0:01Richard Greaser Folks, welcome back to Behind the Podcast. It's been a little bit the last person we interviewed on the show was Stu, but we're back. We're coming back with a bang. Today, joining us is a man who he probably Another shit coiner.

0:19Richard Greaser Another shit coiner. If you don't know him, you should become familiar with him. He's oftentimes, you know, he he's the guy that, you know, comes out with ideas, like, five or six years in advance before anybody starts talking about them and taking them seriously. He, kinda

0:40Richard Greaser I think he's a lot more, grounded in reality than Mike Brock. Mike Brock refers to himself

0:51Richard Greaser as a reluctant Cassandra, but Paul Sports truly is a reluctant Cassandra in a lot of ways. Paul Sports, how are you doing today? What do you got going on?

1:06Paul Sports I'm doing great, guys. So thanks for having me.

1:09Rod Palmer That was I mean, that was a good introduction for Pulse Sports, but can I don't know exactly how to introduce your like, how do how do you explain, your involvement in Bitcoin? Like, what what your journey's been? Because you're you've been around for a while, and you've been pretty close to, the industry. Like, what are you working on now? And, like, how did you get to this point?

1:31Paul Sports Well, yeah, now I work on this thing, drive chain, which is, like, the only real implementation of the side chain idea, which is itself was pretty old and revolutionary idea. That today, that word is you know, it's come to mean all the kinds of different things that, are are useless. But the the original idea was that you would be able to send Bitcoin to other pieces of software and back.

1:57Paul Sports And so that in that way, you'd just be able to have, like, basically something that does what Ethereum does but with Bitcoin or somebody that does what Zcash does but with Bitcoin. And I think this idea is, you know, much better than every other idea in Bitcoin. It's much better than lightning. It's much better than covenants. It's much better than just working on another hardware wallet. It's much better than just whatever. I don't know. You know? Whatever everyone else is just doing. So I thought this was a really important idea. And so I I work on that now.

2:27Rod Palmer When did you come up with this? When did you start developing this protocol, this this new layer?

2:35Paul Sports Yeah. I was originally interested in prediction markets back in the day, and I designed a whole prediction markets on Bitcoin thing that was called Truthcoin, and that was back in 2013, 2014. And then, it came time to attach it to Bitcoin, and Blockstream, this company had come out,

2:55Paul Sports and they had to come up with this side chain idea. And so I wanted to look into what they were doing, but the ants the the truth was that they really weren't doing that very much with the side chain idea. So they didn't really have anything that you could use to attach the prediction market thing to Bitcoin. And then everyone got distracted with the scaling war. This is, like, 2015 or something. But I published this drive chain post in November 2015, so it's been ten years.

3:22Paul Sports And, I didn't really work on the side chains idea for a while. But, eventually, as I grew frustrated with all kinds of things with that were happening in Bitcoin, I decided to to pick it up again.

3:39Paul Sports And, so that's why I work on it now kind of out of obligation to finish it. Even though it's, you know, it is also, like, a fantastic idea that would bring privacy to Bitcoin. It would bring scalability to Bitcoin. It would bring extensibility to you know, let let you just change Bitcoin. Move it to an l two where you can make it whatever you want and send it back. So this is the greatest thing. If you wanna ossify l one, this is the best idea because now you can it's easier to actually ossify l one in, like, a credible way and sustainable way when you say, well, actually, we have this as l twos

4:12Paul Sports where you can be a a playground to do whatever you want. And so it does, you know, all this great stuff. It fixes governance. All these people today are debating overall which soft fork should we have and which soft fork should we have next, or should we have any, or should we have none, or what, you know, what do we do about this? But all these questions about both the soft fork and the hard fork are resolved if you just say the l two can do whatever. So it's pretty important idea, but, for some reason and a lot of people agree with me too. That's the thing is I'm, like, seen as, like, a fringe character by many, but I'm also seen as

4:46Paul Sports extremely popular person among, like, super, many elite type people. You can go to the layer2labs.com/friends list. I, like, collected a bunch of, like, quotes and stuff from people who agree. So it's kind of a bizarre situation to be in. But the all the answers are I got all the answers to explain how the situation seems bizarre, but I know exactly why it's bizarre, and it has to do with just culture of Bitcoin and the history of the block size war

5:17Paul Sports and with, you know, dysfunction of bureaucracy and Bitcoin core and stuff like that. So so it's it's I think it's pretty interesting, the situation that I'm in. It definitely interests me. But, yeah, if you wanna make sense of the Bitcoin world, there are a lot of illusions that have to be purest, I think.

5:37Richard Greaser Yeah. I think, you know, one of the challenges that, you know, Rod and I were talking. Rod pointed out that, Aaron Redwing does a really good job of of translating the things that you're talking about. So what you just described is the plat you don't connect with the plaubs. And one of the reasons why you don't connect with the plaubs is because you don't speak in pep slop. You you speak in, you know, a technical

6:05Richard Greaser manner that takes a lot of context that you're not gonna be able to understand from having just watched simply Bitcoin videos. You're gonna have to dive a little bit deeper. You're probably having to spend some time on GitHub to understand some of the language. Maybe you read Mastering Bitcoin, and you, you know, did a lot of digging. Now, you know, I don't want the Plebs to turn off this interview even though this podcast isn't really, you know, for the plaubs. But, you know, what's probably screeching through their brain right now

6:38Richard Greaser is this guy wants to bring shitcoins to Bitcoin. I think we have to get the elephant out of the room right away. If from what I understand, drive it's been a while since I've looked at, you know, your Bitcoin improvement proposals, 300 301. But from what I understand, in order to implement drive chains in the way that you want to, you would need,

7:04Richard Greaser a soft fork. And, correct me if I'm I'm wrong in my, you know, language or terminology, but what what the plants are wondering right now what I imagine, what they're wondering right now is if these improvement proposals were merged

7:23Richard Greaser into the protocol, would that mean that there would be CSAM on their notes?

7:30Paul Sports Yeah. I'd I mean, it's a very when you put it like that, I think, like, we in a way, it's a good thing that all this this is all not all this stuff with Luke and with the CSAM and all this stuff is all nonsense, but it's kind of good that it's come to light because it just means that it's pointless to even try to, like, reason with a lot of these people. And we have to, like, you know, do something else, I think, because the standards for convincing them are, like, so low. They're so easily manipulated.

7:58Paul Sports It's kind of like but, yeah, it the BIPs three hundred and three hundred and one require a soft fork. Historically, this was not back in 2015, that was, a really easy thing to do. Now it's basically impossible. So I think that's something I'd like people to think about is, you know, why is it so difficult to do the soft fork these days?

8:23Paul Sports And the answer is not a good one. The answer is just that everyone's deranged. But yet this is the position that most people have, and it feeds this whole ecosystem of I don't wanna say, like, parasites. It's not really what I think. But even, like, when they do, like, the OpNEXT conference, it's like there's a whole food chain. You know? There's a whole thing you can do that way there's a whole prestige economy. You can be like, oh, we will be the one who who facilitates the the next soft fork.

8:53Paul Sports So I don't you know, it's kind of a mean way of putting it, but there's a whole ecosystem managing this this weird idea of that we have to care so much about the next soft fork. When really all that, they're all opt in and reversible and ignorable. They're all perfectly safe. We used to do many per year. We used to do on average two per year for the first seven years of Bitcoin. They the the fact that it's even possible is amazing because they're all they're all backwards for its compatible. You can just have some people run one temporarily.

9:27Paul Sports And so they're really the soft fork is nothing. Back in 2015 when I wrote it, that was nothing. And even today, the new the versions of drive chain I have now, they don't require any code changes to Bitcoin Core, which is itself like it. But but they do require, like, basically 51% enforcement by miners. So that's kind of similar, but not the same. But I think other people would be surprised to learn that this is even possible to separate all this stuff. It's, like, very technical. But it's like changing the lines of code in Bitcoin Core that has people,

10:02Paul Sports people are all really worried about that for some reason. The and yet they they're not worried at all. Every six months, Bitcoin Core will, like, refactor the code. They will touch lots and lots of of the code many lines of code to get it to do nothing, but just to refactor it. And so that's,

10:23Paul Sports we've got a situation where people the code the protocol doesn't evolve, but many lines of code are touched. So that's the main sense. But

10:31Rod Palmer When you talk about code, you talk about different node clients and and, like, here's a pull request, and this is how the code changes. And, like, the plebs heads are already spinning. Like, right? Like, it's going it's kind of a joke. Anybody who knows how to code, it's probably one of the easiest skills cheapest or like most cost effective skills to learn and the fact that like people are so intimidated by learning how to code it kind of tells you a lot about

11:02Rod Palmer their approach in general. Like, if you care so much about this protocol and you have, like, this religious awakening and attachment to it, but you're complaining, oh, core treats us bad because we don't know how to code. It's like you can just watch some YouTube videos in a few a few months if you actually care and then stick with it. You've been pretty good at this. I mean, you can go to Jimmy Jimmy Song's boot camp and learn Python or like in a in a weekend. But that's really not What is like the most important at least I guess it depends on the context But thinking

11:38Rod Palmer and problem solving and living in these like abstractions like you have to think about everything from an it's an abstract complex abstract concept and it's theoretical until you can kind of prove it out you can get nodes or users to kind of start with following these new rules The code itself, not that difficult, but thinking abstract, how do we get the plebs to be able to think in abstractions?

12:06Rod Palmer Do we have to I think Richard was talking about this a little bit offline before you came on. It's like he can Plebslop bring success for drive chain? Can can Plebslop help? Can you take these complex concepts, feed them through JATCPT, run the white papers through JATCPT,

12:26Rod Palmer and give a digestible piece of slop to the plebs to help them understand what you're trying to do or what a a new proposal aims to do, what the, the incentives, how those change, like, is Slop the answer? We hate it, but maybe it's provides a net benefit

12:47Rod Palmer to society and to the plebs in general.

12:50Paul Sports I don't think I know enough about slop. I mean, it must be theoretically possible. Right? So for someone to calculate the perfect slop, you know, that's like the, whatever, thermal exhaust port, and then you just hit at one you know, for every every political cause must have, like, the the one meme, you know, that,

13:12Rod Palmer that's is right. Like, a meme is not something you engineer in the lab. A meme is something that you put out there, and you know it's a good meme by the way it's received by how other people are able to connect with it they're able to identify with the message of that meme whether it's a direct message or kind of a more subtle hint whatever it is so it's it's the slop is there's no such thing I I don't think

13:41Rod Palmer as like an academic slop as somebody who can sit in in a in a classroom or in a in a science lab and create the perfect slop to create good slop. You have it's like being a stand up comedian. You have to go out into in front of an audience every single day and put the slop out there and gauge the feedback to see if it's good slop.

14:01Paul Sports Yeah. I can Well, I don't know. Maybe

14:03Richard Greaser oh, sorry. I can I can speak on this a little bit? I can I can translate this for you, Paul? So, you know, like a project manager is like a shepherd for autistic developers. Right? So you've got a bunch of retarded executives that want things done by the developers, and they have no idea what they're talking about. And so the project manager has to be an interface between the two. So that that's kind of the role of a podcaster in a lot of ways as a project manager. So what computer code is so you look at, like, a language like Python or c plus plus.

14:39Richard Greaser Is it an intermediary language communicating between humans and computers? So it's translating zeros and ones into something that's a little bit more decipherable for a human because, unfortunately, we're not that good at or or efficient at communicating in zeros and ones. And so Plebslop is like computer code

14:58Richard Greaser for retarded plebs, if that makes sense.

15:04Paul Sports It does, I think. I mean, I think in general, there's like a specialist versus generalist idea. Because, really, the executives are trying to do what the customers want, and the customers are, like, the least specialized of all. So they maybe they know they want they think they want something, and then the executives have to, like, figure out what do they really want. Then they have to tell the programmers, then the programmers have to tell the computer. Then the computer just has some electrons

15:31Paul Sports or whatever. I think, you know, I think it must be possible to engineer a perfect slop, like, okay. Of all the diseases that have ever afflicted humans, most of them evolved, you know, over

15:47Paul Sports many, many years or many possibly millions of years in the in the wild. But then I think, you know, eventually, if you understood it enough, it must be theoretically possible to come up. But, yeah, I don't know. Because with does DriveSheen need better outreach? The answer is yes. But

16:08Paul Sports isn't it yes asterisk? Because just think of, like, what these people fall for. You know? So it's kinda like I kind of was thinking more as a lost cause, and we want to somehow create a situation where we can use people's ignorance or mistaken beliefs against them. That's, like, more what I think would eventually work is to say, can we profit off of ignorant

16:34Paul Sports plebs instead of educate the plebs? I've become even more cynical, maybe even in the the two of you. I don't know. Maybe not. But for now, I'm just working on the product and making it good. And I have many, many supporters and fans, and people always try to you know, like, a lot of people try to apply to to work, or there are two labs. And and so we have a lot of great people,

17:01Paul Sports and we put out a a pretty good product, and I I would just I think I like getting, you know, the right answer. So I like having an accurate view of the world. So I just think if I go into the plebslop world, then I'll become, like, a different type of person. I'll become, like I might become, like, a Steven Spielberg maybe. If I were super good at it, you'd be, like, a great entertainer. You know what I mean? World class entertainer. You know? Like, of course, he's great. And, of course, you have, like, a Freddie Mercury or something. You know? These people are amazing. But it's, like, a different type of thing maybe than just building a piece of software that does its job. It won't make any traction.

17:40Rod Palmer You don't wanna be a gay rock star. You wanna be a cypherpunk. Right? Yeah. Sure. So you you you mentioned to this that, you know, your drive chain idea of, like, these layer two's like you a lot of people agree with you and I believe you, but if you're on the raw algorithm on social media

18:01Rod Palmer where the the loudest post reactionary most volatile emotionally plebs live and and post every day, you would not think that people agree with you. In fact, there's a lot of people when it when it comes to l twos,

18:17Rod Palmer there's none that a certain sector of the industry have as much. It's drive chain derangement syndrome, I guess, is what you could boil it down to. And it why do you think, where do you think that dry chain derangement syndrome comes from? Do you think that it is because you're so you're you know you're astrophobic you're so critical of lightning you're so critical of like these sacred cows that people don't to reject anything that that you propose, or

18:46Rod Palmer is it because maybe, you know, fifty percent of the population, women, they they see drive chain and they think, oh, great. Like, I'm not gonna be good at this. We're gonna run off of the drivers. I'm not gonna be good at using this l two.

