hello and welcome to what i hope will be the first in several uh interviews about cryptocurrency and uh for those of you who already know me of course these are intended for a technical audience so we're not really going to be talking about cryptocurrency at a high level we're going to be talking about the nitty-gritty um and uh hopefully this will sort of resolve some of the confusions that people like myself have or maybe some of you out there have about what exactly crypto actually does at a technological level uh or at least what people claim it does versus what it actually does and and issues like that uh so my name is casey meritori and uh my guest today is i'm jameson lop nice to be here uh thanks for joining me today jameson can you give the audience a little bit of a quick background on your experience with cryptocurrency uh why you're you know just kind of how you got into it and why you agreed to come talk to me today about it yeah um i'll never remember exactly what the point was that really got me looking into bitcoin i think it was a slashdot article uh around 10 years ago i'm pretty sure i had heard of it several times and dismissed it several times as a silly project that was gonna get hacked and everybody was gonna lose their money and would end in tears and so it was probably the third or fourth time that it came back up i was like okay maybe i should look into this thing because it's not dying read the white paper started going down the rabbit hole and ended up going full time in early 2015 working for a security company where i was basically building infrastructure that was being used to help large institutional wallets specifically exchanges payment providers other type of major players that were facilitating a lot of transactions and holding a lot of money so that they would hopefully not get hacked as often as we had seen prior to that and uh spent about three years working at that company and then i made a small pivot to instead of focus on enterprise uh private key management uh to focus on individuals i felt like there was still a big cap in the market there for people who you know if they had been in the space for a number of years we're probably sitting on a large quantity of value in this digital bearer asset and a lot of people i think we're just kind of scared to even touch it because it can be very fragile it can be very easy to have a catastrophic mistake happen and so that's what i've been doing for the past three years trying to take a lot of the best practices that we've learned over the past decade from a lot of hard lessons and a lot of horror stories and build those best practices into the latest hardware and software so that we can make a better user experience for people because i believe that being your own bank was one of the original promises of bitcoin and we still have yet to really get there uh for a mainstream audience so effectively what you're trying to do is uh give individuals the tools they need to stop relying on these sort of intermediary exchanges which i assume is how almost everyone does their crypto banking right now which of course as you just said is is sort of opposite of the entire point that it was originally sold on uh because you're right back to the credit card processor or the whatever model of doing business exactly i mean there are some benefits that you can get from still using third-party services if they're all still using this bitcoin protocol but there's a level of systemic risk where you know if you're just recreating the old system but on top of a new protocol i want to avoid it and it's one of those uphill battles it's it's like any type of security any type of privacy where the defaults tend to be towards highly convenient but also highly brittle and insecure and not private and so we as technologists need to continue improving the user experience to fight that uphill battle so i guess that uh that dovetails nicely into i guess some of the first things i wanted to ask about um so just to get like a common framework here uh i was wondering if you could perhaps give in your opinion what do you think and you can also say none if you want but what do you think are the important technological aspects of cryptocurrency that make it something worth doing or worth talking about as separate from for example the social aspects of cryptocurrency because one thing that i should get out you know early because i've never really talked about cryptocurrency before obviously i don't think anything anyone's ever said about cryptocurrency is false in terms of what you might be able to achieve with a social movement in other words we know that with social movements we could achieve almost any random idea we wanted if somehow you were able to get enough people to buy into it because at the end of the day what happens with the currency is just what we all kind of agree happens with the currency so separate from what might happen socially with something if you had enough momentum i'm curious what do you think are if you think there are any what do you think are the important technological aspects of cryptocurrency and what do you think those important technological aspects give us that we wouldn't have if we didn't start adopting them well the term that you hear a lot in this space is self-sovereignty uh really what it means is that you know you can voluntarily opt into a new set of rules not only uh opt into it but actually enforce those rules by running the software yourself and you know this overlaps a lot with what you were talking about uh social movements because it's a it's a new way of codifying social movements instead of them being more abstract and having rules that fluctuate wildly uh as memes and other narratives change over time many of the rules that we're talking about they still get shaped by those narratives it still evolves over time but at the lowest level there is an actual codified set of rules that you know you can read you can write you can run and so that's interesting to me because i think it's it's a new path of evolution for these type of networks and social movements and what have you it it's confusing to a lot of people because i think it's a blend of so many different things that um at the end of the day it's much like the the fact that just the world in general continues to get weirder and weirder at an accelerated pace and this is just another way that technology is accelerating the weirdness evolution and creating essentially whole new worlds whole new networks whole new sets of rules that some people may opt into and the vast majority of the rest of the populace may not know about it may dismiss it uh and and can you know they're free to ignore it if they don't care about it so i guess following up on that uh can you go a little bit more into detail about why you think uh or i mean maybe maybe it's time to get concrete here so can you give an example of an existing cryptocurrency that you think exhibits this property meaning it has technology or i mean technology is a broad term but it has baked into its operation algorithms which uh provide the self-sovereignty you're talking about just so we can start talking about specifically whether it does that or doesn't do that yeah well you know bitcoin is the one that i've been focused on um i have built on top of and played around with a number of of the other protocols that are out there and and really the whole space has become so large that it's not even possible for anyone to keep up with with all of the different protocols and networks and things that are happening at this point but i do believe that bitcoin manages to maintain a lot of the properties uh that are more important to what we would call self-sovereignty and there are very many different aspects to that i would say different levels of sovereignty of you know what you're enforcing or what you're at least keeping out of the hands of manipulation of third parties um it's there's of course the actual control of these assets via the private keys but then there's a much higher level issue of like what is the actual rules of the network or how is it governed how does it evolve over time and that's where things can get really uh complicated and uh sometimes nasty you know on social media uh if we're talking about quote-unquote governance or lack thereof um it is i think best described in many cases as crypto anarchy okay so like like we said you know you know anarchy has a very uh bad rap and that's because governments hate anarchy it's you know the natural uh predator or um the natural antithesis of government uh government uh is anarchy uh but you know anarchy does not mean chaos it means rules uh the the the real difference that we're talking about is who enforces the rules you know is it some centralized body or is it some new sort of amorphous collective that's a lot harder to quantify so i wonder to parse out that sentence before our sentence i shouldn't say to parse out that explanation uh before i go into detail on either side of it it sounds like you're sort of saying well okay so there's there are technological things going on but uh are you sort of saying before we even get to the technology that that's not really actually what's happening meaning it's not so much about technology anyway it's just about the amorphous collective model and really the technology i mean what emphasis i guess are you placing on the technology is the technology just there because we kind of need something to agree on or do you think the technology actually does anything does that make sense yes so um i i have an entire hour-long presentation i think that really