $107 on X.

[01:13:27] Riccardo Spagni: You'll click yes and approve it or click no. And it'll make the purchase because it doesn't matter how much it loves crypto. It doesn't matter if it thinks Monero is like the only way it should be transacting. The services that it needs to hit are just not accepting crypto. And so that's, they've got to make a rational choice. And the rational choice is to just use a card. And frankly, as a user, that's probably the rational choice too. Now, maybe in a few years time, crypto starts to play more of a role in that as you start to have like agent to agent commerce, where there's no need for a card where the agents can transact.

[01:14:11] Riccardo Spagni: And there again, I think the question is, do they choose to use Lightning? Probably not. Do they choose to use Monero? I wish, but I think that the more rational choice is that they have to weigh up the privacy benefits of Monero against the stability and low cost benefits of USDT on Tron. I'm not personally saying that Tron is a great vehicle for anything, but the Global South love Tether on Tron. And so that feeds into LLM training because they capture all this information. They capture information from forums and Reddit and all sorts of things where you've got a bunch of people in the Global South who are not even typing in English.

[01:15:07] Riccardo Spagni: They're typing in whatever their native language is, you know, talking about how they only use Tether on Tron and via Binance as well, which is wild to me. And I see this all the time. Anytime I have to deal with somebody in Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, India, 90% of the time, they give me their Binance ID. And they're like, please send USDT. And I'm like, I don't have a Binance account anymore. So give me a deposit address. And then they're like, they give me a Tron address, a TRC-20.

[01:15:48] Riccardo Spagni: And I'm like, can you change the network to ERC-20 Ethereum? And then I finally can send them money. It's crazy. Like they just, their concept of crypto is USDT on Tron on Binance. And that's the thing that's been fed into LLM. And so yeah, the LLM is not going to sign up on Binance, but it's going to go like, I have an MCP server that allows me to create a wallet. I'm creating a Tron wallet. And if I don't have an MCP server or a skill for that, I'm getting one.

[01:16:23] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's really interesting. I've also had like a wake up call when I met my girlfriend and she comes from Iran. And the only way that her parents can send her money is with USDT on Tron. And I was like, yeah. And so this actually has a real world use case. Of course, it's not censorship resistant. Of course, the Tether company can decide to censor these addresses, but for as long as it works, people use it. And it's not a scam. Of course, you can argue, okay, Tron started out as a copy of Ethereum, a plagiarized white paper.

[01:16:59] Vlad Costea: Justin Sun is a megalomaniac. And he put pictures of himself in Times Square during Consensus. And he acts like he's the king of this space and whatever. But to his credit, he actually built something useful.

[01:17:16] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, and I would like to say that like, I really like Justin. I don't know if it's just me. But like, I find Justin fairly like, I know that he's done a bunch of like strip mining of dApps and whatever. But honestly, like, that's just the incentives at play. You know, that's like complaining that somebody who has $20 million buys a bunch of Bitcoin miners and mines because the price is low, and they get a lot of bang for their buck. You know, and they've got free electricity or whatever, like complaining about someone playing the incentives is silly.

[01:17:57] Riccardo Spagni: But I find him funny. And, you know, he is a showman. He is a salesman. He is a marketer. He markets himself primarily. But I just like him in general. I don't have anything like super negative to say about him. You know, he, like, he built Tron. I don't care if it's an Ethereum fork done, you know, poorly or whatever. It works. It's cheap. People love it. It hasn't had like a major hack or anything like that. Like, he's just generally done a good job as a marketer.

[01:18:38] Riccardo Spagni: I don't think he has like, you know, super strong technical skills, but he doesn't need to. He pays people who have decent technical skills. You know, it's, it's chill. Like, I mean, that my opinion might change in the future, certainly if he starts to do things that are negative. But I don't really find him a particularly harmful person. You know, I think he's, I think he does a fairly decent job. I find him quite fun and affable and never met the guy in person. But, you know, we've messaged a couple of times, and he's been super nice to me.

[01:19:12] Riccardo Spagni: And yeah, I think he's generally, him and like Roger Ver are examples of people who I think are often misunderstood and attacked because they don't do the things that in the way that you think they should, and they don't have the same worldview as you or whatever. But I just think they're, they're both nice people who have built some good stuff, and they've done so in a way that has not harmed Bitcoin directly. And you can argue that like, every competitor harms Bitcoin, but like, that's, again, delusion to believe that Bitcoin should exist in a vacuum.

