0:00 Desert Dave, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to get to meet you. Been a fan of yours for a little while now, been watching your videos for a little while and appreciate what you're doing in the space. And it's a pleasure to get to have a chat with you today. Yeah, likewise. I mean, you have not officially been on the scene for that long, But I have appreciated those small videos that you did in fighting for BIP-110, which subsequently played out maybe not in the way we would have wanted, I'd say, to be diplomatic here.

0:45 But we'll get into all that pretty soon. First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself since you haven't been on the show before? And I think most of my viewers may not know who you are. So who is Desert Dave? Yeah, so now I live out here kind of in the Sonoran Desert. I live off grid and I mine Bitcoin off of solar. Very small amount of Bitcoin. It's a passion project. It doesn't do much for me in the ways of bringing any wealth or anything. But I've been passionate about Bitcoin for quite a while. so it's kind of a big part of my life used to have a pretty successful electrical business up in phoenix and i kind of got tired of the grind got tired of that pressure um you know at the same time i was kind of learning about bitcoin and wanting to resist the fiat world so my bitcoin journey kind of you know coincided with coming out here and learning to be more self-sufficient being off grid and uh yeah i'm i'm all in in this space it's something i think about quite a bit and i feel like it fits um right in with wanting to be uh more self-sovereign live off grid and figure things out in a different way other than just kind of punching the clock and you know doing that thing yeah so so so when was this when did you choose to to leave the exit your

2:20 fiat life so to speak and and go fully into self-sovereignty mode yeah um so in 2020 i actually left the city and it kind of happened in stages i moved out of the city and i moved to a little tiny town, bought a little piece of property. And then after a couple of years, I realized that wasn't removed enough. So then I moved again in 2022. That was when I first kind of went off grid. Same thing. I was there for a couple of years and realized that I was still just a little too close to people. And we wanted more property. We just wanted something a little better. Ended up down here in Cochise County because they have an opt-out building structure down here so you can really do what you want to on your property. Ended up in this spot in 2024 or 2023 maybe. So yeah I want to say we've been here like two and a half years. So yeah it's been a process of getting more and more removed from the fiat world I would say. More and more removed from general population.

3:29 and there's like no one out here for miles. It's pretty wild. Luckily, I can get enough of a signal out here to do this with you. Nice. Cochise, that's a Native American tribe, right? I think so, yeah. Yeah, this area, this county is like, it's down in southern Arizona, and I want to say it's like the last part of the country to become part of the United States. So it's very, we're like right next to the Mexican border. The town down here is very, a lot of Mexican culture. It's like barely being in America, but fits me well. That's cool. Yeah, I'd love to see those places one day.

4:13 So far, I've only been to the East Coast. And now this summer, I was in Michigan for two weeks and drove around a little there in Michigan and Ohio. And saw a bit more of the U.S. than I've seen before. And yeah, I enjoy being in the U.S. And I enjoy Americans being more, I'd say, more direct and more open than Europeans, I think, in a sense. In casual conversations, when you just meet people on the street and in gas stations and such. yeah i could yeah i like america you know i think no matter where we go there's a bit of a grass could be green on the other side type of thing but anytime i travel i find that i'm happy to get home and arizona in particular the southwest is particularly freedom-minded i would say you know So, you know, we're cowboys out here.

5:17 Yeah. And, okay, so you did the deep dive into Bitcoin then around 2020, I guess. Actually, I started kind of getting into it in 2017. So they happened kind of in parallel. But, yeah, I definitely started mining in like 2018. But, you know, you know how it is. Bitcoin is a deep journey. So I've been kind of deep diving the whole time and learning as I go. Yeah, I know precisely what you mean. And so were you participating in the block size wars or were you there when they happened? Were you there to like, what was your role in that time, if any, or did you watch from afar, so to speak?

6:07 Yeah, I was definitely there observing it. I was very new to the space at the time, so I didn't have a lot of information. I didn't have a lot of experience to draw on. I was pretty clueless about what a lot of the stuff meant. I was definitely navigating it mostly kind of how I'm navigating this. A lot of it is just through intuition and looking at the personalities and seeing what made most sense to me, even though I didn't have a deep technical knowledge. But I was definitely, for me, like in that particular, whatever you want to call it, that little civil war, like to me, it was very clear that Bitcoin was the thing I was going to hold on to. But I had the opportunity to get my coin split and went and sold the Bcash on exchange right away.

6:51 And that was pretty cool. But I was pretty new to the space at the time. So I was observing, but I wouldn't say I knew much about what was going on. similar to my story i mean i had been in it for a couple of years then but i i like my the first article i wrote that got any any kind of spin online is one about how to how to get access to your home private keys because i wanted to sell the fork my myself so i needed to read up on it and i i figured i might just might as well just write an article about how to do that so yeah and I definitely have a memory a picture of how that played out and it's sort of it's the event that made me made me passionate about Bitcoin instead of just curious about it I'd say because it sort of confirmed that that all its promises were true but that's how I saw it that this thing is actually decentralized and the plebs are actually in charge and not the big companies. And I just loved that that's how it played out. Is that how you remember it too?

8:06 Yeah, it felt really exciting. And I would say my passion, my dedication, whatever you want to say, My conviction on Bitcoin has kind of grown pretty steadily, but that was definitely eye-opening. It was so cool to, one of the cool things about when something like this happens is it causes people to consider self, you know, self-storage and, oh, the split's going to happen. How do I need to prepare? What does that mean about keeping my coins on exchange You know it definitely you know these things are always if nothing else they great to learn from And that definitely played a big role in helping me understand Bitcoin Yeah, I remember also around the same time when Niklas Doria of BTC Pay server, that wasn't really a thing yet then, but told, I think it's a BitPay guy that my trust in you is broken. It sort of coincided all of these things that these centralized entities like BitPay and the big mining companies and big Bitcoin back then, so to speak, that we were sort of giving the middle finger to them or I guess not you and me specifically, but a lot of people were.

9:25 And to me, the block size wars, like the Bcash was always a takeover attempt. That's what it looked like to me, since they wanted to increase the block size. And it was obvious to me that that would make running a node more expensive. And therefore, you would centralize Bitcoin and centralizing Bitcoin is never a good idea. If it's costlier to run a node, then you sacrifice the golden goose for a chocolate egg. And it's not what Bitcoin is all about. So that's how I remember that and why I've been so passionate about Bitcoin since. So from that to the recent fork, I mean, you started releasing these videos.

10:10 When was that? Like back in June or July or something? Or was it even earlier? Yeah, I want to say the first video I put out on the YouTube channel, I literally had an I've never like I had a gmail that was just sitting there I don't typically use log into gmail or anything and I just kind of on a whim put up a video and I want to say it was about a month and a half ago but beyond that I mean I've been in this fight if you want to call it that for a long time I've been mining with the ocean for a long time I've been a fan of what loop has been working on I've been running knots for quite a while I've been paying attention for quite a while it just um on that day you know something told me to like to get on my phone and record a video it was completely on a whim and yeah I decided to start talking about it and it seemed to resonate with some people and it got a little bit of traction so um I'm not necessarily someone who wanted to show my face on video and everything so that was kind of a uh a challenging thing at first, but people have encouraged me to keep coming back and having conversations. And right now there's so few of us that kind of hold the viewpoint that I do. So I feel like I want to keep talking about it. And I love having these types of conversations with someone like you that I have respect for, but maybe we're not quite on the same page so that we can hopefully understand each other a little better and help others that are watching to consider what, you know, what they

11:41 feel is the right thing for them. Yeah, I think that's where you find truth. When you have an honest conversation with someone you agree with to like a 90% degree, and then maybe you have a slightly different view about the last 10%, and that's where you will obviously learn something. At least one of you will learn something, and that's if you have an open mind. So I love this Terry Pratchett quote that the problem with an open mind is that people will come along and try to put stuff in it. Which is why I think an open mind is only useful as long as you're intellectually honest.

12:29 Otherwise, it's just susceptible to everything. so you you got to be honest with yourself and that's the most and others and that's the most important thing and i honestly believed that bip 110 was a good idea i i did not honestly i hoped it would go through and i i uh i i honestly believed it was a good idea to try to push it through because I thought it was such a small fork and obviously only bad actors would be against it sort of thing. And I still believe that. I didn't make too many predictions about the plausibility of this actually going through or not. I know other people in what used to be our camp, which now seems to be splitting in two also, did. But what was your reason for choosing NOTS and subsequently BIP 110-2? What was the main reason for you?

