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Maximalists vs. Multichainers: Who’s Right in 2025? 🛐 Crypto Quorum Ep. 1
Recorded: April 10, 2025 Duration: 3:12:51Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion among crypto enthusiasts, key topics included the rise of multi-chain adoption, the importance of partnerships in fostering growth, and the ongoing challenges faced by Bitcoin in scalability and usability. The conversation highlighted the potential for DeFi to reshape the financial landscape, emphasizing the need for innovative solutions and community engagement.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hey, everyone, welcome as you start to pile on in.
This is going to be a good, fun space.
As always, there's people running around having real life, you know, happen with who can be on the handle at what time, etc.
But we do have a quite nice lineup. I definitely hope that LightCoin can get someone to cover the handle to come in and co-host, but for in case they can't make it, I would be more than happy to let someone else come. So, oh, there we go. Here is like, oh, nice. I gotta go approve.
Um, as we're starting to, um, trickle in and everything, um, yeah, I'm going to just
start, get your, uh, share the space out first and foremost, and then feel free to get to,
um, starting to think about things that you're trying to do.
Just start getting your arguments and points like that um kind of going
you never know exactly where this is gonna go but you know you never know always be a little
bit prepared always better than nothing um thanks everyone for being here by the way um let me just
now that light coins the coast we have a bunch of people already here to speak um real quick while
we're waiting for a few minutes for everyone
to trickle in, I'm going to play this fun theme song. Cringe alert, by the way, but I do not care.
I am cringe man myself. And we'll just get this thing going. So see you guys in a few minutes
officially. And meantime, enjoy.
Can you turn the volume up, actually? I think it got worse. Yeah, I can't hear it at all now any better
no heart hearty it's also kind of in and out so i don't i don't know what the issue is
yeah joe it might be your sound cancellation that's smoothing it out.
Yeah, it sounds like that.
Just sing it, man. Just sing it.
I haven't heard of this,
so don't worry.
... So dash is dedicated to make sure we hear this song even though none of us can hear a word
right now joel oh there we go it really goes in and out the fact that this hasn't been
better figured out by now is kind of fun. But anyway,
we'll get it figured out
for next time.
This is just for me,
by the way. All right.
I think that's probably enough of that.
And we will definitely share this out after the fact and just kind of get this, you know, get the full glory, get people to share the cringe all over the place.
But thank you very much for being here, everyone.
The cringe all over their face?
Or something like that.
Yeah.
I mean, where else do you receive your cringe?
If not, you'll kiss her.
Yeah.
So, everyone, thanks for being here.
This is the first in a weekly series of these spaces.
Very happy to be kind of doing these.
Very happy to have Litecoin to join as well.
And it's kind of, by having this space in this way,
it is sort of staking a claim on the issue of the day,
at least on our part.
But that's,
we're more than happy to have dissent because dissent kind of leads to a lot of fun stuff.
So anyway, I'm just going to introduce myself. Everyone can introduce themselves afterwards.
My name is Joel and I run business development and marketing for Dash. And my position is I'm clearly an anti-maximalist. That's kind of where I am. Everyone else go around the room and the same thing.
Who you are, who's speaking, what do you do, what do you work for, etc. And then really quick, yes or no, maxi or anti-maxi.
So let's start with light coin here
it's like you guys are messing with me here okay let's go to layer 1x then
gm gm gm good morning good afternoon evening, wherever you're at. My name is Cody. And yeah, I'm behind the L1X handle. I am over user experience and marketing there as well. So thanks for having us on.
Personally, if I had to say for Layer 1X, we're definitely multi-chainers.
Due to our Xtalk technology that we have integrated in and built within our Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem that we have that allows users to go cross-chain without the use of a bridge,
because we've built our own VM and consensus mechanisms from the ground up
that makes us EDM as well as non-EBM compatible,
adding more security and speed
and reducing costs in the long run.
So that's us.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, absolutely.
And Litecoin, feel free to raise your hand
if you get someone who can speak. Otherwise, I'll just assume you're inert in your coffin in the meantime.
I could jump in.
Yeah, go ahead.
An introduction. So I imagine I'm probably looking at the people on stage because I know many of them. I'll probably end up being more on the maxi side than most here
uh i i think i coined the phrase like maybe seven years ago bitcoin maximalish i think bitcoin is
the king i think it's the future world reserve currency i think there's nothing that competes
on it uh with it on that level but i think there's all kinds of other really interesting stuff out
there and i built a lot of that stuff i am am the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets. We're a venture studio, like hybrid
incubation and marketing firm that incubated Polygon, Quickswap. Quickswap was the first L2
decks in the world to reach a billion a day in volume. We incubated lots of other things, the largest Doge L2, Doge chain, et cetera. I'm a
co-founder of QuickSwap. I'm on the Polygon. I serve on the Polygon Grants board. So that's a
billion dollar fund used for growing Polygon and Ethereum. And I'm a mentor for Tim Draper's
Bitcoin Phi Accelerator. And then I'm also a city leader for BitAngels Los Angeles.
So I love both Bitcoin and a lot of the other stuff,
but Bitcoin is the king.
Fun stuff.
Thanks for being here.
And yeah, I've been on some of your spaces as well
and have definitely enjoyed that.
Yeah, good to see you, bro.
Yeah, no problem. And speaking of all
this, let's bring the heat with Justin Bonds. How's it going, Justin? Introduce yourself, et cetera.
I'm doing well. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me to this, uh, this discussion. It's
definitely up my alley. I'll take the pretty hard, uh, extreme. I'll take the extreme end of the position of against maximalism here.
I think that maximalism, I think the way I understand it is somewhat intellectually bankrupt.
I think it ties for me more into kind of ideas of tribalism and religiosity than they really do
towards finding truth. I think maximalism often gets in the way really do towards finding truth.
I think maximalism often gets in the way of really uncovering truth.
And I think it's very, it also runs counter to like a lot of free market principles for
me and free competition.
Anyway, I'm the founder of Cyber Capital, which is the oldest crypto fund in Europe
and the oldest liquid token fund in the world I think by
now as well so I've been I've been a full-time cryptocurrency researcher and investor for over
a decade now and some of a lot of you here I'm familiar with a lot of your work and your life
with a lot of my work so yeah I'll speak all those details thank you this is gonna be great
yeah no problem.
And obviously, thank you very much for coming.
Always have a good Thunderdome quality of spaces,
which is kind of fun.
I promise I won't call your job
and try to get you canceled after this one, though.
So, Borswap, would you mind moving on to you guys?
Do you want to mention what you guys do, et cetera?
Sure thing.
Thanks so much for inviting us.
This is PaperX, Director of Comms and doing some BD work for ThoughtSwap.
Been with ThoughtSwap since 2021, which is roughly what we founded.
And if you're familiar back then, I think, so we were the flagship index interface for ThoughtChain. So one of the first to build a cross-chain protocol
that is native asset swaps,
not wrapping or issuing wrapped assets as a bridge.
And we obviously support Bitcoin swaps to Litecoin
and also Dash through Maya protocol,
which is a ThorChain fork. And we also support Chainfl my protocol which is a store chain fork and we also
support chain flip which is another cross chain protocol so um not only are we i guess not
a maxi for any particular um uh protocol but also not any chain we're very much in the multi-chain
space so i i would say um i think if there's anything I'm maxi for, it would be self-custody.
That is kind of the core of why we're here and why we want to help users be able to
just have the freedom and choice to own their assets. And if they want to make the decision to
exchange, they should do it in a safe and non-custodial permissionless way. So yeah, thanks.
in a safe and non-custodial, permissionless way.
So, yeah, thanks.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks so much for being on.
Definitely used you guys since the ChaosNet days on ThorChain
and actually just used ThorSwap like two days ago.
So, yeah, definitely very familiar with what you guys do.
Thanks for what you do.
And you've had a lot of heat in the past
for doing this kind of permissionless type stuff.
And it's always cool.
And by the way, we do have one spot left right now.
So if anyone like, I see Shapeshift is down there.
If someone like Shapeshift wants to come up
and say something, you're more than welcome to.
I plan this for like a two hour segment.
People don't need to stay the whole two hours.
But so just to people cycle out, others could cycle in and then we're good. I plan this for like a two hour segment. People don't need to stay the whole two hours.
But so just to people cycle out,
others could cycle in and then we're good.
By the way, if I could jump in,
would love to have Shapeshift up.
Huge fan of theirs and Eric for he's,
he's very similar to my thinking on a lot of this.
And one of my heroes and has been nice enough to give us some nice kind of business advice at quick swap and polygon or limb but
um quick swap is also in the audience if you end up having a slot quick salt probably won't speak
much but uh could help with the algorithm because they just got a lot of followers if we want them
up cool yeah i mean absolutely uh just if shapeshift can't make it up i'll put um quick swap
up yeah well actually i i'm here representing on Shapeshift's behalf.
My name's H. Payne.
I'm the head of marketing and protocol relations at Shapeshift.
Been here since 2021.
Joined the space back in 2014, mining Bitcoin.
I was a maxi.
To the death of me, I was a maxi.
Used Shapeshift back in the day to swap Bitcoin to Darkcoin, if any of you remember that wonderful little project, which
has now basically gone to zero.
Been with Shapeshift that entire time, then now I'm sort of working with them.
I've definitely fallen to the camp of true multi-chain adoption, right?
Much as, you know, similar to what ThorSwap entails.
It's all about self-custodial use of crypto.
It's all about no KYC.
It's all about privacy.
Shapeshift is completely open source, completely private. We launched a new feature uh it's a memoless swapper uh powered by chain
flips so now you can even abstract away the wallet flow where you bring your own wallet you know
insert wallet address one insert wallet address two do a swap it's all permissionless it's all
private there's no kyc at any any point um you know going back to our original roots back in
when i was using shapesShift in 2014,
which has made me really happy as a marketer.
Nothing sucks more than having to tell your users,
hey, man, we're KYC-ing you now,
but it's been really great to go back to the ethos of multi-chain permissionless finance.
So that's me and that's ShapeShift.
Happy to be here.
Nice, awesome.
Well, if you're who you say you are and not a poser,
maybe you have access to the ShapeShift handle
and can bring it up to speak so we can... I do. Yeah, yeah, I got you, if you're who you say you are and not a poser, maybe you have access to the Shapeshift handle and can bring it up to speak.
So we can.
I do.
Yeah, yeah, I got you.
I won't speak from it, but I will.
Yeah, I'm happy to speak on behalf.
We have a bunch of OGs on this panel.
Hold on.
Digibyte in the audience, too.
You got bumped for Digibyte for now.
Sorry.
Joel, I'm.
We'll have more spaces in a second.
Joel, I'm surprised you let that one slide.
The comment on Darkcoin. I thought it was kind of hilarious under the context.
Well, that's the funny thing, though.
That's kind of what we're here for, is to hopefully have a fun, well-meaning back and
forth on these kinds of things.
And it is true that there is no such thing as Darkcoin.
And funny enough, there's so many people that still try to say this term dash coin a lot these
days.
Dash coin was a real coin for many years.
It was just the bottom of the barrel shit coin that just constantly got
confused.
And someone's like,
I bought so many dash coin and how come I can't use it in the wallet?
It's like,
you bought the wrong coin.
What the hell is going on?
So it is true that dark coin did
go to zero there's no dark coin anymore yeah okay okay but like that that coin i think that was
rebranded into dash that's literally the dash that's hosting this right right yes yeah okay
cool i just just put the audience and just forain, it's just a funny mistake to make because you said that Darkcoin went to zero
and then that was rebranded to Dash.
It definitely did not go to zero
and they're doing some really interesting stuff nowadays.
So, you know.
Yes, it's pretty funny.
Like with these spaces,
if you have enough smart people
who have enough like history in the space
who come to these things,
you're going to find a lot of small little quips
being snuck in there that new crypto people have no idea what they're talking about, but everyone
else got to be honest. I was, I was around at the time and I barely remember the details of this
stuff. Uh, would any refreshers is, uh, is fun, fun little jump back in history. Yeah, absolutely.
So, uh, let's move on to, let's's see did we get to stash yet let's get
to stash because stash is kind of the it's like the john daly golfing meme of like you know in
the room here uh very hot so definitely a lot of goofy like facade behind an actual like cool
community focused on adoption and stuff so stash why don't you guys introduce yourselves uh nothing
not safe for work yet that's second hour of course thanks for having us on uh jewel uh i
so actually before i say you know we're like maximalist or or not uh so stashes i'm one of
the core contributors here uh we're building on solana but we're chain agnostic in terms of projects we work with so our core product
is an educational uh platform where excuse me where we create really high value engaging
and humorous content that help projects get users and retain existing ones
but we're like very chain agnostic even though we're building on Solana. And I'm surprised like, God is not giving a thumbs down emoji right there. But like, I feel that you know, no single blockchain can optimally
serve every single use case, like the flexibility of having different different ecosystems is kind
of what makes the space great. So you know, we're definitely like the opposite end of the spectrum.
So, you know, we're definitely like the opposite end of the spectrum.
Very anti-maximalists.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And just please don't molest anyone until after the show, but feel free to after the show.
Let's bring up Sal, someone I've known for a while.
How's it going, Sal?
What's up, guys?
What's up, Joel?
Thanks for putting this together, man.
Some great speakers here.
This is going to be a good one.
But yeah, I'm Sal Mayweather.
I am the founder of Agoristics, which has a host of e-commerce companies and social media projects designed to push Sam Konkin's version of anarchism.
I'm probably best known as an anti-maximalist, but my position is a little bit more convoluted than that.
probably best known as an anti-maximalist but my position is a little bit more convoluted than that
like i do believe in a diverse ecosystem but i also believe that like at the end of the day there
will be one sort of uh one cryptocurrency that becomes true money um and i base all that on
austrian economics we can get into that but that's just a little bit of my position who i am
economics we can get into that but that's just a little bit my position who I am
excellent well let's move on then to I believe Kurt is the last one who has
introduced himself here known Kurt for a long time how's it going man yeah that
that sounds about right what's up so you know I might be the only person on here
who knows that you prefer to pronounce your name Joel.
So I will say thank you to Joel.
It's half and half. It's like my name has been 51% attacked, honestly.
There you go. So, yeah, no, good to be here.
I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012.
I've been running mining infrastructure, node infrastructure and stuff since 2013.
My background is cybersecurity, IT, general entrepreneurship. I do call myself the first
full-time Bitcoin historian as I spent a lot of time ingesting all the history of Satoshi and Bitcoin and also the predicate technologies and ideas that went into creating Bitcoin.
I'm also sort of a general purpose historian on both technology, money and culture.
And I am the co-founder of a mining operation called Gorilla Pool and offer hosting service for anybody that wants to host
any kind of ASICs or GPU or anything like that, but primarily focused on SHA-256 and as well as
R&D on scaling Bitcoin stuff. So kind of a lot of things. I am sort of pragmatic as it comes to
multi-chain. Obviously, there's lots of people doing lots of stuff on
lots of chains. So to say like multi-chain doesn't work, I think is a, is a silly place to be. But
I also think that that tends to toward like a, the reason that's the case is that ultimately
maximalism led to eliminating use cases from Bitcoin early on. Really, I think
almost everybody was a maximalist until the block size war really kicked off. Basically, anything
that you could do on any blockchain was possible on Bitcoin until the Bitcoin core devs decided that
it was not going to be possible anymore, started removing features, started limiting capacity,
limiting how many things could be done per transaction and per block and lots of other
things. So as Bitcoin became more and more restricted, things like Ethereum started to
become very interesting. And then Ethereum went through a similar process of, hey, Ethereum's
not really good for all of these things either. And that's why we have a Solana ecosystem and lots of other things.
And so I think as the space matures,
I think we will trend back toward whichever chain
is the most useful and the most scalable.
But I think that could be a very long journey.
So that's my take.
All right, perfect.
Yeah, it's definitely enough fodder for the spice here.
So now that we've kind of introduced everyone, basically there, there is no hard and fast
format here. I will do sort of like a interview panel style, ask people questions, a thought
provoking thing, go one by one until we get some chaos going. If we get some chaos,
then we just let it go where it goes. And be, you know, I would say be minimally respectful,
but feel free to get all spicy in here. So the basic conversation starting point on this thing
is just the idea of will one chain rule them all in the end or will we have many that
end up working out and end up being kind of having the major mind share and market share
of the space and just open-ended explain your point make some arguments of someone raise their
hand just so we can go by the most willing rather than the just subject someone to a victim
style to this oh we got sal all right sal go ahead so i think that like there's going to be
different use cases for different coins and there will always be a multitude of coins but uh you
know in misis ludwig von misis in his The Theory of Money and Credit, he says that, you know, a unified market will ultimately narrow itself down to just one or two monetary commodities.
So like that happens through the competition process, though.
So there's going to be a shit ton of coins all competing for that one sort of for that throne.
And again, a unified market will sort of narrow
itself down to only one of those exists and uh you know that's what happened in history with
gold and silver and i think that's going to happen with cryptocurrencies again there's going to be
other use cases there'll be other coins out there doing different ship but as far as like a money
goes i think at the end of the day and it's know, we're obviously a long way from that, but at the end of the day, there will be one cryptocurrency that sort of becomes the
generally accepted medium of exchange. What's your percent likelihood that that is Bitcoin?
Zero. Zero. It doesn't really, it doesn't really function as a medium of exchange um even now so i couldn't
imagine it functioning as a medium exchange in the future i'm assuming you're talking about btc
of course i think big block coins have a much greater chance of that happening but
you know it's it's it's really just speculation at this point who knows there could be a coin
that comes along next year that sort of does all kinds of crazy shit.
Right now, I'm really excited about Zeno because it's sort of, Joel and I were speaking about this a couple of weeks ago, and he said it sort of checks all the boxes.
So, you know, who knows what this conversation will be like in a couple of years.
But I don't think it's going to be BTC Bitcoin right now.
Well, it literally can't be, right?
The capacity just isn't there for what people claim.
If I may, I'm sorry.
Yeah, go for it.
Absolutely.
Next person.
So I would like to sketch this out a little bit because I think there's a number of different ideas flying around.
and I have a very specific thesis
And I have a very specific thesis when it comes to these things as well.
when it comes to these things as well.
