Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 503.
I was a guest recently (Oct. 2, 2026) on The Bitcoin Group #505, on the World Crypto Network (Youtube channel), hosted by Thomas Hunt. (Apple podcasts; Madbitcoins). Panelists: Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella), Vlad Costea, Ben Arc, and Thomas Hunt. We discussed a variety of topics. See transcript below.
Shownotes
The political bitcoiners thought they had found true love, but ended up broken hearted. Just like anyone who bought trumpcoin
THIS WEEK:
- Citi raises bitcoin, ether forecasts on strong crypto activity (Reuters)
- Adam ‘Not Satoshi’ Back’s Crypto Empire Hit by Hack, Lawsuits
El Salvador Shifts to Stablecoins as Bitcoin Payments Wane- Trump loses favor with crypto fans who call him out for cashing in (Washington Post)
- White House Blames Democrats After CLARITY Act Fails in Senate
(Blockonomi)
Summary (Grok)
Stephan Kinsella joined The Bitcoin Group #505 to discuss Bitcoin’s price, industry news, and politics. On the price outlook, he said he was happy with current levels but noted that hitting $100,000 felt like a long time ago; a group of them had celebrated that milestone at the French Laundry in California. Asked whether Bitcoin would be higher or lower the following week, he predicted higher while cautioning that he is almost always wrong in the short term, likening the unpredictability to Burton Malkiel’s random-walk thesis.
On Adam Back’s recent difficulties, including the Liquid Network hack and failed treasury-company efforts, Kinsella wished him well and mentioned having met him for the first time at a Bitcoin conference in Helsinki. He said he was more honored to meet early Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi (Sirius). When asked whether Back would recover, he predicted yes, again noting that he is usually wrong about such things.
Kinsella was more pointed about El Salvador’s shift toward stablecoins. He gave it a thumbs-down but said he was never surprised by what governments do, adding “never trust politicians” and drawing a parallel to enthusiasm for Argentina’s Javier Milei. On Donald Trump, he observed that while Trump is “bad” and “all over the map,” he is at least not hostile to Bitcoin in the way Harris or the Democrats would have been. He dismissed fanfare around the Clarity Act and similar legislation as window-dressing that distracts from substantive steps such as lowering or eliminating capital-gains taxes or making Bitcoin legal tender. He added that people who are “taken in” by such politicians “probably deserve to be,” framing it as social Darwinism, and noted that he has seen arguments that Jesus was an anarcho-capitalist who would have been a Bitcoiner.
In closing remarks he predicted that Austrian economists would continue to become more pro-Bitcoin. Early skepticism, he said, often rested on the claim that Bitcoin violated the regression theorem because it was neither gold nor physical; those views have largely faded except for his friend Guido Hülsmann, who recently argued in Turkey that Bitcoin can never become money. Near the end of the episode, after the host mentioned copyright-related obstacles (paywalled articles and YouTube content-ID risks), Kinsella observed that intellectual property now permeates everyday life—“like the Sixth Sense, I see IP everywhere.”
Transcript (Grok assist)
The Bitcoin Group #505 – Cleaned Transcript
(for Kinsella on Liberty Podcast Episode 503)
Introductions and Welcome
0:31
Thomas Hunt: The Bitcoin Group, the American original. For over the last 10 years, the sharpest Satoshis, the best Bitcoins, the hardest cryptocurrency talk. We’d like to welcome our panelists. Ben Arc from LNBits.
Ben Arc: Hello. Good evening all.
Thomas Hunt: Stephan Kinsella from the Property and Freedom Society. Hello.
Stephan Kinsella: Hello.
Thomas Hunt: Vlad Costea from Bitcoin Takeover magazine. Buy my Coldcard.
And I’m Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network. Moving on to issue one.
Issue one. Citi raises Bitcoin Ether forecasts on strong crypto activity.
Bitcoin Price Outlook
1:16
Thomas Hunt: Citigroup has raised its 12-month forecast for Bitcoin and Ether, citing stronger crypto activity, a supportive macroeconomic backdrop, and a resumption of ETF inflows. The brokerage increased its target for Bitcoin to $113,000 a coin, up from $82,000, and Ether to $3,028, up from $2,240.
Ben Arc, it’s always the price, the price, the price, the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and other things. Ben, what do you think about the price of Bitcoin?
Ben Arc: Everything’s fine now. It’s a few months. October. It’s October. Usually happens this time of year. I think a lot of it is there’s a lot of people are getting a bit twitchy around the AI bubble. Some of that junky capital’s looking somewhere to go. People are seeing moves with Tether and Bitcoin and yeah, the ETF. I think it was the biggest inflows they’d had for a year. So you’ve also got, you know, inflation was a little bit cooler than people expected, the US inflation. You got weaker job market as well in the US. So it all points towards the price going up. But yeah, it’s not like an extreme rally but as we all know once you can have that feedback loop where it just goes up and up and up particularly I think if there’s some drop in the AI markets. I’m seeing a lot more FUD around AI and around the AI industry as well. And I think that inevitably the thing which people shift their capital into from AI is going to be Bitcoin.
Thomas Hunt: Yeah, it’s going up.
It’s funny, Ben. It’s not just the intellectual capital of people like me and you and others spending all their time playing with AI. Soon it’s the actual capital as people exit their stock investments for the chance to buy Anthropic, the chance to buy OpenAI, if it opens up or not. We’ll have to see how it goes. Stephan Kinsella, what do you think about the price of Bitcoin? Everyone wants to know.
Stephan Kinsella: I am happy with it. But when it hit $100,000 seems like a long time ago. What two years ago I think a group of us went to the French Laundry in California to celebrate. So I guess I’m looking forward to the chance to do that again. So we’re not quite there.
Thomas Hunt: Yeah. The main thing we’re always looking for is like our friend Cryptographiti used to say, if you can get guacamole at Chipotle. If it’s guacamole on time or guacamole off. I think we’re about halfway to guacamole.
Vlad Costea, what do you think about the price of Bitcoin this week?
Vlad Costea: You know, two years ago when the first ETF was approved, we were promised that we’re going to be in the hundreds of thousands and we’re going to get bankers at our doors asking or begging us on their knees to sell our Bitcoin to them. And there’s going to be this massive demand and the scarcity is going to kick in. We’re going to be super rich. We’re going to buy basically private jets with the dust that we had from transactions 10 years ago or something.
None of that happened. I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of paper Bitcoin circulating that nobody wants to talk about and we just ignore this phenomenon. I also don’t know what half the words in that article mean and that’s part of the reason why I got into Bitcoin so I don’t have to learn bankers’ lingo and jargon. So, sorry for my ignorance, but I had greater expectations. Whoever is happy with what we’re having is just being delusional. We should have had prices way up. Like, we were promised by Donald Trump. I know that this is part of the topics list, but he was going to be the best crypto president. What’s going on?
It seems like only the memecoin creators are enjoying anything because there’s no SEC investigation into anything. So that’s the extent he freed Ross, but now what? Like we have to just watch how a bunch of guys are getting rich and we’re just stuck with Biden era prices. Come on, man. I thought you were making Bitcoin great again or whatever. Just tweet something. Pump our bags.
Thomas Hunt: It does seem like a return to the prices and the values of old. No one really profited except maybe the insiders. But we got more on that coming up. But first, predicting against the magic eightball the truth of all power and prediction in this or any universe. Ben Arc, will the price of Bitcoin be higher or lower this time next week?
Ben Arc: I mean, I think higher. This current epoch of price kind of reminds me of, you know, when we breached 10K and everyone was like, “Oh, it’s never going to go into 10K again.” and then it went into 10K and then it went over 10K and then we breached 20K and it’s like ever going to go under 20K again and then it goes into 20K again then it goes over 20K again you can’t imagine never going back to it but that’s kind of what happened with 100K. Everyone says it’s never going to go under 100K and then it goes under 100K and then slowly crawls its way back up so for now we’re going up higher.
Thomas Hunt: It does seem Ben like last time we had the big drawdown and you’re looking at it and your terrible investment and everyone thinks you’re stupid and your family’s against you and you’re like, why did I hold on to this stupid thing and then somehow it goes up and I look at it this time and I see it drop to what 65 or something awful and everyone’s freaking out and your family thinks you’re stupid and now we’re holding it and it looks like it might be coming back at 80 again. It’s the craziest thing. Stephan Kinsella, higher or lower this time next week?
Stephan Kinsella: Well, you want the good news or the bad news first?
Thomas Hunt: Always the good news.
Stephan Kinsella: The good news is it’s going to be higher. The bad news is I’m almost always wrong in the short term anyway. It’s almost like Malkiel had a point about the random walk down Wall Street. Seems to be unpredictable at least in the short term. So I feel like it’s going up, but I’m usually wrong.
Thomas Hunt: Well, now we’ll have the AI to judge. You’ll be included in the statistics of the AIs monitoring this program. Vlad Costea, is the price going higher or lower this time next week?
Vlad Costea: I’ll be the contrarian one. I will say lower, but like 1% lower. Not much. We’ll just go sideways for a while and then something’s going to happen and we’re going to pump and nobody will know why. And we’re going to try to rationalize what’s going on.
Thomas Hunt: As Proud Horn said in the Proud Horn song, I’m a bull and I’m bullish. So, I continue to prick upward without any evidence or information of why this should happen. Moving on to issue two.