18:60Paul Sports In an Islamic country, they're not even allowed. They would maybe not even be allowed to use. You know?

19:06Rod Palmer Right. So that'd be me. That's what their concern is. That's an insightful question. I think,

19:11Paul Sports but the thing is I was critical. I've only, like, recently started I think it goes the other way with the criticism of the sacred cows and lightning because, of course, drive chain is very old. It's from 2015. And, of course, I didn't really push it very, aggressively, but I kind of have been pushing it the whole time. And I kind of was thinking, like, why don't we live in a world where everyone just dropped everything they were doing to just work on this? Because it really is that much better. And so the answers are kind of bizarre, I think, but I think it's not because of the criticism of the

19:46Paul Sports of, like, Lightning because I kind of just you know, I had nothing to lose by just ramping that up and up and up because I just think that I it was already disliked, and they and they are the idea isn't very good. So lightning isn't very good, and yet it's just it's part of this complex of the sacred cows. They all overlap each other. And so if you're in the cult, you have to just say, you know, that lightning will just fix everything, and it's part of the belief of the future of Bitcoin. And if you whatever scales Bitcoin will probably just retroactively be labeled lightning at this point even because the connection between is lightning really just refers to, you know, this saving of Bitcoin in the future.

20:28Paul Sports I think the reason why you know, there's a couple historical reasons. So one was that drive chain is a little bit minor cent centric, and that is why it is decentralized because the whole the whole way to get something to work without having, like, an individual administrator

20:47Paul Sports is to tie it into the mining process. But mining was very unpopular at around that time because of the scaling war. So that's I think that's one reason. Another reason, though, is I think drive chain actually reduces the developers from a position of prestige to make them more competitors. So it's kinda like YouTube. It's kinda like what's the relationship between YouTube and, like, CNN or or Fox News or something, where it's like before you were one of these big players in the post drive chain world. Anyone can just use any software.

21:20Paul Sports In in the pre drive chain world, you have to care a lot about what happens in Bitcoin Core because you think, oh, if we let something in, they will destroy the project. So you need, like, the safety officer, whatever it is. You know? You need these people to guard the the safety of the protocol. But in the drive chain world, you just have ossified l one, and then you have all these l twos that compete. If the l the l twos maybe fail every once in a while, but when the l two fails, it doesn't bring down any other l twos. So this is like a paradigm shift. I think drive chain is hard to understand also because I care,

21:58Paul Sports I since you're allowing for the l twos to fail, it makes it seem like you don't care about the safety of users' funds, but that's just, it's sort of the reverse. It's like, here, you have a food court where you can order whatever you want. Whereas right now, we have just, like, one chef. We have, like, one Gordon Ramsay or whatever, and he's very expensive. And he can't cook enough food for 8,000,000,000 people, but but that's, like, what we have right now. And I'm saying, we'll just throw it all open, and then you will have

22:30Paul Sports microwave, you know, TV dinners in addition to having a Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant and whatever. So I have all this variety and choice. I think it inherently humiliates some people. So, like, I think all the lightning startups might be destroyed once there's a version of scaling that works. It might look bad for Blockstream or the other people who theorize the side chain idea, but they never actually realized it. So this includes really prestigious people, such as Greg Maxwell. A lot of people are, like, sort of basically afraid of him, the technical community.

23:03Paul Sports So I think you have that dimension. Also, you have, like a lot of people benefit from the ossification grift as you guys know. There's just this interlocking set of beliefs that people just use and that that only affords a few business models. So these business models are like parasites.

23:23Paul Sports They kind of force out like, you could be a podcaster. It's easier to just not do anything significant. Because if you do something significant, you can be, like, criticized. But if you just do the Bitcoin maximalist podcast and you just say, this is, you know, it's just easy to just talk, and it's easy to just say, like or even to throw the conference or to throw the do the steak dinner book thing. And so

23:50Paul Sports it's just so much easier to to be on this this team stasis and just say, we're gonna just defend ossification. We're just not gonna change anything. Status quo. Some of the reasons. And even when stuff is allowed to change, like, stuff like covenants, it's or OPCAT or it's unbelievably

24:10Paul Sports slow, and you can see that actually in practice, like, nothing happens still. So still still there's nothing with CTV. Still there's nothing with even Luke's thing with four four four. So people have tried all kinds of strategies. But I think overall, it's just that over time, the community actually has

24:29Paul Sports subconsciously ossified. It's very different than the active ossification that people think that they are a part of, but it just actually subconsciously, it already had happened by, like, 2021 or something. So that was the Taproot. But Taproot was also a special case because it was in some sense a mirror image of Segwit, which took too long to activate, and the miners felt guilty about that. And they felt bad about losing the scaling war, and they felt like they wanted to have some kind

24:57Paul Sports of apology or whatever, so they quickly activated Taproot by speedy trial. Taproot also came from basically Greg Maxwell again. So the whole thing is actually Taproot is like just the echo of Segwit Segwit from 2017.

25:12Paul Sports We've had nothing since then. Other than those two things, we've had nothing in the last I don't know how many long long time. But back when Drive Chain was written, there were three soft forks in q four of twenty fifteen. So they used to be regular, and they used to be on con uncontroversial. They were there was no controversy about them at all. And in fact, there was no real controversy about Segwit. The controversy was about the block size war. Miners just said, we will hold up. This was just the next one in the list, and they just said, we will hold this one up until we get the two x block size increase that we want. That was a very foolish decision that they made, but that but that's just the history of the situation is that it's this is all, like, became weird,

25:54Paul Sports political landscape. So that's I think those are some of the reasons. I I also think one final thing is that some people don't want like, Michael Saylor does not want privacy in Bitcoin, which he has said sometimes openly and sometimes sort of secretly.

26:13Paul Sports But so, again, if you improve Bitcoin's privacy, then they won't like that because their view is that Bitcoin has to cater to mainstream finance and that it must become more palatable to, like, whatever, you know, Wall Street or something. So that's, that's what they think.

26:32Paul Sports You know, a lot of people have arguments for why they're right, and a lot of people have other arguments for why they're wrong. I think they definitely are wrong because it's not like the Internet catered to, like, magazine publishers or something like that, and that's how it became big. Oh, what we really need is for the Internet to be more like People's Magazine or whatever. You know? Like, that's not what happened. The Internet is just so different that

26:57Paul Sports it couldn't be like what came before. I think Bitcoin is the same way. We're dropping the ball on all the cool things that Bitcoin could be in order to cater to, you know, these people in the past. We're letting them off the hook also. We're saying you don't need to learn about what Bitcoin really is. You just need it's just another ticker. So those are some reasons. I think it's a very valid question. I do have a drive chain, like, misinformation page where I do go through, like, like, 10 or so

27:26Paul Sports reasons of, like, why what is going on? Like, why are you know, people think this and that, and it's even things that are completely 100% false or even the opposite. But, like, people so that's on drivechain.info. If people go to the the sidebar on the desktop or they go all the way down on their phone, you can see all the sections. So I have a misinformation page that but, yeah, who know I yeah. I'd another sense is that I don't really know because you would think if people really cared a lot about Bitcoin, they would really look into all of the issues, and then they would see that this idea is of the cost of trying this idea is very cheap,

27:60Paul Sports and, the benefits are very high. So you would think, a lot of people would support it. And, again, a lot of people do support it, but these are, like, people like Robin Linus, creator of BitVM, or even, like, Rene Picard, the author of Mastering Lightning. I have, like, all these, like, very elite supporters. But then, as you say, we have not mastered the Plebslop. You know, our Plebslop game is like a d minus or something. So

28:28Paul Sports but I kind of also think, like, you know, whatever it is. But yeah.

28:33Rod Palmer You need a sidekick. Yeah. This is before I let Richard at yes. There you go.

28:40Richard Greaser You need your sidekick.

28:45Paul Sports Yes. Yeah. I know. There you go. I know. That wasn't my mistake. Right? I mean, where's that? Who who would have thought? Who's who's scamming who in that relationship? I don't know. But Well, yo,

28:55Rod Palmer the TNA can seem to be fine. He's a company man. He's he's he's he does what Ocean wants him to do. He doesn't care what people think. He goes out there and he he tows the company line. He's gonna be alright. People always wanna find a company man. But real quick before we we talk about anything else, I went to drivechain.info and again you said, you know, we haven't mastered the plexa. So I go down and I see a, a section called explainer memes.

29:27Rod Palmer And these explainer memes are very busy. There's a lot of information. There's a lot of scribbles. It's, you gotta condense those down. You gotta you just need a picture in like four words. If you can't do it with a picture in four words,

29:40Paul Sports it's honestly That's a very good point. I mean, in my defense, I'm not saying that you're wrong. You're definitely right. But but the drivechain.info, that was always supposed to be again, I think this is a very important conversation for everyone to hear, I think, because drivechain.info, I made the site in, like, literally, like, January 2017 or something. And the intended audience of the site originally was just like people like Adam Back, Peter Todd, whatever. This was like my site to dump out

30:08Paul Sports the info so that they would have something to look up and read. And I never even thought that you'd have to do this, like, big convince the masses type thing. And, so, yeah, I think you're definitely right about that. And then some stuff was, like, added, like, piecemeal later. Like, the FAQ and all this stuff was, like, added later

30:30Paul Sports and misinformation page. So but, yeah, I think that's, so the question is, do we want this is, again, the specialist versus the generalist idea, like the, you know, the plebs versus the elites where it's kind of like, do we wanna live in a world where the specialists don't talk to each other and become, like, super specialized team?

30:53Paul Sports Because that has a lot of benefits as to saying, we're gonna push the envelope as quickly as possible. We're gonna do, like, a Manhattan project. You know what I mean? Like, imagine if they had to explain every step, every single, like, differential equation in the Manhattan Project. They had to explain it to everyone in Louisiana or something. You know? It would be pretty hard to get it done in time to stop New York City from being obliterated by nuclear explosion. So it's kind of like the specialists maybe should have their own little, like,

31:23Paul Sports club and their own little vocabulary. But, yeah, I I agree with you that that well, yeah. And then, like, those memes, those are from, like, whatever. I don't even know. Like, I don't remember when I put that up, like, 2018 or 2017 or something. But, yeah, those those aren't very good. I agree. And this site just kinda grew as I just stapled more and more stuff on. The FAQ was eventually that was composed of questions that I literally was frequently asked. It wasn't even like a written thing. I was just like, I'm so tired of getting these questions. I put it on there. But, yeah, Yeah. I don't think drivechain.info

31:54Paul Sports is a good site for the masses. But then it's kinda like the masses, you know, they have no idea. So Segwit activated, And, you know, there are many, many stories we could tell about Segwit activation. But, you know, there are common myths that people believe about Segwit making the transaction smaller. That's not true. It actually makes the transactions bigger, but since it can use the four megabyte space, they get the discount.

32:20Paul Sports And, you know, people there are people one, so for example, Bitcoin error log, John Carvallo, he has tweeted about this, so this is why I bring this up. But anyone can kind of trace this up or have Grok look it up for you. He is like, he was a huge militant supporter of Segwit activation. He was kinda like a pleb slop a pleb shepherd. And but then years later, he had to admit that he was like, oh, yeah. I was really misled. It didn't work the way I thought that it did. I believed all these things that weren't true about it. And so then he concludes that maybe it was rushed. Everyone has this conclusion that we have to inform everyone first so that it's people make an informed decision to upgrade.

33:04Paul Sports I kinda think almost the reverse where it's kind of like we are never gonna inform enough people. And so what we instead need is some kind of, like, leadership or accountability or something where because I just think I just don't buy it that everyone will understand BIP 300. Even the BIP 300 is is simpler than SegWit, I think, and it's, I think Taproot is more complicated than SegWit, but maybe BIP 300 is the simplest of the three because it's really under the hood. It's just counting the 13,000

33:34Paul Sports with op not five. So but I just don't think people will understand it. And in fact, I think much simpler than BIP 300 is this whole op return thing, which is even simpler than that. But you could see that we've run a ground on that issue. So it's kind of like trying to explain it to people seems like a lost cause.

33:55Richard Greaser Well, it it's important to understand the landscape. And I think it's something that we've been trying to educate people on is just, you know, how the way the world works. Because there there's a perceived way that the world works. Like, in in many ways, we live in a feudal society, where the the podcasters, the communicators are like the lords communicating for their, you know, kings or whatever. So you've got Luke as the king,

34:29Richard Greaser mechanic as the lord, the lord commands the plaives. Then you got Kratters, another lord, and then you've got, you know, the you know, the very the various, you know, Justin Beschler is a lower lower lord. You've got these dynamics in different places. And so, you know, like, on the core side, you've got you've got a similar, you know, situation where you've got, like, Adam back or, you know, whoever is, you know, towards the top. And it's the royalty commanding lower lords like Shinobi,

35:02Richard Greaser you know, and they're directing different plums to go fight each other, you know, in battle. And this is this is kind of the, you know, the game that is played, you know. And what you're saying, which I think is correct, and, you know, people are gonna be offended by this reality, but sometimes if reality is offensive, is, you know, the the the kings and the lords, they they oftentimes

35:27Richard Greaser play the game because they understand the game that you can't you kinda have to be Machiavellian sometimes to accomplish your goals. And you can't communicate everything to the plebs. And now, honestly, sometimes just communicating everything outright is counterproductive.

35:44Richard Greaser And what you have to do instead is is use distractions and and and culture war stuff. I'm not I'm not, like, you know, a huge advocate for this because I I don't like to, you know, just mess with other people's lives. But this is how the game is played and is being played right now. The the pliers are hurling themselves as useless cannon fodder, not understanding

36:08Richard Greaser the incentives and and goals that they're trying to to further. They're being, you know, in many ways, miss Lev, because, you know, the the the plebs in the allegory of the cave like, the I think this is one of the dangerous dynamics in the Bitcoin ecosystem is the plebs think they're outside of the cave,

36:32Richard Greaser but they're actually inside of the cave. And they're terrified to get outside of the cave. Yeah. They're, like, the defenders of Bitcoin. Mhmm.