And I think one thing that I hear,
so I'll start off by saying what I expect
over the long run,
like kind of your final state, right?
I would expect there to be maybe five to 10
dominant, say, layer one blockchains,
but that the number one chain
would then gain the lion's share,
like 80% plus of the usage and market.
And we pretty much see that today already.
Like something like Solana already has 80% of the usage almost, right, of the entire blockchain space combined.
So like, and that's a phenomena we saw before in Ethereum as well.
And I think that's because of the way composability works and DeFi, et cetera.
I think composability and having DeFi, et cetera.
I think composability and having a single composable state is very important.
I'm not convinced when it comes to crypto as money, though, and as payment,
because, like, Sal, like, the theories that you're talking about,
like, when it comes to, like, Austrian economics,
I'm not sure if they fully took some of the possibilities of digital into account. The fact that, you know, theoretically and technically, I could just buy my coffees with Apple stocks if I wanted to,
I think that should change the theories around a little bit more. Now, a really important thing,
another really important point, and then maybe if Sal, you could respond to that as well, but
another really important point I want to make in all of this, I hear people say this all the
freaking time, and I think it's flat out wrong. People say that we need different blockchains for different use cases that we need
because of trade-offs. And it's just, as a technologist, as a crypto researcher, I think
that's flat out wrong. Like, if I think of like an ideal design in my mind in terms of highly scalable,
programmable, et cetera, right?
Like, I will ask anyone here, I will challenge anyone here to find a single use case that does not excel on that blockchain.
I think there is one competitive space for blockchains that all blockchains need to compete
into, which is why I also don't believe that BTC can ever serve this function, because
if you put it into the same category as all other blockchains, it fails miserably, objectively so, empirically so.
So that's really where I'm of the position that, yes, we will have many blockchains,
there will be a dominant one, but that dominant chain will also change over time, right? So this
is far from a maximalist vision of the future, even though it certainly
does balance a lot of FET protocol thesis into the equation as well, as you can tell.
So my final position is a bit more nuanced in that regard.
So Sal, you want to respond to that real quick and then we go to someone else?
we can't hear you so maybe you're muted now he unmuted and mute his muted self maybe just
wanted to protest silence i'll hop i'll hop in while uh sound gets his microphone figured out
um i i think yeah i i think that's very, very obviously the case. I mean, it's the way
that technology is adopted for our entire lives. And it's any tech, it's analog tech, it is digital
tech, it's communication tech, it's fintech. It's always that same thing. It is whatever becomes the
most useful for the most amount of people becomes highly dominant. And then there's always other things that people use in niches.
And I like to make the example about Bitcoin in regards to pirate radio. There is a very
pirate radio ethos, the sort of cypherpunk ethos that gets applied to BTC and this notion that
everybody needs to run their own node and all that kind of thing but that makes the system inherently uh unscalable which has its own like it has its own romanticism about
it just like pirate radio does like yeah people can only listen to my my nonsense for 15 miles
but i can say anything i want i'm completely free and like that that is cool for what it is but
you're never going to compete with like
AM, FM, and then ultimately the internet and the other technologies, satellite technology
that made all of these things, uh, end up being that much more interesting and useful
for, for that many more people.
Now, obviously there's a trade-off.
The trade-off is, well, you're FCC regulated and you can't talk about, uh, you know, you
can't talk about absolutely anything over the air that is controlled by other people.
And so there is a weird trade-off there.
But ultimately, if we're trying to disrupt both money, finance, banking, payments, and communications with this technology, then, well, you know, you need to put your best foot forward.
I think in a lot of ways, you know, the black size war was people trying to figure out initially
what that best foot was. And then it just became so toxic with people who have an almost entirely
political position without anything like any thought going into like business.
I think there are very, very, very few business strategists that have been involved in the
blockchain space since day one.
And an unnecessarily large dose of politics being the filter through which everything
came initially.
And I think that that has turned everything into the way that it looks today,
which is ultimately highly confused. And to Justin's point, we don't need 20,000 blockchains
or 50,000 blockchains. I'd argue we probably don't even need five or six. Truly, we need
whichever one can do the most things for the most people. And to back up
my original point, I think we will trend back toward maximalism, toward whatever that thing is.
Very nice. Can I jump in on this? Yes. And then let's go to Aaron Day,
because he couldn't speak before. He just popped in. Yeah, no problem.
So I'm going to come at it from a different angle, a little bit different angle, I guess.
Being a UI UX designer, I'm going to come at it from a user experience.
I agree with Justin that there's going to be multiple chains that are going to thrive and survive.
survive. But in reality, we all need to come together and create a unified chain experience
for the end user. Because in reality, the user doesn't care what chain they're on.
They just want to know whatever product or service that they're using is going to get them from point
A to point B. And so I use the analogy of a car, right? People get into a car. There's certain drivers that
only know that if they stick the key in the ignition, turn the ignition on, turn the engine
on, they're going to get from point A to point B. But then you're going to have the ones that
are car enthusiasts that love to tear down their car completely, you know, have it spread out
across their garage floor because they know exactly what little part
does. But the interesting thing about that is that if you're a car enthusiast, you know that some
Jaguar parts can actually fit into a Ford and some McLaren parts are actually VW parts and
no one cares. All they look at is just, I'm driving a freaking McLaren,
right? And so that's the ethos of what L1X is all about is it's like, yes, we are a layer one
blockchain. We're not out there to become the number one go-to chain. We're the ones that are
acting as the universal translator between all of these, being able to bring it together
because of our interoperability technology that we have.
Because as it was mentioned earlier,
we definitely believe in custodial rights
to the user being able to own their assets,
own their data, own everything across the board,
even when transacting across chain, right?
And so for us, the way that we've got some things set up is that we're introducing quantum
resistance security into our interoperability play, which will make it even more secure,
even more faster. And that way you can move not only assets, but you can also move data and logic cross-chain, basically unifying into that one chain experience of what the end user wants, not necessarily what we're all grappling about with trying to figure out who's going to become that top chain in the future.
Interesting. Aaron, do you want to pipe in, but also give your intro about
who you are, what you think about maximalism versus not?
I'm sure. I'm Aaron Day. I wear a variety of hats right now. I run the Daylight Freedom Foundation,
which is a 501c3 that's predominantly trying to educate people on the perils of central bank
digital currencies, but then also working on kind of a whole variety of other things. And I'm a serial entrepreneur, been involved in a number of
different crypto projects. And right now I'm really focused on, I wouldn't say I'm a maximalist,
but really tuned into privacy coins, because if we're going to defeat the threat of CBDCs,
which is all about surveillance, The way to do that is through
privacy coins and privacy tokens. And like Sal, I've become incredibly fascinated by and have
gotten involved with Zeno. I'm a freedom maximalist, which means, at least in my opinion,
that that means that I'm not a single coin maximalist at all. I'm definitely for multiple chains. And on this front, I think that the only way we end up with one global currency is probably if it's a global CBDC that ends up being backed by energy credits, which is what the technocrats are pushing for. In fact, if you follow what's going on with CBDCs, you actually
have various countries working on building out CBDCs, but then creating things like regulated
liability networks where the CBDCs interconnect, and we're moving towards a place where if their
model holds true, all digital assets will be tokenized, and CBDCs are a form of tokenized assets. It's tokenized money and all of
these things will settle on one global platform. So I think it's not going to be Bitcoin. It's not
going to be any of the projects we're working on under that model. It's going to be something that
allows central control and central surveillance. As to if that vision doesn't hold and we're successful with market-based approaches,
I think there will likely be multiple currencies for payments and for tokens.
And even if you look at fiat currency, today there are 180, I believe, fiat currencies.
And so there's actually been an increase in the number of fiat currencies.
And so while there may be a global reserve currency, which right now is the dollar and
previously was the pound, historically, if you look at the last five global reserve currencies,
they only lasted for, I believe it was something like 84 years. So whatever happens, I don't think
there'll be one chain to rule them all. Maybe there'll be a couple that are dominant, but innovation is innovation.
And so they probably won't retain that dominant position forever.
Interesting.
Let me see.
Let me hit on Boreswap.
I've seen your hand up for a little while.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, this is an interesting topic because we break it down
a little bit um i think sometimes people interpret it as either you know one one chain to rule them
all or one coin to rule them all right um i mean i like if it's my personal portfolio i would say
definitely i'm more maxi for Bitcoin.
But I think that's just looking at on a long enough time frame, right?
You know, the market cycles
have always been, you know,
Bitcoin dominance goes up
and then liquidity starts flowing
back and forth
depending on the market conditions.
And I think sometimes
people interpret, you know,
that question like very differently,
even just for responses from our guest speakers so far, right?
Some of us value freedom, some of us value custody,
some of us value the tech and what you're able to do with it.
So I think, yeah, I think obviously there wouldn't be a one-size-fits-all
because simply people use blockchains for different purposes
or they hold coins for different purposes.
In fact, I see more like app chains in the future
that might not even have their own token, right?
This is where the kind of like layer twos and such comes from, right?
It's more application-focused.
focus that's really drilling down to trying to solve
That's really drilling down to trying to solve like one specific problem, perhaps.
one specific problem perhaps.
I remember
I was in a conference
like a blockchain expo
slash tech event in
Japan last year and talking with
a lot of the
exhibitors there
I was really fascinated by the fact
that they actually
talk about blockchain as in the tech,
as opposed to what we're talking about, like Bitcoin and all these things.
So a lot of the projects are even just kind of like,
oh, I can build a blockchain for you, but it's centralized.
I'm managing it for you and you can trust us.
So sometimes it's easy to forget that blockchain technology itself exists outside of tokens and coins.
Because I have enough Bitcoin Maxi friends who, if you talk about everything else, it's just Bitcoin and shitcoins.
Because they're evaluating this question based on a store of value.
And anything that could potentially be more volatile is seen as a shitcoin.
that could potentially be more volatile is seen as a shitcoin.
And obviously, I think Bitcoin has had enough history
to be able to, it's moved on past the point of having 90% drawdowns.
Because if you evaluate currently,
I think most chains and most tokens have the potential of 90% drawdown
if suddenly the market condition changed.
So I think it's a bit of an unfair to assess
whether a token or chain
should should exist or not because of price action um i think the the space you know there is
obviously a culture of self-custody freedom but also there is a culture of building there's a
culture of um innovation and there's always going to be people in the space who are like i can do it
better right so they're going to build new projects They're going to build new chains and try new things.
And people will want to speculate. They want to join in on day one. They want to
see their efforts being rewarded. So I think that will never change and we'll still see more
chains and new, more tokens and what have you. But yeah, I mean, in terms of market cap, I definitely see Bitcoin still being there
as the number one.
And depending on my contentions,
I kind of think that's what keeps the whole ecosystem
kind of float as well,
because the liquidity goes back and forth, right?
And obviously as a multi-chain, cross-chain platform,
that's always been our focus is like Bitcoin to anything
and anything to Bitcoin. So we kind of
serve both sides of the user base
and we definitely see people who are
more multi-chain kind of perspective.
They move their assets
between Bitcoin and other
chains, new ones as well
as old ones. So yeah, that's
just a bit of my perspective on it.
Yeah, so I'd go to HPain next
unless someone has like a,
whoa, whoa, wait, I really need to get in on this.
I do.
Yes, Justin.
I do really want to get in on this.
So first of all, you said that BTC
does can't have a 90% drawdown.
I would really strongly disagree.
I think all cryptocurrencies or assets,
I mean, you don't know what's going to happen in the world.
A lot of these things could draw down 90%,
especially cryptocurrency.
And I think it's a bit long to say that BTC
is somehow exempt from this.
Well, it's the most resistant.
That's not debatable.
But it also has the worst fundamentals
from my perspective, right?
So if I only looked at past price performance, then yeah, Bitcoin's the best thing ever, right?
But if I looked at fundamentals and I actually evaluated it based on its own merits, from my perspective, BTC is the worst.
And I would even consider it dangerous considering, you know, the problems with the security model, et cetera, right?
So my perspective is obviously very different from yours.
But what I really wanted to ask you actually directly is you said different blockchains
for different use cases.
Now, when it comes to applications, like I agree with you 100%.
We need tokens for different DeFi protocols and et cetera for dApps.
We are investors in DeFi protocols, so I'm 100% on board with that.
But when it comes to a layer one, right, when I really think about the design and the trade-off space of a layer one, when it comes to providing decentralized, fast, cheap, and secure block space, I really don't see the trade-offs in between use cases. It seems to me that it's only one blockchain,
and I'm not a maximalist,
but it seems to me that, like Kurt said,
that one blockchain, one layer one,
can actually do it all.
And actually that that blockchain that does it all
is actually the most superior design
from pretty much almost every perspective,
including decentralization and security,
which I'm sure as a bitcoin is we we
would take that but yeah sorry i'll give you a chance to respond yeah absolutely um actually the
part about no bitcoin not being able to have neighbors in drawdowns is just that that's purely
me speaking from a uh putting my big like a like you know interpretation of bitcoin maxi's perspective
um i literally had a friend um stay over with me for about a week.
And he's one of the, I wouldn't name him.
He's a very big Bitcoin podcaster.
So we have this debate, right?
And every time we talk about anything other than Bitcoin,
he's just like, oh, he just calls it shitcoiners, right?
Shitcoins.
So I'm kind of just delving into what drives that mindset.
And obviously an easy reason for it is,
you know,
like,
your token is,
yeah.
You know,
a lot of people lost money on it.
Like it's all speculation,
you know,
and all of that.
So I think this is kind of the modern day,
like a lot of us driving that because it's easy to sort of point to any other coin.
But they're not really arguing.
It's like,
ha ha,
ha ha.
Like we're not really talking about usage and utility
and revenue and security
and trade-offs in the technology.
This is just like rhetoric,
like laughing at the other tribe kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
Well, you, I think, are trying to exclude
the amount of money and assets in the world
that have
flowed into Bitcoin because people believe that they can store their value
there and have a better result than all these other things.
And it's the,
the speed it's growing compared to any other coin.
I think that is utility knowledge.
I'm the contrarian here,
but I'm the contrarian saying the majority is.
I think everyone here actually is mostly on the same page with you, actually.
I think the majority here.
This is a very special problem, to be fair, but I love you guys.
Real quick, I think there's actually a bigger point to be made.
I think if you focus on cryptocurrency markets, it ignores the fact that nothing has been an asymmetric store of value under pressure since probably the Cypriot banking crisis.
Like that was the last time Bitcoin severely outperformed any macroeconomic event.
And that ultimately since then, we have seen things like even just the last year or so, like Bitcoin has been outperformed by gold and silver because, and silver because the things that Bitcoin maximalists talk about specifically is like the Gresham's Law and Lindy effect and all these broad economic on that principle, but they're wrong on the fact
that they think that BTC is that thing,
which is why amid all this crazy market volatility
and stuff that we've seen,
especially just the last week or so,
that things like gold,
ultimately the people that actually matter
and that actually hold all the big, big, big value
in the world.
That value is trending toward much older assets that Lindy effect and Gresham's Law talk a lot
about, well, the thing that's been around and unchanged the longest is going to absorb capital
under pressure. Bitcoin's been around for 15 years. BTC in its last major iteration, probably the last
major upgrade was the Taproot upgrade. And that was what, five years ago. And so you get these like bizarre technologists
talking about like, yeah, man, price performance and price history and all these things. And we're
talking about an asset that comes from the early 2000 or the mid early 2000s. That's not enough
provenance to mean anything to real capital and sovereign wealth. But the value is that it doesn't change.
That is part of its feature, right?
That's not the bug.
That's the feature.
Yeah, but it does.
My point is that it is resistant to change.
So my point is that the upgrade taproot is evidence that it is.
I agree.
A hard money does not and cannot change, whereas BTC changes as part of a quorum all the time i mean
you can talk about like the addition of things like but that kind of contradicts what you just
said you said it last update was five years ago and you said that as if it's a bad thing and now
you're saying it changes all the time like it radically changed it changed its entire vision
economics and purpose by not increasing the block size limit, right?
I mean, the hiding behind-
By not changing, it changed.
And that's a semantic trick to hide behind that, right?
Because it was always the intention
to increase the block size.
So by not doing that, you're radically changing the plan
and the design of Bitcoin, absolutely.
And that shows that, no,
this whole idea that Bitcoin doesn't change,
it doesn't change based on what?
Because what?
Bitcoin Core has like dominates for a single client implementation because there's no…
And the nodes.
And the nodes.
Oli could take this one maybe.
Who blocked SegWit2x?
The core developers did in combination with conspiring with the exchanges.
It had nothing to do with running for nodes.
No, the exchanges broadly supported 2x. the exchanges. It had nothing to do with running 4-0. No, the exchanges broadly supported 2X.
The exchanges.
They all signed in New York the agreement
saying we're going to change.
The exchanges swept around the tickers, right?
If the big block side was called BTC
and the small block side was...
I think Coinbase did that, didn't it?
No, they didn't.
If that happened,
then guess what would be the dominant chain today?
You know, this is a very...
What did they list Bitcoin on Coinbase as
when the fork happened?
They first, they put,
they certainly put Bitcoin Cash above Bitcoin.
They definitely did that.
And I think, I don't remember what they put for naming.
Someone remember?
I think you're recalling the controversy
about Bitcoin.com.
Coinbase never was playing that kind of semantic game
with naming and
tickers but the the they definitely put bitcoin cash above bitcoin when you looked at the list
of currencies bitcoin cash was the top one which is a clear we know what they were doing and also
about that time the majority of businesses supported big of the bigger block size the
majority of like stake when there was voting support the bigger block size seemed to me that especially at the beginning of the debate the majority of stake when there was voting supported the bigger block size.
It seemed to me that, especially at the beginning of the debate, the majority of users supported
too. And guess what? The core developers still got their way. There isn't a better example of
centralized control, right? The nodes were involved in this decision too. I think you're
saying the businesses. I mean, the businesses, that's the beauty of it,
that the nodes were able to resist the businesses and the miners.
I honestly believe I have the utmost respect for you,
but I really think that's BS. Because do you understand how trivial it is for me to spin up 20,000 nodes?
Like, there is no simple resistance there.
Node counts are completely meaningless in the context of a consensus algorithm.