[01:19:57] Riccardo Spagni: It's just not reality, not market reality either. And they haven't done stuff that I think is particularly anti-Bitcoin or net negative in any meaningful way.

[01:20:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, if I recall correctly, the moment when Tron became like the biggest USDT chain started when Justin Sun went to attend Satoshi Roundtable. And Udi Wertheimer sort of made a joke at the time, he was trying to take shots at Ethereum. And he sort of said that anything that Ethereum can do, Tron will do better. And he sort of persuaded Paolo Ardoino from, not Tron, from Tether to start accepting the fact that he can issue USDT on Tron. And that's when it blew up. I don't know how it grew so fast.

[01:20:59] Vlad Costea: It's still a mystery to me. I feel like in a sense, this was supposed to be Bitcoin, and we kind of lost the battle. Yeah, yeah. This is what Bitcoin, we used to say that Bitcoin is going to do this, empower people in countries where they don't have bank accounts or authoritarian countries where they don't have access to money, they're in some sort of financial [unclear: apartheid], or their fiat currency is inflating like crazy. But it seems like USDT on Tron is doing this and Bitcoin is being rebranded as this collateral for loans and store of value and generational wealth and something that you're never supposed to spend, which is crazy.

[01:21:48] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, to sort of yes and that, I do think that there is a future where Bitcoin becomes the unit of account. And it's like just a very popular unit of account. It's accepted everywhere. People are pricing things in Bitcoin. And so then it makes sense that that becomes the way to disintermediate a lot of those situations. But we might be decades away from that. You know, we might need a total collapse of like the fiat system or like the dollar or whatever.

[01:22:32] Riccardo Spagni: That's not where we're at now. Like the dollar for all the tariff games and whatever the US plays, the dollar is still a strong currency. People still primarily all around the world price things in dollars more than any other currency. And, you know, I mean, Cape Town, where I live, is a very touristy city. And so from like end of November till mid-March, like there's just a bajillion Germans and Americans and British people that come for vacation. And the services, yeah, despite the plethora of Europeans that come, a lot of the places, yeah, prefer dollars if you have to pay in foreign currency, you know, if you're not swiping a card or whatever.

[01:23:29] Riccardo Spagni: Like they will accept dollars and might not accept euros, which is kind of interesting. You know, even when it comes to like tipping culture, which is in tipping cultures, yeah, it's not quite as invasive as the States. But like if you tip someone in dollars, they're happy. If you tip them in euros, they're just like, oh, gosh, how am I going to exchange this? And that's because there's an entire underground black market style dollar to South African rand exchange network that exists in poorer communities. Because they come from like Zimbabwe or Malawi or whatever, they work here, they earn rands, they change those rands into dollars.

[01:24:17] Riccardo Spagni: And then when they go back to Zim or Malawi or, you know, any sub-Saharan African country, then they want to take dollars. They don't want to take rands. Rands are useless to them then. They're certainly not taking euros. So that just speaks to like the fact that the dollar is relevant right now. And USDT on Tron is the cheapest way and easiest way for someone in the global south to use a digital dollar. There isn't a better mechanism for them. And Binance is so dominant in those markets that it's even easier and cheaper for them to just send each other Tether on Tron on Binance than to do anything else.

[01:25:05] Riccardo Spagni: And I think like we have to recognize that reality. Whether there are changes in the future or not, I don't know. Of course, I would love that to be the case. But that is the reality right now. And pretending it isn't is silly.

[01:25:21] Vlad Costea: Speaking of South Africa, it was actually my social media manager who is from South Africa who set up this interview with your assistant. I was actually pleasantly surprised that he was able to pull this off. So thank you very much. I'm not going to dox him, but thank you very much. And I also need to ask you because today I think is like the third or fourth day of Monerotopia. I was there in Mexico City in November of [unclear: 2014 (sic), i.e. 2024], which was the previous edition. I did notice that a lot of old time Bitcoiners were attending there.

[01:25:56] Vlad Costea: You had Nick Spanos, you had Tatiana Moroz who did a concert. It felt like Bitcoin in 2013. And that's also when I realized that it's a movement. And they also had this marketplace where you could buy stuff from locals using Monero. And Doug Tuman is the guy who set up everything. Like he had a node set up in the venue and he had everyone connect their Cake Wallet phones to that node. And I guess everyone received some basic instructions. And at the end of the event, I think he sort of bought the Monero from [unclear: everyone] with cash.

