6102 Bitcoin

Hi and welcome to the Stefan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today my guest is sixty one o two Bitcoin. So if you're on Twitter or if you've seen some of his resources around the place, sixty one o two Bitcoin dot com or Bitcoin dash only dot com, he's known for his contributions in terms of resources and how-to sites and infographics. So first a word for the sponsors of the show, and I have an announcement. I've got a new lead sponsor, it's Swan Bitcoin. So those of you who know I am an advisor and also hold a small equity stake with Swan. So if you are in the US, you should absolutely get your auto stacking on with Swan. It's so simple, even a no-coiner could do it. Step one is autofund USD from your bank account. Two, auto-stack the Bitcoin, and three, auto-withdraw your Bitcoin to your cold storage. Swan doesn't charge withdrawal fees. They want you to follow Bitcoin best practices and hold your own keys. Swann crushes Coinbase's fees for recurring buyers by up to eighty percent and beats Cash App's fees by up to fifty-seven percent. So set and forget, enjoy your life, just Swann and chill. Go to swanbitcoin.com/livera to start auto-stacking with Swann today. Be sure to use my ref link swanbitcoin.com/livera to get ten dollars worth of BTC dropped into your account when you start stacking with Swann. Next up is a really fascinating new app called Bitcoin Lessons, and you can find that at bitcoinlessons dot org or on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. And essentially, it's like Duolingo, teaching people in bite-sized pieces with little quizzes, and it can be done just in little five-minute intervals, and it's a way that you can help get your new coiner or pre-coiner friends to learn a little bit more about Bitcoin. The fundamental reality is that most don't understand money, so then they can't understand how Bitcoin is better. So I've had a couple of Quick look through some of the lessons, it's all Bitcoin only, obviously, and it's been crafted in a way to help a newcomer learn about Bitcoin. So make sure you recommend this to your friends, it's at bitcoinlessons dot org, and you can find it on Google Play and Apple App Store. Next is Unchained Capital, a Bitcoin financial services company, and you know I'm a big fan of these guys, they really respect the not your keys, not your coins nature of Bitcoin. And so with Unchained, you can set up a multi-signature vault with two of three. And you can use Trezor and Ledger, it's a web interface, it's really easy to set up, and you can then geographically separate your keys. So the unchain guys have a saying, "Friends don't let friends sell Bitcoin." If you need liquidity, if you need to pay some expense, you can get US dollars without selling your Bitcoin by putting up Bitcoin as collateral. So all Bitcoin is stored on chain in a dedicated multisig address, and the Bitcoin is never rehypothecated. You still hold one of three keys in that scenario. For Caravan, open source multi- Multisig coordinator, check out my recent episode with Parker and Buck from the team, go and learn more at unchained dash capital dot com. Next up is CipherSafe, producing the CipherWheel steel backup product. So if you've got a hardware wallet, are you just keeping it on that piece of paper? Well, make sure your bip thirty nine seed, the twelve or twenty four words, is backed up in a way that's fireproof, waterproof, rustproof, petproof, and tamper evident. The CipherWheel comes in a wheel shape, it masks the words of your seed, and it You've got a padlock tamper evidence seal, so make sure that if something happens to you, that your loved ones can still get access to your bitcoins. Go and order yours at ciphersafe dot io. Here's the interview. 6102, welcome to the show. Stephan, it's so,

I'm so happy to be here. Huge fan of the podcast.

Wow, that's awesome, thank you. just a second there, I mean, your voice sounds pretty familiar to me. Are you sure you're not somebody else I know? I don't think we've ever met before. damn, okay. Look, I think my listeners are very interested to hear from you because, this is the first time they've, they've ever heard the voice of, sixty-one o-- Okay, now we're gonna drop the act now. I wanted sixty-one o two to appear on the show, and sixty-one o two obviously didn't wanna dox his voice, and so we enlisted the help of our good friend Matt Odell. So thank you, Matt, 6102.

It's quite the honor. Hopefully this, hopefully this goes well. I'm a huge fan of 6102 and his work, so, it really is an honor to, to be here and, and read his words.

Awesome. So just for the listeners, what we've done basically, I have- Sent some questions through to sixty one o two. He's answered in text format and Matt is now gonna read those answers. So we're gonna proceed with the interview now. So, the first question for sixty one o two. So why sixty one o two as your name? Tell us about the executive order and why you

chose this. Executive order sixty one o two was a presidential directive which forbade the hoarding of gold in the United States. Citizens were instructed to deliver their gold to the Federal Reserve within a month of signing of the order in April nineteen thirty-three. 3. Violating the order carried a punishment of ten years in prison, ten thousand dollar fine or both. The ten thousand dollar fine is equivalent to two hundred k today due to inflation. This won't be anything new for the people who have heard about this before, but for those listeners who are hearing about this for the first time, I think it'll be quite surprising. Less than a hundred years ago, in the United States of America, it was illegal to hoard gold. It was illegal to have a shiny rock in your home. 6102 finds that fact astonishing. To me, Executive Order 6102 clearly marks the start of the end of the dollar as a global reserve currency, and maybe even the end of fiat. With the signing of this order and the seizing of this physical gold, it was clear that fiat money had failed to compete in a free market against gold. Coercion was required to force people to abandon good money, gold, in favor of bad money, fiat. Historically, fiat money has been backed by gold. You could take a one dollar bill to a bank and redeem it for physical gold equal to the amount written on the promissory note. Interestingly, many people still mistakenly believe that it is backed by gold today, which isn't surprising given that many fiat currencies carry misinformation. For example, the British ten pound sterling note carries a message signed by the governor of the Bank of England which states, "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds." Originally This meant you could exchange a note for ten pounds weight of gold. Not today. The adoption of gold certificates or gold IOUs was quite natural and occurred voluntarily because banks had a good track record of honoring the claims, and physical gold was and remains inconvenient for a number of reasons. That said, physical gold remained superior for many people for long term savings, and they held gold either on property they owned or in bank deposit boxes. In the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve was required to have forty percent gold backing. The limit-- this limited the amount of credit creation that was possible, and this was thought at the time, and in many Keynesian circles today, to have been stalling recovery in two ways. Firstly, because the government couldn't create credit and effectively print its way out of trouble, like we are seeing now. The second reason is that people were storing value in gold rather than investing into companies, which in turn was restricting economic growth and suppressing employment rates. By banning the hoarding of gold, the government could kill two birds with one stone. They could increase the money supply and force investment into pro productive goods.

I mentioned earlier that Executive Order sixty one o two marked the failure of fiat because of coercion was required to persuade gold holders to sell for fiat, but it was also a clear demonstration of a serious weakness of gold. There are obvious disadvantages of gold compared to Bitcoin. It's hard to split into small units, it is hard for the layman to verify its authenticity, it is physical, heavy, and requires significant logistical work. to transport long distances. But at the time of Executive Order sixty one o two, its biggest weakness was made clear, that through a combination of the aforementioned weaknesses, it is unsuitable for widespread use under a hostile regulatory regime. Good money should be useful despite its use being outlawed. Gold isn't. Schven Sniders has written a great article called "Stop Calling for a Free Market in Money." Stefan's gonna link to it in the show notes. The name 6102 reminds me that it is critical to ensure that Bitcoin becomes usable even in a hostile environment. Bitcoin has properties which I believe can make coercion ineffective, and therefore a repeat of Executive Order 6102 with Bitcoin is unlikely.

Were you already into Austrian economics and libertarianism before Bitcoin?