And look, I appreciate
the ability to run a node and disagree with the rule set, but that's not really what's driving
these movements here, right? If we're really being honest about the power relationships and
the balance of power and influence. I mean, I don't know. You had miners, the biggest miners,
the biggest businesses, the biggest exchanges all signed the New York
agreement and we blocked it. No, the core developers blocked it. That's beautiful.
You don't know that. That is the misnomer. You're saying the people blocked it. No BS.
The core developers refused to include it in their code. That's what happened. And now they
control. Now they completely dominate that client's implementation. It is perverted. It is corrupt.
It is an extreme form of centralization
within BTC decision-making. So this whole idea, like it won't change. No, they can,
it's not that it won't change. They can even push through controversial changes like RBF.
They pushed full RBF after they pushed Taproot, if I remember this correctly. And that was one
hell of a controversial change. Like what the hell? Like, no, Bitcoin. No, no, the way you ensure the integrity of a blockchain and you, and you, and actually
Kurt will disagree with me on this one, but we agree on anything else.
But the way, but the way you secure a blockchain, like long, actually, actually me and Kurt
can agree.
His way of solving this problem is having a blockchain that never changes.
Am I correct in steel manning you there, Kurt?
Yeah.
Yes.
And my solution to the problem is actually stakeholder governance.
I actually think then you should have incentive and you have stake driving things instead of a freaking cartel that is probably controlled by some shadow rulers in the form of a get-up.
A cartel that essentially acts, if you want to call it that, I think there's some truth to that, but that
effectively acts as a check and balance to gridlock the system. So you can't change.
And I personally think that's a good thing. I think the more ways we have to block Bitcoin
from being upgraded, the better. It's like the US, you know, that's why the US was so beautiful.
We created this Senate and House of Representatives and the Supreme Court and the presidency.
And they just block the fuck out of each other usually.
No, no, no, no.
Because what you're describing is a dictatorship.
And you're saying the dictatorship is good because I like what they're doing and they're going to block changes I don't like, right?
I didn't say that, but you could look at it like that.
That's how you're describing it.
But I see what you're saying.
Chicks and balances would be what I'm describing.
Stakeholders, you know, voting systems, quororums all of this kind of stuff right like checks and
balances like actually designing in supreme court type mechanism but but the concept i i agree the
con the concept is that unless you get the miners the businesses the nodes the community sentiment
on reddit and other places where you may
have said you know there was censorship and there was uh but if you get the community the nodes
the miners everyone they all have to agree you need a super super majority you need like a 90
super ultra majority to make any changes i like that i think that's a good thing that's like the
constant it's like if you want to change
the Constitution, you better have
some serious fucking support.
I'm missing my point. Core can make controversial changes
when they want to. No, they can't.
Not without support of everyone else.
What about IBF?
Isn't that an example of a
controversial change?
I don't know. I don't remember the history
enough on it. The problem is
that there's a technical barrier here. And, and this is,
this is a thing that plays out in, in the government too. Like when you get up to things
like, you know, climate policy and things like that and say, well, yeah, we understand that
everybody wants the world to look like this, but, but we have science on our side and we have to
trust the science because the scientists are all professionals that understand things at a level that nobody else can.
It's the exact same ethos that goes into, hey, there's just not a lot of people that can code in C++ and understand code deeply and also understand the economics of the system.
And so, again, it turns into we have to trust the science and the core developers are the scientists.
And they have their own layers of things. Like when people say that there's a robust debate at Bitcoin Core, it ignores the fact that for most of its history, and this has actually changed very, very recently, but there was a single BIP editor.
And what the editor does is he's the person that looks at every proposal made in private, and then he allows whichever ones he decides to be viewed publicly for debate in GitHub, for example.
And that person was Luke Dasher.
He's in South Florida.
He's the smallest of the small blockers.
He's Mr. 300 kilobytes and one of the partners at Ocean Pool today.
But he is the person who was the first filter.
And so you had the most extreme small blocker was your first filter.
So the only things anybody ever saw
debated in GitHub, they had to go through his filter first. And then from there, then you had
to get past the group of maintainers, which is five or six people. I think it's been as many as
nine at certain points. But again, you're talking about a very small like as small as the supreme court before
there can be a general purpose vote or anyone can put something out on any forum to be discussed
and if it was strong enough there would be the community would that's also not really true for
most of the you were allowed to do that as long as you could get it past the two moderators on
reddit also which we now know like looking back at the history,
guys like Thamos, if you were discussing any other implementation of Bitcoin other than Bitcoin core,
you were called a shit coiner and banned from our Bitcoin and all these other places where
these conversations were happening. So it's like to say there was a robust place for open
communication about what Bitcoin should be is abjectly and provably false.
And then where things have gone since then, it really is just, well, if the reference client
is run by 98% of all nodes on the system, then there is no practical resistance. I mean, this
is like presidential elections in North Korea and saying, well, yeah, I mean, the people voted for
it. Like, look, everybody loves Dear Leader. And it's because there cannot be any practical resistance to the regime.
Look at how controversial it was.
It caused, I mean, it was a civil war.
There's still animosity today on this call about it, right?
It was such a heated discussion.
I mean, it was my life mission for a while to fight on the side of small blocks. I got a t-shirt made that says, you know, be cash, be trash back in the day. And my whole team was wearing them to conferences. I mean, look, it was, and I look back and go, maybe we shouldn't have been so aggressive towards each other. But the fact is it was controversial. And so it didn't go through. That's the point. You can argue about why it didn't go through
and is there a cartel.
You have some fair points completely.
But at the end of the day,
the fact is it didn't go through
and things only go through on Bitcoin
if they are unanimous by like every party involved
has to be in agreement.
If it's controversial, it's just not happening,
even if it's a good upgrade.
And let me ask you,
now let me ask a question.
Let me ask a question.
Well, the fact that everybody,
real quick,
the fact that all opposition
was culled before the real vote,
as it were, could happen,
it makes that completely irrelevant,
especially after the post-2017 era.
Everything that's happened in Bitcoin,
like Bitcoin Core since then,
has been just a rubber stamp
of the same core group of survivors. I mean, we're literally talking about like Bitcoin core since then has been just a rubber stamp of,
of the same core group of survivors. I mean, it's,
we're literally talking about, you know,
the people who conquered the system now congratulating each other every time they come up with a new brilliant idea that everybody hit Carissa on.
But none of them go through. I mean, but anyways, okay,
let me ask a question though.
We may just may just add to that. That's a really good one.
Cause I wanted to touch on demographics a little bit. Like that's part of the reason why i don't have a lot
of hope for bitcoin changing before it's too late right is because what happened is myself included
and kurt included like me and kurt are both and a bunch of other people here or old school bitcoiners
right like i'm from the school of 2013 myself so we were like Bitcoiners, love Bitcoin. We're in the movement. We can dedicate
it. Right. So like, like, so like for a lot of us, sorry, go ahead and make your point.
I got distracted. No, no worries. So this is, this is my question is, and my thesis is that
countries will start trading in Bitcoin because it's the only option they have for cross-border settlement between assets that all countries can trust is neutral enough, won't change enough, won't freeze their assets, won't seize their assets that someone in North Korea can transact with someone in Russia or the US or wherever without some king or benevolent leader,
charismatic leader making changes or blocking things. And there's nothing else that can do
that right now. Is there any, give me another coin that could be used for this. Okay, give me
another coin to name a specific coin. You can objectively measure the security budget of a
blockchain, right? You can actually actually look and understand the censorship resistance qualities of a blockchain.
I think that I respect what you're saying.
I really do.
And I really believe in what you're saying as well.
And I just don't think that if you look at it objectively, empirically, that BTC is the best to achieve those objectives.
What is?
Far from it even.
Give me one.
Hundreds of examples.
Name one.
Well, Ethereum, for example, I don't support Ethereum, but I'm just going to name it as an
example.
I would argue that Ethereum is more secure than Bitcoin right now.
That the cost to it.
No, I'm not asking that.
I'm asking would Russia transact with ukraine people in russia or a
russian government transact with someone in ukraine or north korea with with with that
ethereum blocked half of the tornado cash this is actually this is this is again observable so i i
work in the mining space and i'll tell you right now that when we buy you know we're placing a five hundred thousand
dollar order with china they don't want btc they actually prefer tether because for them doing
liquid cross-border payments uh using tether is is much more simple for them because uh of
liquidity period and the other issue is that that's that's a that's a fair argument and that's i
think tether tether has a possibility but the problem with tether is is it's backed by the u.s
dollar and these countries don't want to be supporting the u.s dollar china is now selling
more so it's not right they don't want to support the dollar system they want to they want to use
something that does not support the u.s they want to get away from the u.s that's what bricks did
create stable coins of another.
Correct.
Well, and Tether also offers services.
It's not trivial.
It is not.
It is not trivial at all.
Why aren't there any that are getting any dominance?
ETC technologically cannot support a large stable coin ecosystem, right?
At least not on chain.
Like, that's why the future-
Well, Lightning Network just enabled Tether.
Really?
Yeah, Lightning Network. Don Tether. Really? Yeah, Lightning Network.
Don't even get me started.
You can read half a dozen papers from half a dozen universities about the ways to civil attack and time warp attack and all kinds of things on Lightning Network.
And it's still growing.
And still getting adoption.
Popularity is by no means an indication of something's usefulness.
I don't think it's that popular, but it's getting used to it.
I agree with Kurt, but the numbers are pathetic in the context of the kind of...
It's a 10-year-old proposal that was supposed to make all other blockchains irrelevant.
And it has the adoption of...
I don't even know.
I don't even know that it has the adoption of a top 100 cryptocurrency, which, you know, among cryptocurrencies is also extremely illiquid
relative to global markets. So if we're talking about... I actually looked into that today,
by the way, let me just give the data point, because I did look it up like an hour ago,
actually. Lightning network channels and nodes, et cetera, are at a four-year low, I believe, right now.
And liquidity is kind of trending downwards as well,
even in BTC terms, just the last few months at least.
So just kind of interesting thing to think about.
That's not the charts I'm looking at.
You want to send a link or something?
Yeah, let me link to the post,
and then it's bitcoinvisuals.com.
Before I give you more of a hard time work, I just want to say I really have a lot of respect for you coming into this call because a lot of people have a different viewpoint than yours here.
So I really think you're doing great and I really respect you here.
And I appreciate it.
I mean, if you weren't here, it would become a really boring, much more boring conversation.
By the way, it's's funny i really appreciate that man
and i do respect you too i respect everyone here honestly you guys some of some of you know probably
know parts of bitcoin history better than myself as the kind of supposed to be maxi on the call
but i do want to say uh thanks nicole i think she brought me uh here as like to be the maxi guy which
is funny because when i'm in uh you know any bitcoin
you know shit they're like this guy's a shit coin or building polygon and ethereum shit right
can't even talk to us right they instantly explode you know i mean i just think we did
we did a terrible job at getting a maxi on the show. I mean, I'll take that side for this show.
So I actually tried my best, but a lot of people actually had blocked me or refused to come on.
The ones that I did know, as far as BTC maxis at least, refused to come on or didn't answer me. So
I did my best. I'm actually here. Sorry, Rock. Hey. Hey. I actually have to tell you that you are needed elsewhere and you have to leave right now.
It's urgent.
Oh, shit.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, sorry.
He's basically, the Liquid Corps team decided he couldn't do this anymore.
No, no.
Luke Jr.
Luke Jr. censored him from this space.
John Dillon's back your light your lightning channels have all been revoked sorry rock who do i talk to about this nicole is it is it really super i'm really enjoying this call it is
a sales call and it's the person who you need to talk to about it is. I see the message. Yeah.
Yeah.
I'll try to come back guys.
I'll try to come back quickly.
As a final thought,
if you don't come back,
look into RBF and some of the politics found segway.
I think those are two counter examples in terms of controversial changes.
Anyway,
that was great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to try to come back guys.
I really am.
I want to continue this.
This is,
this is my favorite like kind of thing to talk about. I on a lot of spaces and this is like you know a really fun
conversation okay see you guys thanks cheers so before we all carry on h pain do you have anything
that's current on this thing to talk about um just i didn't want to leave you kind of unread
for so long totally on this specific conversation, I didn't wanna jump in.
It was actually, if we zoom back out like another 30 minutes
when I think it was the person from layer one X was talking,
right?
I just have some more add-ons for that,
but I don't wanna disrupt you guys going at it
at each other's throats.
It's quite entertaining.
I can share those comments, but I also don't wanna like. So I would just say, why don't you share those comments?
Because it seems like the main counterbalance in that argument is dipped out briefly.
So we'll get back to fighting when he's back.
Why don't you just say what you're going to say?
Sweet.
Yeah, I guess I, as, as the marketer in the, in the room, like I think a lot about like
the end user and talk a lot about... It's so funny in this conversation.
I think the person...
I'm so sorry, I don't remember your name.
The person speaking on behalf of Layer 1X was talking about cars, right?
There's a lot of people who just want to fucking take the key, put it in the car, turn the car on.
They know it's always going to turn on.
They know how to drive the car from point A to point B.
It serves a function.
And they don't really care.
They could be like, I could drive a Toyota.
I could drive a Honda.
I could drive a Maserati. they don't really care. Like they could be like, I could drive a Toyota. I could drive a Honda. I could drive a Maserati.
I don't care.
All they care is that they can just do the thing they need to do, which is transport
themselves somewhere.
And so I think the future of, you know, this idea of like one chain rule at all versus,
you know, multi-chain, I think whatever it's going to be is it's going to feel like one
chain or it's going to feel like one unified experience.
It's going to feel anything.
Maybe Thor's office alluding to the list.
It'll feel seamless, right? It'll feel like a one click
experience, but they might be using Bitcoin. They might be using base. They might be using
whatever to settle how they want to do these payments and they won't know and they won't care.
And a lot of these people that I found, the same thing with decentralization and privacy. I'm a huge
privacy advocate. I'm a huge decentralization maxi, more so than anything. And I found just talking to users, right?
A lot of people don't care, which is really crazy.
Like I came into Shapeshift from, yeah, decentralization, no KYC, private,
you know, no tracking.
This is awesome.
You know, run your own nodes, blah, blah, blah, GitHub.
Users don't care, right?
Which is crazy.
And the users who do care, it's like the 10% of the users who do come through
user app are like, it means a lot to them.
And because of that, we'll continue to offering those services.
Oh, that was accidental. I just thought. Damn. I got the rambling mute. No, no, no. I was rambling.
Welcome to our, welcome to our Bitcoin. Okay.
Oh, there.
Rock's back.
Hey, Rugg, did you have any continuation of your thought that you wanted to kind of get to now that you've popped in back?
Yeah, I brought a friend. If you guys know Yago from Bitcoin OS, he's really a brilliant mind in the space.
And I think brings up.
Yago has been inspiring as of recently, actually.
You've been what?
Me and Yago have been sparring these last two weeks.
Right, Yago?
Sparring?
Sparring.
Oh, sparring.
Perfect.
It's a sexual thing.
Touching tips.
Yago, you want to introduce yourself Yago you're still mute
okay looks like he dropped down. I don't have any...
I guess, okay, yeah, I'll just continue on it.
Just to say that I just don't see any...
I'm totally open to other options for countries to do their trade with.
And I think USDT is a reasonable one. I think it's interesting
that they're taking the stance of let's not be in the US, whereas USDC, a lot of people won't
want to use because they'll be afraid that they can be censored and they can. USDT is interesting
that they're trying to stay out of that. Even with the US supporting stablecoins, USDC still
seems to be taking the stance of we don't want to be in the
US, which does give them an edge in global adoption. It's backed by dollars largely and
bonds, but it maybe won't be as censorable. I imagine it probably will be though. If there's
sanctions, they're probably not going to want to fight the US on that, given a lot of their team, you know, US people. But yeah, that's a fair one. But I still think Bitcoin is the one that people
adopt. I think BRICS, they're trying to make their own, their stablecoin, our digital asset,
they're calling it backed by, you know, commodities like oil, gold, wheat. I think managing that
between a bunch of adversarial countries is just going to be really, really difficult and will end up with a lot of fights and arguments and issues.
Whereas they could just use Bitcoin.
It's already there.
It's easy for large amounts across border.
And it's neutral.
And the US can't censor it.
Yeah, it's funny. Every time people bring up Bricks, I have to ask everybody, how much money would you be willing to keep in a Russian bank or a Chinese bank?
And whatever that number is as a percentage of your net worth, that's how much of a chance Bricks has of being a serious contender. Like for me, that's zero. So, you know, I, I always think
the, the bricks thing is, is kind of funny because you know, those nations don't have full faith and
credit. They don't have trust, uh, among the rest of the world. They don't even actually have
internal trust largely, you know, most of the powerful people in, uh, even Russia and China
are doing their banking in other countries for, for. And then furthermore, the way they value gold and things too is also,
their gold is less pure than Western Hemisphere gold and things like that.
And it's just kind of a bunch of nonsense.
But to the thing about Tether versus Bitcoin versus anything,
it really comes down to two things.
It's liquidity and it's friction.
So, I mean, if you have a liquid asset that is low friction, then in that sense, ROC is right.
Like I think, you know, oil trade, for example, in theory could happen denominated in BTC.
But I still don't think, you know, I actually don't know how many trades occur per day that have settlement with them for oil.
But if that number is over more than, you know, tens of thousands per day, then it actually can't work for a couple of reasons.
You know, and Lightning Network doesn't work that way either because you can't have large transactions across Lightning.
So I don't think that works unless there's a fundamental change in the way
that BTC works. But again, I think it comes down to using anything. There is a value to tokens.
And this is why I think that you need a general purpose blockchain that absorbs most of the value
so that that underlying liquidity is in the base asset. And then you can have a token. This is
actually the original theory behind Tether.
A lot of people don't realize that Tether was built on top of Bitcoin circa, it might be 2014 or something like that.
I do remember that.
Omni protocol.
Yeah.
And so Omni was a way to bootstrap tokens on top of Bitcoin.
top of Bitcoin. And the idea is, is okay, if your Bitcoin is your digital gold, it absorbs value and
whatever else, then you can have these tokens that are dollars because people think denomination
and dollars. And so we let them do that. And then they can come back and essentially settle to the
Bitcoin blockchain. And that's your underlying assets, very similar to cash and gold before
before the central banking nonsense of 112 years ago.
