SLP410 Pete Rizzo Principles of Bitcoin Maximalism

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Pete Rizzo of Bitcoin Magazine rejoins me to chat about what bitcoin maximalists actually believe. We chat:

  • What maximalists actually believe and do
  • “Crypto minimalism”
  • What to do in cases of technical infeasibility
  • Commitment to slow change and enfranchising users

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Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera – 00:00:08:

Hi, you’re listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode 410, my guest is Pete Rizzo. He is an editor at bitcoin magazine and we’re talking about the principles of bitcoin maximalism. Now, there’s been a lot of discussion about this over the last few months, articles, discussion online and so on. But I think it is interesting and important to have bitcoin maximalists decide what that role is for themselves as opposed to having that put onto them by somebody else. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin the easy way to buy bitcoin and learn about bitcoin. Swan is organizing a conference. It’s called Pacific Bitcoin. It’s on the 10th and the 11th November in LA, California. This year I’ll be one of the hosts. There’s going to be a range of awesome bitcoin is there, whether that’s speakers or just everyday bitcoiners that you’d know and love from bitcoin Twitter. There will be all kinds of fun events. Also there’ll be a swan dome with deep dive sessions. There’ll be a bitcoin lab and all kinds of other sports and gaming associated things to give you a flavor of bitcoin, but also a bit of fun associated with it. So you don’t want to miss this one, particularly if you’re in the area or you’ve got friends and family who you think they could really benefit from coming to a bitcoin event like this. So go to Pacificbitcoin.com and use the code livera to get a discount on your tickets. They are rising in price over time, so you want to get in now. Welcoming a new sponsor to the show, it’s bitbo.io. This is a dashboard that you can use as a one stop shop to keep an eye on the bitcoin ecosystem. So you can see the bitcoin price, you can see an article feed, you can see blockchain statistics, difficulty stats, mining fees, as well as Lightning statistics.These are all different things that you

can use to keep an eye on the ecosystem. I also like to keep an eye on the sats per dollar, which is useful if you’re doing some mental maths around how much bitcoin you’re paying for things or receiving for things. So that website is bitbo.io. It’s a great one to bookmark or to periodically check that’s bitbo.io. If you’re in the market for bitcoin hardware, my favorite is the cold card available over at coinkite.com. The cold card looks like a little calculator, but it is a highly recommended bitcoin wallet with so many different features and very, very versatile. It’s been designed in a way to be very secure while giving you all kinds of options and methods that you can use to further secure your bitcoin, whether that’s using it as part of multi signature or whether it’s using the address Explorer on the device. This is a great way to practically check which addresses are controlled and owned by the private keys residing on your bitcoin cold card. And this can help you by making sure that you don’t receive into a bad address or malicious address. So if you’re interested to get your cold card, go over and get yours at coinkite.com and use the code Livera to get a discount on your cold cards. Welcoming and you sponsor to the show. It’s bitbo.io. This is a dashboard that you can use as a onestop shop to keep an eye on the bitcoin ecosystem. So you can see the bitcoin price, you can see an article feed, you can see blockchain statistics, difficulty stats, mining fees, as well as Lightning statistics. These are all different things that you can use to keep an eye on the ecosystem. I also like to keep an eye on the sats per dollar, which is useful if you’re doing some mental maths around how much bitcoin you’re paying for things or receiving for things. So that website is bitbo.io. It’s a great one to bookmark or to periodically check that’s bitbo.io. And now onto the show with Pete.Pete, welcome back to the show.

Pete Rizzo – 00:03:39:

Awesome to be here. Great. See you in Texas. And yeah, what a time to be in bitcoin.

Stephan Livera – 00:03:45:

Yeah, exactly. So for listeners and just for anyone listening in future, we’ve just come from bit block boom in August 2022 over in Austin, Texas. And as we speak now, I’m actually in Riga in Latvia for Paul T county Badger, which is another European conference. And Pete, you’ve written this article recently on how to be a bitcoin maximalist. And I think there’s various ideas to explore here around essentially, what are some of the principles of maximalism? What is it the maximalists actually believe? What should maximalists actually do? So do you want to start off with why’d you write this?

Pete Rizzo – 00:04:24:

Yeah, I’ll start off with that. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear, like bitcoin maximalism is under attack, right? So there’s people all over the internet who seem to be mad at bitcoin maximalist, right? And their accusations are kind of always the same, right? It’s that bitcoin maximalists are intolerance and belligerent and it is actually bitcoin maximalism is actually the belief structure that encourages that, right? So that’s a bit of a sophisticated breakdown of the claim. Often it comes out as like sort of Twitter shouting, but at the root of it, that seems to be what they mean, right? That there’s this rogue group of people who are irrational and that’s sort of lashing out at the world, right? They’re blaming bitcoin axelism as someone who comes from a background, as a journalist or somebody who’s research oriented it’s like words have to have meanings, right? So therefore we have to break this down. And I wrote in the article, if you ask someone for a definition of yes, two people about to define bitcoin maximalism, you’ll get four answers, right? So it seems to me there’s a problem here. There isn’t really a definition for bitcoin maximalism. So what is it that people are actually mad about? So in this case, I essentially just tried to strip down the argument and say, okay, let’s not talk about these bad behaviors and negative behaviors which they exist in online communities. If we can strip out this kind of toxic nature from what people assume as bitcoin maximalism, what is it, what is bitcoin maximalism at its essence? And is it in fact bad? Right? Is it actually encouraging people to do bad things? Or perhaps, maybe do those people are just expressing something inefficiently or maybe they think they’re doing the right thing? Can we break it down on that level? And I think what I was able to find is that what I suspected that essentially bitcoin maximalism is actually very coherent and I think valuable set of values. I think it’s one that we all share. But again, there’s a question that I think that this piece asks then is like, are we effectively communicating that message? And I think that the second part, I would say perhaps not. But I think the best way to start having that conversation is to write down, okay, what is it actually that unites us? And are we actually projecting that positivity or are we often kind of focusing on the negativity? Again, I think that’s sort of the genesis of this, right? Kind of peeling it back, getting to the definition and then circulating this is bitcoin. If you don’t think my framework was useful, fuck me. You can lash out me on Twitter, make out something different. I’d love to hear people’s critiques. But so far I think the agreement that I’ve heard from people is, I think BJ said this is an objective kind of case of like most bitcoin maximalists, this is what they believe. Whether that’s always very clear to other people is kind of a secondary question.