touches on this topic uh but we can link it in the description as well yeah okay uh the short version or at least what i entitled that presentation uh i called it um inverting bureaucracy with blockchains okay and and the the short version of describing it is what this technology i believe has done at a fundamental level it has changed the nature of how humans can organize and if you if you look at the way that humans have organized throughout history it's it's very obvious how society has evolved and it's been through a hierarchical top-down command and control type of pattern and the reason why that makes sense is it is because it allows for your specialization in different things when you specialize in one specific thing you can be a lot more productive and efficient at it and then when you build command and control hierarchies then you have people who specialize at managing other people who are specializing in other things and you know it compounds and that allows us to build the level of civilization that we've gotten to today now the downside to that is that it becomes a lot more brittle you have more points of failure in this hierarchy not in even if it's not points of failure you have points of power where it becomes so consolidated that now you have to worry about the fact that you know power corrupts and humans in general are very bad at not abusing power when it's given to them and so what this technology has done you know the the blockchain data structure plus the peer-to-peer distributed networks plus forms of consensus around proof of work proof of stake whatever you want to plug into that it allows you to invert that where instead of having you know one centralized entity that is deciding things it's actually a bottom-up type of mechanism where instead you have organic consensus that forms by all of the individual actors deciding what rules they want to run and basically running that code running the protocols that are compatible with each other and therefore creating these mesh networks that self-organize and eventually evolve over time uh so i think that's that's a great framework to continue to discussion because i think if if that's the way you think about it i think all of my questions that i would have will slot very nicely into that framework so i don't think we even have to discuss that any further so let's just take that as a given because again i i really don't want to talk about the social parts of things because i fundamentally agree just across the board that anything may be achievable in human history socially we just don't know so anything could be possible exactly what you're saying could easily be possible so what i'd like to focus on in that description is the again technology part so i guess almost all of my interest in these interviews in particular could be summarized as saying why do we need blockchain at all for the thing that you're describing so what it sounded like you described to me is basically a form of for lack of a better term algorithm democracy in other words i have a all of the people who are citizens of this new uh entity that's being formed who are participants in it are effectively voting in some way as to what algorithm they wish to live under in a sense you could think of for example uh the idea of in any of these systems which ip address list you choose to broadcast to is effectively your vote in who is part of your collective right in other words at some level all of these systems require you to start by saying who are you participating with is that a fair assessment because that's just the nature of a network yeah i mean it's an opt-in type of thing it's really tricky though when people start using words like democracy and voting because those tend not to be like one-to-one mappable to these systems and the reason for that is that we don't have a real standard for digital identity and as long as you don't really have that then you have to worry about civil attacks and people uh you know using computational resources to pretend to be other people i suppose i shouldn't say democracy then perhaps i should simply say uh for anything that you wish to connect to this network uh you are effectively casting a vote with that thing and and yes like it's not individual people who are the citizens in this sense because like you said there's no way to guarantee that that one particular person is exactly corresponding to one particular node in the network but otherwise would you agree with that assessment that basically like at some level we are choosing to participate by that initial selection of who do we broadcast to basically yeah so uh in this in the sense that you know you can self-organize and write protocols that are it's essentially a new type of language for you to communicate with other people um that in and of itself does not require a blockchain and you know there are plenty of examples of that well i mean any internet protocol email servers uh bittorrent you know these things do not require blockchains i would say you know the blockchain is really more about the history this is the authoritative record of what has happened in the system and so if you're doing some sort of economic exchange then it's important to have the history of who owned what so uh assuming that we're on the same page there roughly uh that's the part i'd like to talk about so if you could can you give me how you think about which pieces of this are necessary for achieving the social goals that you stated if we think about blockchain let's talk about it as being broken up into three rough parts the first part is one that any technology would in theory provide and that is that there is simply a block of data that we all pass around now at the barest level that would not give you anything in particular other than the fact that anyone you communicate with would send back some data and you would send them some data right part two would be the literal part the literal description of a blockchain meaning that data is sequentially signed in some way meaning that the blocks are not effectively random access where they are all equivalent but each incremental block at some level each you know some stride is then encrypted or signed in some way that lets you know that it came after some other block which i guess that's a linked list yes which is how i would define well it's an append only ledger a linked list can insert things this cannot um at least if we're talking about blocked you could talk about linked lists too if you think they're better or different or something right or you know if they were an improvement over blockchain and then finally there's proof blockchain i don't know a term for this but to encompass all the possible proof of x things where it's expected that nodes have also adopted an algorithm whereby they all agree that there is some kind of work that has to be done by somebody or some kind of bearer like i don't know how you want to define proof of stake but basically some kind of a token that we all agree comes from somewhere or some computation that says who it is to just to distinguish that from say proof of work or something can you talk about like those three levels and why you think going all the way to the third one is necessary to accomplish what you were talking about since bitcoin goes all the way to the third one at least it if you count lightning network there's a whole bunch of other stuff but yeah so you know blockchain as a data structure in and of itself is not that particularly interesting it really predated bitcoin though it may not have been called blockchain there were definitely some papers i think in the 90s that talked about these hashed linked lists or whatever you want to call them um the creation and passing around of data is not uh an interesting problem i mean the internet has solved that with many different protocols uh the the interesting novel thing is uh if we want to talk from a computer science standpoint everybody talks about well bitcoin was interesting because it solved the byzantine generals problem which is how do you coordinate amongst a group of random actors who in this example want to plan and coordinate an attack against a given target and how do you do that even if there are malicious messengers that are going between these generals and trying to screw up their coordination and that's where the blockchain plus the proof of work comes in because what all of these proof algorithms are doing is all they're really doing is they're adding a known quantifiable cost to creating these new blocks of data which means that you can't just have a random actor spool up a script and generate a bunch of data that is otherwise valid and could otherwise rewrite the history of the blockchain and pass it around to people and get that propagated so you know it's really an anti-spam mechanism um and that is what allows us to have like better denial of service resistance and anti-sybil resistance in these systems so that we can say okay we know that there are a theoretically nearly infinite number of possibilities of different permutations of how this blockchain could exist and how the data in it could be structured but this is the one that we all consider the true authoritative history because there is no authority that we can ask we have to have some sort of algorithm that is deterministic that we can all settle upon uh so would you say in general that the do you then have an opinion further on that or not really is it just that look anything that we could use that would be able to specifically pick which broadcast piece of data we will append is fine meaning proof of work is just a