But conceptually, that made a lot of sense.
And it made a lot of sense until the scalability issues.
And Tether was a Bitcoin maximalist organization themselves
until it became very clear that Bitcoin Core
was going to lock down the protocol
and actually remove the ability to do tokens,
first by limiting op return size and then a couple other things about
the nature of script usage and transactions.
But that's why they pursued Ethereum.
And now I think Tether is spread across at least six or seven major chains.
It might be as many as 15 or 20 at this point.
But that's also a problem.
And the people here are saying like, yeah, we're just going to
keep abstracting this stuff away and all these databases. It doesn't matter how many chains
things are on. But in reality, the really cool stuff that you can do with a blockchain,
it only really works if everything is happening on one chain, because you should be able to access
that data very trivially. And this could be things like privacy data.
So you can have a sovereign identity, and then you can have a private identity, and you can have pseudonymous identities that all can correlate to each other. And only you
can share the information that you want to share. And you can do instant commerce doing these kinds
of things. And these are the kinds of things that could have been done on Bitcoin by itself.
Now, the same thing, a lot of people talk about privacy.
A lot of people say, ah, but Bitcoin isn't private.
And that's not actually true.
So if you had a scalable functional Bitcoin in Bitcoin script, I don't think you can do
this in BTC today, but you can do this in the forks because the forks use more similar
to the original script stack is that you can create a ZK snark. You can create,
you can use things like NLock time to create an on-chain payment channel. That payment channel
can be open using things like ring signatures and confidential track transactions, very similar to
Monero. And so you can combine the value of the privacy or anonymity of things like Zcash and
Monero in creating an open contract between
people to transact in Bitcoin. Now, again, those features are gone in BTC. But again,
if we were to go back to circa 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16 Bitcoin, these are the things that we could
have been doing. And we wouldn't have to say, well, okay, I'm going to go to Monero for this,
and then I'm going to go to Zcash for this. And now, okay, I'm going to use Xano over here and
all these things. What you would have is you'd have the global liquidity of Bitcoin, that store
of value aspect of Bitcoin, but also all this privacy technology to allow yourself to do
confidential smart contracts or bootstrap operating stuff, operating system stuff,
or have your digital identity such that you can have a QR code that simply says,
hey, you're allowed to sell me a beer, but you don't have to know my home address and my blood
type or whatever else is on your ID and that kind of thing. And the fact that we've lost that
opportunity and may not ever get that back is, in my opinion, the biggest tragedy in the last 20 years of technology. But to act like, you know, maybe we can get it back. I hope we can get it back. I'm a big believer in ultimately building this technology out and showing it to people and then hoping people work their way back to it, start asking these questions, say, hey, why was this shut off?
Who shut this off?
I could be doing business just as easily in South Korea as I could be in South Carolina.
Who the hell deserves to be punished for this?
Let's bring it back.
Because ultimately, the only thing keeping these things turned off in Bitcoin Core is
a social consensus, much to what Rock was saying.
If you can get everybody, imagine everybody saying, hey, give me my features back.
That could be a revolutionary thing that ends up happening at some point in the future.
I'm not...
That's something I wanted to touch on.
Go for it.
In terms of the demographic.
Yeah, the demographic.
Sorry, I was going to say that before and I didn't get to it.
But what ended up happening, I was just saying before, like we're saying, a lot of old school Bitcoin is here.
A lot of the people that wanted to scale Bitcoin, like they've been pushed out.
Right?
Like the people that want to scale Bitcoin, they're not in Bitcoin anymore.
And the people that are fine with the status quo are still in Bitcoin.
So like who's left to push?
Who's left to attempt another revolution?
Like you have to understand,
like a lot of us here are like Mimi and Kurt included
and Rock included.
We're veterans of the block size debates, right?
Like we fought a hard war for many years.
So like, and from my perspective,
we lost that war and BHC now doesn't scale, right?
But like, you know,
the expectation that there's going to be another civil
war and you're going to win it even though the demographic shifts that happen even though today
we have solana and ethereum and all these other blockchains that are just miles ahead no i just
i just don't buy that path i mean i would like that to happen it would make things more
straightforward i could not explain to investors why like I don't even support the number one and two blockchains.
Like that's a hard conversation to have.
Honestly, like, yeah, it is.
Like, look, I'm a critic publicly, but like a lot of the professional work that I do, I'm talking to family offices and funder funds and institutionals.
I have to like explain how great crypto is, but how Bitcoin actually security budget is unknown, has no utility and it doesn't fit within my value investment thesis so like to speak to that thesis quickly again I just want to zoom out a little bit
here like what Rock was saying earlier about like oh but bricks will use it oh but the banks will
use it it's kind of this like reasoning where it's like well they use it because it's the best and
it's the best because they use it like there's a circular argument here my thesis is very
straightforward I'm saying the chain with the most usage will have the most revenue the chain with the most revenue is therefore
also the most secure and decentralized there's a virtuous cycle here in terms of how blockchain
design works so you really and this goes back to the point i made at the start of all of this as
well you can have all of this in one and the blockchain that's able to do it all in one is literally better
in every single way.
So, like, if you have blockchains that are more secure, that are faster,
that are, you know, faster, more secure, more decentralized, you know,
and cheap, why would you use the more expensive, low-capacity,
archaic dinosaur chain?
Like, why? Why dinosaur chain. Like why?
Why would these countries do that?
I think these big countries or big institutions
or big players or whatever,
I think they want to use what is most decentralized,
what is most secure, what is the most used,
what is the most established.
And over the longer run, arguably not now,
but over the longer run,
those are the blockchains with utility
because the real value and the real security and the real decentralization ultimately comes from revenue and utility because something has to pay the bill.
And whoever can pay the biggest bill is the most secure.
Can we let Yago jump in here?
Yes, real quick, Justin, regarding revenue, what are the rankings right now?
Which chain is getting the most revenue?
What are the top five?
Solana is way up by far right now.
Solana is getting like 80% of the revenue
in all blockchains.
Who else?
Who's next?
Ethereum?
Bitcoin?
Number two.
Bitcoin is not even like,
it's like way down the list.
No, it's Solana, Ethereum,
Sui.
Actually, Sui does quite a lot as well and then you go down the list it
falls off pretty quickly actually it's really solana has like 80 plus percent of the entire
market right now and almost crazy single yago that's not true hey yago do you want to introduce
yourself real quick can you guys hear me yes you want to introduce yourself real quick and then get the response yeah sure so i'm
jago uh i've been working on bitcoin since 2011 um i'm currently working on bitcoin os which is
a project to bring full programmability and scalability to bitcoin utilizing um new
cryptographic techniques primarily around zk proofs that we can now do with Bitcoin.
I have a lot to say about this, but I'll try to keep it relatively brief.
First of all, just on the facts.
So in year 2024, so the year ending in December, the 10 top blockchains combined generated $7 billion in transaction revenue.
That split up $2.8 billion on Ethereum, $2.2 billion on Tron, interestingly enough, 1.1 billion on Bitcoin and 700 million on Solana.
So those were the top four chains in terms of revenue.
Right now, those revenue numbers have collapsed significantly for all chains except for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is still trending to do about 1.2 billion this year.
Solana, as of March, is trending to do about 300 million
in transaction revenue over the course of this year
if it trends as March does.
It may do more or less, but that's the current ARR.
And, you know, this is not a new debate, but it's weird to me that very often the debate is framed in a way in which people say,
Oh, you know, Bitcoin core developers, they decided to shut down Bitcoin.
And it's presented as if, you know, just a bunch of stupid people did something really, really mysterious without delving into the question why.
What's even more interesting about it is if you just look at the sort of result, there's very good reason to think that they were right.
Bitcoin is winning on every single level in terms of its adoption as a asset.
BTC is winning.
And so then people say, sure, but as as a blockchain it can do so much less and so
the question I would ask is are we using the right terms does anyone actually want a blockchain nobody
wants a blockchain people don't use blockchains what people want is they want ownership they want assets and they want
to be able to use those assets right so what we would typically think of as like daps or
applications or smart contracts and when you actually look at the way that people use the assets
unfortunately the vast majority of people actually prefer to use them through centralized services
the one thing that they're not willing to do in a centralized way at all is the asset and so i would argue that we do know that there's
very very clear product market fit for two things right one is um uh these sort of crypto assets
the most significant being BTC
by a very, very large margin.
It's 10 times the size
of the next biggest one.
And sort of stable coins,
which is dollars.
Both of those are tokens or assets.
And so I think what we really
should be talking about
is ourselves as an ownership industry
or an asset industry,
not a blockchain industry and if
that's the case then really what matters is the reliability of those assets and the property
rights that are attached to them and the way you generate reliability is by not having forks is by
not developing software software is inherently unreliable. Software, if you're constantly changing it,
becomes spaghetti code, becomes a system
which nobody like Ethereum, there's no one in the world
who knows the entire Ethereum code base.
And it also becomes highly politicized,
which you don't want for your property rights.
And so I can talk about this much longer, but I would encourage you not to sort of look at, you know, the choices that Bitcoin have made is sort of incomprehensible and stupid, because there's a very, very clear reason why Bitcoin has gone down the path that it has, which was to provide the world's best security, the world's best property rights, and to create
instead of software, permaware.
And in point of fact, this has worked.
I think the other thing illustrated, you know, just talking about the numbers is how much
all of us have failed to disrupt anything.
You know, if there's only, you know, 1.2 billion dollars in transaction revenue on the
biggest blockchain uh you know we're essentially talking about no money when we're talking about
global uh usage and then ultimately you know talking about the fact that you know hey these
things could be doing all kinds of really cool disruptive stuff in theory. The technology is basically capable of it,
but it sort of points to the fact that we're all people living in a very niche bubble way outside the mainstream on what we value fundamentally. And that's all of it. Even
among us who disagree, I'd be willing to bet that the people on this call who disagree the most
actually agree a whole hell of a lot more
than the average person in the Western Hemisphere about what, you know, any of this can or should
do or why, you know, why any of it has any value theoretically or practically. And, you know,
it's really, it actually kind of bums me out. Like I would argue that largely we have failed
to get anybody to understand
why any of this is a good idea.
If there's only, you know, maybe a billion,
maybe 2 billion tops in fees generated in a year
across the entire blockchain space.
And then-
No, it was 7 billion across the top 10.
Well, that was 2024.
The numbers are cratered this year. But the other
point, this notion of people desiring this sort of self-sovereign store of value, I think is also
pretty observably false. Most people are holding their coins, including even your Michael Saylors
and your Blackrocks and stuff. We don't even know exactly how these things are being held like they talk about relationships with coinbase custody and
people sort of vaguely understand how things like bit go and fire blocks and these things work but
but really most people are holding their value and trading that value in paper bitcoin uh vis-a-vis
these you know etfs and lots of these these other financial vehicles that exist out there.
So I think.
Which are essentially side chains or layer twos of Bitcoin, you know, as much as my bar
tab is a is a layer two of Visa, which I'll ultimately use to pay my bill at the end of
the night.
But, you know, that's it's a little bit of a semantic, you know, concept like is is paper
silver a good thing for silver?
You know, like, I mean, it's like USDC is a layer two of dollars, right?
I mean, these are important things to know.
I mean, I would actually argue, you know, they're, they're a little bit more like
counterfeit inflation, not necessarily USDC, but we also don't know, you know,
that circle circle has been slow to get their audits out
many times in the past as well.
I think it's pretty clear.
What's the odds that they're not backed in your financial markets?
If you can trust anyone, it's definitely Goldman Sachs and Coinbase.
Yeah, I mean, we've gotten pretty far astray
when the point of Bitcoin was a peer-to-peer digital cash system independent of central authorities and central pays. Yeah, I mean, we've gotten pretty far astray when the point of Bitcoin was a peer
to peer digital cash system, independent of central authorities and central banks. And now
people are sitting here talking about how great it is that we have digital tokens that may or may
not be auditable that are backed by fiat, which is the source of all of the problem. And now we
have governments passing legislation, they're going to make it so that we basically have CBDC level surveillance on
top of stable coins. I mean, we've lost the plot on stable coins, I think entirely. But to Kurt's
another vote for Bitcoin. But it's not a vote for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is slow, expensive, hijacked
digital surveillance gold. It really doesn't solve any fundamental problems. And the fact that
it is so trackable now, the fact that we have a US Bitcoin strategic reserve whose
base is 200,000 coins that were confiscated. I mean, I think the idea that, oh, yes, sure,
you can't block a transaction, but you can track a transaction and then you can flag it as as and put it on a on
a list makes makes it uh certainly a lot less useful than anyone would think but i mean the
idea that we're sitting around here saying well bitcoin has the highest market cap now relative
to all the others what difference does it make the entire space is losing and we're losing to i
took kurt's point
that the idea behind this is that you have a base layer
and then you create tokens on top of that
and everything else.
Not only have we lost that, but what we've lost it to now
is that we face the threat of CBDCs.
I would argue stable coins are backdoor CBDCs in the US,
but there are 133 countries outside the US representing 72% of the global GDP that are working on CBDCs.
The EU is talking about launching one in October of this year.
So it's not just the relative performance of crypto.
It's the fact that we're now playing defense.
In 2009, this was potentially a brand new innovation that can completely change the dynamic. And now we're actually playing defense, trying to figure out how not to be completely crushed as an entire sector by CBDCs.
that doesn't really make sense in the old ideological sense, because like self-custody
is literally impossible for BTC, right? Like for everyone in the world, just to do one transaction
would take more than 20 years. For all current holders, just to do one transaction would take
two to four months, right? Like it's honestly a disaster waiting to happen. So, but like this
whole idea that we're losing, we're losing. I do think there's a reason to be positive,
even though it might not pass every beauty contest.
We do have massive revenue on chain now.
We do have massive usage on chain now.
So we can be optimistic that the industry has moved past BTC
when it comes to actually building real things
and actually making a difference.
And I think there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic about our movement and that we haven't lost the war. We might have lost the battle
with BTC, at least from our perspective, because it doesn't actually do anything and it doesn't
actually, from the cypherpunk perspective, fulfill any of its ideological goals. The alternatives
very much do, and they're very much growing in revenue and usage
and in security in terms of scalability.
It's actually beautiful.
It's going faster than I even would have expected.
So I just want to inject a little bit of positivity,
at least from us old school Satoshi loyalists.
Let me interject my own positivity very quickly
that I've been sort of running this experiment, this data gathering experiment of using crypto as daily money since the end of 2015 as exclusively and without a bank account since 2016. it was has changed radically today where now disruptions and services i use of business
whatever goes away it's so much easier to just switch to something else and keep doing it
there's so many more coins i used to have to use bitcoin for a lot of things or swap out of
something else into bitcoin for certain things now there's dozens of options so for my perspective
which i care about digital cash,
I care about people living on sovereign money. That stuff has gotten easier. We don't see the
adoption numbers we need to by far. Absolutely not. But I'm very happy and positive. I couldn't
be more positive almost. Well, I mean, I've lived on crypto since 2019 and I agree with you. And
in fact, part of what I do is, I mean, I wrote a book called The Final Countdown,
warning people about this.
And my wife and I go around the country and now starting to go overseas,
trying to teach people how to exit fiat and also live on these alternatives.
And so it is a good news, bad news situation.
I agree with you all that there are more alternatives. But at the same time, there are so many steps and it's so complicated that it becomes very difficult.
using cryptocurrency as an alternative payment system.
These are not people that have been in our orbit.
I mean, I've been in Bitcoin since 2012,
and these are not people that are at the intersection of crypto
or even the liberty space.
A lot of these are people that were radicalized by COVID
and started to finally study and learn about the Federal Reserve
and all these other things.
People in the health freedom community,
people in the food freedom community.
And a lot of these people aren't very technical. So they have the desire to use these alternatives, but
but there are almost so many choices and it's so complex that it's actually hard to onboard people
and to get it to be sustainable. I'm not pessimistic, but I'm more concerned about the fact
that as a space, as a sector, we should be sitting here not competing amongst ourselves
and understanding what the real threat is. And the real threat isn't this war in between
blockchains. It's the threat of what's coming from central banks and from governments. And
they are developing these things. On the CBDC front, in 2020, there were 30 countries researching
CBDCs. Fast forward five years, that's gone from 30 to 134, and half of
those are beyond just the research stage. They're actually moving towards pilots or full-out deployment
with 11 countries having rolled out a CBDC in one form or another. So we have to reframe this
as we're actually now having to compete against, not ourselves, that's what we're actually competing against.
I agree 100% with what you just said. You know, it is interesting how much ego,
how much, quote unquote, I can do this better is in this space right now. And it was something that Justin said, you know, a while ago, if these blockchains can do everything, then why are there
so many? And in my opinion, you've got to look at it from the builder point of view, right?
All these chains that come in that are backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding,
they can go out and they can buy these projects to come over onto these different chains.
The users are going to come and onto these different chains, the users
are going to come and go.
Anything that's new, anything that's shiny, they're going to go wherever the projects
are going to be building.
And then oftentimes these projects get stuck in these dead, pointless kind of chains, right?
And so we're actually creating a lot of complexity for ourselves, and we're making it extremely hard to onboard quite a large mass of adoption as a result of that. on a fundamental front so that we can be the ones that are the experts rather than relying
on the governments coming in and all the other regulatory type of stuff that they're going to
try to impose because it's going to be, all right, well, can we move from Web 2 over into Web 3
and basically keep that model when in reality that model won't work in Web 3 because of the
whole ethos of what Web3 is all about.
It's interesting.
I actually have a very different perspective on CBDCs as everyone else here.
I don't at all feel like the industry is threatened by CBDCs.
I don't think they compete with cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, neutral, scarce things, or at least things of predictable supplies, right?
Decentralize things.
And that's not what a CBDC is at all.
Like a CBDC is functionally not that different from how a lot of central bank cryptocurrencies
work right now.
If anything, I would view CBDCs as a kind of a power play by the central bank to concentrate
power.
And I think that a lot of the private banks or a lot of the other banks in the world don't
like that.