Adam Back and Industry News
8:29
Thomas Hunt: Adam, not Dude, you didn’t shake. Oh, Ben, you want to go? No, you didn’t shake the ball. Oh, the ball. Yeah, you’re right. Cuz that’s how we actually know whether it’s going to go up or down, Vlad. So, Ben’s right. We have to shake the magic ball. I almost forgot. It’s good to keep me honest here because this is how people predict for their whole put my trades in. This is important. Okay. Will the price of Bitcoin be higher this time next week? And remember, shaking the ball can cause bubbles. Will it be higher this time next week?
It says, “Yes, definitely. Yes, definitely from the magic eightball.” So, there you go. I’m not surprised, but it’s good to check. Moving on to issue two. Adam, not Satoshi backs crypto empire hit by hacks lawsuits. Adam Back, a pioneering cryptographer and friend of the show, has businesses linked to him showing signs of strain as the crypto industry undergoes a major shakeout. A $320 million hack of the Liquid network, most of it retained and returned by a white hat hacker and Back’s role and reputation in the Bitcoin world are being tested, which include a failed project to stockpile $4 billion worth of Bitcoin and a collapsed public market deal for a Bitcoin treasury firm he promoted. Which was really too bad because I keep saying over and over on the show that Adam Back’s treasury company probably had the best entry point. Better than Nakamoto’s, better than MicroStrategy. Now, it doesn’t look like that company is going to exist at all. Stephan Kinsella, what do you think of Adam Back’s recent troubles from the hack to the other problems?
Stephan Kinsella: Well, I wish him well, of course. Like I mentioned to you guys pre-show, I was in Helsinki at Bitcoin BTCHL, Bitcoin Hell, last week and I met Adam for the first time in person and seemed like a nice enough guy to me. So you know, I wish the guy well.
Thomas Hunt: Yeah, there you go. You got the picture. That’s the in the middle is the Bitcoiner… Finland’s economics minister wanted to have a meeting to talk about Austrian economics and Adam Back joined in somehow.
Stephan Kinsella: So no offense there but I would be much more honored for meeting Martti Malmi aka Sirius. He’s the guy he’s on the end there. Look at that little… Yeah. So actually the original meeting was me and then Marty. And then our handler sort of said, “Hey, do you want to meet this guy on the left who’s Daniel Batten?” And then they brought in Adam Back too. So to meet this guy in the middle who’s the economics minister there. But yeah, Marty was great.
Thomas Hunt: That’s very cool. You got to meet Martti Malmi one of the first worked with Satoshi on Bitcoin. One of the first programmers on Bitcoin. Let’s go to Vlad Costea. What do you think about Adam Back? his recent troubles, his companies going down, and of course, the major Liquid hack.
Vlad Costea: Wait, so I just want to say that there is no trouble. It’s all just FUD that’s being spread by Ethereum shitcoiners. Only in Ethereum, you get hacks where people lose money. Not in the pure and perfectly professional Bitcoin world where you have world-class cryptographers that they hire and they’re super competent and there’s no way that this can ever happen in Bitcoin.
If you believe what’s going on, you must be a shitcoiner yourself because otherwise there is no rational explanation for this ever happening in this universe or any other. Blockstream. If you want to pay me, I’ll put an address below, but it’s not going to be Liquid.
Thomas Hunt: I’m glad you didn’t even get to show off your necklace. Did you show your incredibly valuable Bitcoin necklace?
Vlad Costea: Yeah, this is the Coldcard, which of course is the best hardware wallet in the world. There is no way that this can get hacked because it’s airgapped. And you only use this by connecting an external battery and it never touches a computer or the internet. So, it must be super safe. There’s no way anyone can ever hack this. If anyone says that they hacked it, they’re just liars. And I choose to believe this. It’s the Mark III, by the way, which some people claim that got hacked. There is no way in the entire universe that this can ever happen. No AI, no alien, no whatever. I’m stacking hard on this one. Matt Odell said that it’s the best one ever.
So, I believe in it. Shinobi spent like two or three months defending this and saying that, well, at least it has great features. You’re right, Shinobi. You’re very smart. Thank you very much for advocating for the best device on the market. There’s no way that anyone can hack this. And if you do, you’re a liar and you’re a shitcoiner from Ethereum. That’s all I had to say. You can pay me Blockstream. I’ll send you an address.
Thomas Hunt: Vlad taking down the Coldcard there.
All right, let’s go to Ben Arc. What do you think about Adam Back’s recent troubles?
Ben Arc: Yeah, and I hear with the Coldcard that rolling dice is an expert feature. You shouldn’t roll dice. Just trust the RNG. Trust the true random number generator coded by Rulo’s mate. Poor old Adam Back. As you know, as he said, Tom is friend of the show. I like him. He’s a good dude. He’s been in Bitcoin a long time. He’s been in the scene before Bitcoin, pre-Bitcoin. So, anyone who’s been cypherpunking, pre-Bitcoin, because I don’t know how many people would be cypherpunks like if it weren’t for the monetary incentive. I don’t know if I would be doing stuff. I don’t know. Who knows? Like, you just don’t know like whether you’d be involved in the scene. Whereas anyone who’s in that scene before Bitcoin I kind of instantly give kudos some respect to. Doesn’t really matter who it is. And Adam Back’s one of them for me. So you know I like him.
When it rains it pours. He’s had a pretty horrible year. It did coincide with him putting on a suit wearing that black suit. So in that photo I was glad to see him dressing down again. He still needs to get a little bit more shabby. Put the orange cap back on and then we’ll be back to Gandalf the Gray. Adam Back the gray as opposed to Adam Back the black. But yeah, he’s had a hard time of it and I mean with the BSTR holdings thing, it was just the worst time to pitch it and to try and build one of those treasury companies off the back of you know what happened to Naka. What happened to all of them with Tre… oh what’s it called? MicroStrategy and and then also Nakamoto although Nakamoto’s back up to be fair which is pretty pretty incredible. I mean, you know, Wall Street needs some way of getting on in and out of Bitcoin and these treasury companies seems to serve that use case. And it sucked what happened with Liquid. I like Liquid. I’ll still use Liquid once he’s back on his feet. And yeah, hard it was a hard year for him, but hopefully hopefully Blockstream. And yeah, he’s a good dude.
Thomas Hunt: I still love this liquid hack story. So, we’re sitting out there and we’re saying, “Okay, they inform their developers of the bug before they fix the bug. It’s such an obvious, simple, easy mistake.” And we think maybe there’s a chance. Maybe there’s a chance one of the developers is a white hat hacker who took the money to hold on to it for safekeeping and who would give it back. And then they give I think it was 80% an incredible percentage of it something back to Liquid and because it’s too much money and because the lawyers made them say it and whatever they’re like we’re going to get you hacker. We’re going to get the remaining 20% back when really the guy has just handed them 80%. I agree it would be very hard to spend. He’d be chased to the ends of the earth and all that but it seems like they’re going to chase him to the end of the earth for the 20% anyway. So they got to say that, man. They can’t let it go unless it’s a more reasonable amount for a while.
We got to encourage these white hat hackers though. Also remember flag hackers of the Coldcard hack. Come hack. Come back. Give us a bunch of money and then we’ll chase you anyway.
Why are people giving back the money? You may as well keep 100%. You’ve got a better chance of survival, right? I mean, I guess also that’s harder from an insurance perspective. Like that’s not 20% of all the liquidity on Liquid as well, which is also something we should remember. I don’t know how I don’t know what the entire liquidity is on Liquid, but it’s you know, it’s a smaller percentage of that. So, I still got trust in the network. You know, like plenty of things have been hacked for a hell of a lot more. And yeah, I still think it’s not white hat. I think you can still go away with like, you know, $10 million or something and then agree a sum where you’re not chased to the end of the earth and you can be a normal person and not look over your shoulder.
I think there’s some kind of unfair sliding scale that you’re using against hackers where you’re saying because the money kept on the computer is so large, which is not the hacker’s fault, right? If you’re keeping $400 million on one computer in one address, like that’s not the hacker’s fault. If the deal is percentage based and the hacker gives you 5% back or keeps 5% keeps 10%, right? Gives you the rest, then percentage based is fair. But what Ben’s saying is if the money left on the computer by the people who got hacked was too large, then we have to work out a different deal than the percentage base.
Ben Arc: It’s the amount. It’s the amount. I think people who do white hacking think it’s a bit too much. 5% 3%. But 20%, come on. 320 million is bonkers. Scandalous. But now the exit question.
Thomas Hunt: Is this the end of Adam Back? He had a little Epstein involvement. Andy was out there on the island. I don’t think he did anything.
And we broke that story, Thomas, right here, didn’t we?
And I broke that live reading the documents live on the air. To our horrified truth, as we found more and more about Andy and his company, and again, I think they’re just raising funds. But he bounced back from that. He’s still a big star of the internet. He almost got his own treasury company. He almost got this other thing. He seems to be in a little trouble for blockchain mining according to this article. But he’s still riding high at Blockstream. Stephan Kinsella, will Adam Back be back?
Stephan Kinsella: Well, you want the good news or the bad news? Always good.
My prediction is yes, but then again, I’m usually wrong about these things. But no, I think so. I think he’ll be fine.
