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How secure is BTC? PoW versus PoS
Recorded: June 11, 2025 Duration: 2:45:22Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, participants explored the chaotic political landscape in LA, the implications of civil unrest, and the challenges faced by immigrants in the U.S. They also delved into the potential of blockchain technology in gaming and the evolving narratives surrounding Bitcoin's role as a store of value and its future in a rapidly changing world.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yo, yo, yo.
Moby, you're muted, by the way.
I don't know if you're talking.
No, I wasn't.
I'm still waiting a little bit to start.
Oh, okay. you
okay can i pin my trailer in the meantime or or no? What did you want to pin?
Have you watched it?
I sent you my trailer.
Your trailer?
Yeah, bro.
Go ahead and pin it, man.
I have my hands tied at the moment,
but go ahead and pin it and we can talk about it.
Okay, appreciate it, man.
Love you, bro. Thank you. Thank you. All right. What's going on everyone give me one second below g um i didn't realize that your
trailer has a contract address in it uh guys none of none of what you see in the jumbotron or anything
like that is financial advice just fyi but tell me about it belowushi what's going on yeah oh so sorry about that um okay look so
so actually we're sponsored by pump fun and the based house so like officially and uh they created
some sort of like a content house where you know it's a competition and creators in the house and
we have episodes and stuff the first episode actually dropped on on
monday uh you guys can check it out it's almost at like 200 000 views it's which is fucking
it's in la we're in la right now nice what part of la um i i can't i can't i can't
i can't really say i was i was mainly asking the question because i wanted to see how close you
guys are to the chaos so how close to you to the chaos oh we oh we're we're uh we're right there
bro like okay got it yeah i was i was actually in the middle of it and i live streamed it
and bro like there was fucking military helicopters uh 10 burnt Waymo cars, cop cars.
So you're there on the ground.
What is it like?
Is it because, you know, it's interesting.
You watch it on TV.
I haven't really been keeping up with it, to be honest with you.
I generally have stopped keeping up with anything political after the election.
I just don't find it as interesting anymore now that we know the verdict, who won and whatnot. But you can't help but hear
about it and you can't help but see clips about it. And the clips that are showing shit on fire
and things blowing up and the riots is obviously mostly right wing. And then the left wing
rhetoric is that these are peaceful protests and you know
the majority of people are peaceful and this is a small percentage and whatnot so i'm curious to
know from someone that's on the ground that's actually laid eyes on it what have you what
have you encountered it's chaotic bro like what you guys are seeing, that's really true. Like what is happening? Like fucking, bro, it's extremely chaotic.
Military is everywhere.
You have, you have, this is the first time, by the way, I experienced shit like that.
Like with the air cop, cop helicopters and shit, always circling around just to make
sure that, you know, everybody like it's, it's kind of controlled.
But yeah, it is chaotic bro like
there's i don't like malaji you're not from la i don't want to say where you're from i know where
you're from but i don't know yeah i know where you're from and so where you're from you're not
used to seeing shit like this right no not at all bro i'm from canada okay cool well i even know
where from canada you are and i visit you often. So I know that you guys don't have experience with anything like this.
This is like you're in a different reality right now.
Yeah, this is the first time, bro.
Like, it feels like a fucking GTA trailer for some shit.
Like, I was here.
I thought I was fucking playing.
I thought I was playing Call of Duty for a second.
Because people were getting hit with rubber bullets and gas.
We got gas, actually, and we couldn't breathe.
Our eyes were tearing out.
So it is some sort of a movie.
But if you ask me if I'm with it or against it,
I don't really know, to be honest,
because I'm not in the politics here in
the states and stuff but yeah it is it is chaotic forget the politics i'm curious to know from like
when you're walking when you're looking on because i'm hearing so many different takes on what's
happening and it's so hard oftentimes to wrap your head around what's true because you're being fed
so much different information
and a lot of it's contradicting.
So if you had to walk on or you've walked on the streets of LA, right?
You said you've had front row and center seats and you've been in the chaos.
So tell me what percentage of it looks peaceful to you and what percentage of it looks like
it's people just looking for an
excuse to fuck shit up there's no percentage at all i think every single factor of it is fuck shit
up like um and that's yeah yeah and that's comes from my point of view to be honest and also like
i want to i want to say this like yes yes, you're in this country, right?
And I know for a fact that in this country, like, it's very hard to actually get a citizenship
or, you know, like, immigrate.
Like, it's very, very difficult.
That's why, like, me, for example, I immigrated in Canada, right?
Because it's kind of an easier process and stuff like that.
process and stuff like that. But I really don't understand like why, why would, why would the
immigrants, you know, create such chaos in a country that they're supposed to get, you know,
welcomed in the country? You get what I'm saying? And if you are like, if you are illegal, like,
for example, you came into the country illegally without actually going through the process of asylum seekers and and like
As a refugee or something like I really don't understand
Why would you cause all of this chaos? Like you can just go back to your country if you don't like if you don't like the system
The narrative that I'm so what I'm hearing is that people are seeing their friends their
their co-workers, family members that are not U.S. citizens, right, that are not here legally being stripped out of their homes, being stripped out of work.
I've heard of kids being pulled out of school, which is a little crazy.
I've also heard of U.S. citizens being caught in the crossfire. So I don't know
how much of it's true. Again, I'm hearing stuff from all sides of the spectrum, but I'm hearing
of children being caught in the crossfire who are U.S. citizens who've been deported
illegally, right? They're being illegally deported. you can't deport a u.s citizen so i i don't know how much of it's true and um i'm curious like i i what you you you have more
people that you can bring on here that are on the ground i'd be interested to hear uh you know what
kind of chaos they're seeing or if people have any different perspectives that have a that have
a bird's eye view a literal bird's eye view what's happening yeah yeah i mean like my like the other creators they're actually sleeping right now i'm i'm like
the only one awake uh but um but yeah there are a few videos that we actually filmed i could pin
up top so you guys can actually get a get a view of like what it was and how it was. But yeah, regarding like the kids getting kicked out
and stuff like that, look, the media always tries to play some sort of a narrative like for politics
and stuff like that just to take sides. But at the end of the day, it's always the responsibility
of the parents. Like you cannot, like the kid has nothing to do with what is happening. Like it was your responsibility to bring them through a proper process with the immigration.
And if it didn't work out, you know, like it didn't work out your responsibility to get out.
And that's just my point of view, to be honest, because I was myself an asylum seeker, because obviously like my country is getting bombed and like starved to death so
like I was an asylum seeker and we went through the process like we went to jail for like three
days when we came to Canada just to like get the papers ready and stuff like that but we were we
were actually like you know got into the country and then you know it took us like 12 years to get the citizenship and so on
and so on so no matter what the media says there's always some sort of a point to it where
they're always taking sides you know this is really interesting because i'm also a child of
immigrants and i am very thankful to have been born on this side
of the globe. I have relatives that have, my parents are Iranian, I have relatives
that have waited decades to come here and there's a lottery system and it's a
pain in the ass and it's, know that they they would have rather spent the last 20 years here than than than back home most of them anyway. And so I see this thing where and I said, came here the right way, they seem quite angry
too. Not all of them. Some of them understand and empathize with what's happening. Um,
cause cause then, you know, you can, you can make the argument that a lot of these,
a lot of these people that are fleeing from the South, they're fleeing from, you know,
violence that the U S is, uh, directly or indirectly caused. And I don't, I don't want
getting like, I'm not a political scientist
I am sure you might come up here and wipe the floor with me
You know why they're angry though?
You know why the people are angry even though they have their citizenship it is because bro
They they do understand that the system is extremely difficult to actually like get in properly
so so it's like it's like if the country
you know didn't want some sort of immigration process or or something and also you need to
understand like not only political uh parties they would do things to actually back their political
party but at the same time the citizen himself also will do things to actually back you know for his own benefits in some way you know right
look I I was having this discussion with my girlfriend and I asked her just a
simple question I play devil's advocate a lot just and the reason I play devil's
advocate is if you know if even if I don't agree with what I'm necessarily saying, it helps me better understand my own viewpoint and the opposite.
The other person's other person's viewpoint on this issue.
I don't say I'm completely on the left or even on the right.
I'm a little the question I asked my girlfriend, this is like, what other country is OK?
Right. Apart from a few that you can think of off the top of your head, what other country is okay with people just coming in illegally and just like chilling, right?
Everyone's acting like, you know, what the US is doing is completely abnormal. And, you know, this wouldn't happen. But imagine if you migrated to, like, the UAE or to Saudi Arabia.
I mean, those are nice places to live, right?
Imagine if you, you know, you just walked over the border there
and said, no, you know, I don't, the outcome wouldn't be the same.
I think there's this.
You can't. Bro, you can't.
I've been to the
uae yeah yeah you'll get insta kicked out like it's no no questions asked right and so i think
that the u.s has this standard put on it because it is big brother of the world and because it is
a nation of immigrants and i'm sure there are other reasons but.S. is put on a higher pedestal when it comes to what's expected of them, what's expected of the country.
Because I can't think of maybe Sweden.
I can't really think of too many other countries that are OK with people, that would be OK with people, like millions of people coming across their border and just like hanging out there without documents.
millions of people coming across their border and just like hanging out there without documents.
I don't want to throw them under the bus, but France comes to mind.
Sure, sure, Taco. I mean, we can France. My girlfriend's Swedish. And, you know, Sweden is
we all know how lenient they are with people, asylum seekers and people coming over the border.
I'm just saying, like,
if you don't consider countries in Europe, Western Europe, some of the ones that have more lax immigration policies or illegal immigration policies or illegal immigration tolerance,
I guess they're not policies. Think of a Norway or a Finland or a Poland or, like I said, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar.
These three countries, by the way, I know tons of people that would love to live in those countries.
But they all have immigration processes.
And if people come to those countries illegally, then I think that no one would bat an eye if the government of the UAE just went around and gathered everyone up and pushed them out of the country if they came illegally.
Again, I'm not saying that we need to hold ourselves to the same standard.
I'm just asking questions, right?
At what point is everyone happy?
And is it possible for everyone
to be happy because the way that i see it when i watch the news the degree to which we sensationalize
the news i don't i mean taco we were in dubai for i was there for a couple of weeks and you
were there for a couple weeks as well like i uh when i was in dubai i didn't i almost forgot what
it's like to have to hear about politics every day.
It was great.
It's not a, it's not part of their social fabric, right?
They're not, and to me, it's a layer of, it's, apart from how safe it is, I think multiple
layers of anxiety for me were lifted.
I don't have to look over my shoulder when I'm walking in the street, right?
I'm not really worried about, you know, if I walk down the street in Washington, D.C.,
man, I am super vigilant.
I'm very careful about where I'm going, and I'm looking at 360 vision the entire time
in Dubai that was lifted.
And on top of it, I don't have to hear about all this sensationalized political um this political news that's been
pushed out every single day i can't even log on to twitter my feed is all elon versus trump and
it's it's just for me it's too much i don't i don't care about this stuff to the to the extent
that other people do the one the one thing we got we have to forget is how, I'll say this, how privileged we are in the U.S.
Now, I'm not saying this in a bad way, but because everything seems so law and order in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and UAE,
is because they're effectively almost police states.
Same thing like Singapore, but like they, there's no room for, you know,
whatever we want to call it, the, the, the outcries that we, that we,
the freedoms that people are, are liberties that people have in the U S and
that's how those societies and those cultures have grown up.
And so where we see them as like, oh, my God, it's so clean and everything.
We sort of miss some of the back room stuff that, you know, the part you're missing to all the people that die.
Right. Exactly.
You know, like the people that have died to get to uh what we see like okay
cool you go steal someone's phone you get your hand chopped off you know uh as much as i i mean
it's not to that extent so sorry to cut you off it's it's no longer to that extent but i yeah you
you do have a point yeah like it's very strict over there bro like in in
the uae uh when i was there um the reason why they don't talk about politics is because of the royalty
right you don't want to you don't want to say anything bad about the royalty because they
will literally yeah i get it i get it you can't you can't look i understand that in most of these
countries you can't criticize the government um but i also just see people i don't, you can't, look, I understand that in most of these countries, you can't criticize the government.
But I also just see people, I don't know, I don't, I think a lot of people just don't even feel the need to criticize the government.
Their living conditions are so good.
And the quality of life is so high and safety is so high.
And maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe this is the path down to authoritarianism. The thing is, the quality of life, right, is so high because of
these freedoms, right? Like a lot of the prosperity in the world and like Saudi Arabia sits in a bit
of a weird place, right? Because it gets to be an absolute monarchy and still benefit from the
global economy that is more free, right? So it's a weird example in isolation. But I think it's important to keep
in mind when we visit these kinds of places that are authoritarian or totalitarian, we might be
impressed by the order of it and the safety of it from one perspective. But it's very important to
remember the other perspective. If you try to oppose the regime, you know, they will take you out. And, and like ultimately systems of absolute power corrupt and they corrupt absolutely. And they
don't lead to more prosperity. They don't lead to more happiness in the long run, even though they
are incredibly, um, tempting, right? That's the, that's why totalitarianism works because it's
very tempting to, to give into the power of the state state, to feel secure, to be like, you know, this is why they say about the United States that it's the home of the brave, right?
Because freedom requires bravery.
A free place is going to be a more chaotic place.
But I think that tradeoff is so, so worth it, because without freedom, we lose creativity, we lose innovation, we lose the ability to change, the ability to self-reflect, to look within.
It's so important.
And you lose that in these places.
This is why innovation happens in free countries.
This is really important to remember.
Yeah, that's a good point. I think the reason I referenced the UAE, the whole, I guess, tangent I went on was because I was trying to give, you know, my, what countries are okay with just this many illegal human beings coming there's the right way to come in here for a reason.
But I don't know.
I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I think it's important to separate these ideas because, like, we can have sensible immigration policy without becoming an authoritarian, totalitarian state.
Right?
Like, we really need to separate those two things from each other. It's okay to say, you know,
we can't let immigration go too far
or the culture moves too quickly away from us.