36:41Paul Sports You know, like, they they think, you know, many of these many of them many of these people are bots that aren't even real, but many of them are, like, people who own, like, point o o o o o three Bitcoin or something. And then they join, and then they're told this is how to contribute to Bitcoin is just be be very toxic to everyone. So then they're like, oh, I can do that. It's like an on ramp with people with no skills. Yeah. I mean, I hate to say this about Shinobi also, but it's like, yeah. What can you do if you have the Shinobi skill set? Like, this is as high as you can get on the the skill like, this is your best way. You know? It's kind of like, you know, it's like Adolf Hitler. You can't draw. He can't paint very well,

37:18Paul Sports but there's this other thing. I guess that's not a great example. But it's like, you know, he where's shinobi's code? Where's shinobi's, like, technical documents? Where's his, you know when when you know, what else but if so if all you can do is is troll people online, then you have, like, a little bit of an opening in this climate because that's one of the few things that one of the few models, like, a few business models that sort of works. But, yeah, I think that every sorry?

37:50Rod Palmer Honestly, that's one of the people think that, you know, they they may try to get shinobi to step down from the core maintainer because he supported core, but the reason that he needed to step down is because he wasn't contributing, he wasn't coding, he was online calling people retards. And, like, if that's what you wanna do, that's fine. But, like, get off get off of the core maintainer roster. You know?

38:14Paul Sports Right. I mean, you know, we so much have really just if only they could just put it we should just make a list of all the people who actually are on the core roster, and then we would actually know who was you know, if there was, like, a site that just tracked, you know, every time someone made a contribution, that would be very helpful for organizing.

38:31Rod Palmer You know? Well, we do a ranking list. We we do the the the power rankings for core maintain for core contributors. We used to do it every month, and it was literally just based on how many lines of code you committed over the past thirty days. And

38:46Paul Sports I don't think I can't see of a better way to do it. Right. That's obviously anyone who knows works with software knows that it's just the more lines of code you touch, the the more efficient you are The more The more evaluable.

38:60Rod Palmer Skin you have in the game, the more lines of code of the touch, the more bugs you might have introduced, the more fucks up fuck ups you might have added to the code that we can blame you for later. So you have if you're gonna do a 100 lines a day

39:12Paul Sports They're the fall guy. They are the It's like sleeping under the bridge after you build it. The engineers Can't fire the guy. The guy who's touched a 100 lines a day, you can't be fired. So, I mean, that's something. So, yeah, I don't know about, like, persuading the masses. I'm not sure. Maybe we need more, competition of a different kind. I've said I've I said on,

39:36Paul Sports on a few previous podcasts that maybe the hard fork should be rehabilitated. Like, everyone hated it when Roger Ver did it with Bitcoin Cash, but he, like, tried to say it was the real Bitcoin, and he owned the bitcoin.com domain. And so if we had a little bit more competition of some kind, then it wouldn't just be about, like, can we persuade everyone? Because you see that the persuasion route is,

40:01Paul Sports like, just so inefficient and slow. And it's so easy to distract people. I mean, there are these, there are cynical theories that every time we get close to a soft fork, there's, like, a new distraction. I don't really believe this, but, like, Moon Settler, my friend Moon Settler, he kinda thinks this, and he just thinks, like,

40:22Paul Sports there's something people although I think I'm pretty sure Robin Linus thinks something like this. These are, like, super smart people. They're totally real, and they think, you know, you should have them on the show if you haven't already. They're they're great. But they're like, something is intentionally halting the progress in Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a lot less threatening if it's you know, instead of being something that people really use every day, it's just like a ticker symbol. It's not that. But then, you know, I also think it's unlikely that

40:54Paul Sports I don't think it's true. Like, a lot of people think Michael Sailor is like a spook or like a CIA operative or something because, of course, the MicroStrategy head headquarters is, like, right across the street from the CIA. He went to, like, West Point, and he was in trouble in the past for, like, with the SEC and, like, for fraud and, like, so that he's been, like, flipped. So there's always, like, funny theories about what this is. And not to mention

41:16Rod Palmer MicroStrategy's customers and vendors are all deep stage agencies, contractors.

41:21Paul Sports Yeah. There's a long Hospitality,

41:23Rod Palmer health care, very, very sensitive, but very pertinent in in important information about the whereabouts, the habits, the records of people.

41:34Paul Sports Yeah. Absolutely. So that is so people should be aware of that that theory because it's pretty it's like a fleshed out theory. But I kind of just think it's much easier to imagine, like well, I mean, the is the question is, is is there, like, an actual room somewhere where people calculate out, okay. This is what's best for Bitcoin, and this is what's worst, and this is what we think we can achieve. We'll send the Michael Sailor out there to say that it should be digital property. And it's kinda like that. It's too that's really hard to believe. You know? Like, that's just too hard to believe. Yeah. It's hard to believe that it's a room. Yeah. It's not as hard to believe that it could be a group chat.

42:15Richard Greaser Well,

42:17Paul Sports I I mean, the group chat sometimes, in some ways, the group chat's worse because the group chat, you can get screenshots. Whereas the room, someone's gotta get the recorder in there somewhere and, you know, and As Luke as Luke learned the hard way, yeah, from screenshot of your combo. So it's hard to say. But, I you know, like, do they really one question is do does do these people really actually know? Like, this is better for Bitcoin versus this is worse. Right. That's really hard to figure out. And they do they care. That all the time. So It's I don't know. Do they really have that out? And then they say we're gonna kill privacy in Bitcoin, and and the way we're gonna do it is we're gonna have Michael Saylor kill a deal to

42:55Paul Sports donate money to poor developers. I feel bad for some many of these developers because I'm kind of a little bit more of a Bitcoin OG, so I'm not an impoverished

43:07Paul Sports developer. And, you know, I still had all this coin stolen, sadly. But I think if someone's starting now, there's a lot of pressure to, like, how how are you gonna earn a living? And it's like, oh, you know, you really can't afford to make certain people upset, so you can't touch anything controversial. Anyway, yeah, I think you wanted to say something.

43:27Rod Palmer Yeah. I I I don't like the to fund core devs. Right?

43:31Paul Sports Yeah.

43:33Richard Greaser I don't like the framing of, good for Bitcoin because that's such like a it's like an impossible thing to define. I think there's what's good for individuals. So, like, the plebs don't know what's good for them.

43:49Richard Greaser They're told by the podcasters what's good for them, and they just kinda pick and choose which one sounds more attractive and makes them feel good. You got Udi. Spam's good for Bitcoin in Udi's mind. And then, you know, privacy's good for Bitcoin in other people's mind. You know, for people in the finance world like Sailor, having, you know, the banking system have a monopoly on on money laundering where you have to go through individuals like Jeffrey Epstein

44:27Richard Greaser that's good for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's just a a store of value, that once your funds are laundered by Epstein or or another folk you can park it in and sit on it. You know, there Bitcoin has a lot of different individuals interacting with it who have different incentives and desires

44:48Richard Greaser and needs.

44:50Paul Sports And so Well, that's kinda my point, though, is that to figure out what is good for Bitcoin overall is actually really hard and very controversial. But I do think there is something. Like, you could say when Bitcoin when the price of Bitcoin goes up, when Bitcoin has more users, when more people let it into their hearts and minds and they decide that it's not just a fake thing, it's actually some real thing, when more people accept Bitcoin I think people accepting Bitcoin in return for goods and services or in return for, like, labor, like, if someone says,

45:22Paul Sports can you give me $200 and they send a Bitcoin address? That itself is pretty good for Bitcoin. I do think all the money each every type of money in the world, like, you know, the the euro versus the US dollar versus the Japanese yen,

45:40Paul Sports I think all the all the money in the world that has, like, these strong network effects. So you tend to one tends to gain at the expense of the other. You don't normally see a place where we like, oh, we take both euros and Japanese yen. It's usually there's just one, and then it kinda hits a limit. Like, you know, there used to be different money. And if you go even a few hundred years back, in American history, there was, like, a local bank had, like, its own local money, and there were many, many, many kinds.

46:14Paul Sports And so the only reason we didn't have a single global currency was just because people didn't do that much travel or didn't do that much international trade because the world was a lot smaller place. But as the world has gotten bigger, now the US dollar is like whenever there is a forex trade, the US dollar is one of the two legs, like, 85% of the time or something. So you really like, there's a strong so when I talk about, like, what's good for Bitcoin, it's kinda like, are we maximizing the chances that Bitcoin, like, survives and is the

46:44Paul Sports the winning coin, or are we making it so that it's less likely that that will happen? Because I think if that doesn't happen, then Bitcoin will fail. I agree with Satoshi said, like, it's Bitcoin's either gonna succeed or it's gonna go to zero. And I agree with that. I don't think it will be, like, some intermediate. If it's if it's in some intermediate state, I think it will always have to be looking over its shoulder for, like, some kind of event that will just wipe it out.

47:11Rod Palmer You know, something something that I think Johnson has talked about on Bitcoin uncensored that I thought was a good point, and this was, like, years ago, was that if you like, money is not people think that the the Fed just prints money, and that's where the money comes from. When reality, most money is created when any sort of loan or credit is generated by individual banks and, like, every if you thought about it, it's like every individual bank issued its own dollar, right? Like, you you and you could go to CoinMarketCap and you could see that it was trading a few points, you know below par above par wherever like that maybe could come

47:47Rod Palmer to fruition now if like every bank issues its own stable coin you got Tether versus Circle versus PayPal USD versus you know, Farmers Credit Union of Iowa USD versus whatever. Like, adding maybe that would might bring more perspective to it, but that's an interesting, but I wanted to get back to something because I had not thought about this until this conversation. But

48:13Rod Palmer if is there a difference? And if so, what is the difference between persuasion and building consensus? Because I think people conflate those two things.

48:24Paul Sports I think the bigger conflation is the word consensus, which unfortunately is has, like, screwed us all. Because when Satoshi or in in the context of the problem of, like, creating, you know, eCash

48:40Paul Sports or creating Bitcoin, the word consensus meant that every single node would it meant that you were solving the double spent problem and that every single piece of software would agree on what the blockchain contains and which which branch of it forks, which branch is the real version, and all the other ones are fake. So the word consensus came to have this, like, mythic property. And now everyone cares about, oh, do we have consensus on this soft fork, which is something that we never had before and no one ever wanted before. And this is all this is a myth. So building consensus, I think, is actually an evil thing as I've gotten, a little bit older, but especially I have this firsthand experience with it in Bitcoin, the soft fork world being coming completely deranged. You never really have a consensus. And you can't want one either because it opens the door to, like, a kinda counterattack by these people who just say, well, hey. I wasn't convinced.

49:29Paul Sports Even if they really were, they lie. And they say they say that you go down the list. So, basically, imagine a world where you had to get and this was actually the Polish political system for a while, and it led to disaster. But it was like, you have to get all a 100 senators to agree on something. At a first glance, this seems like a decent idea because it says, well, the process is only gonna let something through after everyone agrees that it's good. And so if anyone has a concern, if anyone has an idea, they think, oh, hey. Wait a minute. This might be really bad. Then everyone will stop. It's kinda like a Star Trek kind of idea too. You know, like, the captain will bring everyone into the room, and they'll talk it out, and everyone will share their expertise and their idea, and then they'll decide on the best course of action.

50:15Paul Sports But the problem in a political context is that, you know, as often people want different things or something at the expense of another person. So, one person could say you you can contrast it with something where it says if you win 51% 51 senators, then you're good, and the 49 are are ignored. And you could say, but the problem is with the consensus version where you need all 100

50:41Paul Sports is that each individual of the of, you know, the the people who may disagree. So maybe you have something where 80% of the senators already agree and there's 20. Each of the 20 can start demanding a personal concession. And they can say, you need to cater to me and my because I've got a veto on this, and so you need to give me everything that I want. And then what do you do in a situation where two or the three senators, they each ask for something, like, mutually exclusive? They say like, oh, I want I want you to give me the next I want you to give me this city or I want you to name the next opera after me or something. You know? You can't

51:16Paul Sports now it's impossible. The the problem can't be fixed. And in fact, the Polish system had to be abandoned because people would come in. They would bribe one of the one of the equivalent of, like, the nobles, one of the equivalent of the senators. And they would say, we won't destroy your province. They will give you this bribe. And then they'll just veto anything about defending the country or a standing army, and then they would get constantly get invaded. So you need to have something where this threshold is if like, basically fit a majority, 50.000001%, because it is the only way of assigning responsibility

51:52Paul Sports accurately is when you say, actually, because when you have these super majority thresholds, it creates this toxic limbo. So for example, you have maybe you have a 75% threshold. These are in The US constitution. They need to override a veto or to do many things need two thirds or to amend the constitution, you need 75%. And, so

52:14Paul Sports you need when you have something that's a 75% threshold let's say you're making it very close and you're at 74%. You just need a few more people. Well, now it's you have 26% of these people who can demand

52:27Paul Sports the the concession. And so maybe if when the when the proposal ultimately fails to pass, you'd no longer know who to be who should be blamed. Because if it passes, you know you can blame them. They're responsible. If it fails, you know exactly what to do. If it fails, you know you didn't convince enough people. More people were not convinced than convinced, so you need to just find if you're at 48 or 49 and it fails, you know, okay. I need to find someone out there that I can flip, and and then I'll get to a majority. But but until then, I haven't

52:59Paul Sports succeeded in my goal of persuading people. So this is the difference between persuasion and consent. Consensus is this 100% agreement, and persuasion is just persuasion is more of the 51. Because even when in in the single individual mind, like, in in your own brain, when you wake up and you decide, oh, what do I want for breakfast or what should I do today? You don't really you very rarely have, like, 100% of the the thoughts or 100% of the neurons or whatever it would be, 100%

53:29Paul Sports of the ideas agreeing that you oh, this is exactly what I wanna do. I wanna immediately go and get, like, whatever, an egg McMuffin or something. Usually, you have a couple thoughts in your head where you say you kinda pulled in a couple directions at once. And you say, well, maybe I wanna go to the post office, and maybe I wanna go to to get to get a bagel. But you don't you when you decide, you go all in on whatever you decided. You don't, like, go to a point that's, like, halfway between the post office and the the bakery and then which could be in the middle of nowhere. And then you just kinda wonder about, like so

54:04Paul Sports when you have these decisions that have all these, you know so that's I just think the bigger problem is consensus is actually a bad idea. And what you really want is just to persuade enough people. And that that I think consent true consensus among human beings has never been achieved and probably isn't even desirable. That's like when you have, like, Peter Thiel had that line about

54:28Paul Sports if the voter turnout is a 100% and the guy wins by a 100%, you're probably in North Korea, and the the election's not real. So it's bad it's better to live in a world where it has a little bit of this messiness. That is what preserves people's right to dissent in the first place, and the dissension is good sometimes. And it breeds creative creative

54:49Rod Palmer problem solving, creative thoughts. Hey. You you mentioned the the accountability aspect and it makes me think like, you know, recently, X added the feature that it shows the country that an account is is posting from and that's controversial whatever but there I think have been some or at least are some benefits to like knowing like all of these political

55:13Rod Palmer propaganda accounts are from Malaysia and India and it's like it's it's good to know that I kind of suspected that already and we talked about the dead internet theory a little bit like are these bots like are these nots people bots and I think part of that dead internet theory is is important to always, I think, realize that even if they're not bots, if they're indistinguishable from from bots, what's the difference?