This dude's epic. Okay. Until I discovered Bitcoin, I had no idea that Austrian economics existed. The study of money and markets always seemed like a waste of time to me prior to discovering Bitcoin. Having watched the global financial system edge close to collapse in 2008, it seemed to me that economists were generally an obstacle to progress. It was refreshing to discover Austrian economics through Bitcoin and re- You realize that economics is a fascinating field when you start from the correct axioms and build up from there in a praxeological manner. He means that. There you go. Fundamentally, Austrian economics is about people and how they act. I think anyone who thinks poorly of economics has simply not encountered Austrian economics. Similarly, I only understood libertarianism after discovering Bitcoin. Previously, I believed that individuals acting in their own best interest was a long-winded way of describing someone as selfish. I thought that if everyone acted in this self-interest manner, there would be significantly more hardship in the world than if everyone worked together for a collective goal, for the collective good. In discovering Bitcoin, I interacted with a vast range of individuals with experiences and opinions vastly different to my own. This eventually led to the realization that no collective goal can ever exist because there is no universal moral code, no universal agreement between what is good and what is bad. That coordinating a group of people to act against their own self-interest requires a violation of their liberty which cannot be justified. That the best outcome is reached where individuals are free to take actions to satisfy their own needs, provided they don't impede on the ability of others to do the same. That an individual knows what they need better than any authority or bureaucracy ever could. Libertarianism also opened my eyes to the fact that it's logically inconsistent to seize private property through the use of force, even if the intention is to then distribute that property to other people. Bitcoin makes this ideology practically meaningful because public key cryptography gives the individual a huge defensive advantage against any attacker. Tell us about your different projects and why you started them. Editor's note, I fucking love his projects. Here we go. I make educational material to help people better understand Bitcoin and use Bitcoin in more secure and private ways. I do this to aid with my own understanding, to help other people fast-track their learning, and ultimately to make Bitcoin harder to sixty-one-o-two. I have a number of projects which I try to juggle, which are listed on my website, sixty one o two bitcoin dot com forward slash projects. Let's start with Bitcoin only. In January twenty nineteen, I built a Bitcoin Dash only dot com. To list projects that exclusively support Bitcoin. I remember when that launched. Okay, since then, the project has grown significantly and now tracks a wide range of Bitcoin tools, products, events, meetups, wallets, hardware, podcasts, stores, conferences, and more. People submit suggestions for projects to add and I evaluate whether the project is actually Bitcoin only. This has worked very well and there are now sixteen contributors. Some people take submissions and turn them into pull requests so that I can quickly merge the branch, which speeds up everything significantly. Shout out to partis79 for their help in this regard. I don't know who they are, but they appeared one day, made a pull request, which closed an issue, and have been helping ever since. This project is open source, licensed under the MIT license, meaning anyone is free to fork the project and make their own version. Just don't make it Litecoin, Litecoin only. Some people forked the project for translations or to create their own self-hosted version to share with friends and family, which is great because they can easily push useful changes upstream to the Bitcoin Dash only repository. Now let's move to Bitcoin Dash Intro Dot Com. It's a simple onboarding guide which newcomers can work through to develop their understanding of Bitcoin whilst discovering how easy it is to use. It is founded on a number of guiding principles. First is that starting simply And improving is better than not starting at all. Often I find that people are reluctant to start because they have information overload. Each time they're about to use a tool, they hear that there is some additional thing to consider from a security, privacy perspective. This frequently means that people don't bother and just leave their Bitcoin on an exchange. The idea behind Bitcoin Dash Intro Dot Com is that it guides you step by step, starting simple so that you actually do start. The second principle is that it's more engaging to use tools before reading a detailed explanation. Often Bitcoin guides give a detailed explanation of what Bitcoin is and why it is needed before people even have an opportunity to just try it out. With Bitcoin Dash Intro dot com, you're encouraged to get a wallet and get some Bitcoin first so you can see the magic. Then, once you have hooked in, we point you to some excellent resources to learn why Bitcoin is useful. Then he gives shouts out, shout outs to Wiz, VJ, and Alex Fedsky. Then, having used Bitcoin and started to understand why Bitcoin is useful, we finally get into what Bitcoin is, with a superb eight hundred word intro by Greg Walker, among, amongst other things. I won't go through the full guide, but to summarize, you're then guided through improving your seed backups, running a node, attending a meetup, improving your privacy, and using Lightning. The third principle is to always keep control of your Bitcoin using non-custodial tools. New users won't understand the extreme ownership which Bitcoin enables, so I think it's important to show them from this, from the outset, rather than onboarding them into a custodial solution which misses the whole point of Bitcoin. Elimination of trusted third parties. The final principle is to stay focused and avoid scams, use Bitcoin only tools and services. Again, new users won't understand why Bitcoin is unique and may fail for the altcoin narratives if exposed to them before they have a deep understanding of Bitcoin. The easiest way to avoid this is to simply point them to Bitcoin only tools so they don't get exposed to the altcoin side of things. An alternate approach could be to link to a robust explanation as to why newcomers should ignore altcoins. If anyone has a suggestion, make a poll request. So we've gone over Bitcoin Dash only, Bitcoin Dash intro, Bitcoin Dash intro is really fucking dope. It's like a, it's like a checklist format, I fucking love it. Send so many people there. Okay, that was Matt's editorial. Come back in. Bitcoin privacy. I think it's incredibly important to help people improve their privacy when using Bitcoin. It benefits everyone if a significant portion of Bitcoin use is private. Conversely, it would affect everyone negatively if the vast majority of Bitcoin use was not private, because it would be far easier to sixty, oh, you spelled it wrong, sixty one o two. I think that the easiest thing that people can do to improve their privacy is to look to avoid address reuse, avoid posting transaction information publicly, and to switch to a Bitcoin wallet that prioritizes privacy over convenience. Avoiding address use is-reuse is an absolute no-brainer. It costs nothing to generate new addresses and makes a huge difference for privacy. The good news is that almost all wallets will generate a new address each time you hit receive, so in normal use, people probably won't accidentally reuse addresses. The one time where people do reuse addresses frequently is in receiving donations. For example, by putting an address in their Twitter bio or on their website, these people should re-research PayNems or set up a BTC Pay server donations page. Coinjoin is a powerful tool which Bitcoin privacy enthusiasts have been working to make mainstream for some time now. The three implementations are Joinmarket, Wasabi, and Whirlpool. I've done some work to help users understand both Wasabi and Whirlpool, as well as catalog all other Coinjoin work That has been done over the years in the form of a research repository on my GitHub. Timing analysis was something that I noticed no wallets had considered, so I made a Python script which takes signed transactions and broadcasts them at random times. Information for that can be found at txcast dot org. All things Bitcoin privacy related can be found on btcprivacy dot org, which hopefully will be expanded in the near future.

What are your favorite privacy tools?

Within Bitcoin, I'm a big supporter of the Samurai Wallet stack. I use Samurai Wallet on my Android phone, connected via Tor to my Ronin Dojo full node, which lets me use, send, and receive Bitcoin with confidence. There are a number of innovative privacy features which make using Bitcoin in a private matter a slick and pretty seamless experience. I think Whirlpool is a great innovation which lets Samurai Wallet users coinjoin with ease. It's important that users run their own node, which is made easy by the Ronin Dojo project. And I- I think it's important that users are encouraged down this path. JoinMarket is, by all accounts, a superb project which uses a market-based approach to drive the fees down really low. Chris Belcher and Adam Gibson have quietly been building this powerful tool, but because it has historically been more difficult to set up than the aforementioned projects, it hasn't seen widespread adoption. My mission for this year is to get to grips with JoinMarket. More generally, I think Tor and Linux are privacy tools which everyone should learn to use. Connecting directly to a Tor hidden service provides a reasonable level of network level anonymity, and using the web browser is incredibly easy. There are some occasions, for example, if you need to use a block explorer, where I think everyone should be encouraged to use Tor, even if they don't use it for anything else, or your own block explorer. He didn't say that, but he meant it. Linux is vital if you are interested in remaining private online. If you use OSX or Windows, then there is significant data leak and you are far more susceptible to common malware.

