The Truth About the UASF and BIP-110 with Giacomo Zucco | Bitcoin Infinity Show #221

0:00 Giacomo, a warm welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Lovely to have you here, as always. Knut, thank you very much for inviting me back. Yes, we have a lot to talk about. I mean, we haven't spoken since pre-Bip 110 fork failing or not failing, depending on what side you are. And we have a lot to unpack. You're back with Ocean again. I'm very curious about that. And I think you have made a lot of friends and a lot of enemies, as always in Bitcoin. A little bit my thing. It's Bitcoin's thing and my thing, peculiarly.

0:42 Yeah, I know exactly what that feels like. So I want to unpack some of these things. To begin with, what's your assessment of the fork? Let's start there. what happened and why could the miners ignore the fork attempt without people running a user-rejected soft fork? Why did the prisoner's dilemma scenario never play out? How does this actually work? What is your definition of an economic node and how much do nodes matter going forward? Can you give an overview of that, please?

1:25 Yeah, I think it was what happened is what I expected to happen. And it's a combination of the proposal not having the large support that an internal echo chamber effect made some people believe it had. And on top of that, even a way major support not being enough to change Bitcoin's rules to the degree that some mythology about SegWit created over the years. So let's start with the second, because the second, I think, is more objective, while the first we can enter more like something which is fresh and recent. So I published a meme, which is a very leftist meme, which says that it's very large and nobody will read it.

2:10 You know, the left cannot meme and there is like the giant meme. But I'm proud of it, even if it's very leftist in the sense that nobody will read it. And I used the different, the meme about the two groups calling each other our heroic pioneers, they are brutish invaders and that kind of stuff. And I used it to symbolize something which was coming out of my conversation in person with Jeff Booth. Because Jeff Booth was saying to me, I agree with you that BIP 110 is bad, but there is a fight going on in the background. There is some kind of fight. I can see it and you can see it as well. So we may just as well select a battlefield to that fight. If not now, when? If we are not fighting back now, when?

2:55 And I think that in order to, I explained to him, but he knew, I clarified to him that in Bitcoin, there are many battlefields. One is trying to unilaterally change the rules in an expensive way. That's called an hard fork. Imposing an hard fork is the harder thing to do because the status quo is against you. Everybody else not caring is just running the same consensus. So every machine without a human intervention, every business that doesn't really have a process to change, the status quo is a very important force. If you try to change the rule in an expensive way, the status quo will be against you. And that's what SegWit2x tried to do with an overwhelming power, economic power.

3:39 and then I will enter into economic power. SegWit2x had a huge economic power because exchanges, 80% of the miners, etc., etc. And they failed because the battlefield was too hard. And the community had the defensive power of basically being in your citadel and you have these people trying to come in your citadel, but your citadel is status quo, is habit, is time, is Lindy effect, is a shelling point of repeatability. And we defended and we were very effective. Then there is a second thing, which is defending from a soft fork. So the miners are trying not to push him by a transaction, but to, we can use the word sensor, even if it's a little bit charged, sensor value transaction because of some reasons.

4:29 resisting to this is trickier, but it's actually possible. There are many discussions and I didn't even try to do it because I didn't think BAP 110 was worthy of any real active opposition because of this low support. But with some more nasty things, like for example, with drive chain, I was ready to do something of that. And I'm not talking about RSTD because, sorry, the use of resistance of fork, because that will be symmetric. That will put the defender in the very same position of the attacker. The attacker wants to restrict the rules.

5:09 The defender will counter restrict the rules in another way, which is completely giving away the advantage of status quo. So then you move outside of consensus and you go into mempool policies. In mempool policies, there is also an asymmetry. There is a possibility to enlarge or loosen the mempool rules, which is the easier thing to do, and tighten it, which is the harder thing to do. Because in this case, you don't need economic nodes. You just need connection nodes, like topologic nodes, to be stronger, more connected. because if you want to propagate something, this is a typical Andy Beck sentence about intolerant minority. But it's true. In a network, if you have a small minority that would be more permissive, you need a very large majority to be unpermissive in terms of selection. So I think that what happened is that the movement, and then we can go more into what socially the movement wanted, Bitcoin is money, core is too much centralized or corrupted, or shitcoins are bad and we are losing the reactions to shitcoin or whatever. Whatever was the reasoning or just my was mostly a principal point about definition of spam because it was triggered by bad philosophy on spam.

6:29 Everybody had a battle and this battle was felt, but the battlefield choose was something very bad, which is imposing a soft fork. That's only possible where the majority is, the economic majority is overwhelming. Now, what is an economic majority? Economic majority, basically, it's very hard to measure. If it was easy to measure, it will also be easy to game. Instead, it's very hard to measure. It's basically the average of how much transactions you process receiving, because it means that if you go, so if you go out of the consensus with Bitcoin, people that will try to pay you, you will tell them, sorry, I didn't receive my payment. And that's something that will make your client worried because they cannot pay you. So how much important is your service?

7:20 If McDonald's refuse the dollars tomorrow, some people will go along with the new McDonald's choice because McDonald's is important. If I stop receiving Bitcoin for my consultancy and I only receive Zaxx bucks, people will just say, I'm more commodity, I'm replaceable, I'm disposable. I'm not that important. Now, it's not that we are divided between important like McDonald's and unimportant like me. It's a spectrum and many less important people together can compound economic importance. It is basically a good metric approximation could be the amount of money in purchasing power terms.

8:06 So let's say in present dollar terms, you process for unit of time. There may be another measure of economic weight, which is hodling. So even if you don't process anything, but you hold a lot of Bitcoin, if you're willing to dump on one consensus rule, but not on the other, and buying. So if your bid and ask will differentiate among the rules, so basically you are dumping your airdrop on one side or the other that also matter on the price and the price will matter on incentives So I would say that the hodlers and market receivers merchants are the economic node My node on AWS will do something in terms of propagating transactions, but it will do nothing in terms of making people scared, economically scared of changing consensus versus me. Okay. I need to unpack this because I think I need to up my own understanding of Bitcoin and incentives in this sense.

9:10 So I'll tell you how I view it, and then you can poke holes in my worldview here, if you want. Because the way I see it, when you're faced with this type of software, if you're a miner, what you have to take into consideration is exactly what you say. if people are going to refuse to use your payment system in the future. So what that means is that they will not get the fees nor the reward from those people. Well, they will get the reward anyway because it comes from the rest of the network. But you end up having fewer participants in the network, which is bad for you, objectively speaking, because you're losing out on those fees.

9:55 However, if they think that this movement is too small, then they have their other economic incentives, including being friends with Saylor and Adam Back and people who are big in the space but were against this fork. So they have to weigh this economic decision one against the other. And the sales numbers of Start9s and Umbrils, like 5,000 new nodes fired up approximately, like this is all of this is approximation. But I think that if I was a fiat-minded miner, I wouldn't have cared that much about those sales numbers because I would know that I would suspect that most of those are insignificant nodes that have no incoming traffic or that much Bitcoin in them to begin with or going through them.