solution to a consensus problem and we don't need it for any other reason or do you think there is a reason to prefer say proof of work over proof of stake over just a magic oracle that floats around somehow and just we all know the number who's the node who comes next oh yeah for sure and and countless hours have been spent arguing the uh pros and cons of different uh proof mechanisms and um i would say in a lot of cases people's problems with some of these other especially proof of stake is more from an economic perspective okay you could easily argue that it creates more of a uh you know the rich get richer type of setup because basically with proof of stake the people who have the most money and value in the system are the ones who are getting rewarded for quote-unquote securing it by you know signing these blocks now the reason that i think you find people will say proof of work is better is because it takes an external resource from the network proof of stake uses internal resources the tokens that are already in the network to secure itself yes i kind of see it as a snake eating its own tail but that's my biased opinion that's a bit of a feedback loop no matter what you think because it's like it is by definition looking backwards to see what has already happened in the network to decide what will happen in the network correct uh you know there from a technical perspective proof of stake is not a new thing it's existed since probably 2013 but many of the early iterations and networks that use proof of stake found that it was susceptible to things like long-range attacks where this specifically means if at any point in time in the network some attacker gains a sufficient uh threshold of ownership of tokens they can essentially rewrite the whole blockchain because they essentially own enough tokens for everyone to agree that they can do that whereas with proof of work this is taking an external mechanism it's taking electricity energy mining hardware and at any point in time the free market is at work where more people can come in and start competing against the existing you know entrenched miners and this is what we've seen happen over the past decade is that miners tend not to stick around for many many years because it is a fierce competition really to to the bottom uh of you um mining to the point of barely being profitable or sometimes in case in some cases miners actually will mine unprofitably for short periods of time because they're kind of speculating on stuff but the point being like the hardware keeps getting better miners are incentivized to keep finding cheaper and cheaper energy which actually tends to be renewable energy uh and you know that's a whole other esg debate but that that i don't care about i mean not that i don't care about it philosophically obviously energy consumption is an issue but what i mean to say is that's someone else's argument and is largely based more on factual research than than tech technology at some level like the technology is what it is either way so yeah put that aside let's just assume that that the electricity comes from things that don't harm the planet for now because that would be the best case right yeah so you know from that perspective also the miners this is i mean there's a lot of misconceptions around what miners actually do but you know miners do not have the ability to arbitrarily change the rules of the protocol miners are getting paid to follow the rules of the protocol and if they try to break it then they're essentially creating an invalid block that all of the nodes will reject and thus they will not get paid so there there is another perspective that miners are essentially uh glorified time stampers yeah well that's actually what they were sort of called a little bit in the original paper right it was talked about first is like let's talk about a time stamp mechanism right and then it proceeds to uh to follow on uh okay so focusing on that part and in fact exactly what you just said is is where i'd want to go with this next i'd like to talk about lightning network at some point because i think there's a very big difference to me between bitcoin without lightning network and bitcoin with lightning network for a number of reasons but uh setting that aside for one second even with the original bitcoin so can you elaborate on again trying to focus in on whether blockchain actually does anything useful for us as far as achieving the sorts of goals that you stated at the beginning if we already know that in general we are a network and we are sending data to each other and as you just said people inspect the data already because they need to be able to reject blocks that are clearly invalid because like you said it really can't be allowed to just have people putting whatever on there because you know other nodes wouldn't even know what to do with the thing that's on it right we have to have a level of consensus above the proof of work stage anyway because after we agree on who did the work we also have to agree that the thing is something we can actually understand why did we need the proof of work part if in general we are already expecting people to take a look at an incoming block and validate that it actually makes some sense why couldn't that be the entire protocol why do we need the proof of work part you could think of something like for example a git repository in general it's just expected that any valid thing that comes through that nobody has contested will simply be merged into the final product and it would be relatively straightforward to see how you would do that with bitcoin um there are some issues you would have to work out but i'm assuming you have an opinion on why that is not what you would do yeah i mean the first two things that come to mind are denial of service resistance and also just uh convergence so denial of service resistance if you look at the way that these nodes are written they are written from a very adversarial perspective before the code actually does many calculations especially anything that's you know using like disk resources it tries to throw away and reject as many messages as possible so for an example here if we're talking about like the way that a block gets validated uh when it comes into a node instead of requesting all of the block data and starting to parse it and look at the transactions the first thing that the node actually does is it only requests the 80 byte block header and by doing that it can actually inspect that proof of work and if the proof of work is not sufficient for the current required difficulty target then you can immediately uh close the connection on that other node you know throw it away say you know you're trying to feed me bad data and you're not going to be able to waste my computational resources by feeding me data that i already know is invalid and the result that you get from all of the nodes on the network being able to do that means that they're not going to be accepting arbitrarily valid data that may conflict with other arbitrarily valid data like i said there's you know theoretically infinite number of permutations of valid blockchain but instead you know that you're only going to be getting and processing data that has had enough work applied to it that you know it's not just some random spammer or who's trying to fool you uh so you said i think you said two things come to mind so i'd like to do the second one as well but so just to make sure i understand you because this seems like a totally reasonable thing in a sense proof of work in that example is literally just your rate limiter it's a thing that tries to rate limit how many block updates any particular node could possibly issue in this network over a certain period of time because since we know that unless they get incredibly incredibly incredibly probabilistically infinitesimally unlikely uh scenario or lucky i should say uh they really can't send out very many blocks in any period of time because they would need just too many computing resources is that a correct statement of basically what you said that's that's correct and there are so many other implications as a result of it uh you know for example the um the the actual time stamps themselves like there are many time stamp related aspects of the bitcoin protocol also economic aspects of course with the inflation rate and so on and so forth yeah okay and so did you have a second one i thought you said two and i just wanted before i would talk about that one could we talk about the uh oh yeah well uh it was convergence uh basically yeah being being that um it's much more likely that all of the nodes are gonna be on the same page now this is this is also somewhat probabilistic it is still possible and from time to time it happens that two miners find a block within a few seconds and we end up with blockchain tips that are not the same and then usually within the next block that gets resolved and that's why you know when we talk about requiring block confirmations uh for transactions that's why i usually want to wait for a few uh because there can be issues where not all of the nodes on the network are on the same page um so would you say that's i mean is that basically it meaning the the uh i i guess can we even elevate that one further could we say that in general blockchain with a proof of something uh where that something is presumably not capable of being done too often the primary goal is just slowing it down in a sense meaning it doesn't really provide anything else it just is there to make sure that the network runs slowly enough that we don't run into the kinds of problems that