What's your view on Bitcoin blockchain taint? Does it exist and in what sense does it exist?

Bitcoin utxos are sometimes described as tainted, for example, if there are known proceeds of a crime. But what does this practically mean for a Bitcoin user? Should they be concerned about inadvertently accepting tainted Bitcoin? I don't think so. Taint can be objectively measured, and it is completely subjective. Taint can't be objectively measured, it's completely subjective. It relies upon heuristics which are becoming increasingly invalidated. Taint isn't an intrinsic property of a UTXO, unlike, for example, the value of the UTXO in Satoshi's. It is an extrinsic property imposed on the UTXO by the analyst. Nevertheless, some businesses attempt to try and track Taint in a desperate and misguided effort to be seen to be taking steps to comply with regulations. I have produced infographics, which Stefan will link in the show notes, to explain why none of these methods are viable, which you can find on my website or in the show notes. There you go. The key thing is to realize is that exchanges are only using these models because chain analysis companies present them as an easy way to avoid regulatory issues and overstate their usefulness in order to generate sales.

What are your thoughts on the hopes for the non-KYC Bitcoin economy?

Bitcoin is a tool. Being technologists or economists, we can easily forget this. Bitcoin isn't in itself gonna change the world. It's the people using Bitcoin who will change the world. Originally, Bitcoin was promoted as a way of transferring value in a trustless manner, and the scarcity was a useful extra feature which let us experiment with the first example of a truly limited money supply. It seems that increasingly, people are only interested in the potential for Bitcoin to increase in value relative to the dollar, which it was designed to obviate. This ignores that fact that for the buying power of Bitcoin to be important, you need to actually eventually exchange it for goods or services, or if you intend to pass the Bitcoin onto your children, that they will have to exchange it for goods and service. As a result of this number go up obsession, there has been an explosion of on ramps, which in requiring KYC are anti ethical to Bitcoin. Those who insist that in order to acquire five dollars worth of bitcoin you must submit photos of yourself and your passport to a trusted third party are in an ideological sense diametrically opposed to the ideology of the cypherpunks who created bitcoin KYC creep has infected Bitcoin businesses because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is a database. When you buy Bitcoin, you are just paying for a change to be made in that database. This can't be legally regulated in America without violation of the First Amendment, as Beutheon has pointed out time and time again. In any free country, there is some protection of free speech, and Bitcoin being taxed is simply speech. I am hopeful that eventually anti-Bitcoin Regulations will be challenged in court, and it'll be clear that the emperor has no clothes. I am hopeful that companies and individuals who have spent years designing complicated regulations and selling methods of meeting them will be cast out, and finally, Bitcoin businesses will have the courage to reject the mischaracterization of Bitcoin as money. Bitcoin being a database should be no more regulated than an equivalent system using Excel or MyS-MySQl, like in-game currency. Regardless, just like strong encryption, which faced significant legal resistance in the USA, Bitcoin is unstoppable and can and will be used regardless of the law. Let me quote a section of The Sovereign Individual, a book written twenty three years ago in nineteen ninety seven. "You need merely lodge your transactions in cyberspace. This will, of course, be illegal in many jurisdictions, but old laws seldom can resist new technology. In the nineteen eighties, it was illegal in the United States to send a fax message. The US Post Office considered faxes to be first class mail over which the US Post Office claimed an ancient monopoly. Billions of fax messages later, it is unclear whether anyone ever complied with that law. Widespread adoption of public key/private key encryption technologies will soon allow many economic activities to be completed anywhere you please. Bitcoin users have a choice. They can either opt for the convenience of buying, selling Bitcoin via a KYC exchange, potentially putting themselves at risk of extortion and theft, or they can support those companies' individuals who are challenging the status quo by offering an alternate, alternate and legal method of acquiring Bitcoin without using the legacy rails. The simplest such method is doing work and getting paid directly in Bitcoin. My hope is that people become more aware of the options available and support those businesses and individuals who are challenging the assumptions that Bitcoin sales need to be KYC'd. For example, Bitcoin voucher companies like Azteco or Fast Bitcoins offer a way to buy Bitcoin without any KYC information. Within certain limits. The other option is BISQ, which connects individual buyers and sellers via decentralized P2P platform which uses Tor to maintain network level privacy. To reiterate, in many countries these methods are completely legal and are actually not significantly less convenient than KYC exchanges. I encourage listeners to look into these projects. Governments around the world will eventually realize the potential income from a hands-off regulatory regime combined with competitive income tax for Bitcoin businesses. So though the current KYC issues limit Bitcoin adoptions in some locations, for example, New York, other locations are unaffected. Another thing to note here is that KYC is a security risk. If you give your personal data to a company to verify your identity, there's a real risk that this data could be leaked or sold following a hack of the company. A recent example of this is BlockFi, who were hacked, leading to physical addresses of their users being accessed. To date, they have failed to make a public announcement about this, and some users have reported that they have heard nothing from the company directly. It is highly likely that the hacker will sell this data to criminals, and that we will eventually have reports from BlockFi customers of receiving blackmail or even being victims of theft. Once this kind of information is leaked, it is impossible to get back. For many users of this service, it may even be worth moving house, especially given that account activity was leaked. This is the hidden side of KYC that is rarely considered by a newcomer buying their first coins, for example. Submitting this information does increase the risk that one day you will be the victim of theft. To summarize, KYC creep developed due to a misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is and has been exacerbated by regulatory capture. New companies and services are appearing which challenge the status quo and allow people to use Bitcoin properly.

Do you see it like we will have two parallel sides of Bitcoin? The regulatory compliant Bitcoin side and the gray market Bitcoin side.

Bitcoin as a protocol is completely unaware and unaffected by regulation. If individual countries misunderstand Bitcoin and legislate that all Bitcoin sales must be KYC'd, then those countries will fade into insignificance regarding Bitcoin. Similarly, if companies misunderstand regulations and overzealously require users to submit KYC documentation for all purchases, sales, Then they will eventually lose business to those companies that understand, test, and change the limits of regulation. Bitcoin is a global system, and each country has autonomy to create unique rules and regulations. As some countries tighten regulations, others will loosen regulations in order to entice Bitcoin companies. I don't think the distinction between compliant Bitcoin and gray market Bitcoin is useful or a good message to be promoting. Do people talk about the dollar having a gray market side and a compliant side? No. A dollar in the hands of a criminal can be exchanged for white market goods and within a day be cashed in a bank. Similarly, cash withdrawn by a seemingly law abiding citizen can be in hand, in the hands of a criminal within minutes. There exists a white market, a black market, and a gray market, but the dollars used are interchangeable. At what point does Bitcoin used for black market activity become acceptable to a regulated entity? Suppose a regulated entity were to take a whitelist approach, that is, they only let you deposit a UTXO if they can fully trust Trace back the coin's origin to another regulated entity. This would make it impossible for the users of this entity to receive Bitcoin from anyone without first checking that these coins could be fully traced. Quickly it becomes apparent that such an approach will hinder the ability of both the regulated, regulated entity and the users who engage in economic activity. Everyone would be anxious to accept Bitcoin because they would be at risk of corrupting their whole stash.