Thomas Hunt: Well, I hope it’s yes because he’s a good guy. Dan and I had dinner with him once and he talked our ears off about technology for hours and hours and just always been really kind to us here at the show. Vlad Costea, I don’t think you’re a fan of Adam Back. Do you think this is the event that will take him down? Business failure and hacking.
Vlad Costea: No, I think that’s too lame. He deserves something better. He deserves to be proven wrong by the big blockers or something like that would be like poetic justice, not something as stupid as just bad business management. Like this is a cypherpunk world. Honestly, what I think one point where I sort of lost respect for Adam Back was when so I don’t recommend people to listen to Laura Shin. I think it’s a boring show, but somehow she got Adam Back and David Chaum in the same interview. And I’m jealous about that. And I want to publicly say that I’m jealous about that. But David Chaum who is like the grandfather of cypherpunks and one of the people who is so OG that he doesn’t even call it cryptography. He says it’s cryptology because it’s the science of studying cryptic stuff or whatever called out Adam Back for claiming that he’s the inventor of proof of work and said it was not you. It was my friends Moni Naor and there’s another one. They are actually cited also in the white paper and said why do you call yourself the inventor of proof of work when it’s obvious that some people did it years before you’re even working on this and Adam Back I don’t know he had kind of a weak defense in my opinion he said that he was not aware and it was kind of like a Newton and Leibniz kind of thing where they found or they had the same idea in different parts of the world different contexts but David Chaum is right like these two people published papers and were doing the proof of work research way before Adam Back was.
And Adam Back still lists inventor proof of work on his Twitter Twitter profile. I got to check that. Maybe he removed it. But I don’t know.
Maybe it was applied proof of work with the remailers whereas the other ones were probably a little bit more academic. Was it Wei?
Okay. He calls it inventor of Hashcash right now. He doesn’t hash hash which was for remailers which was so it wasn’t proof of work it was Hashcash which was proof of work sorry but that was for remailers so it had an actual application as opposed to just you know an academic exercise which he was legitimately the inventor of and also he printed t-shirts with RSA on it fought the crypto wars back in the day. Oh yeah. I mean it isn’t Einstein given credit for E=MC² but there was some high school teacher who kind of came up with it like 10 years before took it to the patent office like in Family Guy.
Thomas Hunt: There’s often disagreements on who’s first in crypto. I was just reading again about Curio cards and CryptoPunks and who the first NFT is and how much you know controversy it is. I agree with what he’s doing now. Just change it to Hashcash. Just say you made the project you made and let other people fight about like if it’s the first of this or the first of that. I certainly do hope Adam Back survives it. Although what Vlad was saying, I didn’t want to forget. Vlad think speaking of things we’re jealous of, you had the creator of PGP on your show, Zimmerman, right? Tell us a little bit about that. How’d that go while you’re here?
Vlad Costea: You make me so happy right now because I put so much work into chasing him for many years and then I finally was at the same event as him and I hung out with him for an entire day and he told me that he actually lived in Romania. So this was kind of a nice bridge to connect and talk about stuff. In the 90s after he fought the privacy and cryptography the open source cryptography wars he sort of found refuge in Romania and he was living in a very central place in Bucharest which I know it’s like upstairs from a Ferrari dealership which is very fancy living there from earlier guys missed it we talked about Sammy Hagar getting to join Van Halen because Sammy and Van Halen got their Ferraris repaired at the same dealership and we’re saying that’s and then now comes back.
Can’t believe can’t believe you’re doxing for Zimmerman. Next level. Go on. Where is he? Ferrari. Ferrari. Next level Ferrari dealership. Yeah, you’re right. But that was in the ’90s. So, you can go visit that place. I don’t think it’s even an apartment anymore. Maybe it was used to extend the dealership or whatever. But my point is that I connected with him and I got to interview him. He gave me 20 minutes in the beginning and then I started setting up my stuff and I was super nervous and then he spoke for like 35 I think which I thought was very nice of him. I think he believes that Hal Finney is Satoshi because he’s cryptic about it. He doesn’t say it directly but he does say that he knows Satoshi and the Satoshi that he knows would not like mining to have this impact on the environment.
That was kind of his stick at the time. He was trying to talk to people in Bitcoin and try to figure out ways to diminish the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining. And he was thinking of ways to incentivize miners to use renewable energy. And I did try to tell him that this is what the market does because as the difficulty ramps up, only the most efficient miners who are using the cheapest form of electricity will be able to survive. He’s not buying it. He thinks mining is very dirty and it should not be. And that was part of the conversation. I was also surprised to see that on one hand he’s kind of living in the past because during his keynotes he says the same stories which is weird like to spend so much time so many decades talking about the same thing. But on the other hand, he’s also trying new ideas. Like he had a business with Telephony and he was trying to develop encrypted communications, which is cool. So it’s not like this guy is entirely living in the past. He’s still like a businessman building stuff.
I think you Thomas would have a lot in common with him because the last time I met him two years ago, I think in Frankfurt he was talking about the end of American democracy if Donald Trump wins. And I was like, “Okay, just calm down. We’re in Germany. We’re Europeans here. We don’t really care about your American politics.” But he was like, “No, you should be concerned. It’s really bad.”
I drew no my girlfriend drew a pepe for him and he was very triggered by the existence of this creature. He was like, “Oh, that’s a symbol of the alt-right.” And I was like, you know, sometimes after World War II, people were wearing swastikas and German uniforms, especially in Britain, as a way of showing triumph over evil. So sometimes you need to take symbols and give them a different meaning. And he did not buy that either.
Thomas Hunt: Well, the it’s tough to rehabilitate the rare Pepe. I was just reading about in a book that the AI has written from my tweets, and it was talking about how in 2017, Hunt noticed a major problem with rare Pepe. They were all based on a what had become an alt-right hate symbol, and they were all palleted to green, as well as being Magic the Gathering parodies. Hunt thought if you could do any other kind of card it could make more money. So, but I do agree with him to worry about Trump and things. Still awesome. You got to talk to Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP. Everyone should check out that interview on Vlad’s channel. I remember downloading PGP back in the day from the command line. You had to agree from the command line that you would not export it. There were serious US military controls on the email encrypting and hard drive and you know stupid little folder full of stuff that we encrypted type thing. We never did anything worth encrypting. But it was fun. It was fun to play with real encryption and to get to do it because he allowed us to. And while you’re mentioning the trying to get a clean Bitcoin, Bram Cohen creator of BitTorrent did for a while run his own clean Bitcoin called Chia. I don’t know what ever happened to it. But like you say, Vlad, that’s a common thing it seems to be and kind of a retired or second career type technology success guys. They look at something and and maybe try to make it green. And I don’t know how well that turned out for Bram. I think they made money, but look at the price. That that’s a good way to understand whether or not the project was successful. But it was also harmful for the environment because Chia was using plotting. That’s what they called using your hard drive for mining. And I think it destroyed like a lot of hard drives and SSDs and whatever. People were essentially burning them to be able to mine coins. So, you can’t claim with a straight face that it’s environmentally friendly, especially since you had consumer electronics that were being destroyed on a weekly basis just to be able to keep up. So, I think for a while the SSDs went up just like the RAM is going up nowadays because people were mining Chia.
Ben Arc: Yeah, I feel like the whole proof of work and it’s you know carbon footprint has kind of fallen by the wayside now because we’ve got AI like out competing it and burning you know a hell of a lot more fossil fuels to power it than Bitcoin. So people no longer seem to care about Bitcoin so much.
Although I was going to say that I’ve forgotten all the names and everything, but that upcoming Bitcoin fork Vlad, isn’t that going to double the amount of miners online? Wouldn’t that increase?
Vlad Costea: Yeah, Vlad. Yeah. Isn’t that a Yeah. Bad for the environment fork. Which one? Oh, what’s his name? eCash, baby. E-cash. That’s it.
I mean, it’s going to cannibalize Bitcoin’s mining. If anything, I’m not sure if people are going to mine this one specifically. It’s still shot to 56D. So, it will compete for the same hash rate just like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. And I think there are a couple of others that are not so notable, but they’re still doing it. It’s interesting. So, to I think it’s also bold because it’s easy to 51% attack and I’m not sure like Paul is kind of crazy. He just wants to let the market do whatever it wants with this and he’s not going to enable any protection. Are you sure behind the scenes? Isn’t it important to line up the miners and so forth? The last time we had one of these conspiracies, I hate to be the you know, users manual for Bitcoin conspiracies. But the giant Bitmain company lined up behind Bcash. So on the opening day, I don’t recall the numbers, but they had tons of hash power, right? They weren’t getting hacked. He’s not going to have the same thing. You got to have the backroom deals, right?
No, but Bitcoin Cash also did. So when Bitcoin SV split from Bitcoin Cash, they did a weird timestamping thing so that you could not reorg a certain amount of blocks. Like they sort of tried to make the effort futile.
So this is like a sign of centralization when you’re able to impose certain rules or change the rules of mining. Paul just wants to do a one-to-one copy of Bitcoin that has the drive chains.
I think he’s when when is when is when is eCash going to because I thought it was I thought it already happened to be. I thought it was arranged for September or something. Yes.