we would expect to run into if people could simply flood the network and mostly adversarial though for convergence like you said even with only good actors it's theoretically the case that you could have convergence problems with a congested enough system although in theory if everyone's a good actor no one's double spending no one's doing so who cares i guess how you converge but you know even with mostly good actors let's say uh convergence becomes an issue there yeah uh like i said there are many implications as a result of it but uh you know proof of work for example was actually based upon the hashcash algorithm which was developed in the 90s and hashcash was developed as an anti-spam email mechanism i have actually implemented hashcash in other projects as anti-spam mechanisms i use it on my own website on my contact form so uh requiring some sort of computational resources to be expended is a great way to stop spammers because you know they're looking just to to be able to send out as much data as quickly as possible okay so i i don't want to keep you for too long so at any time feel free to tell me that you're out of time uh let me let me open up into a small window of that because that actually gets it something that i think is very interesting question that i'd like to explore further um so it seems to me that that aspect the rate limiting which i agree for distributed consensus protocols i haven't spent that long thinking about them so i guess i'm not prepared to say i 100 agree but let's just say that my inc my intuition would tend to agree with you which is that if we are going to make a distributed consensus protocol having it go slower slower rather than faster is going to make it more likely to be stable not less likely so to say the least can you talk about the tension though that comes with the fact that we also are trying to make this thing scale up to a large number of transactions because these two things are sort of uh opposed to each other in terms of what you are asking the technology to do and so can you kind of elaborate on is that slowdown really something that ever can sort of persist throughout the entire system anyway yes uh and you know this is definitely the crux of one of the greatest uh periods of contention uh in the network history and um and it's it's somewhat a technology technological issue but i would say it's also an economic and philosophical issue and that is what has resulted in there being splits you know forks in the protocol and thus forks in the actual blockchains and networks themselves and um so like i said there are many implications to slowing this down one of them is the ability for the average person to be able to sync the entire history of the blockchain starting from scratch um one of i think the values that is held dear uh on the bitcoin network is that not only today but preferably 10 years 20 years 100 years from now we would like it to be accessible for people to be able to audit you know invalidate the entire history of the network themselves on a fairly um affordable level of machine whatever that machine may be at the time and so in order to be able to do that you have to understand that you know this is an append only blockchain and you whatever you put in it for the rest of time as long as people are using that protocol someone is going to have to download it and verify it if they want to get to the the current tip of the blockchain in what we would call like a self-sovereign state where they're not just like using a checkpoint from some other uh source that they got so that has been just just to clarify that for some folks who may not be familiar with it and also just to make sure that i understand because since i don't work with these things you know it's always good to check my assumptions that process uh is required specifically because and and i guess i should say that process involves more than simply for example checking the headers to see that they're assigned because right if i understand correctly the way that they originally designed bitcoin into my knowledge i guess the way it still works today is that is based on a transaction model which means that in order to verify the final block whatever the latest block is you kind of need to know the state of all transaction all bitcoins what their transaction status was going into that block which means that you sort of have an inductive proof of just you have to start at the beginning and track every bitcoin's transactions to see that they were all signed correctly in each signed block after you check the signature of the block rolling forwards because some bitcoin that the last time it was traded was ten thousand blocks ago you need to know that state going into the current block is that a correct uh statement in order to be sure that it hasn't been double spent yes um and so you know we talk about the blockchain a lot and then other people will say well it's a distributed accounting ledger um really when we're talking about the um the quote-unquote ledger of what the current state of bitcoins are then what we're talking about is called the utxo set which is the unspent transaction output set and like you said the only way to know what transaction outputs have not been spent is to iterate through every transaction that has ever happened and build that uh mapping up now what we're talking about here is what i consider to be the most robust security model that the bitcoin system has to offer there are many other security models that you can operate in one of them is called simplified payment verification where all you do is look at the headers and then all you when you want to know about specific transactions you can query nodes and get specific proofs that are much more efficient and and can prove to you that you know a transaction happened in a given block without you having to download the whole block there's a lot of trade-offs to that and then of course a lot of other people are just using uh centralized providers who are just keeping their own internal database and they're not validating anything at all and just completely trusting that so uh yeah so you know most of the time what we end up talking about is this you know ultimate level of self-sovereignty and self-validation some people call it trustless um basically you're not trusting that anyone else on the network is being honest with you and the only way that you can do that is by going out on the network and asking for all this data and checking that every every bit of data over the entire history that you receive is following the rules to which you agree uh so i guess uh i kind of want to go two ways with this here so it's a it's a little bit difficult but let's just finish up this one so again can you finish talking about because i kind of interrupted you there just to clarify that one point can you finish talking about that tension between needing to process a lot of transactions and wanting to have what you're talking about so as you said there's an issue with large transaction volume right away separate from the fact that the bitcoin protocol can't really do it at its base level because of its proof of work requirement and how hard it is at least for today's computers um but uh you know you were saying that there's a space issue there too which is totally true if anyone in particular wants to be able to really validate the entire blockchain uh from start to finish then presumably they would want to be able to download the whole thing which you know if you have a rate limit on it is much more plausible but keep going from there because i don't think you're done yet oh not by any means um so uh so yeah the problem with this you know if you start raising that limit even only linearly then over time you can end up with a geometric if not exponential increase in the total amount of data that needs to be downloaded and verified and this is something that i'm very fascinated in other than just the fact that i participated in a lot of those scaling debates uh one of the projects that i do on an annual basis is i uh i i actually run nodes for many of the popular networks that are out there um on the same machine that i've been using for four four or five years now as my benchmark machine and i see you know how long does it actually take to fully validate the state of this system from genesis without using any tricks like checkpoints which most of them are doing these days and for the most of the really popular networks um you can look at my posts year after year it's becoming uh it's taking longer and longer and not just like linearly longer but like most of the ethereum nodes out there for example are taking my computer over a month uh to to completely sync uh and that's on a really fast solid state machine most of it's usually disk io is what is the throughput uh bottleneck on most of these things um and this i'm doing this on a fairly top of the line uh m2 uh nvme drive which you know has several like gigabits per second of disk io but um it's it's an interesting thing to ask i think as a question because you then have to ask yourself well now um what what in many cases they're doing is they're optimizing for cheaper transaction fees because if there's less congestion then there's less economic contention to get your transaction into a block but the the natural um trade-off and conflict that you have here is you can either have really cheap block space and a lot of block space um and and have it cheap to transact but as a result on popular networks it will be very expensive to verify everything or the flip side which is what bitcoin tends to optimize for which