Unbanked individuals will be onboarded onto Bitcoin over the coming years and they will want to buy products and services from around the world. A user of the whitelist system would be unable to accept payment from these individuals who have no bank account, no passport, no driver's license. Clearly, any users who engage in such a whitelisting system will lose out economically to users of entities which take a more sensible, hands-off approach. It is tempting to then propose a less extreme form of regulatory compliance somewhere between a hands-off approach and full white-listing only. This middle ground doesn't exist. It is an illusion. If the compliant world is willing to accept a coin which may or may not be linked to crime, then the criminal simply has to manage their coins to ensure that they pass this test. For example Suppose there's an ambiguity in the flow of value in a Bitcoin transaction, with some inputs being known entities and others from unknown entities. A middle ground approach may assign an equal risk order to each output, effectively diluting the degree of taint which the analyst has assigned to the coin. In this case, a criminal must simply partake in a number of these transactions consecutively in order to reduce the degree of taint of their coins below that required to be deemed compliant. As such, there is no meaningful middle ground approach between a complete hands off approach and a whitelisting approach. The idea that such middle ground exists is primarily due to PR by surveillance companies who profit from selling their black box middle ground services to exchanges. In some jurisdictions, these surveillance companies have influenced the writing of the laws to mandate the use of their technology, as was seen in New York with the BitLicense. In other jurisdictions, they simply mislead exchanges and other entities into believing believing that their tools are required to meet the legal requirements, though that is often not the case. A quick aside, people often think that the unbanked refers to people in non-Western countries, but they're according to 37 million unbanked adults in Europe and 8.4 million unbanked households in the US.

Do you recommend that others follow your path and use a pseudonym and go only by that name?

Oh, you think it's 3.7 million unbanked adults instead of 37 million? No, I, I think, I think that, that's probably true, that's probably correct.

That's crazy. Okay,

I'm not, I'm coming out of sixty-one. Okay.

Yeah. So, let me, let me ask it again. So, do you recommend that others follow your path and use a pseudonym or go only by that name?

I recommend people try using a name at least for a while. You are forced to build your network from scratch without the benefit of being able to leverage your social network. This forces you to refine your arguments and contribute something meaningful to be noticed. I am pleasantly surprised at the level of trust I've been able to sta-establish with pseudonymous bitcoiners. I wouldn't have thought that many people would be reluctant to share thoughts and opinions and confidence with someone whose name is a number, but in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case. They'll even read my words on the podcast. Using a name is liberating. You're able to express yourself freely and it often seems that people are more receptive to some ideas when they come from a name. I encourage everyone to read the book True Names by Vernon Vinge, an early cyberpunk book which explores the idea of using names and the dangers of revealing your true name. I think that Satoshi releasing Bitcoin under a name was a powerful statement, that he remains unknown is a testament to the degree of privacy which can still be achieved.

6102, what are your thoughts on attending local Bitcoin meetups? There's the trade-off there between being able to learn quickly and share ideas and make contacts versus the obscur and privacy risks.

Meetups are great for many reasons, but I remind people to carefully consider their actions at meetups, particularly amongst people they've only met a few times. The Bitcoin VR meetup is great for this reason, although obviously it doesn't beat Meetup in terms of the personal connections you can form. It is obviously possible to attend a meetup without revealing your name, but you should take care to use a burner secondary phone and think before you speak. If I met someone in Meetup who knew me under my name, it would likely be challenging to avoid telling them, and it would feel like a violation of their trust if they knew me as sixty-one-zero-two Bitcoin and as Redacted, but didn't know that we are one and the same. I imagine it would be hard to tell them sometime after having become acquainted. I would love to hear from people who have had this experience and can share their thoughts from either perspective. Please drop me a DM at sixty one or two Bitcoin on Twitter. Generally, I suppose attending a Bitcoin meetup may increase your chance of being put under targeted digital surveillance, but I think that unless you are very careful online, a sophisticated government could identify you as a Bitcoin user anyway. You only have to make one mistake. Downloaded one block over Clearnet and they know. That said, in an authoritarian country, I would be very cautious about attending a wildly advertised meetup. It could be a honeypot. For most people, I think a more realistic risk is that you're identified as a Bitcoin user by a thief attending the meetup or someone who is willing to sell information to a thief. For this reason, I think that it's critical that you never discuss your Bitcoin security setup at meetups. Check out bitcoin dash only dot com slash hashtag meetups to see if there's a meetup in your city. If you run a Bitcoin meetup which isn't listed, please raise an issue on GitHub. Send me a DM if you need help in doing this. Do you think there are

bigger government attacks on Bitcoin coming, or do you think that Bitcoin eventually builds up enough of a Bitcoin electorate to make it less politically palatable to attack?

I agree that it's possible for a sufficient Bitcoin electorate to dissuade politicians from attacking Bitcoin, but I think it's even more likely that Bitcoin businesses will make it known to governments that any efforts to overregulate will result in immediate relocation to international waters. As mentioned previously, some countries will structure regulation to be very light regarding Bitcoin to attract Bitcoin companies and the tax revenue they bring from around the world. The switching costs will be negligible and the process will be completed within hours without the need for physical contract signing or physical headquarters. This will place pressure on governments around the world to tread very lightly.

Some governments will undoubtedly try and regulate against Bitcoin or worse, attempt to confiscate Bitcoin from their citizens. I don't imagine that these regulations or attempts at seizure would be particularly effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, Bitcoin can move at the speed of light. Regulations take time to develop, and in most countries, a vote would be needed to confiscate Bitcoin. Before the vote even takes place, most owners of Bitcoin would have transferred ownership outside the country beyond regulatory reach. Secondly, Bitcoin can be trolled by numerous parties who operate under different regulations, making such confiscation unworkable. Finally, Bitcoin can be hidden in plain sight and owners can build plausible deniability into the scheme used to hold Bitcoin.

I expect the tools to enable shared ownership of Bitcoin to develop to the point that they are very user friendly and secure long before any Western country attempts such a feat. It may well be that development and widespread use of these tools dissuades a government from even attempting to seize Bitcoin, so these tools can't be developed soon enough. Enough. Multi-sig, let's go.

You commented that Blockstream Liquid and LBTC being an IOU, what risks do you see if LBTC is used by retail users? Is it mainly the risk of having your peg out denied or perhaps other government, government or otherwise permissioning entering the system that way?