55:37Rod Palmer But back to the accountability, I think that X should add a feature that shows whether or not you put a green box in your profile in 2001 to signal support for Taproot. So you can't come back and say, oh, I always thought Taproot was a bad idea.

55:54Paul Sports Right? Because people are doing that. Kind of like anytime you don't jump on the bandwagon, I would like that. When anytime they did, like, the, pylon, and you could say, these are the pylons this person was on. And, then if they pile on someone today, you kinda think, well, okay. What's that worth? Because it's very easy. I mean, people learned with the mob and pitchforks that the mob and pitchforks era, you know, innocent until proven guilty. Instead, it's very, very easy to just have people freak out and just stone someone to death for imaginary crimes like witchcraft that are are unreal.

56:26Rod Palmer Well, you know, we talked a little bit about ossification of layer one. Maybe that's already up here. However, one of the big

56:37Rod Palmer trending pieces of FIDE lately or concerns or just it's the it's the current thing it's quantum computers and quantum computers are gonna do you know break Bitcoin's gonna break it's at least the, legacy signatures, and people have proposed solutions, ways to make Bitcoin quantum resistant, which would require another

57:01Rod Palmer another fork, but I I'm curious at a high level. I personally think that quantum computers are plot slot. I think it's, I I I've yet to be convinced that I should be worried about it or that it is a a practical concern, at least in the near term. I'm curious about your perspective and do you think that this is gonna cause some serious problems?

57:26Rod Palmer I think this is the perfect thing for a prediction market by the way. Oh, I agree that this would be an ideal prediction market,

57:33Paul Sports thing because it is something where a lot of people are clearly, like, bullshitting, and they have a strong opinion that they say they have, but they don't really know what they're talking about. This was, like, one of the nice examples I used to use for prediction markets was, like, global warming because the phrase global warming is actually really, really vague, which is helps make it a political football, but helps make it much so you could change the question in very many ways, which I did. And I could say when people bet on this, they can bet on, like, what will as reported by this satellite, what was the average what will the average surface temperature anomaly be? Like, there's this NASA satellite that's just, like, pointed over this part this part of the ocean, and it just tracks the temperature, like, every day. And then they just point at to, like, what it is it you know, compared to what it normally is at this time of year.

58:20Paul Sports And, so when you make it more specific, then suddenly it becomes a more productive conversation and even the creativity increases where people can say something like, okay. Well, that's not really what I meant. Oh, well, then what did you mean? Oh, well, then maybe we'll bet on this. Oh, maybe we'll bet on something else that's, like, easier to measure. Like, c o two concentration is, like, way easier to measure than global warming because global warming is, like, this vague thing. So I think quantum computers is a very good example of that. I think the problem with quantum computing is that you have to be a specialist in quantum computers to know the truth. None of the three of us are. Even someone who's a specialist in Bitcoin is not necessarily also a specialist in quantum computers. Of course, some people have looked into it more than others. And, again, Robin Linus, he was we hosted a debate on the quantum computer,

59:08Paul Sports threat. It was a Twitter space, so people should be able to find it on the layer two labs Twitter account or should be able to find it somewhere. And, we heard lots of arguments about that. But I think, you know, really, I I don't think there has been a,

59:26Paul Sports like, a verified example of a quantum computer factoring the number 35 or something yet. So and they are really complicated to build because you have to, like, basically make it so that not a single photon of light escapes because then the universes will split or something. So,

59:48Paul Sports yeah, it's being also recombined later. Yeah. It's pretty weird.

59:53Rod Palmer So the concept that we already talked about, the concept of consensus. I I I'm too retarded to elaborate, but I just feel like the concept of consensus when it comes to any sort of outcome in quantum computing is going to be a problem. Like, alright, you were able to,

1:00:13Rod Palmer observe some sort of outcome from this quantum computing task. How is that relevant to any other person, any other observer in the world,

1:00:27Rod Palmer at any in this, Brown, whatever you want to call it. It's like, alright, you did something cool with quantum computers, and you got a bunch of data, but like,

1:00:36Paul Sports what does that mean to to me? Well, the cool thing would be if they could if they could just, like, break RSA or something at will, like, for everyone. You could just go to a site and be like, okay. Factor this in unbelievably enormous number into two primes, and it would just do it for you every single time. That would be like you that would break all of that. That would break all that encryption, and then that would just be permanently broken for everyone. And then, you know, there's a lot of, like, conspiracy theory shaped stuff. Like, of course, this has, like, something like because since the military uses encryption, this has, like, some of the military. So maybe there's secret computers in China or secret computers in America or whatever. The CIA black site has the computer, and and and they're they're gonna get it before everyone else and stuff like that. So, unfortunately, this is a situation where it is hard

1:01:23Paul Sports to tell what's going on because on the other side, I I, you know, some quantum computers I've is I understand it have been demonstrated to exist, whereas with, like, four qubits or something, they they have those working. And there's this other thing called the Mach Zeder interferometer, which is not a quantum computer per se, but it's basically a thing with mirrors and photons. And it it it, like, kind of basically

1:01:49Paul Sports proves that quantum computer is possible because it does, like, something it's, like, basically bounces light off of a mirror, and it never arrives at some other mirror that it could arrive at. So these things are all real, I mean, as far as I understand it. And so it's hard to know, like, what on earth and I also think it's inevitable that a quantum computer will be constructed,

1:02:12Paul Sports you know, at some point in human history. It's also the case that the quantum computer, I don't think it will be like switching from, like, a black and white TV to a color TV where you would never go back. I think the quantum computer will always be worse than the classical computer

1:02:34Paul Sports at many types of computing. And it's because first, because it's so much more expensive and difficult to build and has to be, like, cool to absolute zero or whatever. You know? I'm not sure. Don't quote me on these details. But the point is it's, like, extremely difficult to, like, a science project to, like, get the car on a computer to work, whereas, we're much better at just just, you know, normal CPU, graphics card, etcetera, that uses a 120 volts of electricity coming out of the wall. So I think,

1:03:02Paul Sports you know, only in a few cases can you actually take advantage of the quantumness. So I think it will be kind of a niche thing. But, yeah, I don't actually know. I mean, you asked me about my opinion. I the thing is I really have no idea. I think the prediction market on it would be a good we would say, is there what we would want to know and, again, this is a case of the clarifying effect of the prediction market text where you would say, will there be a site where you can just break, you know, 4,000 bid RSA or something by this date? And then

1:03:32Paul Sports people would just bet on no because I think it probably but maybe there would be a bunch of people out there who know that it will happen by so you could have them for different dates, and you could see, oh, the probabilities are really, really low for the first two years, but then they're really, really high. So all that would be that's a better so the and to me, the prediction market represents consensus in a much more helpful way than the idea of until we'll just talk until everyone agrees. I think that is useless. But the prediction market always returns one number, and you can see that market context is one where you have people who disagree completely often fighting each other. You have, like, the big short or you have, betting on zero or whatever, or you have, like, the Herbalife thing or you have,

1:04:13Paul Sports Theranos or whatever. You have the stuff where there's stuff as a certain market price. The market price is a product of intense disagreement, but it it's like a tug of war, and the the price lands where it is, and then that's that's the price. So, yeah, I would definitely whatever the prediction market says, I would defer to. And I but I do think, the word quantum, it just has this weird effect on people where it's just these one of these fancy sounding words that everyone wants to have. It triggers people to be more idealistic, I think, psychologically.

1:04:45Richard Greaser What what do you think the timeline is for Start nine to develop a home quantum server for the plugs that they can buy for $900?

1:04:56Paul Sports Yeah. When will you be able to just click a button, right, and just download the coin in the computer? It's done. Yeah. I mean, this is funny too about, like, the, like, the you should run a full node is, like, part of the the 10 commandments of Bitcoin or something. And it's, like, the most sacred,

1:05:16Paul Sports thing, and then people don't do that. And then it's always funny when people say stuff like, oh, you should make it easier to run a full node or stuff like that. And then Casa had the, oh, we'll just send you a full node. And then I saw Jamieson Laupp. I think it was in the Miami Beach conference, which is maybe, like, 2022 or 2023, one of those. And I was like, oh, yeah. That's the Casa product. It's really great. And he's like, we discontinued that. And then I was like, oh, this is embarrassing

1:05:44Paul Sports for me. But, and then I was like, why? And he said because the support was too difficult. Because, of course, people would get it. This is an intriguing, like, idea also. It's like people would get this is it's all related to, like, what you were saying. Like, okay. Someone says they have a quantum computer. What does it mean? And it's kind of like you have a full

1:06:05Paul Sports node. People only do it because they're told to do it. They don't really know what it means. So even if you ship them the full node, they don't know, like, how to operate it or what it's they don't know what it's like. What's the difference between when it's working versus not working? They don't even know the difference. Some same as the quantum computer. Like, okay. What's the difference between we have we have quantum computing versus we don't? They don't no one knows. So the full node, if it doesn't, like, explain itself to the user and kind of, like, persuade the user,

1:06:37Paul Sports then it's useless because the user is trying to they have to use the full node for something, even if it's just to, like, look at the blockchain or measure confirmations on transactions that are going to them. I think, like so

1:06:55Paul Sports the idea of start nine might be a contradiction. Maybe not. I don't know. But it like, the idea of, like, we'll just do it all for you. I mean, I'm all in favor of I have we have our own thing, Bitwindow, where it's like, you download Bitwindow, which is small. And then Bitwindow lets you download like, you can download Bitcoin Core. You can download the BIP three hundred, three zero one enforcer. You can download, like, other stuff. And so we have, like, our own little, like, kinda like a start nine thing.

1:07:21Paul Sports So I like that, and I like the idea of the user being able to, like, zoom in. And, you know, you just they they only commit to, like, a tiny little, like, 50 megabyte piece of software at at first, then they download they can download Bitcoin core. I mean, then they can download, like, the wallet and do other stuff. Then they download baby Bitcoin core, which will ask them for, you know, 800 gigabytes or 900 gigabytes for this. So you kinda ramp people up.

1:07:49Paul Sports But, yeah, it's a good question. When will there be the, you know, quantum nine or whatever?

1:07:56Richard Greaser Have you have you ever considered starting your own university? Like, this is something that the Nazis have realized. They've been very successful. You know, university professors like Matthew Kratt are very effective at indoctrinating the youth.

1:08:12Richard Greaser A lot of the stuff that you've talked about on this show, this is, like, you know, master's level college curriculum, in my opinion, in in the Bitcoin world. I'm just curious if you ever thought about starting a university.

1:08:30Paul Sports Well, I mean, who can how can we when when Matt Kratter is doing such a great job? I was like, well, this is another thing that I thought it might make. Like, I've had, like, various, like, kind of feuds with people, and then, like, literally, like like clockwork, it's, like, only six to eighteen months later, they get, like, canceled by the Bitcoin community. So I'm like a canary in the coal mine. This goes way back. I mean, ancient ancient days, but there was, like I had, like, a funny feud with, like, Amon Goodsire in, like, 2014 or something. He blocked me on Twitter and, like, scaling Bitcoin one era. And then, like, after that, everyone, like,

1:09:05Paul Sports decided they didn't like him or whatever. But this goes back along along and even Shinobi, like, Shinobi is, like, one of the chief drive chain haters. But then, like, he's still around, but people kinda figured out that he is just a sound bite, that he just calls people retarded, and he doesn't actually have that many, like, real ideas

1:09:25Paul Sports himself. And he's just, like, it's kind of it is what it is. So, but, yeah, I think that's the thing is, do people if people really want to learn, like, the whole, I'm actually a huge beneficiary of school per se. I got, like, multiple master's degrees and also career in academia. But as an individual, I'm very pessimistic about school, and I have become, like, a school skeptic and like a radical anti school person. I think school is a waste of time for most people. Now you can get on YouTube. You have your podcast. You got your YouTube. You can play something, and you can pause it and go back and rewind. And and you can talk you can find the track the person down on Twitter and say, you know, hey. What did you mean by this? They'll probably answer you even if they're whatever. You know?