I don't think that that is such a wrong position to have.
These things need to be done in balance.
And as a democratic society, as a free society,
we can decide on the correct balance
without sacrificing all of
our freedoms i think there's a bit of a false dichotomy and thinking you can only have it one
way right no certainly um anyway look i i we were talking to below you about the pump fun
so below you this is a pump and i you know i agree, Justin. I think that there are trade-offs
and I would rather, personally rather have grown up in the U.S., I think, than most other places
in the world. I think that you have outliers. Like, to me, UAE is an outlier. Singapore is an
outlier. I don't think those are terrible places to grow up and have families. I know people that are raising their kids there for a reason. However, I like the
hedge of being a US citizen. I think there's a big difference, though, between the UAE and
Singapore, though. Singapore is technically a democracy, even though it's very strong-handed,
whereas at least in Singapore, politically, you have the option for
change and there's some political protections. Whereas in the UAE, that's not the case at all.
There is actually a big difference between those two places, even though they somewhat feel the
same. And that's part of that distinction of like not throwing the baby out with the bathwater,
right? And I will just say, since we're on the subject of UAE, it just has to be said there's millions of indentured servants
from like india in uae that are like a massive slave population basically because they've been their passports get taken away and they're stuck there to work under horrible conditions so both
both with it with uh i was going to mention that as well but like both ind Indian and Pakistani. And a lot of, you know, I like, I don't want to say I
like to stay in the seedier side of Dubai, but I like to stay in the cheaper side of Dubai, which
in the public facing hotel sides, Dubai, it's like a two star hotel US, it's still at like a four-star hotel level um but you know a lot of them that i talked
to you know from the multiple times i've been there you know yes that that is the case you
know they'll they'll say yeah i don't have my passport anymore or anything like that
but they're still they're still making money in in some regard more than they would make at home
and that's that's sort of why they tolerate it.
I mean, that's true.
I mean, that's why they choose.
I mean, that's why historically indentured servants in the U.S.
also chose that life, right?
But it's still wrong because it's an abusive, exploitative relationship.
Yes.
And we'll see.
I think we'll see, you know, eventually, you know, Dubai particularly, we'll see once the building boom, you know, in the next decade to 20 years, it will shift as well. The population will, the, the, the ruling authority will, its views on, on immigration
will change and no longer be needed there. And we'll see that we'll see that change as well.
But the difference is between like the U S and, um, specifically, you know, the UAE, is we'll see it televised in the U.S.
It will just happen in the UAE, you know.
But to touch on Singapore, the same piece,
like, it's what I appreciate about, like, Singapore,
you know, in that aspect, too,
is, like, sort of the no- the no nonsense. Like everyone has that fear.
You, you know, you spit gum out on the street, you're going to jail or you're, you know, getting fined.
And that's just because they've gotten to a certain level of class.
My favorite sign that I see almost in a lot of different places in Singapore, walking around both tourist and non-tourist sections,
is if you harass women, you'll be beaten with a stick.
And that is usually shown with characters
in some way, shape, or form.
But it's a certain level of respect.
I like that.
I'm going to come out flat out and say it.
I like it.
I think that there's a certain level of fear
that should be instilled because, again, try walking as a woman. I mean, I, a lot of this
stuff came, uh, you know, came clear to me when I started dating my girlfriend. It's my first
relationship and I would see. Congratulations. Well, thanks. Yeah. We're three years. But the
point is, is when I would walk down the street
in New York City, I've been going to New York for two decades. Like, I've never had a single issue
walking blocks in New York City. I'll literally be walking down New York at four in the morning.
I'll be walking like 50 blocks. I love walking in New York. No one fucks with me. No one says
anything to me. I try walking down a few blocks
with my girlfriend in the middle of the day. And just the number of people that want to come up,
and I'm with her. I'm literally walking with her. The number of people that want to come up and
say something or whistle or talk shit, it's crazy. Just hearing about her experience
interfacing in the world.
I I kind of like that Singapore has that law because I think too many people are too many people here are just used to fucking around and not finding out.
I call Singapore and the UAE fuck around and find out countries.
I yeah, I don't know how you guys feel about that, but I kind of like that, that people. And I agree with you on New York with that.
And I come from a privileged piece of this.
I'm 6'4", 260 pounds most of the time.
Sometimes I'm leaner, but I'm a big guy, wide shoulders.
So, yeah, but I see it too.
So it's not, you know, and that's from the, you know, no one, I don't know.
It's too deep as shit.
Let's talk about fucking Base House and how fucking awesome J. i want to i want to i want to move
below she tell me about because you said this is a official pump fun creator house like official
yeah yeah yeah official official sponsored by pump fun and super based uh by jakey and steve
yeah yeah why are we talking about this and they got they got pd in there um yeah yeah yeah so i
was i was on stream with um oh donnie uh on pump fun the other day uh i'm surprised someone hasn't
done this sooner i remember i saw like a content creator house type of thing but was more of like a trench warrior piece and and
someone like was like oh that's like a sahil pump and dump house but this is because like no one's
on stream no one's a social socially forward content creator yeah but this is like real world meets big brother well more like real world meets pump fun basically so it's trash
combined with trash basically yeah yeah yeah but no no but but justin justin i think let me explain
let me explain look at it look look at it this way okay the other platforms are very extremely strict about like their their creators and stuff right
so anything that you know by mistake whatever happens they get instantly banned that that that
that fucks up their whole career and on top of that you know like as the audience as the people
actually watching those streamers if if the streamer is actually let's say he's he's already
loaded like he mill multi-millions of dollars and he's getting donations out of these audiences
like five dollars five dollars in subscriptions or donation or maybe your mic is on five dollars
in subscription and stuff like that right so the audience doesn't gain actually anything from it other than, hey, the creator, here's a little bit of water drop into your fucking ocean, right?
But on PumpFun is extremely different. say you know buying their token or whatever they are literally owning some sort of a percentage
of the that specific content creator's career i don't think that's true though like i don't i
don't think that's what you're saying i don't think that's true i don't think we should be
promoting meme coins definition of a meme coin is no utility this is not a meme coin this is no no
i i can't i can't let you talk how is that enforced yeah yeah okay so
if you buy this token you now own a proportion of all of the revenue that this creator creates
into perpetuity how is that enforced so let me let me tell you let me tell you how it is okay
yeah yeah because if that's true i might be on board a hundred percent a hundred percent so
so look at look at it this way
Let's say let's say mr. Beast right now like he goes live as a content creator This is his first day as a content creator and back right and now he he has let's say 50% of his business
And you know 50% is on the open market, right?
And you buy let's say 1% out of you know how to economics work right and then
later on in the future you know he grows he becomes huge whatever whatever you're one percent
it's a speculative mania it's a pump and dump it's a it's a mean coin frenzy sure i got it following
you so far no it is look i know to economics i've been in this industry for a very long time you're
like you're not you're not gonna you're not going to twist my words.
You need to understand the vision over here that I'm telling you.
I'll listen.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm telling, I'm trying to explain to you the vision.
I just need you to listen.
That's all.
And yeah, that's basically what it is.
It's as simple as that.
There's no, there's nothing else to it. And just so you understand
one thing, let's say you buy a supply, right? Instead of letting it stagnate, for example,
inside your wallet as for your content creator to grow and become bigger and bigger, you can
actually take that supply that you bought and open an LP and actually start gaining revenue out of that lp right it like there are
a lot of ways for you to actually explain how the revenue was enforced though like so for instance
if that creator is getting revenue from youtube how is that revenue how does that revenue go back
to the token holders in this case can you explain that yeah yeah it's very simple well it will
definitely go back to the creators you know know, creativity and the creations of the videos and the content that they're doing.
So the more revenue that they actually generate, the more they can reinvest back into their company, which is, you know, like their content creation.
And the more they get virality and the more that the investors actually gain momentum.
Justin, can I?
Belogi's overcomplicating it.
He's hitting everything right on the hammer on the head.
But one of the simple questions you ask, how do creators make money?
One, if they buy initial supply of themselves.
All right.
But also they make a percentage.
I don't know the exact.
I don't remember the exact number.
They make a small, tiny percentage of trading fees.
So like if you have.
And I think.
And then.
That's part of the pump.
Fund platform, right?
Yes.
Pumped up funds.
And I think that they made a.
I heard that they made if you hit like
a million dollars or something like that in trading volume you get like 5k i haven't confirmed that
and i'm and i'm but and i'm not concerned about the value flow towards the creator i'm concerned
about the value flow towards the token holder so the token the the this is this is like where the token flow for the creator, there's two pieces.
Have you used PumpFun in any way, shape, or form?
I have for experimental purposes.
Okay.
So one of the pieces, it's a token factory that's tried to standardize a safety piece.
Once a token bonds lp is burned uh the soul and token that is left has been
gets burned into lp so that the idea is to protect a base base value for the token holder so
it is i really hate saying this but this is really, truly security.
It's not a meme token because it's not based on – it is based off the work of others.
It is based off the work of the content creator.
You still don't answer the question, right?
I had a really simple question, and it's not answered now.
And what is that?
Yeah, so I want to – how do you enforce –
I agree with justin i i think so i i just how how is the revenue that is
generated from the creator enforced back into the token right how do we guarantee that that that that
yeah exactly and and the example i used is youtube revenue and specifically i'm using that example
because it exists outside of the token right so like how do you guarantee how do you enforce that the creator puts all of their youtube revenue back into the token and how
does that work exactly so i don't know that they're they're not oh it's like youtube revenue
on this this is basically they've made like a pvp whoever has the lowest market cap at the end of
each week gets voted out of the house type of thing this is sort of
a learning experience type yeah but this doesn't answer his question i i get his question right
now justin um it's like it's like me asking you this when you open your business right you open
a grocery shop down the street how can you guarantee me that the revenue that you're
creating from that grocery store is actually going back into the grocery store in the case of a grocery store i'll answer the question if there is some
sort of joint ownership of the shareholding of course then there are legal protections in place
so actually the legal system the state actually acts as the enforcement mechanism to make sure
that dividends actually do go to the appropriate owners. Yeah, 100%. And that's because it's like some sort of an IPO, right?
It's a stock out there that pays off dividends as fucking income.
It could just be shared ownership of, say, a small grocery store, for instance.
It works at a small scale as well.
Yeah, now you see, like, this is the beginning.
This can actually get built
because this is actually the beginning of something big.
And I think that's the vision that I'm trying to project.
But hold on, what we're describing here, like this is what I do, right?
Like I'm an investor in crypto. I've been a full-time researcher for over a decade, right?
So what I do is identify use cases, things that are actually useful, faster, cheaper, easier, more secure, etc.
Something that people actually want to
use. And then I investigate the technology, make sure that all makes sense. And then identify the
token economics where actually demand is positive demand is being created on that token. If the
underlying platform is being used either for burning mechanism or dividend mechanisms,
you see this a lot in like DeFi DAOs, right? This is also as a value investor you can understand why i'm extremely
skeptical and and this this is this from an investor point like that this isn't your cup of tea
this isn't geared this isn't aimed for you this this is this is entertainment this is wwe but then
it's just gambling and it's just a meme coin like Yeah, that's what I said. I literally said this is, I never once said it was, oh, this is the future.
It is something new.
That is all I'm saying.
But like, I'm going to be a bit harsh here.
Sorry, Balogi.
No, no, no.
I actually like you and I actually followed you.
And it would be nice to discuss me and you like in private, maybe like find some ideas or something that I could maybe reach out to PumpFun and be like, hey, you know, there's this guy, you know, he's talking about this.
Maybe we could implement this and that, you know, like I love critical feedback because this is just the start of something huge.
So whatever we can actually gather, it will be amazing.
That's a great attitude.
I really appreciate it.
I'm actually also really enjoying this conversation. And let me just be clear i'm not against i'm not fun
i'm not against meme coins where i tend to have an issue is wherever meme coins are kind of being
sold as more than meme coins that's where i i kind of feel like it becomes a bit tricky ethically
speaking because if you're selling something that is just gambling as an investment,
I think that's wrong.
Well, I think that's the whole idea of a meme coin,
is that there is no utility.
Now, meme coins have been forced to to define utility to to create um community like i still don't i
still don't even know because what defines a main coin is no utility what what does fart coin do
other than go up exactly it's fast or something yeah i don't know you know and so that falls into
that that category where this is a little bit different. What they're doing a little bit different is do you believe in this creator?
Like this is a voting mechanism type of thing.
You might lose.
You might bet on the wrong creator to stay.
I wouldn't really push back against that, though.
I mean, I would push back against it.
No, these are just meme coins.
Oh, well, yeah.
They can go down. It's just degenerate gambling like let's be real yeah yeah 100 it's
like me saying just hold on hold on hold on one second there is nothing nothing else other than
bitcoin that is not a fucking meme coin you you cannot tell me that there is something else. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Here you go. Let me land.
Wait, hold on.
Let me land my plane.
Let me land my plane.
Bitcoin is the only decentralized fucking asset that is out there.
And you cannot tell me otherwise.
There is no other chain that is decentralized.
It doesn't exist.
And I can tell you this.
And I can tell you this for a fact.
You're so good at the can of worms, sir.
Go ahead.
Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you.
It's just...
Oh, this is hilarious.
Yeah, yeah, because I've been...
Do you know my work on this subject?
Are you familiar with it?
No, not really, no.
I just met you, to be honest.
That's why I followed you,
and I like the conversations that we have
because it's actually critical,
and it's good.
It's actually good, bro.
And I would love to have you for example on you know like on a live stream or a podcast or something where we can
discuss this or something let's i'm going to try to take a bit of a different approach to this
something i've been thinking about how to get the message across properly so let me give this a go
now with you i think this would be fun so So Balogi, I love what Bitcoin stands for.
I really, really do.
Like I'm a Bitcoiner from the school of 2013.
Okay.
I came into this community when it looked very different than what it is today.
Okay.
