Putting Bitcoin into practice for noobs

Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today my guest is Matt Odell. He is a co-host of the Rabbit Hole Recap podcast series, so make sure you check that out. And his co-host is Marty Bent, who also appeared on my podcast, on the earlier episode number forty-nine. Matt's a guy in the space who provides good updates and analysis, so I wanted to get him on the show. So here is my discussion with Matt. Welcome to the show, Matt. I'm a big fan of your work with Tales from the Crypt and Rabbit Hole Recap. It makes two of us happy. Good to be here. So Matt, what I've seen, what you're doing is really putting Bitcoin into practice for a lot of people, because when more technical members of, you know, Bitcoin community talk about things, it can be put in a very technical sense, and then sometimes that can be kind of difficult to break that down into how should I, the individual, actually go and do that. And so I think some of the material that you share, both on Twitter and also just from your commentary that you offer on Rabbit Hole Recap, I think It, it just helps offer some of those resources for noobs, and I think, yeah, it might be good to, to talk through some of those, kind of typical setup ways because we face that challenge of trying to get people into Bitcoin, but then get them in the right way. Do you, I, I'm sure you sense that same challenge as well. Yeah.

You know, it's, it almost feels like we have, we have two completely, like a, a, a completely different situations where you have You either have one side of the spectrum where peo-people are getting information that is just completely incorrect, that is just not based in reality whatsoever and is pushed because of ulterior motives, and then you have the other side of the spectrum where Everything is based on actual hard observations and facts, but it's just super technical and just way too dense for anyone to actually reasonably get through, especially if you're a beginner. So I try and-- I've been trying for a couple years now to bridge that gap in between, where You take some of these technical things and you distill them down to like what's really important, what are the key things that people should take out of,

About, take out of these different scenarios and these different,

strategies. Yeah, exactly. And I think the, the challenge for most is people are just time poor. They don't have the time to go and read the correct way to, you know, to go and, let's say, store the bitcoins correctly, run everything using their own full node, et cetera. It, it, in practice, it tends to be, unless they're already very highly technical and very, you know, having a lot of A lot of time, you kind of, they have to sort of start in a very basic way, but doing those basic way things tends to erode their privacy and so on.

And it's, you know, it's also, it's one of those industries where Individuals that aren't necessarily, the most ethical or,

you know, the, the, or most morally conscious, ten- tend to, they can make a lot of money steering you in the wrong direction. And not only that, then you have on the opposite side, you have the people that, that do know this stuff, that is, you know, the, the wizards out there, and, and they, they're too busy to really- Interact with beginners or interact in any way that can, can, you know, they just don't have the time. Everyone is time poor, right? So they, they don't have the time or the, the willingness to, to, to break these things down in, into noob friendly,

New, new friendly content in general. You know, one of the things I love about your podcast is I feel like you, you strike that balance really well, like you can have a, you- Your, your podcast is great for someone like me who's, who's been in the space for what feels like forever, a- a-as well as someone who's, you know, two months, two months in. you really are able to distill it down to, to the important things in, in, in a dig-digestible way, an accessible way.

Oh, well, thank you, Matt. That's very kind of you. I, I find sometimes I'm going too, into the details as well. Sometimes I talk to, you know, normal people in the real And sometimes they listen to an episode or two, but they just think, "Whoa, it's just like too much." So it takes a certain level of technical ability and a certain enthusiasm to go and learn to really, get into it. Yeah. So I think one thing for you, like, and maybe this is like a question for you as well, like, how do you-- what's kind of the, someone's totally new, what are the sort of resources that you would point them towards to try to get them up to speed in a way that's not gonna totally turn them off, while at the same time pointing them in the right direction?

Okay, so that's not an easy question. it, it's definitely Easier than it was before, I mean, to, to start it off, there, before we had the block the, you know, the blockcrypto dot com, Mike Dudas' news company. there was, there was probably not a single, news website that I could like wholeheartedly recommend. It was like if you, if you went to a website like if I said like, "Oh, CoinDesk is like relatively reputable," there's still like sixty percent of their articles are like complete absolute trash, you know? And, and The Block like kind of still has some. They like, you know, they release like press releases that they shouldn't be releasing because You know, it's just for some garbage project, but, but it's, it's most-- it's mostly there. you know, I really like that we have this new crop of, of high quality podcasts. I, I tend to-- I tend to, I, I personally am a podcast addict, and, you know, it was one of the reasons it was such a good fit for me to go into podcasts myself, and I feel like I'm so comfortable with Marty, even though it's like the first time I've ever- recorded on air was like a year ago. so, so the podcast format is, i-has-is a really good format for me to learn. so I like, I do like recommending the podcast and, and I- we also have like this, this, you know, solid group of podcasts where I can basically- wholeheartedly recommend to not worry about any, you know, I could say to someone, "Listen to every episode of Stephan's podcast. There's not like a single episode there that I would feel like they would be getting steered in the wrong direction." Like, that's the biggest, the, the, there might be some that are too technical, but at least I know that there's none It's extremely difficult recommending something in this space if, if there's a potential where they go down that route and they, they, they, they get steered into the wrong direction. They, they They get steered into scams, they get steered into, certain sketchy situations because of either the ads or because of, of, The content not being, you know, you, you, you people need to have a certain amount of editorial integrity in this space, otherwise the content gets overrun by horrible advice and, and horrible, just content in general. so, you know, the podcasts, the podcasts I always say noted, I have you guys, I always say, I obviously tell them they should listen to Rabbit Hole, Marty's interview series is like fantastic. the guys at Block Digest are like constantly putting out good content. Reckless Review, I, I like, but they only have three episodes so far, we'll see if they keep it up. and then like, so like we have stuff like What Bitcoin Did, for instance, where like I would never say to someone- Someone listened to every single episode of what Bitcoin did, any of them I could wholeheartedly recommend. No, there's like, there's like a decent amount of episodes there that are like kind of questionable and kind of could lead people into the wrong direction. but I, you know, I, I, I, I do like what Peter's doing over there. He has a lot of solid pots. So where, where do I send people for their first intro into Bitcoin? I mean, I, I like the Nakamoto Institute's, Catalog, I like Jameson's page, Bitcoin dot page. I tend to send them in that direction. The Bitcoin Standard made it way easier, you know, it kinda depends on who your audience is, if it's an older audience I tend to point them in the, in the direction of Bitcoin Standard. if it's a younger person, I tend, tend tell, I tend to tell them, you know, create a new Nim account on Twitter Jump into Twitter, you know, you gotta-- Twitter takes at least six to a-- six months to a year to like properly distill that shit down and, and see who you really wanna be following and listening to. It's like a really active process. I like to tell people that, you know, you can sit on the sideline and try and learn as much as possible before you buy any. But really, you're not gonna learn anything until you buy a little bit too, because you have to have, you know, you have to have some skin in the game. Like most of the stuff I've learned, and I don't know about you, most of the stuff I've learned has been because I kind of recklessly jumped in and then had to like learn on the fly, like how to not lose my money, what am I investing in, what the hell's going on here? and if you don't actually play with it in your hands It just never really, it's really hard to visualize any of these concepts or, or strategies or anything like that.

Yeah, my, my sense on that is it's very personality dependent, right? So some people are very perfectionists, they have to know every little thing before they go into it, and then there are others who are more like, "Ah, just, just jump in and I'll just learn as I go and wing it," right? So there's different aspects there, but I 100% agree that really you learn by doing and so- So you, you need to just, you know, get your hands dirty and try to run, you know, run Bitcoin Core, try to run these different pieces of software, but then obviously because it's such a space with so many scams and distractions, people can end up running the wrong things. So, yeah, but I think your recommendations there are really great. I think ultimately it comes down to sort of pointing people towards Following the right people. So let's say, you know, like pointing them towards the Nakamoto Institute, pointing them towards certain journalists in the space or certain podcasts in the space who you kind of trust a little bit more than some of the others in the space. might also be good to talk about what are some common, you know, mistakes and pitfalls, because obviously you and I, we've been around in this game for a little while, what are some, what are some common, errors that a newbie can fall into?

You know, I, a-and just to go back on the previous question, just for a second, you know, yeah, and, and it's, it's great that we have content of, on all different platforms now, you know, way more content than we had before. You know, one of the things I've been doing a lot lately is, is trying to get more people to use Wasabi. And what I've found is some people like watching YouTube videos, so I, I linked them to a guy, four o two payment required on, on Twitter. Who has, who has the YouTube videos. Some people like reading the text, so then I just link them to a text guide. And then a lot of people like listening, so I link, link them to, to your podcast with, NoPara. and, and so no matter what type of learner you are, there, you're able to like have a pretty good solid introductory into Into Wasabi, but the, the crazy thing there is that's from three different content producers. So it's really hard to then transfer that into some kind of one-stop shop, you know? Oh, here, you're ready to go, you're ready to start because You know, who, who decides what, what, what those three things are? Who, who, who puts, who says that I'm right about, about putting those things? So a-n-anytime you have like a site that collates that stuff, then you have more issues. So that's why I really like Twitter. anyway, back to pitfalls. as, as far as pitfalls go, I mean, the big one was coin loss, right? so then coin loss comes in, 'cause like at, at the end of the day, that, that is, I, I think the, the two biggest issues, Beginners have is, is either, is either you lose your money, which no one wants to lose their money, or basically you inadvertently leak your privacy everywhere, and that could end up resulting in you losing your money at a future date. so as far as losing your money,

I, I, I, I'm pretty sure you got in around the same time I got in, like early 2013. like back then it was way, way, way, way more difficult for us to securely store Bitcoin. nowadays we have- You can pretty much tell someone, get a Ledger, Trezor, or Coldcard. I, I- As I think there's a huge drop off in hardware quality after those three, so you tell that the, those, those three are very reputable, they're used by a lot of people, there's probably no critical errors in them You can buy one of those, and then, this is where it gets difficult, how do you interact with that? You know, do we get, we get into the whole, does, does every new user, should they all run full nodes? Should they all run this? Should they all, you know, all, all run that? I think On a base level, just being able to say to someone, "Go buy this reputable hardware wallet," you know, even take a step back from multisig or everything, even take a step back from using your own node. Just, you have your hardware wallet, you use their built-in UX, which, you know, from a privacy perspective isn't great, from a sovereignty perspective isn't great, but at least, you know, you control your own keys and you probably, you probably won't get hacked. and now that we have all these different methods It's a very easy thing to say to people, use a couple of them, don't use the same one, don't put all your eggs in one basket, if, if you lose something, you know, because look, we like saying, you know, don't trust, verify, all this stuff. 99% of people can't check the code. They're not gonna be able to audit the code and look at it. So what's the next best thing? The next best thing is you use wallets that are very popular, that are being used by lots of people, and, and you use multiple of them in different setups so that if one, for some reason, one gets compromised, you don't lose your, your whole stash. Now, like what, two days ago or yesterday, Wasabi announced that they're about to release hardware wallet integration. They've already tested it with Coldcard and Trezor. which are like my two favorite hardware wallets. Yeah. So now we can tell people, download Wasabi, get a Trezor Ledger or a Coldcard, use it with Wasabi It'll be the most private light node experience you can have, 'cause it all runs through Tor, automatically built in. And if you have your own full node on your computer, if you decide that, you know, I'm ready to, to be a full Bitcoiner Then you can run like Pierre's power node launcher on your computer, and, and Wasabi will automatically pull the blocks from your own full node, so you'll be able to use your hardware wallet with Wasabi through Tor, Privacy preserving and then also have easy access to coin joints as well at the same exact time. So we're, we're, we're close, we're slowly getting to this point here where it's becoming way easier to recommend privacy preserving, secure coin storage that is like very close to, to really mainstream user accessible. And then on the, on the other side of that equation, we have these easy multisigs that are coming out with Casa and Unchained Capital, Each of them have their own trade-offs, but the, the capabilities they're offering on the multisig front in terms of UX, in terms of, of user friendliness, is like insane. It's absolutely insane how easy they're making it, and that's only gonna get easier. so I think in, in terms of, of terms of that, which is like the major pitfall for beginners We're sitting in a, in a really great situation right now compared to where we were even like a year ago, two years ago. I remember during the 2017 run-up, like there wasn't really that great, you know, it was- Yeah, it, it, it was really hard to, if someone said to me, "How do I use Bitcoin without leaking all of my transaction data everywhere and still have secure..." storage. That was like a, that was like a, let's sit down for two hours and go over how to set up Electrum personal server, and that, that was just a crazy conversation, like that was just unrealistic. I wasn't gonna be able to, it was not scalable in terms of getting people to, to do that method.

Right, exactly. And I like what you're saying because it's very easy for people who are more technical to sort of say, "Oh, you've gotta be perfectly cypherpunk and you've gotta run full node and Electrum personal server and Some combination of hardware wallets with multisig and Dukcoin joins, but for a newbie, it's just overwhelming. They just can't handle that. And I think obviously, let's be real, many of my listeners aren't newbies themselves, they tend to be technical. But what I'm hoping to kind of tease out in this conversation is, let's put ourselves into the mindset of a newbie and what are the best ways that, you know, many of, you know, me and my listeners, when we're out there talking to normies, we can try to give them a, an easy way

Even, having a, starting with a basic phone wallet and just having a, you know, a small play amount of money on there, whatever, twenty, thirty bucks worth of Bitcoin, you know, get them on, you know, Samurai Wallet if they're on Android or get them on Blockstream Green. And then once they start to increase the investment a little bit more, that's when you start to go, okay, get a Trezor Ledger, a cold card, start to look at Wasabi Wallet, get a desktop wallet going. I think these are kind of hopefully ways that we can

Or as they get into it.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's the way, that's the way you have to go about it. You can't like, you can't be like demanding perfection or expecting, you know, to them to, to go, to go to these lengths that, the more experienced users are going through. I mean, I remember like we had the, the whole samurai controversy where, where, Greg Maxwell and others were giving samurai a bunch of shit, and they were saying like the alternative is It's like you should be running Electrum's, personal server and then like Electrum Mobile on your phone and then connect them through Tor. I was like, there's no way that anyone is ever gonna, like, that's not the user we're talking about here. They're never gonna, for ninety-nine percent of people, like, using Samurai is like way better than anything that they would be doing. You can't expect them to set all this shit up. That's not, it's just, it's just not realistic. but we can expect them to not use Custodial That it's not your keys, not your coins. you know, the mobile wallet space is better than it's ever been before. There's never been like any major hacks of any of these big mobile wallets

so yeah, so like, that's how you have to do it. You gotta slowly like get them comfortable, get them used to, used to, Framing this in the right direction and then slowly they'll, they'll improve their setup, and, and they'll, they'll learn more and more. I, the big, one of the, yeah, one of the big pitfalls are these custodial services, But I think that we've passed the point where they are, you know, the non-custodial options have gotten so, so good that the, the advantages of using them is, is, is dwindling fast, I think.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's really only a Lightning thing now at this point, and even that will, I-- hopefully with time, if enough people get onto things like, say, Pierre's node launcher and so on, or even, like, there are certain wallets that you can use. I know right now, as we, you know, make this, episode now, in, We are, well, sorry, in April in twenty nineteen, there is now Eclair wallet, and you can do a receive transaction on that. So even that is an example that you can-- if you wanna do Lightning just in a quick, easy way, you can just get Eclair. Obviously, it takes a little bit more setup in terms of opening a channel, having incoming capacity, but again, we're still very early in Lightning days as well.

Yeah, I'm not ready to,

I'm not ready to say that, that custodial wallets are, you know, some people are saying that, that we're, we're just, we're not gonna have a choice. Like for the smaller users in terms of Lightning adoption, they're gonna be using custodial wallets. I'm not, I'm not so ready to To say that, that fight is lost. and then the other one is, Breeze Wallet, they just announced, which is, is an Israeli company. They're not custodial But they're not truly custodial, but they only open the only channels go through their node? So you're still kind of trusting them, so the, you know, there's, I, I, I think there'll be a little bit of a,

that's one thing that, that Bitcoiners will be talking about over the next couple of months is, is what I-is that a trade off we're willing to make that it's not, you technically control your own keys, but, but they can cheat you out of your money if they wanted to. so is, is that a ex-uh, acceptable trade off? Is that not an acceptable trade off? You know, I'm really kind of, I really like this idea of like a node box in your home. Yeah, the Nodle. You know, like a-- Yeah, the Nodle. I mean, you have a Nodle too, right? Yeah.

I got a Nodle. I have a Casa node. o-obviously, just as I'm a podcaster, I wanna be familiar with some of the products, but yeah, my view is I wanna see a healthy ecosystem of many of these things, right? I wanna see Casa node, Nodle, Samurai Wallet, collaboration with Bitsy, the Dojo

You know, the more the merrier. We have, it looks like we, right now we'll have like at least three strong competitors, which is, I, I think is like a minimum, like a minimum amount that like we could go with But, and the, one of the things I like about the Dojo, which is nice, is the Samurai one that's coming out, is they're gonna release everything so that you can just install, install it on an extra computer you have or something. so you don't even have to buy the hardware from them, which I'm hoping some of these other guys, also do. But I, I, I could see, our-- probably I think our easiest path to getting around this custodial issue will be if, if people are able to run nodes at home and then connect everything to that master node. you know, connect your mobile wallets to it, connect your hardware wallets to it, you know, obviously connect, you know, all your lightning can go through it. I think that might be like the super user friendly end result that we want, because once you start-- like, I love Pierre's launcher, but like, once you start trying to run these things on, on like the computer you use every day that you're like turning off and turning on and stuff, it becomes way more of a user headache. and then the alternative there is, is like something like Eclair, where you're actually running a Lightning node on your phone. but it's, you know, then what? So then we're managing channels on two nodes, 'cause you presumably also have a node at home. I don't know, we're very early on Lightning, so that, that can go a bunch of different ways.

Yeah, I think you're right there. I think there's different schools of thought you might say. So some people might like, let's say Pierre gets to a point where he, gets the node launcher going such that you can also easily pair it with a mobile wallet and do Lightning on it, I, I imagine that might be something he, he might be thinking about, and maybe the idea is, yeah, even if you, you know, you could just $100 laptop and set that up and leave that on permanently running at home, or obviously just buy a node or buy a car or buy a, you know, dojo node sort of thing. and I think the key idea would be having your phone pair it back to your home node.

Yeah, I like that idea. I think, I think that idea makes the most sense for me in like a distribute- 'cause, 'cause let's be honest, like we're not just looking for- I personally don't think that we should be stopping with money. Like I think that we should be pushing for more things to be distributed, particularly, Encrypted communications and, you know, so you have like the, the free speech element, the privacy element, and that goes hand in hand with,

You know, just a distributed network in general, so you can imagine these boxes running everything that like a distributed home of the future would need. you, you know, you're gonna need to be running either not Tor nodes probably, hopefully not, hopefully we have the next generation of Tor, You know, something that works a little bit better, but basically like you need people to be running, running all different things from their home servers, in order to enable All the good stuff that we want, that we want to be happening. So you can imagine like a world where people are running Tor, where people are running like distributed file systems, stuff like that.

Yeah, and I think the challenge is, obviously, you know, we want privacy in some level, but then what happens is people want convenience, and it's so easy to just, you know, sign up to a, you know, an already existing service. And this is something I'm slowly trying to change myself as well, because in the past I wasn't as, you know, privacy conscious, But, you know, think about some of these things, and I, I think similar to that idea before around sometimes you have to get people in, i-in Bitcoin just in a way to get them started in a basic way, and then slowly they have to go and learn What are, why, why is it important for me to go and do these other things?

Have, have you used BlueWallet yet?

I have installed it, but not actually put any bitcoins or used it. I've, I've pretty much, for, from a Lightning point of view, like on a mobile, I've used a Clair.

It is BlueWallet is super, super convenient. It is, it is such an easy onboarding experience, and it's absolutely horrible for your privacy when you don't have your own keys, but the onboarding process is super, super simple. So, so yeah, I do think that, you know, it, it, there's definitely, there's definitely a balance here where, where privacy, you know, all this stuff is, is self-responsibility and privacy and self-sovereignty, like these things take work, they're not free. They, they're actually very costly, so people are always gonna have to, I think, go out of their way, to achieve these things, and they have to think to themselves that it's worth it,

I, I think the way most people do, unfortunately, learn these things is through pain. They, they realize, you know, that they, they get a breach or their, their, their privacy gets compromised. I mean, one of the things that really woke me up, I was fortunately already very privacy conscious beforehand. You know, the, the Snowden revelations woke me up a lot just in general. but what really woke me up is Coinbase sent like- you know, they had that court case where they, they sent two years worth of, of data on certain users, withdrawal addresses, purchase history, everything, to the IRS, and I was one of those users. They literally sent all my data and then so you have to, you have to, you have to say to yourself, "You have this wake-up call where it's, it's if I don't protect my privacy, like no one else will." and I, I, you know, I, I go back, I, I've, I had debates with Maraud about this. he thinks no one will ever care about their privacy, and I, you know, I, it's one of the few things I am like very optimistic about. I think that as like we have more information online in general, people will start to care more about their privacy and, And they will take, they will, they will take action to, to

protect it. It may be that people have to learn the hard way and there need to be more of these leaks that happen, and, you know, Facebook data leaks or whatever that- puts someone's data out there, and then they might now start thinking more about these things.

Yeah, and I think, yeah, I think it's a combination of that, and it's a combination of making it as easy as possible for people. you know, in, until A year ago, maybe it wasn't easy to do any kind of coin joins or mixing. would like Wasabi change that, like just a single software project that ran adjacent to Bitcoin, all of a sudden made you know, network level privacy like within reach of people. before that, it was just, it wasn't even, you know, I mean, I get, I used to recommend like centralized mixing services 'cause that was like, that, that was the trade-off that I thought was User friendly enough and privacy preserving enough, because like, no one was ever gonna use JoinMarket. Like, there was no way I was gonna be able to walk a beginner through using JoinMarket, And, and, and Wasabi changed that. They, they made an easy piece of software that, that, that newbies can actually use if they so desire, and then all that, all that's left is, is getting them to desire it in the first place.

Yeah. Gotta make 'em want the freedom for themselves, right?

Yeah, exactly.

What are some other, what are some other kind of common scams or pitfall ways of thinking, right? one, one example I could bring actually is- In, you know, over the years, as new people kind of hear about Bitcoin, they would come to me 'cause they knew, they knew me as like a Bitcoin guy within my kind of real, real life circles. And they'd be like, "Oh, man, how do I do mining? Like, let me set up mining and stuff." Because, and then I'd always be pretty much cautioning them, "Look, unless you're gonna like go and invest a lot of money and time, mining isn't worth your while. Just buy the bitcoins, right?" And people would see these ads

mining is such a bad one, man. I, it's just, you can't convince someone that it's a bad investment, you just have to let them do it. Like every single person thinks it's the best fucking idea ever, especially cloud mining. Cloud mining, they're like, "Oh, I get an ROI, it's a return, it's such a safer investment." I'm like, "Dude, you're just making a leveraged play on Bitcoin." I, I had so many people in 2017 who told me that, like, "Oh, I wanna do this cloud mining, or I wanna do that, or I wanna actually go into mining, who bought a bunch of GPUs and decided they were gonna mine shitcoins and then pull it over into Bitcoin. And like, really at the end of the day, you just gotta be like, okay, like, I'm just telling you, like, you'd..." You, you need the price to go up to, to make money here, and if, if the price goes up, you're gonna make more money if you buy it, but at the end of the day, they have to, they have to learn that, that, that themselves. I mean, I know I- I did cloud mining when, when I was starting, I thought it was the best fucking idea ever, you know? And the reason I know it's not is because it wasn't. And then I, then I, I like quickly learned, I think I got exit scammed by one cloud miner at one point, and like the one that didn't exit scam me, just like, you know, obviously I didn't get the right ROI on it, I, I think, yeah, so cloud mining, well, that's actually a really good one, I didn't think about that, and it's way bigger than people realize. I, I think what is it, Genesis mining or something, someone had a, like a big hack? six months ago or a year ago, I wanna say it was Genesis Mining, and the amount of money they lost was like, holy shit, I didn't realize people were still doing it to that level. But yeah, so you have that, I mean, you obviously have, altcoins, I think those. Oh, that's a huge one. Yeah. I

mean People don't remember, but like Havelock Investments, you remember Havelock Investments?

Oh, I, I feel like I've heard the name, but I don't. Refresh my memory.

They were kind of like- I guess like security token offerings before STOs were a thing or whatever. they, they like traded like fake stocks on Havelock Investments, but you couldn't like withdraw them as tokens. Neo and B had their, they were on there, a bunch of miners were on there, I think like ASIC miner was on there, and everyone just lost all the money that they put into Havelock Investments, into any of-- I don't think there was a single, there was like a couple that were profitable for like a- A little bit, and then everything just fell in on itself. So, I mean, I think, I think, and like, look, at the end, I'm not like a Bitcoin maximalist that says, you know, you, you, you should never speculate in any of the altcoins or trade them or whatever. Like Fuck it, like if you wanna gamble on super volatile, illiquid, cryptocurrencies, like absolutely, like go have, have fun, but it's gonna be brutal and like you probably will get fucked. But that's a major use case of Bitcoin, is the altcoin casino. what I would say is, the number one thing is if someone tells you that there's no trade-offs There's trade-offs, so they're lying to you. Like they're either willfully lying to you about there not being trade-offs, or they're so fucking dumb that they don't realize that there's trade-offs themselves. so like that's a huge red flag. Just always, just assume there's trade-offs everywhere, and if they're not talking about the trade-offs, then they're, they're intentionally misleading you or, or they haven't done enough research themselves.

right. And I think one other thing, like, again, we have to put ourselves, 'cause you and I have been around for a little while, but you have to sort of put yourself into the mindset of the newbie and like try and understand what's in their mind, because I think a big part of it is they feel they missed the boat on Bitcoin, right? They feel like, "Oh, if only I bought back in, you know, whenever, whatever year." And now, I'm not gonna get a ten x if I buy a Bitcoin now, but I might if I

One thing we as kind of more experienced Bitcoiners and probably my listeners have to think about when they're talking, when they're out there trying to, you know, help explain Bitcoin to newbies.

Yeah, you-- Oh, yeah, like Ripple. If Ripple goes to ten dollars, like I'm gonna be this rich or whatever. Yeah, I, I, I mean, when, when, when I got involved in twenty thirteen, I thought I was late to the boat. I think everyone thinks they're late when they come in, no matter when you come in, and we're all early, like we're all ridiculously early. but it's natural, to, to think you're late. And I think a lot of the ways people realize that is they kind of get wrecked on, on altcoins, and then they come back. you know, it's like the same idea as like the The five year old not to touch the stove like a million times, but like he won't touch the stove once he touches the stove, he needs to get burnt, and then, and then he realizes, you know, oh, maybe, maybe they were onto something.

I, I think, and I, that was one of the reasons, like, and it's like, it's like crazy to me that, and like for a little while there, like people were really- Attacking hodlers, like people who are basically saying, you know, like dollar cost average responsibly, while that is like the least risky investment strategy you can take in any space, especially this space. So, you know, that was one of the reasons why, like, the whole like, I tried to like memefied the stacking sats idea, right? Because I think that That that is like the most conservative way that you can get exposure to the space and learn about it, in like a slow and steady way with money you're willing to lose, and it kind of- I think part of the reason is it, it, it kind of got corrupted by altcoiners that were also saying to, to hodl those, you know, to become a bag hodler of those, Of those shitcoins, and it kind of corrupted it. But that's, that's really-- I mean, if you backtest it like that, most people can't time bottoms and tops, like they shouldn't be. Why would they be trying to do that? That doesn't make any sense to me.

Oh, I'm, I'm a big believer in that as well. I, I, I occasionally like to kind of read and, sometimes on my, you know, as, as you know, on my podcast, I've spoken to people who do, do some element of time in

you know, take a position, and that is really the b- like in my view, a safer way to kind of accumulate. I think the thing, now, the other thing which we have to be wary of here is we put ourselves back into the mindset of like, when there's a crazy bull run, everyone just loses their mind. They're not thinking the straight way, and they're, they're not-- and even then, people aren't paying attention to the cooler heads in the room, so to speak. They're looking at, "Oh, look at this crazy new alt 10x, right?

Yeah, I mean, in 2017 it was like really hard to keep your head straight. I mean, I was talking to Pierre about this, and we both shared similar sentiments that we were very conservative about how we felt about the market in 2017, like kind of up until the point we hit 10K, we were like, "Guys, like, at any point, like, like we could go back down, like, just be responsible, like, only use money you're willing to lose." And then once we breached 1 You start going through your head like crazy things, like we're just hyperbitcoinization is happening now, and you know, the cycles got-- the cycles are over now, all of a sudden, like the cycles aren't the same anymore, and this time is different, and we're just going to the fucking moon, and you better get in now, otherwise, like, I can't sell any bit of it, because if I sell a little bit, like, that's gonna be worth so much more in just a year from now, and you really get- Screwed mentally, so that's why it's really important to, to like have a plan, like stick to the, stick to the plan and try and, I like a, a really good strategy is At least for people that don't delete on Twi- Twitter, it's really nice to go back to different time periods and see, you know, what people were thinking, what people were saying during those time periods to try and Get yourself out of your own mental, your own mental head. I was actually, I was thinking like one pitfall that I think will become a bigger issue Is, people holding like centralized altcoins and tokens, and not realizing that they're not your keys, not your coins. I mean, your audience, my, my audience are probably less likely to have this affect them, but like for instance, like something like, Like Binance Coin, like that's completely centralized. Yeah. So essentially, any Binance Coin you own are not your keys, not your coins. Like even, like there's no, you-- there's no such thing as like cold storage for like a centralized- Coin because everything can change out from under you. It doesn't matter how you store your own keys, the whole network can change overnight. The whole thing could be worth zero overnight. so I think we'll have more and the, the same goes with like pretty much all the ICO tokens of 2017 and whatnot, and some of the centralized, more traditional cryptocurrencies, I guess, if you wanna call them traditional cryptocurrencies. you know, something like, I guess like EOS or whatever, like, who knows? Like, you can put it in so-called cold storage for eight months and then you come back and maybe your keys don't work. I don't know, like, fucking Lyra has done worse than that before with like bitshares and stuff, so you never know. Yeah, exactly. And I, I think, yeah. Even with

the, even with the, sorry, I was just saying, even with the, if, if, if the coin is continually hard-forking, then that also introduces a whole new layer of risk for everyone involved, right? Like, what if the wallets aren't, kept up to date? What if, you know, you think a certain transaction will work, but it doesn't? It just, it brings in a whole new level that I think I really appreciate that Bitcoin, you know, tries to maintain that backwards compatibility.

Yeah, I mean, I think, and this is kind of where I, I, I think the, the idea of telling newcomers like, don't under any circumstances, buy any shit coins Because you learn a lot of this from speculating in, in shit coins. Like I, a, a lot of, a lot of the knowledge I have now is because I got burnt, I got burnt with, with altcoins in the past. I mean, one, one thing that's, like kind of, I guess, kind of interesting is like in the, when I was, when I was bored in the depths of, of the last bear market, Like I picked up like some Vertcoin, I, I, you know, whatever, it was supposed to be like ASICs resistance, right? That was, right. That was before I realized that ASICs resistance doesn't exist and like that we should be embracing ASICs. Yeah. But that was part of my learning process to get there. And so I guess like during the twenty seventeen bull run, like Vertcoin hit like eight dollars or something. Crazy. I don't know, whatever it was, it was like crazy. It was like twenty thousand X or something insane in Bitcoin terms, and I was like, "Matt- I think, I think you got some Vertcoin. Like, let me go, like, check this out. And I, I found the wallet, and it was encrypted. And- The wallet maintainer stopped maintaining the wallet three years prior. No one on the Vertcoin team had done anything to bring that up to spec or whatever, and I was, it was impossible. Like I wanted to just market dump the coins. I don't even know how much is in the wallet. I was never able to access the wallet. You know, it just wasn't-- that, that was gone. It was just- Yeah. Lost cause, didn't bother trying. I put like a meaningless amount of money in it, like in 2015, and I forgot about it. Whatever. But it's a real wake up call that If you don't have, if you're not looking five years into the future, ten years into the future, twenty years into the future on how you develop these systems, like you'll The, they can never be, we can never have like, it'll, it can never be a global standard money, right? Like you can never-- There needs to be some assurances that, you know, Marty likes to say, like the man in the coma You know, like when you wake up out of your coma ten years later, like you gotta be able to access your money. If you can't access your money, then we failed. The project has completely failed.

Yeah, that's a good, it's a good little story. Nice anecdote there. I've got another idea to talk about as well, actually, it just came to me. Because, let's think about it this way, the scams that were done in the past won't be done in the, the same in the future, right? So scams of the future may be, you know, affinity scams. There might be somebody who tries to associate and look like they're, you know, they're like you, they're a real bitcoiner, but then actually they are, you know- Maybe they're doing some dodgy software and you trust them with the software and that causes you to lose some of your coins, or, you know, they scam you in some other way. So these are things that we have to even think about in the future as well, because the scams of the future may rhyme, but they may not be the same as the scams of the past.

Yeah, I mean, I think we have like some really, Exciting scams in our future that, that we've, we've just barely scratched the surface. Like scammers are a very creative bunch. I mean, look at like the ETH scam, the ETH scams we had in 2017, like I didn't see that coming. and they like got a lot of money. They got like a, a, a decent, decent fucking haul. I think ICOs are probably pretty much dead, hopefully. Yeah. I, I think we're going back to the quote-unquote fair launch proof of work coins, which I find a lot more tolerable,

I think like the I- the whole ICO mania was like a- A, a very big low for us, and it was, it was brought on starting with Ethereum, that showed like the playbook of how to do it, and they all prioritized ICO development on their platform was like the first thing that they pushed forward, and they, they all had their hands in it. yeah, but I mean, we already see like the affinity scams kind of like with like the Andy Hofmans of the world, like pushing B-B-Rodium or whatever his like garbage fork is. people like Richard Hart as well. I was about to say, I was about to drop him. Yeah, I

mean, he built up such a reputation.

Yeah, he did it intentionally for this, like there was no way, like that was a whole plan. Like he spent six months like courting Bitcoiners, right? And then you just throw it down a shitcoin, you know, runway and you just hope you get some of them. And it's like super easy to monetize without ethics in this space. So like, yeah, so like that'll, that'll be, you know, and who knows, like, did Kevin Pham sell his account? Like, I don't know, but like he could have, he might, he might have, he might still be controlling it and getting paid on the sideline. You don't know, but that's-

some people just lose it as well, so it's, it's hard to necessarily tell if there's malice there, but I, I think, We've always had affinity scams and we always will for sure because, because they're, they're eas- they're easy to pull off, and a lot of people that, that do put themselves intentionally in the limelight in the space do it in so that they can then push, you know, like we have You know, you have the obvious examples, right, where you have like the Richard Hartwins and you have the Andy Hofmans, and then you have like kind of like less obvious ones, Like, like Bruce, Bruce Fenton and RavenCoin. Right. you know, he, he is, is, is that malicious? I think it kind of is. he like used his position as, as, as like a well-known bitcoiner, to push that coin heavy. But is it on the same level as like a Richard Hartwig or something like that? Like, I don't know, like, or like a, a Charlie Lee and Litecoin. you know, I have a lot of ill will towards Charlie and Litecoin, but- Yeah, I, it's, it's a very, it's a very delicate, it's, it's a very delicate balance. I think, I think the big, the big thing is Is if they're not, if they're not properly disclosing the trade-offs, if they pretend that trade-offs don't exist, I think is like a really good measurement of whether or not someone is acting unethically in the space. I mean, I remember, you know, like- Well, like, so Char- one of the big things that Charlie likes to pitch about Litecoin is like it's silver to Bitcoin's gold. Like that makes zero sense. Makes absolutely no sense. He doesn't care. He knows it makes no sense. He says it anyway. he was, he was pushing the whole narrative for a while. It kinda still is. that Litecoin's like the cheaper way to access the Lightning Network. like that doesn't make any sense because there's gonna be plenty of alt chains that support the Lightning Network, and they're all gonna be in a race to have the lowest fees. So that's not a sustainable way of, of setting up your network. So either you just race to the bottom and completely destroy your network, or, or you're not gonna be the lowest in fees. So someone's gonna use DigiByte to fund their Lightning channel, you know? And he just intentionally ignores that. so I, I, I do really like the, the trade-offs, and also I, I just think in general, like if you're shilling- Iliquid tokens and altcoins, and you have like a big following, then that's just inherently unethical to a degree because they're just so iliquid that you know you can move the price.

Yeah, precisely. And I think, yeah, you're right. I think this whole yardstick of people who lie to you about no, no trade-offs, typically that is in the, at least historically, it has proven correct that that person tended to be a scammer or pushing some sort of questionable, Altcoin, let's say.

Yeah, look at like, look, look at like the block size, like a-anyone who was saying that the block size argument was about storage. Right? When it's really about, mostly about bandwidth. Yeah. and they know that, and they're like, "Oh, look, this is a one terabyte SD card, you know, like obviously we could do, you know..." Gigameg blocks or whatever, you know?

that, that's, that's, you, you immediately know that they're acting, they're either acting out of bad faith or, or they're, or they're an idiot. And either way, that's not a good

thing.

I think another one is just KYC. Like, obviously, KYC is difficult, like, the, and depending on where you are and like if you're a newbie, how else do you get coins, right? Like obviously the-- in the past there was local bitcoins, nowadays there's Hodl, Hodl and Bisc, but, I can-- it, you can see how if there's not enough volume, then people will just use KYC services.

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm like a huge proponent of privacy, and I've only gotten my coins through KYC sources. I, the, you know, it's, this is another one of those things where it's like, you really shouldn't be Like you can't tell noobs to go use Bisk, like that's crazy to me. Like they, that is way too difficult of an onboarding process and They could just as well get robbed in the process of trying to buy it in the first place. So you en- you enter all these other risks. I think now that we have things like Wasabi, you just You have to pound it into them early on that if they use a KYC service, which they probably will have to, any of their transactions to and from that service can, can link all of their other transactions, and they have to make sure that it's isolated with Wasabi. I, I think that's like a nice balance, you know, like you use Cash App and you withdraw to Wasabi and then you mix, and so like they, like Cash App knows you bought Bitcoin, but they don't know which Bitcoin is yours. I think it's like Like a, it's like a decent balance and hopefully, you know, Bis gets more volume, you know, more liquidity. But like right now, it's like, it's like kind of, unfortunately, kind of unusable. I haven't used HODL HODL, they don't allow Americans. And I, 'cause the bank account, but I think with HODL HODL, like a bank account's involved, right?

Yeah, right. my understanding is there's different ways you can use it, and you can use bank transfer as one method.

Yeah, so

Start going down the privacy rabbit hole, it gets, you can get really paranoid about it, 'cause all it takes is one little thing to mess it all up. Like I was talking to someone, like, you know, like looking up an address without a VPN on a, on a block explorer, you know, that, that can leak your information right there, and people don't even think about that. So you need to get them to use VPNs, you need to get them to get used to Tor, but even with something like that, like Blockstream.info does, says they They have like a, a Tor, a Tor address you can use. we didn't have that before, you know, like now at least we can be like, okay, like you should be using a VPN, but if for some reason like you forget it, like hopefully, you know, Blockstream probably isn't logging your IP address. It's all, it's all very much a balancing act.

Yeah, and I, I think, look, if I had to summarize, we're in a much better place now in, you know, April twenty nineteen

compared

to, you know, And from that, I mean, we have kind of easy coin mixing now or coin joining now, and who knows what's coming next. And the other challenge is just kind of keeping material up to date, right? So even if I took, if I just, you know, spent all my time making a newbie guide, it would be out of date within, say, six months.

I did that, I fucking did that, and it was out of date quicker than that. You know, like I was like walking people through how to use like blockchain dot info and mycelium and stuff. And then I was like, basically, once that, once that went out of date, I was like, "Matt, I'm done with long form content. I'm not doing any of this shit anymore. Like, if other people do it, I will signal boost them." But that's why I really like, I, you know, I really like Twitter, I really like the podcast, because I'm able to get as much content out there as possible, help as m- many people out there as possible without putting in too much time, because the space changes so much that I would just be updating it forever, like I would never, you can never like just- Stand still, in terms of like best practices. Like I feel like in like two months I'm gonna be saying like, "Oh, there's probably another best practice that you should be doing instead."

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, that's a insightful comment and we, yeah, just have to kind of keep updated and as Bitcoin people who like us, like you and I, and, you know, probably our listeners as well, tend to be the hardcore listeners, hardcore Bitcoiners, so it's on, it's kind of on us to go and figure This for newbies and try to help our newbie friends. Oh, hey, you know, don't, you, you know, use, use coin mixing and use, these tools. Have you got any, kind of last comments around there, around this stuff that you, you know, you think we haven't touched on?

Well, I, I think two things, I think it's really important that all of our listeners go out of their way to help their friends and family. We like, we need like a knock on effect, like you kind of mentioned it earlier that you had like a lot of people coming to you 'cause you were the Bitcoin guy, like in twenty seventeen. And like I had the same thing, and that's one of the reasons why I do the podcast and I do Twitter and stuff, it was because I was answering the same questions over and over again with my friends, I might as well do it for others as well. But I think like one Disposal is that we have all these Bitcoiners that are super enthusiastic, that are super engaged with the project, and it's up to them to help guide, you know, like ten or so friends and family down the right path as well, and like hopefully for those people they have good people that are guiding them, but I think that like we're increasing that base of people that can do that, and then they can go and, because at like the end of the day, like You can respect what, what you say, but like they, they're not gonna be taking straight advice from some guy in Australia that they've never met or some guy in New York that they've never met, to, to actually hear it from a friend that they trust, a family member that they trust that's, that's willing to sit down with them and like set up a treasure with them, is like a huge, huge bonus for that person. That person is able to enter the space in a way more comfortable situation than they would otherwise. So I think- I think it's, it's on us and it's on all of our listeners to, to pay it forward. If, if you had someone help you get into the process, like you help someone, you know, get through the process. and then the other thing is like it's really hard doing what we do when we have people that own like Bitcoin dot com and Blockchain dot com like actively working against us. And, and like one of the things I always forget when I talk to beginners is like, I actually have to tell them, you have to tell them, like straight up, like, ignore bitcoin dot com, ignore blockchain dot com, don't ever even go to the, the, the anything you see on those sites could just be garbage. Like, don't, don't go to it. all the big news sites like c c n, don't go to it. Bitcoinist, don't go to it. Newsbtc, don't go to it. Like, that's ridiculous. Like,

Like, if someone was like interested in iPhones, it wasn't like, "Oh, like if you go to iPhone dot com, like you're gonna get wrecked." Like, that's ridiculous.

That's a good point. I didn't think of it that way, but you're right.

That's one of the little things we never-- I never, I always forget about that, like, Bitcoin dot com is like not a good site. Like, don't, don't go to that.

Yeah, there's a lot of, pitfalls in this space. So hopefully, hopefully this The right way. so look, Matt, maybe I, I'm pretty sure pretty much all my listeners know who you are, but just in case any of them don't, tell them where they can find you.

so I'm on Twitter at matt under dash odell. my DMs are open. I'm on Keybase, Wire, Telegram, all under Matt Odell. You can reach me there if, if you don't wanna go through Twitter DMs. my PGP key is on Keybase. Always happy to help. I do a, a weekly review podcast with Marty Bent on, Tails From The Crypt. if you go to t f t c dot io, you can, you can get that feed. He does interviews like Stephan does and, and, And I do, I do a weekly review podcast with him. And, and part of, part of what that podcast is for is that, you know, I listen to a bunch of other podcasts, I follow a bunch of people on Twitter, I'm in a bunch, you know, get a bunch of newsletters, I'm looking at the news and stuff, Marty's looking at the news, and we try and distill stuff, that, that is actually important, that isn't filled with all the noise and all the bullshit, that this space is, is, is dominated

by I definitely recommend for any of my listeners who aren't already subscribed to Tales from the Crypt, go subscribe to that, it's a fantastic podcast. lastly, thanks very much for your time, Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

it's been an abs-absolute pleasure, Stefan, thanks for having me.

Hope you guys found that useful. I think as Bitcoiners, we've got to take it on ourselves to help educate our friends and family into doing this the right way. and lastly, yeah, just make sure you tell your friends to subscribe to the podcast. Podcaster, and hopefully that's one way that they can get onboarded to Bitcoin in a better way than falling prey to all the shitcoiners and blockchainers out there. Thanks, guys. See you next time.