1:10:13Paul Sports Professor of chemistry or something. So it depends. And, I think that will only improve over time. We'll have something like, you know, the Telegram stars thing where if you wanna message someone for the first time, you have to pay $510, but then it keeps the thing open. So that deters spam. So now if you're like a, you know, a chemistry PhD and you have, like, a you put out a video on something weird, like, we had that what was that called? Like, that, like, k 99 or something. It was supposed to be, like, the room temperature super magnet or something. It's kinda like if you have something, you just put it out. And then

1:10:47Paul Sports if if it's really important, someone will be able to find, like, the $10.15 dollars to message you and say, oh, I think I found a mistake in your video, or I think what you're doing is really important, and I wanna finance your operation. You can now it'll be much easier for the Internet to get people in touch with each other. And so I think, and then they have the AI tutor. So I'm, like, totally against all forms of school. I mean, I know your question is partly to bring up Matt Crater, but I was just like, the the this whole premise that there's gonna be a curriculum and there's gonna be a teacher even

1:11:22Paul Sports and that people are gonna come $790. Yeah. Well, I think it's ridiculous that I can't I can't believe how how many people take it. There is a guy I had I go to many different Bitcoin meetups around the world and in in, you know, in Connecticut and in Miami where I've lived and in San Francisco and I live there. There's always this Bitcoin meetups. And, yeah, you can find some people who like the, the Bitcoin University content, but I just think, like, why do they like it? Because every time and then he ends it with the thing saying pay a lot of money to subscribe to, like, this thing. And I just don't think, like, why doesn't that discredit him more? It's so, like, no one else where else would any you imagine if, like, Adam Back did something like that. I've never heard of, like, anyone. Even people who They have, like, sold out what they don't do and stuff like that. They crucified Natalie Brunel for her $800

1:12:09Rod Palmer course in 2001. That's right. Maybe it's the 8 hun maybe that's the threshold. If it's 800 or more, it's unreasonable. If it's $790, you got, like, the Costco pricing model gets past the filters.

1:12:22Paul Sports That's a very good point. We I remember when she was, that people wouldn't let her hit the end of it. And it's kinda like if people because Bitcoin is confusing. So if someone could actually teach it and it if people find it helpful, I can definitely I can definitely imagine that there being a market for that. But, yeah, I think it's I think it's depressing, especially because he clearly doesn't know very much. So that's the other thing is I don't know, like, where he gets his information.

1:12:50Paul Sports It's certainly, like, not great, whatever it is. I think he kinda gets it from Jimmy Song or something too, which is kinda funny because Jimmy Song is also you know, he's, like, kind of, like, an old I would consider him a friend or whatever, but he's also not that even though he's often, like, an expert witness in court and something on Bitcoin, he has his book. But he's also, like, not super, super, super great, I would say, but he's definitely better than than many. And but, yeah, like, it's kind of like, what is the food chain and who is who's getting their information from who? But in this modern time, I'm just I just think, like, if you're a self directed learner

1:13:30Paul Sports first of all, everyone is a self directed learner. Like, it's not like you can't, like, steal someone's attention, like, against their will. It doesn't really happen. I mean, maybe in some really bizarre scenarios, you could argue stuff like, if someone's starving to death and then they smell food or something and or, like, something like extremely highly engineered, like AI pornography or something could maybe, like, hijack your attention, but really not, like, in a serious sense, like, over

1:13:57Paul Sports a long period of time. People, they either wanna learn something or they don't. And if they want to learn, now they will be able to, I think, with a decent amount. They just need a little bit of money for their they just need Internet or they could use the, you know, free plenty of places have free Wi Fi these days. So even a really, really poor off person will be able to it's like a free it's a giant library. The inter Internet is a giant library in addition to the other things that it is. It's a huge library, and it has

1:14:30Paul Sports it has something that every school could only could only dream of having. Like, it would even be beyond the imagination of you know? There would be it would be impossible for Montessori or Socrates or any of these people to imagine the type of learning opportunity that is available today to literally, like, something like 4,000,000,000 people. It would be impossible. So I and now this makes me even more skeptical of regular school. I think regular school is now really wasting kids' time

1:15:01Paul Sports when it's now the opportunity cost is very high since they could now learn anything they want, and they could be they could learn literally whatever their hearts desire. And if all they wanna do is learn about Roblox and, Call of Duty meta or something, then I think that's fine because eventually, these people will all become adults. And, you know, they'll want they'll have to decide, oh, do I want, you know, do I wanna have more money? Do I want a better future for my do I wanna have a girlfriend or whatever? Do I wanna have a better future for my family? And people will just decide whatever they decide. And, all these attempts to to curate the curriculum or to get children to

1:15:38Paul Sports learn a certain thing that people think they should learn, or they learn Bitcoin the way someone else thinks they should learn it. All this stuff has ended up backfiring. I think it's a waste of time. But, yeah, Matt Crater, like, you know, what do you really I mean, how much does he really know about Bitcoin? That's the other thing. It's like, these people show up, like, after 2020. It's like, okay. Like, that's more than ten years in. I'm just gonna turn this light. So, yeah, I don't know, what

1:16:12Paul Sports but, yeah, I guess that's how you want to he's got he's got a product to sell, so everyone's gotta eat.

1:16:22Richard Greaser Trinkets for the plugs. Selling solutions. It's a great business model. So we I think we're gonna transition here in a minute to the end of the show, but, you know, I'm curious, Paul.

1:16:42Richard Greaser Do you have any favorite Polish jokes?

1:16:48Paul Sports Polish jokes. Yeah. I know a few. I mean, the best one is the Norm Macdonald joke. The do you know this joke about the sandwich shop? I don't wanna tell it because it takes too long, but just look. It's great. I don't and I don't wanna do it where Norm Macdonald can do it better than. But, yeah, I mean, everyone knows about, oh, why did the Polish Navy sink? This Polish submarine say, oh, they left the screen door open. I mean, a classic. But the the Norm McDonald sandwich joke is that's,

1:17:16Paul Sports I guess, very old, but and just no one can tell it, like, you know, you gotta some jokes need a great delivery, and to have him run on that joke for three minutes on, like, basically international broadcast television. That's just, but yeah. You know, it's funny about the you know, like, where did the stereotype even come from? You know? Because I know a lot of Polish people,

1:17:41Paul Sports all very bright. But, you know, hey. A stereotype is a stereotype. Okay.

1:17:47Rod Palmer Are you are you relieved that, like, the most, I guess, controversial or disliked in a group is now the smallies and that people leave the Polish alone?

1:17:60Paul Sports The Polish you know, everyone's gotta have, like, the little time. Right? So then it was like, Irish need not apply, and then so if people have their time, I you know, I we should leave it to maybe the sociologist to determine, like, what is the time window? You know, how much time do you have to you put in your hours? But, yeah, then a lot of people even, like, I was thinking when I saw that movie in theaters, Gran Torino. He's, like, has an extremely on the nose, like, Polish name, like Kowalski or something. And I was kinda like, oh, like and then it's like Polish, and then he there's, like, the Asian Korean family is, like, moving in. So I was like, oh, now Polish,

1:18:36Paul Sports that was, like, 2005 or something. And I was like, that's like Polish is now officially, like, old guard American. It's like, you know, you're in, like whatever. You're like a Virginian. You're like a you're like a Puritan.

1:18:50Paul Sports So you're like a Massachusetts Bay Colony full I was thinking so I don't remember when that movie exactly came out, but I was even thinking this is way in. So, you you know, everyone's like, you need your way in, for America, the melting pot. And, yeah,

1:19:11Paul Sports certainly, you know, it's hard to know online, like, whenever there's a political story because you got the online derangement, and then you got people's politics. But, But, yeah, that does seem like if one tenth of those stories are true about and then, of course, the other funny thing about Minnesota is it was, like, extremely Scandinavian. And the Scandinavians, like, have, like, a very good work ethic, some would say.

1:19:35Paul Sports And they're very so then they're always like people are always like, oh, why doesn't you know, socialism works for works for Norway, and, you know, why couldn't it work in whatever? But, I think I I I think this is true. Maybe it's not. Someone could look it up. But I think Minnesota is, like, extremely was mostly was very Scandinavian, and then now they let it all Somalian. So

1:19:60Paul Sports but, yep, we're living through some interesting times. There was a time I've noticed that for a while, like, being a racist was, like, the worst thing you could be. It was like being a pedophile or whatever. And, and then but now we're living we're slowly living through an era where, like, race based arguments are, like, coming back, phasing back in. I don't know, what that portends. You know? Obviously,

1:20:27Paul Sports a lot of prejudice in addition to other,

1:20:32Rod Palmer prejudices already exist. I think at this point, it's like policing a few types of prejudices is it just seems hypocritical because you peep prejudice

1:20:44Rod Palmer about everything else.

1:20:46Paul Sports Yeah. People only well, they it's the same as the specialist versus generalist idea where people don't have enough time to in make an in-depth investigation of every single thing they come across that wouldn't make any sense. To the point about x adding the the location, there's definitely one case where it's kind of, like, justified where the account is, like, clearly some kind of nationalist account of some country, and then the the person is from a different country. So it's like pro America underscore USA, and it's like the the the legal and, like, whatever. And then the the account's, like, not from The US. It's like It exposed to you in miles. Like, what the heck? So at some x I think x should if they if they notice any kind of, like, overt

1:21:32Paul Sports fraud, they should, like, let everyone know. Like, by the way, this account is a fraud, and you shouldn't listen to them. They're lying to everyone. So I think that's I thought that was funny.

1:21:41Rod Palmer They exposed Ian Miles Truong for you know, he's very, very patriotic, and he's never even been in United States. He's based out of Malaysia, I think. And he he he went on he went on a defense of despite not being an American, despite not living here, why he was patriotic. And I think that, you know, a lot of it is because agencies, companies, they're paying these foreign accounts to be patriotic, just to to to, post about certain messages. And I don't think that that's right. I think as long as you have homeless veterans and poor American citizens who you could pay them to be patriotic, we shouldn't be paying foreigners to be patriotic.

1:22:20Paul Sports Well, it's obviously the whole thing is very sketchy, and it's, it is fraud at a certain point. And and many of times, it's not just that the account like, the account has, like, a screen name. It's not just the name. The whole personality of the account is like this it'll have, like, tweets. These are the type of people we're letting into our country. And then it's like, the person's not even from the and so you're kind of like so the whole personality I think there were a few UK ones that I saw where they had people had screenshotted, like, all the tweets, the name, and then it was, like, the location at the bottom, and it doesn't add up. And we know that there are, you know, that there are bot farms, and we know that there are, you know, proxies. And so

1:23:01Paul Sports I think that is I mean, it's unfortunate because x has to decide the more what do they want people to think when they see a tweet? Do they wanna think, oh, this is just spam that might be a bot, or do they wanna think, oh, this is something that I should someone someone really took time out of their day, and they thought about this for a little while, and they wrote this tweet because they wanted people to read it. And they wanted it to be a tweet for the ages and to go down in history and be part of the record of human thought.

1:23:29Rod Palmer And so to be disappointed for advertisers. Yeah. Right. So Yeah. The Internet theory is not great for advertisers.

1:23:38Paul Sports Yep. Well but, of course, the average you know, it's true that that's a conflict of interest. But the other side of it is it does provide an incentive. Like, usually, television television exists for the advertisers, but

1:23:54Paul Sports law and order is kind of entertaining. You know? Even if that's a side effect, even if that's a a side effect of why it exists and is not the number one reason. You could have shows and show even there are some some shows that have, like, an educational dimension or an activist dimension, but they were actually still pretty good, and people a lot of people watch them. And, so you could say x even though x exists for the whoever's paying and for the advertisers and the investors and the people who buy premium or whatever, that it could still it still has to decide, does it want to care about being a place where

1:24:35Paul Sports people kind of are honest? And if they're not honest, then what's the point of reading it? It's all just like a kind of a crapshoot.

1:24:42Rod Palmer So Yep. Pleb slop sells, but it doesn't mean Pleb slop can't be interesting. Doesn't mean a Pleb slop can't make you cry. Doesn't mean Pebble Pleb slop can't make you think have think something. Yeah. Feel creative. You know what I mean? It it it can be good. It can be interesting. It can be beneficial.

1:25:01Paul Sports Yeah. Even the slop has some new nutritional value, I assume.

1:25:07Richard Greaser Do you do you think that X should devise some sort of purity test for what a Bitcoiner is so that if somebody's tweeting about Bitcoin, it says whether they're a Bitcoiner or not?

1:25:22Paul Sports I mean, there was a site during the block size war where you could, like, sign the message with your wallet or endorse it. And so there was, like, a leaderboard of something that maybe only one person had written, but, like, was endorsed by these accounts that had, like, tens of thousands of coins. And so there would be, like, a leaderboard where it got up to, like, 400,000 coins or something.

1:25:49Paul Sports And I think that that definitely had some advantages, but I don't know how much it really because it was funny that, originally, that site came out, then it was like a small blocker. Small blockers had the edge, and then some people were started citing them. And then word got out, and then the a large blocker argument got

1:26:10Paul Sports got higher. That also had an interesting, side effect that it also made people care about how exactly how they worded the claim. So they would they they're they dialed back the rhetoric to try to make an appeal to as many centrists as possible. This is a good thing. There's two types of these, there's, like, different types of arbitration. So, like, sometimes people go and they plead their case, and then the mediator has to, like, draft a compromise.

1:26:38Paul Sports But this is has isn't this has some disadvantages. Like, people exaggerate their case, and they say, oh, this person's the worst. So, like, this is like in family court. They do this, and then usually when people get divorced, they everyone tries some, like, kind of extreme routines where they file for, like, a restraining order and they exaggerate the person's drinking or some because it's, like, pretty normal for someone to drink at some point in the marriage, like, at New Year's party, but then they exaggerate it and they do all this stuff. So then but then in contrast to that, they have a situation where the arbitrator must choose one of the two sides

1:27:13Paul Sports to agree with completely. And this has the opposite effect where the people try to make this their case as honest as possible, and they try to say, I will not exaggerate because if the purse if the arbitrator, the mediator, if they don't believe me, then it will hurt my chances. So they try to make their case as reasonable as possible

1:27:37Paul Sports appealing to the because they the moderator knows if it's it's pulled too far, they'll just think this is I don't believe this. So I think that is an interesting, thing to think about in the context of this site that that logged people's amounts where they would try to some people try to write them like, I think Bitcoin should be used as money or they'd like this this platitude in the statements that everyone would agree with. You could think maybe, like, what would happen if someone wrote, like, Bitcoin is hope or something, and then it would just get, like, a million endorsements. And that was tough. They had, like, a privacy, problem too. But, yeah, I don't know. I do think there is a problem with the civil attack and with this is a problem with measuring

1:28:19Paul Sports people's opinion on Twitter. And there was the scaling the scaling Bitcoin conferences in 2015. People's they they made a huge deal. They made it explicit. They they they said on the website and in the announcement, and they said, we will not make any decisions at this conference, which is funny. It sounds kinda funny. But what they were getting at at the time was they wanted to really preserve the ability for anonymous or,

1:28:51Paul Sports you know, private people to contribute. And they knew that if you had an in person meeting, that would ruin privacy for a lot of people. And so that the hypothetical Satoshi would not be able to attend.