It was supposed to launch at block 964,000 which was in August but he realized that the software is not ready for that and he wanted to do more testing. So he created this system where there was the alpha net for a month where you could mine and you could test the software and the amount of coins that you mine you’re going to get 1% of it on launch day for the mainnet. Now it’s in the beta phase where they’re still testing stuff and some people rage quit because they found bugs and they could not fix them on time or whatever. I actually told them it’s better to just launch with a couple of side chains that are ready as opposed to just getting angry because they can’t have like 10 of them working at the same time. So, it’s better to launch with something that works and then just roll them as they become ready. I’m not sure if they listen to me. I think Paul is a very libertarian guy when it comes to this. He’s like, just let the miners decide. Let the market choose what they want to run. But I think from like a marketing point of view, it’s kind of a bad call. But once again, nobody listens to me. So yeah, they’re going to launch on the 31st of October, which is white paper day. It’s going to be the 18th birthday of Bitcoin when also Paul decides to fork Bitcoin.
Thomas Hunt: It all grows up. It all grows up. He’s a big man now. Bitcoin 18. Well, I’m looking forward to see what happens with it. And you know, I’ve always liked the idea of drivechains. I think just I did see that you guys had a falling out or something like you…
Ben Arc: Yeah. No, I got that. I just I’m just I just don’t He just for the for his project, he doesn’t need to be as antagonistic as he is. It would be better with if he was like, well, you know, if you still want to use Lightning, then this thing would actually you could have a side chain which is optimal for it. And sorry, a drive chain which is optimal for it or whatever. I mean, it’s just that his general approach to coms annoyed me. And it feels it feels too much like the Church of Paul, which I didn’t really like. So, I was like, I’m going to skip out. Good luck to you, but I’m going to skip out. They go back to Adam Back. He was a big supporter of drive chains back in the day. So, no Adam Back supports anything. He’s just going to roll like the cool wave.
No, it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t validation. It wasn’t the cool wave at the time. He was outspoken about it. Shield it where he could to say, you know, this is an interesting idea which people should seriously look at.
Well, that’s when they were trying to get it onto Bitcoin, not when they were making their own drivechain coin.
I don’t know. We’ll see. I mean, it’s whatever. If it proves it’s useful then and and we get BIP 300 onto Bitcoin, then that’ll be a great day.
The other thing about Paul is that he doesn’t want to pay for exchange listings or whatever, which have become kind of industry standards at this point. Like he’s not willing to play that game. I kind of respect it, but I think it’s also kind of terrible because it’s possible that on launch day there’s not going to be any major exchange supporting his coin, which means that people will claim them and then not have a place to sell them. I think he’s talking with wallets to integrate e-cash so you can swap it.
I feel like a real a real a real error in the project was taking Satoshi’s coins because if there’s success there then somebody would just fork it and run it without taking Satoshi’s coins and be like the superior version of eCash. I disagree. Honestly, I would take all of them and use them because now the conversation in Bitcoin is that they should be frozen after the quantum upgrade if Satoshi doesn’t move them. And if you’re going to launch a new project that needs money to pay for stuff, I would just go the Ethereum way and create a foundation and just fund the things.
Yeah. That becomes centralized though, then the Bitcoiners aren’t going to like that. I mean, it’ll just it won’t get any support. This is the thing. He’s rolling out new basically a new protocol which doesn’t have any other developers outside of his company.
It’s just Bitcoin with BIP 300, isn’t it? BIP 301. It’s not like a It’s just Bitcoin with a little bit extra icing on top.
Sure, but it’s like Zcash. I think Zcash without the 20% dev tax or whatever, they couldn’t pull off what they did. However, that was a a big thing which was which people would criticize Zcash for was the sort of founders.
Yeah. But they removed the trusted setup which used to be the main reason why people were saying it should not be activated on Bitcoin. They were able to make transactions much smaller. There used to not so cryptography was so complex that you needed a lot of computation and a lot of storage to be able to run this. They were able to crush it down to like 90% of what it was 10 years ago. You can now run that on mobile and they’re trying to make it scale better. So, there’s a lot of effort that they’re putting into this.
Ben Arc: No, Zcash is doing some great work at the moment. You can see it reflected in the price right there. And the Zcash wallet’s dope. And because they kept the founders reward, they still have all that money going out to development or community or advertising. And with the price being up, they have tons more money. So maybe it worked out in the long run.
And also Zooko is OG OG cypherpunk, a bit like Adam Back as well. He was there before Bitcoin. So Zooko was thinking of ways to decentralize DigiCash while he was working for David Chaum in Amsterdam. And I think he’s a pretty solid contender for Satoshi. The only reason why I don’t think he’s Satoshi is that he actually had a job at the time. He was running a company. I don’t think anyone has the energy to Wasn’t he also the first person to say, isn’t he the one who said that, “Oh, yeah, cool idea, but it doesn’t scale.” Wasn’t that Zooko?
Vlad Costea: No, that was James A. Donald, who was the first one to reply? And Zooko basically replied to Satoshi because some people told him on the forum, and I’m sorry I’m drilling derailing the conversation, but it happened in November of 2008. I know because I studied this recently. And what happened was that some people told Satoshi that he’s being too libertarian in his comments and he’s trying to do politics on a forum that’s about cryptography and some people have different opinions. And Zooko told him, “Hey, Satoshi, why don’t you join our other mailing list, which is allowing politics to be discussed.” So that that was Zooko’s first contribution. And then a few months later in January, he became the first person to write a blog post about Bitcoin. And that one was published on bitcoin.org by Satoshi.
What happened afterwards is that Zooko sent an internal email. He was running a company that’s called TOI LFS which is trying to create a way of file sharing which is decentralized. So basically what Satoshi said to his employees was check out Bitcoin is very cool. One of the people who checked out Bitcoin and started mining is Slush the guy who created Slush Pool. So the first person to invent mining pools was actually onboarded by Zooko to Bitcoin. And I think part of the reason why there’s such a large movement in Czech Republic surrounding Bitcoin is the creation of Slush Pool and Trezor.
So Slush sorry slush slush pool came before Trezor. It did. 2010.
Thomas Hunt: Wow. That guy’s sick, man. What a hero.
He was very smart and very early.
Yeah. And you can check out our interview with Slush and Stick, the founders of Trezor and and Slush Pool here on the World Crypto Network. I I’m jealous about that, by the way. Oh, it was a it was an incredible time there in I think we went to Malta. We were at Adam Back’s conference. We delivered him a satellite dish, Dan and I. And then yeah, I got the Adam Back interview, the slush and the stick. And it was really cool. You know, Slush was really nervous and we had to like restart the interview, but I thought he did fine. And then Stick was like afterwards he was like, “I don’t usually do interviews and I don’t like them, but this one was good.” So I was like, “All right, you know, all right.” Made him comfortable.
Ben Arc: Stoked, man. Stick’s like obviously a gazillionaire at a Bitcoin, you know, Star Trek or whatever else. But then he just randomly like contribute on Alan Bits all the time. Just pops in, puts a little PR in. I’m like doesn’t need to do it. It’s just just he just contributes to to projects. So he’s one of the most selfless people out there. the best.
I’m pretty sure he could retire, but he works every day. He goes to the office. He coordinates people in the Trezor office. He still works there. He still goes to the office and he has no reason for it. Like if he wanted, he could just spend the rest of his life somewhere else on an island just enjoying himself or whatever. He chooses this life.
Thomas Hunt: Stefan, you met Zooko?
Stephan Kinsella: I did. We had been sort of you know internet friends but yeah I met him there and he actually he he suggested I come to Lugano next year for the Yeah. Zooko Jackamo Zooko. That’s a whack-a-mole whack-a-mole.
Yep. Two two Zooko. A different Zooko. Different one. But No, he’s cool too. But he’s a knockoff Zooko.
Going back to Adam Back and this whole thing with Paul and eCash. I do kind of worry when we have these engineering run coins or engineering run companies if the engineers can step up and do it. Like Vlad was talking about remind me a little bit of Made Safe. Everyone can go back and look. They raised a lot of money. They never released a product. They talked about it a lot. They seem like really good guys, really technical. A lot of people were into it. The same thing Star Citizen, this major game that has released many versions but never a complete one. And I just I hope you know it doesn’t matter what I say or what Vlad says, but you you can’t underestimate the importance of a good launch when it comes to one of these crazy cryptocurrencies. If they go out there on the first day and there’s nowhere to sell the coins or nobody’s mining it or whatever, you’re going to be judged by that launch. But let’s see if we can keep going. Ben, do you have any more on Adam Back before we move to the next issue? I just like flat calling Zooko team.
Ben Arc: Oh crap me up team. All right, moving on.
If you don’t like team, I can see wish.com. There you go. Reference for the olders. Check out worldcryptonetwork.com. We’ve got 5,091 videos. You can check them out for free at worldcryptonetwork.com.
El Salvador and Stablecoins
42:37
Thomas Hunt: Moving on to issue three. El Salvador shifts to stable coins as Bitcoin payments wane. In a move that’s no surprise to anyone, El Salvador is changing their focus from Bitcoin to stable coins. They’ve got a new company startup called Modv Von who’s going to develop a quote government-backed platform called Civar that will permit Salvadorans to send and hold stable coins including for remittances using Coinbase’s Base network. There’s also been a lot of rumors lately, it’s hard to tell what’s true, that El Salvador continued buying Bitcoin and maybe even continued holding. Stephan Kinsella, what do you think about El Salvador changing their tune and going to stable coins instead of Bitcoin?