13:47 Yeah. So like I said, I've been kind of paying attention. I had a friend in the space that informed me about Ocean and what was happening with that. The first time I went to run a node, I just kind of heard that there were two options. So I've been curious about this stuff for quite a while. So I've probably been running NOTS for a few years now. And I think at the beginning, I just, something felt good about it. I liked that it was an alternative option. I liked that there was more options. It felt like it was more configurable. You know, I didn't know a whole lot about the ethos behind it, but something about it just kind of felt right. So I've been kind of in that camp for a long time, even before there were like camps, you know, before we realized that there were weird things happening at core. But I would say, you know, the core V30 stuff really was eye opening. Like to me, that's when I really started paying attention and being like, oh like something needs to happen here and at this point it's all a blur like I can't believe some of this stuff has been going on as long as it has been because it kind of just feels like you know pre-BIP 110 everything was fine and then there was BIP 110 proposal and now we're here but I know it's been you know there's been a lot more that's happened so it's hard to say exactly what it was but I've only you know it's been years that I've been kind of drawn and paying attention to what Luke was saying. I've been following Matthew Crowder for quite a while.

15:14 And he seems to, you know, be doing a pretty good job of doing his best to educate people. I have a good amount of faith in his research and things he talks about. So yeah, it's hard to say exactly when, but when the V30 stuff came up, like that's when it really felt like, that's when I think it was like, oh, wow, there's like actually an attack happening versus like, maybe this option isn't as good as not. It was more like, oh, there's actually something happening here that we need to be proactive about. And I think that's when I really started kind of dialing in and paying attention more. And yeah, and then I was like, oh, I want to be running two or three nodes to counteract this thing, you know. And then I started kind of doing everything I could to be more proactive. And yeah, like you, I kind of thought it would go through. I think most of us It was kind of in the back of my mind that we might end up here.

16:11 And for me, this kind of, it was always the way also this was just following through. But yeah, I don't know if that answers the core of your question, but it was a process and the core of the V30 stuff really started to highlight things for me. Yeah, and the V30 thing is the thing that triggered the suggestion to even do a soft fork. So I think this is what people need to remember when we study this fight in the future, regardless of which side turns out to be Bitcoin 50 years from now. is that our side told the core side that if you do this upgrade, V30, or even before that, even when that was suggested, we said that remove this from V30 or we will, at V30's release, if this is in there, this mempool policy change, the softer rule than a consensus rule but still an obviously catering to the needs of shitcoiners type of change We will propose and try to push through a soft fork but they chose to do that anyway, which is interesting to me because I think that I don't necessarily buy that that is simply because they were nefarious.

17:43 Because I think you have, in Bitcoin, you have your people with technical knowledge and knowledge of computer networks, and you have your people with economics knowledge or economically literate, as Kansa likes to say. I happen to like that term. I know Chris Guida doesn't like it. But ideally, for me, the perfect Bitcoiner is in the middle of that Venn diagram, in the intersection of that Venn diagram between economic knowledge, economic literacy and knowledge about computers and code and stuff like that. So I think the core developers I've met have been much more technical than economically, technically competent than economically literate.

18:32 And I think this might be their blind spot that they don't see sometimes that actions have consequences. And it might be something might look good on paper, which I do believe that the core developers did think that this suggestion to remove that filter looked good on paper. I don't think they were insincere in believing that. And technically, from a certain viewpoint, it might have even been correct because it might have been the way I understand their thinking is that if people are going to spam anyway, so they might as well use this bigger waste paper basket that we're providing them with.

19:27 And I think most core developers thought that that was a, because we're doing that, we're actually reducing damage to the chain and making Bitcoin better, even better money. where i where i personally think that thinking is flawed is first that i don't think uh a bigger waste paper basket will do anything since it's still cheaper to spam using other methods than putting something in op return and i but first and foremost i think they underestimated losing such a big chunk of the entire network by imposing a change that was so unpopular. So they didn't weigh in the consequences of their actions in the decision to make this policy change.

20:25 And also that it was so blatant that it was catering to the needs of shitcoiners. We know the the meeting with the Citria people and all of this stuff. The Citria wanted this change, pushed through this change. And there's been a lot of rot in core for a long time as Hodlnots articles have fleshed out and how the woke creep has come in there. And there's probably a more left-leaning political... the core developers are probably much more left-leaning in their political views than your average pleb who likes his pickup truck and his shotgun you know and there's a discrepancy there the thing I never the argument I never really bought on our side is the CSAM one because I don't think there's a judge in the world who will care if a naughty picture is in an op return or somewhere else on chain, because you can still do that.

21:32 To my node, since my node does not have a video renderer or a picture reader, all the shit data are just the same. It's just shit data. I need some other software to interpret it as something else. So I don't really care about that. And that's my honest opinion. The thing I did care about was the taproot exploit. So the 99.98% of op-ifs not even being executable, that to me was a bigger problem. Because these developers seem to be very horny for making Bitcoin programmable in every possible way.

22:18 And I don't think programmability is what makes it special, rather the opposite, like that it's hard to change and that it's not very programmable. That's what makes Bitcoin great. And so I was more for it for that reason. Of course, I saw the uncapped op return as very unnecessary because I never understood why anyone would need an op return bigger than 43 bytes anyway, because you can put a hash in it when it's small and thereby refer to any document. because if you know the nature of the time chain and the nature of data, like the only thing you can do by putting other data on chain is prove that that data existed at that point.

23:09 And you can do that with a hash. You can't own information. This is all bullshit. So to me, it's obvious that this would only be used by scammers. and the thing I was upset about was that Bitcoin core people seem to care about what the scammers wanted all of a sudden and being welcoming to them instead of being hostile to them which they it should have been their main job to be hostile to scammers because we don't want them in Bitcoin Bitcoin is not for everyone it's for anyone and it's its purpose is being money and other use cases leak value from it they don't add value to it like uh and they're not legitimate in the first place because you can't own data so there's there's a lot to that but that's that's just to give you a a background of why i was pro the the soft fork i i view it viewed it as a mechanic said like a milk chocolate soft fork that did very little and was obviously only going to be opposed by by shady people. So yeah, I keep repeating the same question here, but let's dissect that for a while then instead. So what parts of that do you agree with and what do you disagree with?

24:28 Yeah, so I think obviously I was in agreement with BIP110. It seemed to me like it was a good changed, introduced to Bitcoin. I think where we differ on opinion a little bit maybe is that I believe there was an actual attack. And that doesn't mean that any one bad actor in Bitcoin core exists. I just think it's a lot like our political system. I'm not of the opinion that it really matters much if I vote. I don't have a dog in the race. To me, it's the same stuff behind the scenes and we're just presented with two options and that's how i see this it's like that's not to say everyone who goes into politics is bad it's not to say that everyone up on a podium trying to do to fight the good fight has a bad intention i just feel like they're part of a broken thing right and so to me core just seems broken like there's so much um there's financial incentive there that doesn't exist elsewhere in Bitcoin. And there's developers, like you said, you know, one way of looking at it is the economic knowledge and their technical knowledge.

25:43 There's also just like, what life experience do they have? Have they had enough life experience to understand why Bitcoin is important as money? Someone can say they agree that, oh, like, V30 is the best thing for money that doesn make them right right They could believe they right they could feel completely good in their opinion And in their reality they can be right Like I don want to sit here and say what's right and wrong necessarily. It's just for me, I've always been kind of a Puritan in that sense. I think Bitcoin in its simplest form, it's very elegant as it is. I think messing with it at as little as possible is the way.