And I really thoroughly believe for the principles of this movement, of the cypherpunk principles and everything and i
really really do believe that you know and and i'm coming at this with absolute sincerity um
i i really think that beat c is a meme coin it has no utility it's not the most decentralized
it's it's doomed to collapse within a decade i think think it's, have you heard of the parable of the emperor that wears no clothes?
I think it's a lot like that.
And I'll just explain for the audience.
It's a great parable.
And it's basically a story of a king.
It's a king who has a tailor that comes to his kingdom, a magical tailor.
tailor and the tailor says to him, I've got magical clothes to sell you. And they're so magical that
And the tailor says to him, I've got magical clothes to sell you.
only the most righteous and most virtuous people will be able to see the clothes. Anyone that's
evil won't be able to see the clothes, right? And obviously the king is like, yes, yes, I want to
wear these clothes because I'm righteous and what beautiful clothes they are. He couldn't see the
clothes because there are no clothes. And then he goes to the ball naked. And everyone tells him how beautiful his clothes are because
no one wants to be the guy that says that BTC is not decentralized and that BTC is not the future,
right? And I think that's where I'm at today. I've been a BTC critic since 2017. I was part
of the block size debates. And I really, really think that if Bitcoin did follow its original roadmap, what Satoshi wanted, it could have succeeded.
I really do believe that.
But that's not what happened.
BTC along the way has been captured.
It's been perverted. vision, economic design, to the point today where I think that the security budget will
most definitely run out and possibly even end in a death spiral, actually, because of
limited capacity.
When the crisis begins, people won't even be able to exit the chain.
We can talk about measuring decentralization as well.
That's a whole other discussion.
Yeah, yeah.
I just finished writing a long article about this.
Yeah, look.
I'll send you.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I've been ranting a bit. Yeah, look. I'll sit up into you. Yeah, go ahead.
I've been ranting a bit.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's totally fine.
Look, we move in time, right?
And as long as we move in time, we need to adapt.
And technology has been growing rapidly,
whether it's AI, the internet, crypto, decentralized finance, you can say it's ai the internet crypto what the decentralized
finance you can say it whatever whatever the it is in the future there's always going to be
um some sort of new adapt a new adoption to uh to growth and and that's what that's when you said
like bitcoin's main vision at the beginning, we're not going through it right now, right?
But Bitcoin is still decentralized.
It doesn't matter what happens with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin will always be decentralized.
How familiar are you with BTC's governance?
Because I actually think that the decision-making behind BTC...
We got to get Iago on here.
Look, Justin, I...
I want to do a second debate. He's a liar. I'm just going to say it straight up. Iago do a second debate he's a liar i'm just going to say
it straight up yago's a liar he's a scammer he can come debate me if he wants and i don't say
these words lightly well i just messaged his assistant to get get that video debate going
but but like i don't think he i think he's a coward i want to i want to focus on below g's
question because below g said that bitcoin is the only decentralized network
blockchain hold on hold on let's say justin for the sake for the sake of the argument that's true
i actually thought you were going to come in and make a defense for other blockchain networks like
solana and ethereum i think that's the extension of it right right? Because if I say Bitcoin is no good, then I have to offer a better alternative, right? And obviously that can be Ethereum and Solana, right? And many more.
I just like, if I see that this is a toxic asset, if I see that this asset is doomed to fail, if I see that it doesn't actually fulfill the vision, well, we're forced to actually adopt alternatives or abandon the movement as a whole.
I mean, I think that's the intellectually honest thing to do.
And to respond to you, sorry, I'll let you respond to that before I respond to Bologi.
Yeah, go ahead.
I was going to say, let me get Ryan up here, because Ryan is also a brilliant mind in the industry,
and he might have some takes on it.
I think he's having connection issues.
I think the only thing, Justin, is...
Bologi, go for it, man, and then I'll
swing back.
I got to head out, but
it was a wonderful conversation,
but I do want to say this.
Why,
okay, if other
chains, for example, no matter
which other chain that you talk about,
it is centralized.
And it has been
proven
and it has been proven a lot
of times like let me give you the most
recent kind of
centralized it's like
the number of nodes are out
there and you can look up validators
it's I can't
yeah but funds can be frozen right
funds can be frozen hold on? Funds can be frozen.
Hold on.
Hold on.
There's too many people talking over each other.
I just want to reset really quick.
Funds on Ethereum cannot be frozen unless it's USDT or USDC, which are centralized stablecoins.
And they can be frozen on any chain but
front you can't the reason the reason that scammers when they scam something when they steal funds on
another alt l1 the reason they go to ethereum is because it cannot be frozen it cannot be rolled
back although it was once during the dow hack back in 2015 but but that's a different story like
that's that's why scammers flee to Ethereum.
Sorry, go ahead.
Balogi, I would also like to just add, I've done a lot of work on measuring decentralization
objectively. And there's a lot of narrative that flies around. People say, this is decentralized,
this is not because we say so, because this is what everyone else says. But that's really the
wrong approach of looking at things.
If you actually analyze the Bitcoin blockchain, if you actually understand the network, like
Bitcoin is not the most decentralized blockchain today from a technical perspective.
It's also not the most decentralized blockchain today from political perspective.
It's not even the most decentralized blockchain from an economic perspective.
And these are all objective measures that like research can dig into and actually prove.
So I would really promote the idea that you look deeper into these subjects because there really is a case to be made where Bitcoin is not at all the most decentralized.
It's decision-making is extremely centralized, and we have the history to back that up, right?
The actual Nakamoto coefficient is very low.
Proof-of-work has some severe centralizing effects versus proof-of-stake,
and whereas proof-of-stake actually has the decentralizing effects, right?
So I would even go so far as to say that proof-of proof of stake is inherently a more uh decentralized system
if we're comparing two equal networks like this i mean i could spend hours talking about these
subjects you said you need to go i'm sending you the article by the way over dm okay perfect
yeah i really enjoyed it too uh there's a book there's a book before i go there's a book that's
actually called bitcoin hard money you can't Fuck With by my uncle.
You're more than welcome to check it out.
It's the number one book on Bitcoin out there.
There's no hard money narrative.
I'm saying that Bitcoin's security model is broken.
It's going to come under attack.
That's not hard money.
That runs very counter to what most people say about Bitcoin.
Look, that's the title of the book.
I would really recommend you reading it.
It's by Jason A. Williams.
You can check it out.
I really appreciate this conversation.
I got to head out, but yo, I love you guys.
Love you, Moby.
Love you, Noah.
Before you leave, can you continue one more time?
Give us a summary.
What is, uninterrupted, please, what is the P is the pump fun creator house you know how many of
you are there because i think we we got interrupted a lot going on different tangents which is fine
but i want people to get in a full scope of what you got who you guys are and what you guys are
doing so give us that before you dip please yeah so so the the content creator house sponsored by PumpFun and Superbase is actually the first of many to come.
Basically, it's some sort of a competition where the content creators in this house have their own ICO, like a token that backs them.
like a token kind of that backs them.
And the higher the market cap the creator gets
with the live streams that they do on a daily basis
and the content that they actually create and put out there,
they get to stay.
And obviously there's a price at the end
and the lowest market cap gets actually eliminated.
And overall, I think it's a great first step for pump fun.
I know like there's, there, there's probably some things needs to be added or
removed and like fixed and stuff like that.
But at the end of the day, like I, I truly believe like this is definitely
something that is going to get huge, especially after the first episode that
just dropped like two days ago.
And we're already at 180 000
views or something like that on x i pinned it up top you guys can actually go watch it
um but yeah overall in my opinion i think it's like you know owning a part of mr beast kind of
you know when he first got first got out there and now look um it's it's it's awesome. I just it's fucking awesome
Anyways, my my my my token is up there. You guys can check it out. I do I do live streams and stuff like that. So
It would be nice for a support, but yeah, we can have more discussions about this later on
But yeah, it was awesome
It was awesome being here and the discussion that we get that we have uh is very critical which is fucking good i appreciate you guys i wish you the best yeah uh give jake all
the love uh from taco and same to donnie uh you guys be safe i don't want to see any more fucking
videos of you guys out there in the riots um yeah yeah i don't think that's going to happen, bro. He's already said he's trying
to get more footage out there. Yeah. So, but no, I think that this is sort of like, yes,
you sort of compare this to Mr. Beast. This is like a Mr. Beast meets Survivor, you know,
where instead of people calling or, you know, dancing with the stars, instead of people calling or you know dancing with the stars instead of people calling in
and voting it's you know spend a dollar buying buying a creator's token you know and then buy
two dollars of the creator you don't like and then dump it and like so this is and at the end
of the day at the end of the day the, the whole crypto market, and nobody can actually deny that, it is the attention economy.
And that's all I got to say.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, Taco, everything comes down to sales and marketing.
You know that better than anybody.
Yeah, 100%.
Man, Ryan, it's good to see you.
Yeah.
I don't know I I it's funny because I'm actually
streaming I'm streaming this on on pump fun right now so that's sort of the fun funny piece of all
of this oh no you just made me complicit in your meme coin scam I'm just joking well wait my current
meme coin uh uh I'll tell you about it in dms in DMs, but it was made out of a joke against a scam that I thought was happening.
That's very Dogecoin of you.
Are you familiar with the origins of Dogecoin, actually?
It's an interesting story.
I am.
Yeah, no.
Basically.
Maybe you can tell it for the audience because it's a fun one.
The inflation of dollars and how that was built out was
it was literally made as a joke but what's really hilarious is the inflation of doge
is more stable than any other currency uh in the world right now so uh doge inflation is a metric
that is understandable and known so yeah i mean. I mean, just for the audience,
Dogecoin was created as a satire.
Like you idiots will buy anything.
And I remember, I remember getting like,
I got, I got like a 3 billion Doge tip once
for helping an older guy fix his accessibility features in his Microsoft
application. And this is like, we used to hang out in Reddit and just doge tip people. I doge
tip someone a million doge, which at one point could be, could have been valued at three quarters of a million dollars.
Because he sent me a funny meme that made me chuckle.
So, yeah, that's how funny we thought.
That's how worthless we thought Doge was at one point.
So, when Doge first came out, I didn't think it was worthless.
I ran one of the original Doge mining pools.
And the Doge blocks were worth $800 a block.
And it was a 1 million Doge per block.
They were the most lucrative blocks for mining in 2013.
To be fair, as a miner, you're a mercenary, though.
Come on.
You're just happy you get paid.
Well, there is a lot of truth to that. It's just a battle of covering your costs. But
I wasn't just mining hardware. I was running the mining pools themselves. I ran about 80
different mining pools and Doge pool being one of them. And Doge, yeah, it started out
as kind of like this joke, but the joke was kind of bred out of the toxicity of the Bitcoin community.
Because if anyone went on like a Bitcoin talk, it was just toxic.
Like you would get attacked for anything.
And people were constantly forking the GitHub and constantly announcing new coins. And we just saw this Kimbrane explosion of coins in 2013
and they just thought, well,
let's just make the most wow coin ever.
And it was Dogecoin.
So everything was like much wow, much coin, much fun.
And it was just, it was just playing around.
And out of that, where they were just kind of mocking
the toxicity of the Bitcoin community
uh then they actually started getting real money so they you know sponsor a NASCAR driver and
uh have more swag than any other network and it just kept going it was crazy to this day I still
don't I still don't quote unquote believe in meme coins at all but I think I'm just too much of a
hardcore value investor for that you know what I mean you can you can you extrapolate on what you mean by believe in because i think
maybe a better way to put obviously they exist obviously they have value obviously people like
to gamble like i'm not denying that i think that will just continue and never go away but i just
think that like the use case of real cryptocurrency like real crypto use cases
i think that's just infinitesimally more valuable and more meaningful then i just can't get myself
to care i think i think we all agree and i and i i can't fit them within an investment framework
either yeah i think we all agree i think one of the reasons you're seeing meme coins is a lot of
the use cases that we've been hearing about for the last 10 years has haven't come to fruition.
Right?
We don't think we're not getting it.
No, no.
I think the history is a little bit more nuanced than that.
I think a lot of use cases that I believe and a lot of things like DeFi use cases did come to fruition.
DeFi is one.
But we keep screwing it up, right?
Like Bitcoin didn't scale.
Then Ethereum didn't scale.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about blockchain being used for EMR.
I'm talking about blockchain being used for supply.
Sorry, EMR?
Can you just explain that?
What do you mean by EMR?
Oh, medical records.
No, no, I don't believe in that.
No, no, no.
There's just tons of shit.
Like I don't believe in NFTs.
I don't believe in medical records.
Wait, you don't?
Hold on.
I don't believe in most of the bullshit that people...
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
You don't, you don't believe in using blockchain technology to store in for medical information so that if you are, for example, in the UAE,
but you're actually from France, God forbid something happens to you.
The doctors there have immediate access to your medical records.
Like that's, I don't believe that.
I mean, maybe I'm like a few hundred years from
now but like there's some pretty major coordination problems you need to overcome there i understand
a few hundred years from now i think is a long time we we progress no i think you mean like an
absence of government you need some sort of anarchist revolution for that to become no like
the issue i can explain i can explain specifically what the use case is. It's about enforcement.
Or medical is maybe an interesting niche use case.
Okay, I think maybe with this specific
one, it's like, what are you gaining
by doing that?
I just told you.
Transferability.
Yeah, but what's the problem?
It's the portability issue.
That's for someone who's the portability issue. No, but how can't we do that with prison day technology?
And I don't think we can.
Actually, well, we can't.
And the problem is, and I wrote software for insurance companies, like in 2014, 2015, 2016.
And a lot of the reason why is the formats of the health data is different depending on the company
and depending on the region, even in the US.
So we don't even have portability
between different companies
in different regions of the US right now.
And a lot of that is a standardization issue.
And that proves my point.
I'm saying is that this is a coordination problem.
The problem is getting the UAE and the US
to actually agree on something.
The only way you do that is to bring it to the point.
You have to remember a protocol is a coordination issue.
The whole point of rolling out the Bitcoin protocol means that everyone agrees on coordinating.
So by having a...
And let me just use Bitcoin as an example.
Yeah, let me use Bitcoin as an example.