Stephan Kinsella: I’m a thumbs down, but I’m not surprised. I’m never surprised by what these governments do. Just like I’m not surprised about Argentina and Milei and everyone is so excited about this guy, you know. Never never trust politicians.
Thomas Hunt: Well, we’re all still waiting here for the moment when we find out how many Bitcoin will fit in a briefcase as the Bitcoin are lost or stolen or misplaced. And I hope the El Salvadorian people I hope it doesn’t happen. But Vlad, what do you think? They’re changing their mind. They’re switching to stable coins. It kind of makes sense, right? We’ve talked about you know how tight their economy is, how the up and down nature of Bitcoin can wreck an individual’s life there. And yet we in the tech sector are all laissez faire saying, “Hey, just ride Bitcoin up and down. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down.” But if you’re betting your dinner or your rent money, it’s a lot more important. Right, Vlad?
Vlad Costea: What I want to say is that first of all, El Salvador is a US dollar country. Like that’s their main currency. The fact that they choose to use the digital dollar is just an addition to the system that they already have. It’s not really such a big deal. Secondly, the adoption in El Salvador was always exaggerated and overblown. I remember like four or five years ago I was invited to go to adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador and I did not go because I got the COVID. But my point is that when I bought my hotel there, I wanted to pay with Bitcoin and the legal tender law implies that they cannot deny that payment or tell you that you should be using something else. But they did. Like I’ve asked the hotel, is there any way I can pay with Bitcoin? and they said, “Well, we have an ATM down the street. You can go use that and bring us dollars.” That that was one of the moments when I realized that what you see on Twitter is not real life, which should be obvious in hindsight, but people were posting pictures and saying that everything is happening there and whatever. And the last bastion of adoption was El Zonte Beach where people were so enthusiastically posting about their Lightning transactions all the time. But I did see this guy John Attack who actually lives there. He moved to El Salvador to enjoy the freedom of that tropical place or something. And he did say that the adoption had gone down. And he speaks with locals who regularly say that they haven’t used Bitcoin in a long time and they prefer to receive the US dollar.
And I also have a friend who runs a payments processing company and he told me that the volumes are abysmal and have always been abysmal for El Salvador. And the ATM operators can also confirm that there is not much activity like the expectation was much higher and the marketing always blew this out of proportions.
So, I think El Salvador did a good job just attracting new capital and attracting rich foreigners to move into their country and possibly attract investors or whatever. As a nation state, they do care about the ratings given to them by the World Bank and the IMF. So, they have to play the game in order to attract other investors who might bring and build businesses in the country. I don’t blame them. It’s just the way of the game. But it is disappointing compared to what our expectations were. But once again, the price is a disappointment, the development is a disappointment, the adoption is a disappointment. Like if you actually want to go down this rabbit hole, it’s very depressing and it feels like we failed. And in the meantime, as Ben’s t-shirt says, Tether because they use the same technology except that it’s not censorship resistant.
So, it fools you into thinking that it’s like Bitcoin, but the price doesn’t go up or down. But in reality, they freeze hundreds of millions of dollars every week from transactions. And Tether is literally printing money. They’re making millions of dollars every week from their business.
And it feels like so to be honest, it is very cypherpunk because the early cypherpunks were thinking of ways to send US dollars to each other without revealing their identity. So, in this way, it’s kind of cool, but on the other hand, it’s not as Bitcoin. It’s not censorship resistant. It’s not really decentralized. You’re going to possibly have your fund seized, which I This is why I tell people to swap their stable coins for something that cannot be confiscated as soon as they receive that payment. But, I don’t know. Most people don’t care. I’ve been to lots of countries where I tried to pay in Bitcoin because it was a Bitcoin conference or whatever. And what I got in return was, well, we don’t accept that, but you can send us USDT on Tron or Ethereum or even Binance. That was a thing for a while. I don’t blame people for wanting this. It’s just that they should be informed.
And I also want to send this message to Bitcoin designers and people complaining that the UX sucks in Bitcoin and that’s why it doesn’t get adopted. In order to use Tether, you actually have to have the gas token. So you don’t just buy the USDT token, you also have to buy the whatever token. It can be Tron, it can be Ethereum, depending on your network. The fact that you have to use a token that pays the transaction fee is actually much worse user experience and can lead to a lot of failed payments or disappointments or you can have your transaction stuck if you’re not paying the right fee. So it the user experience is actually much worse than what you get in Bitcoin. Except that we always find the wrong excuses for our failures. And my closing note is that Tether was built on Bitcoin on Omni Layer and people forget that. And then other Bitcoiners complained that it was taking up like 30% of the block space. So they just said, “Okay, we’ll just move to Ethereum.” And I think that’s what made Ethereum more successful. So thank you for being such good maximalists that you enabled other networks to thrive.
Thomas Hunt: Well, Vlad, retail adoption, I do think, is the hardest thing in Bitcoin. And I’ve had the same experience you’ve had where you go to the business and it’s on the Bitcoin map and you got your coin ready to spend or whatever and they’re like, “Oh, we lost the tablet or the employee who knows how to use it isn’t here and we haven’t used it in 6 months anyway.” And you can’t expect them to, excuse me, to have a whole different system for something they use three times a year or whatever. It doesn’t make any sense for them to have the Bitcoin retail. And we saw it in the Bitcoin bowl when Bitpay tried and they went around and got all the retailers to accept it and they armed them all with tablets and then no one showed up to buy. And now we’ve seen the same thing with El Salvador on a countrywide scale perhaps even with a little bit of force, a little bit of government pressure on there. And it seems like it’s a huge failure as well. We really need, I think, demand on both sides where the retailers want Bitcoin and the people have it and they want to spend it. And I don’t know when we’re going to get there. It seems like a long time. Ben Arc, what do you think about El Salvador changing their mind and switching to stable coins?
Ben Arc: It actually goes a lot deeper than what you’re saying there, Vlad, on it you looking so you need to go and look at you need to go back to the Genius Act. So when the Genius Act came in, Tether has to prove that it’s backed by assets, one of them being T-bills, treasury bills. So effectively, they’re buying US debt. So it’s good for the US, the more Tether which are out there in the world. When you’ve got the US dollar losing its place as a world reserve currency and then you’ve got BRICS and these other nations who are thinking about using different mediums of exchange between countries. The best thing the US can do, which is what they’re doing, is to encourage Tether to be used more widely across the world. It’s the reason in which here in the UK, Nigel Farage had a huge payment from one of the owners of Tether. They want more Tether out there in the world because the more Tether there is in the world, the more US debt gets bought up. So far has $140 billion dollars worth of US debt being bought up by Tether and that’s only going to rise. Now Bukele is pals with Trump and he wants to build that relationship. So I believe hence the t-shirt that there’s actually more at play at the moment. So you know US citizens are going to widely reject any notion of a CBDC of course but this thing which is buying up US debt which is a private company that that’s okay.
So yeah, Tether’s a huge story and just within the Bitcoin industry like Tether have invested a lot of money and they proxy it through VC funds because they can’t be seen directly to be buying up the Bitcoin industry, but they have invested through proxies through the VC companies in lots of companies within Bitcoin and then lots of those companies then support Tether and then start building Tether support into Bitcoin and like on the Lightning network for example and it’s something which I’m not here for you know I’m not here to be the test net for Tether and build their infrastructure I’m here for for Bitcoin however Bitcoin does have a problem and that it’s not sound money sound money the number one property of sound money is stability Bitcoin doesn’t have stability it fluctuates all over the place so if you’re now Salvadorian earning you know x amount of hundreds of dollars a month then you know if if Elon Musk tweets something out and it harms the price of Bitcoin, that really sucks because your children starve and you can’t afford to pay your rent. So when the El Salvador thing happened, my assumption was that using the Bitcoin stack, using the tools we have that they would build a more decentralized stable medium of exchange on Bitcoin because that needs to exist. And there’s, you know, there’s plenty of like examples of it out there in the shitcoin world. There’s MakerDAO there’s all these different examples as of of being able to create kind of stable medium of exchange by having a vault and using arbitrage or whatever to to create it and I think that’s what needs to happen but the problem is the financial incentive is so big for a company like Tether to exist where you centralize it and I agree it’s completely counter to the proposition of Bitcoin which is being able to send a transaction to somebody else with no third party sat in the middle. And now you’re having this this company which is also a terrible UX like you said. So the Strike wallet which they’re implementing in El Salvador. I think it charges like $2 per transaction or something which is just insane for your average El Salvadorian. So there’s still room for Bitcoiners to build a a more decentralized stable medium of exchange or a recipe for building decentralized stable mediums of exchange on Bitcoin. And it is possible with the tools we have. It’s just for some reason nobody does it. But then hopefully somebody will. And then on another point like our Salvadorans ultimately they don’t want to use the US dollar. Like there’s this assumption that the world loves US dollars. They don’t like countries which have issues with their currency. They end up using the US dollar because it keeps its value. But like somewhere like El Salvador, they hate the US. They hate the US broke their country practically. Installed a horrible dictator which then like got rid of their democratically elected leader put in a dictator and then that’s one of the things which went to destroying their country and that’s what when all things went wrong during the red scare period of the 1970s. So there’s this deep resentment for the US. They don’t want to use the USD. They would much prefer to use an El Salvadorian dollar. And if somebody can build an El Salvadorian dollar built on top of Bitcoin with those payment rails with that, you know, like that better UX like you say, it keeps it stability, it could be pegged to price of coffee, US dollar, I don’t know, the Euro, whatever. It could be pegged to a bunch of things. Then I think that will go a long way and it’d be very very popular. But this this Tether kind of co-option, yay, tetherism I call it, in Bitcoin where everybody’s seems to be excited that Tether are looking at Bitcoin and trying to build on Bitcoin and more people are getting access to Tether. It’s just an excuse to buy up US debt and then get the US dollar, keep the US dollar’s position as a world reserve currency and it’s not something I’m for. It’s not something I’m working on. Hence the t-shirt.