is we're actually going to let the economic side float and you may have really expensive transaction fees but on the other hand you know that the cost of doing full verification of the entire system is going to remain sane and so this is the major economic and philosophical conflict that really i think any public permissionless network is going to have to deal with uh and so getting back uh first of all yeah i mean that that makes perfect sense uh i hadn't really thought much previously because it's perhaps not it's perhaps the kind of thing that an implementer thinks about quite quite early uh but that if you haven't actually gotten in there to do something with you wouldn't necessarily consider which is just like yeah like if something's in theory auditable that's one thing but if it's not actually in practice auditable then that means that it's no longer auditable right and so yeah makes perfect sense um to to push that a little bit further though separate from even just within bitcoin we still have to process the transactions so if you want to scale this up to something that's like more than you know uh the the the one megabyte every seven seconds or whatever the i don't know what the current estimate is for like how much throughput a bitcoin network does these days probably higher than that but if you want to push your transaction rate up above that which it seems like you have to do if you want to actually use this to create any kind of an economic system of any appreciable size uh what what's the answer because if if we're saying that all these things you know we went through like why we need each of these pieces of technology for the block for you know why do we need the signing why do we need proof of something or rather why do we need a rate limiter because it kind of sounded like we don't really care about proof of something so much as we just need a rate limiter uh and that's just the way we have to do it right now um how do we move past that because you know if those things are necessary and they fundamentally limit the number of transactions does that mean it's dead in the water how do we get past that because it sounds kind of like you can't right so so could you talk a little bit about that yeah so in actually i think the first few months of bitcoin's existence uh people were theorizing i mean it was already obvious that you could only do a handful of transactions per second on the network given the uh the block limit uh which was also another denial of service you know anti-spam mechanism um actually the very first version of bitcoin didn't even have one i think it was added maybe after six months or so when someone realized that you know a gigabyte block coming through would be very bad um oh the original influence of the protocol just like the blocks as big as you want to be yeah i mean i think there was an implicit limit of maybe 32 megabytes because of like 32-bit system or something like that but it was there was no codified at the time so yeah what do you do well at the time way back then some people theorized well bitcoin is just going to become like gold and it's going to be stored in centralized vaults and people are just going to be passing around ious like they do with like paper gold certificates and so on and you know that's not the optimal outcome because then you know it's probably a small number of custodians who end up controlling most of the value and you could argue you're essentially recreating the existing system in a sense yes um also you know you run into potential governance issues if the vast majority of the network is controlled by a small number of actors so what happened well actually satoshi nakamoto came up with a concept called payment channels and not much was done with them for a number of years there was there was some very early payment channel work done around 2013 2014 um in the bitcoin j project um and a few like crowdfunding mechanisms and other stuff happen but these payment channels were very limited in what they can do and what a payment channel is is essentially um instead of creating a bitcoin transaction and uh broadcasting it out on the network and then it gets mine it goes into a block and so on and so forth uh you can put your funds into a multi-signature contract on chain and then after that point you and your counterparty who both put funds into uh this contract can uh start passing uh bitcoin transactions that spend those funds privately between each other without having to broadcast into the whole network and then if you get to the point where you decide you no longer want to economically interact with each other you can broadcast the final state of that those series of transactions that you've been privately broadcasting back and forth it goes out onto the network it goes into a block and that you would consider your settlement of funds uh you know this you can see why this has creates a lot more efficiency if you have another actor that you are trading with on a regular basis um but it's not that great it's only it only helps that if you and you know one counter party are constantly doing some sort of activity so you know there was for example there was a video streaming service that allowed you to do this for micropayments and then once you were done streaming the video and paying for it you know a few kilobytes at a time you could close your transaction um and just to be clear i assume this this was implemented similarly to lightning network where when you post back to the root blockchain to the actual bitcoin blockchain whatever you want to call that blockchain um there's a time lock of some kind so that you know that you're not broadcasting old information or something like this so so is it is it still a contended it's it's an adversarial broadcast system just like lightning network or is it different yeah yeah yeah no i'm over simplifying it so what you know what you're doing you're actually creating some game theory and there's some other logical branches to these transactions where if someone tries to screw you over by posting a previous state you can steal all of their money okay um so it's like a penalty-based adversarial thing much like lightning network is i assume or rough like yeah with some differences i would assume because lightning network must be different or they wouldn't have called it lightning network i guess yeah yeah so this this system was far simpler lightning network is far more complicated but also far more useful and far more robust uh so like those those old forms of payment channels have not been in use for at least six years i think at this point um lightning network kind of supercharges the idea of payment channels by creating a network of payment channels so that you no longer have to be directly connected to your counterparty that you want to send or receive funds with with rather it uses a sort of onion routing mechanism to be able to securely and privately have those payments forwarded through an arbitrary number of other hops along the network and eventually reach the final destination and and so this allows you to have that same level of efficiency but with far greater reach now there's a lot of other trade-offs involved and lightning by no means will ever have the same security model as on-chain bitcoin uh for a variety of reasons uh the the additional complexity that the fact that your keys are probably going to be hot rather than cold though it is possible to do some cold uh payment channels but they end up being a lot more limited uh because you can't actively route funds through them but a lightning network uh was originally i think the white paper was in late 2015 or early 2016. um early test net versions of it went online can i just clarify one thing by the way because i just realized i was assuming something with what you said hot versus cold keys could you just uh i'm assuming you mean whether or not they're easily accessible or not but uh elaborate well yeah so uh we tend to say a hot key is a private key that is on some sort of internet-connected device and you know this this is risky because you know hackers can get in malware can get and so on and so forth so yeah i just wanted to make sure i wasn't misinterpreting what you said because i was like well i don't think i've ever heard that term before but all right uh because yeah if one of the things also i should say before we continue it just occurred to me thank you for not using too much terminology this has been very like uh acronym free which i think will be great for everybody uh including myself obviously who doesn't spend a lot of time in this world you know people can can easily just use things you're like wait okay go back what is that term okay sorry so so continue uh so you said that it doesn't the same security the hot versus cool keys and then start continue yeah because really this is optimizing for a different use case this is optimizing for uh fast convenient payments you know probably small payments you know you if you're going to buy a house or a car you probably aren't going to be using lightning network this is really meant to be more of a mainstream uh consumer retail uh type of network so you know putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into it is certainly not recommended so if we assume then that that is what most transactions have to go through and only very large i guess infrequent transactions would go through the main channel uh haven't we sort of kicked the can down the road a little bit like why if we're willing to accept all of the uh lesser you know sort of like like obviously it you know it's going to have all of the problems