So I think there's a kind of inherent tension between the central bank and a lot of the other banks in the world don't like that. So I think there's a kind of inherent tension between the central bank and a lot of the private banks
who don't want to be disempowered by such a system.
And so I don't see it succeeding in more liberal places,
let's say, in the world.
I could totally see...
The same as I said about the BRICS, you know, digital currency.
These are...
They just don't compete.
They can't compete.
Because of their incentives because of what they have to accomplish exactly we can we can
agree on that because because it's just more of the same they're not offering an actual like
cryptocurrency they just they build a centralized thing in their own image that's not innovative
that's not that's not revolutionary that's not the future they're just modern fiat i mean it's not revolutionary. That's not the future. They're just modern fiat.
I mean, it's going to play the same, sing the same song as all other fiats always have.
The problem is outside of our group and the people in the space, 99% of the people don't
understand what fiat is.
This is actually the bigger issue.
I mean, we already have essentially in a form of central bank digital currency.
Our money is already largely digital.
The Federal Reserve runs on an Oracle database other banks use either you know SQL databases or Oracle databases it's already
programmable it's already trackable it can go to a next level you know
essentially with tokenization which you could just look at as being an evolution
of a centralized moving from a centralized database to a tokenization
system but we are largely already have digital currency that has all of the attributes that people
don't like.
The bigger problem is that in the last quarter, only 0.5% of Americans have actually made
a transaction using cryptocurrency.
And so people are not using it for that purpose.
My perspective is unique because I also come from the digital cash space as well.
Right.
But I've evolved my thinking since then I've come to understand that I
actually think DeFi is actually,
at least this is my,
and I understand among Cisco probably a bit of a more unique perspective,
but I think DeFi is more of the stepping stone towards money.
And this might be a multi-decade long process,
but I think DeFi replacing finance with this system makes a lot of sense.
But finance is more in the realm of specialists.
These are not everyday people are going to be using complex financial instruments, right?
This is replacing the finance industry.
And I think once we take over most of finance, then it's only natural to start using it as money as well.
natural to start using it as money as well. So my theory has evolved.
So my theory has evolved.
Like I actually, at first I was fighting for adoption of money, adoption as money.
And I kind of feel like we spoiled that chance of BTC, restricting the block
size when we actually had a lot of momentum, right? That all got ruined. I saw that firsthand.
But now I really think that actually DeFi is our best shot
towards that end result, let's say. But it's kind of
a rounder way. And if you think about it,
people in the developed world,
they don't need,
if they're not ideological,
they don't need a new form of money.
Like it works pretty well, right?
And if they don't care about the ideology of it,
you need to give people something
that's a compelling and competitive product.
That's how we win.
And I think that's how crypto win.
And that's how we beat CBDCs.
We build better products
that are more compelling,
that are able to gain more market share. that's victory yeah go ahead so let me i just want to back that
uh that up a little bit like so i'm i'm also a historian of of money in general um and and done
a lot of study uh about the ancient middle east and one of the interesting things is you know
people talk about money starting as a store of value or starting as a medium of exchange and people debate between those two things.
And there's actually no evidence for for either one of those things being the the oldest incantation of money.
And the actual evidence that we have, the oldest records of any money that we have at all comes from ancient Sumeria, much, much the same as lots of our oldest evidence about lots of things.
And if you read ancient Sumerian cuneiform, we have all these tablets, like literally millions of tablets, little ones.
They used to carry around these little signature items and these little stamps, and they would write down all of this economic information and business information on these tablets.
I have a great recommendation, just real quick for everyone.
There's a great book, and it's called Gilgamesh.
And it's just like 50 pages or 100 pages, a short read.
It's amazing.
And it comes from these old stone tablets.
It's literally a 4,000-year-old story, right?
And you can read it today in a little book form.
Highly recommended.
Read Gilgamesh, people.
Yeah, really good information there.
Yeah, well, and lots of it will ring true.
Anybody that has a background in Abrahamic religions will recognize a lot of the same themes in Gilgamesh as well.
But if you look at money, they actually, so the oldest evidence we have actually shows a very complex system of credit and debt as money, which is essentially what we have today. So they, as far as we know, did not have
central banking, but they had regional banks that issued credit in order for people to buy whatever
it is they were buying, farm supplies or merchant supplies or whatever. People would have credit at
local merchants essentially for their shopping. And this is going back something like 6,000 years and up until about 4,000 years ago. And they had even, they seem to have had some kind of system of centralized
trading, like the way that we would think of a stock exchange, because they had derivatives
trading as well. Also, debt collection and all of these kinds of things existed in a way that
is pretty complex. It mirrors a lot of what it looks like today
in the oldest versions of these things. And so to Justin's point about DeFi being perhaps the
underlying thing that gets people interested in money, he could be right in that essentially
people need a system of credit and loans and all these things because there just aren't that many people
in the world who are sitting on a pile of cash. And as much as your Austrian economics wonks and
stuff want people to have their gold and have their cash and they have all these stores of
value and everybody's self-sovereign and pretty wealthy, that's actually just not the way the
world has ever worked, is that there are some people that hold lots of assets, but the vast majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
And that has been the case for all of recorded history.
And so those people require credit.
They require debt in order to be able to generate any business at all in hopes of perhaps being asset holders someday.
And maybe they won't be because
they are bad at managing their debt and credit. But we see those tools since antiquity. We see
this in medieval Europe. We see it in ancient Europe. We see it in the ancient Middle East.
We see it in ancient China. All of these things, they essentially start with a credit and debt
model or people working from a position of, hey, I don't have any money, but I have the ability to work or have a reputation.
And so I agree that DeFi might actually be the thing, like letting people know, like,
hey, you know what?
Maybe you're not creditworthy at your bank, but there's this DeFi protocol that might
be able to get you a loan.
And immediately that's unsketchy.
I'm very anti-debt from an advice
standpoint. People should not be living in debt. Credit cards are scary and that kind of thing.
But as a practical reality, it really might need to start there that people are issued things
like tokens and they have a debt equity ratio that hopefully works in their favor,
probably largely will not work in their favor,
but perhaps algorithmically or through some innovation in the human spirit, we'll figure
out a way to use debt and credit in a way that isn't predatory and ultimately allows
these tools to be useful for facilitating real commerce.
And then at some point, and this is where I kind of get back to my theoretical Ludwig von Mises sort of world is that we will use real assets
as real money at some point. But I think there is this, there's this bizarre latent period where,
you know, and we've never figured it out. We literally bounce from debt to debt to debt or
fiat currency to fiat currency or whatever.
And ultimately have never had a society that primarily functions on real assets.
And whether or not we're capable of that, I don't know.
There's periods of history, right?
Like there's periods in U.S. history where we didn't have a fractional reserve system, right, for instance?
Sure. Correct.
Well, and to this point, I'm actually building a gold back
privacy token. Nice. So that you can redeem for physical gold,
but that actually has the privacy features of an era on building
it on Zeno, it's just I mean, it's an experiment. And by the
way, I'm not even a maximalist on that. But I just briefly say
that, as I've been going around the country giving these
workshops, and we've been talking to merchants and people kind of outside of our sphere about what the issues are,
the biggest issue for merchant adoption is a lack of a point of sales system, but also
an unwillingness to deal with multiple coins and a complete concern about an inability to deal
with volatility. And so that's actually what stopped adoption. So this is hence why this kind of a coin I'm pursuing.
Well, yeah, it's too many things, right?
It's too many things to explain.
Like, hey, first, here's why you should want to use real world assets as money.
Like that's already, you know, like this is macroeconomics, you know, applied to the
kind of people that work in retail, you know, And I don't want to speak down to those people,
but you just, you have to consider like where the average person is at.
And then when you get to like, okay,
you've gotten all the way past whatever technical hurdles
and macroeconomic hurdles there are.
And then when they say, okay, so how do we do this?
And then you start to talk about like, well,
any one of these thousands of blockchains
with their own asset systems and all these other things.
And it's like part of it is our our our severe separation, our tribalism and these things has has made it really difficult. had like maybe six or seven you know like bitcoin litecoin bitcoin cash bsv dash and you know two
like a couple of stable coins or something like all reasonable things for for doing payments in
and then you know and people saying like wait why are there why are there six or seven types of
blockchains but for payments the solution should just be scan qr code automatically convert tens
of thousands of cryptos on the back end and the merchant receives whatever they want.
You can abstract all this complexity away, at least for this particular area.
Well, that's kind of existed.
Which does exist.
BitPay is a 10-year-old company at this point and offering essentially that service.
But for some reason, it just never gets past the like hey here's
a good idea and I don't know why it doesn't get past I didn't um I just saw something I think
yesterday that uh Visa and MasterCard are doing I don't know if it's just like a little market
shill for some project but that Visa and MasterCard we're gonna start accepting uh Bitcoin across like
some massive amount of merchants i don't
know if it's actual like visa mastercard thing or if it's like some company like bit pay or i saw i
saw something about like mastercard officially but i i don't uh the the details were vague so i don't
know eventually it'll happen it'll be as easy as apple pay right it'll it might be in your apple
pay which does exist already like if you there's obviously Solana Pay and there's projects on Ethereum
like Flexa that does provide that abstraction so that the merchant doesn't have to worry about,
okay, am I getting different assets? I don't want the volatility. It's a seamless experience
for merchants to incorporate that in.
Coinbase had it with their shift card for a long time. They still have it with their,
they have a new Coinbase card
and that works quite well
and 0% fees on USDC conversions, which is nice.
Yeah, and they can like, even right now,
like merchants can incorporate that
without having to, you know,
get a new point of sale system.
Like with their existing ones,
they can integrate Solana Pay,
they can have Flexa and accept all these assets
and the backend, you know,
they're just getting standard,
just USD deposited into the bank.
This is where I think like Andreas Antonopoulos
talks about infrastructure inversion.
This is where I think these things will run
on those old rails at first,
and then it'll invert and you'll have like,
crypto will be the rails and you'll have, like, crypto will be the rails.
And you'll have, like, dollars operating on crypto rails, like stable coins and other things.
Just like we had the internet ran on phone lines at first, but now phone lines run on top of the internet.
Now the internet is run on Amazon.
Used to be that.
You know, Amazon ran on the internet. Now the internet is run on Amazon.
What do we go about Amazon on Nick? That's a good one.
But in the grand scheme of things, payments, I would say it's still early stage.
Even though we started off this whole journey 15 years ago with payments as being the primary use case,
I would argue for the average person, not institutions, the use case is still the casino.
Right.
But better or for worse.
And, you know, like the more as we progress, obviously, you know, more accessibility to payments, making that easier and users like understanding how that works.
Like that's the real challenge.
I think I think I think Kurt will appreciate this as well.
Like my perspective on this whole payment side, I guess I'm bearish on crypto payments,
even though I think in the long run,
it will be the money of the world, right?
I think we had a real shot at it back in 2015 to 2016.
I think when we had Steam accepting it,
when we had all these big companies accepting it
close to where I'm based right now,
there was a place called Arnhem City, which is known as Bitcoin City.
You had like 50 plus merchants kind of creating a circular economy there.
It was amazing.
We had tons of ATMs all over the city.
I was involved in a lot of these kind of movements to kind of build up Bitcoin.
But, you know, realistically, to build up that kind of adoption as money, it takes boots on the ground.
It takes real passion and effort and
and i feel like what happened and you know from my perspective at least what happened is that when
bitcoin became congested all of these services dropped their support right specifically stating
the congestion the unreliability the high fees and then bitcoin's harnham city like it died bitcoin
city died right all the all the atms went away like and and then like's Arnhem City died. Bitcoin City died. All the
ATMs went away. And then
the narrative shifted. The narrative
shifted. Oh no, Bitcoin is not supposed
to be for paying coffees. And Bitcoin
is slow and expensive. It's a digital gold.
I think all of that
did so much harm that I'm
sorry if this is depressing, but at this point, I
honestly think we just spoiled
our chance at doing digital gold I honestly think we just spoiled our chance at
doing digital gold. I think we just... I'll just take the counter argument.
Hold on. I just finished my point. We spoiled our chance at doing money, at least for this decade.
And this is where I go back to the other argument, that DeFi is now the way that we get mass adoption.
And then once we have DeFi and we take over finance then
it's only natural that it becomes the money so that's where I stand now yeah sorry go ahead
so I was at the front lines of that I like a lot of people thought that payments was going to be
an extremely important use case I left what I was doing at the time and I went and worked at a
I left what I was doing at the time and I went and worked at a games company.
My theory was that, first of all, where are we going to see digital assets take off?
We'd see them first happening in digital worlds.
So I wanted to go be involved in digital worlds.
And I thought that payments was going to be important.
And so I went to work at a game company.
I tried to identify the fastest
growing game company for mainstream audiences and so i went to work at zynga this was back in 2011
and indeed i managed to get zynga to become one of the first companies in the world to start accepting
btc payments and um at the time you know there was like um a whole bunch of companies
it was lists and lists and lists of companies that started accepting it bitpay was like the leading
company in the space and was the first uh to that those companies, including Zynga,
the reason we basically stopped taking BTC payments
was because no one was using them.
And to this day, no one is using BTC payments
in large volume for pretty much anything.
And it's not just BTC payments, it's Litecoin payments, it's Dash payments.
The one thing where we've seen that different is with stablecoins, where stablecoins have become a significant means of transaction across multiple industries industries multiple countries multiple verticals
um but hold on hold on can i just put out one thing the the whole thing about btc like btc
was growing growing growing more transactions more commerce then it hit the limit then it just stopped
right like you don't like no i think that's a history if we let it continue it would have been
massive right now and and i think that's the historic. If we let it continue, it would have been massive right now.
And I think that's the part that's hard to speculate on.
Granted, if you hit a hard limit, it can't be adopted more.
It can't be used more.
That was my experience too.
Yeah.
If you look at the line, it goes up and up and up,
and then it just stops.
Like it hits a ceiling.
And that's what happened.
That's what happened. And look, we don't know for sure if money would be adopted massively as money now.
We don't know that.
So I was the product manager looking at this, and I was watching the numbers.
And it's true that BTC was being used more and more for payments at the time.
But really what killed BTC for payments was the death of Silk Road.
for payments was the death of silk road it wasn't uh that we suddenly saw a major drop-off at newegg
and zynga and all of these other companies literally dropped right yes they did drop their
support because citing maintaining some of them possibly cited congestion certainly um from my
experience the primary driver-
A number of them specifically cited. I recall Microsoft and Steam, for example, citing,
like, hey, this is just very impractical. If we have to wait 14 hours for confirmation
and then the price shifts heavily, we cannot do that. I specifically recall those big names
saying that that was their primary reason for dropping support.
Can I add another fact here?
I mean, we are ignoring Layer 2's sidechains, ETFs, Ethereum as a sidechain of Bitcoin, Polygon as an L3 of Bitcoin.
I mean, there's a massive amount of WBTC as just one
example being used
there's lightning network
there's stacks
there's rootstock
I mean these
I think it doesn't have to happen
on the L1
I think trying to focus it all on the L1 is a mistake
I think this will all happen on L l1 i think trying to focus it all on the l1 is a mistake i think this will all
happen on l2s and as as technologies like bitcoin os and and other roll-ups and bit vm get stronger
we can now get the best of both worlds where we didn't have to tinker we can shift the argument
there into like an l2 style debate which is only natural right that that we go there in the argument
then i'll post this i think a lot of us here go there in the argument. Then I'll post this.
I think a lot of us here are very familiar with this topic.
So I'll post a very simple counter argument, right?
In order to achieve self-custody or even to have ownership over your own keys on a layer
two on Bitcoin, you would need at least still need to do one transaction.
And we do not have the capacity to support that any sort
of meaning well i mean or you have to give up something so like you can get bitcoin on ethereum
or polygon right you never have to touch bitcoin l1 which you could argue is a good or bad thing
but you are relying then on bitgo of course okay so yeah but. There are some where you don't have to do that, by the way.
TBTC is a…
You're paying fees to competitive networks,
and those networks then grow in security.
In a world where other blockchains are cheaper, faster,
more secure, and more decentralized,
why would you use BTC?
Or let's say you have a wrap asset on another blockchain.
You don't necessarily need to.
I mean, you can use tbtc
we have blockchains that are more scarce more sound more secure etc right and okay but they're
not more scarce sound or secure yeah like bbt is not even the most secure today like if you measure
according to economic security the theory uh no so we talked about revenue. Bitcoin has...
We talked about revenue earlier,
and I didn't want to interrupt people,
so I didn't jump in.
But when you talk about revenue,
Bitcoin at 1.2 million in transaction fee revenue,
it has 16 billion this year in emissions,
in Coinbase reward.
Now, you can...
Revenue, that's a cost.
But it is if you think about that, you can easily rejigger things like Ethereum has done.
And you can shift things from transaction fees to inflation to deflation.
Many, like, projects in the industry, they use…
Because that is the eventual solution, right?
No, I don't want to see that.
That's, like, the very last resort we would ever want to see. That's my position. That's what I think will happen when the security budget… Yeah, I think it has to see that. That's like the very last resort we would ever want to see.
That's my position.
That's what I think will happen when the security budget comes down.
Yeah, I think it has to.
It has to.
No, it doesn't have to.
If the economics…
Come on.
Right, but you're facing two choices.
You're saying if…
Or increase the inflation rate.
So for 16 years, for 16 years, the security budget of Bitcoin has only gone up.
Hold on.
Has only gone up.
It's gone down over the last five years, by the way.
If you measure it according to the amount.
No, it hasn't.
You know, it has.
You're measuring hash rate, which is a flawed methodology.
What you should be doing is looking at the export.
In both cases.
The easiest way to measure it is actually to look at the amount that's going into securing the blockchain.
So how much is being paid to the miners.
That's down compared to four years ago.
Maybe if you cherry pick some like peak number versus right now or something.
But no, I don't think that's the case.
I've literally been announcing every year for the last four years.
I've said it's down over one year.
It's down over two years.
It's down over three years.
It's down over four years.