So Bitcoin is an example, right? You can verify
internally within the block. When we do a transaction with each other in Bitcoin,
right? We know that that is legit. 100% or whatever percentage. If you're a cryptographer,
you might say 99.999999%, but let's not be pedantic, okay? So, like, we know that because the blockchain is able to fully enforce that internally.
I know, I might lose the debate on medical records, actually.
I'm feeling you're making some good points.
But just more broadly speaking, there's the problem of garbage in, garbage out.
So whenever you're dealing with anything from, like, the real world, like, there's the Oracle problem, right?
Like, the blockchain can't actually verify if that's
legit it doesn't actually know if you're putting garbage in there so there's still some degree of
trust like the blockchain can't internally verify that themselves that's why i don't think this is a
problem that blockchain solves because in this case blockchain does not solve the coordination
problem in the case of us doing a transaction with each other, it does. In the case of DeFi, it does, right? There's two different, yeah, you're talking about two
different, you're talking about two different things. And this is why I might lose this
particular debate, but my point still stands. Yeah, so the two different aspects you're talking
about is the trust through transactions is one, and the trust is through agreeable format is the the trust through transactions is one and the trust is through agreeable
format is the other so for health records would be agreeable format where
you need a standardization and portability so everyone has access to
the information in a decentralized way and only the owner of the information
can update it right so this is like IP uh bit torrent stuff like that where you're posting something
out into a decentralized data storage where everyone can pull from it but only the owner
can update it that type of protocol is incredibly important for something like health information
now when it comes to something like bitcoin when it comes to transactional information
uh where you can't trust the counterparty.
That's very different.
Now you have a two-way information issue.
That's why I'm skeptical, right?
Because if you are already in a position where you can trust the counterparty, right?
Like then why, like this system,
like the way I would see this working is you'd,
like one thing that I would agree with,
I would agree with using blockchain
as a type of additional notary system.
So you have your conventional system that works as it does, and you have this additional system on top.
And then over time, the one can maybe replace the other, right?
But in this particular case, yeah, I just, why would you trust that data?
That's the question. And if you trust the data because you trust it, and if you trust it, why go for all the trouble of putting on a blockchain in the first place?
Well, yeah.
So, so in the aspect of health information, right?
It would be, if you really, really zoomed out, it would be a federated network because the people that could update the health information would be authorized signers, which would be doctors. The owners of the health information would be-
Why do we have a decentralized system? This is not decentralized.
No, no, but you're missing the point, Justin. You're missing the point, Justin. The point is
not for it to be decentralized. The point is for all these silos and information that we have to
be absolved. We don't want information silos when it comes to medical...
There's a core misunderstanding here
because we're all throwing around the word decentralization.
So there's three different words that people often get mixed up.
There's distributed and there's decentralized.
They are not the same thing, right?
We have lots and lots of distributed systems that are not decentralized.
Actually, we have decentralized systems that are not distributed.
These words are on the same spectrum, right? We would agree on that at least.
They're on the same spectrum, right? Because they're applied to the common systems,
but they're very, very different. And this is a lot of people get these terms and they
interchange them. So decentralization is not a yes or no thing.
It's just what level of decentralized is it?
And you can have a decentralized system that is literally two people.
You have a safety deposit box with two keys.
You give two different people the keys.
They have to agree.
They have to come to consensus on opening a safety deposit box.
That is a level of decentralization.
I think that's too much a perversion of the meaning of that word, actually.
It's the actual definition of the meaning of the word.
It's not a perversion.
It's a level of decentralization.
People are not particularly decentralized, right?
Then how many people are decentralized?
I mean, everything is and is not decentralization.
It's a spectrum.
That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying.
It's not a yes or a no.
A lot of people make that mistake
of seeing decentralization as a binary.
And it's not just a single spectrum.
It's a multidimensional spectrum.
There's different forms of decentralization.
There's decentralization of network topography.
There's decentralization of governance, of politics.
It's a matter
of control. It comes down
to a matter of control.
Decentralization is
how much control does a single entity
organization or government have
over the system.
My definition is very similar. My definition
is somewhere along the lines of
the distribution of power.
Exactly. And yeah, so those are exactly parallel, right?
But so when it comes to Bitcoin, is Bitcoin decentralized? Well, yes.
Is it as decentralized as Maxis want it to be? No.
Is it as decentralized as government and large organizations want it to be?
Yeah.
Is it decentralized enough to secure the network?
Yes.
That's really the question.
Hold on.
The security does not come from decentralization.
Sorry, I should rephrase that.
I don't agree with that.
I should rephrase that. Because I don't agree with that. Yeah, I should rephrase it.
The security – sorry, the decentralization – let me just recreate a sentence instead.
Decentralization security, I think, in the long run can only be sustained through – there needs to be an economic input to make that possible.
I suppose that's the problem.
So, yeah, there needs to be incentive drivers for decentralization for it to maintain itself.
I suppose to have decentralization long run, you need revenue, I suppose is what I'm really
saying.
You need utility.
Or subsidy, right?
It doesn't always have to be.
That's an economic disadvantage, right? if you can create systems without the subsidy dogecoin has zero utility and it is
incredibly subsidized because the light coin uh mine uh script alliance um and it is really really
decentralized because of that what's your position position on the security model? Are you an advocate for increasing the inflation rate beyond 21 million?
I'm just really curious.
No, I don't think it matters.
It does not matter.
I mean, we can divide up a Bitcoin to the eighth decimal point.
So it doesn't matter.
No, no, I mean, they increase the inflation rate.
So the supply will go beyond 21 million.
Do you agree with that in terms of security?
No, don't fuck with a good thing.
People want to get in there
and do some good stuff.
Where will the security come from
in the future? I'm really curious about
your position on that.
Oh, so basically
where does the incentive for miners come from?
You can agree there's not enough fees
to cover that now, right? And the mining fee is going to the mining inflation 100 this is so this is a
this is a great question because this this comes up a lot and it happens to be something i know a
ridiculous amount about for a long time yeah yeah same um this is this just happens to be my my my specific niche so i appreciate the i appreciate the question um so yeah so we we did
see we did see these actually overtake block reward when ordinals came out uh we did see
these jump when um slipstream came out from mara right when we started seeing
no but these are i'll let you continue to make your case.
Yeah, yeah. So
these were not
necessarily sustainable models,
but they were flippers, right?
We started seeing the sparks of
what is going to happen, right?
And we didn't know which spark was going to catch the fire
and was going to keep going. Everyone thought
ordinals was going to be the thing, but then you have Luke Jr.
saying it was a bug in the code
and it started filtering out on ocean
and the debate ensued, right?
We saw Slipstream come out and Mars putting videos
on the blockchain from some irregular transactions.
But those are all like anomalies at this point
because we're like, oh, it was a spark, but it didn't take.
Eventually what we're seeing with Bitcoin
because it's becoming more institutionalized, because Bitcoin mining is becoming a core infrastructure and part of the actual energy grid for load balancing, it means that miners are going to become more and more intertwined with the nation states that they reside in. And once miners become fully in twine with the nation states that reside in and become
infrastructure for governments, incentivization does not come from the block fees, but it
comes from the balancing of a power grid.
So that's why I said earlier, it's not just the utility, but it can run off a subsidy.
Aren't you forgetting the demand side of the equation there?
Because as I mentioned, miners are mercenary.
Why would miners become so prominent?
So when you said miners are mercenary, you just completely negated the point I just made.
The point I'm making is miners will no longer be mercenary.
And they're already starting to not be mercenary.
We're seeing in Abu Dhabi right now for example they have a gigawatt of power set aside
for Bitcoin mining from their nuclear reactors right they are building such large mining
facilities that they are intertwining Bitcoin mining a flexible load with their power grid
okay so so you think they were just running it at a loss, basically, right?
But the question is, why are they running at a loss?
What incentivizes them to run Bitcoin mining at a loss?
Bitcoin's secure now.
Bitcoin's a good business now.
I'm not going to debate that.
But in 10 years from now, that's my issue.
Yeah.
The security budget is, let's say, a tenth of what it's done.
Yeah.
Let's jump into that.
Why would they keep running Bitcoin mining
when it's just losing money, right?
Because Bitcoin mining is what's called a flexible load.
You can ramp it up, you can ramp it down,
you can turn it on and you can turn it off
and you can take up electricity to balance the grid.
Now, that's only important
if you have a really, really fucking large,
non-flexible load.
And if only we knew a piece of technology right now
that is growing so rapidly
that it needs as much energy as we can put it
in the form of AI.
So as they scale AI infrastructure,
it's going to be taking up so much electricity
that it's going to be an inflexible load,
meaning they have to scale their power production
in order to meet the AI demand.
But if AI demand fluctuates, you need a really, really large flexible load to balance the grid.
And that's where Bitcoin comes in. So what mission states are doing is they are building
a flexible load right now. And then in parallel, they're building off data centers. So like
Abu Dhabi is going to have a gigabyte of flexible load and most likely within
the next two years they'll have a gigabyte of non-flexible load i mean there is more efficient
ways to burn energy for the sake of burning energy right no like what especially if the security
budget falls so low that like it's basically nothing like they're going to spend billions of
dollars that's for this yeah yeah no please please tell this please tell me
what other
flexible load there is that can burn energy
I mean is this cheaper ways to do it
than to create competitive ASICs
no there's not
this is the thing
I'm not an electrical engineer
to be fierce
I am electrical engineer that's what I'm not an electrical engineer, to be fierce. I am. I am an electrical engineer.
Yeah.
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
This is one of the things to where, like, leftover power can actually be used.
Intuitively, it doesn't sound correct to me at all.
Rather than being just discharged and wasted.
Because it's going to be, it's being created.
Aren't space heaters cheaper than microchips?
But, but, but,
Microchips are space heaters.
To be honest with you.
Yeah.
Aren't space heaters cheaper than microchips, basically?
But, but let, yeah, let me, let me,
yeah, but let me jump in real fast
because I want to clarify something
before we move on with the conversation.
This is a great conversation, by the way.
I'd like to be as open-minded as I can.
Yeah, the, the, the, the the the the the basic understanding that we all need
to kind of lay the ground work here is electricity cannot be created unless it's used right if you're
not using electricity then it's not being created there is no current flow so uh there is no just
um uh oh we're just going to dump electricity into thin air. It doesn't work like that. You cannot
create electricity unless it's actively being used. The other point for this foundation that
we need to understand is that you cannot ramp up and ramp down electricity generation as quickly
as you can ramp up and ramp down usage of electricity.
Like there's always going to be a time gap there.
And that's why there's this thing called load following.
Okay.
You have to at least agree at a certain threshold of security budget,
this doesn't work anymore, right?
You have to at least agree with me on that.
Like, right?
Dive into that a little bit because I don't understand.
Okay.
Hypothetically, I'm just being hypothetical completely to make a point yeah what you're describing does not work
if there's zero security budget you can agree with me on that right if there's zero security
so you're saying if the bitcoin block goes to zero then there's not much subsidizing the security.
Pure hypothetical, just to make a point, right?
Like if there's zero security budget,
the economics of what you're describing would not work out
because there would be better ways to do things, surely, right?
Would you agree on that?
I can't.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree with you
because there's so many assumptions layered on there.
Because like when you say, surely there's so many assumptions layered on there.
Because when you say, surely there's better ways to do things. I'm not saying it's going to go to zero.
I'm not saying that.
I just want to understand your position, and this will allow to create a good logical tree.
My background is in philosophy, actually.
Okay.
So since I'm the engineer, I can't just like, oh, surely there would be a better way.
Well, let's define what a better way would be.
And it could be literally anything.
I mean, we could be shooting lasers in the space out there.
Surely space computers are more efficient than chips.
Yeah.
In terms of just burning energy, right?
I'm being very ignorant, but intuitively, I think that's probably correct, right?
It's not, but I see what you're saying.
So for space heaters, you're running...
So space heaters, you're basically running a current
through a resistance in order to heat up metal
to basically create a molecular heat atten know, attenuation, right?
So really no different than running it through a hashing chip.
The difference with a hashing chip is then you're also running fans
to keep the hashing chip cooler.
Heat and noise are the amazing byproducts of mining.
You have to manufacture microchips, right?
Yeah, yeah, you do.
They're more expensive than other alternatives, surely.
I mean, look, I'm not an electrical engineer.
I'm speaking to an electrical engineer.
Can maybe another electrical engineer step up and...
One of the cool things that we've seen,
byproduct waste heat from Bitcoin mining
is getting used at the same time.
So rather than something just being used as a space heater and a space heater alone,
there's,
there's,
security budget.
Yeah,
but I,
I see,
I see what you're saying.
Is there,
can you manufacture a cheaper space heater if there's no benefit to hashing?
Yes,
yes,
absolutely.
But the,
the,
the caveat is there's always benefit to hashing because shot to my
shot to 56 isn't just used for bitcoin why would you want to there's no usefulness to the amount
of computation in dubai that's that you can't say that right it's i can because i wrote i wrote a
patent and listen i wrote a patent for using256 for encrypting large amounts of data to protect against AI.
So, you know, Adam Back wrote a patent or he wrote an implementation for securing email using SHA-256 hashing.
So there is a lot of use for, what's that?
Wasteful.
I mean, you're not going to have the size of the Bitcoin network to protect emails, right?
It depends what's
in the email.
Okay, let's stay
on track here. Let's stay on track.
I feel like we keep cutting
off player
taco.
Because people are going out so hard right now.
So let's give the man a chance
to speak here, man.
Go ahead.
So I want to touch.
I'll roll back the last piece.
Right now, the only argument you're using as an alternative is space heaters.
So you have to see where this load bearing can be done.
So my counter is, why do you want to run a space heater in Abu Dhabi in July?
Maybe you could run Eco instead, actually. That might be more useful.
But if you're seeing it, like I know in France and I know in Sweden, there's mining facilities where their excess heat is being used to eat hospitals and buildings next door.