1:29:04Paul Sports And so that was a really important talking point for them to say, we will not make any decisions at the in person meeting. This is just like a supplemental thing to, like, help out. But then, yeah, on the online, you have the flip side of that where you have endless fake accounts. I kinda think right now the endless fake accounts problem is worse than the the privacy problem. But, yeah, I don't know. That's a good point. Definitely, I think Twitter, you know, you have this

1:29:30Paul Sports I certainly have this love hate relationship with Twitter where on one hand, it's amazing that you can message I can just Twitter where on one hand, it's amazing that you can message I can just message anyone, any book author or something or any anyone about anything. And it is kind of fun to watch all the ideas compete. The ideas compete on you The ideas compete on you know, and you can you could learn the rules and get better, and you could put more effort into it. At the same time, every now and then, you think, like, oh my god. If this is the way society is going, like, we're all, like, gonna die or something. So, you know, I don't know what to make of Twitter. I think Elon has improved it in many ways, but he's also made it, like he's given it this, he seeded a certain culture that has, like, also kinda, like, monocultured it or something also in a different way. So I but he did improve it a lot, and he did when he fired all those people and it's and it's kept working, I kinda thought, well, I guess those people are probably useless.

1:30:22Paul Sports No offense to that.

1:30:24Rod Palmer You probably been around long enough to know that, like, forum moderators, have a bad reputation. Nobody likes the mods. Everybody hates the mods. But I think what's happened with Twitter, x, whatever, the last two or three years, I think people are starting to respect the credentialed moderators a little bit more. Maybe maybe the mods got too much of a bad reputation, and they aren't all bad. They're not they're not all as bad as the, you know, r Bitcoin Reddit mods.

1:30:54Paul Sports Yeah. But the r bit I mean, I disagree. In my my point of view on that, this happened during the block size war and many times since, but I felt that the the the r Bitcoin suppression of large block stuff, I felt that that was helping the large blockers a lot.

1:31:13Paul Sports I but who's to say if that was really true? But I also think I this is a lot of stuff. There's a lot of interesting stuff that could have been different. So I thought our BTC was just like, we'll be the uncensored r slash Bitcoin. But I think that was a mistake. What they should have just done was said, we will mirror the heat. He should have maybe made a different site that has, like, the same layout as Reddit and just said, we will mirror our Bitcoin, but we will also include all the

1:31:40Paul Sports we'll snapshot and include all the censored posts in, like, a special box. And that that would have would have single handedly eviscerated r slash Bitcoin. So this is a very interesting idea, like a different the right media strategy, I think. But instead, they just created RBTC because they thought we wanna be the king of our own new subreddit where we'll do it right. And, of course, they had to have their own moderation problems, which they did. And then the question was, how should they treat yeah. You had people like, like, again, Greg Maxwell, who's very active on Reddit. And, also, in his dealings with the RBTC people, I thought he wasn't he wasn't completely unfair, but he was very critical. And then he would always get downvoted to hell. So, like, the the Reddit thing would be, like, flag him when he'd go to RBTC as, like, just like a spam person who should never be shown, but he that was not what he was. He was just unpopular. So then he had to be, like, whitelisted

1:32:31Paul Sports and all this other, like, weird stuff would happen. So it's very, very intriguing. That's a These are very interesting stories. Yeah.

1:32:40Rod Palmer That's a good, more like, example of the the guys with spam derangement syndrome, the Nazis who are just, like, so obsessed with spam and, like, tipping spam off Bitcoin. The the problem with that is the it's it's

1:32:57Rod Palmer it's it's it's it's an ambiguous term. Anything could be argued whether well or or not well that it's spam and that it shouldn't be allowed. Like, in Greg Maxwell being, flagged and filtered

1:33:11Rod Palmer on Reddit as spam is a good example of this where it's like just because a lot of people are triggered by by your content or by the by the by the the the the you know,

1:33:25Rod Palmer nature of your existence.

1:33:29Paul Sports Doesn't you know, they could call you spam. He was, like, overtly like, he would be tagged RBTC as you may as people probably know, when you can, like, tag someone in a post on Reddit, they'll get it they could get, like, called over from, like, wherever they were on Reddit to go participate in RBTC. So he'd be, like, invited over, then he would give his so they were, like, honestly having it. This was, like, civilization at its best in a way. You have two people who really disagree and really hate each other, and they're typing it out in in text, in chat. They're not even, like, throwing crazy memes or GIFs at each other or something. You know? They're just typing it out, and everyone can benefit from it. But, of course, he would get, downvoted. And so then, of course, if you program a subreddit, you know, if you're the Reddit mods and you see someone always gets downvoted here, they always have a negative score or whatever,

1:34:21Paul Sports you would think, well, we just shouldn't show this to people. This is not what they came for the subreddit for. And then so I'm not sure exactly how to what to make of it all. I think it is definitely the case that different people are interested in different content. And if you wanna curate the content the right way, you need to be very smart. You can't just say like, you can't just write the word cold and tape it to a refrigerator that's not plugged in, or if it's broken, the refrigerator's broken or it's not plugged in. You can't just write, like, cold and tape it on. You can't just write, like, not spam. You need to have, like, a complicated

1:34:54Paul Sports sifting, sorting idea as to exactly what will be displayed and and what will not not be displayed. And so that's part of why the the nots people are incorrect is because they have an extremely simplistic, idea over something that is not simple, at all. And, of course, one thing that everyone brings up is that Bitcoin already has the sorting based on fee. That's the whole the whole reason it works at all. So it already has this this

1:35:22Paul Sports engine of, suppressing insincere messages, and it works perfectly.

1:35:31Paul Sports And so, but, yeah, this has already been talked to death, I think. But, yeah, and what will become of the the knots cult

1:35:39Rod Palmer when this Well, you do Peter's out. You're not it they you're just not gonna succeed trying to Vibe code a vaccine for Bitcoin. But you know what I mean? You're not gonna save Bitcoin. And Yeah. The Bitcoin core has some of the most

1:35:53Paul Sports the highest standards, sometimes unreasonably high or insane high in an insane way such as inconsistent camel case requirements and other nonsense. But, but, you know, the idea that you that would be, like, the that was, like, the worst place in the entire universe to try to bring the the vibe coded pull requests. That's like so that was just by itself kind of I was almost thinking, like, is there, like, a third or fourth layer to that where they're like,

1:36:20Paul Sports we want you to know that we don't take this seriously either, and we're just wasting your time. And, look, we can get away with it too. Right. The the book the book,

1:36:29Rod Palmer Market Wizards, about the infamous traders from the seventies. They're like, Ed Quayote, I think I might be getting this really long. But, his whole, like, market trading thesis was psychological like that where he thought if there were people, like, outcomes that were

1:36:47Rod Palmer determined by the fact that these people were, like, psychologically expecting themselves to fail, but, like, not not having the self awareness to realize, like, the vid that they have that predisposition to be self sabotaging and that they would lose money or succeed in the market totally based on,

1:37:06Rod Palmer their efforts to sabotage themselves and to try to lose, right? Like, some people do this, like, by trading meme coins or just the way that they or maybe came extra careless with their Bitcoin, they lose their keys. Like, it it might not have been, some catastrophe or security, exploit that some hacker figured out. It's just, like, the risk was that they were self sabotaging and that they didn't believe in themselves and that they they were careless for their keys and that's why they lost them. So it almost feels that way with the Nazis where it's, they're not aware. They are there's no self awareness here, but they are just demonstrating

1:37:46Rod Palmer with histrionics and just over the top dramatic narratives that it they're self sabotaging. They're trying to lose, and they're showing us that they're that this isn't meant to be successful. They are not actually trying to achieve consensus as they would, describe it.

1:38:05Paul Sports Yeah. I agree. I think there are so many holes in the plan. Even it's the idea that it's a temporary soft fork, we have never had anything like that. And so it's kinda like, well, if it's a good idea, then why is it temporary? Like, it's there's so many things about it that are like, well

1:38:24Rod Palmer so I think that is true. Think about this. Right? It's like you could just tell they didn't think about the theory next step or, like, what if this? It was just like, as long as it gets rid of the spam,

1:38:36Paul Sports it will be fine. I thought it was interesting also that they they didn't appear to, like, feed the AI. Here are all of the soft fork bips in the past and just, like, make it look like that. It it really doesn't, to which which is interesting that because the the bips already have to be a certain format. So, of course, they all superficially resemble each other. But I thought, like, this is just weird, like, how the style of this is just,

1:39:05Paul Sports it's not actually like, they don't have well, I don't wanna, like but it's like, I just thought it was strange. It's the whole thing is strange. And even the the fact that Luke gives a four four four because he thought it might activate before he got home. Like, the whole thing is, like, every aspect of it is, like, just a little bit off. You know? You just, like It is. With these people. It's like the the it's the the plebs It's the plebslop

1:39:31Rod Palmer code. It's the plebslop software. It it it makes me think of, like, think of the guy that shot Charlie Kirk, like, this assassin. And all we found out or all we know in the aftermath is, like, how sloppy this guy was. Like, he was just in the group chats, in taxis, saying exactly admitting to his crime, like, it oh, I left my sweater. Just, like, and all of us are sitting at home and we're like,

1:39:58Rod Palmer I thought about the game theory a little bit about doing some kind of high profile assassination, you know, and I would have taken more precaution here. I would have thought about this very obvious clue that he get. And it's like, anybody who follows Bitcoin is like, dude, if I was gonna try to do a fork, if I was trying to compete with, like, you know, I'm getting compared to, Roger Ver, like, alright. I'm gonna fucking come correct. I'm gonna have all my my dot bots, or my i's dotted, my t's crossed. This is gonna be good. I would have thought of this and they didn't do that and it's it's we just live in the world in the era of of plebslop glory everybody's trying to get glory they're trying to take a shortcut to fame and like oh dude I pulled off I pulled off the fork or I saved Bitcoin, dude. Bitcoin is money. I saved it. And it's like, dude, it's just a plump slap attempt.

1:40:52Paul Sports Yeah. It's parts of it are very disappointing. Like, you you watch the, like, the debate. First of all, the fact that this is even getting people's attention at all is kinda depressing because other things are much more worthy of the attention. But then for some reason, you can just hijack attention by just making a lot of noise or whatever. But you'd see, like, you know, this is, like, the main point, the the Luke point or the mechanic point is they would say something like, we think Bitcoin should be used as money, not as file storage. But even that, like, doesn't make any sense. Like, each Bitcoin transaction is a file.

1:41:29Paul Sports And so you just kinda think, like, it is it is already a file storage. And and but then, like, everyone will just lap it up, and they just you the it's it's almost like, you know, it's kinda like an NFL game or something where you get two different colors. You know? People have a red shirt and a blue shirt or whatever, and it's just people wanna divide, and it it is like wrestling where it's like you just cheer for your side, and you're just happy to, like, be included, I guess, or something. And it has the fact that none of it has any, like, bearing on the facts doesn't even bother people.

1:42:06Rod Palmer Well, it's the the the ice one last thing. They people tried for decades, maybe longer, to create a Bitcoin rate, like a decentralized peer to peer system.

1:42:23Rod Palmer And we know that and that's what, you know, they were building up to what ended up being the white in the white paper. But they tried to solve this consensus problem for decades in Satoshi did it by making a database, a decentralized database, a,

1:42:40Paul Sports proof of work database. So then they're like, oh, Bitcoin's money, not a database. Yeah. I know. It's like, no. That was the whole point. The whole point is that it's it's a database. Also and also, like, every form of money is a database to some extent. It's like who has more money and who has less. So I it's like Can you think of distractions is the problem? They can't think of distractions. It's like a kind of hypnosis or something too. It's just like we are, you know, we are not the database team. And it's just kinda like, wow. Like, what? Like, what are they talk don't they know that if you if you look in this if you run Bitcoin or if you look at the source code, there are plenty of databases there. They're they're they're all they're all right there. Like, so I don't know. Again, it's kinda has this this third or fourth layer where it's like

1:43:27Paul Sports it's almost like humiliating. It's like a humiliation. It's like, this is what this is what you're stuck talking about. This is maybe why I don't do the pleb slop thing as much because I'm like, I don't wanna get dragged down into this world. I'm just gonna hang out of my own bubble. You know? I'll hang out of my own bubble. I'll be very happy there. But who knows?

1:43:45Rod Palmer And this just the the irony of it is they basically hate the fact that, Bitcoin is a database that was originally run on the Cal Berkeley the woke Cal Berkeley fucking data library. Like, that is the origin of Bitcoin. That's the only reason any of those exist today.

1:44:07Paul Sports Yeah. Yeah. I know. Thanks to Gloria and and Cal. I do I am kind of I'm curious in, like, a kinda historical way as to how Matt Crater came to be anti core? Like, did was it because you guys were making fun of Knots? And then he like, you wanna I like, I really wanna know because and with the core, I was like, oh, well, at least this is, like, kinda like the end of Matt Kratter because these are, like first of all, these videos are super deranged and weird. And I think any normal person would just be like, what the hell is wrong with this person? But they're also like you know?

1:44:43Paul Sports I criticize Core all the time, and I think Core is lazy and and corrupt. I really do. But it's not like I think they are, like, he is like his criticism of them is so extreme and so weird, And it's,

1:45:02Paul Sports like, based completely on what? Like, just based on just, like, wanting to side with Luke? Like, what the hell is the point of it all? So I just think, like I would be curious as to why why does why do people feel so strongly about this this one thing? Like, out of all the things you could latch onto, you know, and you could jump on them. You could say, oh, this is the topic du jour, and I really wanna talk about it. You you just let go on with this thing. I think that's so so strange. And, of course, these people in core, you know, I think they have bad priorities, but they are unbelievably specialized. And they have been doing this work, you know, for years and years, and they have their own little stuff worked out to, you know, keep new versions coming out. And so they are I respect them in that way.