26:24 And I saw this as just taking Bitcoin back to what we wanted it to be steps you know in that direction kind of like house cleaning spring cleaning you know it's like oh taproot some of the stuff like we hasn't been addressed here's an opportunity let's fix this up and to me the establishment of bitcoin now is bitcoin core and now we've learned to me like the mining pools are kind of part of that establishment and um yeah i you know so for me in the back of my mind i i wanted bit 110 to go through um smoothly but i think kind of the trickster like there's an aspect of me that's very fiery and likes to things to see things get crazy there's kind of part of me that was like you know i've deleted a lot of my videos because i'm kind of like that but at the time i put out some videos saying like bitcoin could go to zero i don't care you know i was kind of saying if we need the fork that's fine and that's how i felt you know leading up to it it was weird because i was like i was nervous and i wanted this thing to happen but there was like kind of a uh a deeper part of me that was like yeah but if it doesn't happen that's exciting like where do we go from there well you know then shit really hits the fan um and that could be really interesting but yeah i i i saw the the you know when it didn't get activated i was watching right up until the last minute you know watching live thinking kind of like a lot of us that just last minute minors would start

27:55 switching over and when it didn't happen you know my heart fell and then like pretty quickly i felt kind of like i feel lighter than i've ever felt right now like i'm so i feel so refreshed and uh renewed in my, you know, because some of us that have been around a while, it's like it's been since 2017 that we're like, Bitcoin is going to be a million by 2020 or, you know, we're looking at all these factors and it's like, oh, there's so limited supply. How could the price not go outrageous? How can hyper Bitcoinization not be in the near future? And then to have it feel like it's stretching on and on and kind of feeling like we've been through the same song and dance over and over again, I'm tired of people just caring about the number go up and stuff.

28:40 So, yeah, so I was pretty broken up. And then also part of me was like, hey, like now this is exciting. And yeah, I don't know. I can't think of a more exciting time in Bitcoin. And I'm not sure how that feels. If you're not feeling the fork, I would feel kind of like, well, what do we do now? And I guess I'm kind of curious to hear from you. like you know if you're not going that way like where's your where's your hope or whatever because to me like bit 110 was signal like for that to succeed would say okay the miners aren't in control nodes still control the network bitcoin solid and getting uh getting a response back that that was a negative to me was like oh bitcoin's pretty broke yeah that's uh uh yeah there's a lot to be said about that of course uh bit bit 110 coming through would would have been sort of sort of a confirmation that the nodes were in charge i i think the opposite the the bit 110 not pulling through was not proof of the opposite though and this is where i differ from uh from i guess i guess from you and and from a lot of other people on the bit 110 side i i i said before the fork because a lot of people ask me, will you hard fork if it fails? And I said, that depends. That depends on how this thing plays out. And I will not decide on what I'll do until after it plays out.

30:15 But I guess just a small question before I lay out more about my views on that. Like, you were always prepared to hard fork then in leading up to this thing. yeah definitely to me that's just the follow through to me the bit 110 was like a proposal and forking to me without forking it's like well what was even the point of that you know we ran an experiment to know what the next step was and to me it was like okay we ran the experiment it went the way it did forking bitcoin one that's one way of saying it to me this is Bitcoin. This is Bitcoin living on. Bitcoin is the community. It's the core community of people that will fight for Bitcoin as money no matter what. And there may not be a ton of us, but to me, that's always been the fight. And so I was 100% ready to go with the fork.

31:10 Yeah, I was not. But I absolutely respect that opinion. And I respect your right to do so more than anything. I came up with a quote in a tweet and a reply to Joe Nakamoto today when he was bashing Cratter that I will respect your right. I don't agree with your Bitcoin fork proposal, but I will fight to the death for your right to fork it. It's paraphrasing. Because I think that's the most fundamental thing in Bitcoin is that no one gets to say what Bitcoin is, you get to say what it is to you, and you get to set the rules of your money. That's the whole point of running a node and validating the incoming transactions. That is that you decide the rules of your money. It's just that the system is set up in such a way that it can be very costly to follow rules that not everyone else agrees to. So, okay, let's do this in stages. First of all, why I don't think BIP-110 failing is necessarily proof of a lack of decentralization.

32:21 So the theory was that as long as we get one domino to fall, we will have this prisoner's dilemma type scenario, the red button, blue button thing. I don't know if you remember that allegory. so basically if you have a blue button and if more than 50% or in this case 55% of people press that button then everyone survives and you have a red button and if people press the red button then only the people who press the red button survive regardless of percentage and in this case it would be only like between what was it, like 2.5% of miners pressed the blue button even though 15% of nodes pressed the blue button everyone else pressed the red button and they all survived in that so I think when you're a miner and you have to make this decision, which because it can be very costly to make the wrong decision you have to take into into consideration what button will the others press and what do I stand to lose from pressing the wrong button.

33:42 And if they think that there's a risk that another miner will press the blue button, then they might as well press the blue button and you get this sort of domino effect and BIP110 activates. I think they have to weigh in and they see this 15% of nodes signaling for this. But they also know, like the miners know that most of these nodes, if we're honest with ourselves here, you know, we kept saying that Start9 and Umbrell saw record sales numbers leading up to this. Most of new nodes were bought for this specific purpose to fire them up and signal for BIP110.

34:27 However, most of those probably didn't have any incoming transactions. So the miners had very little to lose from ignoring them. Because the only thing a miner theoretically cares about is... losing the fees from those transactions that would have potentially gone through those nodes. So they think that the entire movement now that the subsection of BIP1 tenors that are now willing to fork off, they are of such economic insignificance to them. So it was better to just keep going with what Core said. And that decision, if I was a miner and fiat minded, which I think these big miners are, then that decision, it's mostly an economic decision, but it's not only between do I want all Bitcoiners to be with me or do I care about this subset or not? It's also, do I care about pissing off certain people that were, uh, that I have business relationships with that are, that were against the fork. So if you wanted Michael Saylor on your side in the future to make an investment in your, in your mining company or whatever, then, uh, you'd better, you know, uh, agree with him, um, about the fork. So, so, and you can call that corruption

36:02 I think it's not 100% corruption. I think it's a rational economic decision that has to be made, and these incentives are at play. And so the question becomes, were they completely corrupt and did someone pay them to not signal? In other words, did someone pay them to not signal? Or did they simply see our movement as too economically insignificant for them to have to care about us at all? And I think the latter is true. I think they thought that we were so small, so we're not worth being cared about at all.

36:47 And price-wise, I mean, Bitcoin is up, what is it, like 20% cents? So I think to a certain extent, at least short-term, and remember, these are short-term thinkers. These are high-time preference people. They are fiat-minded miners. Short-term, they were right from that perspective. so so uh and the thing yeah i'm talking too much here i should be interviewing you but i find this so interesting and i think i need to flesh out my position here because i think there's a reverse blue button red button scenario going on right now and that is uh if we all stay and there is no if there is no blake to be but we all stay in bitcoin then bitcoin is actually more secure now than it was before our movement started.

37:37 Because we're all here and we're ready for the next fight, which might be more crucial and more important to save Bitcoin. But since we're now forking off, we're losing this chance of making Bitcoin more resilient than it was at least since Core V30 was introduced. So we can make a better Bitcoin post-Core 30 if we stay or we can fork off and and and try this other thing which i and this is the other point i have i think lake to be is doomed because it's by definition centralized uh it's uh it has a clear founder and and who is not an anonymous guy who who forked off who who disappeared. But it's Luke. Luke is the head chef of this thing. There's no denying that.

38:40 And as much as I like Luke, and I understand that all of these things make sense from Luke's perspective, I think this is the Achilles heel and his blind spot that he doesn't see himself as a centralizing force. But I think he definitely is for this fork. And also given the history of other Bitcoin forks like this and how they struggle to survive in the long run because we can't have 42 million coins that defeats the entire point that can only be one Bitcoin in the end. One side has to win. Otherwise, it's not Bitcoin anymore. It's a Bitcoin and a shitcoin. And the question is then, where is my time and energy best spent in trying to save the thing that is still functioning as money, even though it has a spam problem clearly, and it has a corruption problem. Well, I shouldn't say corruption, but a woke creep problem, because corruption, it might be too strong of a word and offend some people. So an incentive problem in how the developers are funded, definitely. Can we solve this? Is this salvageable from the inside or do we just move on and hop onto this other ship where people are seemingly more based, like yourself and many of my friends, and they are more aligned with how I

40:15 view the world generally and more aligned with my beliefs. I mean, I'm not a Christian. I'm way more of a skeptic than many of the others in this movement. But other than that, I think we have very similar views on ethics and morals and stuff. I think Hoppian argumentation ethics are enough for science to derive an ought not from an is, which is don't steal. And therefore, you can deductively reason yourself to the position that Bitcoin has to be money, needs to be money to survive.

41:01 And I just don't think this new fork has any chance of gaining the momentum Bitcoin already has. I think my my energy is better spent trying to save the thing. The thing I fell in love with. Yeah. Thoughts? Yeah. So, you know, I definitely understand your perspective on stuff. And again, I don't think there's a right or wrong. I kind of disagree in a sense that there can't be. I mean, at least for a good amount of time, there's going to be a bunch of cryptos and forks and things that people consider, you know, oh, this is going to be the money of the world or like, To me, what it's called, you know, that's something people are like, oh, what are you guys even going to call it?