[01:26:32] Vlad Costea: And everyone was happy, which is still a very good use case. So this felt very much like Bitcoin in the early days. And my question to you is, why didn't you go there? Why aren't you attending these events?

[01:26:43] Riccardo Spagni: Because I still have my legal battle ongoing. I'm not allowed to leave South Africa.

[01:26:52] Vlad Costea: Oh, man. I do remember at one point at Magical Crypto Conference that you were like an iPad on wheels or something.

[01:27:01] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah.

[01:27:02] Vlad Costea: Was it for the same reason?

[01:27:06] Riccardo Spagni: No, that was for a different reason. But yeah, this is unfortunately the reality. The way I like to think of it is you can't make omelettes without cracking a few eggs. You know, these particular cracked eggs are really getting long in the teeth. But my hope is that eventually this comes to an end and in the next, I don't know, year or two. And we can all just move on with our lives then.

[01:27:42] Vlad Costea: I remember I think it was 2022 in July that you got arrested because I remember very well where I was when that happened. And I think it was your wife who tweeted from your account. And I was one of the few Bitcoiners at the time who said Free Fluffypony. You can actually look it up. I made up a hashtag and I got some backlash from it. They're like, oh, he's a shitcoiner. He deserves it or whatever. Yeah. Like this is what you get for not being like a pure Bitcoiner.

[01:28:13] Vlad Costea: And I'm happy on one hand that you're not in prison anymore. I guess it was terrible. It cannot be a great experience to deal with that, but it also sucks that how long has it been? Almost four years and you still cannot travel outside of South Africa. It's a bummer.

[01:28:34] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, it's extremely frustrating. But, you know, the sort of the counterpoint here is I'll have a hell of a story to tell when this is done.

[01:28:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, same for Roger Ver, by the way. Yeah. He's been silenced for the remaining days of the Trump administration. But once he can talk, he's going to have a lot of interesting stories. I've met him in Palma de Mallorca in Spain. I was there for a conference and he was, I guess, very lonely. He had nobody to talk to. So I just met him and we had lunch together and I realized this guy is so nice. Like he's been vilified for such a long time. And I guess all of these moments that he had when he was crying because of the babies and stuff like this, they were taken out of context and he was portrayed in a certain way.

[01:29:28] Vlad Costea: And then I realized, you know, he's not really a villain. Like he can admit his mistakes. He's fine with moving on. He's not bitter about his life. I think the people who are deranged about what he did and what he said in the past, like 10 years ago or something, are much more scarred by his deeds than he is. He moved on. He just wants to live his life. He doesn't care that much about Bitcoin Cash anymore. I mean, of course, he spent a lot of time marketing it, but now he's like, whatever works.

[01:30:06] Vlad Costea: He's not gonna be dogmatic about something or have some sort of sunk cost fallacy where just because he put a lot of time and money into something, that one must be the successful peer-to-peer digital cash. He will just accept anything that works. Yeah. And I sort of respect that because he's ideological. He's not judging according to his bags. And he also drove me to the airport, which I said to him at the time, nobody will ever believe me if I tell them that Roger Ver decided, okay, get in the car. I'll take you to the airport.

[01:30:44] Vlad Costea: It's true. It's true. And also heard stories about you buying drinks to people at parties. I don't know.

[01:30:54] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, you know, the stories are stories. What are you going to do?

[01:31:02] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Maybe you don't want to go back to that. I was also going to mention how you were a knight in the Most Serene Republic. That was a long time ago. And they wanted to kick you out at some point because you were inactive.

[01:31:18] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah. So Trilema was a blog by a really interesting guy who subsequently passed away. And he had a channel on IRC that we frequented collectively a bunch of us. And he had really interesting views. He had interesting views on Bitcoin. He had interesting views on economics. He had interesting personal views. I disagreed with a lot of his views and agreed with some of his views very profoundly.

[01:32:06] Riccardo Spagni: And he had this little group that he called the Knights of the Most Serene Republic. And yeah, I mean, it was basically like if you were in channel a lot and you participated in absurd experiments.

[01:32:29] Riccardo Spagni: And I'll give you an example. We ran this experiment ages ago where he decided that Bitcoin's biggest failure was a lack of support, user support. You could never really tell how serious he was and how much of it was satirical and joking. But he decided that Bitcoin needed a customer support phone number. And so we went and set up a SkypeIn number where you could phone for Bitcoin support and publicize this number. Man, this must have been 2013, I think. Maybe 2014. And we publicized this number so that anyone could phone and get Bitcoin support.

