Bitcoiners vs Shitcoiners

Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today my guest is Wiz. I met Wiz while I was on my recent holiday in Japan, in Tokyo. Wiz is one of the well known long time Bitcoiners and also been around the scene and was around in the days of Mt. Gox as well. He's a great Bitcoiner and I'm sure you guys will love this interview. Wiz, it was a pleasure to meet you in Japan and, you know, I know you've, you've got a great history in Bitcoin and you're doing some cool stuff, and so it's a pleasure to welcome you to the show.

Yeah, thanks man. Thanks for having me on your show, it's an honor to be here.

Fantastic. So look, I think some of the listeners who are a little newer, they might not know you and know a little bit about your history, your involvement with, you know, Bitcoin and the Tokyo scene. Tell, tell them a little bit about yourself.

Sure. So, I'm originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, and I moved to Tokyo when I was about twenty years old. So I've been in Tokyo for a good thirteen years now. And, I'm a total, You know, high school dropout hacker kid who grew up on, you know, FNET, IRC networks with script kiddies, and, that's how I learned how to kind of use a Unix shell and how to write some code here and there. And, yeah, actually, I, I grew up working for like some ISP startups and some data center startups in Honolulu, and that's how I kind of learned what's going on. So, yeah, Let's see. So I've been in Tokyo for 13 years, I've seen a lot of drama, especially in the Bitcoin scene. You know, it started, it all started with Mt. Gox trading on there and, To the modern day now, where I'm literally running the, the meetup group in Tokyo, and, you know, we got like a really solid following, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a lot to talk about, I guess.

Yeah, excellent. And I know, you know, you've got, although it's no longer, you're no longer involved, you're also, you're also part of the Wiz Sec group as well, self-titled. So, maybe just tell a little bit about, you know, just for

It's, it was originally a group of three people, myself, my friend Kim Nilson, and an attorney from New York named Daniel Kelman. We'd all been goxed after we lost everything we had on Mount Gox, and, we just started working to investigate and figure out what happened. of course, largely now it's, it's just Kim and his blog and, and all his hard work over the years, researching, investigating Mount Gox, analyzing their database, every, everything like that. you know, I wanna make it really clear, I'm not affiliated with WizSec anymore, I haven't, I left years ago. It's all Kim now. All the, hard work he's been doing, he deserves a hundred percent full credit for that. And, you know, I'm just a freelancer, I'm just Wiz now.

Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. and look, I know you've done some really cool stuff recently as well, like obviously on Twitter, the followers might know, you had a really great thread about being more self-sovereign, and so I think that's a big focus of yours. So maybe just, just tell us a little bit of your thoughts on that. Why should, why should people try to be a little more self-sovereign?

Yeah, I guess I was really lucky to grow He kind of data center scene where I got to really learn how the internet works firsthand, to the point where I was, pretty much running, you know, a lot of important internet connectivity in Hawaii when I was a teenager, and that got me to figure out, you know, how to get IP address blocks, how to, how to connect routers to, you know, how to do cross-connects, what's an internet exchange, and basically just how the internet works in general. And from that knowledge, I had just set up a- A small ISP just for myself in Honolulu, when I was very young, and I still have it to this day. And it's actually a lot simpler than what you might think. You know, to, to set up an ISP sounds like a big project, but it's really at the, at the simplest, It could, you know, it could just be one router that's connected to at least two other networks or an internet exchange, and that's what, that's all you really need to qualify as an ISP, right? The thread you're referring to on Twitter is this very nice, you know, it was a very popular thread on Twitter, I got a lot of hits on that where I just kind of explained You could, you could be an apartment building, and your router could connect to your neighbor's router, and you could, you know, route in between like that, and you, you keep scaling that up until you have buildings connected to buildings, and, and that's all the internet is, right? It's this one giant mesh network. And so after everyone kind of, saw that thread, they were all sending me all these messages like, "Oh yeah, I wanna start my own ISP." Actually, a really famous Bitcoiner, BlueMat, is, has just started his own ISP in his apartment in New York. He's, all about the self-sovereignty. So I think he purchased, a small IP block and he's got his own ASN number, autonomous system number, so he's now connected to some mesh network in New York and, you know, obviously Obviously I'm very far physically from New York and over here in Tokyo, but we've been talking trying to figure out how to physically interconnect our networks and actually do some, peering together. But it all kind of comes down to self-sovereignty, right? And I think that's the reason everyone's genuinely interested, is that, I think, you know, Bitcoin philosophy is all about not trusting people and, and verifying, yourself. And, and this is, this is essentially what happened in USA a while back. Everyone trusted their internet providers to give them an honest, unfiltered, you know, raw internet connection, but they didn't, right? They were throttling things like Netflix and the whole net neutrality, dispute was a huge drama, and finally the government got involved and they're regulating it. So it's kind of sad that the internet is now regulated, in the actual country it was invented in, it was meant to be free. But obviously, if you run your own ISP, you wouldn't have to worry about net neutrality since you can control everything yourself. It's only when you have so many people trusting these huge corporations like Comcast or AT&T and, you know, they just wanna exploit their, their users to- You know, make better profits on their bottom line. It's really unfortunate the way that whole thing goes. I mean, it's kind of like a form of extortion, right? They basically go to Netflix and say, "Oh, we see you're sending a whole bunch of traffic to our customers. Well, it'd be a shame if that traffic got throttled down to nothing, so they couldn't watch Game of Thrones anymore, right? " "How about you send us some protection money, and so it will protect your, you know, internet traffic so it doesn't get throttled down to nothing."