41:52 And then there's concern of how do we become the real Bitcoin? How do we get people? I don't care about any of that. And I don't care whether the miners were actively captured or the cultures just slipped way out of alignment. To me, that's the key, right? The culture is gone. The Bitcoin culture, what Bitcoin is, is separation of money and state. what Bitcoin that we know it as right now is number go up technology. That's all anyone talks about. I'm so tired of hearing it. You know, the fact that there was this little bounce after that, like, I do not, I don't, I don't care about that aspect. So to me, it's a matter and I get that I'm an idealist. I get that I'm like standing, you know, firm in my principles. And that may be, that may be stupid or whatever but I'm not in this to be right I'm in this to be I'm in this to follow what feels right to me right and so for me if I see two hammers one of them's got all these gimmicks on it and everyone calls it a real hammer but this one actually puts in nails I'm gonna choose the one that actually puts in nails and trust that eventually well people will see the value in this. This one maybe has a touch screen and it has apps or whatever, but it doesn't.

43:08 You know, like I think the best tool for the job, if Bitcoin wins because it's popular and Michael Saylor says it good then it not Bitcoin Like this Bitcoin that we known for a long time has gone so far off of the rails And it not just since v30 this has been a long time coming and to me you know infiltrating core and doing what they did is brilliant i mean because it's so uh sly and roundabout most people were unaware of it even running a node they're just like what do we do when there's an update on our computer we update the software most of us don't read all the fine print and see the new features they added that slow down our computer we just update it and the same thing is happening happening in bitcoin as i see it and i disagree about it being doa because of a central force just because luke is a central face on it and as a developer it still carries that history of bitcoin it's a fork of bitcoin it is still bitcoin it was bitcoin was always designed to include a proof of work change if necessary. If we want to be Bitcoiners, we have to be allowed to fire the miners. And I see this as we're doing what we have to do. We ran a test. Now we're firing the miners and no one can stop us.

44:24 That's another beautiful thing. It's interesting to me that there's so many people that love to be vocal and write paragraphs to me on Twitter or whatever and tell me why I'm so stupid or why I'm bad for Bitcoin because I'm trying to convince people of something. And it's like, I'm just excited. I'm just sharing my point of view. I'm like, hey, I think we stumbled across a major fix here and I see an opportunity. And you said automatically it'll be less centralized. I completely disagree. I think right out of the gates, Bitcoin Blake2B is going to be more centralized because I know people all over the world that are buying miners. They're all sold out everywhere. So immediately we already have node runners and we already have miners. We don't need whatever the hash rate is of the old network.

45:12 We don't need that. All we need is miners around the world. I would much rather see individuals running single miners, running through a Datum server, mining their own template. And this fork of Bitcoin, we're doing everything we can in the culture to instill those ideals, to keep Bitcoin being what it is. We may fail. I'm 100% okay with that. I have nothing to lose. You know, that's another, And people will misunderstand when I say I don't carry when I don't when I say I don't hold Bitcoin, it's because I believe in and in Bitcoin as a payment network. I don't believe in this like hodl so you can retire rich narrative. To me, that's a fiat narrative. I'm so over it. I'm so over this like, oh, let me keep what I can keep for me and my family versus like build something and provide value in exchange.

45:59 Like the network that Bitcoin has built, this network effect that we're walking away from, it's a bunch of people that buy and sell on exchanges. And it's paper Bitcoin shit leveraged up on top. I don't see it as Bitcoin anymore. To me, Bitcoin is the fork. I'm not afraid of Luke being in charge because if you're on the other side, then you're accepting that core is in charge and whatever individual is being manipulated and paid for on that side. So if that's what makes Bitcoin centralized, they're both very centralized. To me, what makes it more centralized is that there's going to be a bunch of individual miners all around the world, even if there's a hundred of us.

46:40 That's more decentralized than what we have, which is like there could be backdoor meetings. There could be, you know, there's more money. Like you said, you said it yourself. These miners are fiat focused. Me and my friends who are picking up miners, we're like, dude, this has a chance to change the future. we want to be here early and be part of this we want to be part of the network it's not a fiat focused group and so to me that is the movement so this to me this is staying and fighting and people will say i'm running away or rage quitting or whatever to me this is staying and fighting this is like okay time to fire the miners there was always a possibility it could happen again and I would be so happy to see this new fork be confused about its name.

47:26 I would be so happy to see nobody acknowledging it or putting on exchanges. My goal in talking to people is just to get, you know, help people that are maybe people that are on the fence that believe in Bitcoin as money, but they don't have the, you know, I don't know, help people take a leap of faith because I get your perspective. I mean, it's a lot to walk away from. there's a you know i think but i think to consider continue fighting there we're kind of falling victim to a sunk sunk cost fallacy you know i get it like that's a lot to walk away from but to me i just don't see any other choice and i love that bitcoin is this way i love that no one can stop us from doing it and i love that anyone can just take and hold both coins right if you got some Bitcoin in cold storage, you don't even have to take a side. You can just watch to see how it unfolds. And that's a beautiful thing about Bitcoin. And we don't, at the end of the day, none of us know, no one's going to get to decide. I'm just following my principles. And to me, maybe I can't explain it on a technical level. Maybe I don't know the exact details to convince somebody. But to me, it's like 2020, clear as day, Bitcoin, as we know at core, all that has completely been compromised i'm not afraid to say it's corrupted i don't care who it offends it's it's completely effed in my opinion and uh yeah that's just how i see it but i i understand i definitely understand other perspectives on that it's not i mean forking is a scary idea

48:57 and i get that yeah i i agree with almost everything you said there and i i totally respect your right to do all of this like and i i think it's if this is what you truly believe then absolutely go ahead like that's the that is the right thing to do then uh the thing uh first of all the thing with the 20 price increase afterwards that that that was me trying to explain how i think that the miners think it's not how i think uh because i have a much more long-term time horizon. But also, Bitcoin's number go up. Let's dissect that for a bit. What is that?

49:41 Number go up is an effect that happens because a fiat is losing value all the time, but it's also a reflection of the deflationary nature of the free market. It is Bitcoin showing the world that if you have a money with a limited supply, in other words, something that is perpetually scarce, then all prices will drop forever. That is, it's showing you the true nature of the free market. That's how I view number go up. And it's going to be volatile in the beginning because Bitcoin is still small in comparison to everything else.

50:23 But I believe it will be volatile even when Bitcoin, if hyper-Bitcoinization or when hyper-Bitcoinization ever happens. The reason I think that we, everyone considering like either side is we need to do some introspection. And when I've done that, one of the things where I think I can find my own bias here is that I get most of my opinions on what your general Bitcoiner thinks via social media. And I think I get a very skewed picture from there. So I think suit coiners and shit coin apologists and, you know, wannabe cypherpunks are extremely loud on social media. I think true cypherpunks and truly passionate, people are truly passionate about Bitcoin. You don't see them on social media at all.

51:27 And I think that this group is still enormous on legacy Bitcoin too. I know a lot of them myself. I mean, you were exactly that up until a couple of months ago, right? And I think there's a lot of people like you out there. And my hope is that there's enough of people like that left in the legacy system to because I not convinced that it corrupted I think the our movement was simply not strong enough to convince enough plebs to signal and therefore not powerful enough to convince the miners to flip the bit. To me, that does not mean that Bitcoin is a failed attempt. However, as you say, we now have the two coins. Everyone who does Bitcoin properly will have both coins. If you have paper Bitcoin and if you have them in custodial wallets or on exchanges and stuff, you might not be able to access your Blake2B coins in the future. It's very likely that you will be able to access your legacy coins, but not your Blake to B coins. But if you're doing Bitcoin properly, you have the option to be a fence sitter for a very long time here, even for decades, to see how this thing plays out.