[01:33:13] Riccardo Spagni: And we would have shifts manning the number where, you know, you'd be doing your normal work on your computer, but you had to have Skype open and like logged into that number. I personally never got any phone calls for that number. I think there were one or two that actually happened where people legitimately phoned for Bitcoin support and, you know, helped to guide, like set up a node and all that. He was a big believer in like running your own node and whatnot. But yeah, it was fun.

[01:33:42] Riccardo Spagni: But one of his core beliefs, which I always found funny because he was pretty technical. It wasn't that he was non-technical, but he was definitely more philosophical and, you know, very opinionated when it came to economics and that sort of thing.

[01:34:01] Vlad Costea: I think he was running his own client of Bitcoin, which was The Bitcoin Foundation.

[01:34:07] Riccardo Spagni: Yes, it was. Yeah, which was a fork that Ascii had that made some improvements. But he had this interesting thing, which is obviously very obvious now, but it was basically like anytime you need to spend Bitcoin. And he wasn't saying that like you should never spend Bitcoin. But he took this view that anytime you need to spend Bitcoin, you should consider the opportunity cost and write it down. You know, so like, you know, it's 2012, 2013 and you decide to support Bitcoin Black Friday and you buy a case of wine with Bitcoin.

[01:34:49] Riccardo Spagni: Write it down. Write down how much you spent in Bitcoin and then look at it a year later and look at it a year after that and a year after that. And every year, just think about when you look at it, think about how much that case of wine cost you in dollar terms or whatever your local currency is, which was very eye-opening, you know, like to a lot of people because not because we thought Bitcoin was going to make us rich or anything like that, but because it opened our eyes up to the nature of Bitcoin.

[01:35:27] Riccardo Spagni: We wanted to spend Bitcoin because we were part of that, you know, similar to like the Monerotopia movement where you like want to support merchants that are accepting it. But at what cost personally, you know, and can you do so at a smaller scale? Can you do so at a local scale without spending too much of your Bitcoin or can you replenish the Bitcoin from your fiat currency once you spent it? You know, these are the sort of patterns of thinking that were not very widely distributed in 2012, 2013 and certainly were maybe not as eloquently put as he was able to put them.

[01:36:18] Riccardo Spagni: And I do think he shaped the thinking of some very early Bitcoiners who were, some of us were more technical than others, but there were a lot of people who were less technical in that channel and were just more interested in like the philosophical aspects of Bitcoin.

[01:36:40] Vlad Costea: And that's sort of how The Bitcoin Standard was born, the book. It's ideas that Saifedean took from Mircea Popescu, the creator of Trilema, and combined with ideas he took from Nassib Taleb, Nassim Taleb, I said Nassib, but it's M.

[01:37:01] Riccardo Spagni: Oh, sorry, I was going to say like, as well, like some of those concepts of like being robust enough that you can't easily be shut down, you know, like Nassim and Saif and Mircea and all of these people like encapsulate concepts that we understand technically. You know, we understand from like a cryptographic standpoint or a distributed software standpoint, and they encapsulated in a, I think, a format that's maybe more digestible for people who aren't technical. And I do think that that's a good thing.

[01:37:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying that all of these ideas come from these places, and most people don't even know. They just credit the person who wrote the book, but don't actually look back to understand where these philosophical ideas come from or where the point of view might have originated. I also want to ask you, we agreed for an hour and a half. I guess we're a bit over time. If you want to end this, let me know. I can go on for longer.

[01:38:19] Riccardo Spagni: I can go another 15 if that's okay.

[01:38:22] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's good. I wanted to ask you what kind of watch are you wearing today? This is my orange Citizen.

[01:38:29] Riccardo Spagni: I'm wearing no watch. I'm wearing a Whoop on the one hand and nothing on the other. I feel bad that like, you know, I didn't wear a watch to a watch interview. Orange Citizen's great though.

[01:38:42] Vlad Costea: It's not made in Japan. That's my disappointment.

[01:38:45] Riccardo Spagni: You're wearing a Monero-colored Citizen watch.

[01:38:49] Vlad Costea: I just bought this because it's orange, to be honest. It's automatic and it has a calendar. It's fine.

[01:38:57] Riccardo Spagni: So you finally admitted that you love Monero enough to wear it on your arm.

[01:39:02] Vlad Costea: Oh, is Monero orange? Because I associate it with red.