that you were worried about if you get rid of the rate limiting that we talked about before or if you you know if you don't have the things that were supposedly necessary at the root blockchain on the one that people are actually doing most their transactions on what was the point of the root blockchain part so the the main chain as we call it is the settlement layer um you can think of it as from an economic standpoint this is not a new thing you know there are already high frequency fast payment networks whether it's credit cards paypal what have you um and those things don't settle instantly uh in some cases their settlement assurance is on the order of weeks or months and you know the settlement is when you have finality that you know your money isn't gonna get taken away from you so you know if you think of it from a validation standpoint um why should my grandchild have to validate that somebody bought a cup of coffee 50 years ago what what does that matter to them all that you really care about is in a system like this is you just want to have an assurance of who owns what now you don't necessarily care about all the nitty-gritty details of every economic transaction that ever happened gotcha okay so i think most of that uh architecture stuff is pretty well sussed out uh based on what we've what we've talked about so far so now i'd just like to to go back to the original question which is assuming that that technology stack i mean i guess i should ask you first so is that technology stack meaning we have a root block chain with a rate limiter on it so in a consensus protocol uh in this case they're sort of one of the same but you know we we satisfy those two things we have a limited rate of clearing transactions and we have some arbitrary system doesn't matter what it is for for deciding uh how we pick which broadcasts we actually retire on any particular node um so that they can reach consensus or convergence we have that as our root system we then have a sort of a wilder faster system as a second layer down uh which we'll just use the original system to uh i guess one way we might say is conflict detection so so if if somebody starts to try and do anything particularly weird when we go to clear it we will know uh that there were you know was with something bad in the system how does this uh technology achieve uh going forward the goals that you set out at the beginning so the self-sovereignty uh to the extent however you wanted to define it why does this accomplish that goal well you know as the complexity of the system continues to increase people have more and more options of how they're interacting with it so the the premise of at least bitcoin main chain plus this new second layer technology lightning network uh it's still being built with all of the same value you know propositions imbued into it so if you want to you can run your own bitcoin main chain node and on top of it you can slap one of these lightning network nodes and they're talking to each other uh they're interacting uh the lightning node is actually you know using the the bitcoin node uh to determine and get the settlement assurances and you know from that perspective you still maintain that self-sovereignty not everybody's going to do that you can use third-party services you can use lightweight clients that make other trade-offs around the security and the convenience of what you're doing but i think the important thing is that you have the optionality and it's still feasible for someone who puts in you know a little bit of time to do it uh to do so it's not necessarily going to be a push button type of uh just jump right in though there are people who work on products like that i mean my company actually had a such as yourself it sounds like node yeah so you know i've dealt a lot with you know trying to thread the needle of those usability challenges and and being self-sovereign at helping other people be self-serving rather than just taking everything and saying look i'm gonna do it you're gonna trust me it's you know it can be very uh very compelling uh to want to do that because it makes it easier for everyone but you know creates a more fragile system and i guess for people who may think that this system of increase and complexity is daunting or may not make sense i actually liken it to the internet itself the osi model um if you look at the way the bitcoin blockchain works it is a global flood fill broadcast mechanism uh has some similarities to the lowest layer internet you know you put some data out there and it goes out to everything on the network and if if you think about trying to scale up ethernet you and i would not be able to be having this conversation the way that we're doing right now streaming audio and video if we only had ethernet because the other billion people on the internet would also have to be processing this data at the same time yes so that's why we need routing layers you know that's why we need to create more efficiency it is a bit more fragile it is a bit more complex but it gives us orders of magnitude more efficiency from a resource you should standpoint uh so not to keep you too much longer i'll try to now wrap up with the i guess the the crux of the whole thing because i feel like i understand everything you just said and what your perspectives are and what you think the technology is and what you think it does can you walk me through an example of how this self-sovereignty would actually do something in practice so i'd like to give you a hypothetical uh maybe you can modify my hypothetical if you think we need some extra things in it but simplest example i think you already said buying a cup of coffee so i am a person in the world just an average person i have no special connection to banking or anything and i want to buy a cup of coffee from some place that is also presumably going to use bitcoin so i'm going to use bitcoin and they're going to use bitcoin how would self-sovereignty help me do something with this transaction that i can't already do in the real world in other words what is it uh and you can pick multiple or just one what is a scenario where realistically during a real transaction that a person would actually care about the self-sovereignty does something or is that the wrong way to look at it well yeah i mean i think it's a very privileged western uh perspective of looking at it because you and i we have access to great financial infrastructure and i'm not the best person to talk about this there are some great people at the human rights foundation who work with people in countries who do have much better use for uh censorship resistant payments i do not find myself being censored very often is probably only a handful of times throughout my life when i found my transactions being censored but that's a very privileged uh position that i found myself in no i don't i don't mean that actually yeah i mean assuming no privilege so so tell me like give me the unprivileged scenario and if you'd rather if cup of coffee is probably i only use that because you used it let's use something that would be more likely to be de-privileged bread something to feed my family uh where this helps me possibly but you know really what's when you're talking about self-sovereignty or censorship resistance what is generally more interesting is what are the transactions that authorities don't want you to make so this it tends to be things more in legal gray areas you know whether that is like sex work pornography drugs that may be gray market black market uh highly regulated things um you know a lot of people end up finding can we just pause one second though okay so i'm not sure understand that leap then so in one case we were talking about uh you were saying that that looking at the other way was was a privileged view certainly sex work is not a privileged view meaning we wouldn't normally consider well i think it's great to enable as many types of people to do as many types of things as possible surely we're not talking about access to sex work being censored as the primary thing that a person living in a third world country without access financial services is concerned about so can you can you clarify that a little bit because gray market doesn't sound to me like privilege versus sunpress so the two things you just said don't didn't really line up well no these are very many different types of people and i can't speak to any one specific thing you know people in in third world countries uh it's more likely that they don't have access to banking and payment infrastructure yes so they're more likely to be using physical cash for things they're more likely to be in a country that is more susceptible to high inflation rate so you know they may prefer to opt out of that system because it's it's also you know being oppressive from um a purchasing power of their income perspective um that's the thing about this space uh this is a neutral tool people can use it however they like and if they're able to economically interact with other people without meddling from third parties i think that level of freedom is generally going to be good for everyone to prosper except for of course the people are trying to control what we're doing okay so that is that's what i'm trying to get to so can you give me an example of where the self-sovereignty so it's like a concrete thing of like here is an example of a transaction um that would currently be censored and here is how this system would would accomplish that in a way that another system wouldn't right so so like given all the technology said so you know proof of work and all these such things the you