10:51 So I didn't have that much to lose from the fees. Is that an accurate description of the economic decision a miner is forced to take in these situations? I think it's very accurate. I don't have any hole to poke, except maybe just to clarify the size of this factor, because I think that listing them in a flat way may be a little bit misleading. I think that the incentive to actually run the new rules is to avoid to have your block reward not accepted, which is a strong incentive. It's very clear. That depends on the amount of people that will reject it. What is the incentive to keep the current rule and not to just follow any support just to be safe?

11:33 So tomorrow, Peter Todd is saying, I'm going demo reg. Well, I'm a minor. let's just do Demorage just to be sure so I don't lose money. Why aren't miners doing this? Because they're the counter incentive. I think that the stronger counter incentive that you didn't list it clearly, but I know you know it, but I think it's very clear is inertia and doing nothing and status quo. Every operational change. So it's not the same to expand the rule or to not reduce the rules. So whatever was status quo before has an enormous weight in the operation, which is the asymmetry I was talking about. So if you are asking, if you are telling, if miners want to do an hard fork, and a small amount of people are resisting, miners are like, okay, we have to change operations, betting on the fact that users will also change it. This is scary.

12:27 The other way is, wait, we have to not change operation based on the fact that the users will or not change operation, I'm confident. It's not even worth the effort to change. So resistance to change, inertia, especially in big operations like miners, also means regulatory concern. What do I do if I do this? Operational concern. You have to do stuff. And that's a threshold of attention, which is very high to poke. Then the second is actually something like the fees, the reason not to run this fork, which is a bad reason for me. It's a bad reason for Bitcoin, but it's true, is that the proposal of the fork was likely reducing the fee revenue to the miner by cutting out some spam. And miners, they are all mining spam, including some miners on ocean. I'm sorry about that because it's a short-term gain, it's a short-term profit against long-term healthy, but that's the economic incentive right now. So the fork was asking them not to do it.

13:27 And third, there is also what you mentioned, which is reputational damage. If you follow some rule, you can be insulted by Andy Beck or Saylor, Giacomo Zuck or whatever. That has a small weight, but it's not a zero weight, reputational effect. What I think is that this connected with the fact that the actual weight, which was my second argument, the actual weight of this fork in economic sense was basically zero in the sense that from the point of view of business receiving money on the daily base compared to a stake and shake or even whatever, it was very, very small. It was mostly Parma node, which is great, but it was not a credible threat. Parma node, who is now still on legacy, by the way he never he is but yeah exactly so it was not even a real threat but it was a potential threat so yeah yeah my my intuition here would be that the these two out of the three explanations inertia and and reputational damage have a lot more weight than the actual spam because spam doesn't give miners that much money and and that that if anything that that the fork sort of had a fighting chance that there but that inertia and reputational damage weigh in way more than the bit 110 performance thought because actual spam is not fees from spam is not giving miners

15:01 as much as one might think it could be if a reputationally speaking uh it's complex because the miners for example will never be so scared to uh i mean it depends probably on the age of Bitcoin. During SegWit2x proposal, miners were almost reputationally incentivized like Jianghu, Fork Your Mother. They were incentivized to show who's the boss. Reputational for miners was like, we are in charge, not the developers. So there could be a reputation incentive to go against Saylor or Adam or me because there is the incentive to blend in and to be perceived well by the community and the incentive to be perceived as in charge and powerful and the one who causes shock. Now miners are more, they have been humbled in Segwit2x. And so now it seems like they're still square into the part of being like, I just want to be a good boy with developers, with core devs and with influencer and stuff like that. Yeah. And herein lies a problem, I think because you always have this battle between the different groups and at the end of the day like we want plebs to be in charge don't we like we that's important point I don't I want state I want fixed rules to be in charge as much as possible against plebs if needed.

16:28 all right so fixed rule so yeah two things here come to mind uh we're going uh we can start with bip 148 is our collective memory of bip 148 the user activated soft work during segwit and the block size wars is our collective memory of that wrong like did it have as much power as the romanticized view of it uh makes it out to be i think uh yes it's wrong and no it didn't uh it has been romanticized and also hyperbolized over the years. What happened was that there was a fork proposal, which was the actual circuit fork, not the URSF.

17:10 And this proposal had an overwhelming amount of support. So it was basically already a proposal that was giving a very strong incentive to miners to go along But miners had a counter incentive In this case mostly reputational governance control It was not about fees. Well, one miner had another incentive, which was covert ASIC boost. Okay, that miner had that. But it was also mostly Xi'an showing the Communist Party that he was in charge of Bitcoin. It was a battle for dominance, for governance. So everybody, every developer supported the change. Most of the users, even misunderstanding it, but we were supporting in a religious way.

17:55 In Insight, I'm not a fan of Segwit anymore as I was, but in the way that the community behaved, I became a great supporter. Antonopoulos was explaining to us why Segwit was great. Everybody, Luke was Segwit. Peter Todd was Segwit. Even some of the big blockers were secured as long as you do it with an earth fork. So it was uncontroversial. On top of that, it was already arrived to an amount of enforcing that was already sufficient to fork away the non-compliant miner. So the hash rate was already high in support. What was missing was just the amount to actually create the activation in a very cautious activation process, which was 95%. So there was a super majority of miners enforcing the rule already and promising to enforce it, but not really the activation threshold that we use as a coordination. And then there was a threat of hard fork from a very powerful group as a counter.

18:59 So we will hard fork. So if we soft fork now, we prevent an hard fork later. So it was a very unique situation, I am convinced that without UASF, Segwit will have activated anyway, maybe one year later, maybe six months later, but it would have activated for the level of support yet. When Segwit, when the UASF happened, what it did was basically to convince a cartel, a very tight coordinated cartel of miners to capitulate and to just activate the thing with one major loss, which was a covered ASIC boost, which at this point was also discovered already in the open.

19:40 So it was not this advantage to beat Maine that it used to be just before. So it's not that nothing happened. It was cool. But the mythology that if I buy a box and I run a note, now there is a vote. And if it's many of us voting, we can set the rules. This is some kind of extrapolation, of democratic extrapolation of the UASF, which was, I think, completely disconnected from the reality of the event. All right. So let's dissect Bit.1.10 a bit more. Yeah, I think we are on the same page with saying that core version 30 is what triggered the soft fork supposal.

20:27 We are. Proposal. If that hadn't happened, if Core had just chosen to not go against the will of that many plebs, those plebs would still be here, in effect, because there would never have been a soft fork proposal. At least, this is a bit of Captain Hindsight here, I know, but I think there was an obvious trigger in Core V30. We can agree on that. I personally wasn't that concerned with the large op returns, but I thought the fork was good for other reasons, mainly like the taproot, the op if being 99.98% spam, and we might as well just get rid of that.

21:11 And as things evolved, I thought of this as quite a good way to remind the developers of who's actually in charge. Now it turned out that we weren't in charge. So given all that, and that Bitcoin has now lost a lot of very dedicated plebs that care a lot about, and not only plebs, but developers and influencers. I'm speaking, of course, mainly about Luke and Mechanic and everyone surrounding them, Chris Guida and Crater and all of my friends who have now dedicated their lives to this fork and taken the enormous risk of firing the miners, as they call it.