[01:39:06] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah, the logo is orange.

[01:39:09] Vlad Costea: Okay. I'm not going to say no to that. It's just that I have this beautiful orange watch, which was like 300 bucks. Not that expensive.

[01:39:20] Riccardo Spagni: My very first proper watch that I ever bought was a Citizen. There was a particular Citizen that I wanted and, you know, I did a little bit of research and I found that the exact same model was available in Japan with sapphire crystal. And I had to get it on eBay Japan and ship it to me. And also it was inexpensive, you know, probably like $150 or so. But it was very, very treasured and I have it in a box somewhere as my first proper watch that I ever bought.

[01:40:02] Vlad Costea: My first one is a Seiko, which was more expensive than this one. And it's also fancier, but this is orange. So that's why I like it. And my girlfriend also bought me a Casio, which is not fancy, but I wear it just because it's a gift from her.

[01:40:19] Riccardo Spagni: Nice. Casios are great. I've got a couple of G-Shocks. They are lovely, robust and fun watches.

[01:40:29] Vlad Costea: Also on the topic of fashion, I know that you're a big sneakers fan. And you even did an interview, which I thought was interesting, where you mentioned some cryptocurrency networks and what they would look like as sneakers. I thought that was mind blowing. But recently you said that you entered your suit era. So where do you stand right now? Like what do you do with sneakers once you start wearing suits?

[01:40:58] Riccardo Spagni: Yeah. So I mean, I was joking a little bit about my suit era. I don't wear suits that often. I have some nice suits. And it's not that I don't wear them. It's more occasional. But I have worn suits with sneakers. I went to, my sister's an interior designer and she won a big design award. And I went with her and her husband and I had to wear a tuxedo. And I've got a very nice navy blue tuxedo with silk black lapels. And I paired that with a pair of black and blue sneakers.

[01:41:43] Riccardo Spagni: So, you know, a little bit of rebellion down at the bottom, you know, suit up top rebellion at the bottom.

[01:41:53] Vlad Costea: It's like the mullet, right? Business up front and fun in the back. Okay. Also, so there are at least a couple of people in the chat who were amazed. There is Silent Lamb and Plastic P02D. And they say that you look great and you lost a lot of weight. And what's your secret for it?

[01:42:16] Riccardo Spagni: So it's a good question. So I realized a few years ago that I was eating too much. And so the trick was to eat less. And that led to me losing weight. I think you can also apply this principle elsewhere. Like if you find that you're struggling financially, the problem is you aren't making enough money. So just make more money, you know. So this is just a basic principle that I somehow missed for like most of my life until I was nearly 40.

[01:42:55] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's really amazing. I remember eight years ago and this is sort of a wholesome story. Also sad, kind of. Because eight years ago I interviewed you. You were my first big interview when I was working for Crypto Insider. And I have a very soft spot for that. I remember being very nervous and you sort of gave me a pep talk and said, don't worry, it will be over very fast. Don't get stressed. You showed me your Ferrari Testarossa that you built from Legos. Your Star Wars Lego.

[01:43:25] Vlad Costea: I don't know. I think it was like the Death Star or something. Very cool stuff. And I was in this room. This is my parents apartment. I was here just starting out and now I find myself after I got evicted and I don't have Internet in the new place. I came back to my parents room and the only interview that I get to do from here where I started the podcast is with you, which is ironic in a way. I have to set up my recording and podcasting studio somewhere else, but I don't have an Internet connection yet.

[01:43:58] Riccardo Spagni: That's so funny. That's full circle, eh? It goes full circle.

[01:44:03] Vlad Costea: It does. I haven't really asked you something controversial. Let me make use of the last 10 minutes to try to see if I can make you angry. So how do you react when people call Monero a shitcoin with infinite inflation?

[01:44:23] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, I agree with them on both. If you don't have a use for Monero, then yeah, it's absolutely rubbish that you shouldn't touch. I think more and more people are realizing they probably have some use for it and that's fine. But for the people that don't have a use for it, yeah, it's nonsense. Don't touch it. Avoid it like the plague. And infinite inflation, it absolutely does have infinite inflation. I think it's a misnomer to use that to categorize Monero's economic model, but it's not an inaccurate statement.