I understand all of this, but doesn't – it's my – to the argument that I'm saying,
if there's no demand side to the equation, so if the reward for mining goes down,
then a lot of the economies that you're describing that work today won't work in 10 years from now,
or at least not at the scale. We saw that. Well describing that work today won't work in 10 years from now or at least not at scale we saw that right well that's that's that's almost everything so like what worked 10
years ago doesn't always work today yeah but bitcoin not working in 10 years from now is a
bit of a problem right well so so and and but what's really cool is that's addressed one of
the things that you mentioned earlier was and and I don't like this word.
I think that Bitcoin has grown.
I think you used the word perverted from its original creation is what you had originally
said.
I'll stand by that.
Bitcoin was originally made for peer-to-peer payments.
It is now being used as a store of asset value.
It was meant to be a store of value and peer-to-peer payments.
I think that's what crypto is generally speaking. And i think bitcoin is extremely uncompetitive in that regard because
it lacks utility and is therefore also a bad store of value but that's sorry i'm expounding
no you know and we're we're we're reading from the same freaking book all three of us this is
the funny thing we're all reading from the same book, just in different chapters.
And so.
Your chapter, right?
That's usually.
Brian is reading from the original Greek.
Justin, New King James and I'm reading, you know, the made for dummies.
But. Being in this space for so long, you know, one of the made for dummies. Um, but, um, being in this space for so long,
you know, one of the really cool things of seeing and getting to like,
being able to be a builder, being able to mess up and throw away such large amounts of money today,
you know, compared to what it was when I threw it away. Um, it, it, it, it,
it's sort of hilarious, but, um, yeah. Oh man, I don't want to talk about that.
Thankfully hilarious. Let's go back to the argument. I'm creating an argument here.
So one of the big things though is, is you're thinking, okay so the argument i i forget the main point that i
was trying to make but the solution that you were like why is there incentive so this comes back
down to a 5150 hold on is an assumption so the hypothetical i'm creating a tree of arguments
right i'm trying to get to my point because it took us away from the very initial conversational piece of using blockchain technology for things other than crypto, other than financial payment rails.
But I love going – I'm a squirrel on freaking caffeine and cigars, so I will go circle around any bush.
caffeine and cigars. So I will go around, circle around any push. Um, so the pieces of 51 50,
uh, classic attack of, um, bad actors, um, taking control of the, the, the, the network that only
works one time. So if you're looking at this, let's, I'm just going to, for, for the amount
of fingers I have, uh, we'll talk in the number of 10.
If we have six people working for good, then everyone benefits. If we have six people working for bad, which is needed to overpower a proof of work or a proof of stake or a proof of history,
a proof of work or a proof of stake or a proof of history, almost any consensus mechanism that we
have right now, if those six people are bad actors, only one of them gets one good, one
transaction, and then everyone sees it. And that's the cool thing about distributed ledger technology. Everyone will see that happen.
And so that is the big piece that sort of incentivizes everyone to run hashing is because it benefits everyone.
hashing is because it benefits everyone and well i'll talk about i think you're making a great
point that it does benefit everyone i think the justin's point is and it is justin right i'd
sometimes make yes thank you my okay twitter gets mixed up here x gets mixed up um so what i can say
is currently uh with the balancing of the grid and the flexible versus inflexible load,
Bitcoin mining is the best incentivized play, and that's why it's scaling so fast.
And I'm not going to ever, and I think the misunderstanding here was,
I'm not making the claim that it will always be the best incentivized play right like there are a lot
of uses for it and eventually it might get replaced with something better that we don't know what that
is here's the thing i can actually fully agree with you like now like in terms of what you're
saying about bitcoin i agree with you 100 today that's true it's just my my position is that i'm
predicting that this will no longer be the case in 10 years from now.
But I'd love to just briefly complete that argument with you because I'd love to see where that goes.
So if we say, first of all, can you agree that if there was zero, which I can agree up front, that's not the case.
That's not what I'm saying. But hypothetically, if there was zero security budget, what you're describing wouldn't work
out because why would people do the Bitcoin thing?
They could do something else, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I understand what you're saying.
And I think I'd change your statement from zero security budget.
Hypothetical.
I'm just creating an argumentary because if you can agree to this principle, you can change
statement.
Go ahead. Try and change statement. Yeah
Yeah, if I I think what I could agree with the same is if there was zero
incentive for using hash power and then
There was another technology that did provide incentive then it would replace it
Technology that did provide incentive then it would replace it
So if Bitcoin block reward goes to zero there are no mining fees and there's no other use for shaman
256 hashing, but then there's an or even if there is
There's another technology that comes along and it offers greater incentive
The greater incentive technology will always replace
the lesser incentivized technology.
Right, and that's why I think most people,
like crypto researchers that are into crypto,
because we believe in incentive, right?
Like it's cryptographic game theory.
That sits at the heart of all of this.
100%.
And I think we can both agree on that
because Bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum.
If Bitcoin can't offer that fees, then someone else right most probably the assumption is yes yeah and you know we just
don't know what that is yet right like there could be ai agents in the future robots that are mining
coal in south africa and they're tokenized and you know everyone wants to throw electricity towards
that i don't know cool so we're in agreement there then. But the next stage of this argument then is what that then implies
is that there is a threshold somewhere before zero.
It's not actually going to fail when it hits zero.
It fails somewhere before zero.
Yeah, because it's not – and that's the hard thing.
It's not a matter of the threshold itself.
It's a matter of an unknown technology competing with it for incentive.
So it's not a linear thing.
There's an abstract thing where there's millions of people around this world that are innovating and coming up with new, cool, revolutionary ideas.
We just don't know which one's going to dethrone that need for energy.
That's – yeah, I know that's – but for me, the diff now also happens when the network
becomes profitable to attack, right?
So like in my recent piece that I wrote about this, I made the um statement of six million a day that at six million dollars a day
i could see how carrying out a major attack on the network would be extremely profitable
um in terms of 51 percent attacks on exchanges doing double spins exploiting uh numerous
what do you mean what do you mean six million what do you mean $6 million?
Because we've been past that a long time ago.
Oh, yeah. No, no. I'm obviously
predicting that the security
budget has been going down right over
the last four years. No, every
time a new miner,
that's the thing. You can talk about that.
So I actually think that the security
budget should be measured
by looking at the amount that's being paid out to the miners in dollars terms.
Simply measuring the hashtag, in my opinion, is a very bad measure.
So just overall, just we're on the same page.
I don't think I fully understood you.
So right now, just the block rewards, not including transactions, just the block rewards are over $43 million a day to miners.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
I think when I looked at it, it was around $50 million, but yes.
But that's actually lower than what it was four years ago,
if you actually look at the chat.
I posted this in my recent paper as well.
I showed the graph.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's mining profitability.
So mining profitability is way lower.
A little bit of a misnomer, right, because mining profitability depends mining profitability is way lower a little bit of a
myth noma right because mining profitability depends on a bunch of other factors too
whereas security budget i think is an easier um metric to kind of reason around
if that makes sense fair enough it's it's one of the you're correct it's one of the main
variables for mining profitability is what the what the reward is per day or what you call security budget.
Yeah. And basically, if the price stays the same and we have three more halvenings,
then that would put us around the $6 million range today. Right. I'm sorry, in 10 years. I mean,
it's been 10 years from now. My bad. Yeah. But that's saying that Bitcoin price stays the same today. Sure. And the Bitcoin price stays the same.
Yeah, but eventually you can't just keep doubling every four years
because the security budget effectively halves every four years exponentially, right?
If the price stays the same.
And I don't think that the price can keep doubling into infinity.
That's not how economics works, right?
So eventually those two things are not going to match up with each other.
Well, economics is, I mean, when you say that's not how economics works, that's exactly how economics works. No, no, you can't have a single asset that's valued 100 times global GDP.
That's ridiculous, right?
When you come to a scarcity event. That's valued a hundred times global GDP. That's ridiculous, right?
When you come to a scarcity, you can,
you can double again and then you're going to double again and then you're going to double again after that.
Because if the, if the assets are not fully liquid, yeah,
you can absolutely have an asset that's worth more than the a hundred times
the world's GDP because the assets not going to ever hit the liquidity of the market.
That means that now what you're saying is that – sorry, can you still hear me?
Yeah, okay.
Now what you're saying is that BTC security relies on BTC's price becoming like a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a million times.
Oh, it absolutely does.
Okay, but I think that is a pretty, I'm sorry.
That's kind of crazy to me,
right?
Like,
isn't that 100%?
100%.
Like you get,
you're,
you're right.
Like miners are literally racing towards a cliff.
Like it's,
and they're the farmers.
I actually don't think the farmers.
Yeah.
Okay.
But like,
I don't think this is a risk we need to take,
man.
Like we can build systems that are sustainable forever without this bullshit like why absolutely no you're exactly
right we can the problem is control because every other system that we've built that is way more
efficient that's way more optimized is more centralized that's where i think you're mistaken
actually maybe that's where we should take this argument yeah please that's way more optimized, is more centralized. That's where I think you're mistaken. Actually, maybe that's where we should take this argument.
Yeah, please.
That's where you're mistaken.
We decided to knock Noah's face, by the way.
100%.
Noah for going with us here.
Yeah, no.
If you want to divert us now, now it would be like a natural point of conversation, or
we're going to take it to alternatives to Bitcoin, because that's kind of a fun conversation.
Maybe someone will join in.
Oh, yeah, because I'm not a Bitcoin master. If you want to say there's better technology
than Bitcoin, I will 1000% agree with you. Oh, yeah. And not just better technology,
I would actually say more decentralized and more economically sound as well.
Oh, yeah. But I was also rooting for HD DVD and Blu-ray took over.
So just because you have a superior technology does not mean it's going to win marketing more.
I don't think the gap between Blu-ray and DVD was big enough, let's say.
I'm sorry, whatever that...
I was just using this as a similar example.
You could have two technologies that...
The inferior technology doesn't always lose just because of its inferiority.
But I think if, like, a technology is 10 times better or 100 times better, I think that's when it does lose in a free market.
And I think that is the case here.
I mean, look, let me get one of the things that really hurts me about Bitcoin.
Mass self-custody is impossible.
Come on, man.
That's really...
Say it again, sorry.
We can't do mass self-custody with Bitcoin.
It would take somewhere around 70 years.
We can't do it.
No, you can't.
Because in order to own your own private keys, you need to do an on-chain transaction.
For everyone in the world to do one transaction, it would take more than 50 years.
50 years. where are you getting
that number from well i can share the magic i had it in my recent article yeah because you have
7 billion people in the world and you eliminate all the children and you eliminate all the people
that are about to die and you start like with limiting all the people on the internet an
example i don't know i'm assuming that no one else does any transactions either right but the point is if all of the holders the current holders of btc
just wanted to move their coins as one set of coins once it will take it will take a queue
that's over two months long i think that's a bank on waiting but you're forgetting that you can have
multiple outputs for one input so i can find a hundred different addresses with one transaction.
Yeah, but no, no, but that's,
I accounted for that in my example, actually.
I took the average of inputs and outputs actually,
and then I calculated the size of those.
No, I mean, the point is like,
and also like multiple outputs,
that doesn't scale users, right?
If you actually have number of users,
if one user each did one transaction,
it would take like
15 years. Like that's insane.
That's not... Sorry,
in that example, it's two months because every current
user, right? Not everyone in the world. But
that to me is not a usable
system. That's deeply
diverse.
It depends.
Pause. It depends what you're using the system for.
If you're trying to use a system
for transactional cash and basically
to buy a cup of coffee,
Bitcoin is off the table.
We can agree on that then, right?
Self-custody for the...
Masses.
The masses can't do self-custody.
Define masses.
The majority of people.
Right?
Let's just go with that.
Okay.
The majority of people can't do self-custody on Bitcoin.
Impossible.
That's the truth.
Right?
It is absolutely possible.
It's just not practical.
Yeah, but that's the same.
What do you mean?
It's not practical.
It is possible. Everyone in the world could have a bitcoin address that's
possible is it practical or is it optimal no but hold on when you say that it would take
how long and like are we all gonna need neatly queue up in a queue for a system we can't move
out of anymore like are you kidding me i mean i mean if that's practical um that's quote unquote
unpractical then so is uh
i don't know i want to think of a silly example but you see where i'm going with it right that's
kind of yeah you're you're agreeing with me though but it's not practical and it's not optimal but
it is possible i mean that's really stretching the meaning of the word man it's it's not it's
the literal definition of possible is can it happen yes it can can we cross
the atlantic ocean um on a uh can everyone in this spaces cross the atlantic ocean on a boat
made that we build over a period of a month over a thousand with a thousand logs and we're going
to cross the atlantic oceans is it possible yes is it practical no i
would kind of compare it yes we are saying the exact same thing yeah it is possible but
well i'm not and i'm if pedantic is one thing precise than another i believe in
but come on man like what i'm saying is that this is a system that falls really far short for what we
want it to do right like at the very least okay you're talking you're talking in generalization
so i apologize that i keep stopping you when you say what we wanted to do so you're going to be
more precise than i am you're yeah and it drives my wife's divorce lawyer crazy because I believe in preciseness, right?
You know, we can talk in generalizations if you want to, but I don't think it really serves any benefit.
Because the reality is, is Bitcoin the end-all and be-all of peer-to-peer transactional systems?
Absolutely not.
It cannot handle the transaction flow.
It cannot.
It is just not practical. It's possible,
but why do I want to wait a time to buy a cup of coffee and it takes 43 minutes for
it to settle? That makes no sense. Now, there are better systems for transactional cash.
Dash had one. Cardano had one. There's a laundry list of better transactional coins. The problem is they just suck at marketing and they go in and out of popularity.
It maybe ties deeper into what I think a blockchain should be as well and what the ideal state is.
For me, maybe it also relates to my economic theories as well.
I think for something to be a good store of value, it needs to have a foundation in utility.
And so for something to be a good money, it actually needs to be useful.
And actually that idea that on-chain usage, I think that's empowering.
And I think what informs my belief is I actually think we can scale the blockchain while preserving decentralization.