21:57 which I think is like, I refuse to call them shitcoiners because I think the most fundamental thing in Bitcoin is that you get to decide what Bitcoin is. You get to decide the rules of the money you're using. And the only thing that would make you switch to a different set of rules or cling on to old rules, if you will, is that you have a lot to lose from changing them. Like there's making the wrong choice in which set of rules you adhere to can be very costly for you. So I respect the right to, like it's the Evelyn Beatrice Hall, but paraphrasing here again, I don't agree with your fork, but I will defend your right to the death, your right to fork it.

22:47 That is sort of the underlying philosophy here. Where am I going with this? But yeah, so given the fact that V30 is what triggered this whole thing, is Bitcoin now on this slippery slope because we have lost so many good fighters? Is Bitcoin less robust now than before Core V30 was even suggested? And in that case, why were the developers so adamant about this change, seemingly insignificant mempool change, if they couldn't envision the enormous, almost catastrophic reaction to this whole thing?

23:32 I mean, it would have been better for Bitcoin if all of these people were still here, I think. And I think most people agree with that. But will the developers ever admit that it was their fault, in a sense? Or what's going on there? What's your view on that whole situation? Many points. So let's start. We agree that it was caused by core behavior in V30. Absolutely. I agree that we have lost some valuable things for Bitcoin. Particularly, I'm concerned about Luke because, yeah, I mean, Matthew was good in education. Mechanic was a friend and a very interesting voice.

24:14 But I think the real point is, look, Luke was, I believe in Andy's sentence about the 10th man. And I believe in that representation of Luke as a contrarian. My problem with the recent events is that Luke's contrarianism was used to be insulated. Like he says something crazy, like let's change the proof of work. Nobody will go along. Some other dev will say, well, maybe, but most of the people will say, fuck you. No. And this kind of thing will remain as a possible breaking of certainty, as a possible controversy, which I always, I said it several times. For me, being friend or at least we have to check with Luke or former friend or whatever, with both him and Peter is the same way Peter Todd will go along with something crazy like let's introduce Demurage or Taylor mission.

25:10 And then everybody will say, fuck you. But it's good to have these people around. What is not good is when these people become leaders, when these people can really say something crazy and people will actually go along with that as something non-crazy. And that's something which for me is unprecedented with Luke. Luke was always the crazy one and I always respected that because there was an internal consistency in the craziness. There was a provocation. There was a challenge to my view to try to keep it consistent. And then suddenly he's the guy that is calling the shot on a Discord and he will just say, let's do this, let's remove the supply, let's have the supplies. And some people will just go along.

25:52 So look for me, especially the loss here. I agree with that. Now is this bad for Bitcoin I think yes Is this unprecedentedly bad I think no I think that for example when there was the big the block war we have lost a lot of libertarians Pork fest people in New Hampshire, they were mostly Roger Ver people. People in Japan that were strong anarcho-capitalists. Roger Ver was a strong political defender of libertarian principles. Yeah, but I'd say Roger Ver had a very, he was more of a LARP-itarian in the sense of actually understanding the economics, I think.

26:32 I agree, but that's also something we could say for many of our BIPers, BIP 110ers as well. Not everybody is, yeah. So, not everybody is Konza. Some of them were just throwing stuff around. Did we lose Konza? I don't know. I didn't check on him. I hope not. I don't think so. I don't think so.

27:23 not. And it's a lot of people, I think, have a view of Austrian economics like that it's sort of optional and that it's a worldview and do not view it as the accurate representation of reality. For sure, it was a hit, the connection between Antispy movement and Austrian economics. Within the context of this fork was a small loss in the Austrian economics defense within Bitcoin because it was always very, thanks mostly to CypherD, and it was very respected, very powerful. Like, it was not really easy to go around and say to people, ah, fuck Austrian economics in Bitcoin. We were like, it's like saying fuck cypher, cypherpunk principles.

28:05 It's an important part of the story. Now, most of that, not most of that, but big part of that was used as an argument in the fork and on the losing side. So now I see some anti-Austrian regurgitation, which is not unsimilar to some level of anti-libertarian, more compliant view in Bitcoin entering when some of the big cashier that were more aggressive in the libertarian sense went away. I agree that Roger Ver didn't understand economics properly. Otherwise, he will understand not forking as well. But what I want to say is that it's not the first time that an internal struggle will remove something that was valuable to Bitcoin because it was hijacked in something that was ultimately not accepted by Bitcoin.

28:49 Even, I mean, freaking Paul Stork made interesting contribution a few years ago, in my opinion. But the problem is that Bitcoin derangement syndrome is unforgiving. If you try to change Bitcoin, you fail, you will go down with your ship of your ego against Bitcoin. And even if you have value to provide otherwise, that happened to Paul, that happened to many, many other people. Now, I will fight back on not using shitcoin. I mean, you're free not to use it, but I will use shitcoin with no problem because what you say this through, I will defend the right of anybody to define what they mean with Bitcoin for themselves, to run their node with any rule they want and to call it whatever the heck they want.

29:34 But that's exactly the same right that I grant to any other shitcoiners. I don't think that I should stop big cashers from defining Bitcoin another way or just running Bitcoin with other rules, even if I disagree with the merit of the rules. So it's not new. My term shitcoin was never intended as a denial of the fundamental freedom of changing your rules, just sacrificing your economic consensus with the other. Of course, I was very aggressive back then with Roger, selling Bitcoin on Bitcoin.com. And if you ask, if you did, I want to buy Bitcoin, you were buying big cash. That's a kind of when your self-definition is used in a way which is intentionally misleading for other people that are not really understanding the change in their definition. So you know that they don't know what you mean, but you do it anyway.

30:28 I think that's dishonest. Yeah, but here you have levels of autism here. I think in Luke's case, he actually believes 100% that his coin is Bitcoin. I give a pass to Luke about that because I mean, with Luke, it's the same with everything, right? I remember I told this story sometimes to people when he came to Milan for the first time, he wanted me to bring him to a Catholic church and we spent like two days back and forth. Yes, look, of course I can bring, no, a Catholic church, but of course it's full of Catholic church, but I mean a Catholic church. And then after two days, I understood Sedevacantism and everything. So for Luke, that's totally standard. He will just calmly and politely using his own definitions and it will, I think, ignore the fact that you don't understand it. But what I'm saying is that, well, let me get back to the main point. I don't see any, I agree with your shitcoin defense.

31:23 I don't see why it will be different this time from any other time, except for the very personal fact that we have our friends there now, which I didn't understand during the block size wars. I didn't have many big block friends. I understood people suffering like Eric Lombroso was telling me, oh, I'm losing all my friends. And the Mandric was like, oh, all my friends are. So I've seen the suffering. Now I feel it. Now, yeah, these were my friends and now they are in a shitcoin. Yeah, I still hope and think that I can remain friends with them simply because of the fact that I wouldn't have been friends with them if they were actual assholes like many people in the big cash fork uh but these people aren't uh and i'm using terms like these people which which which i don't want to do like uh i i still i still view um these people now i said it again but as my friends and i i don't want it to be another way Tropic Thunder moment So you have before we go on to Ocean and all the other stuff we want to talk about you have a famous tweet or should I say infamous tweet in which you semi agree with Peter Todd that you say something like Demerage itself or a little bit of fixed inflation would not be categorically wrong and I think people misinterpret you there because i think what you mean is that if these were the rules set from the

32:57 very beginning then they would be okay uh but but but they're not okay if if i think you're still you still have the view that they're not okay to implement later absolutely i i largely yeah my question is if if there was even one sat inflation in in bitcoin at one point ever would you completely abandon it at that point or not? I would. Because I would. Yeah, I would as well. Not for the set and not for the economic effect of the sets. For the precedent that given a strong enough emergency, it would be easy to manipulate people into changing the economic rule.