When are you going to start seeing the riding on the wall here i mean on a longer time horizon it's
clearly been going massively up massively i mean if you cherry pick like that what do you cherry
pick in the the peak of the last bull run versus right now when we're in a total dire bear market
come on i mean but it also it also presumes, you know, it's, it's funny
earlier in this conversation, we talked about how it, you know, it was something like 90 plus
percent of the hash power was signaling for Bitcoin to be a certain thing. And that, you know,
what was essentially a Sybil attack decided that Bitcoin would be something else. And so those,
those, you know, quote unquote nodes were both nameless and faceless. We ultimately don't know
who is running what. Like I've, I've run 15,000 BTC nodes as part of a testing scenario because I
run a cloud compute system. And so, you know, like looking at, you know, what, what is the,
like what actually determines Bitcoin and what is the security model. Bitcoiners, even among small blockers, don't even agree what the security model is. Like if hash power goes rogue and rogue is defined, you know, it was undefined also. But if the node operators decide the hash power is evil, you know, that there's some way for the node operators to rug hash power. And then, you know, maybe there's something in the inverse of that that also exists.
But all of this is, it's like this weird,
like three body problem of antagonistic game theory
that all theoretically makes BTC secure,
but it's so ill-defined.
And frankly, it's just convoluted.
It's confusing.
And maybe that is the model.
Like, why would you invade a country
that isn't even sure who's in charge? Right. But it's like, uh, it's, it's very, very hard to say
anything in precise terms about BTC because it, it, it just, it, it's like this zeitgeist. It's,
it's not one plus one equals two and everybody agrees that that's how it works. And so I think in a sense, you both
have a point that until BTC is like severely and successfully attacked, like sure, it has a
near flawless record of not being, you know, 51% attacked or blah, blah, blah. But I would argue
that depending on your perspective, you know, that it is very, very susceptible to social engineering attack and civil attack, which is ultimately why the block size war played out the way that it did is ultimately there were decision makers who said, OK, if you don't have these views, you're just to start to segregate out certain views as Bitcoin or non-Bitcoin. And if
you have a non-Bitcoin view, according to Thamos and Luke and Greg Maxwell and whatever, then
you're a shitcoiner, you go over here. And ultimately, that's a social engineering
vector of attack that really, this could happen to anybody like your ideas about bitcoin could suddenly become the you
know the dangerous ideas about bitcoin and until that's tested you don't really know and you know
it's similar rock was saying like among maximalists he's not a maximalist and that could become a very
dangerous thing for rock at some point uh and and it's because these things are not defined and so
we really can't say one way or another that it is or is not secure because you do not know who actually holds the puppet strings on it.
To be fair, I'm making the claim it's not secure.
And I think that's a fair argument.
I would tend to agree with you for the record.
Yeah.
I mean, there's – you guys, we're talking about something that happened sorry please go go ahead and then i'll jump in go ahead
yeah okay thanks um so basically i'm saying like my view is that i don't believe that that btc will
be able to uh get high enough fees in the next eight to 12 years and when that happens and let
me just describe what will happen okay this is my prediction i've been saying this for a few years now but basically what happens is that the mining
industry will continue to decline as as it has over the last four years um and then and then
it will decline so much because the value the the inflation keeps halving right that's an
exponential function so then you need to get all of the security from fees and i just don't think
that's going to happen because bc doesn't have that utility. And I don't
think people are willing to pay $100.
Justin, I'd be willing to make a very attractive bet, right? Because what you're essentially
saying is that Bitcoin is going to fail. And therefore, the price of BTC is going to fail
with it. So let's make a bet. I'm going to give you extremely favorable terms.
I'll do it one, two, one.
I don't, I mean, I'm sorry.
I'm really going to turn you down.
I'm really not in the business of making bets.
I already manage a fund that hasn't held BTC since 2017.
And therefore has been underperforming effectively.
Not exactly, no.
Depends on what time period you cherry pick.
But if you don't include fees, we're still overperforming BTC, actually.
Yeah, but BTC obviously has been the big performer.
But I just don't think this whole argument, like it performed well in the past, it will perform better in the future.
Like for me, I'm a fundamental investor, right?
I care about the fundamentals.
If it doesn't, can't be used.
If it's not long-term secure, right, then it doesn't. I mean, but you the fundamentals. If it doesn't, can't be used. If it's not long-term secure,
then it doesn't... But you ignore fundamentals. You're ignoring the fact that there are countries, many countries discussing holding this on their balance sheet. That's the biggest
fundamental you could have. I didn't finish explaining what will happen because it's
important to understand. So the mining industry will continue to decline at which point you reach
a certain threshold of security in which it becomes a profitable attack, at which point you'll have
51% attacks take place on the network so that it becomes very insecure. And like, so for instance,
a miner might decide to rip off an exchange, for example, that's the type of event I could see
happening through a double spend. And then you might also have censorship attacks as well, where
all usage is just stopped by either a state actor or maybe even a crypto competitor.
Because if you can completely disrupt Bitcoin for just like a million dollar a day or something, like you would, actually.
And if the incentives align for that.
So once that happens, once the network is under attack, once you're truly in a crisis, then the core developers are going to say, look, there's a solution.
The solution is to increase the inflation rate because that will bring back the mining industry.
Right. That's the solution that Peter Todd is working on right now.
One of the key core developers.
There are other solutions, too.
And so we're acting like if something happened, we couldn't respond. If the security, if somehow unlikely to me,
the fees don't go up from various things, unseen things, we don't know.
We saw ordinals and ruins and all these things, DeFi on Bitcoin.
Never sustained. That's the key thing, right?
Because a use case takes off on Bitcoin.
It takes off, right?
And the fees spike, it becomes congested.
People leave, the use case takes off on Bitcoin. It takes off, right? And the fees spike, it becomes congested.
People leave, the use case goes somewhere else.
It dies down for a while, cycle starts again ad infinitum.
It's not sustainable.
All right.
People realize something is cool.
They see it on Bitcoin.
They try to do it on Bitcoin and then realize it doesn't work or they can't afford to play
anymore.
And then, you know, you can even look at the major projects that were on BTC
ordinals and they've moved largely to Solana, but also, you know, spread out across things like
Litecoin and Doge and Bell's coin, you know, everybody's trying to resurrect some other place
because they realized this whole new class of people from the last two years that are like,
wow, tokens are awesome. They tried tokens on BTC. They thought it was cool and were pushed out just simply by the economics of the system because the network disincentivizes.
So Justin has painted a picture, and it's a plausible picture.
One hypothetical future, which is that basically where we are, you draw a straight line.
Nothing changes. Fe uh do not go up
and if that were to happen then at some point i think justin is correct that um bitcoin would
have some kind of crisis of um of of of revenue but i'll i'll draw a a different, just as plausible future. In the future that I'm going to draw out, I believe that the vast majority of transactions will not be done on a blockchain at all.
we're talking about is much closer than the future that Justin's talking about.
Five years from now, the vast majority of transactions will not be done on a blockchain.
And in fact, we're never, should never have been done on a blockchain. A blockchain is designed
to be a ledger and a settlement mechanism. And if you look at every single financial
or monetary system out there, there is a strict separation between settlement and clearing and
the vast majority of transactions trillions of dollars in in transactions are done within the
clearing environment and then are ultimately settled in a relatively small number of transactions
on on a settlement layer on a ledger layer and the technology that is allowing this is the ability to cryptographically
take large numbers of transactions and aggregate them and then write them down to the settlement
layer lightning network was the original attempt in bitcoin to try and create this distinction
between settlement and clearing and weirdly enough it was invented at my company.
So Thaddeus Dirge was working at Epiphyte, which was one of the first remittance
companies in using Bitcoin for cross-chain transactions.
It was a company I started in 2013 because I wanted to get regular people using
Bitcoin more.
And one of the challenges that we had was we were concerned that if indeed
Bitcoin became congested, it would become hard to do our business. And so Taj presented this idea
of the lightning network. And it kind of made sense to him because we were also integrating
into banks at the time and the lightning network sort of worked like banks. And I, despite my belief
that we were going to go from settlement to clearing, I told him Lightning Network was not
the way it was going to happen. And the reason is that Lightning Network required pre-funding. And
so it was extremely capital intense. And so just from a first principles perspective, I said,
this isn't going to work. And so he left the company, pursued Lightning Network. And 10 years
later, I can make fun of him because I was right and he was wrong.
Who was that? Was that Thaddeus?
Thaddeus, yeah, Taj. Thaddeus Dears.
He helped write the light paper for the white paper.
Yeah, he's basically the inventor of the Lightning Network.
And he was inspired by some ideas that had been floating around in the Bitcoin space even before that.
And really, the originator of the idea is Manny Rosenfeld, who is a cryptographer from Israel, who is a friend of mine, who also invented, by the way, proof of stake.
Very, very creative, extremely intelligent sort of galaxy brain guy.
galaxy brain guy um so um but which is something that bitcoin could hypothetically if absolutely
needed and we were worried that hash rate was an issue could switch to um yeah but we'll never we'll
never use lightning network and lightning network as the primary means of clearing looks cool because because it is so
capital inefficient um but the ability to take large numbers of transactions right and and without
having to pre-fund just being able to make a transaction and then aggregate that transaction
and write it down ultimately as an aggregated rather than as a single transaction to bitcoin
allows you to have exactly bitcoin level security for the transaction allows you to rather than as a single transaction to bitcoin allows you to have exactly
bitcoin level security for the transaction allows you to do it as a peer-to-peer transaction and
is exactly where i think the technology is going and ultimately in my view is going to mean that
bitcoin block space is going to become the most scarce and valuable piece of digital real estate anywhere in the world.
So there's these two possible futures, right? There's the one that Justin presents, which is
plausible, which is that we never see technological progress, which allows us to aggregate large
numbers of transactions. No, the technological progress happens elsewhere. It's not happening
on BTC. It is happening on BTC, but not to process large transactions on the layer one, right?
That happens to happen.
Well, we've already processed aggregated transactions,
and we're getting better and better at it.
We processed the first ZK aggregated,
well, at least the first ZK transaction back in July of last year.
And since then, our system has become 54 times more efficient,
and we expect to double its efficiency again before the end of the year.
I mean, like on Ethereum, the first ZK proofs, I mean, we're 1,000 to 10,000 times more efficient, and it's continuing to grow.
Like, my position is that we can scale the layer one massively while preserving.
But we're not going to right no right no i understand
that's why i don't support btc right and i support other chains that do do that what if people
started i'll let you finish but i'll maybe you could weave this in what if through zk roll-ups
or bitvm or other technologies lightning network it whatever all kinds of different technologies
that people are yet to possibly invent even we do find a way to have the security of Bitcoin L1
and have the throughput of these L2s.
Yeah, if you find a way through modular scaling, right,
to actually achieve, I would phrase it this way,
if you have the same attributes as BTC
from like security, trust trade-offs,
decentralization, these kinds of things, if you can have all of the same trust trade-offs, decentralization, these kinds of things.
If you can have all of the same trust trade-offs
and also the same UX,
because of what I've noticed,
these L2 solutions tend to either trade in the UX
or the trust trade-offs,
but they never tend to have both, right?
That's the holy grail.
If that's the case, yeah,
then I'll concede and I'll change my position
because then, hey, I would love to be able to validate the world's
financial transactions on my Raspberry Pi if I could. I just don't think we really can. So I'm
more willing to make the compromise of wanting to verify it on my average gaming computer instead,
which I think is a fine compromise to make. I really believe that through things like
what Bitcoin OS is doing with ZK rollups, we're also incubating ZK BTC, doing some similar things through these kind of things. I think that is it is very much a solvable problem. Very much.
The only issue with that is there is a question because we're seeing it happen on Ethereum, which is five years ahead of Bitcoin and all these kind of innovation thingsBTCs, on the Lightning Network. If too much is happening there and not enough is settling to the Bitcoin L1, you still could run into the revenue security problem.
But that's, you know, this is something to.
Yeah, I mean, that's why.
That's why, right?
I was an Ethereum supporter when like Ethereum was, sorry, when Bitcoin was not scaling.
It's like, oh, I support Ethereum because they're going to do sharding and now on scaling.
And when they pivoted...
They got out of sharding now.
I mean, essentially sharding
is happening through the L2s.
So interestingly, both Bitcoin and Ethereum,
both communities have decided
the best way to scale is through the L2s.
I think just...
No, no, no.
Sorry, just one moment.
But I will say though,
that to me is still a pivot.
It's a pivot from Ethereum to go away from L1 scaling to L2 scaling.
It was also a pivot for BTC to go from L1 scaling to L2 scaling as well, right?
So for me, that was kind of a betrayal. That's not what I signed up for, which is why I became a Bitcoin critic.
And it's also why I became an Ethereum critic.
Now, the question I would like to pose, and this is for Yago as well to answer, I became an Ethereum critic because I don't believe in the L2 solutions. I've written
extensively on this. I don't think L2 scaling is a good solution to the scaling problem. I just
don't. Look, and let me just be very clear. I think the idea of enshrined rollups or base rollups,
that's a good idea. That's something
I'm on board with, but that's not what we're discussing. When you do enshrined or based rollups-
Well, that's part of it.
No, no, but sorry. No, there's a very important distinction for me. I'm on board with that,
right? No, the distinction is enshrined rollups is really just a form of L1 scaling, right? L2
scaling is not scaling the layer one and letting like private companies or whoever else build out the scaling with competing chains.
Right. That I think is a bankrupt idea specifically, just because I think it creates an environment that that creates fragmentation and you end up creating a horrible UX.
And like you don't have interoperability and you still end up with high fees because the L1 fees get passed down to the L2s.
This is why Solana is winning and Ethereum is losing.
And like we've literally seen that play out.
So my question to you, and I'll give you time to respond to this.
My question to you, Ethereum, in my view, is failing.
It's like it's failing in modular scaling and Solana is eating its lunch.
And I understand from Yago that the claim is that Bitcoin can do layer twos better.
I find that claim extremely unlikely.
I'm very skeptical.
I'm currently writing a full-scale critique of Bitcoin OS, and I've been chatting with
Yago in the background about this as well, because I'm skeptical of the claims that are
being made here.
I don't believe them.
But I would like to understand in good faith, how can BTC do layer twos better than Ethereum?
Considering that Ethereum has out-to-out failed and that it's a social coordination and more of a human nature problem than it is a technical problem.
Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
So I'm not going to advocate for layer twos because I don't believe in layer twos and I don't believe in scaling in layers at all.
I don't think that that makes sense.
It's a giant contradiction. No, it's not a giant contradiction. Based on what you said before. don't believe in scaling in layers at all i don't think that that makes sense because what that
effectively no it's not based on what you said before let me let me so the the way ethereum
basically went about it i think is due to a fundamental misunderstanding in fact the entire
ethereum project is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding which is that um the the value is in the blockchain
and so what vitalik tried to do is he tried to shove everything into the blockchain and that's
why it it scales very very poorly it's why it's so extremely complex and as a result extremely
brittle and fragile and then then when the Ethereum community,
because they live with this deep misunderstanding
that the blockchain is a valuable thing
rather than some kind of toxic waste,
when they decided to scale,
what they just did is they copy pasted the blockchain
and put, yo, Doug, you like the blockchain,
so I put a blockchain on your
blockchain and so that's layer two right Arbitrum is an ethereum on top of ethereum and then corn
is a ethereum on top of an ethereum on top of an ethereum it's absurd I can agree with you actually
uh so far except for obviously that's that's not a position I support either so I'm I'm in agreement
with you so far.
So yeah, continue.
Yeah, so I think what you need to do is you need to look at the technologies on a fundamental basis and think about them from first principles. Now on a first principles design, you wouldn't have a layer two at all.
a layer to at all what you would have is you would have the ability to transact
effectively peer-to-peer through proofs right so I send you a proof that I'm
transacting with you I generate that proof as a ZK proof I share that with
you and then when you take that idea to the limit what you get is an entire
cloud of transactions which are proofs and ultimately you aggregate those proofs and settle them in
other words provide canonical ordering to them on a settlement layer isn't that the problem that
blockchain solved in the first place isn't that what you're describing right now. Yes. So the reason that blockchain exists is to provide protection against double
spend, right?
So the reason we have double,
the reason we have transaction ordering is so that I can't send you a
transaction and send rock a transaction.
And then like pretend I've paid both of you with the same money.
So instead we need to say no one of those
Transactions happened first and so only that transaction happened. That's the the transaction ordering problem. So
That's why you need a settlement layer and
That's why you ultimately need to be able to settle these transactions now. There are ways that you can
Settle transactions. Sorry that you can order transactions like with a nonce or with a nullifier, where you can settle them with a lower level of security until you achieve full finality.
Why make that compromise? You have to understand. So from my perspective, I think we can scale blockchains massively while preserving decentralization.
One of the best examples of that are actually sharded systems, right?
Where you can have a million TPS and still have low node requirements.
So it's like, why would I use the system you're describing over what I'm describing?
So you can.
And effectively, you know know depending on the language
that you're using right so if you're just if if what you're doing with sharding is you're just
taking the blockchain and duplicating the blockchain then you're duplicating no no no
that's not what i mean of sharding no what i mean of sharding like proper properly integrated
sharding is actually you have multiple chains right right? But it's all part of the same
validator set. Actually, the validators are actually randomly shuffled between shards. So
in order to attack one shard, you need to attack all the shards. And because all of the shards are
part of the layer one, you can have kind of, you can have a unified cross shard communication
interoperability built in. So it's effectively seamless and you're splitting the workload right so it's a very effective form
of horizontal scaling yes so the the there's a much simpler way of dealing with extremely high
throughput uh transactions and that was actually invented before one example of it was invented
before bitcoin was invented which was uh chowme and mints right and so chowme and mints allow you to do huge numbers
of transactions um at basically zero cost and to have them properly protected against double spend
and and the the the way you do that is you you communicate with a um machine right like a server
just like the the internet right the way you way you transmit information is you communicate with a server
and then the server does a handshake with you,
a handshake with whoever you're sending the data to
and the data gets sent.
The problem with Xiaomi and Mint
was they were completely centralized
and the Xiaomi and Mint could censor you,
could effectively steal your funds
by refusing to honor your funds.
So if you build systems, which the closest sort of analog we have to them in Ethereum
land is sort of like the sequencer, you can build Xiaomi and Mintz today, which cannot
censor you or censorship resistant, cannot steal your funds.