Liquid is a complex IOU that you buy with Bitcoin. Liquid Bitcoin tokens, a.k.a. LBTC, are tokens on a network managed by a consortium, thus you have no guarantee that Bitcoin you peg into Liquid will be available for you to peg out in the future. Effectively, you send your Bitcoin to a group of companies in the hope that you'll get it back. As such, LBTC isn't Bitcoin, it is an IOU. The risk is that retail users Users get onboarded onto Liquid, mistakenly think that they own Bitcoin, and don't take any steps to take self custody of Bitcoin in the future. The peg out could be denied or the consortium could go rogue and steal the Bitcoin. Due to pressure from governments or get hacked and have the bitcoins stolen from the consortium. The consortium uses hardware secure modules to try to limit the risk of theft, but as more bitcoin gets pegged into liquid- The cost and therefore the sophistication of attack can increase and still be wildly profitable. All that said, I think that liquid and private banking systems in general will become increasingly common in the future. Many people will use them, especially once it becomes economically infeasible to make regular small transactions on chain. My main concern is that Liquid provides a new attack vector against Bitcoin in general. Currently, if a single exchange gets hacked and loses a significant amount of Bitcoin to a thief, there is no chance that an economic majority would support a fork to roll back the transaction in which the coins were stolen. We saw the massive pushback on social media when Binance was hacked, and CZ commented that they considered trying a rollback. The social media reaction isn't particularly meaningful, it is the economic supermajority which matters. In this case, with one exchange being hacked, the large players had no interest in helping Binance. If anything, all the other exchanges would be against such a move, because they're in competition with Binance. With Liquid, though, you have a huge list of companies who are locking an increasing amount of Bitcoin into a pool of Bitcoin belonging to the whole federation. Over time, there could well be a significant fraction of the voting weight which would support a rollback in the scenario where two thirds majority of the hardware security modules are hacked and the federation Bitcoin is withdrawn to a previously compromised exchange cold address and then either burnt or sent to the hacker's address. If every exchange was at risk of financial cl-clap-clap due to the hack, then they would all be ideologically aligned and the push for a rollback would be immense. They could make it hard to or slow to access the coins on the original chain in the case of a fork, making it difficult for those holding coins on the exchange to sell the fork coin. They could allow buying and withdrawing of the fork coin to increase its price, they could bribe miners to switch to mine their chain or to perform reorg attacks on the original chain. The percentage of Bitcoin users weighted by their economic activity who are actively engaged with running their own node and enforcing the network rules has only been decreasing over time since Bitcoin's inception. There are huge players who hold vast sums of Bitcoin who are completely detached from the nuance of forks and consensus wars, and I expect the amount of Bitcoin held by such entities to continue to grow. As such, the fraction of the economic activity that would actively resist a hostile fork like this is likely reducing. Making such an attack increasingly viable. Another element here is that any government interested in damaging Bitcoin would identify this as a possible route to weakening Bitcoin. They would support such a fork with whatever means they could, including huge financial support for the new coin, making, mining the new coin increasingly profitable, seizing mining equipment where possible, either overtly or covertly, in order to attack the original chain and perform large and repeated deep or deep reorgs which disrupt economic activity. For these reasons, I think that Liquid could pose a significant new attack vector to Bitcoin if it continues to grow and expand across Bitcoin exchanges and services. Why is it important for people to self-custody their Bitcoin? Stephan. Unless you self-custody Bitcoin, you don't actually have any Bitcoin. You have an IOU for Bitcoin. The numbers shown on an exchange under labeled Bitcoin balance is the amount of Bitcoin the exchange owes you. This is painfully obvious for individuals who had Bitcoin deposited on Mt. Gox. When the exchange was hacked, they were unable to withdraw their Bitcoin. That is to say, they were unable to exchange their exchange IOU for Bitcoin. Self custody brings a number of significant benefits. For one, you don't need to rely on a third party. You can do whatever you want with your Bitcoin, including spending and securing it however you want. Secondly, you can verify that you have actually received Bitcoin by using your own node. If your node shows that you have received Bitcoin, then you know that it will be there when you need it. Whereas if you're trusting someone else to tell you whether you have received Bitcoin, then you might be in for a surprise when you try and spend that Bitcoin.

What are your thoughts on Bitcoin citadels? Are

Oh wow, I wonder if he wrote this before the riots, I wonder if his opinion changed. I love the idea that there will be actual Bitcoin citadels, walled towns where all commerce is denominated in Bitcoin, but hopefully enough people will adopt Bitcoin to make this unnecessary. Governments will realize the huge economic boom that will inevitably follow the globe-trotting Bitcoin rich. I expect small countries with pragmatic governments to compete to make an attractive place for the Bitcoin rich to live, for example, by having no cap gains tax and a high degree of personal freedom. It could be that entire countries become Bitcoin citizens in this manner, or I suppose you could have individual states in America which take a more favorable approach.

6102, do you have any closing thoughts and tips for the listeners?

Historians Do I have any closing thoughts? Historians generally deem the Western Roman Empire to have fallen with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in the year 476, but the Roman Senate, which was established in the first days of the city of Rome, continued to exist almost powerless for another century. It is very hard for most people to acknowledge that the world they inhabit today is significantly and meaningful different to the world they were born into, and yet if you take the time to look, you can see the cracks. In my opinion, it is highly likely that the collapse of the welfare state has already begun. Bitcoin is a tool which can help you survive and hopefully thrive over the coming decades. If you don't know where to start, go to bitcoin dash intro dot com. If you want to learn more about Bitcoin privacy, go to btcprivacy dot org. If you want to attend a meetup, look at bitcoin dash only dot com forward slash hashtag meetups. You can find me on Twitter at sixty one o two Bitcoin. If you have any questions, my DMs are open. I know he also has Keybase under the same name linked. Bitcoin isn't gonna change the world by itself, but if enough people start using it, we just might. Excellent. Well, thanks

very much, Matt, and, some really great comments there by sixty-one-o-two. o-obviously the, quote-unquote interview couldn't be as much of a back-and-forth as it usually is, but, hopefully that was still interesting for the listeners and definitely a lot of really, Depending on your viewpoint, that could be controversial, depending on, what you think. so I guess we, we can have just a bit of a chat about, you know, just our own reflections on it and on what sixty-one o two was saying there. So, Matt, I guess for you, what did you find most compelling? What did you most, most agree with from sixty-one o two's comments?

Well, first of all, that was the hardest thing I've ever done on air, so I hope it came out good, all the listeners. I hope, I hope you enjoyed it. I tried to put some passion into it. Sometimes I felt like he just threw, threw some words in there. In certain orders just to, just to get me, all mixed up. But anyway, my favorite part was the Nim part. one of my biggest regrets in this space is I- Used nims a, a ton, and then when the fork wars happened, I said "fuck it," and I, I was like, I was like pissed off that so many public figures were just so irresponsible, and I, I, you know, here we are, right? I, I dropped the name and I started using my name, and I kinda regretted, and I wish, I wish people-- I get a lot of shit for that, 'cause they say I'm hypocritical, how can I care about privacy, all these things. how can I tell people to use NIMs when I'm not using one? And I, you know, I think like that's, that's like saying to someone who is fat, "Hey, you're fat, you're fat, you're fat, you're fat, you're fat, you're fat, you That, that is now skinny or, you know, the now in shape, like they, they can't talk about why, why you shouldn't get fat in the first place, right? And I, so I've lived through these things and I wish I could go back, and you can't go back, as he said, you can't go back. And, and he is-- And then the second part of that name thing, which was weird reading it, right? It's like he was basically talking about- Our relationship with him, like I consider him a good friend, I respect the shit out of his work, I talk to him all the time. We're here doing this podcast with him but without him, right? And he's, we have no idea who he is or she or, you know, whatever, no idea. So that kind of like, it kind of like got me going, you know?

Yeah, I think that's definitely, that's a tough one because at the same time, if you wanna try to help people not get scammed, it makes it easier for them to relate to you if you have a real name and a real face, right? a-and there are a lot of scammers out there saying, "Oh, look, buy my, you know, buy whatever crypto, you know, you saw this recent one with, what's his name, Tikka Tiwari, five coins to five million or whatever," and I get random people coming Saying, "Oh, hey man, I bought this five coins to five million thing," and like they, you know, they, some of these guys paid like a lot of money for this stuff, right? And like Ian Bolina

and like all of them, there's like a shit ton of them.

Exactly. And so it's like, it's sort of like, how do you, how, how do you kind of be someone in the middle who actually is there trying to, like, trying to provide good and honest information, but having to sort of play somewhere in the middle, right? And, and a, another thing, well, actually, before we get there, Are there any points in that where you would disagree with what sixty-one o two is saying?