Thomas Hunt: Wait, but I heard there’s a speculative attack on the dollar and you’re shorting the dollar if you’re using Tether. No, you’re not shorting the dollar. You’re buying US debt. This is what they want. Like it’s backed by the dollar. It’s the dollar. Like it’s just the US dollar just being just just this, as Bessent said, it’s the new era of dollarization. The stable coins. I think they’re very I think it’s very clever. It’s genius. The Genius Act is legitimately genius, true to its name.
Hey, hey, speaking of the payment systems of some of these restaurants and shops, I was at in Helsinki for this Bitcoin conference last week and the closing event was at a restaurant which had which had a floating sauna and they claimed they took Bitcoin or or Lightning that night and so I I paid for my meal, $20. I happened to have a Wallet of Satoshi which I’ve never used and I had like 50 bucks on it. So I paid for it and it actually worked. I was surprised. And so then I was talking to some guys and I offered to buy them beers because I had free cash, right, that I’m never going to use. So I went to buy them beers and they said, “Oh, our thing stopped working.” So I had to use fiat fiat cash to to buy it. So it worked for one transaction at least. Anyway,
What were they what was the what were the what point of sale were they using? Wasn’t Bits I don’t know. They said they claimed they had their own their own channel, but it just broke down for some reason. So I had to use fiat. So should use LNBits.
It’s usually some guy in the room. Some guy named Joey is backing the whole operation and he’ll just take Lightning for that night and then the next night they’re like, “Oh, no. We don’t take Lightning anymore. That was a for the special party. I I swear we Yeah, it was connected to their their little device on the counter where you pay with a credit card.” So it actually worked the first time. So I was surprised. But is like the stack is amazing. Like you can do these crazy microtransactions, do all these payments on Lightning and like Vlad said like the the Bitcoin payment solutions are good, they work. The problem is that people don’t accept them because it’s not stable and because they have no association. It’s why do they I don’t want Bitcoin. They want something which is culturally relevant to them. So yeah, we need to build stable coins, a recipe for stable coins built on Bitcoin. Then I can build the Welsh pound. Then we can wiggle out of you know the hegemony of the US of the GDP the great British pound and the Bank of England not the Bank of UK the Bank of England and we could become a sovereign nation and Wales can be free.
Well, we like to make fun of credit cards and payments, but we forget how well they work. Even though it’s a system from the 1950s where they used to take an imprint of the front of the card and it’s just a number they write down, it does seem to work every time. And like Ben was saying, I do think if you want to if you’re a country and you have to switch to the USD, it’s kind of like going to the ER. No one wants to go there unless they’re really hurt. And as for the El Salvador Tether plan, I wish they had done this. I think it’s a pretty clever idea, like Ben’s saying, having Tether being forced to buy local El Salvador bonds or securities to back up their economy, then if they can get more and more companies to invest in No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Tether are buying up US Treasury bills. They’re not buying up. So, are Salvadorians using Tether?
I know, but they should make up US Treasury. Salvadorian version of Tether. Ah, yeah.
Salvadorian Tether that buys El Salvadorian bonds that they could support El Salv whatever and so yeah I think that would work and I think because they didn’t do it I think we have to wait now for a larger company like Germany or somebody to do it where they create this the copy of the United States act where they have this Tether backing up your local economies which again remember Ben when we used to be revolutionaries and we were like cryptocurrency rebels and we were going to take down the whole Now we’re backing up company countries. We’re backing up Tether. And then we have the next issue. So let’s keep You’re wearing a suit.
I’m always wearing a suit. It’s free gravitas on TV. You can get them at Goodwill. Moving on to issue four. Trump loses favor with crypto fans who call him out for cashing in.
Political Influence and Crypto
1:01:06
Thomas Hunt: The president’s 2024 campaign leaned into crypto to attract young men, a demographic that is deserting Republicans in the midterms. We’ve talked about this here before over and over again. If you get into bed with a con man, you get conned. They all thought they were going to be the ones they were going to be the ones who got in bed with Donald Trump and didn’t get conned. And then they weren’t. All they got is Ross Freed. The couple of attempts on the Clarity Act and not much more. Mostly derailed by Trump’s memecoin. Ben Arc, what do you think about Trump losing favor with the crypto fans who brought him in and the obvious failure of the right-wing only strategy when around here we’ve been saying the whole time, you’ve got to go left-wing and right-wing. You’ve got to get both of them on board for Bitcoin for their own reasons and then together we advance. And that’s how you get legislation done. I know it takes longer and costs more money. It’s less exciting. But they thought they had it all, Ben. They thought they were the big winners. What happened to our right-wing crypto bros?
Ben Arc: Yeah. I know. You can’t tr you telling me you can’t trust the the politician or the billionaire. But why why can’t I trust the politician or the billionaire? And that’s the first page of their book, too. That’s the first page of like the libertarian handbook. You trust the politician. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Trump did well out of it. I remember at the Nashville conference he was taking photos with people and they posted them all over Twitter and you had to pay like 100 grand or something or 60 grand to have a picture with him. No I think it was 60 grand to have a picture with him and then if you paid like and something you could go to his meal and then people would post these pictures of him shake of them shaking Trump’s hand and I was like you’re a Everyone who had a picture with him I thought you were a But yeah it didn’t really work out for them did it? What a surprise.
Maybe we shouldn’t put our trust in these politicians and we shouldn’t put our trust in these billionaires and we should just build this decentralized stuff where we don’t need them anymore.
And one silver lining to the previous story on our Salvador which I thought was kind of interesting actually was the horrible app which they’re building which is basically WeChat for our Salvador and it has their you know attaches their personal identity to their to to payments and all this other stuff. The thing which I did think was kind of cool was there’ll be polling in there. So they’ll be able to do like daily polling for things in El Salvador to try and get a a handle on what people want which is interesting. This is kind of a more of a direct form of democracy. And I think that a lot of our democratic infrastructure is based on a form of democracy which is you know entirely outdated. Now we have the internet and now we we we we all have this these phones in our pockets where people could vote on just day-to-day stuff. So I thought that was kind of it. So silver lining to the El Salvadorian dictator and the horrible WeChat app is actually you’ll have daily polling. Which to me maybe looked like a way of keeping yourself as dictator and you say well there’s still democracy because people are still you know they’re voting on stuff daily. It’s just maybe I’m here all the time and I’m the main guy. And with Trump yeah he wants to be he wants to be a dictator. He’s he’s he’s jealous of the the the true hardman of this world, which is you know, Putin. But yeah, like when will Bitcoiners learn not to just not to trust them, the politicians and the billionaires?
Thomas Hunt: Well, I’m definitely a fan of liquid democracy and direct democracy, but I’m not sure they’re going to get that in El Salvador. It seems to me a lot that the dictator could just push his thumb on the scale and suddenly win all the polls, Ben. So, I don’t know. How great that one’s going to be. I like I like it in theory, but it’s the same thing like saying I like the Chinese credit scoring app because I could get free video rentals sometimes. Like it’s just not not a very good deal like overall like government control-wise.
And and I do recall at Trump’s first speech to the Bitcoin conference, he said the most telling thing and and again I I feel I can see through the con man from the beginning. And he said something along the lines of he was making fun of of President Biden, of course, you know, belittling him. He said, “I know what to do. You say the Christian thing to the Christian people. You say the Bitcoin thing to the Bitcoin people. You don’t say the Bitcoin thing to the Christian people or the Christian thing to the Bitcoin people.” Like, he was describing the con in front of them. And and I thought for sure that they would like break through and they’d be like, “Wait a minute, we’re being conned.” But no, it it took years and years and years. But I think we’re finally getting there. Stephan Kinsella, what do you think about Donald Trump, his memecoin, and he didn’t get a lot done for being the so-called crypto president?
Stephan Kinsella: I mean, I’ve seen people argue that Jesus was an ancap, and I think Jesus would have been a Bitcoiner, but look, as bad as Trump is, first of all, I I never mind when people get their money taken from them if they’re idiots. It seems to me that’s an efficient you know that’s evolutionary the social Darwinism. So if you get taken in by Trump or someone like that, you know, you probably deserve to be. And as bad as Trump is and as all over the map as he is, I mean just think of the alternative. I mean at least he’s not hostile to Bitcoin. I think the the Democrats would have been. So yeah, he’s not great, but he’s not as hostile as Harris would have been. I think all this nonsense, all this all this fanboy enthusiasm for the Clarity Act and all the other legislation. Yeah, it’s it’s nonsense. I mean what government does is they to distract you from their unwillingness to do something real and substantive which it would be lower capital gains or get rid of capital gains tax, make Bitcoin legal tender, something something real that would actually help it. They do window dressing stuff, you know, just like when they say, “Oh, we’re going to simplify the tax code.” I I don’t want the tax code simplified. Make it as complicated as you want as long as you lower the goddamn rates. And that’s what they don’t want to do. So they they they distract you with with with simplification. So the same thing with the Clarity Act and all these things. I don’t care that it failed. It’s it’s it’s all nonsense. We just need we need rates to be lowered and friction to be lowered. And if it won’t be lowered, it’ll just take longer for it to become adopted. But it will still it will still win. I hope.