I think the blockchain dilemma has been mostly being solved by now so so this idea that we're going to sacrifice so much empowerment and
freedom for the sake that we stick with the old ticker or whatever like i just that's not
the trade-off worth making for me for me it betrays actually why i joined this movement in the first place. Like, for me... No, I totally... I do agree with you
on a lot of those foundational points.
What I was trying to stress earlier
is that the reason why Bitcoin
is propagating like it is
and it's still growing the way it is
is because the economic value
for the energy grid
that a lot of these publicly traded miners
and a lot of these
governments are tapping into.
That's why it's still propagating.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, look, I respect your position on this, but I don't think that's the primary driver
for why people are buying Bitcoin.
I think people are buying Bitcoin based on what I said.
Oh, sorry, then I misunderstood.
Can you just repeat what you said then?
Sorry, go ahead.
Why people are buying Bitcoin is sheer speculation and Michael Saylor doing treasury plays and getting everyone to follow along.
From my perspective, I feel like they're being sold a bit of a lie. That's why I kind of get up in arms about it.
Whether it's a lie or not, it's really good marketing. People are buying Bitcoin because of marketing inspection.
because of marketing inspection.
I just don't think the story matches the reality. That's my issue.
I just don't think the story matches the reality.
That's my issue.
And in most cases in this world and in this life,
story and reality do not meet up.
That's very, very common.
That's where the art of marketing and sales flourishes.
It's somewhere the gap between the story and reality
and sales and marketing.
I suppose that's why I became a contrarian value investor
because now it's my job to invest in those differences right that i spot and and and the
reality is it's not it's not the best technology that wins out you know doge survived out and
it wasn't the only mean coin right but but listen there's something i said earlier in the podcast
i actually think that the value of cryptocurrency,
if it's actual utility, and it's not empowering
if people can't use it as far as I'm concerned.
I actually think that the empowerment side,
the actual freedom side, the actual financial value side
of the utility of the applications,
I think that that is so much more valuable,
thousands of times more valuable than a purely speculative, quote unquote, store of value could ever be.
So like that's also why I have very little interest.
Yes.
Over the long term, utility will outweigh basically marketing hype, right?
And this is why we don't go to the coffee shop and buy a cup of coffee with gold.
Gold is the store of value, right?
Here's the thing.
Keep in mind, for the majority of human history,
and history is also one of my backgrounds,
but, like, for the majority of human history,
we have used commodity money.
Fiat money is a relatively new invention, right?
Like not since like a hundred years ago or something. And it's come, it's came and went
over time. But for the majority of human history, we've had commodity money. Crypto, in my mind,
is a digital equivalent, right, of commodity money. It's both a commodity and a money. It's a gold that you can transact with. And unlike
actual gold, we can sprinkle crypto for fractions of a cent down a phone. Let me put it this way.
You can't sprinkle gold down a phone line and send it across the world for fractions of a cent.
You can with crypto, right? That's what makes crypto a better gold. And I feel like what Bitcoin
did is it kind of took the gold but it kind of dropped
the bit of gold part and that to me is really kind of throwing out the baby with the bath water right
like it is what is powerful is combining money with store value with applications with platform
and the thing that can do all of those things together there's there's the virtuous effect
right that happens is a virtuous cycle because it means more value, more security.
Then it becomes a better store of value.
Then it gets used as money more and so on and so on.
And I just don't think that Bitcoin has that flywheel without capacity, without utility.
You just stated that actual utility there is.
When you say the utility is a portable value
store no but i really think that that if you say store of value and that's a circular argument like
store value for a store value sake that is a spec it's purely speculative asset no i i i add
that's a bad score yeah i added another word in there that oh sorry i think that's all the
difference it's a portable value store.
No, but it's not because it lacks capacity.
Because look, if you have the classical definition of money from Aristotle, right,
it would be portability, divisibility, scarcity, and there's another one, fungibility, right?
Like portability, in my opinion, is actually massively degraded because of the lack of capacity.
That's actually what makes other cryptocurrencies more competitive as money, according to the
classical.
Well, it's the portability is the throughput you're talking about for a general like day
to day currency.
Now what that does not exist.
We can agree on that.
You're misunderstanding me.
I'm saying it's even lacking the throughput
for it to be used as a purely speculative asset.
At least if we want some degree of...
Let me paint a narrative
and let me see if you agree with the value.
Oh, I'll make that shut up for one minute.
Go ahead.
You have a floor.
I'm picking up all my mental will.
If we see Bitcoin go to a million, a hundred million dollars a coin,
and it becomes such a rare asset where the general populace,
no one really owns a full Bitcoin.
Everyone owns like a little bit here and there,
if they own any of it at all, right?
Because the utility for daily transactions aren't there, the reason for the general populace to
own Bitcoin really isn't there on a utility standpoint. It might be from a stance of investment,
it might be from a stance of, you know know you're trying to hold wealth that's portable
where if you move from one country to the other you're not trying to bank accounts because you
are you're right i just want to set you straight um i'm actually for the sake of argument i'm
actually agreeing with you on the transactional capacity thing i understand you're arguing
it has sufficient capacity as a store of value alone but i'm actually arguing it doesn't even have capacity for that. Just so I can stop you from making a storm.
So the narrative is that Bitcoin escalates to the point where it is so valuable that
it just doesn't make sense for the general populist to even transacting it or to own
it because it's just not useful.
But it is owned by governments and it is owned by banks and it is a transactional settlement
mechanism between governments and banks where they don't need to do thousands and hundreds of
thousands it doesn't have enough capacity for that either is what i'm saying right even as a
settlement network it does not have enough capacity for that to actually be useful, right?
At the government and bank level between other banks and other governments, I believe it does.
Not at scale. I don't believe so. I think you'll still have high fees, except to happen, and congestion, at which point it's not very...
Oh, you absolutely want high fees, and that's what keeps the miners going.
And that's why the general office would become reliable, right?
Justin, the high fees is what's going to keep the network secure, especially after most of the investments.
I don't believe that will actually happen, but I'm just for the sake of arguing and going along with the high fees.
But even if you have high fees, it implies congestion, and congestion implies that transactions are unreliable you don't exactly want unreliable why are transactions
unreliable in what context yeah okay let me explain so basically if the network is congested
right and you want to land a transaction there's no way of actually guaranteeing that your
transaction will land because there's no way of your bitcoin
transaction so if i'm transferring bitcoin no no just a basic bitcoin transaction so if there is
congestion then fees the fee rate can actually change very rapidly we've had that though we in
20 in 2017 i think i paid like a $100 fee to transfer Bitcoin at one point.
Right.
So like even if you pay a $100 fee, right, you pay a $100 transaction fee and say you made a mistake.
Oh, shoot.
Actually, in the time that I did the transaction, the price went up.
Or even in the time after you did the transaction, because of the 10-minute block time, the fee actually went up.
And now it's $200 per transaction.
And now your transaction is basically stuck, right?
The problem is you're applying pedestrian rules and logic here.
It's a big problem.
These are not the rules.
But these are not the rules or logic that are applied
when banks settle with each other or governments settle with each other.
When a government wants to...
Unreliable, right? And doesn't actually have the capacity
to facilitate what they need. So why would they use that? It just strikes me as hoping.
Governments and banks will adopt it and will all become rich and successful.
It's just, you're missing the demand side of the equation.
No, but you have to remember
that the transactions of the bitcoin network are processed by miners if government and nation states
are the ones operating the miners or the mining pool that does the processing then that's your
assumption in this hypothetical that this is hold on hold on this is a narrative right so this this is a narrative and and let me preface this by saying
that whether i actually agree with this or not like that's beside the point whether i want to
see this happen or not that's beside the point the narrative i'm painting is that bitcoin becomes so
valuable and the mining resources become so intertwined with the balancing of a power grid that nation
states are involved in using it as a settlement layer and a stabilization layer for their energy
infrastructure to the point where well yeah i just i'm sorry continue i continue. I'm telling you, where does this terminate? We're on a flight path, right?
And if we continue down the road we're on,
if we continue on the flight path we're on,
I'm telling you where it terminates, right?
This is where it's going.
Now, whether we want to happen like this or not
is beside the point.
Whether we agree that this is a good thing
is beside the point.
I'm just painting the narrative
that as Bitcoin increases in value, the need for hundreds of thousands of transactions a day is not there.
The general use case for Bitcoin of be your own bank and the whole orange fuel movement and stuff like that, that goes away very, very quickly because it's too valuable of an asset. And now it's actually nation states are managing it through nationalized
mining pools against each other for global settlement.
That's the natural progression.
The only reason that I see governments using an expensive,
unreliable, inefficient system that they actually cannot fully control
themselves is to enrich all the
Bitcoiners. Like why, why would they empower this other group of people just because it's,
it's all a circular argument. You can at least see that, right? It's all like, it's valuable.
It's valuable. You're a philosophy person, right? You're a your philosophy person so let's just start
there right when you have two counterparties that can't trust each other and say you have a hundred
counterparties that can't trust each other but they all have to operate on a global system
you need a standardization you need a protocol right so right now we wage wars in order to come
to consensus we literally have he who has the most
wins and that's my vision for crypto like one one of the reasons i like like highly high throughput
blockchains and it's part of the vision that's being promoted now is we can completely replace
global markets with crypto because we can get sub hundred millisecond block times and we can have
multi-leader structures where co-location stops being a thing. And yeah, I'm totally bullish on that.
But I only see that reality in the context of having a high throughput chain that's actually useful.
Oh, 100%.
What you just described has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin.
What you just described is not Bitcoin.
Right.
But what I'm describing, I think that will become the store of the will.
That makes more sense.
That becomes the foundation of money and store of value.
And I don't disagree.
I don't disagree with you from the standpoint of the general populace.
Because I do think for the general populace to transact with each other,
we need something with higher throughput.
And all of the things that... And for a value as well.
And that's perfectly...
No, you're exactly right.
That's perfectly fine.
What I'm trying to lay out the narrative for is on Bitcoin's current flight path, between its tie-in with proof of work, between its tie-in with the deflationary model,
its flight path leads to being a settlement mechanism
between nation-states for hundreds of countries
that cannot agree or see eye-to-eye with each other.
No, but why?
It doesn't actually solve any problems.
Why?
They could use any other crypto to do a transaction.
Who cares?
Like, why? It's because the other crypto to do a transaction. Who cares? Like, what?
Why?
It's because the other cryptos are not proof of work.
Huh?
Okay.
They're not proof of work.
I mean, maybe the disconnect here for me is I actually think proof of stake is more secure, more economically sound, more centralized.
That's my conclusion.
No, and that's where we fully disagree.
There'll be another one-hour conversation right there.
Absolutely.
But if Bitcoin switched to proof of stake, then I 100% agree with you that it's worthless.
Because Bitcoin is still proof of work, because it ties into the energy infrastructure of a country. The natural flight path is for it to be a sovereignly run system.
How dependent is this thesis on this whole energy for you?
Is it how much of it?
Oh, it's 100 percent dependent.
Because the moment Bitcoin, just like I said said earlier the moment bitcoin stops being proof
of work then its actual utility on nation state level is worthless because of better technology
but i don't really consider that the thing is the thing about that is i don't really consider that
utility it's only utility if there is another demand side to that equation because like
mining like i do think that,
I guess I need that economic incentive.
The threshold of the security budget
needs to be high enough for that to work out.
And because of the lack of utility,
I see a lack of revenue.
The inflation is running out.
You see where I'm going with this, right?
That's why I don't see that playing out.
And specifically, it's the demand side of the equation.
If you can solve the demand side of the equation,
I 100% with you when it comes to like
its usefulness in the energy grid.
But if there is no demand for it,
there is no reason to use Bitcoin for this.
And it doesn't actually create demand on the chain. Sorry, it doesn't actually create a demand on on the on the chain sorry it doesn't actually
create uh revenue it doesn't actually uh like improve the security budget right it doesn't
actually it's a spin-off obviously right yeah so and and as far as you said so many things there
that were layered on top of each other um long-term
use case for bitcoin and i'll just go back to this the flight path that we're currently on
whether we agree with it or not or think it's a good thing or not the current flight path and
the only reason for having bitcoin into the future would be uh sovereign use cases where
nations cannot agree with each other, see eye to eye,
and the settlement protocol of Bitcoin
is the nation's mining resources.
Okay, but then you have two nations
agreeing to use Bitcoin.
Why can't two nations just agree to use
a different cryptocurrency? I don't see why
this is so revolutionary.
They could, but
different.
They could, but the proof they could but different they could
but the proof of work
the proof of work system
is entrenching itself
into the infrastructure of a country
that's what I'm saying
is yes they could agree to use
a proof of stake system but then you have
to agree well who has the stake and
who's doing the block
there's a bunch of transactional networks
you could use right to just do a settlement like why bitcoin if it's if it's objectively worse than
other systems they could just get their own centralized thing put me in coach huh
go for it
we've already blown Noah's face
way beyond his original
that's okay
I literally just got a call
no shit from Blue Origin
and I was like I have to go
I have a better conversation right now
fair enough
and that is this
but one this is going to sound sarcastic, and it's not, but I want to give you flowers, Justin, for how well you are elegantly able to change the conversation when you're losing.
So I love it.
But I want to point that out, how often you change the conversational
point from one topic to the next. And so I see it and I got to give you hats off because you do it
very good. And it keeps the conversation going and very high level. But this is one of the things that I want to want to point out,
where we're at technology wise with Bitcoin right now. Back in the day, we used to ship
galleons, ships full of gold, you know, and how much of that has been lost? And then we got to the point to where that became highly inefficient and security risked and everything else.
Now, will Bitcoin be the thing that is used for nation state payments in 50 years, in 25 years?
I don't know.
But what's really awesome is it can be still used. Now,
the purpose that I think that Ryan has touched on, but it might have gotten missed, or is that
the reason why Bitcoin right now is the best choice versus any proof of stake any other new crypto is the amount of security that is going
into securing bitcoin itself and so this is this means that no nation state they don't have to. Germany doesn't have to trust Japan that.
You do realize it costs more dollars to attack Ethereum than it does Bitcoin today.