33:38 And that would set the precedent very clear. I would probably find myself in a similar situation to these people, our friends, in the sense that maybe I would say, okay, maybe investment-wise, I don't want to sell this stuff now, but my belief in the unicity of this thing and importance of this thing just collapsed. Maybe I can still buy it. Maybe I can still use it if it's... But just like I can use whatever. One time in 2015, I had to use Dogecoin to give it to somebody because I've lost a bet. I did it. I did use USDT on Liquid to incorporate my company. I felt bad, but okay, I can do it practically, but I will not believe in it.

34:20 While right now, I believe that Bitcoin has the strength to resist social influence in changing economic rules, rag pulling people with economics. What I meant with that tweet and I severely overestimate. So I try not to be tribal. I try to say it as I see it without minding for my team or my friends or my squad. But I underestimate how other tribal people will assume I'm tribal. So I tweeted something that is the same thing I've tweeted about that argument ever. I pushed a link with an interview between me and Peter Todd in Prague in 2016, saying the exact same thing, which was basically, I agree that if Bitcoin was created in 2008, in the first iteration, with fixed inflation, it would probably still work.

35:13 I don't agree it will work better in the sense of having tile emission to pay for minor estate. That's a broken argument. I don't think it's useful, but I think it would have worked mostly just as the same. My only doubt about that is that fixed supply is a way easier thing to explain than asymptotically zero inflation. So I think that education-wise, marketing-wise, that will have been a mistake, not a catastrophic mistake. If Satoshi created 50 Bitcoin per blocks and that's it, I think Bitcoin could have had some way to survive anyway. Maybe better if it was still decreasing. What, for example, I would have preferred, if you ask me if I could go back in time, I think that it will be way better, more elegant, not way better, more elegant to have 21 million as a asymptote with infinite divisibility. So you never have the end of a subsidy. You always have a small subsidy that becomes sub-Satoshi forever. That's very elegant mathematically, and that's also put to rest some small part of the realistic objection by Todd and others, which is mostly one, which is fee sniping. In a moment where subsidy is zero, fees are everything. If you have asymmetrically high fee in one block and not the others, miners of the next block may fight to get the first instead of continuing the chain. There was a Stanford paper a few years ago simulating the

36:46 theory. It's not a big deal, but it is a possible very niche problem in 2140 or whatever. Infinite divisibility would be cool. Now, changing anything now, including one single Satoshi after the final Alvin, for me, would be a complete destruction of every credibility in Bitcoin monetary policy. Maybe, and I want to poke the, I want to be hated here. I want really to try to be provocative. A proposal to increase divisibility would be an hard fork. What will make it less bad than tail emission with one Satoshi more is that at least it will not be arbitrary.

37:29 There are infinite ways to increase the supply. And if you do it once, people will do it again with some fake emergency. So there are infinite ways. There is just one way to go from cutoff to eternal asymptote. So in a way, you create a precedent, which I will not like. I will fight against it. But if the overwhelming majority of the economy introduced infinite divisibility, that's non-arbitrary enough that I may still be saying, okay, guys, we fucked up because we changed the rule. But you see, we changed the rule in a way that keeps the cap, that doesn't change in retrospect any investment decision by any investors. The only thing it does is changing the dynamics about the final cutoff of mining in the future. I would still probably oppose it, but it would probably not lose any interest in Bitcoin if eternal divisibility succeeded.

38:27 But anything that would go above the cap, it would destroy any credibility because it's the typical just this time, just for this emergency and then nothing more. But that's a typical captured state in which if it's not captured by an elite, it could also be captured by the panic, by the plebs, because plebs are possible to capture just as well. Okay, I'm going to have to devil's advocate that and say that even that proposal would be fatal. And I say that because the rules are what they are now, and people have made their economic decisions believing that they will not change these fundamentals. So any change to the fundamentals is at least potentially fatal.

39:14 Also, the FUD about when the reward is zero SATs instead of one SAT and you have only fees to rely on, that's not entirely true because you can use Bitcoin miners for other things than Bitcoin mining, including heating homes. And you can also mine because you do have an incentive to mine. If you have a stack of Bitcoin and you want Bitcoin to work, at some point, you could even be forced to mine or forced to help the network continue on as intended. Otherwise, the value of your coins risks going to zero.

39:54 So you sort of have to do it. So I think that there's a lot of FUD here. And it's also completely uncharted territory for mankind. We've never had anything like this before. But I think, as with most other things, that it's FUD. So, yeah, what would you say to that? Yeah, the only correction that I will feel like trying is that on the heating thing is different. So I think that the only realistic scenario where there is any issue with a zero subsidy is block sniping, which is a very particular scenario. In that scenario, the miners will hit their house, whether they are continuing the chain or trying to just steal the previous fees.

40:37 They are still hitting the house. So the subsidy is what actually pushed them to accept the continuation of the chain, because the subsidy will only be valid if they build on the… Yeah, quick, back to one of my arguments. Maybe I articulated it poorly. But if they do that, if they choose to snipe instead of, don't they risk their own stacks? And at 2140, isn't the world sort of hyper-Bitcoinized already? So you would value your sats way more than your fiat anyway? It's a 10-preference argument. They don't risk this. Immediately, they are trying to maximize their stack by gaining more Bitcoin.

41:18 If everybody does like that forever, Bitcoin is dead. But if you do that, you get some money and Bitcoin is not dead. So it's a typical dilemma of time preference, which if everybody acts like this forever, everything is destroyed. But I'm not asking everybody to do this forever. I just wanted to do it myself, specifically right now. I don't think block sniping is a fatal threat. And I agree with you that messing with divisibility could be, I will not assign a zero probability that you open up the Pandora's box of arbitrary monetary change. I would oppose the fork anyway. I'm just saying that there is a difference between something which is arbitrary. So, for example, the solution to the integer overflow bugs in block height or whatever will be an R fork, technically speaking.

42:10 I am not scared of precedence because it's a totally non-arbitrary R fork. You are changing the rules, yes, but you are changing the rules in a way that is obvious. is a super strong shilling point. There is not a discussion to have coordination, power, influence, social influence. It's just math. It's just like BIP 21. BIP 21, which is April Fools by SIPA, but it's also true that it was a fork to some degree to fix the way that halving was done, which was unpredictable. BIP 21 changed the supply schedule. So we did change supply schedule. But in a way that was framed as a joke, because it is a joke, it's unarbitrary to just go to the obvious meaning of the software and not the text of the software, which is actually, it's like with the inflation bug. When we fixed the inflation bug, we changed the rule of the schedule. So we did it. There was in the code, there was a rule And we changed it.