Stephan Livera – 00:07:06:

Right? And so in your piece, you also help delineate this idea of the Ism from the ist. So can you elaborate? What are you getting out there?

Pete Rizzo – 00:07:17:

Yeah, so I actually had to look up the dictionary definition here and I was kind of confused, right? Because people use bitcoin maximalist versus bitcoin maximalism. Like, am I a bitcoin maximalist or do I follow bitcoin maximalism? So generally an ism is a school of beliefs. It is the ideological and value structure and then an ist is someone who follows that, right? So there’s a bit of a separation where one is essentially a set of values. It is actually an ideology that’s kind of divorced from the individual and then the ist would be the person that embodies that, right? So I think you have to kind of draw a little bit of a line between bitcoin maximalism and bitcoin maximalists, right? It is possible that bitcoin maximalists maybe don’t understand bitcoin maximalism that well and therefore just kind of mistake or confuse these kinds of things. And again, this is where kind of toxicity gets caught up in all of this. At the end of the day, I think you have to believe that bitcoin maximum has to solve a specific problem. What is it trying to address, right? If it is to exist, like, what is the point of the value structure? And I think to me, that answer really became bitcoin maximalism is about expanding bitcoin. It is about against essentially who are our antagonists, the fiat world and the crypto world, right? A bitcoin maximalist should want to expand bitcoin against those other systems, right? And eventually we want bitcoin to succeed and compete and out compete these other things. Therefore bitcoin maximalism has to be that forward motion, right? So I think once I was able to kind of crack that, I was like, okay, that makes sense, right? Why do we need this culture around bitcoin? If bitcoin is just a tool, why is this culture even necessary? Well, the answer is that the culture exists to advance the tool. There has to be a relationship between those two things. And I think that’s why bitcoin maximalism is informed. That’s why we need bitcoin maximalists. But we also need that to be like a healthy dynamic, right? We need actually to have a clear conversation about what our values are and then we need to be able to kind of, you know, again, I think everybody’s had an experience where, like, someone they consider a bitcoin maximalist does something online and it’s like very clear to them that that’s not bitcoin maximalism. So a good example would be, like, someone goes on Twitter and they just shit post somebody else and they call them an asshole or something, and somebody like, oh, well, that’s not bitcoin maximalism. Okay, well then you must know what bitcoin maximalism is. It must be something that isn’t getting mad at that guy on Twitter. I think the piece kind of came from that and trying to peel those apart, right? So our expression of bitcoin maximalism, why do we say, like, okay, well, that’s not bitcoin maximalism? When someone does that, it’s because we actually recognize that bitcoin maximalism is a set of values and that sometimes we fail to express that. And it is that imbalance that I think is revealed, like, in that moment and why we know that they’re separate, otherwise they would just be so intertwined and use this example where it’s, you know, why do I like the term bitcoin maximalism? If bitcoin is such a thing that you can just buy a bitcoin and then you’re part of the group, that’s it like, you don’t have to do anything else, then essentially you’ve reduced bitcoin to an NFT. We’re essentially like a conservative Ford API club where you can just buy sort of some entrance and then you’re always in the group, right? And there’s nothing, no wrong you can do. You’re just part of bitcoin, right? We need bitcoin maximalism. We need to encourage people to do things that we think are valuable for bitcoin and understand the values of bitcoin and then to express them positively. And I think maybe there’s a question of that all not working out super well right now.

Stephan Livera – 00:10:47:

And so there are times where people make parallels to religion, right? Let’s say christians and christianism and so on and so forth.

Pete Rizzo – 00:10:56:

Yeah, it doesn’t really work quite well on that point. Christianity, I think it would be an ity at the point that point.

Stephan Livera – 00:11:00:

Right. But I mean, you get the idea in that idea, christians would be the ists and the christianism or christianity is the ism in this case. But I mean, you get the idea. Do you see parallels there, then, between bitcoin maximalism and religion? Is there a parallel?Should that be acknowledged, accepted, promoted, or should that be rejected?

Pete Rizzo – 00:11:20:

Yeah, again, I think you have to go back to the question of, like, is the culture useful? Right? So there is this old bit, you know, kind of the person who I consider the father of bitcoin maximalism, merciful, pesky, and he used to sort of say, there is no bitcoin community, there’s only the software. And then using the software, like there’s no other part of bitcoin, right? It is like you’re either directly using the software or using it at that moment, or you just don’t exist from bitcoin’s perspective. And I think you have to kind of start from that. So then you sort of say, like, well, why is the culture necessary? Right? And I think the answer to that is that we’re not okay with bitcoin just being the tool it is today. We want to expand its use. So I’ll give you an example. We often refer to bitcoin as a tool for insurance or financial catastrophe or sort of insurance policy kind of in the world, right? Well, sure. I own a fire extinguisher. I have one of them. I never use it, and it’s in my basement somewhere, and I own it because someday I might have to put a fire out. And there’s no culture around this tool that doesn’t seek to advance anything other than its own utility to me personally, which is I can use it to put out a fire if I want, and that’s why I own it and my ownership up. It doesn’t extend beyond that. So if bitcoin is just that, if it is only that, and we don’t need to expand it further, then I agree, like, bitcoin culture might not be useful, but so since we have this bitcoin culture, we must want to achieve something with it, right? There must be an attraction to that. And I think the answer is, whether you call it religion or not, you see this with a lot of groups that have a culture. So America has, like, patriotism, right? So the actual values, the actual ism might be the constitution but then the ists of like, America are patriots, right? People who want to further American values. So in any large enough culture, essentially you have this tension between what are the values and then how do people express them? And then I think, like, everybody knows and has had experience of cultures where they feel out of line with that culture, or the culture has to actually have a conversation with itself and say, are we holding up these values? Like a good example would be like after 911, sort of in the war on terror. There was a lot of that in the United States, right? Have we become the empire that we essentially have always thought we were the antithesis of and that came from- And there was a lot of tough conversations about patriots being patriot at that time, what that meant. But essentially this is about the culture maturing. And bitcoin culture is maturing, so therefore it must have some value. And I think it’s obvious that bitcoin culture has value, right? It helps people convince people that bitcoin is the right tool. It helps them understand why in other fist systems like Fiat and the crypto system, they’re at a disadvantage and why they might want to opt out of those systems. And so the culture then is an antithesis to that. And then the culture is only useful in how much it achieves that goal, right? So therefore now you understand, now the culture has a place and it has a goal, and then you can sort of evaluate the performance of it, which I think is kind of the ideal. And again, I go back to some of the other cultures. I think in every other instance you can look at that. So in your specific example, like Christianity, the goal of Christianity is convert more people to Christianity, to their religious rule set, and to convince them to live by their moral values. And the religion is only as strong as its ability to do that. And over time, Christianity has done it very successfully. It’s the largest religion, but we would also have people who are I’m not an at practicing Christian, so I’m outside of that right now. You could say there’s always problems where like, that culture my dad is a practicing Catholic, constantly kind of talking about what they can do better to reach people. There’s lots of different tensions within those factions and that’s where you get into kind of I think a lot of the subjects that podcasts are good for, just talking about what the culture and value sets are. But yeah, I see this as all –