Other companies. And so if Netflix has no choice but to pay the protection money and increase the subscription fees to their customers, now Game of Thrones or whatever you watch is twice as expensive simply because Comcast, you know, abused their monopoly power on being the ISP for so many people, right? So this is, this is- One of the reasons why it's very important to be self-sovereign, just, it's just kind of a general example, but I think you see this same line of thinking when it comes to Bitcoin more and more. It comes down to the three basic principles of security, privacy, and freedom. And those are all very complex, you know, concepts of their own. You know, you could talk about just security or just privacy or just freedom, but in, in this particular sense, with internet neutrality, it goes along with, freedom and, and specifically anti-censorship, because, you know, throttling traffic is a form of censorship. You're, you're just highly restricting it. And, and the Chinese firewall, the Great Firewall in China does something very similar. If you VPN out of China, it'll work for a little while, and then a few hours later, you start to get packet loss, and then more- Or packet loss, and then soon the VPN is so unusable that you think something's wrong with your router, or you think something's wrong with your WiFi, and you're trying to troubleshoot. You know, 'cause it was working fine a few hours ago, what's the problem? But, you know, they're just kind of, they're doing it in a more sneaky way, right?

Yeah, interesting. Okay. And so the cool thing with that thread is like, it was almost like you sort of had the whole stack through, right? It was like, it was your own land, your own mining facility, your own network, your own full node, and your own ISP. So, I mean, I think the ISP part is interesting. So maybe, can you just

Sure. So, I originally started my ISP and my, kind of like my friend and family's business in Honolulu, which is the, the core data center of Hawaii. So, you know, I got the friends and family discount on my, you know, rack space, power, cooling, connectivity, all that stuff. And I had also co-founded a bunch of, telecom-like companies when I was a teenager that are now huge companies in Hawaii, so they're very happy to give me the friends and family rate as well. So that was great for, getting the ISP started. But all you really need, you know, Bluematt is a very good example, he's doing it on a shoestring budget as well. He purchased an IP block for probably, I think fifteen dollars an IP address or maybe twenty dollars an IP address, and the smallest block you can get is about two hundred and fifty IP addresses. So, yeah, he probably spent about five thousand dollars on his IP block. Next thing you gotta do is have a router that's physically connected to at least two different networks, and that'll qualify as, you as being multi-homed, and you can actually get your own, what's called, autonomous system number registered with your local ISP. You know, internet registry. So in North-- in, in North America, it's Arin, in Asia Pacific, it's APNIC, in Europe, it's RIPE. You know, Africa has their own. So everyone kind of has their own regional internet registry where you can join. You know, it's a private nonprofit organization. They're, they're not run by the government or anything. They're just this, you know, it's, it's internet governance, and it's, usually totally deregulated. Of course, some countries do regulate the internet, right? So, for example, Japan and USA have, freedom in their internet, but like Korea and China don't, right? So, if you wanna watch porn in Korea, you need some kind of VPN to circumvent that censorship. Obviously, in China, you can't use Google, Facebook, Twitter, anything. And, you need a VPN to pretty much use the internet. I think it's, it's actually more accurate to say China doesn't really, isn't really part of the global internet. They have like their own intranet. You know, within China, that with very limited connections to the global internet, it's actually kind of really interesting to study. But yeah, going back to your original question, if somebody wants to start their, their own ISP, all you really need is a router and a data center, which is, you know, you can, you can lease this for quite cheap, or you can do it in your apartment like BlueMat is doing, and you can connect to at least two other connect, internet connections, is all you really need, and an IP address block maybe, or you can, you can You know, I, I have, I have a good thread on, on Twitter I wrote about it. but that's, you know, it's, it's a long topic to kind of get into the details of what you would need.

Yeah, sure,

sure, sure. I, I think to answer your, your question though about the, the full so- self-sovereignty model is that, this is a project I've been working a long, a long time. So I actually purchased some land out in the countryside of Japan where I built a Bitcoin mining facility,

percent self-sovereign. So actually right now I'm installing these huge solar panels, on the, on the empty land I have, that'll actually allow me to generate my own electricity to run some miners, and this is part of a much larger vision to mine my own Bitcoin in my own mining facility using my own electricity that I generated, connected to my own ISP, you know, that's running my own Bitcoin full node that's connected to the, the peer-to-peer network, and basically just Not rely on anyone else as much as possible. So that's the, that's the long term project, is to just be fully self-sufficient.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. And, I think when, when we were chatting, in Tokyo as well, it was interesting, we were sort of talking about sort of like parallels between the internet routing and Bitcoin's Lightning Network. And I know you're, you're playing around with Bitcoin and Lightning as well, so can you offer some, insight for us there?

Sure. I think actually Lightning is a very good way way for people to understand how the internet works, because obviously Lightning is a peer-to-peer network just like the internet itself is, except that All you really need to run a node is install a piece of software. Where if you're gonna run your own "quote-unquote" full node on the internet, you actually need, you know, a physical router that's physically connected to other routers. And, so as you know, to run a lightning node If you just set up the software by itself, you can't do anything. You need to connect to other nodes. So, okay, great, I connect out to a few other nodes, and, as you know, some, some nodes are very well connected. Like, even you could call them hubs, routing hubs, for example, like Bitrefill hubs. Go on. It, it's true though, just like the, you know, the internet, there's, there are tier one providers like Sprint or NTT or, you know, CenturyLink, Level 3, all these, you know, even Comcast. Basically, if you have global network People will pay a whole bunch of money to connect to you, and those are what people commonly understand as ISPs, and those are the "quote unquote" hubs of the internet, right? And then you have guys like me, who aren't hubs, we're the, the Leafs or the, you know, we're not nearly as well connected. I mean, my network is actually connected to about twenty other networks in the world, and they're mostly, between Tokyo and Honolulu, just friends that I've made along the way who are very happy to peer for free or, or some other Actually large ISPs that just happen to have an open peering policy. Like for example, Hurricane Electric is a tier one provider and they actually have an, an open peering policy and they'll peer with anyone for free, so they're really cool. But, you know, other providers charge a boatload of money to connect to them, and, you know, that's how they make their, money, right? So if you think of a lightning node, like Bitrefill, people actually pay Bitrefill to open channels to them, and it's a very similar concept, you know, you pay your internet provider at home to essentially open a channel to you so that you can have well-connected internet connectivity. Whereas if you just run your own lightning node and you- Connect to a few other people that aren't well connected, then obviously you're gonna have routing issues, right? And this is why everyone in their homes just pays some company fifty bucks a month for internet because they don't wanna have to worry about routing or anything. It's, it's Doesn't make sense to run your own ISP unless you really want the self-sovereignty or you really can't trust your ISP or there isn't a local ISP, you know? In a city, it's, it's pretty easy to get really nice internet connectivity, but if you're in the middle of nowhere like my mining facility, then yeah, it's, Not so simple, right?

Yeah, and I think that kind of brings that analogy of, you know, how people talk about ISPs, well, will we have something like an LSP, you know, like a lightning, you know, liquidity provider and that kind of thing? Maybe that's a model that we'll see come up.

Yeah, that sounds as a very interesting discussion to kind of, predict how the Lightning Network will develop itself over time. If you can imagine, Using Bitcoin over a payment network like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, that would actually work totally fine, right? Because if you think about it, the real, or one of the most important things about Bitcoin is not really the payment network, so to speak, it, it's more of the fact that you have security, privacy, and freedom in your money, right? So, sure, there's only a very limited amount of space in the blockchain, which is why we need these, these layer two scaling solutions. But if, to be honest, if American Express opened up, a credit card tomorrow that said, "Oh yeah, it's denominated in Bitcoin, and we just send you a bill every month and for Bitcoin, " it wouldn't be like a, you know, that bad of an idea. Obviously, you wouldn't have security and privacy, with your transactions on the American Express network or something like that. But And, and obviously Lightning is a far superior solution, but it, it really goes to show you how the, the goal of Lightning is to essentially issue some kind of Gold certificate like instrument where you can, you can just, if the, you know, if your counterparty, channel counterparty just disappears one day or tries to screw you over, you can just take that pre-signed transaction, go directly to the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin blockchain and, and get redeemed. And I think that's the real- beauty of the Lightning Network. I don't know if I artic- articulated that.

No, no, I think, I think that's a good explanation, and I think, it might be also interesting, I think Wiz, you've probably got some good- Advice or habits that you can, share with more newer Bitcoiners about things like how, why they should protect their own security and their own privacy, have you got any tips for them?

Sure. And, we recently did a Meetup event, a few days ago in Tokyo, where we had a panel discussion about why or why you shouldn't, why you should or why you shouldn't run your own Bitcoin full node to, you know, verify your own transactions, and on the panel was, Nicholas Dorey, Christian Moss, and the core developer, Callier. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but, they're all really, really bright guys, and, it was a great panel discussion. But the, the biggest point that I wanted to make there is it, it always goes back to the three critical principles, security, privacy, and freedom. And I, I, I can give you some very quick examples why you would certainly wanna run your own node instead of just using the American Express network or bank account or something like that. Obviously, number Security in Bitcoin itself as Bitcoin the token, right? 'Cause there's Bitcoin the payment network, Bitcoin the, the blockchain, Bitcoin the software, and Bitcoin the token. The most important thing about Bitcoin, probably more than anything, is that you have security that the supply will always be fixed at a maximum of twenty-one million bitcoins, and that somebody can't ar-arbitrarily print more money or issue more tokens. This is actually the definition of a shitcoin, right? Is, no matter- No, really. Like USD, JPY, you know, there's something like, I think, eighteen billion US dollars printed every day. It's, it's insane how much money that, the government and the bank robs from, from you just through inflation, you know, without you even realizing it. I mean, in some countries, it is so, so bad that it is actually visible, where they'll, you know, in, in the super- Supermarket they'll reprice the produce like several times a day because the inflation's that bad. But, you know, obviously that's the number one benefit of, of Bitcoin in general is that you have security that your money won't be devalued, no one can steal your purchasing power through inflation. But number two security reason why you would wanna run your full node is for verification. This is what we always say in Bitcoin, right? Don't trust, verify. And this simply means if I send you some Bitcoin, how do you really- know if you received that Bitcoin or not. Well, you pretty much have two ways to do that. You could use somebody else's node, or you could use your own node. And when you use somebody else's node, these are typically called block explorers And, you know, it's who do you wanna trust? Maybe some people in the past trusted sites like Blockchain Dot Info, but, you know, they would, they would often not properly verify transactions. Or I remember one time, Blockchain Dot Info even showed that Satoshi's coins had moved, which was obviously totally, false, but, and no other blockchain, no other block explorer showed that at the time. But It just goes to show you, they weren't verifying, right? They were just kind of trusting, you know, who knows what kind of, implementation they had. But that's a very good example of why you should run your own full node and not trust somebody else's full node, is just simply to know if you really received the funds or not. You know, if I, if I say, "Alright, I'm gonna send you a million dollars for some gold or some, some other products you're gonna release." You probably wanna wait for ten confirmations, right, before you send those goods out, just to be triple sure that you're not gonna get screwed over. And that's, that's really what it comes down to. Of course, there's always some security trade-offs. Maybe you wanna release, you know, if it's a five dollar coffee at the cafe, probably not, you know, so much of a risk of getting a double spend attack on a five dollar transaction. But, you know, there's different security trade-offs for different amounts. And then of course, you know, running your own Bitcoin full node, Bitcoin full node, you also have privacy, right? If you're asking blockchain dot info, did I receive this million dollars to my address? Well, now of course, blockchain dot info knows that you have a million dollars or that you're expecting it at least. Whereas if you run your own Bitcoin node, you can just ask your own node privately and monitor the addresses you're interested in, the transactions you're interested in, and nobody would know that you're watching those except for you. And, number three reason, or I guess big reason to do it is for freedom, and it comes down to anti-censorship, right? If, if you're using somebody else's node, they could potentially censor your transactions or your activity. And this, this has happened a bit in the past, but I mean, just very simply, you have self-sovereignty, you have security, privacy, and freedom if you run your own Bitcoin full nodes. Of course you wanna do this, right? It's- How Bitcoin was meant to be used.

Yeah, great, great, great articulation there. I think a lot of the, the newer listeners to the podcast will really appreciate your explanations there. I think one more thing I was keen to touch on is just obviously as you're an expert around networking and the internet, how important is it to use, and do you have any tips around VPN and Tor usage for the listeners?

Sure. So I actually, I was an executive at, VPN company called Private Internet Access for a short while, and actually left that company with the CEO to start our own VPN company. which was later acquired by Private Internet Access, but the long story short, yeah, I, I've, I have a lot of experience working with VPNs, and, you know, they're, they're really great because, You don't have to, no matter where you are in the world, you don't have to be at the mercy of that internet connectivity wherever you might be. You could be in the middle of China and you can just VPN back to your home ISP in Tokyo or Hawaii where you have your own freedom and No one will be able to see what sites you're visiting, no one will be able to manipulate the traffic that you're being sent, no one will be able to censor what sites you're trying to view, 'cause, you know, you know, that whole VPN, use case is totally different depending on where you are in the world, right? If you are in USA, you might just wanna download some torrents, and you might not want your ISP knowing about it, or you might not want the Hollywood knowing about it, just for pure privacy. And in that case, content is really king. For the developed countries like USA, you're not worried so much about, you know, getting, arrested for posting some, something that's negative about the government. But if you're in China or some other country, you'd absolutely be worried about your personal safety if you're writing negative things about the government. And so- The privacy you gain from using a VPN from China is for a very different, purpose, right? For freedom or for privacy or even your personal security. So, you know, or, or if you just go to the Starbucks and you're using the public Wi-Fi there, obviously everyone can see your traffic because everyone has the same password to the same Wi-Fi network. So, that's the actual security use case for VPN is just when you're on a public network, shared network. you know, there's lots of reasons to use a VPN, but they're all really solid. And they're all in line with the self-sovereignty, provisions. Just obviously you have to trust wherever you're VPN'ing to, right? You're essentially- replacing the local ISP wherever you might be in the world with the ISP that you're VPN'ing to. So of course, I run my own ISP, I VPN to my home network, so I trust myself. But if you don't run your own ISP, you can, you know, pay five dollars a month to some VPN provider and trust them instead. And this is something you should really do your own research about if you wanna trust the VPN provider to not log Your traffic or, you know, monitor you in some ways. And a lot of them accept Bitcoin or even, other anonymous forms of payment. And, you know, there's, there's hundreds of them on the internet, you, you can find one that meets your needs, right? you also mentioned Tor. Tor is, is really beautiful because it's this distributed peer-to-peer essentially kind of like a VPN network, except there's no central point of failure. And, of course, there's some downsides whenever you have a decentralized network, like with, you know, Bitcoin or Tor or anything, is that It's always gonna be more efficient if it's centralized, right? So, but making it decentralized, sure it's, it's slower, it's less reliable, and, you know, there's even security flaws, right? Look at Silk Road. Poor Ross, you know, Ross Ulbricht got busted because of some security flaws in Tor, where they were able to, basically figure out where his server was or, or whatever methods they used. And a number of other, even Silk Road 2 and a number of other, AlphaBay, all these sites. So it's probably better to, in my personal opinion, trust, a VPN provider or, or run your own VPN server on some leased hosting provider if, if you can. I don't, I don't know Tor is a hundred percent legit, but there's so many VPN protocols, especially like OpenVPN, that are really rock solid and, Yeah, I could talk about VPN for hours, man.

Yeah, great, great. I think there's one other point I was keen to touch on. I think it came up as well, there's like parallels with coin joins and stuff as well. So there's this concept w- of an anonymity set, right? So in Bitcoin, people talk about this idea of privacy loves company, and that if there's not enough other people coin joining, then you look dodgy. In the same parallel sense with a VPN, it's sort of like this idea that you need enough other people all Also using that VPN to create an anonymity set, can you comment a little on that?

Oh, absolutely. And, the, the worst example is my own ISP. So my ISP is just called Wiz. So if you, if I go to whatismyipaddress dot com, it says Wiz on there. That's probably the worst possible thing for, for, if I'm trying to be anonymous on the internet, I wouldn't do it for my own ISP because I'm the, literally the only person using this ISP. I mean, sure, there's a few friends using it, You know, it's pretty much me. And you're absolutely right. The, you know, say, private internet access, for example, they actually mix everyone's internet traffic together, you know, on that particular server. So say there's a hundred connections at any given time to a single server. That means all of those hundred people's internet traffic, every site, every DNS lookup they're doing, is all coming from the same source IP address. So you don't know which one of those hundred people- is accessing a particular site, it all gets mixed together in a really beautiful way. So there's times when you want, like you said, a big en-enemity set, there's times where maybe you just wanna be all-alone, right? It really depends on your threat model, who's, who's looking over your shoulder, you know, what, what country you're speaking negatively about. You gotta think about all that stuff, right? And, and I think the most impressive thing is that nobody's really been able to figure out who Satoshi was, right? He had perfect opsec, which is kind of unheard of, right? 'Cause you look at all these other guys, and they all made mistakes. Even, you know, like I said, Ross earlier, or pretty much everyone makes a mistake at some point. They slip up, the government finds them. But, man, Satoshi, he's out there, man.

Next level. who knows? Who knows if he's even You know?

That pretty much sums it up, right? Like you literally don't even know if the guy is dead or alive. That's how perfect his anonymity set, like you said, was, right? He was, wherever he was VPN'ing from, you know, he was probably doing both, right? He was probably using some VPN to connect the tour, to go through a proxy. He just had this perfect,

setup. Yeah. Wow. Alright, look, I'm also keen. So thanks for that, Wiz. I'm also really keen to discuss what you're doing with Hive Dot One. So, Wiz, I know you recently did this whole Bitcoiner or Shitcoiner extension. Maybe, maybe just tell us a little bit about what was the original extension. I think it was called Coinflick of Interest, and then you made your own version. Tell us about that.

Right, so this was actually a joke I made for my friend, Mr. Hodel on Twitter. I was at Starbucks So his name is Luke Childs on Twitter. made this really cool extension that just takes the Hive One data and basically added it to somebody's Twitter profile page. Or if you, if you hovered your mouse cursor over their profile, you could see what percentage of their followers were from which cluster on Hive One. And if you're not familiar- Oh,

sorry. Yeah, if you just explain what Hive One is, yeah.

Right. So if you're not familiar with Hive One, they are basically a data scientist company. So they're not, they're not originally- Bitcoiners, but they're rapidly becoming Bitcoiners as I'm kind of educating them here and there. what they do is they look at all the public data on Twitter and they analyze your followers. What they- Take is, they take all your followers and, I don't know if you're familiar with graph theory, but they, they basically do some clustering analysis, and they cluster all these people together. And, and this is a very low level human instinct, right? It's like tribalism or echo chamber, whatever you wanna call it, but for whatever reason you know, Democrat, Republican, humans always kind of go into these, clusters, and you can very easily identify this with graph theory. So Twitter followers is probably one of the best ways to do it, but you can, I, you know, I could analyze your followers and see that they're almost all in the same cluster, which you could identify as being the Bitcoin cluster. And if you take someone else's, followers, for example, you know, I don't wanna name any- Many Shitcoiners, but, I mean, it's the same phenomenon, right? If you, if you go to, for example, Vitalik, you know, Twitter account, most of his followers are in the Ethereum cluster, right? And sure, there is a little bit of overlap between those two clusters, but for the most part, they're very, easy to identify on a graph And what this browser extension did was, it would just have a few kind of, percentage meters of what percentage of your followers belong to each cluster. And so I think he had four clusters, Bitcoin, B-Cash, Ripple, and Ethereum or something like this. And so for more-- most people in the Bitcoin cluster, it would say like, you know, you're ninety-nine percent Bitcoiner and maybe one percent something else. And so, you know, to make my friend Mr. Hodo laugh, I just kind of add-- I just forked his extension and combined the other three clusters and, and summed them all together into one that said "Shitcoin." And so, I--

I love it.

Yeah, I put it on the Chrome Web Store as "Bitcoiner or Shitcoiner," and it made this very simple diagram of, "Are you a Bitcoiner?" Or are you a Shitcoiner? And for example, I think you and I are by far 100% Bitcoiners, but, you know, it was scarily accurate at, no matter who you look at You know, some, some other podcasters, I'm not gonna name names, they would be kind of in the middle, you know, maybe like fifty percent Bitcoiner, fifty percent Shitcoiner, and, it was always very, very accurate. And so while I just released this as a joke, I checked my, Chrome Web Store stats a few hours later, and I had like hundreds of, users Had started using this extension, I was like, "Oh my god, this is actually like a huge thing." So I started talking to the Hive One guys more and, became really good friends with them and kind of, you know, just doing my best to be a Bitcoin evangelist and teaching about the fundamental principles of Bitcoin, and they're actually super interested in Bitcoin, and so, now that I've kind of joined them as a, you know, contributor or, you know, part of their organization in some way. The project that, using, or I'm actually starting two projects using their APIs, even though it's, they're, they're gonna share quite a bit of code. The first site is, an extension to the, or maybe the, the logical next step of the Bitcoiner or Shitcoiner browser extension. So it's gonna be a website called Bitcoiner or Shitcoiner dot com where it will- Have essentially just a, a list of all the people on crypto Twitter, and it will very accurately label them as Bitcoiners or Shitcoiners. And, Yeah, you're gonna be able to, well, so, so that's the first step, right, is just making the list. And then the second step is turning it into a much more useful tool where you can actually log in with Twitter it, to the website itself. It'll analyze the people you're following and say, "Okay, looks like you're a pretty hardcore Bitcoiner, but, I see you're following these ten Shitcoiners. Would you like me to, would you like me to just go ahead and unfollow them for you?" And so- If you're looking to improve your signal to noise ratio on Twitter, this is gonna be a very useful tool. And I hope it can defend Bitcoin against some of the social attacks that it's seen recently. I mean, just to give you a really quick example, we had a Bitcoin meetup last week in Tokyo, and, well, they, they say it was a coincidence, but the B-Cash meetup changed its meetup to be at the same place at the same time as our meetup. And so, you know, we're doing our presentations and our panel and stuff, and afterwards they kind of come up and, you know, they're like, "Oh, you're paying for your beer with fiat currency? Why don't you use Bitcoin? What's the, what's the fee, right?" And, you know, they're just so eager to, You know, spout their narrative and, and it's like, you know, yeah, I wanna, I wanna argue with them and say like, yeah, it's called spend fiat, stack sat, like, of course I'm not gonna, you know, spend Bitcoin on a beer and pizza when I know it's gonna double the, you know, double the price probably in the next month or two, I'm gonna spend my dirty fiat. Whereas they're very happy to, you know, spend bCash with its zero transaction fees. Sure, I could argue with them, but, but what I really I don't even wanna waste my time refuting that bullshit, right? I just wanna improve my signal-to-noise ratio. I just wanna focus on Bitcoin only. I wanna unfollow the Shitcoiners, I wanna follow the really, hardcore Bitcoin-only people like yourself, and this tool I feel is gonna, is gonna help Bitcoiners to, to do that, right? To improve their signal-to-noise ratio and defend against the social attacks. another website which I've been Contributing to recently is Bitcoin Only dot com, and this is a, this is a really cool source, again, for people who don't wanna have, any noise with their Bitcoin studies. So Bitcoin Dash Only dot com is a really great resource to find, you know, wallets or podcasts or meetups or Any, anything related to Bitcoin that basically rejects Shitcoin, so you won't find any Shitcoin related, you know, noise in your, resources if you check out this site. And, the maintainer of the site is this guy named, sixty-one-o-two, you know, just a pseudonymous identity. And, originally we had created a, a section of the site for Bitcoin only people on Twitter. And, within a few hours, people were arguing like crazy on Twitter. "No, this guy's not a Bitcoiner, he's a Shitcoiner, he was shilling this coin." And we decided really quick, like, "Alright, we're gonna have to take this." People section down from the Bitcoin only site 'cause it's just too dramatic and, and too hard to maintain and too controversial. And so my solution for this is, again, going back to the Hive One data, is to create a fully automated Website where no humans have any ability to change anything to curate a list of Bitcoin only people. And so this is the second website I'm announcing on your podcast, it's called bitcoinwizards dot com. And it's going to automatically, it's gonna combine the Hive One Bitcoin cluster data, it's gonna apply the Bitcoiner to Shitcoiner ratio algorithms, and it's gonna Add some additional algorithms on top of that to spit out a list of Bitcoin wizards, and, and this is my solution to the, to the Bitcoin only list of people drama, right? We're gonna have a list of legitimate Bitcoiners on Twitter that's not generated by any human, it's just purely generated by algorithms. So there's, there's gonna be no opportunity for drama or controversy or for people to argue with each other, and it's actually really accurate. So I'm, I'm probably gonna be releasing these sites, very soon, you know, but just to give you an example, all the, the high, the high-ranking people on the Bitcoin Wizard sites Which by the way, it's, it's separated by color. So the, there's black wizards, purple blizzards, blue wizards, and red wizards, and, and they're kind of, you know, four different ranks of, of wizards, but depending on how much clout they have in the, in the social network. But it's, it's all- Right. So

like Adam Back is a black wizard kind of thing.

Exactly. And, Jameson Lopp and, and all the really, top level guys. Unfortunately, I'm only a, I Maybe, maybe if, you know, I keep doing some, some good tweets and, keep coming on your podcast, maybe I can level up to a purple wizard, right?

So yeah, fantastic. I think it's a great idea. I think, it's, it, I, I think I see a bit of value for new people as well, right? Like if you're new to the space, like those of us who are kind of already deep into this, we know who's, like, a Bitcoiner, who's a Shitcoiner, but if you're new to this whole world, it's kind of difficult, and I think maybe there's a little bit of value there as well, because if you're new, you might come and

Backstory of it.

Exactly, and a hundred percent of those five hundred eighty thousand followers are all shitcoiners, right? So if, if you understand clustering theory, it's kind of like, Google's early implementation of people, I'm sorry, PageRank. So now of course, Google has very advanced artificial, artificial intelligence where you can sing a song into your computer and it'll tell you what song that was or something. The earlier version of that was PageRank, right? And you would have- This very highly technical recursive algorithm that would assign a score to each website on the whole internet. And I think there was only a few websites that had a perfect score of ten. I remember one of them was Wikipedia. So If you had a link from, or like Creative Commons was, was I think page rank nine. So if there was a link from Creative Commons to your website, that would, that would give you a huge boost because they had such a high reputation and they were kind of voting for you in that way. And so the people rank algorithm of Hive One, I mean, that's not what they call it, but it's very simple to understand, is that, you know, for example, if Adam Back is following you on Twitter, well, you just got a huge boost in your score because he's highly ranked A lot of people follow him, and so it's this very recursive algorithm that, you know, if a lot of high cloud people follow you, then your score will be high as well. And, You know, or you could have a million low clout followers, and it all adds up, right? So, so there's many ways to get that overall high score, and that's how the, the Bitcoin Wizard site works, is that it takes those high-ranking people, which, like you said, it could just generally be, you know, like for example, Fluffy Pony is a really awesome, Monero developer, but he's not a, you know, a, a Bitcoin maximalist guy, right? He's a, he's a Monero developer. So the point Is that it takes, even though he's high ranking on the Bitcoin cluster list just because lots of Bitcoiners happen to follow him, it actually analyzes his followers and sees that A lot of them aren't in the Bitcoin cluster, so he actually has a lower Bitcoiner to Shitcoiner ratio than, say, you or I would. And so the Bitcoin Wizard site would actually filter him out and disqualify him from being considered as a Bitcoin Wizard on this site. And so that's what the, the different ranks of wizards are, right? It's, it's a combination. You have to have both scores. You have to be highly ranked on the Bitcoin cluster from Hive One, and you also have to have a very high ratio of Bitcoiner to Shitcoiner followers

Right. Alright. And what about now? Okay, so a couple of the challenges that you might-- people might throw you, they might say, "Hey, Wiz, can't people game this algorithm?"

Yes, it is possible to, game the algorithm in one particular way And I think if you do this, it's totally fine. But, obviously the algorithm is analyzing your followers, and one hack you can do on Twitter is if you just- Block someone and then immediately unblock them, that will cause them to not be following you anymore. So if you have a lot of Shitcoin followers and you wanna improve your Bitcoiner to Shitcoiners score, yeah, you could just block all the Shitcoiners, right? And I think this is, we should actually embrace this feature, because, I, I, I would, I would totally suggest people, yeah, you should increase your Bitcoiner to Shitcoiners score. Score, you know, you, you should, you know, 'cause, 'cause that's the biggest social attack on Bitcoin, right? It's just people saying these false narratives and basically wasting your time and trolling you into arguing with them about, you know, something stupid, and, and that's what Fox News does so well, right? Like, to give a, a real world example, is that they just kind of muddle the issue. And, like you said, if you're a newcomer, oh, big blocks, small blocks? Yeah, of course we should have big blocks, right? Understand the technical nuances of computer science, you know, you could be persuaded by a, a marketing team, right? And this is why Ripple is so successful. And so the purpose of, of these two sites I'm creating is again, just to kind of filter out the noise, improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and defend against these social attacks.

Fantastic, yeah. And, I think it just, a- another common example, and, you know, h-historically there have been some people who, you know, tried to- Identify as a Bitcoiner for the social cred, right? But then they would like, start scamming, right? You know, so there, there have been a few individuals in kind of Bitcoin history who sort of, who did that, and potentially this sort of, algorithm, this sort of website might, You know, help at least some new, newbies sort of see, and I, I, it obviously depends how many newbies would go to Hive One or go to, you know, your website, Bitcoin or a Shitcoiner, but there's potential there.

Yeah, so I'll give you a quick example of that. remember when we were having lunch in Tokyo a few weeks back? We were kind of looking over at the Hive One website really quick, and I actually, confessed to you that I wasn't too familiar with a lot of the higher ranking people on there, but I wanted to, you know, get to, to meet them, and I was very fortunate to meet you and, and, now our friends. But, there was one guy on Twitter I recently followed, his name is Pomp or A Pompiano

The Shitcoiner extension wasn't working because Twitter had just rolled out this new UI, so I was, I was blind. I didn't have any, hard data to go by. But, you know, like I clicked on his profile, it had like two hundred thousand followers, and he had just gone on CNBC and he was talking all these great things about Bitcoin. He refused to talk about Shitcoins on the show when one of the people asked them about it, so I thought, "Oh, this guy's probably cool," so I followed him. And, I think like the next day or something, he tweeted something like "Satoshi is legend" with, you know, fire around it. And I saw his tweet, and I thought like, "Oh, did some news come out about Satoshi? Like, what happened?" And so I replied back to his tweet like, "Oh, what are you talking about?" But then A bunch of people kind of told me, like on the side, like, "No, that's just what he does, like that's his way of, well, growth hack, I think it's a way of- " Growth hacking. Yeah. And I went over to the Hive One site immediately, and I typed his name on the, the overall crypto cluster, where he was ranked very, very high. And then I clicked on the Bitcoin cluster, and I typed in his name, and he wasn't ranked at all, which- If you do the math, that means he has a hundred percent shitcoin score. If that's what my algorithm would, would tell you, right? And I realized like, oh my god, if my extension was working, I never would have followed Pop. I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy, it's just that I'm not interested in shitcoins, right? I'm only interested in Bitcoin. So I, you know, I just wrote him a very polite message, like, you know, "Sorry, dude, I'm actually not interested in, what you're tweeting about

Bitcoin, this tool is actually really critical because even, you know, myself, I made the same mistake, and if, and if I'm gonna make the mistake, that means there's a million newcomers out there that are making the same mistakes, following the wrong people. Again, not gonna name any names, but you can probably imagine this is why, you know, some coins are val- why some shitcoins are valued so highly when you look at them and you're like, "This coin is totally worthless, like, why does it have any value at all?" You know, all these people should be focusing And for whatever reasons, the marketing, you know, used car salesman tactics that they used, it works, right? And so this is my hopeful, solution to at least help defend against these social attacks.

Interesting, yeah, and I think it's also- I, I'm thinking now also about the importance of reputation in this space generally, right? So we noticed that some of the people who are high ranked are people who have been around for a long period of time, right? They didn't just kind of come out overnight and now they're, well known in Bitcoin, you know? They, they tend to have built up a reputation over time, and I think that's one of those things that's, it's a little harder to fake.

Exactly. And so the really cool, the really, really cool thing, bro, about this algorithm That it's kind of like this, holy grail of a dis-- a distributed consensus model, right? So I think Hive One is actually doing something that's a, a true zero to one innovation in the sense that on the internet right now, there's no really good, like, reputation score system, and I feel this could be the beginning of that. So for example- You know, there, there are some Bitcoiners, or maybe former Bitcoiners I should call them now, that, you know, did something that the Bitcoiner community didn't agree with, and as soon as they did that, everyone immediately unfollowed them, and of course, their Hive One score tanked. And this is really beautiful for a distributed consensus mechanism, right? And the, the, the best part is that you don't have to trust Hive One, you don't have to trust my, my website either, right? Everything Something's gonna be open source and you can run the algorithms yourself and you'll get the same numbers, you know? It, it's a really beautiful system, that, that goes along perfectly with the underlying Bitcoin philosophical principles of don't trust, verify.

Right, and I think another, maybe just another challenge people might be thinking of is, what about some, you know, in fairness, very high reputation people in Bitcoin who simply don't use Twitter? So quick examples would be someone like- Like Greg Maxwell or Andrew Polstra from Blockstream. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes, so what we're gonna be adding is, GitHub, Data onto the Hive One backend. So it will be possible to, you know, for Hive One to kind of link a Twitter identity with a GitHub identity. Of course, it's, you know, it's totally opt-in. If, if you wanna stay private, stay private, don't link your data. But the opposite is that is you're not gonna have a, a higher reputation score, right? So if you wanna be a highly ranked Bitcoin wizard, you're actually gonna wanna link all your publicly available data so that Hive One can Kind of rank it all together and see, oh yeah, whenever you push code to the Bitcoin core repository, you know, it actually gets merged into their repo, and they can use that GitHub, contributor data to see who's committing what and, assign some clout score, you know? So for the developer you mentioned, Greg Maxwell, he would actually get a pretty high- CloudScore just from his GitHub commits alone, right? So, coincidentally, like a lot of the highest ranking Bitcoin wizards are the, the core developers already, right? Just because Most, like I said, the distributed consensus of Twitter is actually very accurate if you, add it all together, which is, which is what the algorithms are trying to do.

Yeah, I think it's pretty cool as well that one thing is, if you're a newbie coming into this space and you don't know who's legit or who's reputable, in some sense you're relying, you're sort of putting a little bit of trust in the fact that all of the other highly reputable people follow this person, they retweet this person, they press like on their tweets, that kind of thing, or link to them. So I think that's an interesting idea as well, that as a newbie, you can take advantage of the expert knowledge.

Right. And, and that's the

type of algorithm is that, you know, you, like you said, you can game the system of Twitter right now in the sense that you can go on, Fiverr dot com and buy a hundred thousand fake Twitter followers for five bucks, or if you want your tweet to have a million likes, you can go on Fiverr dot com, pay five bucks, and now your, all your tweets have a million likes on them, right? That's Going to, not affect your Hive One score at all, right? Because Hive One looks at the rank of the people who are like, who are following you. So You know, if Adam Back is following you, you'll get a very high score, but if some botnets following you, Hive One doesn't care about those guys. They don't have any ranking on Hive One. So this is, a very good tool to kind of counteract that, fake follower. You know, problem, like you said, if you're a newcomer and you look at someone's profile and they have a quarter million followers or even a million followers, you know, you think, "Oh, this guy's really cool," but it's all bullshit, right? And that's what the tool aims to kind of, reveal, you know, it's just all about transparency. It's funny, like, even the Hive One guys, the reason they wanna go Bitcoin only, it's kinda hilarious. All the other clusters are complaining to Hive One because, you know, it's Introducing transparency, right? But all the Bitcoiners, yeah, all the Bitcoiners are going to Hive One, like, oh yeah, this is great, it's increasing transparency, right? So, you know, it's just the difference in, I guess ethics or morals, but, yeah, Hive One is, is, really awesome, and I'm trying to build on top of their data APIs with my own, you know, algorithms and present it in a very user-friendly way. my sites are gonna allow, like you said, people to just mass follow. If you're a total newbie, you don't know who to follow, I'm just gonna say, yeah, go to bitcoinwizards dot com, log in with Twitter, and you can just say, okay, I wanna follow the top one hundred, wizards on this website, and I can, you know, guarantee you that it's gonna be, some of the highest, the best content on Twitter you can get. And this isn't my personal opinion, this is what the, just purely algorithms are telling you, based on graph theory and clustering, right?

Fantastic. And, You know, I, you mentioned earlier the Bitcoin Only website, which is fantastic. I, every now and then I, I DM with, six one o two Bitcoin Only, great guy, and so he might even do something like set up a link where if you're a newbie, you can click this and it'll, you know, take you to that site and follow all the top one hundred or one hundred and fifty or whatever, Bitcoiners on Twitter.

Exactly that, yeah. So that, that's my real goal is, in developing the Bitcoin Wizard site is to Kind of partner with 61 and 2 and his Bitcoin only site as the people, portion of the site. So we're, we're gonna link the two sites together at some point. And the Bitcoiner or Shitcoiner website is, Mostly just to improve your signal to noise ratio, right? It's gonna allow you to unfollow the, the shitcoiners that you're not interested in, and maybe follow some of the bitcoiners that you didn't know about and that you are interested in. So the two, the two websites will use the same API, data backend, and algorithms, but they're gonna have very different, frontend UIs. And one, one of them, the Bitcoin Wizard site will be connected to Bitcoin only, whereas the Bitcoin or Shitcoiners more of a- A, you know, half serious, half, fun site to kind of shame Shitcoiners.

Oh, I can imagine it now. Like all the, the Shitcoiners will be like, "Oh my God, Wiz and Stephan, you toxic maximalists. Why aren't you more inclusive?"

Yeah, man. That's, that's what we gotta do, though, right? We gotta defend Bitcoin against these social attacks and, and just- You know, 'cause I'm, I'm the organizer of the, the Tokyo Bitcoin, the only Tokyo Bitcoin meetup right now, that sounds ridiculous to say, and I'm actually starting another one out in Kanazawa, which is a few hours out of, out of the, the city, away from Tokyo. And, you know, there's a huge difference between the level of, You know, Tokyo people are, are, it's a big city, everyone has Bitcoin, they're much more savvy. But if I go to the countryside, they're starting from zero, right? And I really have to teach them what is a full node, what is a wallet, you know, what is a block explorer, and I can totally see why Japan has mostly been investing, if you can even call that, in Ripple and Bcash. It's simply because they didn't know any better. It's a very trusting society. Very trusting culture. If somebody goes to them with a nice presentation and, you know, a nice, speech about why Bcash is the real Bitcoin or why Ripple is better than Bitcoin because it's, quote unquote You know, regulated or whatever their narrative is, that's, you know, that's, they buy it. And, so many Japanese people, like I've met, and they're like, "Oh, no, I don't have Bitcoin, but I have Ripple." And I, and I just- Kills me inside, right? And so I realized, this is what I have to do. I have to build these websites, I have to organize these meetups, and I have to, you know, educate the, the masses to really defend against these shitcoin scams. This is like my calling in life, or, or, you know, this is how I gotta give back to the community, right? I love Japan, and I really hate that it's over-- it's, it's just infested with all these shitcoin scams. It's the worst.

yeah, definitely, yeah, I think that a lot of my listeners will probably feel very similar a-about wherever they are. So, yeah, look, anyway, look, I think that's pretty much it. but look, let us know if you've got anything else you wanted to add about Hive Dot One or about yourself. And obviously, before we let you go, let the listeners know where they can find you.

Sure. So I'm Wiz on Twitter, W I Z, and the two websites that I'm going to be Are bitcoin-wizards dot com and bitcoiner or shitcoiner dot com. And, yeah, hit me up if, you wanna talk about Bitcoin.

Fantastic. Well, look, thank you very much for coming on, Wiz. I really enjoyed the discussion, and I really appreciate that you're, really strong about being a Bitcoiner. So thank you for that.

Yeah, I'm, I'm a hardcore Bitcoiner, man. Thanks a lot for having me on.

I hope you guys enjoyed that. I certainly found it very interesting around the graph theory and clustering. I, I think it's obviously, it's not a silver bullet, but it might help newbies find good people to follow on Twitter. So make sure you check that out For, just note the sites won't be available straight away, however, there are Twitter accounts available right now. also, if you wanna support me, guys, if you enjoyed this stuff, remember rate, review, share it. and also, if you wanna support me, you can pay or make donations on my Tallycoin, which is tally c o dot i n slash Stephan Livera, and if you're interested in joining the private chat group for my supporters on Telegram My Patreon supporters, get access to that. So that's patreon dot com slash stephan livera. That's it from me. Thanks guys. See you next time.