know what is an example transaction that is what we're trying to enable with the self-sovereignty well there's transactions that would be censored uh for any number of usually political or regulated type of reasons and then there are other transactions that may just not happen because you don't have the infrastructure so let's i mean take the internet for example we have this amazing network now that billions of people can connect to and they can start interacting and communicating with people regardless of geographic boundaries jurisdictions what have you and yet a lot of our payment infrastructure still has really weird rules and blocks that are based upon jurisdictions and and regulations of nation states so you know it should be possible or why can't a random person in a third world country who only has a cheap uh android phone and a kind of crappy mobile connection to be able to get onto this network and start uh earning money by using their own intelligence and and being able to perform actions which may not be worth a lot of money to people in western society but may earn them you know enough pennies or equivalent thereof in a new cryptocurrency that they can now receive and hold and use themselves without having to go through banking infrastructure that it probably won't even be available to them because there's just not enough overhead to make it profitable for banks to do that uh and so drilling down on that right uh what is it about this technology that enables that that the current banking system doesn't so for example uh if we're taking this person a third world country i'm not sure i quite get the hypothetical but you're saying they are doing some kind of work on the internet to make it a little more concrete their uh proof readings are translating something into their native language because they happen to have learned to speak english and they take an english thing in and translate to their native language which is providing a service that someone will pay for is that is that kind of what we're talking about sure i mean you could you could even just say like mechanical turk type of work i don't know yes something they're able to perform on their android phone they are getting paid in this system and the uh what i'm trying to get is okay so tell me an example of why this doesn't work with the current system and why it will work with the new system well i think one of the most common reasons that it doesn't work is that the there are no banking providers that even offer them the ability to create accounts that can receive or send money and that may be for any number of reasons whether regulatory or i think it's probably more just profit motivated you know if someone's only earning a couple dollars a month why is a bank going to want to dedicate the resources to setting up all the infrastructure required to maintain that account you know they're not going to be able to extract much value from it okay so there were two things you said there one was regulatory uh and one was uh the fact that a bank might just elect not to provide this right so question for the first one if regulatory was the concern how will this system help because surely if this became common enough that a government wanted to stop it how does regulatory issues not just stop it right so when i was thinking more of you know regulations that uh create a bunch of paperwork and overhead and compliance you know that raises the cost of opening and maintaining accounts in traditional infrastructure so you know that i think turns a lot of banks off to servicing lower tier people though you know regulatory from a uh how is your government may crack down on its type of thing you know that's an interesting question in which we can look to china to to see how that has been going you know china has been cracking down on bitcoin since probably 2014 or so and um there's always going to be the issue of uh you know government has a monopoly on physical violence within its jurisdiction government will always be able to say look if i catch you doing this thing i put you in a box or i find you or you know some sort of other punishment and you know technology won't be able to stop that um but the i guess the cypherpunk side of me uh says that look uh governments have been passing regulations on technology for a long time and and we've seen them fail i mean just look at piracy for example you know people do illegal stuff offline and online all of the time and governments and their law enforcement systems they don't have nearly as much resources as they would like you to believe so they can't actually enforce things as well as some people might think uh but that's also true of the current banking sector so i'm not sure why that's an argument in favor of cryptography so for example if you believe that the government isn't capable of creating regulatory burdens to something then why do you think the current banking sector has those burdens well it's a matter of uh of pressure points right is that if you're doing things through large regulated companies you have sufficiently centralized that system that the the regulators and law enforcement they have a small number of entities that they can go to and put pressure on to say you know you need to comply with this now if and this kind of goes back to i guess any sort of social movement or whatever if you have a sufficiently distributed enough system or sufficiently distributed enough group of people you can't shut it down you can't stop it i mean you can make threats and you can put some token people in jail and whatnot but um that is i think one of the the underlying premises of the the cypherpunk movement and a lot of the cryptographic technologies that spawned off of it is that you know a sufficiently distributed system cannot be shut down so it's it's hard to stop software is really what i'm saying if if it's it's because it's hard to stop the flow of information now that we have the internet so i guess i'm not quite sure i understand that argument how many nodes do you imagine there to be i guess in the root block chain of bitcoin operating in the end game meaning where do you think that number what is the cardinality of that number if you will like what order do you think that number is um i mean it's been fairly flat for a number of years so there's currently around 10 000 publicly reachable nodes and somewhere between 50 and 100 thousand extrapolated total nodes uh they're not all reachable you know they may be behind a nat and it's hard to say from like a percentage of of users like how many people bother to go to the extreme of running it but there's also an argument that it's not necessarily about whether people are running those nodes today about if they have the optionality to do so and you know if it's possible for them to afford to be able to do so if something in their situation changes and they feel like they need to take on that additional level of security so you know preferably i would want to see everybody running their own but i know that it's going to be a small minority of people who bother to do that and if so if i may uh sorry if this is going too long is this too long no no we're good okay so if i may i still don't quite understand how that really works so the reason everybody isn't their own bank today is not really because they wouldn't like to be able to do the things that a bank can do it's because of the regulation so why do you think a government couldn't simply prohibit people from running bitcoin nodes thereby limiting the number because even the number you just said was very low ten thousand there's probably ten thousand banks uh any government any government can pass pretty much any type of uh law that it wants to right it is the supreme rule of its own land uh part of this uh you know from a geopolitical standpoint it's it's a global game um and at least so far while we do see some cooperation between some superpowers and other nation-states it's highly unlikely that they're all gonna get on the same page and agree to unilaterally uh ban all bitcoin usage or all usage of some technology um i think that at least the smarter politicians know that even if you do ban something like that you just create a black market now the number of nodes would drop the number of users would drop but it would still continue to exist not ban just regulate because i think that's also a thing that i've seen before and i don't necessarily think it's very compelling which is to say governments if they see people using something they don't tend to ban that thing what they tend to do is regulate it so that they can control it and i think it's a much harder argument to say that they won't do that or can't do that because especially as you see already with cryptocurrency there are large players and the incentives for those large players to comply with the government if the regulation isn't particularly burdensome are quite high so i believe that every agency within a government is going to do the most that it can to corral this technology and try to get as much of it under its purview and say you know we we should be able to regulate it from aspects x y and z oh yeah as much as possible yes irs doj like they all will want something yes yep and and so you know it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out um they certainly will regulate any large centralized actors especially any that are handling other people's money because that falls under various financial regulations it's nothing really new there they're going to be grandfathered in to all of the like money transmission and custodial issues um but just from like a