Stephan Livera – 00:15:00:

But people would disagree, right? Because you can have Christians who disagree and you can disagree. What true maximalism is, even in Christianity, there are different groups. It’s the same kind of thing. Even in, I guess, the broad school of thought of bitcoin maximalism, there are those who, let’s say, believe as an example that it is a more descriptive belief, that it’s not as much of a prescriptive. It’s more like, bitcoin is the best money, and money is going to tend to one. And that’s a descriptive kind of argument. It’s kind of more dispassionate and neutral.

Pete Rizzo – 00:15:36:

Yeah. And I think that’s a fine belief, right? And then it’s a question of like, okay, well, does that belief actually what is the value of it, and is it enough to achieve the objective? And I think in that case, what I see forming in the community right now is that there are some people who just say, yeah, bitcoin is the best money. It doesn’t have to change over time. It will just win. And that’s an inevitability. I can’t do anything about that, and I don’t want to do anything about that. I’m going to buy into that vision, and that’s it for me, ultimately, at the end of the day, I think that’s fine. I don’t have a particular issue with it other than I do think there are a whole other group of people who say, like, hey, no, if bitcoin is the best system, I want to actively evangelize and get people off the other systems. I want to get them to using it today. And therefore we should consider all these other tool sets and adoption mechanisms. And ultimately, I think both those groups will have to coexist. There’s actually nothing wrong about either of them in isolation, right. Because they’re both good for the ultimate goal. It just suggests that you as an individual have some choice. Right? Again, that’s sort of what we should be about in bitcoin is just choice. Right? So me putting down these values, it isn’t really to suggest that everyone has to follow them. I’m sort of making a critique here where I think, again, if you are okay with bitcoin just being a tool and you don’t want to advance it, you have to then accept that other tools exist and that if you don’t do anything to get rid of them, your hatred is sort of like misplaced. So I’ll give you a good example with, like, stablecoins as an example, right? So there’s a hot kind of debate in bitcoin right now about stable coins. So if we as a bitcoin community don’t do anything to bring that technology, I wrote in the piece that one of the values most bitcoin maximal share is crypto minimalism, right, that they have to actually want to kind of reduce the amount of other tools that exist outside of bitcoin in the cryptocurrency series and bring them back to bitcoin. And I actually believe that’s one of the most important ones, because essentially, if you don’t want to reduce that tool, if we don’t want to bring it back to bitcoin, whether it’s stable coins on Liquid or Taro with, like, sats back dollars, these are all interesting technologies. If those don’t take off and they still exist on other chains like tron or ethereum or whatever, then you haven’t minimize them. They still exist, they’ll still find utility there. And if ultimately we’re unwilling to bring that technology here, then it has to exist. So then I would question your hatred of that system, right? So I think we have this word. There’s another word I don’t like shit coins. I don’t think it actually really means anything. I think anybody actually agrees on what it means. I like crypto minimalism better because I think crypto minimalism evokes two things. It’s one that there are cryptocurrencies that just empirically exist. They’re there and people can use them. And it suggests that our attitude should be to minimize them, to actively reduce those, to accept that they’re performing useful financial services, migrating them back to bitcoin, thereby reducing the need for them, and that it actually will be our actions that decide how much other cryptocurrency type systems exist, right? And it’s our tolerance of these systems that will allow them to continue. So the example that I’ve used in this case to get people to understand this, especially people who are new, is that Lightning didn’t always exist. It’s something that we as bitcoiners had to design and build. And the reason we did that is because we wanted bitcoin to not just be a settlement system. We wanted it to be a payment system that was one of its original value propositions. Many felt many felt that that was just a useful tool for money. And so we had to build the system. We had to decide that we wanted to do it. And there was a whole period of time where there were many payments cryptocurrencies just cryptocurrencies that were saying, hey, bitcoin is a store of value. We’re a payment cryptocurrency, right? So there are all these monero, dash, all these different things that you don’t hear about anymore. And why? Because bitcoin has essentially now outcompeted those things. It is now both a stable resort value and a payments method, and it’s still in the middle of that competition. But it was our unwillingness as bitcoiners to allow those things to exist somewhere else that mitigated them. And my hypothesis is that that’s probably the right relationship to having going forward. It does a lot to justify our antagonism to that system, because I think that’s most confusing for people who are like, outsider in the crypto world. They’re like, why are you attacking us? We’re just building a service that people want. And I think our answer to that should be, well, hey, we think that these services are actually going to be better for people on bitcoin. Therefore, we are antagonistic to you. We are trying to reduce the amount of these other systems that people need to rely on. But that’s our goal, right? And therefore, I talked about this a little bit with tlmer stroller on the swan signal yesterday. It’s like, we can be better at positively expressing those values. Those values can still be antagonistic. I don’t think there’s anyone here that doesn’t want to actively reduce the number of cryptocurrencies that are out there. I think that’s kind of everybody’s goal. But we do have to maybe get better, like people understanding these other systems, like, hey, that is our goal. We’re going to be antagonistic to you. But that’s just maybe the natural state, right? You want to profit and do something that doesn’t exist on bitcoin, we think that you’re wrong. Let’s have at it. There’s fair competition and a lot of economic market sectors kind of along the same lines. There shouldn’t be anything like taboo about this.

Stephan Livera – 00:20:58:

Yeah, okay. So one way to think about it could also be to say bitcoin is likely to win or going to win, but people can try you can try this alt coin if you want. I think that’s kind of the more, let’s say maybe a slightly more neutral or dispassionate view. I think that other bitcoin is some of them do take and then of course, there are others who go even further unless they’re almost totally agnostic about what coin they use. From their point of view, they just take whatever coin in their view serves that role. Whereas obviously I can use bitcoin. I would use bitcoin.