[01:45:09] Riccardo Spagni: And I think sometimes I see people try and complain about whether a statement is correctly nuanced. And that's a great example of that. It's not a nuanced way to describe Monero's tail emission. Monero's tail emission is deflationary, or disinflationary rather, not deflationary, which means the amount of inflation gets smaller every year because it's a fixed block reward. It helps miners stay in business and have mining that is more predictable. Those are good things. On the other hand, it also means that number go up is not a very powerful trait when it comes to Monero's economic model.

[01:46:03] Riccardo Spagni: It's simply just not designed to do number go up. And that's fine. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's merely a different approach to something like Bitcoin, which is deflationary. But I think both statements are correct, albeit not nuanced. And so when I hear stuff like that, it doesn't faze me in the least.

[01:46:34] Vlad Costea: Okay, that's nice. Let me try something more triggering. How come you're fine with Ethereum and you seem to like it, but you don't like Zcash?

[01:46:44] Riccardo Spagni: Oh, I'm not fine with Ethereum. There's an old Reddit thread about how come fluffypony hates Vitalik. I don't hate Vitalik. I don't hate Ethereum. I think Vitalik's fine. I think Vitalik's technically competent and quite bright. And so part of my disappointment with Ethereum is why he chose to do it that way, which was given what he knew about Bitcoin at the time, such a silly architecture. Let's shove everything on chain. In fact, let's shove more stuff on chain and make sure every node has to deal with that.

[01:47:28] Riccardo Spagni: It's a stupid architecture. And so I previously called Vitalik a scammer. And I don't mean that in the traditional sense. I don't think he's a scammer like a lot of the pump and dump scammers that we've had. But I think he's a scammer in the same way that Zcash is a scam.

[01:47:50] Riccardo Spagni: Ethereum and Zcash are both driven or created by technically competent people who make stupid decisions when it comes to architecture or design. And they make those decisions in full knowledge that it's a stupid decision. And that is something I cannot abide by. I feel like Vitalik, firstly, I'm not going to sit here and say Vitalik absolutely should have made Ethereum a Bitcoin sidechain or something like that. I don't think that that's reasonable. I think if you want to go run a grand experiment like that, which might end up being a viable product, you're welcome to do it on its own chain.

[01:48:33] Riccardo Spagni: I think that Vitalik had the opportunity to create a two-layer system where the base layer is proof of work and is used to peg security concerns and security proofs and then build a more temporal layer too. It would have been harder, but he could have done that. He also could have, even if he wanted to keep the Ethereum-style structure, he had opportunity to add privacy to Ethereum. He chose not to. Knowing Satoshi's thoughts on it. I mean, he wrote for Bitcoin Magazine. He knew what Satoshi had said about privacy.

[01:49:16] Riccardo Spagni: He knew about the concerns then. He had an opportunity to change the status quo, to go, Satoshi made a mistake by not having base layer privacy. We are changing that with Ethereum. Even to have a roadmap to privacy or something like that, and he chose not to. And now, a decade later, trying to shoehorn privacy in is nearly impossible. And that I think is a fundamental flaw. And I view Zcash the same way. I think that the technology was nascent, and I understand that there was concern about the technology being nascent.

[01:50:06] Riccardo Spagni: But then you have a choice. Either you need to stay in testnet for longer, you know, be in testnet for an extra year or two so you can iron out those issues, or you need to just accept it and bite the bullet and say the technology is nascent and you might lose your money, but we're launching mainnet. You can't have it both ways. And if you're going to launch anything that is privacy preserving, then your choice is to be Signal or Telegram. Signal goes, we are privacy preserving.

[01:50:39] Riccardo Spagni: You can reveal your transactions, I mean, your messages. Nothing stops you taking a screenshot of your Signal messages. There are even cryptographic proofs that you can provide to attest to a Signal message, which I know is not baked into the Signal client, but it's possible. Telegram has pretty strong privacy for encrypted chats or secret chats or whatever they call it. I can tell you the last time I had anyone request a secret chat on Telegram was probably four years ago. No one uses it. The technology exists.

[01:51:13] Riccardo Spagni: The cryptography is sound. It's being vetted. Just no one uses it. And they went into that knowing that that's the case, knowing that if the encryption is not on by default, users will, generally speaking, not enable it. They are, it requires a great deal of education. And I'll give you a real life example of this. Venmo for a very long time was public by default. And I don't know why they did this. Maybe they thought Venmo was going to be like the social payments app. But every time you made a Venmo payment, then it would like publish that to like, this little database or API that you could query, you know, like, Bob, hey, Jill, and here's the little memo that they put.