And where you can basically have Bitcoin level security when you're performing your transactions.
Now, none of this exists right now.
But it is being built, right?
We're working on building this.
Not with Chowman.
But if we just apply a basic definition of layer two, like maybe going back to the old days a little bit.
Like layer two, it's in the name.
Like layer two, if you do anything off-chain, so it's not part of the l1 consensus it's a layer two right if you if
that's your definition for layer two then i'll agree with you i think yeah it's a very broad one
granted but i think i think i change layer twos like yeah i mean by that definition even sort of
binance is a layer two right because I think that's stretching it a bit.
Personally, I would draw the line before we start calling that a layer two.
But yeah, I can see your point.
But we are starting to see the emergence, for example, of high-frequency exchanges, which act like a centralized exchange.
They're run on a set of servers, but they're fully non-custodial and they cannot cheat you but as bitcoiners we want decentralized exchanges right we want dexers that was always the dream you can build this with rollups my co-founder at quick swap is building
this now they've generated their first proofs right but the discussion we're having here is
like but you have to accept the trust trade-offs what i'm saying you can just do it all on chain right no i don't i don't think you i don't think you can i i think that what i mean
i mean that's that's exactly what we we do actually so no it's all so so exactly you look
at solana right which is not exactly state of the art anymore we We've got like Sway has better parallelism
and has effectively higher TPS,
but they all ultimately are just ways
of increasing the size of the pipe.
And then you still, because it's a blockchain
and because ultimately what it's doing
is transaction ordering through a decentralized consensus,
you have to shove everything through the same pipe.
And so you encounter encounter uh scaling issues
and if you look at the number of failed transactions it's a little bit unfair to say that okay i'm
going to touch on the failed transaction because you're making a mistake there but i will say it's
a little bit unfair to say that oh they just made a bigger pipe it's not innovative at all like
how i didn't say i didn't say it's not innovative. I think for parallelization
is a perfect example of that.
The fact that transactions
have to be verified sequentially
on a single core,
it's not multi-threaded,
there's no good excuse for that.
Even if you don't increase
the capacity of the blockchain,
if you just made it multi-threaded,
you'd actually decrease
the node requirements.
You'd make it more decentralized.
But Bitcoin's not doing that, right?
You're absolutely right.
And if Satoshi was building today with what we know today, Bitcoin wouldn't be built to the way that it is built.
And so if your argument is that Bitcoin could be much more efficient and could have much more parallelism, And if we were to completely rebuild it,
we would build differently.
You're absolutely right.
However, I think that that is completely missing the point, right?
What we're dealing with here is we're dealing with a financial network.
And we have a lot of history of how networks evolve.
Where we are now is 15 or 16 years into this experiment.
15 or 16 years into the experiment of the internet, there were thousands of competing protocols.
There was TCPIP.
There was OSI, which was like the Ethereum of the time.
It was super elegant.
It was very, very functional.
It did way more than TCPIP.
There was the sort of versions of CBDCs, right? So right. So there were lots of different theories.
But ultimately, weirdly enough, what won out in the end was not the best
or the most sophisticated technology was the simplest.
And the reason that the simplest technology, TCPIP today, is completely dominant
is because the fact that it was so simple meant that there was no need to change it.
So there were no questions about backwards compatibility.
It had the largest network effects.
It had, to a degree, first mover effects because TCPIP was an evolution of ARPANET.
And if you look at Bitcoin, it's exactly the same thing.
It's completely reliable because it doesn't change.
It's very, very simple.
It gets the job done, and it has the largest network effect plus a first mover advantage.
You have more of the counter arguments to that, but okay, sure.
So, yes, all the things that you're saying are plausible.
What I would argue is that you are massively overweighting in terms of your probabilities
that things are going to break or go wrong.
You didn't mean to answer the question.
You're massively overweighting the idea that we're going to see
sort of some kind of other thing overtake Bitcoin where we're seeing
the exact opposite. But what you're massively underweighting is how flexible a entrenched,
extremely simple protocol is, right? Bitcoin is TCP on. All right, all right.
So you didn't actually answer my question,
which is how does BTC
do Layer 2s meaningfully different
that it won't lose its lunch to things like
Solana? You didn't answer that question.
You gave me a whole bunch of analogies.
I think you asked a bunch of questions.
I can answer that one as well.
I have one specific question. Can you answer that question?
How does, because BTC do L2s better specifically, like technically, like materially?
Yes. So there's a bunch of things. There's a bunch of things, but two big advantages that
Bitcoin has, weirdly enough, or not weirdly, because I think this was actually part of the plan,
is UTXO run an account-based system and proof of work rather than a proof of stake system.
run an account based system and proof of work rather than a proof of stake system.
And let me explain why both of those are better for a ZK world.
So UTXO has a huge advantage over an account based system because it is immutable.
When you're trying to do ZK in an account based system, you're dealing with accounts
that have a indeterminate number.
So you're trying to prove that an account has something,
has some sort of value,
but there's no deterministic proof of it
because the very nature of an account-based system
is that accounts are mutable.
So that makes it much less secure
and much more complicated to work with
and the proofs end up being slower.
I highly disagree.
I think that this is a semantic argument.
No, no, no, it's not.
Practically not through it all.
We're getting pretty in the weeds
at this point.
We're actually also two and a half hours in.
Crazy to think.
ThorSwap had their hand up. I just want to make sure
they get an opportunity to say
something real quick and then we could start to wind down
with a couple of easy questions.
And then it's my favorite time is shill o'clock,
which is when you get to shill everything you want.
So Thorswap, did you have anything to say real quick?
Yeah, but it's been so long.
Yeah, so I just wanted to bring it back to the topic
because it's maximalist versus multichainers, right?
So I thought I'd just say something on behalf of the multichain part of the topic.
First of all, I find it ironic that the title is maximalist versus multichainers,
but we've just been focusing on Bitcoin pretty much.
So I think maybe we need to have an episode two that's like,
because honestly, as a more consumer-facing product at the end of the day, right?
What our competitors are really centralized exchanges.
So we deal with a lot of different users.
We deal with a lot of different chains.
So when you say maxi, I think like every single one of the chains that we support,
you know, thinks they're the best.
They have their own share of maximalism.
So that goes much, much more beyond all the technical aspects of Bitcoin that we've just been discussing.
And to be honest, I think we're at a state where payment rails and centralized money is just like,
is a very, very fundamentally important part
of like blockchain and crypto in general.
But it's so, the blockchain ecosystem is so diverse now
that you know, it's like the beginning of the internet,
like it's like data communication is very important.
Like email was very important
and eventually like e-commerce was very important
but now you can do almost
anything on the internet right so
in listening to this conversation like if
I put my consumer hat on or
even just as a multi
chain person
you know we had a higher engine analogy
so if I use another analogy
it would be like you know I'm listening to
US politics as someone who lives in New Zealand.
Right. Like it's really, I know it's really, really important to the human race, you know, US politics, like it affects everyone, especially at the current day, like top, you know, terrorists and everything going on.
But as, you know, as someone's like my daily life, it might, it's interesting, but I might not really care.
Like I care, you know, like, you know, New Zealand is famous for having more sheep than people, right?
So maybe I have a farm.
I care more about my sheep, right?
So I think there's plenty of chains now or end users
that they just really care about.
Last cycle was NFTs and gaming and metaverse.
Now it's meme coins and Solana, right?
I think Solana's success, a lot of it is attributed to the fact that
people just want to have a really, really crazy, effective casino. And it was the best
smart contract chain that actually delivered that. It delivered better than Ethereum last cycle. So
now it has all the volume of attention. But then when the narrative breaks, people want to go back
to building, like we did DeFi Summer last time. So now there's a tension back on Ethereum or Phantom's rebranded to Sonic.
So now Sonic is saying, oh, we're better at that than Ethereum now.
So I think every single chain has its own value proposition.
And it's about finding product market fit.
And unfortunately, at the end of the day,
product market fit in And unfortunately, at the end of the day, product market fit comes in our current industry
comes from, you know, just, you know, value generation, right?
The speculative aspect is still there.
People want to dive into new ecosystems
and people want to be rewarded for it.
Like builders want to be rewarded for their time and their efforts.
So a lot of it is, you know, getting on ground zero,
getting rewarded, you know, through the token value through the token value appreciation and all of these things.
So I think at the end of the day, I started saying it depends on the market cycle.
I've been to the most bottom part of the bear market
where we're integrating a new chain. It's one of the top
chains, top 10 chains, I'm going to name it. But you talk to the ecosystem people
there, they don't want to
actually
let the users be able to have
a decentralized access like
a rail to Bitcoin because
Bitcoin dominance is going up. So
in the bear market, liquidity
is leaving. Everyone's trying to protect the little
bit of liquidity that they have.
And then when the boomer comes around again, everyone's trying to track the liquidity from
Bitcoin because it's already on-chain. So that is the first part that's going to flow
into other ecosystems as opposed to fiat. So I think that's kind of the value that we see
as a cross-chain protocol, a multi-chain protocol. We see Bitcoin, even now it has 60% dominance, right? So
liquidity flows and users who are now crypto natives, if they keep the assets on rail,
on chain, as opposed to just speculate and then off ramp, then they always want a way to go between
the ecosystem and between the chains.
And unfortunately, we talk about profit.
The blockchain is actually very profitable.
When there is volume, sometimes revenue is higher than Ethereum.
It's higher than a lot of top 10 chains.
But at the end of the day, the most revenue-generated businesses in this ecosystem in crypto is stablecoin companies and centralized exchanges.
Because, yeah, they've got the adoption and the convenience.
And sometimes people are just willing to give up the self-custody and security for that convenience.
So, I'm here to work on a cross-chain protocol,
work on a multi-chain decentralized protocol
because, like I said, I'm more of a self-custody maxi.
So I think there is always going to be that demand
to move assets and value cross-chain.
And if users can do that in a non-custodial,
decentralized way on the chain itself,
then we're moving towards a better place.
So I'm looking for the episode two of this conversation for sure. But yeah, I just wanted
to give more consumer facing perspective and the multi-chain sort of perspective on this conversation.
Nice. Abstash, did you have a word to say?
Yeah, I want to say when the space started i said you know we're
chain agnostic i think as the space progressed i have become a violent solano maxi you know as the
space i really i agree with a lot of points that everyone made i think everyone made like really
great arguments uh i think joelle there was a missed opportunity here to have some medieval
costumes for for justin and rock um you, having Kurt sort of be the referee here, maybe for the next base.
But, you know, I think in terms of, like, if you look apart from the chain itself, right, like for teams building on a chain, like there's more design decisions that go into it versus, you know, just okay, like is this chain is just a tech aspect.
Like for teams, especially for us, like we also looked at other things like how rich is the
ecosystem, you know, the audience, like how big is the audience, how big is the audience growing,
and the velocity of the new stuff that's getting added that we will need down the line.
Like for example, like Solana didn't really have like privacy features, you know, from day one, like other chains have had. But recently, we've gotten, you know, a token extension
for confidential balances. And there's more for standard built for like institutional compliance.
But my point is, I feel that the, you know, there's a lot more design decisions for teams
than just going by, okay, like which chain
is which coin is going up by market cap, you know, deciding
to build on that.
Brian Smith
Yeah, makes sense. Okay, I have so to sort of wind the thing
down a little bit, I have another life two last questions
for each and every one of you
or obviously you can just decide
to be like, I'm done, I'm tapping out
for the survivors who are still here after all this time.
This is
something that could be
a half an hour each, so
try to keep this very concise if you can.
What
evidence would you take that your
perspective is wrong? if you believe in a
multi-chain future what would you take what would what would you need to see to be like yeah you
know i don't think that anymore one chain is going to rule them all or if you're a one chain maxi of
any kind what would it what would you need to see for you to change your opinion based on reality?
I'll take a show of hands if anyone wants to go first or Kurt's already
talking.
I got it.
I actually,
so I need to go pretty quickly here.
So I just want to touch that real,
real quickly.
I think I'm kind of a bull fan.
So for me,
it doesn't really matter.
I think in the near term,
multi-chain is as obviously the thing,
that is happening. Uh. That's what we can
perceive. But like I said, I think we need to, the world will trend toward one chain
if any of this is successful at all. And actually, I think the only way that I could be wrong is if
we're all wrong and we're all crazy and that the world decides that these things
ultimately aren't as valuable as we all thought they were and we do just some other thing.
So that's kind of my, like, I'll agree I was wrong if in 10 years from now, you know, blockchain
still only have like two or three trillion dollars or whatever it is now maybe five trillion dollars of of global
liquidity and it'll ultimately be you know an experiment in the niche and and then i'll say
okay i guess i was wrong for 30 years about uh about blockchains at this point but um but before
i go um i i don't want to shill anything necessarily but i just want to say like
what my company is working on is is uh you know we're one of the partner groups that's working on what is ultimately an implementation of Bitcoin capable of a million transactions per second by using basically multi-threaded processes and modularization across every aspect of Bitcoin.
aspect of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has always been implemented as a monolithic node. So you would
run a node on a single computer. And the only thing that we ever broke out of it was hashing.
And you see that hashing, given extra incentives and modularization has turned into the primary
thing, the primary economic thing that is happening in the network of Bitcoin. And what
we're doing is trying to modularize all those things and create incentives for people to be running multiple microservices of a Bitcoin node.
So maybe you specialize in script validation or block validation or some of these other things and create a greater distribution of incentives in pumping Bitcoin to a million transactions per second.
And we're doing this work on the BSV blockchain, the most hated, most contentious version of
Bitcoin that ever existed.
And the reason is, is it's the only version of Bitcoin where basically we've taken everything
away from consensus and moved essentially everything to policy.
And so whereas on most Bitcoin or Bitcoin-like systems, if you do something that's wrong or you break a rule, you fork the network and whatever.
But if you just leave everything up to policy, your node fails and the network is is basically unchanged for it.
And so this is largely why I'm a single chain maximalist at scale, is I think that we essentially have to go this direction.
But until we do, I think there's lots of opportunity
to learn lots of things from each other,
like lots of smart contract ideas and stuff that have been created
came from the Ethereum community.
Lots of very interesting ideas.
I think those are cool.
I also think there's tons to learn from the Solana and
the SWE ecosystems about UX and UI and human incentives and why people want to do what they
want to do in a decentralized fashion. But ultimately, I think those lessons that we can
learn from each other, I think we should essentially work toward a world where we all
come together much like the internet. The internet would not be as valuable if there were 20,000 intranets and we
all had to go through exchanges in order to send email past a certain border
and all these other things.
And I think we will go that direction.
I also just wanted to say thank you to Joel for the invitation and for
everybody here.
I've had a really good time debating with the people who I've debated with
and agreeing with the people I've agreed with
and so thank you for putting up with me
thank you for the new follows
I will do my best to go follow back
everybody that gave me a follow
and have a great day
go out there and be good to each other
I think Kurt
it was great to see
this one got less heated than some of our other ones
which was nice
that's always fun though but I think we all had like some agreements,
which was nice.
Like we were all able to kind of concede in areas and agree to certain
things. And I think there was, I think we're all very like-minded people.
We care about this industry.
We care about bringing these technologies and these human rights to the world.
And we may disagree in the way we think it should be implemented,
but in the end, the market will figure it out, I suppose.
Amen to that.
All right, I got to run.
Thanks again, everybody.
Yeah, thanks for being on, Kurt.
All right, so who is next?
Who is next to say?
I'll keep it short.
So the question was...
What evidence would you take to convince you that
you were wrong? And it is a one chain to rule the mall world. And become a maximist, right? That
would be the scenario, which is a crazy one. Now, at first, my answer was going to be, well,
I would need life extension because the time this will take to play out for me to be proven wrong,
I need to live a bit longer. But then then actually i'm going to steal kurt's answer
because that was really good actually i think that's a better answer it really made me think
actually i think for me it's more about a fundamental question about my belief in
cryptocurrency as a whole and currently if i really look at it fundamentally one of the big
open questions i have is that okay a lot of great people here that love and support Bitcoin,
but I don't, as you all know. And I think the reason from my perspective, why Bitcoin failed
and why Ethereum failed, again, from my perspective, I know you don't agree, but I think it failed due
to governance reasons. And I'm an advocate of on-chain stakeholder governance, as I mentioned
here before, but I don't think that stakeholder governance really functions very well at a small scale. We need to see the experiment play out at a large scale.
Now, if the experiment plays out at a large scale and fails again in the same way,
yeah, then I might lose faith and become a Bitcoin maxi and sell my soul to the devil.
I don't know. It's a very strange thought for me.
But it's always a good experiment.
Now, it doesn't have to be a Bitcoin maxi thing.
It just could be, let's say, a Solana maxi.
Oh, no.
But like one chain and one chain alone is my point.
I just, for that.
No, I think for that, my whole thesis for cryptocurrency would have
to be pulled apart because it's very much based on free market competition which implies like a
monopoly can't therefore for monopolies are inherently unstable i believe in a free market
so actually that's another way i would change my view if from an economic theory perspective if i
could be convinced that monopolies can be stable in a free market, I don't think that's the case.
But this ties back into libertarianism and, you know, Austrian economics.
That's my answer.
I said I would keep it short and I ended up rambling a bit, but it was a really fun one and made me think.
So thank you.
So Stash, now you've been thinking about this for a little bit then what so
first of all i i think we need to clarify which position you're taking are you multi-chain stash
or are you still on a maxi stash listen still multi-chain but i guarantee like this space like
you were asking the question like what would it take to become a maximalist, this particular space is turning me into a Solana maximalist.
But, you know, overall, I would say like,
like seriously, if I had to think about it,
if the only use case was the casino aspect
or like the speculative aspect,
that would kind of push me over the edge
because I think there's such a wide array of use cases that you know we
as a whole as a uh you know regardless of the chain like we were just scratching the surface
right like yeah granted like this particular cycle um you know there was a lot of value extraction
because of you know tens of millions and trillions of tokens on on solana but end of the day like
we are leading to a place
where there's going to be a lot more use cases
than just the speculation.
And that just,
it makes me hard to just be a maximalist
for any one chain,
even just Solana,
because it's just not a one size fits all kind of situation.