53:04 And that's probably where I'm at. In the Bitcoin cash fork, it was obvious to me that that was the takeover attempt coin, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. So I did and thereby increased my stack significantly because it was worth quite a bit in Bitcoin terms at the time of the fork. We'll see now. Is it September 1st that the algorithm changes and then it starts building from the last BIP110 block, I guess? And we'll see what the markets say. We'll see if it has a ticker anywhere. And I mean, I'm looking forward to seeing how this whole thing plays out. One thing I've learned throughout all of this is that I'll be more careful with the word shitcoiner from now on. In the end, I think there will be Bitcoiners and shitcoiners. However, I'm not entirely convinced that I don't think that all people forking off are shitcoiners. And I don't think that was true even for the Bitcoin cash fork. I think there were people who sincerely believed that that was the that was bitcoin that they were on the real chain there it was not only people who tried to it was not only this takeover attempt there were people who actually believed that side maybe more of a philosophical battle than i remember it as but but uh yeah i i um it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out and i i uh i wish you

54:37 luck in the future if this is where you uh choose to to spend your energy uh i don't think i think there's a lot of bitcoiners who are not um you get into one other problem i wanted to discuss here not everyone is in a position economically to to to try a thing such as this because if they put all their eggs in this new basket instead and that basket is not worth as much in the beginning or only a fraction of what Bitcoin is worth, then that's going to be a tricky thing to, well, I guess what will happen is that you'd have a price between the two and you could sell one for the other and we'll see what happens in the future which one gets more market share or whatnot but i think it's very risky and i don't this is another thing and and maybe pre-podcaster me i mean i was never a podcaster first i was an author first and a podcaster afterwards so doing doing this podcast has been very interesting because not only do i get to listen to the opinions of a lot of interesting people and maybe get a new perspective that way but i also see the incentives that podcasters have and and uh there's there's even more of those

56:09 bags of shit coins that you're being offered and and uh i i get why some people choose to take them to just keep their channel alive as soon as you're doing something other than just hodling and doing your thing you are exposed to a lot of other incentive malincentives if you will and that is a problem i see the problem with podcasters in general i see the problem with conferences and how it's sort of these environments they incentivize people to be less adversarial in their thinking. They incentivize diplomacy and being friends with everyone and stuff like that. And Bitcoin needs toxic people. I'm absolutely convinced that it needs toxic people and it needs skeptics that are willing to call out bullshit whenever they see it. And my fear now going forward is that in losing so many based Bitcoiners in this fork, then Bitcoin is less resilient going forward than it was before.

57:27 It's such an interesting system because it's the most robust and the most fragile system ever constructed simultaneously because it's completely dependent on the people doing things in it. And we thought we had the game theory figured out. And maybe we did and maybe we didn't. We'll see. As I said, I'm openly a fence sitter here and I'm going to wait and see what happens. If I see more and more rot and more and more suit coiners and shit on the other chain, then I might follow you one day, but not immediately. I'm still willing to give this another round and fight for Bitcoin as it is with all the infrastructure that is built around it and all of that, because you're going to have to rebuild everything now. It's really interesting.

58:30 Sorry, what you're saying brings up so many thoughts. So it's interesting that Luke, Mechanic, Kraters, someone like me and some of the other YouTubers or anyone on Twitter kind of behind this movement that are speaking up. Some of us are like, you guys are completely retarded. And some of you are like, don't leave Bitcoin. We need you. And I think that's really interesting. And I think it's a good point. This was our best shot. Luke was our best shot. That's what I'm curious. It's like from someone in your perspective, it's like, what is the next move? Like what? Like the best of Bitcoin is leaving Bitcoin. And we already kind of took our shot and missed at correcting that path.

59:13 And now the best of us, in my opinion, the based ones, the ones that care about Bitcoin are leaving. And I want to bring up one interesting point. There's been Bitcoin forks before that everyone just called shit coins and they disappeared. not once that I know of was that fork a better version of money not once this is a time where there's a movement of individuals there's nobody selling this thing there's a movement of individuals that are saying this is the better tool I'm going to pick up the better tool and I want to see this for I understand that no matter what you know there ends up being in an exchange like if there is a person that wants to sell Blake to be coin and a person who wants to sell dollars, there's going to be an exchange. And at some point, there's going to be a value assigned to it compared to dollars or compared to the other Bitcoin or whatever. That's inevitable.

1:00:08 But what I would like to see is I would like to see this Bitcoin, this fork, whatever you want to call it. I just see it as Bitcoin living on. I like calling it Satoshi's because I think if we focused on Satoshi's, we would think of the medium of exchange over the store of value and and that huddle mentality mentality i want to see this thing gain its value based on its usefulness as a tool based on its network based on what can happen with it and we've lost that track like nobody cares about bitcoin as payment rails nobody using it nobody selling stuff for bitcoin and getting paid directly it happening rarely on nostr and rarely in person or whatever but that the movement to me is the individuals who care about it as money and i don't care if 99 of people disagree with me i believe that the best tool will win out no matter what like you know think about any tool in history there's no reason why the best thing will not end up being used it doesn't matter how many people hype up tool a if tool b is a better tool it's gonna eventually win and i've already said this but that's what's so beautiful about this is that we you know people can sit on the fence they you know i just nobody has to make any rash movements you guys can keep supporting bitcoin as you know it but me and a lot of my friends aren't going to be there anymore and i don't know how you guys plan to fight that battle. I don't know what the next step would be. To me, it's like there's two choices

1:01:40 and one is like fighting a giant and behind this giant, the spoils are fiat denominated Michael Saylor shit coins, or there's a clear path where there's just real Bitcoin and we don't have to fight anybody. And that's what I feel like. I'm taking the path of a peaceful, there's nothing to fight there anymore and to me this is like oh we can just choose into uh the new better tool i don't think that there's ever been a bitcoin fork where they actually made uh major improvements and um yeah well i have a lot of faith in it i'm very excited about it i don't even um i don't know for me things are like that sometimes like i hit a switch in my head and it's like a binary thing And now I feel, you know, I'm over it. I'm so over Bitcoin and chasing gain, like even just browsing Twitter or anything.

1:02:38 It just it's it's so even people that say they're maximum maxis or whatever. They're just look at most people are just looking for those fiat gains. And I understand that that is a way that we base our value on. But I want our value to base out of the usefulness of a tool, not out of hype, not because of what Michael Saylor says, not because of some political discussion or something that happens on the other side of the planet. You know, news, news events and stuff. I'm just kind of over that. And yeah, I'm probably overly idealistic and oversimplifying things, but I'm going to just follow follow what feels good to me. Yeah, to devil's advocate that I think a whole bunch of the Bitcoin cash people actually did, as I said before, I think they did think that that would make Bitcoin better money. And they also believe they were righteous and that they didn't care about number go up and that they were on the right path. That's why they clung on to it.

1:03:39 I think the number go up thing and the usefulness of the tool and the medium exchange versus store of value, here's my perspective on that. I often try to push this that I think store of value is a useless term because you cannot value as subjective. So it should be medium exchange over space and time. And when you medium exchange over space is the normal medium exchange when you exchange with others. And medium of exchange over time is when you trade with your future self. And the hodl mentality, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Because as I know from Praxeology and Austrian economics, catalactics is that money is never idle.

1:04:25 It always provides its user with something. So if I have a stack of Bitcoin that I know is going to go up in purchasing power over time, I refuse to use the term dollar value, I mean purchasing power, then my best cause of action is often to just sit and hodl and not trade it for something else. The whole notion that we have to exchange all the time is a Keynesian notion, in my opinion. Keynes tried to push that every time a dollar bill changes hands, a new dollar worth of value is created.

1:05:06 And therefore, we need inflation. And the flaw of that argument is, of course, that, yeah, but then you discount. if you have inflation, then people will just trade them for frivolous shit and you end up with quantity over quality. But so the counterpart to that would be, I don't think on a Bitcoin standard that we will need to transact as often as we do on a fiat standard. I think we're, since everyone on earth has only ever experienced a fiat standard, we think that we need to exchange money often and we base our opinions on that. Whereas on a Bitcoin standard, I don't think that's as necessary anymore.

1:05:47 Like value for value and barter and stuff will be more, ironically, be more prominent in a hyper-Bitcoinized society. I will be more inclined to just buy everyone a round of beers or coffee than each one paying for themselves. I think that's a part of the scaling to me, that we use money less. So there's that about that. And the usefulness of the tool, it has to be the usefulness both as a store of value and a medium of change, or a medium of change over space and time. You can't just have usefulness over space and it not holding its value over time.

1:06:29 Then it misses half the point, or the bigger point, because the problem is fiat. Fiat is a great medium exchange over space. You can use it everywhere. The problem with fiat is that it's a lousy medium exchange over time. It loses its value over time. So this is the thing that Bitcoin does better than fiat. So medium exchange over space is important, and it's important that we don't fall for moronic fiat traps, such as Bitcoin is digital capital and you need a stock based on Solana to make it into money. We need to not fall into those traps.