technology standpoint i think at least in the united states there's a very strong argument that you know the use of open source technology is basically a freedom of speech issue that you know what we're doing is we're interacting with each other voluntarily we're communicating with each other over the internet and that is not something that the government can regulate unless they decide to somehow repeal the first amendment uh i guess that i don't follow at all okay the first amendment does really is really not implicated very heavily in banking regulation though at least from what we've seen so i guess i'm not sure why if that were a useful defense surely it would have been raised already by a bank at some point i don't think really banks would care enough to raise that as a defense uh but you know i'm not the lawyer but you know i am repeating something that some of my you know crypto legal friends on twitter have definitely said a number of times um so i'm not the constitutional law expert but i think that from the premise of the fact that this system you know it was not created by the government wasn't created by the fed or the treasury or anything like that i i think if we're talking about the the banking system which really does all flow from those original entities and they get to say well you know you're just further down the hierarchy so you have to comply with all this stuff you know that's probably how they would make a legal um standpoint of you know we get to regulate all of these activities whereas we're talking about a communication system that was created by an anonymous entity and is run by thousands of people all over the world from a voluntary standpoint uh so that that's good we'll i'll i'll put that on the my list for interviews or maybe afterwards you could recommend a person to talk to you since i i love first amendment law so i would love to have a conversation like that okay so uh and then for the regulation point we'll just keep brief because like i said i'll be doing more interviews so i can also ask other people to elaborate on some of those uh the flip side of that just to finish up you said uh is making it worthwhile to do was another reason that people might not have access to these banking services so how does this help meaning we already see that there's a lot of fees associated with things like using bitcoin and that sort of stuff how does this technology help reduce the cost of interacting with the banking system if that is a key aspect of self-sovereignty right well i mean i don't think it's necessarily going to help uh with using the traditional banking system it's more of a question of you know can we create a closed-loop economy that is more efficient and able to to work inside of because right now you know even if you get into bitcoin or you're using lightning or whatever i think most people because of how new it is it's not a closed-loop system and they end up having to use on-ramps and off-ramps those on-ramps and off-ramps are probably going to be charging fees they also tend to be regulated they tend to be choke points uh there's a lot of bad things that tend to happen at on ramps and off ramps like we said you know with exchanges getting hacked or exit scanning so on and so forth so i from that perspective i think it's still very early days because i want to see um you know native internet currencies be able to be you know fully closed loop systems where you're not only buying stuff with them or storing your wealth with them but you're also earning with them um and you know being able to complete that full life cycle it also means that you know businesses need to be able to pay other businesses with these currencies in order to be able to facilitate that all right well uh thank you very much for talking with me today i think we got through a lot uh it actually sounds like we probably don't disagree on very much actually based on on on your answers i i would suspect that uh probably other cryptography people might disagree with with me more um because it sounds like you know uh you had a pretty realistic picture of what actually you know is or isn't possible that didn't sound particularly fanciful to me uh presumably it also doesn't sound very fanciful to you but it does sound also tell me if this is an unfair summary it does sound like at the end of the day it does lean pretty heavily more towards the social aspect than the technology aspect uh since it didn't really sound like you were actually that it didn't sound like you actually thought there was that much of the technology implicated in a sense you were like if we have the bare minimum for rate limiting um and selection then that's that's the technology like that's that's the extent to which we really care about this technology and most of the other things are about like you said uh hoping that government can't intrude too much because it happens to be something that can be multinational um you know hoping that people adopt it so that business could pay each other without having to go through on-ramps i mean is that an unfair characterization or not so this is really hitting i think on the complexity of the system you know it's so multi-faceted the technology is important but there's also the game theory there's the economics there's the regulatory aspects uh you can get into like i said like the um the geopolitical implications of what happens with nation states if they start competing more directly against each other with regard to crypto and you know we've seen you know legalization of bitcoin in some countries and and some believe that this is just the beginning of domino's falling so um is that good or bad by the way like do we know if it's good for who absolutely it's going to be good for some people it's going to be bad for some people uh but that's this is all this complexity that we just barely scratched the surface of is why i've been so fascinated with it for a decade and why it continues to fascinate me and i just try to soak up as much of the information of what's happening as i can and i certainly have uh fanciful optimistic hopes for what we may see the world look like in a few decades if this progression of technology results in social changes results and economic changes um but that is you know getting more like nostradamus and i guess uh as a as a final thing one thing that i kind of think about with crypto and i'll just end on this is you know sometimes it's unfortunate for technology people because you hear a lot of claims about crypto and you're like well the technology doesn't really do that thing it's you're sort of talking about something that you're just hoping happens because we use this thing or something like that and we did touch on a little bit of that but like i said it was i thank you for being refreshingly clear on a lot of this stuff it you didn't say a lot of things like that you weren't like oh and then you know technology is x and then magically we get unicorns that ride through the sky which you know sometimes it sounds like um tell me your reaction to this as the closing thought is there a certain degree to which the over optimistic or fanciful unicorn flying unicorn nature of the discourse around crypto is that also somewhat of a strength which is a weird thing for me to say because it annoys me that it occurs but since there is so much of a social component to it is having a fanciful notion of what it will achieve even if we know full well that's mostly a lie technologically is the lie perhaps a necessary motivation to get the social part to occur which if it occurred would actually accomplish the thing even though the technology itself does not guarantee it that outcome yes it's a feedback loop of memes and narratives and i also have a whole article that i wrote about this uh you know you can make the argument that you know we're memeing certain things into reality and that has become literally true in the case of some of these meme crypto tokens uh though i i tend to think that those are gonna be more flash in the pan but regardless of which of these protocols or networks you look at um that is also kind of the dark side of it is that uh we have incentivized people to you know pump their bags and so some people who are in it for a get rich quick type of thing will make all the promises in the world and they don't care they just want to get enough other people to to come in and invest money in the system and then they're going to dump it on the other hand it creates some interesting incentives for the people who are in it for the long term and who care about building the technology and i do believe i'm one of those people where um i you know i don't have to keep building this stuff if i didn't want to but um as you've seen like i think i'm fairly realistic about where we are right now and i think i'm gonna be working on this for the foreseeable future because there's still so much left to do this is um this is not you know mainstream adoption while we are at a mainstream level of uh at least i think people being cognizant that the technology exists very few truly understand uh what it's capable of doing or why they should care about it all right well thank you very much for joining me today it's a pleasure talking with you and uh for anyone out there who wants to find you or follow you uh what's your what's what's the best place to look you up online uh you can check out my website at lopp.net and if it's easier to remember bitcoin.page will take you directly to my resources that has about 1500 different links to various educational sites about bitcoin awesome well thanks very much thank you i'm gonna