That's just a fact.
You know that, right?
It really doesn't.
Please look it up.
I can send you the numbers.
Yes, on paper, yes.
But when they're both unreasonable attacks, then it's a mute point.
Yeah.
If you say, oh, Ethereum is $10 trillion and Bitcoin is $5 trillion to affect the network, it doesn't matter.
It's a mute point.
At current prices, Ethereum has more security.
This goes back to the separation of the word probability, probable, and practicality.
Like, this is one of those things to where, can I ship gold up into space to go do transactions on Mars with?
I mean, if it's more expensive to attack Ethereum than than it is bitcoin i would say it's more practical
to attack bitcoin no no neither one no because neither are practical you know or else it would
be like like we this is one of the really cool things that we see where um l2s, they're not necessarily coming out with their own node infrastructure. They're riding on the
coattails of Ethereum and integrating the security protocol layer of Ethereum as the
rolling bulldozer machine that will just keep going. And so Ethereum in a classical sense of
proof of stake, you have like one of the funniest things, like we've talked about decentralization,
we've talked about the electricity grid, we've semi-talked about node operations for Bitcoin. for for bitcoin but if we talk about it on ethereum uh 37 percent uh of all ethereum nodes
are ran on aws you know uh 58 percent of all ethereum nodes are ran on aws azure and gcp what
percentage you know hold on what percentage of because the equivalent in Bitcoin would be pool nodes, right?
They act as validators effectively.
What percentage of pool nodes?
Oh, it's worse.
Oh, yeah.
And there's only about 50 of them, right?
The top four mining pools do over 85% of the blocks.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's why Ethereum has a higher Nakamoto coefficient.
That's why Ethereum has a higher security budget. That's why Ethereum is a higher Nakamoto coefficient. That's why Ethereum has a higher security budget.
That's why Ethereum is more difficult to attack.
That's what makes Ethereum more secure.
It's not that crazy, right?
No, it's not crazy at all.
They're both impractical to attack.
Neither one is going to succumb to an attack based on economic reasons. No, no, I agree. Neither one will succumb to an attack. Neither one is going to succumb to an attack based on economic
reasons. I agree. Neither one will
succumb to an attack. But it is
making a point about the underlying
technology. I can say that Bitcoin is
the most secure. It's not a factual
thing. One of the things you like to do is you like to
freeze the entire world
while you attempt
your
takeover.
And you think that, okay, if you're going to attack Ethereum
and it will cost you X right now, true.
But if you start buying all of that Ethereum
to take over the proof of stake side of things,
you're going to drive the price up exponentially.
That's the piece of it.
And so it will- That's what the piece of it and so it will that's what
makes people take even more secure and that's but that's the same thing with with bitcoin mining
and protecting so if you're you not only have to buy the hardware you have to buy the electricity
as well so and then you have a big I... The facility costs of housing that hardware
and... Maybe it'd be more
interesting to maybe get a little bit more specific
in the scenario, right? So one scenario that
I could foresee happening is in 10
years from now, security budget drops
to that 6 million range per day
that I mentioned. And let's say
there's a very large miner
in China
and their hardware shelf life is running out and the business is
not really going to continue, but they're able to kind of gain a majority. And the U.S. has gone
really hard into this whole U.S. reserve thing. That gives China the option for relatively low
cost to basically massively disrupt and undermine the Bitcoin network,
potentially even destroy.
Yeah, they could interrupt the Bitcoin network for about 10 minutes.
No, no, no.
Yeah, because if they have a majority of hash rate,
this attack could go on for months.
The thing is, when is the next block is produced,
everyone follows the next block.
That is the way the consensus mechanism works.
No, no, hold on. If they gain a majority hash rate right but but but one mining operation or china alone cannot
that's a hypothetical if if the security budget is still low right oh wait no i'll tell you
this has happened twice this has happened twice that mining pool has had over 51 of the hash power and they self-regulated because they realized do you know the inside there's an angle here
because i know the inside scoop to that story i'm not going to name any names to not betray
confidence but i think it's so long ago now that it's not really that relevant when that
question yeah hold on i'm not going to name names, but when that pool in question did that,
not actually the one you just mentioned, another one, another instance,
because it's two instances, right?
But on that other instance, when the hash rate moved to another pool,
and the pool was controlled by the same party,
it was even hosted out of the same building.
But this is a detail.
I will concede your point.
It's just fun talking about the history a little bit.
Go ahead.
No, I mean, we can go back and forth with hypothetical scenarios all day long.
I think we can tie a bow around and agree that Bitcoin is not the best transactional
currency or utility network out there.
I think we both agree that it's...
We can both agree on that.
I think maybe we...
I'm not even sure if we differ on this,
but I don't see it as a particularly good store of value either.
I mean, is that also...
Long term, at least, I don't see it as a good store of value.
It depends who's storing the value.
Isn't a good store of value a good story it it depends it depends who's storing the value so isn't a good store value
no i i i believe i believe at a nation state level uh bitcoin is a proper store of value and solely because of its tie to the mic to the power. We totally disagree on that point.
And I do, I respect your angle, actually.
I don't fully understand it, I think, interestingly enough.
Because I think most Bitcoiners I talk to would make more of a circular argument here.
It's because they would say something along the lines of like, oh, well, it's the most
valuable.
So governments will treat it as a store of value.
It's kind of like circular, right? It is because it is. And that's why I say I keep asking
for the demand side, but you're saying that the demand side basically comes from solving this
energy grid problem, right? I'm just trying to steel man your argument here. Yeah, because I agree
with you. If the argument is that Bitcoin is the best store of value because it's the most secure, well, that breaks down. If it's the best store of value because it's the best utility, well, that breaks down. You could say it is the best store of value because of its
its stayability with the energy grid and i do remember in our in the earlier part of our debate
you did also agree with me that there is a threshold somewhere where that breaks down in
terms of the security budget right we probably disagree wildly on where those numbers are.
It was under the hypothetical that another technology comes online
to solve the energy grid issue.
And one of the pieces with that is it won't be instantaneous.
Just like Bitcoin mining didn't become a power load distributor overnight.
It was one of those things that had to be realized.
Like, we're such a slow society, we're still using cobalt.
And so, you know, yes, talking about 2014, when people realize things, they try to self-regulate if they are a good actor.
So that's one of those things that was able to be seen and able to be recognized.
the i think that you're i'll be honest i i'm assuming you have looked at numbers and you have
put a pen to paper or a spreadsheet but my brain and the way i'm functioning right now
i 100 disagree with your six million dollar uh valuation in what you said, five years?
10 years.
10 years.
I apologize.
10 years.
No, no.
Actually, that wasn't a prediction.
That was actually just a hypothetical.
So once we're, you know, and that's one of the big things where we're talking hypotheticals,
practicals, and probables.
And so they are all three very different things. So I think that that's one of the big pieces. For a moment, I would love to rewind the conversation because I feel like
one of the things that you shifted on your belief and you started to give ground and say that, you know, at least with medical information.
But do you so blockchain technology, not necessarily just Bitcoin, but blockchain technology encryption.
Do you believe that it could be a good store as a standard for data
um so i'll give some examples i would believe in uh so for example as a journalist and if you're in
some war-torn country and you want to prove you said something at a certain time yeah that that
a blockchain can do that and that's great i'm very happy that that exists it's i would kind of
describe that as it functions a little bit like a notary does in a way that that would right that
would be that's being utilized right now by what by nft technology it has for a long time in the
history of crypto as well so i think that's a great great use case um for for me i kind of get i get
i get stuck on the or Oracle problem and the enforceability
problem. That's why I'm
skeptical of like a lot of
RWA stuff.
As a value investor, I'm also
skeptical of NFTs and memes
and actually
most of
what's it called?
Real world infrastructure, what we call that nowadays.
Deepin?
Yeah, Deepin, thank you.
Yeah, Deepin.
I'm also skeptical of most Deepin,
with the exception of decentralized storage networks, actually.
I think those do make sense to me.
The economics behind decentralized computation
does not make sense to me, actually.
So I am very skeptical, as you can tell,
but I kind of take things from first principles.
I think there's a lot of BS in crypto
and there's a lot of stuff that works.
I think what's proven itself really, I think, is DeFi.
So that's something I'm very big on.
So just so you know where I'm coming from.
The whole storage computational infra, that is my hat.
I love that hat.
But that is that is my hat i love that hat so but that is um yeah i think and i
think people are willing to pay a premium for for the kind of security guarantees and storage
that's why i think that makes so and that's you know what i mean that's there's there's two words
that we've used we've used distributed and we've used decentralized the And I think I've heard both you and Ryan use this word.
The word that we really like is sovereign and sovereignty data.
So not only do you own it, but you control it.
And so that is one of the big pieces that we're starting to see.
And my…
In political science, sovereign is usually only for states, you know, not for people.
But in crypto, we get to actually be sovereign.
It's very cool.
Exactly.
And so that's one of the big things that, like, I feel that everyone's intention, and I want to just 100 give flowers to noah for bringing
this panel together like i literally just told someone from a space company david johnson would
punch me if he knew this that i that wants to put me up on a rocket and i was like i gotta go
i'm on a space right now.
I didn't even tell him what to go out.
And I was like, I got to go, Hunter.
But a shout out to Noah for, you know,
sitting back and just eating popcorn to this one.
But the big piece that all of this sort of is,
is this is an alternative.
And we're starting to see standards.
And I think that that's one of the things that we're sort of all arguing around is Bitcoin produced an agreeable standard.
Because, like, we could even go farther.
We could go to eCash.
I don't agree.
And what Chom created and stuff like that but uh bitcoin became an adaptable an adoptable
standard and so will bitcoin be true for everyone to have as a um bitcoin wallet
uh practicality versus probability this is one of those things like, does everyone own a little bit of gold, you know, or, you know, like, you know, like practicality versus probability versus, you know, use case. Will other crypto and blockchains come about for the everyday person that reaches the speeds that are needed?
Of course they will.
And so, but that's the first thing that will come about is standardization.
And one of the things that we've all sort of reached on and touched is first principle.
is first principle. And so the main tenets of being a first principle base is immutability,
permissionless, and trustless. And so that means that neither party has to trust each other
because there is the open source nature of it where everyone can see what's happening.
one can see what's happening. The permissionless is there is no counterparty that needs to
approve that transaction or that happening. And so the mutability is I can't go back and
pencil, you know, make the math, math differently. And so those are the three big pieces. And so
when it comes to both data, we're like standardization, it's first mover pieces like medical, like we could talk about care, care coin, like no care, solve care, solve care, which is running on near running medical health data for insurance companies and, and personnel in like 15 different
states. That was one of the big, and what they're doing is they figured out incentivization models
because when it comes to medical, and this is something that I can talk on because I spent a
long time in the medical health industry side, it isn't actually about care.
The only person that cares about the care they receive is the patient.
It is the documentation of the care given.
That is what's billable.
That's what doctors to insurance companies to everyone in between care about.
The only person that actually cares about the care they receive is the patient.
Oh, and the insured doctor.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
So if they give basic minimum care, they've covered their bases.
And doctors following Hippocratic Oath want to give good care.
Doctors following Hippocratic Oath want to give good care, but they're limited by billables and everything like that in between.
So a doctor, every piece of peace in the world, but everyone is mitigated by that piece.
And so the great thing about standardization is how easy is it adoptable by others?
That is the number one piece.
Interoperability and easy.
Let me throw a piece of kindling on the fire here because I've been having this conversation for well over a decade now.
I don't believe blockchain is the right choice for 99 99 of the systems out there 99 of the use
cases out there where i hear you know everyone and their mom wants to tokenize things or put
things on the blockchain and like i see this a lot with like gaming on the blockchain where i do
think it's an inferior product and it's really just a money grab and i don't think a better way
of doing it i don't believe in game five at all okay well uh gal i i need to step in here because
i um i'm very passionate i'm a gamer too hold on hold on i'm very passionate about this one and
while i agree with you guys i think so far game five i think it's a stupid name for it has just
been a money grab and there are people that are launching tokens without the game being built and the games suck.
They're not fun to play.
I do believe that there is a tangible use case for gaming on the blockchain.
However, not where it's like completely on chain.
I think a hybrid approach works.
And the reason I say that is because you have games.
I'll always go back to World of Warcraft
because that's the one that I'm most familiar with.
But you have games and gaming identities
that people have built over long periods of time.
Excuse me, not games.
Identities in games and also games like MMORPGs,
like WoW, like EverQuest, like RuneScape
that people have spent decades
playing and they don't own any of the accolades any of the accolades excuse me any of the items
any anything that they have accrued over decades is not theirs i think there's a use for that i
think there's also i think there's also a use case for the tokenization of an in-game asset, such as gold in World of Warcraft, because there is already a black market where items, characters, and gold is being traded.
That's value that companies can capture.
So it's going to happen.
Someone's going to figure it out.
And I think that that's one of the sectors I'm most bullish on.
However, it is nowhere near finding product market fit so far.
I think I think, look, I think the what you're describing, I like the idea as a gamer.
But as we're talking about what we're talking about before, I don't really think it's practical.
And the reason why. Right. Is because a game a game is a workaround. Right.
It's developed by a central group of developers, right?
Development of a game is not decentralized.
Like what that means is that you can put whatever you want on a blockchain,
but the developers of that game can still rug you.
They can still take it out of the game.
They can still nerf it.
It doesn't give you any actual protection it's it's
just a bit of an illusion in in that regard i feel similar to how a lot of nft stuff works as well
and and and and part of it because this is the lack of enforcement mechanism and i think
the reason why a lot of crypto gaming is so trash is because it it's just casino. You don't have gamers playing crypto games.
You have gamblers playing crypto games.
And that will probably go on forever,
but that's not the case.
I mean, you guys are missing the core component of it.
These are not good games.
They're not fun games to play.
And the ones that are off the grid,
I keep hearing about off the grid.
Off the grid is just a Walmart Fortnite.
It's a poor man's Fortnite.
So, so far, these have been money grabs.