Well, just on that last topic, like that's how I justified it as well, and I still think it was worth it in the end, like I mean, there's a reason 6102 doesn't want his voice on here, it's because if, you know, if you meet him in person at one of these Bitcoin meetups or something, he's afraid you're gonna be able to tell it's him. So, you know, we obviously love doing our podcast, and I think we've reached a lot of people, and it's very valuable. But sixty-one or two, like, I love him, but it hurts because he did it, he did it right. And still reaches a lot of people, you know, like he, he is the perfect example of like the ideal Bitcoin educator from a privacy perspective in my mind. Like that is, that's the template. Like may a million sixty one o two's bloom, you know? Yeah,

I think so. and, it, it, I think it, it sort of takes a, it takes a combo as well. Like I think there are some people who just won't- Listen to a pseudonym at all, right? They need a name, a-a-and then, like, once they've kind of come into it a bit more, then I think they're able then to start looking at, okay, look, this sixty-one-o-two guy has built up a reputation over time under this name, so now I might actually use some of that material or listen to that material. Yeah. so what did you disagree? Did you disagree with anything he said? A couple points for me personally, I disagreed a little bit in terms of I think the whole KYC question, and okay, now disclosure, obviously I am biased, right? I have sponsors on this show who require KYC, right? So Swan Bitcoin is a sponsor of my show, Unchained Capital is a sponsor of my show, so you know, hands up, that's, you know, potentially maybe I'm talking my bag, maybe I'm talking my book or whatever, but From my view, I don't, I, I see, I'm sort of in the middle, right? I personally see it like, you can have two worlds, you can have that kind of KYC compliant world, and then, let's call it the gray market, non-KYC world, and I think If you want people to be able to buy Bitcoin and have it at scale, then at this point, it's just not really feasible for anyone to do that, right? Like, oh, they're gonna pay a huge premium, they're gonna pay a huge premium to be able to buy that same amount of Bitcoin, and how do you- Sort of do that. I mean, my, my perspective is more like you can have a foot in both camps, right? So for example, I might purchase some Bitcoin, from a KYC exchange, and I might keep that in a hardware wallet or a multi-signature setup, but then I could also have a non-KYC stash, right? I could have Samurai Wallet with my own dojo and- have kind of have a foot in that world and never shall, never the two, what's the saying? Never the, never the, twain shall the two meet or whatever, right? Like you can just keep them segregated that way, but

I, I, I, I'd certainly-- the other point I would also add is you might be more bullish on the idea of the Bitcoin electorate, or you might be more bullish on the idea of leaving to a better jurisdiction. And so for you, you might see it like, "Look," All things considered, if I KYC with one particular service and I buy Bitcoin regularly through that, then for you, you might consider that an acceptable level of risk, given also that I think there's also a fundamental number go up driving factor to Bitcoin as well, right? Because as number go up, we see more development, we see more, kind of name recognition come to the space. So I, I'm sort of in the middle there.

You took a swipe. He took a swipe at number go up,

right? A little, yeah, I think so. And I, to me personally, I think it's sort of like, you've got to recognize that we can ha- we can, we can have both, right? We can have the number go up, Hodor crew, and we can have the circular economy. I just think we have to be realistic about how large the circular economy can be before there's a sufficient network effect. but what's your view?

I was surprised that the swipe and number go up. I, because I, like, I don't, I, I think censorship resistance is a key aspect of the value prop and I, but I, I also think that the idea that your value that you hold in Bitcoin either maintains its value or goes up over time, like it maintains its purchasing power, is obviously a key aspect of good money. And if, if you don't have that aspect, let's say Strawman it and go the opposite that it's just number go down all the time. you don't really have, you don't have the censorship resistance because you need, you need the money, you need a bearer asset that has value to send value. And you need to pay the miners without a trusted third party, so the, the token needs to have value. So then once it has value, it's impossible to make a token that's just stable. So it should have a value that just goes up over time. You know, short term volatility, fine, but long term should go up. And I, so I don't think it, they're conflicting. But- What I assume he meant, is I actually think he agrees with what I just said. I think what he meant is like the number go crowd, number go up crowd on like Twitter and whatnot, that's just like buy and hold long term. And I, I, I can respect that, to a degree, but I think they, I still think that both sides help each other. I think first of all, number will go up. Only if we can have censorship resistant payments and if that's preserved on Bitcoin. And I think more investment into Bitcoin, driving the price higher, driving the liquidity up, driving like regulatory, would you call them? You, you call them like bastions or something, like people that have jurisdiction, like jurisdictional arbitrage, right? Like just going to the- No, but not that. You were like just a pure mass of people that are- Or the electorate. The electorate, yeah. Exactly. Like that helps- It helps everyone, right? And it all helps everyone together. In terms of KYC creep, I'm very outspoken and agree with, with sixty-one or two there. I do like his distinction that he made, which I say all the time, where that middle ground can't really exist. There, it's like unenforceable. it's just gonna create a, it'll create a mess. So, you know, you either get major crackdowns, like this idea that like people won't be able to spend like Coinjoin Bitcoin or CoinSwap Bitcoin or blacklisted Bitcoin is just ridiculous. Like if that, if we get to that point, the people holding that Bitcoin isn't the only ones concerned, Bitcoin will lose its value in general, I think. so I, I do wholeheartedly agree there. I'm not as hardline of anti-KYC as he is, I do agree with you that if you do KYC, you should limit it, limit as many K- they, they're your custodians of your privacy, so you wanna limit it as much as possible. But I do personally, I mean, when I got involved in Bitcoin, it was a lot easier to get KYC for Bitcoin, and I didn't prioritize it enough. And so I imagine it could be the same thing, it'll get worse before it gets better. Like I think eventually this is all irrelevant because most people will earn Bitcoin Or spend it rather than buy or sell. but until then, we're gonna need tools that allow people to use Bitcoin with decent privacy if they have to KYC.

Yeah, fair point, fair comments, and I think there's a few things to, to break down here. So this concept of taint, obviously I'm aligned with sixty-one and two and you on that, I think it's not long term, it's not sustainable. But I think we should also consider, again, what's realistic, right? Like, are these, for example, chain surveillance companies? Now, listeners, check out my earlier episode with Rafael Yacobi, right, where we were talking about this idea of Baptists and bootleggers, right? So these surveillance companies Just to help, to, you know, stop the terrorists or whatever, right? Or whatever, whatever the enemy of the day is. but at the same time, they have, they have this incentive to try and profit off the industry, but they also don't wanna kill it, right? It's like the parasite doesn't wanna kill the host. So I think that's why to some, like obviously I'm not like defending the surveillance companies, but I think it's fair to point out that they're not gonna-- I dare you. You, you know what I'm saying? They're not gonna- They're not gonna like go so far that everyone has to interact inside this kind of whitelist environment. And I would never wanna be obviously part of Bitcoin if it were, if it was like that. because they'd be scared

that Bitcoin would fall, would fail, right? And that's if they go too far, they'd be scared that they kill Bitcoin, then they're not useful anymore. Right. And

I think the way some of these-- now, again, I can't speak for them, right? But the surveillance company people might say something like, "Oh, but..." If you don't have a foot, if you don't have like a seat at the table, and you should be part of the regulatory discussion about whether the travel rule is going too far or, you, you see what I'm getting at, right? That's probably the argument that they would try to make. Obviously, I don't agree with that. I would rather just say, like, no, just, but, the, the, here's the, here's the difficulty as well that I see. It's all well and good to talk about, yeah, everyone non-KYC, but at some point, once you get beyond a certain scale, if you're interacting with the fiat banking system, you will come up on the, on the transaction monitoring systems of banks. You will get, they will probably run a sting operation. So as soon as you start offering any su- any real volume, then You know, governments will crack down on you, and it to me, it's, it, I'm just not sure that it's realistic to expect that everyone's gonna go non-KYC. That's my, stance or my thinking on it, and that's why, like you, I'm not as hardline, never KYC. But obviously I, I don't like those regulations, and I wish we could live in the world without them. I'm just-- I think it's more just like a disagreement on the best way to go about moving forward. But what do you, what do you think?