1:45:46Paul Sports I just think that they their claim to be doing what's best for Bitcoin is not always true, and so I think that that's open to being criticized. But, yeah, I just I would love to know why how it came to be. And because if if it is, like, a fundamental effect, then there will be that just means that in the future, even more deranged people will all come together and they'll all clump together on the same thing. And and so I I just think, like, that's kind of interesting. Like, why why do that? I don't know. But who's to say?

1:46:19Richard Greaser I think, like, just giving them these guys the benefit of the doubt without trying to espouse some sort of, you know, Machiavellian intention, because it's it's hard to know. But it it's the the easiest way

1:46:36Richard Greaser to bootstrap a company with a marketing effort with minimal resources is to use the plaives in a crusade.

1:46:48Richard Greaser You get you give them a moral crusade because the the plaives tend to be made up of people that don't feel really good about themselves. So they're they're they're looking anywhere for a sense of meaning. Like, they want a priest to tell them how to live, which podcast to listen to, which, shitcoiners to attack on Twitter, which plebslop terms to parrot that they don't understand.

1:47:12Richard Greaser They're looking for that guidance in that direction, and they wanna displace their feelings of insignificance and dislike for themselves onto something else. So if they can project all their feelings

1:47:28Richard Greaser and so, you know, these individuals that are a little bit more sophisticated, like, okay, well, how do we scale a business, that isn't that impressive while we identify somebody to attack.

1:47:44Richard Greaser So instead of anybody ever evaluating our product and what we're doing, they're so focused on attacking these individuals and supporting us. And I I feel like a lot of individuals fall for this trap over and over again. We saw it with, Swan

1:48:02Richard Greaser and, you know, the whole the whole Bitcoin only prime trust cabal. I think you you would Yeah. I agree. Swan,

1:48:12Paul Sports this just like I don't know. It's like, I think didn't you guys figure this out or someone was like, oh, Swan just takes it from or whatever. Like, that's the and then they just they package it into, like, a product. So it was kinda like, and then I was like, oh, that actually makes perfect sense. But, of course, they're all getting it from somewhere. They get it, like they just think these are the talking points. And it's like whether or not they even believe these talking points, I think that it doesn't even matter. They just think this is the this is a magic incantation. It's a lot of, it's a huge Bitcoin affinity scam. So, you know, the the treasury comp this is not the first, and it's not it won't be the last. And a lot of people do this. Even Lightning, I think the treasury companies and Lightning

1:48:54Paul Sports are also all an affinity scam where it's kinda you have two circles. You have Bitcoin and you have, like, the Lightning Network, and the people try to get them to overlap as much as possible inside someone's brain. And then they just think, oh, yeah. Lightning equals Bitcoin. And same for the oh, if I buy the treasury companies, I'm helping bit I'm buying Bitcoin. And if you know, whatever. What's good for Swan is whatever. What's good for Bitcoin, that's like, that's that's the scam. So

1:49:23Paul Sports there have been many Bitcoin affinity scams over the years. And, but, yeah, whether or not they even believe the talking points, I I don't even think they care. It is weird, like, still, what is the ultimate origin of one talking point or another? That is interesting. And this is interesting, the number of people who are just complete liars and hypocrites in the space and even there are other things where a lot some lies are, like, plenty of people who have, you know, plenty of the loudest Bitcoin maximalists today. They,

1:49:55Paul Sports you know, I remember them doing ICO sales or or something on Ethereum or they did token sales on Ethereum in the past. And it's like and even, like, Swan was caught, like, putting everything, like, on Ripple or something or what. I don't even remember what it was, but it was, like, something else, something like you wouldn't even believe. It was, like,

1:50:19Paul Sports even it was so dumb that even you had trouble wrapping your head around it, but it whatever it was, it was very funny. And, so it's kind of like and then, of course, like, even like, you know, I hate to, like but you can go down the list. Like, Jimmy's song was like a decred guy. He was even like decred Jimmy or something, like, back in the day. Like, I hate to, like, bring up, like, ancient, ancient, ancient history, but it's, like, every single person who is, like,

1:50:44Paul Sports Giacomo Zuko, he did the block BHB, blockchain something lab. He did, like, normal fundraising for it wasn't even Bitcoin. So I'm not trying to say, like, too much about but you can go down the line for many of these people and, you know, even things like, this is this isn't as big of a deal, but, it's funny that certain people, like, I think,

1:51:09Paul Sports like Pierre Richard worked for a BitPay, but then they all started to hate BitPay. So that's not quite the same because you could maybe say that they learned by working there to hate them or something. But then Michael Gold seemed at 21. So everyone was kinda, like, taken in. Everyone had this phase where they were much younger, and they were early in their career, and they had, like, no money, and they wanted they just wanted a job. Everyone was excited about Bitcoin, and everyone wanted a job in the space. And it was so cool to be working in Bitcoin. But some of the other examples are are really funny where the people are just they are actual, like, complete actual shitcoin scammers, and then they become Bitcoin maximalist affinity scam. So yeah. And it's like, why does Michael Saylor you know, who he's saying Bitcoin is a scam and, you know, whatever that was, 2013, 2015,

1:51:56Paul Sports and then he's joining you know, if you join in in 2020, you're you're still very new. So why would his opinion ever outrank anyone who had joined in, like, 2019? But the people say he's got a lot of skin in the game. But, you know, skin in the game, it just means that you're not lying. It doesn't mean that you have the right idea. It doesn't even mean that sometimes. So there's a lot of funny little quirks.

1:52:21Richard Greaser Absolutely. Well, Paul, we've been rolling are completely different too. Like, the Monero

1:52:26Paul Sports is Oh, sorry.

1:52:29Richard Greaser We've been rolling for almost two hours. I think I wanna get through so one thing that we do at the end of all of our shows is we read the the fountain boost for the previous interview. So, you know, one of the things that we're trying to show people is that, custodial lightning works. And, you're a great guest to to share this.

1:52:53Paul Sports It's very easy to get it. Well, it's like the, you know, the driverless getting the driverless way motor route. This is what I in the TabComf. You get the driverless how do I get the driverless car to work? You just have a human driver, and and then they drive you to the destination. Problem solved. And then everyone would be amazed to be like, wow. It drove me it drove me from my house to my work, you know, and it didn't make any mistakes. So it definitely does work.

1:53:20Richard Greaser Absolutely. So our first boost is from Soap Miner who sells homemade tallow soap and sell it for satoshis only. If you want girlfriends of Bitcoin, you

1:53:34Richard Greaser have to you have to shower on occasion. Mhmm. You've been you've been around a while. It's good advice. You've been around a while. There's a lot of stinky Bitcoiners. Do you think there's any hope for these guys getting girlfriends?

1:53:55Paul Sports Well, man, some of them, you know, and you don't want do you really want like, imagine you have a really good friend. Suddenly, they strike it rich, and then some

1:54:12Paul Sports people wanna be their girlfriend. But imagine, like, they get into a relationship or even they get married or whatever, but the the woman doesn't really respect him. It's just using him, you know, as an ATM. Is that really is that really that much better? You know? That's a sad thought. Don't we want I think it's nice if people two people, they each like each other. You know? That's a more stable

1:54:38Paul Sports arrangement because then they'll through thick and thin, they'll fight for each other's best interest. And that's that's a good thing. So can even some of these people, you know, I think yeah. Is it really Bitcoin that will help them, or should they should they some of them experiment

1:54:59Paul Sports with, like, these very strong drugs. They should maybe take the psilocybin magic mushroom and and and reflect or, you know, the MDMA, they say. You know? So I read. Maybe that would be better for us. Because, you know, a lot of these people clearly you said it before about

1:55:18Paul Sports what type of people can be led into a crusade by the the priests. And it's you know, these people don't have a lot going on in their lives. They need they need something to latch on to. So, yeah, if you want I mean, sometimes this may sound funny, but sometimes people do

1:55:38Paul Sports ask for I mean, I think if people want a girlfriend, you should just start doing push ups right now, you know, and you can buy a guitar. And the top three notes on a guitar are minor chord, and the then the next three are major chord, and you can learn one, four, five that have dots on them. So you can learn a lot of songs right out of the gate. And so now you can play the guitar, and now you can do push ups. And then I and then I would, you know, try the but, yeah, of course, the I think it's not,

1:56:06Paul Sports you know, we're now we're now we're delving into topics that are even more forbidden than than Bitcoin. But, yeah, I think it's you know, men have, like, a higher sex drive than women on average, so now we're all gonna get canceled for making these generalizations. But so in that way, you know, it's not unfair, I think, for the women to ask, like,

1:56:28Paul Sports listen. Is this person gonna be financially a contributor or a a drain. You know? And so, actually, I don't think it's so I don't think it's so mysterious or weird that, you know, you should have you should be able to, like, you know, pay for dinner and flowers and stuff. That's not that so but, yeah, I think most people say they want a girlfriend, but how but they won't they're unwilling to do

1:56:53Paul Sports push ups today until they physically cannot and then to repeat that every other day, which only takes, like, a few seconds. So how bad do they really want it again? I question that sometimes.

1:57:05Richard Greaser A 100 push ups a day till a 100 k and shower with beef tallissoap that you paid for.

1:57:15Paul Sports Yeah. I mean, just because you need soap. You need to take a shower. It doesn't necessarily mean this you need this soap, but because the CVS every CVS sells some kind of soap or another, I think.

1:57:26Rod Palmer We're all. By the way, everybody goes. So we're gonna we're gonna recommend his soup. Don't go to CVS, actually.

1:57:34Paul Sports Should be great. 2,121

1:57:37Rod Palmer sabs from the Daniel. He said this podcast is going too highbrow. And I I I don't know what he's talking about except for maybe we've been kinda teasing and trolling Noster and he really likes like Snowster so, yeah, we got we got a post over, and guys stop picking on the guys on Nostra.

1:57:59Richard Greaser Paul, do you ever use the Nostra app?

1:58:04Paul Sports I don't, but I really should because, you know, Fiat Joffe is a huge supporter of Drive Chain. He was one of the earliest, and he was also one of the earliest haters of Lightning even before I was. He like, years before. I was just kinda like, well, I think drive chain's, like, a little bit better than lightning. But he was like, no. Lightning doesn't work, and it's a huge distraction, and we should we should burn it all to the ground. He was saying that, I think, in, like he was at least saying that publicly on the Internet in early twenty twenty three, but I think I heard it earlier in, like, a private

1:58:40Paul Sports Telegram chat, like, even before then, years before then. And he was like, this doesn't work, and it's a huge distraction. And, but he's always been a big supporter. One of the biggest supporters of Drive Chain. And he had the drivechain.xyz site, which is a little bit more pleb facing, and he was kinda with you guys about you should do, like, communicate this to people differently or something.

1:59:02Paul Sports He was probably right about that. And so I do think the fact that Twitter is now or ex formerly Twitter is is so it's like it has this unsatisfying vibe somehow. And so the question is, can you

1:59:20Paul Sports fix it? And if so, why not just fix it and launch your own project? And I think that, I think it will actually need a few ingredients. I would prefer it if we had, like, the Namecoin side chain back up. I think Namecoin is a totally underexplored idea, and I wrote a blog post about this on truthcoin.info. And I think so with with the,

1:59:41Paul Sports if it was amped up with the human readable names, I but, yeah, I I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about, like, is Nostra supposed to relay every like, like, to everyone and, you know, I think I don't know. I'm I'm not sure exactly how it will how it will work under under pressure in a way that I think actually, something if you wanted, like, a private relay thing, kind of Telegram kind of already does a little bit of that where you can just have different many, many, many different groups.

2:00:14Paul Sports And so I don't know. I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure about it, but I I probably should get it. But, I don't know. Like, who am I gonna be talking to on Noster? It's like so so but whatever. I know that some peep some cool people are there. There. I don't think, like, if I if I if I can't sponsor He supported your drive chains, and you won't even I know. Post on I have it on for a few hours. I had Amethyst on my phone for, like, a few weeks at some point. I don't know. Was that still like, what are the good, you know, what are the good what are the good apps? What are they good? I don't know. None of them are good, man. Yeah. UX is terrible. Yeah. Well, that's the problem is that, people I don't think they realize exact they they have a decent idea that there's a problem, but no one really knows exactly what the problem is. And it's very hard to solve the problem if you don't know what it is, although that does occasionally happen. But I think it's kind of like

2:01:06Paul Sports people don't like the algorithm, but then you choose when you wake up in the morning, you choose to, like, go on Twitter or whatever. So in a way, you do like that. It's like guys but then it's like, why did Elon have to buy Twitter for billions of dollars? Because you could replicate the tech stack for, easily, for, like, $2,000,000. Right? So why pay

2:01:30Paul Sports over a thousand times over 10,000 times more? Because the network effect because the other pea all the other people were still there. So that's what it's worth. So, in that sense, it's very pessimistic because it says we're just locked in. We're locked in the same room as everyone else, and we can't escape. We're in, like, a weird equilibrium. So I don't know. I don't know. I think that question I'm very open minded, but very skeptical to that.

2:01:57Paul Sports To me, the Telegram project seems to be going better where and then, again, this is just completely ruled by one ruler, but they the user experience is good. Mostly stuff is unsent you can use the Telegram to just censor you have encrypted messages that you encrypt and just send them back and forth to people. I think a Telegram bot situation or, like, a Telegram you know, they have, like, the little Telegram

2:02:24Paul Sports Like, you can you can do, like, little stuff where you can have, like, a little store or a little thing. That seems like it works. It seems like that's actually making progress towards something. I don't know what not what Nosto because, again, of course, Nosto is partially created in the wake of rampant censorship

2:02:45Paul Sports on Twitter from the US federal government that was, you know, blatantly illegal, I think, of, like, with the government pressuring them to, suppress people's

2:03:00Paul Sports speech. And so but then, Elon bought it, so that made that different. And then we had we have new the administration switched from from Democrat to Republican. So both of those things got shuffled out anyway. So I'm not exactly sure. But Yeah. I'm not sure what to make of it. But I think I should probably get on there at least and experiment with it more. I think so. But I still I am skeptical and open minded at the same time.