[01:52:14] Riccardo Spagni: It wasn't quite as as brutally public as that, but it was pretty close. And there was massive pushback. And there was like from users when they realized this, which took years, by the way, it took years for users to cotton onto this. And you could disable it, but no one did. And it was only through like, very scary Instagram stories and YouTube, YouTubers publishing viral videos about how Venmo is leaking all your transactional details and scaremongering and articles in mainstream media that people started to go and enable the privacy setting and turn that stupid thing off.

[01:53:01] Riccardo Spagni: And then Venmo eventually was like, okay, fine, we'll make it private by default. And then I think that feature has largely gone away. But it requires, it requires massive amounts of scaremongering amongst people. And you know, like those those wild stories of I made a payment to my friend, Bob, and as a joke, I put Al-Qaeda bomb as the description, and then I got arrested, and I was in jail over the weekend. You need crazy stories like that for people to wake up. And I feel like as builders, as cryptographers, as researchers, as people who are building anything in the privacy space, if you're building a privacy enhancing tool, you shouldn't wait for scaremongering to happen to turn the switch on.

[01:53:54] Riccardo Spagni: The switch should be on from the get. And so these are complaints that I have about both Ethereum and Zcash. The complaint is the same, they knew better, they chose not to, whether it's from an architectural perspective, a privacy preserving perspective, whatever it is. And if we continue to build layer one blockchains, or layer two blockchains that do not have privacy by default, we are basically saying that Satoshi got it right. And I think that that is a terrible thing to do, given where we stand in 2026.

[01:54:34] Vlad Costea: Oh, I get your point. But Zcash is basically the Zerocash paper for Bitcoin on a Bitcoin fork. So if anything, these guys hoped that Bitcoin was going to adopt the technology, which is why they kept it opt in, so that they could prove that there is no inflation bug, which they had to fix at least one time. So the concern about an inflation bug was legit on behalf of Bitcoin Core. So the way that I interpret this is that Zcash has been, since the beginning, a Bitcoin experiment, with the hope that this is going to improve Bitcoin.

[01:55:11] Vlad Costea: Zooko is the first guy to blog about Bitcoin, like it's very hard to dissociate him from the project, just because today he tells you to use Zcash. He onboarded Slush, the guy who created the first mining pool to Bitcoin. It goes a long way, and I think it's a very long game that everyone's playing here. And you're still a Bitcoiner. Roger is still a Bitcoiner. A lot of people who get associated with all sorts of altcoins are Bitcoiners. I know for a fact that Charles Hoskinson is a huge Bitcoiner, even though he's selling a lot of fairy dust with Cardano.

[01:55:50] Riccardo Spagni: So my only counterpoint there, and I recognize that we're coming up on time, or we come up on time. My only counterpoint there is, if that is the case, if it was just researchers creating a thing that they hoped would become a model for Bitcoin to follow, why did they raise money? You don't need venture capital for that. You can get a grant. You raise venture capital because you're going to build something that is profitable and will create an exit strategy of some sort for the VCs.

[01:56:24] Riccardo Spagni: VCs do not invest in something that they cannot turn into money for their LPs. So there has to have been enough meat on the bone commercially for VCs to look at this and say, I can 10x, 50x, 100x, 1000x my investment by putting money into this. And that's at odds with the claim that Zcash was meant to be some model for Bitcoin to look at and go, okay, cool, we can now implement Zerocash. And I'll add to that, again, if it is a grand science experiment that exists in the hope that Bitcoin will look at this and go, this is mature enough for us to adopt, then you stay in testnet for a lot longer.

[01:57:17] Riccardo Spagni: You iron out the bugs in testnet. You don't iron out the bugs in mainnet, where you put funds at risk. I'm not going to sit here and say that these are non-technical people. I'm not going to sit here and say they set out to steal money from little kids or anything like that. We're at odds on how we would approach something like that. We disagree fundamentally on what is both technically and even maybe morally right in that situation, because I do view privacy as a moral stance to take.

[01:57:58] Riccardo Spagni: And that's it. We're just at odds. And that's fine. They make different decisions. Zooko once called me a bad actor. I disagree with him. I think my acting is very good. And I'll go to drama class if I need to prove that. I'll go star in Annie. I'm sure I can sing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow. And that's where him and I diverge and disagree. And that's fine. He doesn't have to agree with me, and I don't have to agree with him.

[01:58:29] Vlad Costea: I think that's fair. And it's honestly the least toxic way of putting this. And I guess Twitter, in the way that it's designed, usually or frequently makes us look more aggressive or opinionated than we actually are in reality.