It's funny because I don't agree
with the one size fits all thing,
but I'm still no maximalist
just because of the free market aspect
alright
who's, oh, Yago
so, just to reiterate
what would cause you to believe
that
maybe one chain maximum
is not going to be correct
it's not the way to go
or even, let me throw in a bonus one that maybe one chain maximum is not going to be correct. It's not the way to go.
Or even, let me throw in a bonus one,
or that maybe one chain maximum is good,
but Bitcoin's not going to be that one.
Just for you, I'll give you a special second answer if you want.
So I'll actually clarify what my actual position is.
I think that there are going to be many, many chains forever.
I think chains are useful.
I think they're going to have, some of them could be worth many, many trillions of dollars.
But they're going to probably end up being part of a cohesive network, which is deeply integrated and settles ultimately to one chain. I think the most likely chain that that is is Bitcoin and what we're building now and are in the process
of auditing and will soon be introducing our technologies which will allow all of these
different chains to integrate into Bitcoin and for people to be able to port the
value, not just of BTC, but of other tokens between Bitcoin and other chains with cryptographic
assurances or effectively, you know, like the colloquial term is trustlessly. So what are the
three things? I think I could be wrong in three ways, right? One scenario in which I'm wrong is
it turns out that nobody actually cares about any of that stuff.
Really, the big use case here is people just want to have digital gold.
That would be a little bit of a boring and disappointing world, but I think it's definitely a possible world.
And so there we basically just end up with BTC and Bitcoin is fine in terms of its transaction throughput because most people are not transacting
their hodling. A second way in which I think we could be wrong is that we don't see adoption of
mostly ZK, but also other kinds of cryptography that allows these systems to integrate.
We don't see more transactions settling to Bitcoin
or really any other chain.
And then I think Justin's scenario,
which I think is the second most unlikely way
in which I'm wrong, could play out.
And then this basically entire industry will evaporate.
The third way in which I could be wrong
and is the least likely but the most
terrifying, is that it turns out that XRP is actually useful, and for whatever reason,
Ripple somehow survives. So, you know, that's also, I suppose, a possibility.
Hey, careful what you wish for with that. It could hang out for a much longer period of time than it has.
Yeah, so who else wants to say,
what would convince you that your key thesis on this is wrong?
We got Thorswap and Rock,
and Litecoin's been quiet this whole time.
this whole time if like coin you want to come up and talk to just let me know
If Litecoin you want to come up and talk to, just let me know.
so for me it would be if we stopped seeing the continuous adoption and like key events that
we've seen with bitcoin to me it's it's actually advancing much faster than i ever would have
expected i didn't think in 2025 you know 10 years after i got into have expected. I didn't think in 2025, 10 years after I got into
Bitcoin in 2015, I didn't think governments would be using it or even talking about using it.
If there was some major 51% attack that crippled the chain, that would be a dent. I don't know that
that would even kill the chain. I actually don't think it would kill the chain. But depending on how bad it was, or if it was happening multiple
times, or these kind of things, it could change my perspective. If, ironically, because a lot of
people here are more pro-tinker on the L1, actually, if we started tinkering on the L1
too much, that would give me less confidence in
Bitcoin's future because I don't want there to be some kind of like cypherpunk Fed or Cabal or
Cartel like the core devs making a bunch of changes to the protocol. That would concern me that
down the line, there's a higher likelihood of actually seeing, you know, changes to the inflation rate and other serious
things. I don't want Bitcoin to be taken over by anyone. I'm comfortable right now with the
core devs and then the community blocking things. I think that's a good thing for Bitcoin. Let's
block any changes generally, because I think it's not perfect by any means, but it's
good enough and it's almost perfect for what we need it to be because we can innovate outside of
the L1. We can innovate like they did with ordinals or runes, like Lightning Network,
like even ETFs, like other ZK rollups you know, ZK rollups and bit VM.
There's plenty we can do as humans.
We're really good at solving problems.
And I don't think we need to play with the L1 so much.
I'm not opposed to maybe a couple of changes, you know, once every, a change once every
five years until we don't have to make changes anymore until it fully ausifies, you know,
I'm okay with at some point
us doing some kind of quantum resistance upgrade.
If there was enough,
like if there was like a 90% consensus,
I would even be okay with something like Opcat
and some of these other things.
If there was a 90 to 95% consensus,
I'd be okay with other changes to Bitcoin.
I'd be a little resistant,
but I could be open to them.
But okay, yeah, I'll stop there.
Actually, could I throw some things out?
If anybody has any projects that they want to pitch,
we in Dubai 2049, we have a BitAngels pitch event.
It'll be a big one.
Polygon will be supporting, sponsoring.
There's going to be Gordon Einstein and Tech Tuesdays
are going to be collaborating on it.
So if you have a project
that's raising funds right now,
apply to pitch at bitangels.network.
I don't know if applications
have closed yet,
but for the Bitcoin Fi Accelerator
by Draper Associates
and Boost and Thesis,
Tim Draper,
I think it might still be open,
but applications for the second cohort of Bitcoin projects,
go ahead and apply there.
And then Polygon Grants,
it's closing very soon in the next days,
but then there'll be a season three coming soon.
But if you want to apply for grants from Polygon,
I serve on the board there. And if you apply, make sure to get a season three coming soon. But if you want to apply for grants from Polygon, I serve on the board there.
And if you apply, make sure to get a hold of me somehow
and I can make sure that I try to take a look at it.
Excellent.
Let's go to ThorSwap next.
Oh, I just had a funny question that popped up.
In your mind, Rugg, in regards to, say, the Bitcoin Oh, I just had a funny question that popped up. In your mind,
Ruck, in regards to, say, like the BitcoinFi, a BTCFi
grant, would
a Bitcoin DEX, cross-chain
DEX, be considered a Bitcoin
project? Yes.
So it's not a grant. So
I'll just clarify. For the Draper
thing, for the BitcoinFi accelerator,
that's investment. So BitcoinFi and Desys and Boost the Draper thing, for the Bitcoin Fi accelerator, that's investment.
So Bitcoin Fi and Thesis and Boost and Draper, such as they invest in projects early stage,
they need to be a relatively low market cap.
So I don't know.
I actually don't know ThorSwap's details, but I mean, it's possible.
That's okay.
I just asked him as more of a philosophical question. absolutely absolutely because often you know like thought chain infamously in i think
bitcoin conference in 2019 or whatever it was on stage and it was got it got called a coin and i
remember last year when i went to bitcoin uh uh asia in hong kong it's like half the projects are
layer twos they're not even native bitcoin so all of a sudden it's like oh what is even the definition of a bitcoin project anymore you know
i mean i as me personally i'm not i'm not you know tim draper or them but you know i'm just a mentor
for the projects but i i'm open to anything that is good for bitcoin um i mean bitcoin l2s
is good for Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin L2s, DeFi on Bitcoin, SocialFi, Ordinals, Runes,
anything that advances the technology, Bitcoin OS type stuff, Lightning Network projects. And
I think they're generally pretty flexible too. Tim Draper was never like a maxi maxi. A lot of
people might think he's a maxi and he wears his Bitcoin tie and socks as I do too. And my Bitcoin, you know, lapel pin with my American flag, lapel pin,
my two religions, I guess. But he's not a true maxi, right? He believes in other things too.
He invests in other projects too that aren't just like, and not just Bitcoin L1, like, you know,
the coin itself, right?
He's a reasonable person, like Eric Voorhees, who created Shapeshift, too.
We're reasonable people.
Cool, thank you.
Yeah, I just thought it's funny related to this topic.
That's awesome, man. I think it's one of the best experiments with Bitcoin
I think it's amazing
I'll pick that as well
Big round of applause with DoorChain
Clap up, clap
By the way, I like Dash a lot too
I didn't say it on here
but I like Dash a lot too
I've always supported Dash
and Litecoin, the silver to Bitcoin's gold
I wish Litecoin could have talked more
I would have loved to have heard from the Litecoin account but I love Litecoin, the silver to Bitcoin's gold. I wish Litecoin could have talked more.
I would have loved to have heard from the Litecoin account,
but I love Litecoin. I was curious because some of the content
Litecoin has been putting out recently
has just been hilarious, like so funny.
Yes.
They're fire.
They're fire.
Well, then let me quickly show
the Litecoin Summit in Vegas.
I believe it's immediately after
the Bitcoin conference, and I
will be speaking there.
I'll be there as well.
I don't know if I'm speaking, but I
would like to. I love Litecoin.
Yeah, and they're
slated to be a regular co-host
here, so even though they can't quite,
they haven't been really able to participate much
because of travel and other things.
In the future, they'll be here a lot but yeah that's good um do we did i miss anyone
for the wrap-up or for the shill i didn't do a shill i'll have a shill yeah oh yeah you want to
shill um why don't you shill um what is it, Cashew or eCash stuff, eCash Mintz.
Go shill that real quick.
Oh, I can't do that.
No, no, no.
I'm just kidding.
All right, go ahead.
I don't really shill blockchains.
I'm a pluralist.
It's like the opposite of a maximalist, right?
So I really shy away from trying to tell people what to buy and all of that.
And as part of that, I also am the founder of Cyber Capital.
So most of the audience here, it's not really a product for you because you all want to
do it for yourself and self-custody.
But for a lot of institutions, family offices, or maybe very high-net individuals, it makes
sense outsourcing some of your investments.
So that's my business.
We basically manage a portfolio of 30
plus different cryptocurrency assets. And we do a long-term investment based on
the type of fundamental analysis you've also heard today. So yeah, that's what I do professionally.
Besides sparring with Bitcoiners online, that is.
Bitcoin is online, that is.
I actually have to go to another space
in person at some point.
For BitAngels, but
gosh, this is a long space.
But actually, I would like to shill. I never shill,
but I want to shill QuickSwap
as a community
DEX. It was the first L2 DEX in the world
to reach a billion in volume, and
it recently achieved a new milestone,
which is the first DEX in the world that's deflationary. I've been digging around. If anybody knows any
others, I can't find any. But yeah, Quickswap recently threw burns. Instead of giving the
revenue to all the token holders, which we gave 97% of the tokens to the community,
we never took investment. We turned down like 30 million investment from Sequoia and Lightspeed and others. We gave everything to the community. I took nothing
as a co-founder. And recently, instead of giving the revenue from the DEX to the stakers, the
stakers voted and decided to just burn the tokens. And it's officially deflationary, which is pretty
cool. It is cool.
And there's so much cool stuff in crypto that I think we can all agree is super cool.
And that's one of the nice things.
And there was a comment.
I'm not sure who said,
I think it was you, Joel, who said this,
that like we have so much more in common
than we do people outside of crypto,
yet we're just fighting each other two for nail
most of the time you
know it's it's a very it's a very revealing comment but i think that's true for a lot of
political movements yeah and that kind of had to do with that last question too of what would it
take you to convince you that you know to change an opinion if we have those kinds of things in
mind i think i feel like over a long enough time frame, everyone is going to hit or not hit their trigger that would cause them to change opinions.
And then everyone will end up on the same opinion if they were all aligned for the principles to begin with.
sovereignty and decentralization
and sound money and stuff like that.
I think that over time, everyone's
concerns will be answered
and slowly everyone will converge on
consensus on what actually works
because right now we have opinions.
Opinions based on
data but extremely incomplete data
because we're so early in the process
still, which is why you're, I want to
live forever to bear this thing out kind of
comment. That kind that resonates for sure.
Joe, mine.
So, so I'll do a quick show before before we hop off because I have another call that's
coming up.
But we essentially our core product is stash Academy, and we create really high value,
easy to understand and humor humorous videos for other projects
to help projects get users that both are engaged
and retained in your product or blockchain
or whatever you build.
Because no one likes to sit around and read API documentation
or try to figure out how API docs works.
Users just don't have the attention span nowadays.
So we help them, we help projects essentially get visibility
and create and get them users no matter what they do.
Yeah, and Joel, amazing space.
I'm really looking forward to episode two.
Yes, so that's the first thing I'm going to show, right,
is episode two is a week, Episode 2 is a week minus several hours because this thing took over three hours so far.
The subject is going to be on stable coins.
Are they the future or the Trojan horse?
We sort of touched on this kind of stuff a little bit.
Any of you guys here invited back if you want to, just make sure to DM me.
This account or my personal
one on that and we'll
get you back in.
Obviously, everyone here was like, I'm not just
saying this because that's what you say.
I don't think there was a single speaker
here who I didn't like and don't want
back. So absolutely, come back,
talk on that thing.
My last little thing,
if you are an Android user, particularly if you're a US
based Android user, try downloading the Dashpay wallet and check it out. You can usernames,
contact lists, encrypted transaction metadata on the blockchain, privacy features. And then there's
a spending tool that's being rolled out in the US at first, which basically lets you spend privately for discounts up to like 5% or 10% even
at tons of places around.
So basically, I think with a lot of cryptocurrencies
right now, you can live entirely off of them today,
including without a bank account.
And it's getting easier by the day.
And in my opinion, this is one of those
kind of cutting edge tools
that lets things work out really well.
So just try it out if you want.
Everyone also, by the way, make sure to follow this account.
I'm going to put out the theme song that didn't work out super well and then figure out how to make it work out for next time.
So just share this space because it is recorded.
And I think a lot of people would like to listen to this over there,
you know, their coffee or whatever else they got going on.
And yeah,
just get the,
keep spreading the word so we can grow it for,
for next week.
It's going to be,
keep on getting bigger and bigger.
Kind of like the,
the,
kind of like the inflation rate and stuff of stuff.
So anyway,
by the way,
if anyone wants to join the next spaces,
I did pin it to the top.
It's the second one after Thor swap.
So if you guys want to keep listening to good spaces,
this is going to be with bit angels,
you know,
founded by Michael Turpin invested in Ethereum and tether and all this.
How do you pee?
Like,
I pee during the call.
Yeah. Just mute the microphone and actually i took a shower
uh in the very beginning of the call because i i had another in-person meeting i had to go to
after this but i just rescheduled it because this was so fun thanks now stash is our stash is now
going to make memes of you nude on the space so you just you sealed your face already done
already done they're all over the place you
know fake videos everything make sure i'm well endowed please if it's ai yeah do it yeah before
you before you play the song do you mind if i answer the question real quick oh yeah didn't
i count you in the next spaces bye rock bye rock, rock. Yeah, I used my opportunity to ask the Bitcoin protocol question, project question.
Yeah, actually, I found a...
This is paper on the Thorswap account, so I actually pinned one of my posts.
Because I actually felt like it was funny.
If I were to answer the question...
Obviously, I'm multi-chain, right?
If I were to answer the question, what would make me kind of a maxi?
I found like a tweet I made that's like very relevant, which is, I think, you know, I talked
a lot about from the user's perspective, who was using crypto.
And I think in the depths of the very bottom of the bear market, where everything is very
quiet and every project token price is like going, know it's already 99 dumped um those are the moments where it's kind
of hard to you know if i'm trying to onboard someone to crypto for the first time it's hard to
you know um convince them of holding anything other than stable coins and bitcoin um i think
for you know that's kind of where I would put my maxi hat on.
Because anything else is really convincing them
to kind of understand the risks
and take a gamble or build on something
that's like, you know, for the future.
And I think that's what most of us are here for, right?
We are building things that is not for today,
but it's, well, both for today,
address problems today,
but also for improvement
you know
in the future
yeah
I think that is
that's the hard part
like what would
you know
kind of shaken my belief
would be
you know
because I feel like
every cycle
things have gotten
really very fast
in terms of people
expecting
the speculative value
to kind of just
you know
I want to 10x
next day right and that kind of just, you know, I want to 10X next day, right?
And that kind of cultural shift away from builders
and just trying to solve long-term problems
is kind of like scary to me as like a builder, right?
Because, you know, I think I mentioned
about like deflationary on quick swap.
Yeah, I think like those are the things we were taught
like last, you know, after DeFi summercf summer right if you build it users will come and you should work towards having like real yield
low emissions um and you know on fourth of all we did all these things like our token as well as is
it's um we share uh 75 of our fees with with uh stakers we don't have emissions anymore um we
burned like majority of the community pool,
so it's low FDV.
We do all these things, but at the end of the day,
people, they take a look at it
and they just want their 100x on the next meme coin.
So these are the things that are kind of scary
as a built-in space because that's like,
currently, we're still expecting an alt season,
quote-unquote.
And if we're in a very bear
of the market then you know it's these are the situations of where i think like um builders will
leave you know and and uh yeah unfortunately people can't be holding on to things that um
you know that aren't being built so yeah that's the only scenario where i can see where i would
might be just become like full-time bitcoin maxi. But other than that, obviously, if you're building something for the long term,
then, you know, unfortunately, I think for me,
is I'm working for a cross-chain DEX.
And I think, yeah, like I said in the beginning,
there's always going to be a need for value exchange between chains.
And Bitcoin is most likely going to be that liquidity source.
So, yeah, that's kind of my personal perspective on it.
And if I made this do a tiny shield, it's obviously, yeah,
try out source swap. You connect your own
wallet, whatever chain you're on,
Bitcoin to Sol, Bitcoin to ETH,
and it's back to Bitcoin.
It's self-custodial.
And we also,
part of the team
spun off and built a SDK called SwapKit.
So if you're not a multi-chain protocol,
you could use the API and just build that into your project
without having to expect your users to swap on Central Exchange
and then come back.
You could just make your app or project or whatever natively multi-chain.
So yeah, that's my tiny show.
Also, XRP is getting integrated next.
So yeah.
Okay.
I'm kicking you off the space after that.
Just kidding.
But, yeah, anyone else that I missed
before we kind of wrap this thing up?
Okay, I think that's probably good.
Well, thank you, everyone, for tuning in.
This was great.
If you were listening and you wanted to speak for another time,
just feel free to hit me up, my personal account,
or the Dash account, obviously.
Leave comments if you can't DM.
DM if you can.
We'll hope that Litecoin makes a full recovery and is an NGMI
right now.
And yeah, don't forget that
taxation is theft. Your phone is spying on you.
Fiat is a scam, so
live on crypto before it's too late.
Keep that in mind. I'll see you guys later.
Have a great rest of the week.
And yeah, looking forward to next space
next Thursday. Bye-bye, everyone.
Bye, everyone. Thank you.