Thomas Hunt: I do agree. I don’t think we had very much to win. What they had planned out, freeing Ross, the Clarity Act, maybe the price goes up, we wouldn’t be in that much of a different position if we had all that. Whereas what you’re saying, if we had legal tender or if we had a a more clarified tax code, something simpler, something we could understand, we would actually gain something by that and something that we could gain for a long time. Whereas, even if we had these things, we just have another legislation that seems to protect incumbents like Coinbase, which is not us. We’re not Coinbase. Vlad Costea, what do you think about Donald Trump? He seems to have some of his magic wearing off with his crowd.
Vlad Costea: Well, first of all, I don’t think about Donald Trump, but I don’t know. It was always weird the way that he treated us. Once again, you mentioned how he was explaining his game where he was just being a politician who was open about it. I think this this is like the greatest virtue that Donald Trump ever gave to the world. It’s that he reveals to us how the game is played. And I think that’s also part of the reason why his peers in politics hate him so much because he’s nonchalant. He doesn’t care about maintaining any degree of modicum or whatever it is that you call it when someone is diplomatic and nice and says all the right words. He doesn’t care about anything which exposes how the game works and we get to understand behind the curtains what it was probably like for many years or decades or whatever.
But he did say during or at the end of his speech at the Bitcoin conference, “Good luck with your Bitcoin and crypto and whatever else you’re playing with.” He did say something like this. I’m paraphrasing. I’m not sure if if it’s the exact quote, but he did sort of make us sound like we’re just children playing with stupid toys and he’s just trying to get everyone’s votes.
And yeah, I mean, well, and that was the speech where he was demanding their money. That was the speech where he’s like, “Crypto people, give me your money. Let me run with your money.” And like if you listen to the same speech once again, you’re going to realize that he opened it by saying what happened in Israel and then he spent a lot of time talking about stuff which is completely unrelated to his role at that conference. Also, if you listen to the speech by what’s his name? Robert Kennedy RFK Jr.
He tried to kiss our asses for like 30 minutes and he spoke like he’s on a Bitcoin podcast and talked about being orange pilled and falling down the rabbit hole and appointing James Lopp to you don’t have a ministry of defense. I think it’s defense secretary or something. But my point is that it was too much. It was so sugarcoated or orangecoated or whatever you want to call it. And then Trump came and he showed us that he doesn’t care about any of this. But people cheered for him anyway. I think even Elon Musk fell for the illusion that he’s able to buy his president. And he believed that he’s going to have someone that he can manipulate and control. And then he got his ass kicked and he got kicked out from the White House. Like literally, he had a black eye when he was sort of stepping back from his DOGE initiative.
So, if Elon Musk cannot pull this off with all the resources and the money that he has, what makes David Bailey think that he can or what’s the name of the guy from MicroStrategy? I think he was the one that sort of sealed the deal for the entire industry. And the Whalevast wins, they’re also playing along with this. And it’s just weird. It’s a phase. I think even Mark Zuckerberg is trying to play along and I I I think his presidency will end and everything will reset to whatever it was before. I’m not even sure if it it will reset to the Biden era, maybe to the Obama Times or whatever, but he will be forgotten, which is possibly his biggest concern. He’s doing his best. He said he’s running for the legacy or whatever. He started with a promising administration where he put together like the smartest people in the conservative camp. He slowly but surely phased them all out. Like even his biggest supporters don’t support him anymore. And it’s it’s just weird at this point.
I I think he revealed how the game works much better than other presidents before him. And I’m not going to get political here. This is about Bitcoin.
I I just hope it it’s weird, right? I’m going to a conference next week in Singapore and the headliner is Eric Trump and I’m like, who’s this guy? What did he ever do for this space? Did he ever accomplish anything? Did he like of course he co-founded the World Liberty Financial Ponzi? And that’s sort of a milk that they’re a cow that they’re milking dry. But it’s weird. It’s like we have to also please the Trump family to whatever. I’m also aware of someone who was trying to get some favors from Trump like forgiving of his if I say it specifically, it’s going to single out the individual. But what I know is that when what I can see is that someone was told that in order to receive some legal favors like a pardon or whatever from Trump, he’s going to have to buy some shares or tokens or whatever from World Liberty Financial. So yeah, that worked that worked for the the Bitfinex guy. Was it Bitfinex guy?
I’m not gonna confirm or deny.
What’s his name? Thomas, but I don’t think it was Bitfinex. By Justin Lau or bought a bunch of the coins or just that was the other guy that was the other guy that was the was it Bitfinex or Binance or orance as well bought a lot of coins got a pardon got a pardon he’s from Bitmax back door back door pardons.
But I do agree Vlad if anything Trump’s shown us with his nihilism with his nothingness and his his utter belief in nothing people are always saying oh the the enemy of my enemy is my friend or as they learned in Dick Tracy, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy. It doesn’t mean anything if Trump’s on your side or against your side. He’s always on his own side. And I think people are starting to realize that and are seeing a little bit of it. And and again, what can you do with a nihilist? What can you trade with them? What can you negotiate? They believe in nothing, Lebowski. They believe in nothing. But we’re running.
Well, he is what you call in the US a lame duck. So, he’s not gonna get reelected. His movement will probably die as soon as he leaves office. And once again, this is the thing that hurts someone like him the most because he was hoping he’s going to have a huge impact and his legacy will live on. He was hoping he was going to be the next Ronald Reagan who sort of changed or reshaped the entire party around him. But I think the opposite is going to happen because political parties have to adapt. And I don’t think his ideas or approach were successful at anything, which means the party will have to distance itself from Donald Trump. So, I I look forward to seeing where they’re heading with this. I honestly hope that like this is just my rant about modern or future politics. We usually have a right left dichotomy which has worked but is very 19th century rooted in the philosophers of a time that we don’t live in anymore. I think the next regimes will be much more focused on data because there are so much data about our behavior and there are so many ideologies that assume that you don’t know anything about individuals. So you assume like some large ideas about what you should do about people you know nothing about. But now we’re going to have a world where we know a lot about what people do and you can sort of generalize using data. So I think maybe that we’re going to head into that direction where we have data about people and we make politics according to that data.
Thomas Hunt: Well that’s an incredibly optimistic technology-driven belief there Vlad. I hope it comes true. We have seen in the past in the United States that certainly if the Republicans take over, it swings back to the Democrats at the midterms. If the Democrats take over, it swings back to the Republicans. The country in a way seems to self-regulate. So hopefully this will happen at the midterms and they will be seated in January. We’ll have to see what happens. But we’re running out of time. Just wanted to say briefly, it’s not a sponsorship. They didn’t give us any money, but check out removepaywall.com. Like three or four of the articles this week I could not read because they bounced up a paywall. I just want to read one article. I don’t want to subscribe, right? I’m just in and out. Removepaywall.com has a couple of mirrors, internet archive type things that will get you to read the article you want to read. So check out remove paywall. Also we’re out of time, so let’s see. Let’s go to predictions or story of the week. Stephan Kinsella, are you ready with a prediction or a story week or just tell us what you’ve been up to lately? What you’ve got coming up? Go ahead.
Stephan Kinsella: Okay. Prediction. The Austrians will continue to become more of pro Bitcoin. You know, in the beginning, the Austrian economics, I’m talking about mainly the the Misesians, the Rothbardians, the Mises, the two types. Some of them were skeptical in the beginning of Bitcoin because they they said it violated the regression theorem. It wasn’t gold. It wasn’t physical. And those seem to have been winnowed out over time except for my good friend Guido Hülsmann who gave a speech in Turkey two weeks ago when I was there for the Property and Freedom Society conference and he argued that he explained why he viewed that it’s impossible for Bitcoin to ever become money. So we shall see if if Guido is a lone voice in the wilderness or if he turns out to be right. But I have a feeling that he’s a minority voice.
Thomas Hunt: Well, I know we’d love to have them on board. It seems like they should have been with us for a while. And definitely check out the archives here on the World Crypto Network. Our friend Max Hillbrand went to many libertarian conventions, the Mises Convention and others, and I think spoke with them philosophically about Bitcoin. So hopefully his work helped convince them as well.
Thanks, Stefan. Vlad Costea, do you have a prediction or a story of the week or what you’ve been up to? Go ahead, Vlad.
Vlad Costea: I I I don’t have any specific prediction except that we’re in October. So supposedly the prices will go up and up only. We can only hope for the best. Otherwise, we’re screwed once again. But we got to hope for the best.