1:07:10 And absolutely, I believe we should use our sats and exchange them and thereby help other Bitcoiners become more economically powerful in the world. But the more interesting aspect of Bitcoin to me was always how it truly reflects the deflationary nature of the free market. In other words, that it is a good medium of exchange over time and not only keeps its purchasing power, but makes its purchasing power go up perpetually. That's the magic to me. And if we perpetually fork it and form smaller and smaller subgroups, then it cannot have that because then you have 42 million coins now and you force people to choose between one or the other.

1:07:58 And the whole point was you never have to choose again. Like, this is it. And this is true. To me, this is true regardless of if Blake 1-2 or Legacy wins this war. Like, a decade from now, if Legacy is the winning thing or if you are the winning, or I shouldn't say we or you because I'm going to keep both and I'm going to be a very interested fence sitter here. But yeah, so that's some kind of counter argument. Love to hear your thoughts. I think one of the most interesting things to talk about in Bitcoin is why is it valuable, right? Like, why do we, what gives anything value?

1:08:42 Because depending on how you look at it, if you're looking at it as a payment network or if you're looking at its limited supply or if you're comparing, if we're comparing it to fiat, But it's like automatically it's got a limited supply. So it's like it's already got a huge leg up no matter what, even if it just sits in cold storage for some people. It can play the role of digital gold. And that's what I see Bitcoin as we know it. You know, the same way gold gets manipulated and is there's all these derivatives and paper and it's like a convoluted thing. And people don't really know who has what. That's how I see Bitcoin as we know it. It's like the Michael Saylor games. it's like we don't really know what he holds or how.

1:09:22 Okay. Let me just interrupt that for a moment because Still, that does not make gold worse. It makes paper gold worse. It makes all the shenanigans going on on top of gold worse. And I think the same is true for Bitcoin. It doesn't necessarily make Bitcoin worse. It makes the paper Bitcoin worse. I completely disagree because if people are coming in and they want to figure out a store of value, half of them are going to get stopped at MicroStrategy because they can get a yield, right? Versus holding Bitcoin in a cold storage wallet. So it's taking that value that could have gone to the pristine thing and it's distributing in all these games. Like if gold was only physical gold and there was no paper derivative, I think gold would be worth a lot more dollars per ounce or whatever.

1:10:09 And obviously you and I both know the shortcomings of gold. I'm just talking about that store of value narrative. I've kind of already said this, but I would like to see Bitcoin more so as we go forward. And when I say that, I'm talking about my Blake 2B chain that people are disregarding. I want to see it build its value based on merits as a network, not over what we can do with it later. Right now, there is overwhelmingly, even people that say they're maxis or whatever, they're not thinking about adopting. They're not thinking about getting people in their lives to adopt Bitcoin. They're not thinking about trading it value for value. They're thinking about selling it for more money later.

1:10:51 or maybe they're not thinking about selling it, but they're still thinking it's going to be worth more later. And to me, that very baseline idea of like, that's a scarcity mindset thinking like, I got to save for late. And I understand that that's, you know, it's a weird way of looking at things. But to me, the store of value should be based on the fact that it makes a good payment thing. Versus right now, I feel like people are seeing it as, Well, maybe I'll start spending them once it gets to this level. There's always like that. How much do you need to retire? How much am I going to need later? There's never discussion of like, how do we put this to work in our community?

1:11:33 The tools have been here for a long time. Lightning's been around for a long time. We could have had tons of changes in the world already. But instead, we've mostly just kind of turned on our TV and we watch Michael Saylor and we watch the news. We call Bitcoin the volatile thing. I don't see it that way. Bitcoin is super solid. It takes a certain amount of energy to get Bitcoin. The only thing that makes Bitcoin volatile is proof of work change. That's how you value Bitcoin is that. But we don't value it that way. We have a peg to a dollar. We have exchanges. We have all these fiat games. We got the micro strategy funhouse that adds. It's like a distortion, right? It's like a funhouse. It's like, well, what's the real thing anymore?

1:12:14 and yeah I don't know I think Bitcoin as we know it can exist for a long time while Bitcoin that I'm rooting for builds out its network and finds its value its own way like I don't know if it's going to be super clear very quickly that there is a winner or something I just I kind of see one is like a fiat based derivative game that people can speculate on and then we're going to fork and try to make it a better tool and put it to use hopefully and i know it's it's a tall order to try to get people to exchange differently yeah my point was more that it does the the games on top of gold doesn't change the the the chemical properties of gold if you want like it doesn't actually change gold that's true so uh gold is just a stupid rock and i i sort of want bitcoin to be a stupid rock too, and that it doesn't change over time.

1:13:14 You should go with Blake 2B then, because they're fixing it. I don't know if you heard, but they fixed Bitcoin. Yeah, maybe. The narrative that it should be a store of value because it's a medium of exchange, that's exactly the Bcashers argument. And I don't agree with that, because as I said before, I don't believe that money is ever idle. But am I like a B-cash-er? No, no, no. Do I look like Roger Ver? No, no, no. Am I up on a stage? No. I have six miners right now, ASICs, that I paid brand new. I paid $12,000 a piece, and now I'm going to brick them.

1:13:58 I'm choosing to brick my miners. Yeah. So I'm just going to say we're not like B-cash. Not very much. No, no. You haven't referred to crying baby, to dying babies even once in this conversation. So I have to give you that. Now we're on to eating cats. A rebuttal to another argument that no one uses Bitcoin. This is simply not true. I'm one of the founding members of the Free Madeira organization. And there's like 200 retailers there that accept Satsnow. And it's being used daily by a ton of Bitcoiners. A lot of digital nomads, for lack of a better word, move there for this very reason.

1:14:39 I use it all the time when I'm in El Salvador. I use it in Lugano and whenever, and I use it in Prague and any other place where if there's a restaurant to accept Bitcoin, I go there instead because I want to support that. And whenever I'm with other Bitcoiners, I mean, conferences is the obvious example, but whenever I meet other Bitcoiners, we use Sats. When we trade with one another, we use Sats. So I don't believe that that is true. Like I use Bitcoin daily and as a medium of exchange over space. Would you agree that maybe realistically 99% of Bitcoin is not being used that way though?

1:15:21 Yeah, of Bitcoin, but not Bitcoiners. And I think it's more important that that 1% of the Bitcoins is being used as a medium of exchange, that Bitcoiners use it, because I don't have a problem with large stacks sitting in the hands of a few wealthy people. I don't think that is, the fiat system is the same and worse. The most fiat money is, it's like what is 1% owns more than half of the world. Like, that is a much larger problem in fiat. And it's not a problem in itself.

1:16:02 Because all it does is like, if it's being huddled, it increases the scarcity of the remaining coins, making number go up, meaning making purchasing power go up. So I don't see that as a problem. I do see what Michael Saylor is doing is a problem. These fiat derivatives on top of it, I hate those. I think they suck. I don't think people should fall for that scam because all it is is I like Bitcoin by my goddamn stonk. And that's a bullshit game. So anyone who says they like Bitcoin and they use it to sell you a product, guilty as charged because I've said I like Bitcoin by my goddamn books.

1:16:44 But a book, at least, does not claim to store value over time in any other way than that the words will still be. So that's not entirely the same. If someone wants to sell you a T-shirt for Bitcoin, they are probably not trying to scam you and take your sats. However, if someone claims that you can get more yield by buying some other shit, then they're obviously lying and they're trying to get your Bitcoin. So that's how I view that. But I don't see it as a problem that people voluntarily choose not to spend until Bitcoin has 100xed.

1:17:27 That is a rational economic choice to me for most people. Most people will never accomplish it though, right? Most of us come into Bitcoin and we buy and then we sell a little bit later. Like human psychology, generally we're not very good at buying low. Yeah, but that doesn't mean we should be resentful to the people who figure that out. I mean, that was part of my journey. I didn't touch my Bitcoin for years, at least not to buy anything. then when I actually bought something I always regarded it because I could have bought 10 more of the same thing a year later I mean it supposed to do that to your psychology That's what creates this quality over quantity attitude in you, that you don't need frivolous shit.

1:18:21 And ultimately, I think that leads to everyone becoming more stoic and more like that which I can do without I own. I don't need all this frivolous shit. I can just be minimalist and be I can owe nothing and be happy that's what it leads to right so I don't think that aspect of it should not be understated it is still the thing I fell in love with more than more than being a convenient payment system I love that I can send that I can pay anyone in the world that no one can do anything about it of course I love that but but the That's, that's, it needs to be, my point is it needs to be both.