You're not pure.

Yeah, I, you know, it's, it's, it, it, it comes down to, you know, how much, how much Bitcoin you want, right? Like if, if it's, if nowadays, you know, if you keep it to smaller amounts, it's, it's, it's still relatively easy to get KYC free Bitcoin. But if you, once you start hitting larger amounts and you're dealing with bank transfers and stuff like that, like you're gonna get KYC. It's just, it's the unfortunate reality, right? and you have to weigh those risks, people have to weigh those risks, individually and, and, and, you know, it basically comes down to a privacy versus convenience trade-off with a little bit of legal risk added in there depending on your jurisdiction. but no matter what If you do use KYC, you should limit the number of services because every service you add, you're just, you're increasing your attack surface. You're just making it so one more service can- Leak or s-sell your data or, or lose your data and, and, and you're screwed. Or share it with, not only necessarily your government, they might share it with the government they're based in. a comment I have is you mentioned fast bitcoins, I'm pretty sure they have KYC.

I think it's above certain thresholds as well, yeah. and depending on the country as well.

Like, you know, less, and like if you get paid in, if you get paid in Bitcoin, then there's not gonna be KYC there. so that, that is obviously a route for, for some people that they get to take. And so the chain analysis companies like not wanting to kill Bitcoin, I, I, I would hope that they're long-term thinkers, but I just don't, I don't know, I think they would like accidentally kill it before they, before they realize the damage they've done,

right?

Yeah, and there's like a tragedy of the commons there, right? There's not just one surveillance company, so like they're all trying to outdo the other one at blacklisting as many coins, and, until they kill the golden goose. So I, I think the only way to handle chain surveillance, and, and actually, chain surveillance doesn't go far enough. He made a point of calling them just surveillance companies, and I think that's proper because they do more than just chain surveillance. They run nodes and they- Aggregate people information and all this other stuff, they're just straight surveillance companies. the only way to really deal with them is, like, we need to build tools that obsolete their, their asses, right? Like, you gotta build tools that make it so that their job is completely ineffective, and then they will just fade into irrelevance and go out of business. Like, that is, I think that's the plan.

Right, and I, it's, I think it's also fair to say that as number goes up, we will see more rich bitcoiners, and then those richer bitcoiners can fund projects that will improve privacy, hopefully, right? Now, perhaps, again, straw manning a little, or not, just kind of the counter argument to that would be something like, "Oh, hey, but, you know, haven't you guys been saying that for years? Where's all the develop- Where's all the privacy development happened? I, I wanted to see more, work on the

It's, it's where, where, where do you, where does that leave us, right?

I thought it was interesting when he was like, "You'll just move to international waters and like, you'll sign a contract with just, I guess, a private key." No, he, he got, he got a little sci-fi, he got, he got a little bit excited like halfway through there. I'm not sure about the international water things, but the, the regulatory arbitrage will be very real. I'm not sure how much of a boost it will be to the economies that bring them in, because, like he said, like There, they'll get better taxes and stuff. Like it's gonna be, just like we see today, it's just, it's also another tragedy of the commons situation where like- It's, they're all gonna be just competing with each other down to zero, and it's, whoever gets you isn't gonna, you know, like the government will be smaller in general probably. As for citadels, I don't think I have to defend why citadels are gonna happen anymore with what's been going on in, in America over the last five days, six days, and I think that's global, we've seen protests around the world, but other places understood it more than I think Americans. Americans are a little cozy about it. But now most Americans are like, "I, I wanna be in a citadel right now."

yeah. I, I thought it was funny that he knows I'm in New York, so he kept using us as a fucking example, like- Well, the

BitLicense is one of the quintessential examples, right? Yeah.

Yeah, the board member, Ripple board member Ben Lausky, trying to protect consumers with the BitLicense. Oh man, what a joke.

Also, Liquid. So obviously, for listeners who aren't not familiar, you might have-- Well, it depends. If you're on Bitcoin Twitter, you would have seen some of the back and forward, between sixty-one and two and some of the Liquid team. at times it gets a little heated there. I think on net, I still think Liquid is good for exchange. Managers and trading desks and those kinds of people, and that it'll be useful during this coming bull run because there'll be less congestion on the chain, there'll be, you know, more people who can just-- those people can just use liquid, and I think that makes a lot of sense to me. but I certainly do see, I do appreciate the, the risk around permissioned peg outs. what's your view on that whole, thing around LBTC and being a, a complex IOU, and sort of having that nuance there?

Yeah, I mean, anyone who knows 6102 on, on Twitter knows how he feels about Liquid. I, I like to think that most people listening to that part were just chuckling because I was trying to hold back my- I was like laughing a little bit as I was reading it, like, "This is so sixty-one or two." and I like loved that he had me read it. Anyway,

I, you know, he takes-- he, he, he really doesn't like the branding that it's considered, that it's called Bitcoin, and I do agree with him that it, you know, it is- Basically custodial, it's like custodial plus. but, but the, the issue, his, his issue with the chain rollback, I'm actually kind of close to him there. I'm not worried about a chain rollback, 'cause honestly, this isn't Ethereum, it's just not gonna happen. That whole thing he went into, that whole-- he went pretty deep into that thought experiment, like governments were like Getting miners and reordering the original chain and stuff, like I was just like imagining like Seal Team Six coming in and just ra- raiding Bitmain or, I don't know, whoever's the big miner at the time, 'cause Bitmain sucks now. Anyway. I'm worried, I think Liquid reduces the risk of a single custodian in ninety-nine percent of situations, right? So instead of just trusting Bitfinex, you're trusting this, you know, a threshold of this federation of multiple companies, and that's almost- Always a benefit probably over keeping your Bitcoin just directly on a single exchange that can just single party exit scam you or screw up and get hacked and lose it or whatnot. But what I'm worried about is this kind of black swan that he's talking about. I think it increases that risk because they're almost all tied together, and if you combine that with Tether and other fiat coins on Liquid, then it might not just be Bitcoin at the same time, right? So you lose Bitcoin, you lose dollars, you lose, you know, shitty exchange tokens or some, I don't know, some other things on there. and all the exchanges lose it at the same time. That could be devastating for people that hold other assets on those exchanges. So let's say you owned, you know, regular Bitcoin or Dogecoin or some other shit on Bitfinex, and all of a sudden them and all the other federation members lost Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin through the liquid thing. They're gonna haircut everyone. We saw that when Bitfinex got hacked, their most, their most recent act, but that was like twenty sixteen, I think, or something like that, right? It was like a hundred thousand Bitcoin, massive, massive hack. they haircut the Ethereum holders as well, who were completely unrelated. They were completely unrelated, but, but Bitfinex was insolvent and, you know, One, one, one part got hacked, everyone got hacked. so it, I think it increases like the black swan risk on these exchanges, but reduces the You know, just the day to day risk, but at the same time, even if that happened, no rollback, there would be no rollback.