[01:58:46] Riccardo Spagni: Right. And to that end, I will say I generally find, and this is true for so many things, not for everything. I generally find that the builders and researchers and cryptographers are more level headed and I get on with them and we can agree to disagree and we can even be very cutting to each other without taking offense. It's the advocates, the bag holders that are the problem, because they're the ones that lean into personal attacks and mischaracterizations. Generally speaking, if somebody that I disagree with on when it comes to some cryptographic primitive mischaracterizes something I said and I call them out on it, they will say, OK, so I'm sorry, I misunderstood.

[01:59:36] Riccardo Spagni: And they will not make that mischaracterization again. Whereas people who are either anti-Monero or pro Ethereum, pro Zcash, whatever, when they take something I said and they mischaracterize it or they say something about me that is clearly not true and I correct them, they tend to double down. And I think that's where I've become unforgiving on Twitter. I just don't have the energy to correct somebody multiple times.

[02:00:06] Vlad Costea: And on the other side Zooko is also very liberal with blocking. For a while that was like his whole identity. The description on his profile was, I block people a lot because I like to preserve the time of my followers or something like this. So I guess it goes both ways. I feel sorry that we got to the end of the interview and I haven't asked you about Tari because I think that one is interesting. The last time we spoke about it was still a very early stage project that was almost 8 years ago and now it's on mainnet.

[02:00:40] Vlad Costea: So maybe some other time we can do this and talk about Tari also. Last question, just very short 30 seconds answer. What do you think about Zano?

[02:00:52] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, I think that like with Firo and with a bunch of other projects in the space, like with Litecoin's MWEB and so on, everyone's trying to do interesting stuff. I don't begrudge projects that are trying to do interesting stuff. Again, I think what I found with Zano is the people working behind the scenes are more level-headed than some of the proponents that sometimes try to pile into my timeline. Or reply to posts that I've made. I'm trying to shill it. I don't think shilling something on an unrelated post has ever worked or ever been beneficial.

[02:01:34] Riccardo Spagni: If I'm tweeting about Monero, then piling on and being like, well, Zano does this differently. Okay, that's irrelevant. If you have a design for Monero that you think is useful, like open an issue, submit a pull request, commenting on a tweet to try and shill something that you hold a bag of is useless. So yeah, I always just encourage people, don't be useless. Just be useful in something like that. No one cares about your bag holding. Have an opinion that you can back up technically or ideologically. That's important. Yeah, I think that's

[02:02:17] Vlad Costea: A very good answer. Last but not least, I'll give you the chance to promote anything or whatever it is that you're working on or where people can follow you.

[02:02:35] Riccardo Spagni: I mean, we're working on a bunch of things. We're very excited about what we're doing at Tari. We've also built Blink, which is a browser use agent on blinktheweb.com. And our hope is by building a bunch of agentic tools that we can steer AI towards crypto a little bit more. Again, we don't think that it's there yet. But if we build the right harnesses, then perhaps we're busy building an MCP server for Tari at the moment. So that you can control your Tari Universe miner from an agent and turn it on and off and that sort of thing.

[02:03:19] Riccardo Spagni: So yeah, we're excited about an agentic future. And hopefully crypto becomes a more intrinsic part of that. Oh, and if you want to follow me, I'm fluffypony on X.

[02:03:32] Vlad Costea: That's very cool. At some point you also had a Yat or whatever. Y.at?

[02:03:37] Riccardo Spagni: Yat's still going. There's also interesting ideas that we have around Yat and how agents might use emojis when they're interacting with humans as a form of identity. But this stuff will take a while to play out. I think AI is moving crazy fast. But for the landscape to settle and for things to emerge as dominance will take a few years.

[02:04:09] Vlad Costea: I think your Yat was something like this, which is the live long and prosper sign from Star Trek.

[02:04:16] Riccardo Spagni: Exactly. That's the Yat symbol. And my Yat is the horse, obviously.

[02:04:22] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Riccardo. I appreciate your time. I understand that you went over time and I respect it. And I hope we're going to do a longer interview to talk about more in-depth topics and also cover Tari.

[02:04:36] Riccardo Spagni: Awesome.

[02:04:37] Vlad Costea: And also, don't go, I want to tell you something very quick, like one minute before we go off there. Off the air. OK, thank you very much. Don't forget to subscribe and stuff like this. Bye.