1:19:06 It needs to be store of value and medium exchange or medium exchange over space and time. Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe, you know, they require each other and it's a chicken or egg thing. Maybe it happens all at once. I'm not really sure, you know, something that just popped into my head that I think is really interesting that you kind of alluded to. You said, own nothing and be happy. and it makes me think of the have fun staying poor thing because a lot of people have been people will say that to me right if we're having an interaction and I'm explaining why I'm going with this for or whatever and then they'll say that and it's funny to me because I don't have Bitcoin so I like I'm not losing first of all no one's losing anything it's just a fork you could pretend it doesn't exist keep your coins as is and there's no fight to fight like it's just it's just an option for some of us. And so, and this is looking big picture, like, again, very idealistic, but I would love for everyone to have fun staying poor. Meaning my goal is to learn to love life, no matter what happens, regardless of, I don't keep money in my bank account. I've never been a saver. That's just who I am as a person. When I have money, I spend it because that's just the, that's like the incentives of fiat, right? It feels like you're going to miss out because it's burning a hole in your pocket. Right. And so that's part of that mindset is that I was kind of raised in the fiat world, but I've also, I was kind of raised in a, when I was young, I was in,

1:20:37 my family didn't have a lot. We, we went through a lot of hardships. So I've always kind of like known that I'm not, I'll be fine. It doesn't really matter what happens to me. And that's a bit where this fire comes from of like, Hey, if we're not fighting for the best tool, I don't care. like I don't you know I hear you that people are using it around the world and everything and I 100% you know I believe that's true and I think that's beautiful and maybe you're right if Bitcoin can be fixed as it is and it's already somewhat distributed and these things are happening I would love to see that florist too and maybe me and my friends are idiots and this will die off or whatever I don't really care I'm not in this to be right I'm just gonna like navigate day by day and for me right now it's like that thing is so far gone and even though it has those network effects even though there are so many people that have good values behind it and that are doing you know good things for bitcoin it just feels uh too far gone and uh but you know i'm happy just to keep observing right now i'm excited just to get mining on this new chain it's you know From my perspective, it's like, oh my God, it's like we get to start over again. We get to figure out where we went wrong, figure out how to keep mining more decentralized, get more people mining on their own templates. So I feel like we're taking all what we've learned from Bitcoin and that's integrated into this fork.

1:22:06 I don't see it as like a brand new thing centralized by Luke because he's the guy who's like pushing the code. But at the end of the day, individuals have to choose to run the software. And there's other options. Anyone could fork. We could leave him and go back to Bitcoin Core. So there is options in the space. And I don't see it as, you know, there ain't being any issue with their big kind of a single finger head or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. I definitely appreciate everything you're saying. And I, yeah, I understand why it's a tough call. No, and likewise, my hope for the future going forward for this channel to begin with, and for me personally, is that I can be, I still intend to keep talking to people on both sides of this fight, because I don't think the fight is over.

1:23:03 I think that there's a lot to be learned. And as I said, I think where we differ is how doomed we think Bitcoin is at this point. And I think there's still a chance that it survives. however I might not be as convinced as I was before I started signaling for BIP-110 or especially not as before Core V30 which I thought was just a weird thing to do with such obvious opposition from the plebs so we'll see what happens going forward And I think this is true for most of the people who were vocal in this fight, including yourself, that we are honest people who are honest to ourselves and not afraid of reputational damage or all this bullshit, which I'm not afraid of at all.

1:24:11 because like if if I was even able to be afraid of reputational damage, I wouldn't have been like if you're honest to yourself, you can't think about things like that because then you're not honest to yourself. Like if you're playing some kind of tactics game for likes like that's not that's not even on the table. And I hope that I can still have these honest conversations with with good people, regardless of whether they end up on Legacy Chain or Blake2B Chain or whatever we'll call them in the future Well and obviously I mean the fact that you've even chosen to have this interview means you haven't deemed this like a complete shit coin There's a mutual respect which is interesting I said this earlier, it's interesting that people's opinions of me are either like oh wow like you're doing great work or you're like an idiot you know and it's it's like one of the two is i guess true it's depending on how you look at it but uh you know this is the bitcoin infinity show and you're talking to someone who's on a fork of bitcoin you know like there's something to consider there you said it you said it not me yeah so so many people are considering this like doa or whatever but yet when i'm having conversations with individuals who are looking at it level-headed they're hanging on to both forks and gonna wait and see i see a lot of that

1:25:46 people that are like they're not convinced but they're they're not also they're also not so convinced that this is just a stupid shit coin that they should off offload right away to me it's like it doesn't matter what we call it or what you know it's just it's it's a fork you know a fork is a fork it doesn't mean this one's right or wrong necessarily and as individuals the people who want bitcoin as money will decide and to me that is the bitcoin community and uh right now it feels like it's not a lot of people but i think it's a lot more than we would realize you know i like looking at the comment sections and and the replies and it's like to me it feels like there's a ton of people gearing up for this. I'm excited. And yeah, grateful that you're, you know, allowing space for this talk, because it's really easy to just kind of fall into a camp and say Oh you guys are idiots or whatever And to be open minded I think is good for all of us Yeah absolutely And I mean that would have been moronic on so many levels Like, I signaled for BIP-110 because I thought it was a good idea.

1:27:03 And I thought it would have been good if it came through because that would have even further cemented my belief in that Bitcoin is sufficiently decentralized. I still think it is. I don't think it has been disproven by Bitcoin 10 failing, but I will try to keep the conversation going and I respect what you do 100% and I will never call I will refrain from calling people shitcoiners more going into the future that's my big takeaway from this I guess I have a question for you I'd love for you if you're willing so assuming let's say we fast forward a couple months and this fork isn't anything big no one really cares about it and whatever just not really considering the fork too much What do you see the way forward with Bitcoin as you know it?

1:28:07 What would that next movement look like? What would be the next attempt to get us back on track? Because you're obviously someone who sees the issues with core. You see these problems. What do you think the next attempt would look like? Or how do we get back on track? Or how would we know for sure that Bitcoin is decentralized? How would you come back from this? What might that look like? What would be the ideal outcome? Thank you. That's a great question. And what I would want is for these alternative implementations to gain more tractions. I hope in the future that Core is not the default implementation.

1:28:49 I hope that there's like five of them at least and that none of them have a majority. I also hope that Ocean survives all this and that the Datum protocol is still a thing in Bitcoin and that more and more hash mongers choose to mine with them or similar things so that we get actual minor decentralization because I think that's the bigger issue, always was the bigger issue. And meanwhile, of course, I hope there's no other sneaky attack or that someone puts CSAM in an op return just to fuck around with people or something stupid like that. Of course not. But I think, or rather, I know that there will be another fight and that there will be another battle to be won.

1:29:38 And I also know that you will have that on, now I say you and me again, but there will be such a battle on the other chain as well. Inevitably, forks are a natural phenomenon that happens in Bitcoin. It's a thing that is more important, really, than the protocol itself. It is the solution to the Byzantine general's problem, in a way, because if you think that the messenger whispering in your ear is not delivering the right message, your right to fork off and not trust him anymore is more crucial than anything.

1:30:21 It is the fact that this is a leaderless system so that you get to decide what Bitcoin is to you is more important than anything. So, yeah. But for legacy chain moving forward, hope for new implementations, as I said, and more minor decentralization through Datum and Ocean and similar things. That's what I hope for. And I hope also, I hope that some of these big entities that are obviously malicious do giant rug pulls and wreck a lot of people.

1:31:02 That might sound harsh, but that's how markets are supposed to work. The problem with the fiat system is that people like this can get bailed out and that we have a bigger problem. like they're not kicking the can down the road they're rolling the snowball down the hill like the 2008 crashes a crash is a good example when the democrats and the republicans chose the easy path out and bail out the bankers instead of fucking putting them in jail or worse like because they should have they were and they should have let the let the fucking system take the blow because the whole problem with politicians solving problems is that they create bigger problems every time they try to do so by not letting people learn from their mistakes.