Pete Rizzo – 00:21:31:

I think a lot of those people are like self-interested when you say of course a lot of those people are like, really like self interest maximalists. This is like the dgen shitcoiner mentality, right? So they’re in a whole other value set where it’s like and the question then is, like, are we effectively getting them out of that? Because they’re essentially they’re here to just profit off anything, right? And then sort of our tasks is like bitcoin maximalist, I think, to then sort of tell them like, hey, that’s not an effective mindset, right? Like, hey, I’ve been there. I’ve potentially lost almost everything because of all the collapse of these things. You should save some in bitcoin, right? Even if you hate us and you think all of this random garbage that people are saying is correct, like American Hodl says, love yourself, buy bitcoin. The question then is like, do we have a responsibility? Do you want to give these messages and look again? At the end of the day, I respect that some people don’t care. I just think it centers the conversation a little bit more on, like, what do we want to achieve and what responsibilities do we have? And then how are we going to kind of explain what we’re doing to the rest of the crypto world? Which, again, I sort of say this all the time to the folks in the journalism community, which is that bitcoin exists and it’s going up in value over time. You have to have some explanation on that, otherwise your opinion isn’t relevant. In the same case, I would say to bitcoin is cryptocurrencies exist. They continue to be made. You have to have some outlook on them. I think our outlook on them is that we want to diminish them, we actually want to outcompete them. And I think if we have that aspiration, we should be clearer about that. And again, there’s nothing wrong with antagonism in itself, right? But then antagonism can sometimes cross over into like and this is where I think it gets a little weird, like supremacy, where it’s like, oh, I want to eradicate and destroy like, all of those things and they should never exist. And supremacy is kind of a word where it’s like, it doesn’t bring up any good connotations, but you have to kind of wonder, it’s like, have you crossed over in a supremacy where it’s like you’re so angry that these other things exist, you really just want to destroy them and you’re just entirely negatively motivated at that point.

Stephan Livera – 00:23:43:

What about the notion then of, let’s say seeding the turf? Like, if you just view it like, no, bitcoin should just be money and it shouldn’t be trying to do all these other things, or maybe some of these other things are not sustainable. So I would rather seed that turf and let some shit coin handle that because I’m focused on getting the money right.

Pete Rizzo – 00:24:00:

I think that that’s a great way to put it, is actually like seed the turf. You have to actually then be willing to allow again, this is why I said I frame that I like crypto minimalism because it suggests what I think is true, which is a lot of these things exist at our best. They exist purely through our willingness not to replace them or our disinterest in replacing them. Because if you ultimately believe that bitcoin is a system that can expand potentially to do all these things, right, that’s been the claim of bitcoin maximalists sort of forever, right? Is that long enough timeline? We can do these smart contracts, we can do these bitcoin. NFT started on bitcoin. All these things are just stuff we’re going to be able to rebuild over time. So then you get the question of do we want to do that? And this is why I often say that in a world where bitcoin bitcoin maximalists sort of accept ossification, or a world where bitcoin is accept ossification, I don’t know how maximalism exists because it doesn’t have like a forward direction at that point. You’re just sort of accepting that bitcoin is as it is today and that people will find utility elsewhere. I think in that point, maybe you could be a bitcoiner and be like very strongly for bitcoin as a tool that you could use and probably the best money amongst other monies, but then you still sort of have the problem of that, like forward direction, right? And this is like kind of the tension that I see in a lot of bitcoin maximalists right now is that there is why. Has the online conversation become so difficult? Because it’s become very difficult for us to talk about what it is we’re trying to achieve versus this other cryptocurrency systems. Like we see them getting bigger, there’s more kinds of random shit happening on them and I think it’s unclear to the culture what our attitude is to them, right? The culture right now, it’s like we’re just sort of attacking those things. We’re just saying hey, these are bad investments, these will go to zero. And again, I think this is where some of the criticism against Bitcoin maximalism has been fair. It’s sort of like, well what if that doesn’t happen? What is going to be your response then? Because then your ideology at that point is going to look like it is incorrect. It’s going to just appear to people as if it’s not functional, what it’s trying to achieve, right? And I think especially around like the celsius and all those things collapsing bitcoin maximalists definitely took like a really big victory lap, right? We were like big kind of proponents of custody and owning your own keys. And I think in the article I try to say that Bitcoin maximalists, what we want to be is critical of these things and we should be and we have the right to do that. But then we also have to build other products and services that then can replace them. Otherwise people are still going to use them, right? So there is a push pull on these two dynamics, right? So if we don’t build something better, one of the great products I think that’s cool right now is Fedimints, right? They’re talking about kind of advanced custody techniques and to see that stuff is out there like that is really cool and that’s a bitcoin maximalist effort in my opinion because we are trying to get increased the quality of custody. We are actually opposing these like centralized lending services and these other crypto defi type lending services and we are actually making ground there. And to me that’s the right cadence for Bitcoin maximalism, right? Like we have a clear antagonist, the antagonist is clearly bad. We’re putting in the effort to make up ground there and it is that culture that is driving that movement forward. And that to me feels like a really solid example. Like the Lightning example that I pulled out like the US dollar stable coins on Taro. But then again it’s like our culture has to be unify behind that and then we have to make the progress because we’re not going to be able to kind of compete against billion shit coins, right? We can’t do all the things. We have to be really, you know, choice with our energy as bitcoiners. I think this is like a lot of the frustration from the people who are critical of Bitcoin maximalists these days. They’re saying like oh, all these things exist outside of Bitcoin, right? Sure. Because we can’t compete against the consoling effect of all these coins like you just can’t. So then you have to be slow and measured with how we advance bitcoin. I think if you look back at the history of bitcoin, you’ll find that bitcoin maximum bitcoiners have been slow and methodical in how they’re advancing bitcoin. And we’re not going to be the most listening casino thing at any given point. And that’s an advantage, but we have to keep marching forward. Right, so I go back to it where it’s in a world where we accept ossification, where we don’t compete against the status quo, then I think maximalism doesn’t exist.

Stephan Livera – 00:28:48:

Back to the show in a moment. Now, those of you who are still leaving your coins on the exchange, it’s time to drain the exchanges. Unchained Capital is running a promotion until the 8th of September. So if you need a concierge onboarding to help you, take your coins off the exchange into a multi signature vault that you control the keys for, they can help you out here. And there’s a big discount on at the moment where this program is now available for $250, where they will coach you over a video call how to do this. And you can get a further $50 off by using the code “Livera”. So if you’re interested, go to the website. It’s unchained.com/concierge. Use the code “Livera” to get a discount. Give yourself that peace of mind. Take your coins off the exchange. Today, if you are interested in bitcoin mining, brains.com is the website for you. You can optimize your bitcoin mining operations. They have a full stack solution, including ASIC management and firmware that you can use to autotune and get more sats for your dollar. They have farm management software and they are the operators of the world’s. First bitcoin mining pool, previously known as Slushpool is now going to be called Brain Spool. So if you’re interested in that, go to the website. You can find a range of content. They also have a bitcoin mining book available, so I’ll be chatting soon with some of the team on that. And if you’re interested, go to braiins.com. That’s braiins.com. Mempool.pace is the bitcoin explorer built by bitcoin is for bitcoin. It features real time, time transaction tracking and Mempool visualization. So you can quickly get the information you need about your bitcoin transactions. And at the time this podcast goes out, they’ve got a Lightning Explorer. This is a brand new feature available in Mempool.space so you can go there and they’ve got all kinds of 

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The Lightning network and explore that on Mempool.space. Now, this is available over Tor. It’s also completely open source. You can run your own at home. Over 1 million people use Mempool.space every month. This project is operated freely for the benefit of the community. There are no ads or third party trackers. Go try it out today at Mempool.space. And now back to the show.

Stephan Livera – 00:30:49:

I see. Okay. And so to your point about progressing forward in a centralized ecosystem versus progressing forward in a decentralized ecosystem. This has long been an argument amongst a lot of bitcoinersAlso where.For example. It’s a common thing where people say. Oh. Look. There’s actually some old thread on bitcoin talk where that idea was proposed years ago and it got shot down. Or for whatever reason. It wasn’t feasible, robust, scalable, decentralized, et cetera. It didn’t tick all the right boxes from a bitcoin point of view. And I’m sure you, as a bit of a resident bitcoin historian, you definitely appreciate that also, having obviously trolled through the history records.

Pete Rizzo – 00:31:28:

Yeah, tons of bad ideas, for sure, yeah.

Stephan Livera – 00:31:32:

And perhaps some ideas that maybe weren’t ready yet, right. And I’m sure at one point, Lightning or payment channels, people were talking about that in the early years on bitcoin talk forums and IRC and so on. And then it only got actualized in, let’s say, early 2018, when the Lightning Network started.

Pete Rizzo – 00:31:50:

Well, yeah, that’s the thing, right? It’s like, I think we’ve been good at differentiating from the crystal system as saying, like, hey, look, a lot of these systems that are achieving these things today, they’ve taken the easy route to get there. And this has always, I think, been where the criticism against Ethereum from people like Greg Maxwell has been the most effective by sort of saying, like, yeah, look at thee, has achieved this system of applications. But what they don’t have is they don’t have social consensus on a monetary policy, they don’t have the ability to kind of run their own software. And it’s kind of you go through the values that I laid out in the article, Ethereum is sort of absent, every one of them. So the first one I wrote down was that foremost, bitcoin maximalists should want to preserve bitcoin for future generations. We believe the system will exist in perpetuity. So from a bitcoin maximalist view, why would we ever want to do something like the merge? They can’t guarantee in that instance that their protocol is going to be live or operational, like the next day. So it couldn’t be more antithetical to our value set, because our value set is actually that this is such an important system, we can’t ever assume what condition people would want to use the system is. We can’t forecast the extremity of their circumstance. So, yeah, it’s actually paramount for us that the system not only be operational today, but like, every day in the future. That’s what we talk about. Long time preference. Short time preference. Like bitcoin has a super long time preference, right, or low time preference.

Stephan Livera – 00:33:19:

Yeah, low time preference.

Pete Rizzo – 00:33:20:

When you go to number two, the bitcoin running your own software, right? Like bitcoin maximus wants to encourage people to run the software. We think that this is what you give you stakeholdership in the network. Bitcoin node cheap, really easy to run, can do it in a couple of hours. Ethereum debates out long Twitter threads. Takes a couple of weeks. Can they do something like a UASF? Unclear. The third thing that I said was essentially the slow commitment to slow software changes and enfranchising all users. And then you look at the merge and, what is it doing? Anyone who disagrees with their technology plan is disenfranchised. You don’t exist. You have to then build your own network. You’re kicked off, right. You, as a minority, sort of cease to exist. And so, yeah, again, this is where I think it becomes helpful because oftentimes when we try to attack things like Ethereum and things like the merge, we really, I think, struggle to kind of say, okay, we come off as really angry and negative. And I think we can also just say, no, we just don’t believe in this stuff. Our values, what we positively think is opposed to this. And I think our criticism might be taken or maybe like, more effective at kind of like raising this if we didn’t appear so negative. Right? Because I think for me, it’s like very easy to dismiss something like the merge say, like, yeah, look, every one of our values that we hold as bitcoiners and so it’s like pretty antithetical. And, you know, at the end of the day, if they want to encourage people to put value in that system, that’s their choice. I can’t stop them, but I’m not going to encourage you to do that. I’m not going to, like, be a part of a system that would have that sort of reckless kind of outlook. And again, I think the better that we are positively expressing our values, the more we’re going to be effective in making critique about them. Because at the end of the day, look, I think the merge is going to work. It’s going to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, I’ll just be honest, nobody is going to care because ethereum doesn’t exist in the same way. It doesn’t have like an absolute structure. They’re just going to go back to the drawing board, they’ll try something else, they’ll make something else up there’s. No structure doesn’t have like, a constrained structure of bitcoin. Bitcoin is a system of values and rules. And ethereum at the end of the day is kind of whatever it wants to be. So they’ll find a way to figure it out. So I don’t just don’t know if it’s a great use of our energy. And my worry is that the bitcoin culture, that our negativity and our attacks of Ethereum actually come from, like, our own insecurities. We’re kind of insecure about bitcoin. At the end of the day, I’m not I don’t have any insecurities about bitcoin in relation to the merge. If it works, great for Ethereum, if it doesn’t, I’m sure they’ll figure out something else and make up something else and move forward. They’re very creative people.

Stephan Livera – 00:36:08:

I think the point, as you are saying, is that bitcoin is encouraging people to run a Bitcoin node, whether that’s on a raspberry pie on your existing computer or your laptop, and encouraging people to actually use the tools as Bitcoiners as would say. And so I think that’s important to understand, that the ecosystems are very different. And so that also goes into the next principle, which you said and you were elaborating a bit. There this commitment of slow software changes and trying to enfranchise users. And so I think that’s where also a critique comes. They say, oh, look, see you. Bitcoin has took forever to get Taproot. And from their point of view, there’s not even that many people using Taproot, even though we are seeing so, for example, LND is now moving to Taproot by default.

Pete Rizzo – 00:36:53:

Honestly, that’s the biggest one, and I think this is number three, is the one that took me the longest to understand. And I would argue that from a bitcoin like four cores perspective, like the entirety of the four cores was about principle number three. And I don’t think that anyone like it took us years. I would say it took the Bitcoin community like four years to kind of understand that point. And it’s a really deep point, and it’s essentially that in a decentralized system, if it is to be truly decentralized, then no one can tell you what software is bitcoin. You as an individual get to make a choice of softwares and as long as the software is compatible, it is bitcoin. And that no action of any other individual or group can actually remove your access to Bitcoin. And I think this is why the more and more I think about it, bitcoin is an economy, it’s a culture, it’s like a rule set. And we do face opposition to other cryptocurrencies, but I don’t know if they’re actually like I hate the crypto asset thesis. I just think it’s so terrible. I really think there’s just two competing cultures at this point. There’s the bitcoin culture, which has a very clear value set, and I think a pro user value set, a pro human value set, like a value set that, as Jimmy Song says, is very aligned with classical liberalism and morals, right? And the other value set, which is the Ethereum world, the smart contract platform world, which is move fast, break things, developers lead, the users follow. If it doesn’t work, fuck them. They lost their money, they’ll speculate on somebody else Degen anti system and the two cultures. It makes me sad that bitcoin maximalism is viewed as such a negative culture because I can’t think that it isn’t like anything. But if you look at the shit coin sort of degen culture, it is so devoid of any reasonable values other than like, fuck you, I’m going to get mine. Damn the consequences that it really says a lot, I think, about that we haven’t been effective in our messaging because if you really actually understand the values that each system expresses, one of them I think is very nihilistic, often almost to the point of selfishness and greed over everything else. And the other system, the bitcoin system is no, we need to do what’s right for everybody, we can’t make decisions for everybody else. And yes, that is going to slow the ability for us to make these sort of technical upgrades, but it is worth it and it will be worth it. And to me that’s the kind of fight that is really romantic about bitcoin is that we do have that aspiration, right?

Stephan Livera – 00:39:34:

Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. And I think on the question of being ineffective in quotes, as you were saying, I think that’s where let’s say some people like to critique bitcoin and saying look how ineffective you are. All these people just leave their coins on the exchanges or they say oh, look how ineffective bitcoin maximalists have been, look how many shit coins there are, there are 20000 shit coins. If you are so effective, there’d be less of them. Right? That’s kind of part of the argument. But I think it’s also not fair in other ways because it’s not like bitcoin maximalists can stop the creation of new shit coins and it’s not like we’re not already swimming uphill in some ways because there’s just all these fiat incentives around us. And of course there are going to be people who succumb or just go with the fiat flow.

Pete Rizzo – 00:40:16:

Is it from Samuel Jackson where he’s like the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities and like the evils of the world, right? That is the thing. Bitcoin maximalism has to be aligned to that path. And this is why I think why I’ve been dismissive of the attacks on bitcoin maximalism is like yes, we have to walk against the opposition, we have to continue that forward direction because we are beset on all sides by evil. It is true. Like the fiat system is an economy that continues to penalize us for people who are average, people that can’t get ahead. Does that mean bitcoin is inflation? Head I don’t think that’s true, but again, the whole system itself has its pros and cons and then the crypto system at large. Again, we are opposed to that. We have to be opposed to both of those things and to me that’s what maximalism is. We have to strip maximalism down to what it is. And I think bitcoin maximalism has to be the forward direction against both of these other systems. We have to oppose that, we have to have a system of values that opposes that and we have to have a system of values that gives us direction and forward momentum against those systems. And I think to the extent that bitcoin maximalism can do that, it’s like very useful. And again, that’s why I said earlier I was really trying to peel out toxicity because I don’t think toxicity is that. I do really believe that toxicity solves a core problem. And the problem that toxicity solves is that we have to be able to protect bitcoin from ourselves, right? At the end of the day, that’s what toxicity is for. That’s why it was created. But then toxic maximalism then kind of starts to become somewhat incoherent because again, there are just two very different goals. One of themselves, okay, how do we move forward and how do we oppose the forces that are against us? That has to be maximalism, I think. I don’t know what else would be that. And then there’s toxicity, which is, yeah, look, it’s an unsolvable paradox, this idea that any upgrade to bitcoin is indistinguishable from an attack. And we have to live with that and we have to become a culture that has a conversation around that and that’s what toxicity is. But then if you combine them, this is kind of where I get to look the point where it’s like, are they really compatible? Is toxic maximalism effective? Can it move us forward? And I almost think the question then is probably not because they just do two different things. One of them again, has to oppose other forces and the other one of them, it just opposes us. At the end of the day, that was what gave rise to toxicity. And again, I don’t think it’s bad. I think toxicity is one of the greatest things bitcoin had ever achieved. And it’s hilarious to me to see the Ethereum folks realize that toxicity is good, right? They’re talking about their own user activated software, when and why that might be necessary though. So they’re also starting to understand that bitcoiners just hit an existential problem before them and they came up with a solution and our solution actually works for them. Which is crazy, right? That’s how good the solution is, is that they will probably need to use it. And that says a lot about why toxicity is good. But again, we should be asking like, are these compatible ideologies?

Stephan Livera – 00:43:21:

I see. And also in your article you talk about this idea, the commitment of building on bitcoin, using bitcoin where feasible. Now that is also certainly I see that in the bitcoin community or in communities that use bitcoin. I think perhaps one question that might come up is in cases where something can’t be built on bitcoin, does that then legitimate the creation of that shit coin? Right? Like, again, I’m not making that argument. I’m just saying that’s kind of the argument that we might hear. So how would you respond to that?

Pete Rizzo – 00:43:56:

Well, that’s why I would go back to one of them and the assumptions we have to make is bitcoin is only limited by our ingenuity. And I think that’s why I think that I like crypto minimalism, because we have to accept that some of these things are achieving things that can’t exist on bitcoin today and therefore legitimately exist and are providing real services. The question then of like, will they ever exist on bitcoin? That’s always going to be up to us, right? And I think that’s where it becomes kind of like a positive way to frame it, where it’s sure there might be ideas that how short is short term? This is a good question, right? If bitcoiners are so low time preference, short term might be 100 years. Like, there might be monero or Uzi cash or some of these cryptocurrencies that purport to have better privacy. They might be better than if you want privacy, they might be better than bitcoin for some period of time. And that could be decades. They could does that mean there’s never going to be a solution on bitcoin? Does that mean, like, no point? Is anyone in the future ever going to figure out how to do that? I think the answer to that is also probably no, because again, we have to believe that if we are effective at creating more bitcoiners and that we do create this culture that breaks ground against these other movements, then the smartest people in the world will work on bitcoin, and hopefully they’ll find a solution. But it also gives us, I think, like, a bit of humility and patience. Because, look, there isn’t going to be and I wrote this at the end of the piece, it’s like there’s no amount of anger and frustration that we can have that’s going to remove all these cryptocurrencies. There just isn’t they’re just not all going to go to zero tomorrow. So then we have to do something with that frustration. We have to do something with that anger. And that has to be the positive. We have to get people to channel that in a positive direction. And that’s why I view bitcoin maximum. It has to be directional. It has to be effective in convincing people to do the best that they can for bitcoin, because some of these other things, like the hodl culture or the take on debt by bitcoin culture, they try to get you to like, if you’re putting yourself interest before bitcoin, I have to wonder if you’re a maximalist. I just do. And that’s not bad. I’m not trying to cast judgment on you. I’m just saying, like, bitcoin should get to have all the things if you’re going to be a bitcoin maximalist, bitcoin should in every case, whatever is bitcoin maximalism should be the best thing for bitcoin. So I think, like, one of the most controversial things I put in there at the end was like, everyone should use bitcoin. And if you’re a maximalist, you have to believe that. You have to believe that everybody can benefit from bitcoin, and that’s everybody in the world. And do we always live up to that? Does everybody live up to that? It can be hard, but a value set should be aspirational, right? There’s a reason in christianity that they have saints, because it’s so fucking hard to be a saint. It takes you your whole life, and then you might die. Or even, like in the United states, we have the presidential medal of freedom. It’s like, you were so american. You lived up to our values to such a high extent. There’s like a special medal that we give you. So I almost visit, like, bitcoin maximalists. It should be like a lifetime achievement award. It’s like before you die, you should be kind of up there with a walker. You’ll be up there, and they’ll be like, what a podcast. Here you go. You effectively increased bitcoin. Here’s your medal. And then that’s it.

Stephan Livera – 00:47:30:

One other idea. So politics is often the art of putting one principle against another. And in some cases, are there instances where some of these principles of maximalism or these guidelines of maximalism where they come into conflict. So, as an example, this idea of keeping bitcoin open and accessible for everybody. But on the other hand, it should be technological supremacy as well. And I think what happens is with the cryptography and the maths and the science and the computer, the networking and everything of it, it just seems to come out that okay, for example, confidential transactions does not seem like it would be feasible to put into bitcoin today, given those other aspects of accessibility, verifiability, openness, et cetera. So how do you wrestle with that aspect of it?

Pete Rizzo – 00:48:16:

So you’re talking about the specifics of the technical proposals. Since we can’t get something like that in today, what do we do about it?

Stephan Livera – 00:48:23:

As an example, there are people who want privacy in bitcoin on chain. There are people who want various other things.

Pete Rizzo – 00:48:29:

Yeah, right.

Stephan Livera – 00:48:30:

But they’re not all feasible.

Pete Rizzo – 00:48:31:

Well, I think we, like, in trying to find bitcoin maximalism, I was always struck, and I could never really reconcile this, right, is that there’s what our culture expresses and then there’s what the developers do. And I think, you know, modern bitcoin maximalism and the current Twitter culture is very divorced from, like, the developers who I watched, like, growing up. So I think I was for a while trying to kind of reconcile these contradictions. And I think one of the things that struck me is if you look at sort of Greg Maxwell or Andrew Pellestro or all the kind of the great bitcoin developers, they were always interested in other ideas away from bitcoin, full stop. They always were. You know, you look at when mimble wimble came out, there was a very active discussion in the community around that. Always the developers in bitcoin have talked about Monero. They’ve tried to understand its privacy tools. I mean, even zcash, which comes from ZK snarks. There was a whole conversation about whether that applied to bitcoin. Ultimately, Zcash essentially forked off and created their own coin. But that was a bitcoin conversation. So, again, I think that the modern bitcoin maximalism way to handle this. The whole thing about like, oh, don’t be a shitcoiner. Everyone’s a shitcoiner. Like, no one’s a shitcoiner. I had this conversation with Matt Odell where everyone that I talked to seems to have an exception. Like, if we are against shitcoiner, if you’re a shitcoiner for doing, like, one single thing against our values, well, then everyone I talk to has an exception. Developers all have their one proposal they think is interesting lsewhere, Matt Odell will still talk to the guy who uses Monero because he’s interested in privacy. Adam Back will still be interested in US dollars stablecoins and bringing them to Liquid because he thinks they’re onboarding tool. Well, so then do we really have a culture that actually is shit when the best expression of our culture? And that’s why I think crypto minimalism is better, because it suggests that you as a maximalist, you can still think something else would be best for bitcoin, and you can still work on that and have that aspiration, and it still kind of fits the mental model. Peter McCormick can still think that bringing leftists to bitcoin is great for bitcoin, and he can work on that, and it’s his way of kind of working within the set. Right. And I think this is one of the things when we talked last about my Nick Carter piece, I kind of said that everyone seems to have their who is a bitcoin maximalist, like, who does all the things. And there was often this kind of, like, intense debate around whether you hated shitcoins or whether you were indifferent to them or whether it mattered. And I think there’s something I hope I can contribute to the conversation is I think it doesn’t I think the right way to look at this is not to constantly judge ourselves for whether or not we’ve said or done the right things. We can’t become a judgmental culture. Okay, so I’ll give you another thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, where it’s is it better to do less bad or more good? Like, is it better to actively reduce the amount? I asked Jimmy Song, this is the end of the conference. I was like, tell me what it is. Because I think we’ve become a culture that prioritizes doing less bad, and we’ve become a culture that venerates people merely because they don’t do bad. Oh, well, why is he the best maximalist? Oh, he’s never used the shit coin. He’s never said anything positive about Monero, has never used an exchange. Well, in the end, you’ve never done anything at all. You’ve just never done anything. So how do we get people to do more good at. What point can you do enough good to outweigh the bad? And my fear is that we become a culture that’s like so insecure about its values that we become so judgmental. And like, now we’re sort of like, you know, this is the whole dumb thing around, like the whole Nick Carter episode where he’s done more for bitcoin than you. And I don’t understand what’s happening here. Why is our culture so concerned with judgment? And I think that’s because we’ve kind of made bitcoin maximalism as this impossible standard. No one in isolation actually fits this mythical description of the perfect bitcoin. Maximalist is never shit coins. And so then our conversation is all about, oh, well, Sampson did this and this person did that, and this thing is better than that. And it’s like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, why are you having this fucking discussion? It’s totally pointless. We should have a common goal. The common goal should be to reduce the amount of other cryptocurrencies there are and bring the useful stuff back to bitcoin. I don’t really care, like, who did what with a token like two fucking years ago. It’s like I’m a person of limited time. So again, that’s like where the conversation breakdown seems to happen. So I’m hoping this can help because I think we have to say that a culture that prioritizes doing less bad, it’s just like, what are you going to achieve in that culture? You’re going to achieve sort of like just imagine a world in your head, like mentally imagine a world of people doing less bad. And in my head I come up with a, you know, this guy goes to work at nine in the morning, get to work on time and goes home and he tucks his kids in and then imagine a world where people are doing more good, where everyone is incentivised to do the most good. And it’s just a vastly different world. It’s like, okay, maybe this guy is going to donate some people’s things to the homeless, like on his way to work, and maybe he’s going to co worker who’s like feeling bad about himself, so he’s going to spend some time doing that and oh, you know, you just kind of go down the list and it’s just like they are two very different worlds. They seem to be so I don’t know, I’ll leave people with that. The less good, what’s better?

Stephan Livera – 00:54:17:

So what are the other good things in your view that people can do for bitcoin? I mean, it doesn’t relate to, let’s say, getting adoption or helping merchants or helping grow the base of hodlers. Like, what’s good in your view?

Pete Rizzo – 00:54:28:

Yeah, good is whatever is good for bitcoin, right? And I think that we all get to interpret that, but I hope that these values speak to that, right? So I put there that our goal should be to expand the economy. Like that we should want to do that, and we should push ourselves to do that because, again, if we make it a label, this is what is really infuriating as an outsider to the Bitcoin culture. The thing that sort of infuriated me for the longest time is that we seem to kind of, again, have this idea, well, he’s a Bitcoiner like, oh, you can never say anything bad about him because he’s a Bitcoin. Therefore everything that he does is good for Bitcoin, which is kind of an irrational view. It’s really just like, was the action that you took that it was a good for Bitcoin or not? Could you have done something for Bitcoin? Right? So I have to have used this framework personally to try to push myself. I do go to the grocery store. I spend $300. I’ve never talked to that merchant about accepting Bitcoin. Maybe I should. Maybe that’s my small way that I contribute and do something better. Mr. Hodl, I was talking to him saying, oh, well, I tried that and it didn’t work. And those people didn’t end up using Bitcoin. And I was like, sure. That says nothing about whether your aspiration was valid. And if you stop pushing yourself, if you allow yourself to stagnate, if we allow our culture to kind of stagnate, then it will stagnate, right? Ultimately, maximalism should be about doing what’s best for Bitcoin and other instances and falling short. It has to be a default, unattainable goal. And again, the sort of like Twitter class, again, we’ve created this culture of heroes, right? And again, even the people who are at that status, they need to be pushing forward. Can they do more? Like, you can always do more. It’s hard. It should be hard. We’re trying to do something that is impossible. We’re trying to meme this currency into the global reserve currency of the world. We’re going to face every degree of opposition, and I think we have a value structure that helps us get there. So if you check out the article, I tried to put everything in there that I could think of. It seems like the conversation has been positive. Some people have really said that I should have got because it’s kind of divided into like, nine commitments that Bitcoin maximalists have, and I guess I should have added a 10th. The religious faction really is upset at me because I didn’t add a 10th. I actually didn’t really even see the thing when I was doing it. But yeah, look, I mean, we have to have a positive conversation about our values. And I think these kind of things like Shit Coin, cult, everything is bad as Fiat. I was saying this the other day where we’re really critical of the other cryptocurrencies because they use all these fucking technical buzzwords, but we use social buzzwords all the time. Like shitoin is a social buzzword. It means nothing. In the same way that decentralization used by the Ethereum people means absolutely nothing. It’s like they’re just using a random buzzword. And I think we also need to fight against these in bitcoin. Like, let’s get rid of these cultural buzzwords and try to focus on what do you mean? What do you mean by that when you say that? What are you trying to say? And I think if we can get better at that, we can get better at, again, like, speaking positively, otherwise we allow people to define ourselves. And I think that’s what the other kind of anti-maximalists have been so effective at doing is that they’ve allowed the whole of the kind of crypto world and the financial world to kind of see bitcoin in a negative light because we have kind of refused to define ourselves. They, in turn have defined us, and they’ve defined us very negatively. Right. And I don’t think that’s true. It’s why I’m here.

Stephan Livera – 00:57:59:

Yeah, right. So, yeah, I think it is important as well. I mean, it does come into that conversation about not accepting, let’s say, the frame that somebody else gives you, but choosing your own. And I think that’s an important thing rather than just kind of letting other people define who you are, define what your goals are. No, like, we all set our own goals and our own desires and aims. So I think we’ll probably finish up there. So, listeners, make sure you check Pete’s article. I’ll put it in the show notes. It’s over at Forbes, of course. Check out BitcoinMagazine.com. Follow Pete on Twitter @pete_rizzo_.

Pete Rizzo – 00:58:32:

Wow.

Stephan Livera – 00:58:33:

I think that’s it.

Pete Rizzo – 00:58:34:

Memorized my Twitter handle. I love it. Yeah, man. Enjoy the conference. I appreciate chatting. And look, it’s great debate. I mean, hopefully we can continue it. I love the work that you’ve been doing on BitcoinMagazine.com, particularly the stuff around kind of credit lending and where that goes in bitcoin. So I hope you kind of push our culture forward too. I’m not an expert in Austrian economics, never have been, but we need people from all different different walks, so I appreciate it, man.

Stephan Livera – 00:59:01:

Fantastic. Well, thanks, Pete. Chat soon. Get the show notes@stefanlivera.com/410. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the citadels.

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