My story of the week is that I will be releasing a new magazine which is called Bitcoin Takeover forks with an exclamation point. And it explores every upgrade that Bitcoin has done. Every UTXO fork that Bitcoin has. Actually, not each one of them because there’s a lot of junk there from 2017. Like nobody tracks Bitcoin Diamond anymore or whatever. It was just a thing of etera. But the major ones that are still out there like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, the eCash that was created by the creator of Bitcoin Cash, Amaury, there’s also Bitcoin Gold which tried to do mining without ASIC. I mean that there are some lessons to be learned from these and also the the code-based forks because we have Litecoin, we have Dogecoin, we have Namecoin, we have what else? Zcash, Dash, Decred. They’re still around. They’re still being developed to some degree and they are all forks of the code that Satoshi gave us. Namecoin was actually sort of supported from afar by Satoshi. He was encouraging people to merge mine it. So, it’s interesting and I’m going to have all of them in one magazine which I think is going to have 120 plus pages and I hope people will like it. I will make it free for people to read. But if you want like a hard copy, I’m going to bring them I think to Amsterdam next month in November. And also Bitfest, which is NDI’s event. If you guys are gonna be there, I’ll print some magazine copies for that and bring it to you guys.
Thomas Hunt: That’s very cool, Vlad. It sounds like a great magazine and a great history of Bitcoin forks. Looking forward to it. Ben Arc, do you have a prediction or a story of the week or what you’re up to? Go ahead, Ben.
Ben Arc: Um yeah, Bitfest. Looking forward. Oh, can you enable sharing? I want to get Bitfest up there. This will be a great conference. So, if you enabled it.
Yeah. Cool.
Yeah. So, we have Bitfest which is a conference in Manchester, which is going to be our new capital in the UK, with Andy Bernham. But they did an absolutely phenomenal conference last year. Everyone who came away from the conference. They said it felt like a proper Bitcoin conference with Bitcoiners. There’s my ATM. There’s the Fossa. Nice. Thomas, there you were. Hey, there’s me.
There was you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That it’s a proper Bitcoin conference and it’s not a corporate conference. And yeah, it’s just made by great Bitcoiners and that’s in Manchester in the UK and that’s on the 19th 22nd of November. Vlad’s going to be coming, which is great news. And there is also a Nostr day at Bitfest which I’m really looking forward to. There’s a Nostr hackathon which we’re going to be involved in with LNBits. Super like really looking forward to. It’s one of the only conferences I’m going to this year because it’s great.
And then couple of things I’ve been working on between now and the last time I was on the show did finally after trying for many years. I managed to get Bitcoin payments into QuakeJS, which is pretty sick. So, you can play Quake. I have no idea how to um, yeah, I need to make a better looking URL, but you can you can create a Quake game, a QuakeJS game. You can pick a map. And then you can charge so you get five sat five lives for 100 sats. And then you can actually put in a creator fee as well. So you could charge 5% and then have that go to your Lightning address. So I can put my Lightning address here.
And oh, which was it this one here? And then if you click on it, it’ll load up the assets for the arena. Seems to be loading pretty quick. So I might actually demo this in a second if it loads. Whether or not it kills my internet. Oh, I think it killed my internet.
Can you still hear me? We can still hear you, Ben.
But he might not be able to hear us. Go ahead, Ben. Anymore?
Looks like Ben flew too close to the sun there. I’m not sure if we can get his share off the screen or not. All right, so thanks so much, Ben. Hopefully we’ll be back. We do have a sad remembrance today. Although I am many months late on this. I’m about 5 months late. I acknowledge my lateness.
In Memory of Ugly Old Goat
1:24:12
Thomas Hunt: But I just heard over the weekend that the Ugly Old Goat Conrad Jules Braun had passed away. He was a great man. He talked about Bitcoin. He promoted it at his own conferences. He spent his own money to allow people to speak about Bitcoin. Then he did a great job recording it and put it on the internet. It’s really sad. He was a big fan of Mad Bitcoins. He really liked what I did with the show and he hosted me on the Bitcoin cruise. I got to go down to Ensenada and go to his house and meet his wife and his family. And Ugly Old Goat was just a great guy, a big fan of Bitcoin, a big fan of econ, you know, economy and silver coins and gold coins. And we have just a really brief remembrance of Ugly Old Goat that the computer put together. Here’s just a three-minute video remembering our friend Ugly Old Goat.
[Music]
Guys, it’s not about me. It’s not about the Ugly Old Goat. It’s really about you. That I I define where we are right now. The next big move
[Music]
Build a builder builder sound My knee
[Music]
Sound. Huddle. Huddle. Huddle. Save. Save save. Build a builder. Build a sound.
[Music]
Well, I thought that was that was really nice. It’s a nice remembrance of our friend Ugly Old Goat. Big supporter of Bitcoin, big supporter of Mad Bitcoins on this show. Vlad, did you have any interactions with Goat or any remembrances of him maybe online or sort of put me on the spot here?
Vlad Costea: I I had to look it up. We were following each other on Twitter. I did exchange, according to Grok, a bunch of tweets with him about arbitrary data. Sort of sucks that he didn’t live to see what happened to the Knots Fork BIP 110.
Thomas Hunt: Yeah, there’s a lot more in this biography that I don’t feel I have time to read. I’d like to do a separate show about Ugly Old Goat. I’ve talked to Juan G online. We’re hoping to get it together and just to have some more remembrances of him. And like Vlad said, part of his the end of his life was spent in that I think very unrewarding knots versus spam debate. That whole thing. It didn’t seem like it went well for him. One of his last tweets was I am blocked by both sides. So I think it was kind of a sad ending to a person who really I think built a lot of Bitcoin community. He hosted a lot of people who might not have gotten a chance to speak and then he recorded them and put them online forever. If you like or don’t like their speeches, it’s still it’s amazing an accomplishment. Are you going to are you going to put together a biography for him? Are you that’d be a great biography? He was a great dude and he was like heavily involved in Bitcoin and kind of woven in woven into the when Bitcoin was was weird and and yeah, he’s a he’s a good dude. I mean, I chatted to him a few times on the show and he was just all out just a nice fella and he supported a lot of Bitcoiners and he was also just sort of very wise as well when it came to to Bitcoin, but yeah, he was a good dude. It was sad to see him go and quite sudden as well.
Ben Arc: Yeah, I think well, he was he was about 76, so it’s always hard when you’re in the 70s. We do have a little bit more biography available right here at there’s a long address but it talks about how he was on my show there doing the first computer interview. His first computer he said was an electric typewriter the IBM with the multiball and there’s a little bit we’ll lose our our copyright unless I can mute. Oh They took away the ability to mute YouTube videos, but we did a great on a boat parody video here. You can see where is Ugly?
Didn’t he used to organize He used to organize the He used to organize a the cruise, didn’t he? Yeah, he did the the Bitcoin cruise. We got to go once to Mexico. Here we go. We’ve got it without the sound so we cannot get flagged. But yeah, I had a really fun time goofing around on a boat thanks to Ugly. Never been on a cruise ship before, so didn’t know what to do. Figure you have to shoot this on a boat video. There’s ugly right there, but then it cut away trying to get him on the thing. But, there we are goofing around.
They were the good old they were the good old days, man. Having a good time. Weird. Mad Bitcoins and Ugly Old Goat. So, yeah. God bless.
Then he had a we interviewed him on our poolside interviews in Las Vegas from Tones conference. Dan was there. We talked to him about yacht chain and our our fire offering where we’re going to light all the yachts on fire. And like Ben said, he launched the working man Bitcoin cruise. He had another conference later in Ensenada. He paid for these conferences all himself. I don’t think he made any money. There’s me at the conference. And it was really fun to go and I wish I could have gone to more of them. It was kind of tough. It was during the COVID times.
He was also he was also legit like lowkey an amazing trader too. Like he was able to work up a pretty big stack from Yeah, he was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephan Kinsella: By the way, Thomas, notice not to get political again, but twice in this episode we’ve talked about copyright something related to that. Your your paywall thing and also your your concern that your your video you ordered to play would would be violate YouTube’s policies and all that’s of course because of and driven by copyright. So we live in a world permeated with intellectual property and we’re just so used to it but it’s just it’s everywhere. It’s like a it’s like the sixth sense I see IP everywhere.
Thomas Hunt: It is sad to see how quickly YouTube was so free in the beginning. It was just people talking to each other and things like that. But now when I watch the serious YouTubers, I don’t I don’t care that much about my ads. I don’t even think they’re turned on. But the serious ones, they won’t say the words and I’m going to get as flagged if I say the words, but they won’t say like sex or suicide or like a lot of other very common English words.
Isn’t it like non-lifeing or something?
Yeah. They’ll bleep it. They’ll bleep it and they’ll they’ll blur it on the screen even. They’re afraid. And we’re adults here. This is an adult show where they won’t even say they won’t even say Dr. UGS. I mean, it’s crazy the things you can’t say now.
And and and it’s the strangest thing because we we’ve seen it as as a medium. I mean, I was here when this was the free place. This was the not the TV. And you go on TV, they can’t say curse words. They can’t talk about hot topics, whatever. People on YouTube could. And then now all the professional people are really hiding from this. They won’t say the word. It’s almost it’s it’s almost like it’s almost it’s it’s almost like we we as the users need to take the internet back with all these cryptographic tools and protocols which we’ve been building and yeah we will I think we do and I think that’s a good note to end on one we can all agree and certainly you know shout out to Ugly Old Goat it was great to have him on the show he’s a great guy and thanks to Vlad and Stephan and Ben for joining us today but oh we’re out of time Until next time. Bye-bye.
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