1:31:53 So yeah, I hope everyone buying paper Bitcoins gets wrecked at some point. I hope that some guy at Coinbase fucks off and buys an island. And I hope that the balance sheets of all these treasury companies just get wiped at some point. Like the way I always saw this is like Bitcoin is sort of like the final scene of Fight Club, you know, where the Pixies song starts playing and all the skyscrapers fall down. And the guy has just shot himself through the face, but he still gets the girl. Yeah, that's what I'm looking forward to. that that's my optimistic future yeah so I I heard like everything you're saying makes sense I think that's the stuff that a lot of us would hope for in Bitcoin and you use that word a lot you said I hope this I hope this I hope this I hope this and then we talked about you know politically or the it's like it would have been good if they would have done this like so ideally that stuff will happen, but what are the steps to get there? Like outside of just like we could all talk and say, I hope it becomes more decentralized. And my experience in life has been things that become centralized, become more decentralized, right? If we look at our corporate structures, they just, you know, and it's like you said, instead of doing bailouts, we could have just felt the blow. Well, we hoped and it didn't change, right? It's like in our political system,

1:33:26 I'm telling, you know, in my point of view, there's no reason to hope for that system anymore because we don't have any actual agency. And so in all that, while I agree with like that would be ideal that mining became more decentralized and there would be more implementations for running a Bitcoin node. I don't understand how we get there because this thing has only gone in one direction since the beginning. right? Mining has become more decentralized outside of a couple of big events, China bans or whatever. Overall, this stuff has become more centralized. And I think that's a big reason why Bitcoin is different now with this fork than it was in 2017. I think a lot's changed in that time.

1:34:12 I think there's been more corporate, there's more money in it. There's more of the fiat game stuff. So I guess my point is, it's like I heard you say a lot of things that you hope to see, but I don't hear any real like actionable steps. Like, how do we suddenly end up with more core implementations? People can write them, but how do you get them out? Is it a matter of like voices that are loud enough? And it's like, well, as far as I could tell, Mechanic and Cratter and Luke did like everything they could to, you know what I'm saying? And maybe we're going around in circles, but it's like everything you were hoping for, we already pushed for and it already didn't happen. So like, what are the actionable steps? You know, like and I'm with you also, I would love to see the Treasury stuff go away and blow up.

1:35:00 And I think that's inevitable. And Bitcoin could go up in value a lot, you know, but I don't I don't know. I don't know what the actionable steps are for individuals. Like if you know, if you're just whereas with what I'm doing right now, I feel like I get to take action. Like I'm choosing I'm like instead of hoping for this thing, I'm choosing the thing that's like, hey, this is an option. And I all about hope and and having faith in something But I lost my faith on that side And I don know i don know what there is to keep hoping i don i don know what that would look like no and uh yeah that we differ here i think because i think we the way i see it we lost the battle but that doesn't necessarily mean that we lost the war and i know a bunch of people that We're working on new implementations.

1:35:47 And I know that the simple fact that some of these problems have even come to light gives me hope. The whole datum thing has pointed out to Bitcoiners that the mining is centralized. Before that happened, no one was talking about that. The spam issue has come to light to Bitcoiners. They are more aware of it now than they were two years ago. Like, it's obvious. And these are the things that give me hope for it. Sure, it's small in the beginning, and it takes time for stuff to change.

1:36:27 But the more awareness there is, the more hopeful I am. More education is always needed. And I think another big entity crashing, like an FTX crash, for instance, something similar to that, won't name any specific companies, but you know the usual suspects. If that happens, that's great. Fiat games, like trying to bridge between fiat and Bitcoin, it's this square peg in a round hole thing. because if we're going to go deep here, I bet you heard me say this before, but I don't even view Bitcoins or sats as being ownable at all since they're just a string of information.

1:37:10 Like the UTXOs, you can see them on the time chain, but the time chain is only ever a historic document of what happened to each Satoshi. It's never the Satoshi itself. That is not on chain. The ability to move it is the actual powerful aspect of a Satoshi. And that is always in some person's head because it's just a string of information. And even if it's on a hardware wallet or on paper, the knowledge of where that hardware wallet or that paper is, is a secret that you keep from everyone else. The way I see it is you can't own a Bitcoin, but you can act as if you do if you A, believe that no one else has access to the secret that you have, and B, that you don't believe the system will change to such an extent that it will render that Satoshi useless.

1:38:02 If you believe those two things, then you can act as if you own the Bitcoin, but you can't actually own it because it's just information. And it points out to humanity that money never needed to be anything but information, which is totally mind-blowing when you think about what that implies. We were always able to interact with one another, to trade with one another in a completely honest way where there's no possibility to cheat. And that's the beauty of the system. And it illuminates so many other truths about trade.

1:38:42 Like it illuminates the fact that the true nature of the free market is deflation. That all prices ought to drop forever, forever. Because humans get better at doing things. So therefore, everything should cost you less over time. It does all of these things. And it also points out that aggression is bad in the sense that, you know, this is another one of my talking points. I can point a gun at your head and say, give me all your Bitcoins and you can give me a minuscule amount and I have no way of knowing how much you actually had. So it changes the incentive structure around aggression.

1:39:22 It's very hard to steal something that you cannot know is even there. So in that sense, it points out to people that being honest and trading is better for everyone than aggression, always. And theft is wrong and all of these things. And it allows for such a utopian view of the future. So it's truly, when I say Bitcoin is hope, and when I hear you say it, it's not, that means something to me. That is super powerful.

1:40:03 It's literally hope because it has shown, it has illuminated a path forward for humanity where it is this meme with the shoes between the two roads, like the dark stormy castle or the beautiful future. It's exactly that. And my passion for it has taken a hit, but it's not gone. It's very far from gone. And I think regardless of how this whole thing plays out, I feel super privileged to be able to have a front row seat to see this whole thing play out. And I'm grateful to everyone I've interviewed.

1:40:46 I'm grateful to everyone I've met, except the assholes. but yeah and i still think the i don't know if you heard the dicks pussies and assholes rants that i took from uh from uh team america world police like uh bitcoin is has three characters yeah um we need the dicks to yeah i don't need to do that again and it's sort of yeah R-rated, so we shouldn't do that here. It checks and balances of sorts. Yeah, exactly. It's super exciting to watch it unfold.

1:41:28 Nobody really knows. When you talk about that split between a utopia or the dark, I just feel like we're doing it again. We're walking towards this mirage. We're on this trail together and this one mirage is starting to look kind of fake. And now I see another one over here. And yeah, I don't know. I agree that this has brought a lot of awareness, but a lot of those people that are becoming aware are also coming to mind on Blake2B. So I don't know if it's strengthening Bitcoin's awareness or not at the end of the day, I guess, but we'll have to find out. one thing I think it inevitably does is that it educates at least some people like people will pay attention and people will start to do their homework and that's always a good thing and I think there are more good-hearted Bitcoiners out there than you might believe from just watching Twitter feeds Twitter incentivizes conflict because that's good for Twitter right But there are a lot of good people out there. There are a lot of bad ideas out there. Some of the good people have bad ideas. But still, we live in the timeline we live in, and we have to make amends with it.

1:42:51 I think, yeah I feel that you're a good soul and you have good intentions and I think that's more important than anything else and I hope my hope is that I can stay friends with the good people on either side of any fork in this regardless of how things play out Yeah, and we're going to be probably welcoming a view the whole time because you've been kind to everyone and just been kind of humble and sharing your point of view. And that's all I want to do. I'm not trying to tell anyone what's the right way or anything, because I don't know.

1:43:33 Just, you know, we're all making our best guess. And we're definitely all learning this stuff. I mean, I'm learning more all the time, you know, just watching, just witnessing it happen and understanding even what a hard fork is versus a soft fork and everything. A lot of this is new to me. And it's a fantastic time for learning. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We've been going for, yeah, one hour and 46 minutes now. So before we run this out, is there anything else that we haven't talked about yet that you want to bring up? I think we've touched on most of the stuff that we figured we would probably want to talk about.

1:44:16 You know, I think we have a different point of view, but we both have good intentions. And that's the people I want to keep having conversations with, because that means that they're open-minded enough to consider what's possible. And I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, let's already now plan for having this conversation again a year or so from now, maybe even six months from now. and just to catch up and see how things play out. I've absolutely loved this conversation, Dave, and I will push extra for this pod because I think it's one that people need to hear. I think things aren't as straightforward as many people think.

1:45:01 And yeah, if we get the privilege of making people think a little, then that's worth it in itself. I agree. Thank you so much, Nick. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. You should still like, subscribe, and brush your teeth and all of that. And thank you very much, Dave, for coming on. And see you on the next one. Thanks for watching. Have a good one. Thank you.