43:15 I not scared of the precedent because we changed it in an obvious way which is following the rule that we obviously intended as opposed to the rule that emerged from the complexity of the code Now divisibility I not sure that we could frame it as Satoshi really intended the cutoff to go to zero because that's cool. I mean, it's just simpler because doing integer is simpler. Doing fractions, in order to do infinite divisibility, You need a fraction point, basically, when you have... It would be the amount of Satoshi in the output would have to be two integers instead of one, which is more complex. To some degree, it's bad, but it's not just as arbitrary.

43:59 But now I just want to scare people and to create conspiracy theory, because the reality is that I don't think that proposal will ever pass, because it's stupid, because there is no problem to fix in the first place. I agree with you, it's total FUD. There is no block subsidy issue and fees going up towards subsidy is good for censorship resistance because there is block sniping, but there is also empty blocks attack. And fees counteract the empty blocks, while subsidy does not. So subsidy going down is actually good. Unfortunately, it's not happening because the price goes up so much that the subsidy is always going up for now.

44:39 But eventually, it will go down and I'm happy that it will. Okay, how about this proposal? Right now, you start a movement where there's a fund with one Satoshi in it on the Lightning Network. And this one Satoshi, that will be forever available as these fractions going into the future and would be given to miners as a subsidy past 2140. Because it's only the last set that is the issue. It can be done. Actually, it can be done without changing the consensus. There could be done with the probabilistic lottery on lightning closing. So it can be done. The last Satoshi could be frozen in a contract that will always only release not the Satoshi itself, but only lightning percentages of it.

45:29 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Fascinating stuff. You should talk to Michael Dunbarth about that, I think. It will trigger his brain. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I think we're on the same page about most things here. So, okay, one final question about this. If miners now have more power than we believed, or a lot of us believed, is Bitcoin dependent on miners acting in their own self-interest and not shooting themselves in the foot? Or is it more robust than that with the layer of plebs actually having more influence?

46:13 I struggle to wrap my head around where the power actually lies here and how robust these incentive structures and game theoretical things really are. Because I've ended up viewing Bitcoin as the most robust thing ever and the most fragile thing ever simultaneously. So are we dependent on the miners that we have to take for granted that they will, or do they have the power? I guess this is the question. Do they have the power to at one point, if the cultural slip is so large so that all of a sudden you get all the plebs to stop caring about the 21 million limit, to stop caring about the 10 minute intervals and 1016 blocks and whatnot, and thereby they can actually change the rules and give themselves more money than we thought.

47:08 Is there ever such a scenario? Is there a slippery slope or is a slippery slope just FUD? So let me separate the answer. The first part of the answer is that since 2014, I became a Vosculian and I didn't change my name. I disagree with Eric in many things, but not in this. I think the state eventually will find the best way to attack Bitcoin, to take over a majority of ASHRAE and just mine the equivalent of empty blocks. And they could do partial things like OFAC transaction censorship or something. They could start with partial things. But the basic thing is we will not be able to settle black market transaction on chain because the government will just take over the majority of ASHRAE.

47:51 I'll always assume this is not only a possibility, but this will eventually, maybe not in my lifetime, but it will be a battlefield. And I already made peace with the fact that miners could prevent on-chain transactions from settling for a very, very long time. And that will be similar to some degree to what Luke thinks is happening to Bitcoin since the 8th of August. I don't think it's the case now, but I think we may see that eventually. I think that the response of Bitcoin as a system, as a complex system, not just as a as a time chain will be by moving, will not be proof of word change. I think that's a game theoretical disaster.

48:32 I think it will be into moving most of the economy off chain in a way that is still functional for very, very long period of time without settlement. And by being off chain most of the time, you can build up a fee pressure that can counteract the pressure of the censorship by the government. So the government prints money to pay the miners to censor or to pay the soldier to point the gun to the children of the miners to censor. And the black market is not printing, is creating wealth out of free exchange in a way that has to counteract that. Now, when I say that people recently, people, especially in the BAP 110 side, are mocking me like, yeah, like, doesn't seem like we are so strong.

49:18 Yeah, I know. This is a bad situation. I'm happy that self-interest, as long as the governments will not step in explicitly with exogenous incentives, self-interest will probably keep this scenario from happening for a very long time until it happens. When it happens, we have to have a second layer, which is very, very, very strong and allows us to non-disrupt the economy, even if we have one. So the Bitcoin that can resist to this attack is a Bitcoin that could have resisted to the 8th of August in Luke's term without losing economic activity. Now, that was not the case because there was no lighting channel in the BAP 110 chain.

50:00 Most people had to close it. So there was no second layer basically active. So it was a disaster. People could not trade. But if you can trade with the second layers, that's why I also think that I don't care for use case in terms of NFT or whatever. I do care for increasing of the possibility to aggregate fees off chain because I don't think it's just a matter of paying your coffee. It will also be a matter of aggregating fees to resist miner censorship at one point. Now, miners have this power. Yes, sadly, yes. Do they have these incentives? Endogenously, not, because they are just shooting themselves in the foot. They want to sell the reward to a functioning network.

50:42 Exogenously, they will, because the government will come and will pay them. Now, is this a certainty? Maybe not. We could have a scenario in which most of the world governments collapse before they attempt successfully this kind of attack. But I think we should be prepared. I think that I became a small blocker, not because just of efficiency or whatever, but because I think that on-chain is eventually not doomed because we still need it to settle, but is eventually the most fragile part of Bitcoin from the point of view of scalability, censorship resistance, spam resistance, and privacy. All the important things on chain are bad.

51:22 We have just one very good thing on chain, which is the fact that you can receive offline easily. That's something which is very hard to do off chain. But we have to do it because this attack, I think, will just come. So in this case, I was not surprised because I was expecting miners. I don't think the government had to pay the miners to ignore BIP 110. I think that nobody gave a fuck except for a very small circle of maybe 200 people, mostly on Twitter. So I have a very different view of what actually happened in terms of, so if I went to a meetup in the last year a Bitcoin meetup a BitDev with plebs talking about Bitcoin and guns and stake and the fact that nobody was considering BIP 110 seriously in any of the physical meetings I had in the last year The only moment I, there was, so funnily enough, and since we want to talk about Ocean, the only moment of my week where BIP 110 was an in-person argument, like with actual people, not just Twitter people, was during ocean board meetings, where I was feeling like taking crazy pills because people were like, I'm discussing with Mara about BAP.

52:37 What are you even talking about? Nobody, Mara, maybe they are humoring you in a funny way, but nobody's even considering this. So, yeah, I diverge from your question a little bit. okay and here here i'd say it is don't you think that you are in your own bubble though i've been to lugano i know the people you hang out with and there's like predominantly devs like there's a lot of devs and there's a lot of people that want to build stuff on bitcoin and want to build things so don't you think that there's it's not entirely true in lugano there are like three or four so the big devil lugano was great but mostly with people coming from outside in lugano I'm non-dev. Zbam is non-dev. My wife is non-dev.

53:22 Yeah, but I mean, in the circles that start companies and stuff around Bitcoin rather than your shotgun shooting pickup truck owning pleb. Because in my circles, I have a lot of pleb friends that were pro the software because they simply thought that it aligned with the ethos of the entire thing. For example, giving it to the man is a big thing. In Prague, I remember meeting Fractal and Crypt, which was pro. We had a friend discussion. And then there was you and there was Daniel Prince.

54:04 Three people I knew. Well, of course, I think, I don't know if mechanical look was there, but I don't think so. So three people I knew were in favor of it. And then I met the ocean management, Mark, and he was trying to survive the internal struggle. So he was mostly in favor if there is consensus. So he had a mild position, while most of the other people were not. So it was in Prague that I knew three people. Of course, many people I didn't know around. But for me, it was impressing the imbalance. I can have a bubble, but I don't think this was the case. I don't think it was the case. I think it was clearly another option in which you guys had the bubble. I have many other things probably, but not really this one.

54:51 Yeah, I think that the rebuttal to that from the Bit.10 side would be to say that conferences are inherently bad incentive-wise because you go to them not only for promoting Bitcoin to people, but to promote whatever you like to sell. I mean, I'm guilty selling boxes. But you see that there is a lot of goalposts moving. So, yeah, I think that ubiquitously in any kind of metric, the support for this proposal was pretty low. And of course, in some metric, it was higher, including Twitter activism and including, I guess, in correlation with some, for example, Austrian economic circle, we have three people discussing that, seriously, which is basically Saifedean, you, Knut, well, Rahim, and Kinsella.

55:50 It's probably five Bitcoiners discussing Austrian economics. You and Konsa were BAP. So two out of five in one very specific circle. Well, you have this Hubertus the Austrian, but I think... Oh, yeah, six. I disagree with him about it. I think he's got a pretty weird view of what Austrian economics is, to be honest. I see him tweet a lot of strange stuff. So I think, for instance, the thing that I totally agree with Konza about is about the quality of money and that use cases leak value from a medium of exchange over space and time, and they do not add value. And here I know that Hubertus is completely on the other side.

56:32 He thinks that use cases obviously add value. And to me, that's a tell that he doesn't really understand the Austrian thought tradition around money. So, yeah, I think you agree. I think there maybe the disagreement could be that sometimes I had with you a discussion and also with Konse about inheritance. So I think that if the use case is inherently very money-like, it's like how to use your money better as money, then we are going to circulate a bit because, okay, it's a use case, but the use case is in full support of monetary. Yeah, but herein lies that this, I think, is the crux of the problem. And the thing that all Bitcoiners should think about all the time, especially developers, I'd say, is like, does this make Bitcoin better money? This was the title of my talk in Vienna.

57:25 So if you think it does, because it provides you with better inheritance usage of money, for instance, medium exchange over time, then that's okay. But if it facilitates shitcoins on Bitcoins, including stablecoins, of course, which are shitcoins, then it's not a monetary thing. Like a stablecoin on Bitcoin. It is a monetary thing. Here I think, meh. No, I think it's a monetary, but in direct competition with Bitcoin. Exactly. Exactly. So it's by definition counterproductive. Exactly. It's counter the Bitcoin monetary function because it's a pure dilution and competition to Bitcoin. Yeah. So a stable coin on Bitcoin is not a good thing, in my opinion. Would you agree?

58:12 I disagree in the sense that as long as the stable coin, so it depends what it means on Bitcoin. I think a stable coin is a temporary scam to the regulator. It's just fiat in a way that will scam the regulator a little bit. Okay, that's it. I think that if the stable coin has to choose between, on one side, creating incentives for another more direct competitor of Bitcoin, like Solana, Tron, Ethereum, etc., moving ecosystem and money to these shitcoins on top of the fiat. So there is a fiat shitcoin. There is an investor scam shitcoin. If the fiat shitcoin is legitimizing the investor scam shitcoin like Tron, I think that's an even worse scenario.

58:55 If it just is the fiat rail while competing with Bitcoin anyway, because they are competing anyway. So keeping fixed the fact that they are diluting Bitcoin, they already exist, but they at least incentivize the race and infrastructure of Bitcoin in a smart way. Like, for example, I'm a big proponent of doing that on RGB. In that case, I think it's beneficial to Bitcoin. The shitcoin itself is not, but it's not in my power deciding for it not to exist. If it has to exist, that increasing Bitcoin liquidity, anonymity, and stuff like that is better than increasing the legitimacy of another or yet another Bitcoin competitor. So it's a very conditioned kind of claim.

59:36 yeah yeah the the my my forever thought vector mind would would uh the devil's advocate the other position in this way or or try to refute that argument by saying that if this potential stable coin on bitcoin or shit coin on bitcoin puts any arbitrary data somewhere in bitcoin that shouldn't be there and that isn't sat monetary, then it is bad for Bitcoin because it makes the initial block download more expensive by definition. And therefore, I'd prefer it if it was on Solana or Ethereum because this is all temporary and transitory.

1:00:18 Agreed with that. But the node cost is forever. So the forever vectors, those are the ones that are, they should be sacred. And that's why I view the Satoshi as so sacred in comparison to everything else. But yeah. Yeah. Okay. Over to Ocean. You left Ocean and you came back to Ocean So let start with why you left I think BIP had something to do Let me start on how I joined because that consequential to why I left So when Luke suffered a catastrophic theft, we were very close, we were staying very close, and I was checking on him to understand how he could do and stuff like that. When he met Dorsey and he started Ocean, He contacted me and he wanted me on board.

1:01:12 He wanted me to invest and he wanted me on the board of director to somehow protect him to some degree because he trusted me. So he wanted me to be there to guarantee the purity of operation against evil capitalists. And Jack Dorsey was on the same mindset. When we met in South Carolina in Greenville, Jack Dorsey was like, I want Luke to be Luke. I want Luke to be the protector angel of Bitcoin and the guardian angel of Bitcoin. And he created, Dorsey, Dorsey's lawyers, created a situation in which Luke had basically 51% of the same Bitcoin of the voting rights in the company.

1:01:56 So there was debate, but he was calling all the shots. Now, after I agreed, I invested my money and I became part of the board of directors. And it was cool. It was hard sometimes because working with Luke in a company setting is harder than doing that in a philosophical debate sense. So when I appreciate Luke being the way he is, if we discuss religion or things, when there was actually to implement lightning, payoff and ball 12 is something, but ball 12 to look at something else and then I have to talk with Steve Lee because it was hard, but it was fine.

1:02:36 And the mission was great. The idea was great in Datum. And Datum versus Strait on V2 was also a relationship that I would have managed differently, frankly, because we were going the same direction. No reason to create this, but it was okay. So I had a very good time in Ocean. But then the BIP 110 things happened. and the very night that Luke decided to do it, it was in call with me and Mechanic and John Attac and other people and I say, don't, I cannot support you there. I will fight against this. I'm against this. I'm not just not in favor. I will stand against. This happened. I stood against in any possible venue and then I realized that one possible venue was the board of director of Ocean and I was feeling bad in doing that because every time most of the people were just going along with him, especially, and this is funny for the conspiracy theory, especially, I cannot say too much because in theory, the content of a board meeting is secret, but I have, I can, okay, I will deny this in front of a judge, but Tether people were among the close, the most favorable people to look in that case, and I was against, I was like, no, no, no.

1:03:48 And Tether people, which I brought in because I wanted their ash rate on ocean, so I created the initial link to Tether mining, they were kind of my friend Gibb was kind of, yeah, possibilist. And I was, no, no, no, against. After a while, close to the final date, the situation became very tense. I cannot give you details, but Luke started to use his 51% attack that the company allowed legally in a very aggressive way. His goal was to move the entire pool without any choice to BIP 110 only because the rest was pedo chain and the company cannot support pedo chain. And every move, like just give the miners a choice.

1:04:30 That was, our point was to give miners a choice. And every move was sabotage in a subtle way. Like, yeah, let's give miner a choice. But then when it goes out, we will understand that the default is going to be a P110 and you have to actively change then. So there was a lot of tricks, I would say. So in a way, I felt that I was fighting against Luka I wanted to fight this battle, especially towards the end. I wanted to really fight this battle to save people from financials or reputational suicide or even just intellectual feeling stupid sensation, which is bad. And so since I wanted to fight this, I understood that fighting it from the board where Luca pointed me to was unfair because he asked me there to protect him, to help him.

1:05:19 Now, even if I think I was right and he was wrong, and I still think that big time, I was not helping him. I was fighting against him in the position that he appointed me to. So I quit the board because I said, look, if you think I should quit because I'm not serving you anymore, tell me. And he told me, no, no, no. Then one day he told me, maybe yes, just go away. And so I resigned immediately. I resigned the same minute that Luke told me, I cannot use you anymore. And then I told him, look, now I'm a shareholder. This is my money. The position in the board was your request to you as a friend. My position as an investor is my freaking money.

1:06:02 I will try to save the money invested in this company. I don't want you to destroy 16 million of other people's money. I want to save this company. So as a shareholder, I will fight back. So I joined an internal thing that I cannot probably disclose to my details about, about fighting back within the very thin layer of position the investors had. All the investors were basically against the madness, but the structure of the company was putting them in a very difficult position. So with lawyers and letters and stuff, we reached out the final agreement, which is Luke will go away, he will build his pool on his coin, and he will take a percentage, I cannot disclose, of the assets of the company, and all the investors will receive Luke's shares, pro quota, including me, and we will keep building the company with everybody else, basically, but Luke and mechanic.

1:07:01 So after this happened, I was just a shareholder, and then people on Twitter started saying, get Giacomo back. I saw the new board people said, want to come back? And I said, okay, now I don't have any ethical reason not to. I want to save this company. I didn't invest so much money, but a little bit. And other people I know invested, which are also plebs and not big corporations, invested lots of money. And so I said, yes, I want to try to relaunch and save the original Luke vision without the recent complete disagreement. So that's why I joined when I quit and I rejoined last week, basically.

1:07:44 all right yeah after after luke and mechanic left there were a couple of news coming up very rapidly from ocean um and i i think like i'm gonna play devil's advocate here in in why ocean has received a lot of critique afterwards and the first thing is uh yeah first of all uh Bob Burnett was selected as CEO, right? No, president. Chairman. President. Chairman of the board. Yes. Which I think is a very good thing. I'm interviewing Bob here next week, and I'm eager to hear his takes on all of this because I think he has a very sound view of what Bitcoin mining is and what Bitcoin mining ought to be.

1:08:33 So I'm eager to hear what he has to say about it. However, conspiracy theorists would say that this was Bob's game all along and that he was aiming for this and that he undercut Luke and stuff. And I think that's probably not true. Would you comment on that in some way? I understand it's hard to tell just trust me bro is not true but I it's the only thing I can do bro trust me bro is not true the man so everybody everybody except for me maybe I was the nasty one I was the one being nasty to Luke everybody else tried to keep everything together up to the very last minute until they witnessed the complete collapse of any governance structure because of loops action. So I cannot enter specifics, but Bob tried to put it together. Bob opened every single meeting like, I agree with your intention, Luke, with the fork.

1:09:32 It's just that we cannot change proof of work. So it was super reasonable. If it was his plan, then he's a 3D chess genius that basically caused Luke, but agreed with Luke so much, the Luke felt emboldened to fork off, but it's not true. Bob tried to be of help and Bob, like me, has a very economic... So from a personal point of view, we could just say, okay, we were friends, now we disagree, let's close this down. But then there is a financial angle, which is, I got my money and other people's money into this. People put real money in a company. They not expect this to be a circle of friends that can just disagree.

1:10:15 I'm not your friend anymore. This is an investment with money and responsibility. So Bob... stepped up when the crisis was total and not before and didn't try to accelerate. I've seen Bob trying to reduce the animosity and the crisis and give Luke any single possibility that he had. And then since he was very reasonable and also very connected to the BIP movement, he signaled in the very first block in BIP 110. Unlike me, which I was against, Bob was in favor, but not without consensus. So that's the difference between me and Bob. Bob was considered a very good figure for also his experience. When you will interview him, he will probably explain you the plot, but he will not give up rumors about what happened, which I'm failing to not do because I'm not a corporate guy.

1:11:04 I am talkative. I like to spill the bin. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the position I had. I am pro, but not without consensus. like if if the community says that no this is not bitcoin this other thing is bitcoin like then bp 110 it's it's it's a thing i wanted but it didn't happen and yeah life was like you and i like me because it was not a thing i want no yeah yeah uh so uh the next news though is is more so okay final word on bob uh i think swanholz racer can be applied here that never attribute to 5D chess that which can be explained by retardation.

1:11:46 Absolutely, yes. So regardless of who's the real retard, we have the next news coming out from the ocean camp is more of a red flag for a lot of people, because now you have the board of directors has elected Rafa Zaguri as a director. And this is a guy that is the very definition of a suit coiner, I'd say. He is the CEO of 21 Capital, the firm that Jack Dorsey left because it didn't align with his Bitcoiner values. And he's been with, you know, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, you name it.

1:12:28 This is a suit coiner. And why did that happen? And how is that not a sign of Ocean being captured by the suits? So the way it happened, again, if anything I'm saying is covered from secrecy of company, I will just deny in front of a jury. But what did happen is like this. I brought the connection to Tether for ASHRAE only. At the beginning, Tether was very, Ocean was very well funded. There was a lot of runaway. So we didn't need money. We needed ASHRAE. So Tether was mining and Hafa and Gib were the two people in charge of the mining operation, which, by the way, goes back to a controversy with Zouane.

1:13:12 We'll discuss that a little bit. But Hafa is pronounced Hafa I don know why Hafa okay Yes E and GIF were the Tether expression of the Tether rate mining on Ocean which was a very important part of the success of the pool. So the initial connection was on my end. I went to Arduino asking him, can you support Ocean with Ash rate? So these guys were often invited to the board as observers without voting rights, like it happened with other mining pools, like it happened with Mechanic occasionally, because they were representing an important part of Ash rate. Now, there was a moment, even before the split, in which the money of the company was starting to run out because it was not profitable.

1:13:58 There is revenue. It's a good model, but there was a lot of cost. And the revenue was not increasing as it was supposed to, especially, I think, my opinion is that because of the controversy. So many deals that were very carefully crafted disappeared because miners were like, I could put my ash right there, but isn't your pool going to disappear into a fork in one month? Are we really mining on you if you're going to change consensus and just be forked off? So there was a lot of damage, in my opinion, made by the controversy of B.110. So the role of Hafa and Giv as one of the most important miners was more active towards the end of the tragedy.

1:14:41 In no way I have witnessed any hostile takeover dynamic. Actually, I don't know if I can tell this, but whatever. You should have the suit corner on the show. But Hafa was also like Bob, starting every sentence with, while I agree with BAP 110 myself. And I was, stop, I'm the one disagreeing. So Hafa was also not against the proposal itself. But it was like, guys, reality check. This is just not happening. Nobody's in favor. So after I was out of the board, there was the 8th of August, the tragedy, the fun because it was an ocean block to basically give the kiss of the death to the fork chain.

1:15:28 So it was a lot of fun, but also a lot of tension. I've been told that there has been a lot of bad stuff happening in the company while I was not there anymore. Like people trying to sue each other and send the cops and stuff like that. So after all that, Luke was out, mechanic was out, and now it was time to rebuild the company. So I've been contacted to rejoin, and half as well as part as an activist person within the board has been also contacted to join. Now, I may or may not be legally allowed to say that since now the company needs money because the asset has been split, there may have been a minority investment by Tether, but we don't know.

1:16:13 We can only speculate about that because it would be illegal for me to say that. What I can say, either legally or legally, Tether is not the majority shareholder of Ocean Entity and doesn't plan to be. Now, the funny thing with Hafa is that I didn't know him very well before. I've known him within this controversy. And I can totally understand why from the outside, I like Bob, which has a very pristine image of a good boomer. Hafa seems like the serial takeover or style takeover guy because of the Zouan controversy within Tether Mining.

1:16:53 And then there is Corey saying, oh, this guy came and stole my company. Then there is 21, where it's not that Jack is saying he stole my company. Jack said, I went away because I didn't want it anymore. And Tether asked which was part of 21 big part asked Hafa to take over Now Hafa in the board seems like a serial plan But again trust me bro that actually not what I seen So much so that not knowing Hafa before, I became way more skeptical. I will have to chat with Corey eventually, but I became way more skeptical about what happened in Swan and Electron as well, because I've read the public litigation and I know that my friends at Tether, they can be very Italian in some moments, like very aggressive when there is controversy.

1:17:45 So I know them and I do believe part of the things you see in the paper is true, but I had my idea that Hafa was part of a very active takeover attempt. Now, I'm not an insider in Zouan, but I am an insider in Ocean. And in Ocean, I've seen the very opposite. this poor guy didn't want to become and he just wanted to negotiate he was tasked by the company to negotiate hash rate to ocean but in order to do that he needs a company to exist and not as which is not destroyed he tried to be a pacifier he tried to reduce contention he never escalated never in front of me before i've left what happened after i quit could have been probably more tension building up.

1:18:33 So, yeah, again, it's healthy that guys are conspiratorial. It's healthy that they think I'm a pawn of the deep state or suit corners. It's cool. We should always assume so. If you ask me an honest tale, I have to give it, but I cannot prove most of what I'm saying. So it's healthy that some part of the community will still think that I'm just covering up for an evil tether takeover on a mining pool. So to which extent are you an insider in Tether then, if you're not an insider? In Ocean, I'm an insider legally because I'm a shareholder.

1:19:16 I was a board of directors, I'm not, and now yes. So legally, I can access to a reserve document. And in Tether, I'm an insider in the sense that I'm just an Italian guy who loves to spread rumor. No, I just love to. I don't like lies because I think it's very complex to maintain them. So I like to talk a lot because I think that truth is a very powerful shelling point. So even if people tell me, sometimes it's wrong because I create problems by not being, I don't segregate information very well. If you ask me what happened in Plan B Network in Tether, I would just probably tell everybody.

1:19:57 Because I think it's simpler if we're all on the same page. This is not a very business-competible attitude. Many people are basically scolding me for this attitude, but it's just easier. So in Tether, I don't have access to any. Tether is just a company which is funding 50% of the Plan B operations that I'm running. My role in Ocean is completely independent from Tether. I just, I was the one, I was in Ocean because of Luke. I brought Tether in as a miner, as a big friend with Arduino and stuff. While in plan B, I'm part of an operation which is getting 50% of the money from Tether.

1:20:39 So being that the case, especially two years, three years ago when we funded this initiative, I had the weekly meeting with, uh, with Paolo, with people in Tether. Now I, now Paolo answered me one text message every six months, but now Paolo is talking with Trump and I can see that I'm not Trump yet. So I I will not blame him for that So now my my relationship with Tether is just just billing them a couple of times a year for education staff Lugano staff the Plumby Week the Cypher Tank stuff like that That's it. But I had rumors and in particular, I was an insider of the Tether dynamics within Ocean because I was in the board while this was happening.

1:21:28 All right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is there anything here? Yeah, let's get to that point. Is there anything here that we've missed in this whole discussion? Is there anything else you'd like to disclose or that you think that people have gotten this or that wrong or any kind of things that bother you on the Internet at the moment? Bother? No. Some things are funny. Like I told this already, but I want to repeat. Thether was more BAP 110 friendly than me. So this is just funny. It's not important to say, but people that tell that there is the conspiracy.

1:22:11 Luckily for Bitcoin, I was against Thether in opposing BAP 110 more than they did. But anyway, this is the funny point. And the other one is that I don't act within Ocean as an employee or shareholder or partner or manager of Tether. I'm there with my own money, personal money, not Tether's money, because Luke asked me when he trusted me. So it's a completely different story. I'm inside many other companies. My participation in R-Collapse is not Tether, it's me. My participation in Rely, with all the debate about KYC, we had a lot of fallout, but it was me.

1:22:56 my participation in Portal with Alecos. So my personal investments and advisory roles, I'm an advisor in Breeze, not because of Tether. So Tether for me is a client paying 50% of some educational activity. Yeah, all right. That should settle that, I think. And I think I'm going to name this episode, Trust Me Bro. Yeah, correct, correct. verify me bro that's another thing to meme into reality maybe Giacomo it's always a pleasure to talk to you and we'll have plenty of chances to do that this coming months first of all we'll see each other in Helsinki and then in Lugano and then in El Salvador so looking forward to all three of those occasions it's educational and inspiring as always.

1:23:57 Thank you very much for having this conversation and looking forward to the future as always. Me too. I enjoy not knowing about it. Most people are afraid of it, but don't be afraid of the future. The future is a beautiful place. Totally agreed. And listen to Knut's music. I really like it. Oh, thank you. It's very, very good. Yes, it's only on Fountain at the moment, but coming to the Fiat platform soon if any Tether people are listening to this. You're becoming a suit coiner as well. Yeah, we'll see. Thank you very much. Like, subscribe and brush your damn teeth. We'll see you next time. Bye.

1:24:42 Bye. Thank you.