Because why build and why spend years building a good game where integrating with the blockchain makes sense when you can just soft rug your investors, right?
Build something that's bullshit, launch a token, make millions of dollars, and fuck off.
That's...
But there's more than that.
These games are bad because you're adding financialization to it.
The financialization doesn't...
That already exists, Justin.
MMORPGs already have financialization.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Then it can exist.
Yeah.
The issue is bad games.
That's financialized.
Right?
Like, it's the difference the difference is
no they're not bad games you know you don't you don't you're missing my point look look like
again there are people in the us for example with full-time jobs that want to play world of warcraft
i keep referring to this game because that's the one i'm most familiar with they want to play like
they used to but they can't so what do they do they go to black markets they used to, but they can't. So what do they do? They go to black markets. They go to black markets and they buy, with real-world money, gold.
They buy characters.
They buy boots.
I know all of this.
Right.
But if, first of all, even if a game developer is legally allowed to do this, which they can't,
but hypothetically, if legally they could do it, right, there's no incentive to do it
because the game developer makes less money, right?
The game developer makes more money.
No, no, no.
You're wrong, sir. Sir, Justin, you're wrong sir sir you're wrong you're wrong there is an incentive because right
now everyone no no listen listen right now there there is the black market for just wow is a
multi-million dollar industry there are there are bot farms there are bot farms making multiple
seven figures a year so if you don't't think that Blizzard Entertainment can build a proprietary NFT marketplace and capture some of that value, you're missing the point.
No, no, no.
But hold on.
If you make it easier to kind of buy these assets off second markets, doesn't that mean that less people buy it directly off the developer?
There is no one buying it off the developer.
That's the point I'm trying to make.
Yeah.
So can I pause real fast?
It doesn't make sense from the developer
from an incentive perspective.
Justin, no, let me jump in for a second.
It does, though, because they're making money from it.
They're making money.
Let me jump in here for a second.
Sure.
I thought I was throwing kindling on the fire.
I threw a stick of diamond on the fire.
This is kind of fun.
I think the point I was originally making is, and to Noah's point too, there are a lot of black markets.
Blizzard could be running those markets centrally,
and they could be capturing all that value.
The problem is it's illegal for them to do so.
And a lot of these Web3 games,
they're launching on these platforms
in order to build these markets,
in order to build these cross-platform assets,
all this stuff,
because they're capturing value
where regulation has made it illegal for Blizzard and these other game developers to capture that value.
If those regulations weren't there, like in another country, they could build really good games with their own markets, their own trading stuff.
And they could capture all that value.
And they don't need a blockchain for that. And I think that was my original point
is there's a lot of things
from like Web3 gaming
that they're simply using it
to get around regulation to capture value.
And it's kind of like this idea of,
oh, we want the money from the game
aspect.
So they're going Web3 first
to plan for the black markets
versus focusing on the really good game first and
then letting the black market you know merge out of that and that's it's just a different mindset
yeah and that's spot on and that's why i keep bringing up this idea of like um you know if
they already control it if can if if the game developer is a centralized entity it doesn't
make sense to decentralize that control from an incentive
we're not talking about decentralization though this isn't about decentralization this is about
tokenization of in-game assets this is not you don't actually own the asset if the dev can change
whatever he wants that's kind of my point no the game the idea is that you can the idea is that
you can off-board the asset itself.
The asset itself is a hybrid.
That's the whole point I'm trying to make.
This is meant to be a hybrid.
So just as Brian was able to say that where he was able to come from a power of knowledge and authority by claiming he is an electrical engineer, and he is, by the way.
My name is literally derived from gaming.
My name is Player One Taco.
Player One.
I've had that name since 2008 when I tried to figure out what my name was going to be online.
So from a gaming perspective, I can talk fairly well.
talk fairly well and having before the movie came out too right and having started a gaming company
That's before the movie came out too, right?
and and been part of both uh supercell and ea and other game game companies like
the biggest piece that ryan touched on is there what there was gaming companies have not been able to legally tokenize.
And so they make so much money that they cannot risk any regulation piece of losing a piece of that money
because then everything falls apart because they're only as good as their last game.
apart because they're only as good as their last game. The only game that actually pays back to
creators slash users that I can really put on a pedestal is Second Life. Launched in 2003,
literally got a letter from the SEC stating that the Linden
dollar is not a security. And users have over 600,000 monthly active users today,
where I had to go confirm the number because I knew this number from last year when I was doing
some stuff. But they have spent over $1.3 billion on on this game um linden labs and they've paid out
over a billion dollars so um in the 21 years 22 years um you know they've made roughly 200 million
dollars uh profit versus what they have spent building versus what they have paid out to
uh players that's a great example by the way i remember in the early early bitcoin days 2013 14
a bunch of other bitcoiners i met in the meetup scene were second life players because i think
yeah they had a bit of an insight into what bitcoin was actually at the time yeah and so
one of the biggest pieces i was an eve online player
myself back in the day it was war all of them were good all of them are still good um but uh
the the thing that everyone wants to do as soon as they they want to bring these games online
on chain is they they're like oh we're gonna change change the UI and we're going to do this. I'm like the UI as it is, is what the players love. I mean, I mean,
what I don't know of assets, like I have spent, we don't want to talk about how much money I have
spent on ACE combat or on FIFA. And so, but the fact that every, I the fact that I can't bring jerseys over from a previous year
or now that I am done playing with it,
I legally cannot even give my account to someone else
because of terms and conditions.
So the big piece that I think comes to on gaming is that sovereignty
the ownership those problems right that's that's my issue with it because i agree there are problems
that i wish we could solve i'm just not just blockchain solves that and i agree with ryan
not everything needs to be on blockchain like i just i just don't i just don't
think like adding this kind of monitor there's a there's something beautiful about playing games
and like the post scarcity of the digital world like that's fun you know when you financialize
games when you turn it into a casino that's not fun i i just think there's something to that that
actually inherently makes the game worse it's my experience
and also like if it was so great how come some breakout indie title hasn't done it like i play
a lot of indie games as well right like it's i just don't see it some really good indie games
start to do that but then they're overtaken by triple a studios that promise this huge
blockchain integration and then they are just a walmart version of fortnite
right i mean i just and so yeah like a like a game that i'm i'm having to
that i'm trying to keep the the game company from closing their doors because they you know they
this is what's really hilarious when a game company is actually building stuff and building at need,
how tight their belt is versus, you know,
I remember working for game companies in 22 and they're like, oh yeah,
we need $50 million to build a skin,
reskinned version of Flappy Bird.
And now it's like, you know, companies are like, you know, we have a game with 20,000
monthly active users, but we have to close our doors because, you know, we need 500K
to like, you know, push that, you know, to keep us open another two years.
And I'm like, hold on a
second. Don't close your doors because what they're actually looking at doing is like, they're like,
no, we have our users. We're just going to open source the game and leave it for someone else to
build. And I'm like, no, you own it. Let me, let me solve your problem. So yeah, like this is where
we're at today. Like we have off the shelf Fortnite versus, you know, looking at like Supercell.
All right.
How many games are within the Supercell family?
I'm just going to name four or five.
There's five games off the top of my head.
I know there's I know there's seven more actually, but five games within the Supercell family.
All of those are separate.
And what I spend in one and what I buy in one, I can't buy.
Everything is at the barest level is a 99 cent transaction.
Why can't I interoperable, interrupt that gold between games?
Like, oh, I bought it in Farmville.
Why can't I go spend it on boom beach
i do think that messes up progression balance though right like moving assets between games
like that there's also no technological reason we can't do that without blockchain so that's
another thing i'm not quite convinced blockchain blockchain brings that proof of receipt you know
so like if you're thinking about it environment it doesn't matter anyway like these games are all trusted environments anyway like yeah but no and this is where like
if you're wanting to go outside of that environment though like you're wanting my game ecosystem to
interact with your game ecosystem because look my game i don't want my Minecraft sword to work in Skyrim. That would just ruin both games.
It would go.
That's not how games work.
Most developers, when they
build an in-game ecosystem,
they monetize it because they control
This is the thing with Web3 Gaming that
I keep running up against.
I'm just like, wait, you guys want to build cross-game assets.
That doesn't make sense for anyone in the gaming industry, from what I can see.
It doesn't make sense from an incentive perspective.
It doesn't make sense from a gaming perspective.
Or a development incentive.
That's like saying I have a...
I don't know. I can't... Anyways, guys, I got to jump. I really a... I don't know.
I can't...
Anyways, guys, I got to jump.
I've really enjoyed the conversation.
I apologize for lobbying the grenade.
I've been assuming this, but I also got to go.
Yeah.
Hey, Noah, can I ask you a quick question?
Sure.
I've been trying to consciously be a bit less aggressive
and trying to be a bit more open-minded yeah can
you tell i'm thinking it improves the message i think it improves i think it also improves if
you don't interrupt uh i feel like you've done a better job of not interrupting letting letting
fantastic letting your opponent for lack of a better term finish their sentence but yeah i mean
i think it's always good to have you on stage. You drive strong conversations and I think you make some contrarian points that I maybe
don't agree with all of them, but result in great discourse and allow people to get a
better understanding of why you have the points that you have and why people believe what
they do when they counter you.
Yeah, counter you.
Yeah, thank you.
I was just consciously trying to be a bit less aggressive and more like,
what's the word I'm looking for?
Compassionate, I guess.
I don't know if I'd ever go as far as to say you're not compassionate.
I think that might be a catch. But I think understanding, trying to understand the other's viewpoint more,
you know what I mean, as opposed to just trying to win the argument, I think is.
Yeah, I would hope that, you know, I would hope that you're just trying to win the argument off of false claims.
No, of course.
But there's degrees.
There's degrees to these things.
I was just reflecting a little bit because I've been trying to make some conscious changes there.
So I'm glad you approve.
Justin, I got to jump. I've been trying to make some conscious changes there. So I'm glad you, you're putting it.
Justin,
I got a jump.
I've enjoyed it.
Thanks for the conversation,
Justin.
This was so much fun.
Thank you so much.
Always.
Justin,
I say that,
you know,
you have done,
I love your devil advocacy.
And so, I guess that makes me the devil. because i do believe in most of those critiques i don't like see what you're talking a lot of the time in
is hypotheticals and so that means that you don't necessarily believe in it or think that it should
happen you're just wanting to bring awareness to it. Actually, my, my, it's interesting that you bring this up.
My motivation is by bringing awareness to it.
And also in the more extreme hypothetical scenarios, it's,
it's my best attempt at trying to avoid those things from happening.
I would be happiest if my predictions don't come through,
even though it might be a little hurt.
You know, so, you know you know because that's that's what
that's what we have been in uh you know uh the the piece for a devil's advocate is bringing
attention to something to it to uh an opposing um view and and that is that comes down to all of this being attention. And I just sort of like where it's been.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
I'm glad you appreciate my opposing view.
And I appreciate yours as well.
It was very interesting, especially your view on GameFi, actually,
I thought was very interesting, especially with your background.
It gave me some things to think about.
No, it's a very very
fun day and uh i don't know i i'm in a like you could literally say that this everything is going
to zero in the next year and i i would come up with 30 positive arguments against it because
i'm in such a good mood that because we got our project listed
on uh cookie dot hey congratulations congratulations i am i'm i'm happy because i'm all about that
attention sometimes no i get it i mean like if you believe in what you're saying you want you
want attention right oh well no not always because, as a content creator, I've been creating content since 2018. And I don't even I don't create content that other people necessarily want to see. I create content about what I want to do, and what I want to see. So I think that that's like, do we make thoughts about what we think others want to know about or what we want to know more about
yeah i i think i think for me i kind of i do come up with a little bit of a political agenda
is that like i kind of want to put a little bit of weight on the scales you know of history here
you know that that is a motivation i can admit to. It's to be an influencer is to have influence, right?
Are there KOLs? Yes. But I feel like we sort of fall into a different category.
And that's been all four of us, Noah, Ryan, you and I.
Well, I assume none of us here are taking money to shill XYZ projects, right?
So that does put us in a better category for sure.
And that's where I think we fall more into the TLs, the thought leaders.
Yes, that's a good point, actually. I had a discussion about that earlier today. fall more into the TLs, the thought leaders. Yes.
That's a good point, actually. I had a discussion about that earlier today, so that's actually quite
on the nose.
Interesting distinction to draw there.
What do you think the difference is?
Wait, what? What do you think
the difference is between an influencer and a thought leader?
a thought leader
makes their own opinions based off of what they see and and uh
a kol is like one step down they hear different thought leaders and they make
either their opinion off of that or they megaphone for right so then most kols are kind of downstream
from the thought leaders then in terms of how ideas flow yes and and and they they make no
not i don't mean it as they're just regurgitators they make their own thoughts off of it
disseminators might be a nicer way to put it. Yes. You know, but they,
they go through what they are focusing on, you know, what focuses. And so who are they listening
to? Because you could have, I don't know, when's the last time you had a conversation about, um,
well, XCD or XRD, um, against XRP. So, you know, I, i do kind of mess with those communities so i might be the exception
there but i understand that that's not for most people so it's it's the fun piece there and so
yeah but i do have to run because i literally have to go call rocket people back. That's exciting. I think if maybe in 10, 20 years from now,
space might be the next big thing I invest in after crypto.
That's exciting.
We need a new frontier as well.
We need that.
What is the current saying?
Is we know more about space than we do know about our own ocean.
So there you go.
There's more platinum in space, though.
Yeah.
A lot more.
Yeah.
just an amazing time
today. Noah, thank you so much
as always.
And, yeah.
Yeah, thank you for putting this together no we had some
had some great conversations i enjoyed where it went i hope i didn't we didn't dominate the
the flow too much but i think that's kind of the intention at the end of the day anyway isn't it
i can i mean that was that was a great one for me to like pop taco said sit back and have some
popcorn too um thank you, everyone, for joining.
Remember that everything you hear on these broadcasts is meant for educational purposes only.
Nothing is financial advice.
So be safe out there, and we'll see you all in the next one soon.
Take care.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye.