2:03:27Richard Greaser Well, revolution won't have good UX.

2:03:29Paul Sports So that's my nostalgia thought. It's tough if you don't have the good UX because that's just it makes it hard for anyone to Yeah. Get get what they want. So

2:03:44Rod Palmer Totally. Yeah. I guess my final thought is on it is that, you know, it's a question of identity. What is it for? Like, is Nostra for, you know, zapping each other's custodial lightning wallets for Putt's lot. You know? Is like that what we need Noster for? We can do that on on Twitter.

2:04:03Paul Sports I think that's a very good point that this has fueled people's misunderstanding of lightning. Like, of course, when a lot of times people will invent something in technology and then they'll do whatever they call the pivot. You know, it will it'll it'll evolve into being used for something that was different than intended. And so is that the case? Is that is is Nostred is is it just a vehicle?

2:04:27Paul Sports Is it just a giant lightning marketing campaign? So because imagine this. Imagine you're raising money for your lightning startup. You use a noncustodial. You have a noncustodial lightning company,

2:04:43Paul Sports and it's not the numbers aren't going great because it's noncustodial, so it doesn't work. You have whatever it is. I hate to give an example. But whatever you have you have moon or something. Whatever it is. And so then, but you have an edge, which is that you also secretly on the side, you run

2:05:01Paul Sports Primal, which is fully custodial, and then you link it with Nostr because you're like, this is great for the Lightning brand. So it's all the Lightning brand. So you just say, oh, I'm just gonna pump up the Lightning brand with all these fake Lightning transactions where there's no Lightning transaction at all. When you do the primal to primal Zap, there is no Lightning transaction. There's no HTLC. There's no anything. So it'll be completely fake, but it'll make Lightning look good, and then I'll be able to raise money for whatever it is, Phoenix or whatever. And so then I then I get the real plan is to get $3,000,000, and then I can just spend it however I want after you, you know, you raise it to do lightning and then now, like, you have now you have a job. So, I don't know. That's very significant. To advertise on podcasts.

2:05:46Paul Sports Yeah. Right. Then then that's all this this that's the last ingredient, just a little bit. And then some some virtue signaling on the regular Twitter. So, yeah, that's, like, probably at least, like, 60% of the business models in Bitcoin today, some version of that of just, like, how do we keep certain words in vogue, you know,

2:06:07Paul Sports sir certain popular words somehow and, through some combination of open source software and paying people off.

2:06:18Paul Sports So, yeah, then the real thing, it's like what they would always say, why do the pharmaceutical companies advertise? On news, it's not to that because they care about anyone buying the product. It's because they want to make the news companies feel uncomfortable, criticizing

2:06:38Paul Sports the pharmaceutical company under any circumstances. This is the same thing as, like, you know, the lightning people will sponsor Stefan Lovera or whatever, and then it's like, oh, okay. Like, so you're never gonna get the truth about how lightning doesn't work, from them or at least it's much it's gonna go a lot slower. So yeah. But, yeah. Now it's the there's more than two hours, so, this has been really fun.

2:07:04Richard Greaser I know I know at least one, like, company your quest to mess with people. I'm sorry? Oh, we're just reporting the news. We're not messing with anybody. But, yeah, I know at least one company that was upset with me for writing that, they had bad UX and that Lightning had bad UX in, Bitcoin magazine. But, yeah. Well, I'll read the we got only got a few more boost, but

2:07:28Richard Greaser Sean 1,000 says, I'm immediately buying the first trinket that runs the deal with. Oh, sorry.

2:07:37Paul Sports I said, Paul, you can run. We can finish the boosts. No. No. I'm fine. I need one more time. So, yeah, let's do see if there's any good boosts.

2:07:51Richard Greaser I think I cut out for the last one. Apologies, folks. I've got a bad Internet connection. But Sean says, I'm immediately buying the trinket

2:08:02Rod Palmer that runs Temple OS. There you go. Knock offs, 808 sats, live Aloha.

2:08:12Richard Greaser Rev Huddl says, all Bitcoin transactions are economic transactions. The more hash one owns and operates, the more clear this becomes.

2:08:24Paul Sports I think, yeah, if you buy the if you pay for the block space, you are the you're at least the rightful owner of that block space. We already have the consensus rules to stop people from spamming the blockchain with stuff that will shut off people's nodes. So so I would definitely agree.

2:08:45Rod Palmer Next one, five hundred sats from Sasha. Great show. Congrats on the University of Bitcoin scholarship. Hell yeah.

2:08:55Richard Greaser So just for context, Paul,

2:08:57Paul Sports Stu was expelled from Bitcoin University, and so the university I remember. Yeah. I I as I caught I I got caught a few episodes. That was one of the ones that I that I saw. That was great. That's the one of the funniest screenshots I've seen in Bitcoin in a while. Just the I got expelled or whatever. I'm just like, why would you but, I mean, that's what's really funny is, like, he I think he's mortally afraid of, like, anyone who actually knows about Bitcoin, like, going through the thing and seeing, like and because and and without any doubt, I'm sure there's just a lot of mistakes in there too. So I mean, I'd say that, but it's just it's obvious from the way he he talks that he he's not really that interested in Bitcoin, actually. He's just, like, kind of an operator. He's just there to get the eyeballs or something.

2:09:43Richard Greaser Collect his tuition money. Yeah. Shadrach, 323¢ is mile high boost. Hashtag 40 HPW. Pies.

2:10:02Rod Palmer We got Pies, 121. Yo, yo, yo.

2:10:09Richard Greaser Pies is probably the most prolific Bitcoin podcast listener of all time. And our final boost, BTC on board, 100 sats, two thumbs ups emojis. Thank you for the boost, folks. So what do you think, Paul? You just witnessed because there's because there's no way of winning.

2:10:31Paul Sports Well yeah. And you get a 100 sats. So, of course, it makes no sense. If you understand the design of lightning, like, there's no way that, they have to have a special carve out for amounts that are too low because the ink, it would require to write the HLC to the blockchain. You know, it doesn't actually work. You would lose more money just broadcasting to the chain than the 100 sets you would you would collect. And so it's like, they have a special carve out that doesn't use the HLCs, but when you do the intermediateness so blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I mean, I'm a huge lightning skeptic, and everyone can watch my debate. I debate the whole room of at TabConf. This is, like, the most technical audience you can find. And, but, yeah, that last guy had the activate CTV or l enhance in his in his name.

2:11:18Paul Sports And, yeah, I've I see this a lot too because some people had, not that many, but some people had, like, a BIP 300 car, like, icon thing. And I because this is how Taproot activated and how Segwit activated, so people have kind of been trained to do this. But I I I I think it's important. I like when people do that and they say activate you know, they put it, like, in their name. I support CTV or I support Ellen Hance or whatever. I think, though, that we have to reflect on how little progress they have all made towards activation

2:11:52Paul Sports and, like, that nothing has happened at all. So every time you see that, you have to wonder, like, is this person do they not realize that this isn't working at all, Or are they do they realize that it's not working, and are they so passionate that they are willing to endure this humiliation in order to help change the world?

2:12:10Rod Palmer I hope, though. I hope those same people feel the realize the same thing about, hashtag free samurai. Like, are we is it are we really getting anything out of this? It's nice. It's cool. It's glad to see that you support that, but

2:12:23Paul Sports anything else? Well, I really would have preferred. I actually made a whole site for this, but I just didn't I had a lot on my plate, and I by the time I launched the site, it was too late. And it was, like, basically, but I wanted to make a site where I wanted to do because I was very confused. You guys helped make me confused and deranged. I I slightly blame you guys because you had your funny video with the, where it was, like, for the Las Vegas conference, and then it was like, there'll be, like, people in tuxedos who kinda vaguely look like Michael Sailor. And then it was like, oh, but then we're gonna have midget wrestling.

2:12:57Paul Sports And at in in Las Vegas. You know? And so you guys are your at least your constellation of Twitter associates were, you know, the originators of this. That's how I found out about this thing. And I there's like, there's gonna be a samurai there's gonna be a fundraiser for samurai there. And I dragged multiple extremely rich friends. I was like, you gotta come to this and donate. And I was like, it's midget wrestling. It's insane. These guys are like punk rock. They can't be controlled. They are literally insane people. And I drag I dragged them there, but there was no when I was there, I mean, I was a little late, but there was no, like what I was expecting was, like, we're gonna, like, send around the hat or whatever, and people are gonna, like, write down donations or something. And that never actually happened. I was, like, confused by that. And then by the time I figured it out,

2:13:44Paul Sports I wanted to make, like, a new site, and I it may still even be on the Internet or something. I'm and I made, like, a big thing. I made, like, a big FAQ with, like, a lot of texts. You would hate it because there's lots of it's very busy. But, it was like I was gonna raise money for, like, a prize that was gonna be something like, we will give all we're gonna raise all this money, and we will give it to samurai's lawyers if they get off scot free. But if not, we will give it to samurai or their families or something. And I was gonna do something like that. And I thought that was way better. And I know someone personally who donated over, I think, over $1,000,000

2:14:20Paul Sports to the free samurai. And so it just goes to the lawyers, and now they didn't, you know, they didn't get freed. I'm not trying to, go too deeply into this thing. I don't know that much about it. But I was always, I was I've had tremendously

2:14:36Paul Sports good luck with the the prize model is a very good model. And you see there's a kind of an underlying logic to it even though it's very skeptical and it's kind of like it's not great for, you know, it's not great for getting people to like you, but it is good for getting a job done. And there was even, like, debatably it it's debatably, I'm not sure the legality of, like, if they're ordered to pay the restitution, if they could've seized that money or something from the fund. But there was also a lot of precedent set even in, like, a famous movie. There was that famous movie about the,

2:15:11Paul Sports Erin Brockovich or whatever where she has to sell it to the the plebs, basically. She has to explain to them, like, why are they agreeing to this, like, 30% cut in thing. And they because he had already structured the lawsuit that way knowing that these clients are, like, too poor to take on this giant company. So, so I was interested in that. And so, yeah, I'm I'm an enemy of cheap talk. And if you're in favor of prediction markets, you are also you're an enemy of cheap talk, and you really wanna get at the truth. And, yeah, I think we in the Bitcoin community, there have been times where we found a lot of money to do all kinds of fundraising in the past, and I think a lot of those people are still out there. But but it's just with the samurai, I do think it was, like,

2:15:56Paul Sports it was kinda confusing because you didn't ever really know maybe you could, I mean, my thought was you didn't really ever know, like, what to donate to or how it would help or how you how it would actually move the needle. And eventually, I decided to try to do it myself. And by the time I finished this website, it was too late. And that was just me making a website just describing, like, what I would do. I think you might be able to say that we have been infiltrated by people either intentionally or not who are just very good at jamming all the communications by just dumping all the spam, and it's a lot harder. Also, the community is larger

2:16:32Paul Sports now. It's a lot harder. But in the past, you we you did have people who would the thing where you would find someone like Jack Dorsey to do the COPPA lawsuit, that I think that I can remember all the previous times when stuff like that would happen where we'd find, like, a patron. I think other things that contributed to this being different was that, like, people like Roger Ver, he was a huge

2:16:58Paul Sports small I mean, excuse huge large blocker. And so then we kinda, like, forced him out. We also forced, like, Brian Armstrong out. So were there there were, like, some, like, rich business people who in the past, I think they did finance a lot of stuff, like, for free. And as just partly as a casualty of the block size war, this all got, like, kinda ripped apart to some extent. But even in the small blocker world, there were these there were these huge super rich people, people behind chain code and stuff like that. So I'm a little confused as to why this the samurai case went the way it did exactly, and I don't understand it. I tried to figure it out, and I'm I'm a little baffled by it. So I don't know what

2:17:40Paul Sports what that meant, but, yeah, I'm in favor of a free samurai. I think you gotta start maybe if you don't know what to do, you just start with putting free free samurai, and then you just hope that the right people will find you and, or something. So but, yeah, cheap talk is also not not great. But I guess it's better than no talk at all.

2:17:57Richard Greaser I love the idea of the prediction market. But, you know, Paul, you have so much to say that is interesting. I I I I like that you're doing these Twitter spaces, but I I think it's important for you to start a podcast. And, this has been this has been an absolute pleasure.

2:18:18Richard Greaser I wish that we could keep on going, but I I'm currently sitting in a room that is approaching pitch black. There's no lights in here. You are easily the smartest Polish man in a Just have just invite me on.

2:18:33Paul Sports Yeah. Well, can I me on at any other anytime?

2:18:36Richard Greaser We'll have to do it again. You're easily the smartest Polish man I've ever met.

2:18:42Paul Sports Well, thank you. I'm Poland's looking on Poland's looking great with the g d GDP per capita is, like, higher than The UK, and they're gonna, like you know, I pretty soon, we'll have a Polish Manhattan project, and it'll be a world power. Polish Poland is setting the example in Europe, and that is that is the truth. And that will move on. They kept out, you know, I don't wanna make we don't wanna touch too many hot button issues, but let's just say their immigration policy was to keep certain peep be very skeptical of certain groups and then also to welcome with open arms an enormous number of a certain other group that was in dire straits, and take them into the country,

2:19:26Paul Sports which both both decisions have paid off. So they don't have, like, a cookie cutter like we close the border or open the border. They instead actually thought about what they would want and what they thought was the right thing to do, and they did that. And it seems to have worked both times. So so I'm very happy now. I'm being more proud more proud of being Polish than ever in the recent years.

2:19:48Richard Greaser Oh, yeah.

2:19:50Paul Sports Well, thank you for, coming on. I appreciate Maybe we should end it here, or we'll just keep going on and on forever. Because I think one person's gonna be he's disappearing to the shadow realm. Where have all the breaking posts gone? And where did Dennis go?

2:20:37Paul Sports Paper

2:21:30Paul Sports I look at macro charts and all the models all look really bad at. People who are bullish seem to be filled with cope. The outlook looking sad. The