I think so as well, but, it's worthwhile considering that risk and, I'm remind-- I'm sadly reminded of, the late Thomas Blumer, right? So listeners, if you go back and check out my episode with Thomas, he was basically-- and this, that episode was around that time of the Binance, you know, s-- the considering of a rollback, and Thomas is saying essentially Okay, in this instance, it didn't occur, but we have to be prepared that in future, there may be more tooling that helps miners coordinate such a such a rollback, and we'd have to think about what, what would we do and accept in such a circumstance.

In practice, it was a really bad example because CZ never had a shot. He was like speculating about it on Twitter, and it caused a furor, but he was doing it like hours after the hack happened. He had never had a chance. Like, there's no way he could pull it off. Like, if you wanna do it, you have to do it right away. what'll be interesting though is The hot, the hot thing in Silicon Valley and Shitcoin Land, I thought it was interesting he kept calling them altcoins and not Shitcoins, by the way. I thought he was gonna be provocative. in Shitcoin Land is proof of stake, right? Ethereum wants to move to proof of stake, all these- Ethereum competitor chains are doing proof of stake, and the exchanges are dominating proof of stake. The exchanges are the primary validators securing their networks. So we might actually get, you know, a no cost preview of what that type of situation could look like with one of, one of these exchanges getting hacked for a proof of stake chain. And we kind of saw it I, I wasn't really watching it that well, I don't think you were either, but there's like this Steamtron controversy that's happening, yeah, there was some controversial fork or whatever, and then I think the exchange had to take a position, yeah, yeah, he bought Steam. And then like the big holders of STEEM were like boycotting him, so he blacklisted their addresses in a fork and then got CZ to agree with him on it. And, and like, 'cause CZ was the second biggest validator after him. Yeah. And that's

like, welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss, right? Like, are we just recreating-- And those people are just kind of recreating the same new system, but just with themselves at the top.

Exactly. So it should be interesting. We can, we can get a free preview there. But I honestly don't think- I, it'd be so hard to get, get a rollback in of any kind of, of any kind of depth. Yeah. maybe a couple blocks. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, who knows, who knows. I'm also curious to ask your thoughts around, obviously, I mean, guys like yourself and I are, are spending a lot of time teaching new coiners, right? And so- What's your approach there in terms of, teaching a new coiner? Right. So the way I'm sort of thinking about it is more like, okay, I try to assess, okay, what's this, what's that person's level of technical, you know, capability? What can I teach, what can I recommend for them that they can actually do? And then also, what are they trying to achieve, right? Are they trying to, like, be more private? You know, in that case, I'll try and say, hey, get Samurai Wallet, like, or Interesting idea is, though in the earlier days, people probably started on, a software on a, a phone wallet, like just a small amount on a phone wallet, because that was kind of the thing in like twenty thirteen and those days, whereas nowadays It might actually make more sense to directly onboard someone onto a hardware wallet, but what's your view there?

I think, you know, depends how much they're putting in. A phone wallet is perfectly fine while they wait, you know, a hardware wallet you gotta actually get delivered. So that's the main hurdle. Some of us

have extra to, like, you know, like I have a few that I, you know, when I'm helping, you know, oh, oh, oh,

if it's in person and you have like an extra hardware wallet to give them, then like by all means, but I, I do think, the mobile wallet still remains one of the best ways of onboarding someone who doesn't, you know, doesn't have hardware yet, and it allows them to dip their toes in without any additional purchase. and it's fine, it's fine for small amounts. We never hear of any real- You know, the, the, the tax service is there, but we rare-- I, I don't remember the last time I heard of a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet except for scams, get hacked on mobile. so it's, it's worked out so far, if it's not that much, it's not that big of a deal. I, I really try and not scare them with the hardline shit that some people say on Twitter, like, "Oh, if you don't run a node, you might not have Bitcoin," you know? Like, you're

It, it is definitely a valid point to make to them eventually, but in practice, you're just scaring the shit out of them. But I actually, this is one of the reasons I love sixty-one and two, because

I, I can't count the many, how many times I've sent people to bitcoin dash intro dot com. It is a fantastic resource, he has it set up, fin- just really good, just like the checklist, the way it goes down. btcprivacy dot org is actually my domain that redirects to his subdomain, which is bitcoin dash only dot com forward slash hashtag privacy, which is so much worse. and I was sending so many people there, I bought the domain just to redirect because I, I got sick of, of seeing Saying that over and over again. so that's like where I send people for privacy and, resources after they're more ready. Bitcoin Dash Intro, I really like sending them in the beginning. And I, I think I, I-- He made a point of saying this, and I agree with him, and that's one of the reasons I like Bitcoin Dash Intro, is, is because it's, you, they gotta get their feet wet first. They gotta play with it, they gotta see why it's cool, you-- Before you hit 'em with all the high level 'Cause, and he made a good point in saying this, like, they get overwhelmed, you don't wanna get overwhelmed. Just take it slow and steady, you know, and you'll figure it out, and every improvement is an improvement. And I, I really liked how he said that, that he was like- I'd rather you come in in a shitty way than not come in at all, you know?

Yeah, that's, I think it, that is the approach that we should pursue, and I think it's also- Yeah, that, that's just kind of the, the typical way because ultimately people have to get invested, whether that's financially or emotionally or some way to get invested into it and then start like- Flipping that switch to get them to actually start wanting to learn more. And then once you've flipped that switch, then it's sort of relatively easy, right? Like I've had some friends who, well, obviously as I have the podcast, I typically just say, "Hey, just listen to some these ep-- this episode, that episode, whatever." And just sort of do it that way, but, I think it's, it's really about kind of how do you light that fire?

Absolutely. I mean, there's no one size fits all, and I'm like I- I, the way I look at the podcasts at least is I, I, I think like the way that scales is we're basically educating and, and, and learning alongside like the Bitcoin guys of each group, and then they're gonna go and they're gonna educate their ten fat friends and family members and maybe let them use a node. That's one thing I've been doing. If they have Android, I have them install a Samurai wallet and I uncle Jim their ass. I have, I have five- Five people right now that are using my dojo. that's a really slick way of just like getting them in, getting them just like in the door, not trusting someone else's node besides mine, and then when they're ready, they can, they can easily transition to their own in the same interface and whatnot.

So when they graduate and finally, leave the nest, hey?

They get to become their own Uncle Jim.

Yeah, that's right. It's pos-it's a, it's a pay it forward system. Alright, well, I think, that, that's pretty much the key points I had. was there anything else you wanted to mention?

No, I don't think so. I think this was great. I hope, the listeners enjoyed it. I hope sixty-one-o-two thinks I did a good job. This was, Like I said, the most nervous I've been on air in a while.

did he spell "proxialogy" wrong? Yes, he did. Okay. So just to the listeners, I'm not that crazy. There was like a G in there, I was super confused. okay, yeah, no, I thought it was great. It was good. Awesome, man. And I, I enjoyed it as, I enjoyed it as usual, and much love to the listeners. Awesome, man.

So yeah, so listeners, make sure you check out, sixty-one o two sixty-one o two bitcoin dot com. obviously the links will be in the show notes, and I think most of you know Matt very well, but find him at, you got your new website, matt odell dot com, so go and, find Matt there. And of course, obviously, go and check out Tales from the Crypt. so, other-otherwise, thank you very much for joining me, Matt.

Cheers. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having 6102, I mean. And then, thank him for having me. Cheers.

I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Make sure you subscribe on my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/stephanlivera. I'm trying to start doing some more livestream episodes. Not every episode will be done as a livestream video, but, where possible, I'll try to do that, as I think that helps build the audience and helps get this word out to more people. and of course, find the show notes at stephanlivera.com/178 for this one. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels.