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In this episode of "Better, by Bitcoin," hosts JD, Bondor, and Anton Seim delve into the fiery debate surrounding Bitcoin's op_return filter removal, exploring its implications on Bitcoin's core purpose as a currency versus a database, block space, and long-term sustainability. The dialogue highlights the contrasting technical and cultural viewpoints influencing this critical issue.
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Hosts:
JD - @CypherpunkCine on ๐
Bondor - @gildedpleb on ๐
Anton Seim - @antonseim on ๐
Sponsors:
Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin
Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of
Storytelling - @indeehub on ๐
Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.
Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,
degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is,
but that it's going to get way better.
Better, by Bitcoin.
Better, by Bitcoin.
Nice. Love it.
Always good.
So glad we got that going. Really puts you in the right head space.
Especially considering, you know, all the drama and all the insanity
and all the other ridiculous things that we got going on.
Is there stuff going on in Bitcoin? I didn't anticipate this.
Stuff going on.
Yeah, so we're back on the show Better, by Bitcoin.
We are going to, you know, we did this at the top of the week,
but we kind of want to revisit it again.
And this is talking about the Bitcoin, the debate about the filters
and what's happening, like what it means.
Because a lot of different people, there seems to be a, I don't know,
a disconnect in the conversation.
People on one side are kind of hearing one thing.
People on the other side are hearing a different thing, right?
And so people on both sides, they're not really talking to each other.
They're just talking past each other on both sides.
It's a very, you know, interesting dynamic and worth exploring,
worth trying to flesh out and understand at a deeper level.
So, JD, got you back.
You are remote today, which is working through it.
Working through it.
My phone dies.
Whoops.
But we'll see.
I'm, like, away from every charging orifice.
So we'll see how that goes.
We'll go a shorter episode.
Let's try.
We'll make it work.
We'll make it work.
Yeah, so the debate.
I'll try and introduce the debate this time.
You introduced it last time.
You had some good things to say.
You went on some epic rants.
I'm going to try and introduce it this time.
Try and get, you know, lay some groundwork,
and then I'll pass it off to you to see, you know,
where you're at in your head space about the current state of things.
So mechanic, grass-fed Bitcoin, right?
That's the guy.
He was essentially kicked off of the Bitcoin Core repo for posting a comment about,
I forget what the exact comment was, but it raised the question about,
well, maybe there's a conflict of interest here, right?
That was the one?
Yeah.
And the consequences of that were that he gets kicked off the repo.
He didn't, like, okay, cool, but, like,
it really drew attention to, well, what was he commenting about?
Well, he was commenting about the fact that they're trying to remove a filter
on the op return setting.
Like, not change the filter, but remove the ability to have a filter at all.
Remove a setting from the CLI tool for Bitcoin D.
Yeah, Bitcoin D.
Okay, well, gee, that could be bad.
That could be good.
What's the deal with this filter?
Why does this matter?
Okay, so the filter says it sets a limit for a valid transaction that your mempool
will recognize, and that limit is something like 83 bytes.
So if your op return op code had a value that was more than 83 bytes,
it would be an invalid transaction according to your node,
and, therefore, you'd automatically have this setting as a filter,
and you'd filter out transactions that violated that rule, right?
So if they're removing the filter entirely,
that allows anybody to set any bit amount on an op return and just go ham,
like, go ham, whatever.
Now, the problem with this, of course, is that this affects block space.
Now, if every transaction has this massive block of meaningless text
or JPEG, wizard dick pics, well, you're going to run out of block space
really soon or faster than you would otherwise, and the consequences of that
are that nodes become more expensive to run.
If nodes are more expensive to run, the system becomes more centralized.
We covered this last week, you know, and, well, not last week,
the beginning of this week, and so there is a practical consequence
for just removing the filter.
It kind of cascades into this bigger thing, right?
Now, some of the pushback has been, well, bro, they're already doing, like,
okay, op return, you can fill it with spam.
Well, they're already doing spam.
Okay, so if they're already doing spam, well, then what difference does it make
that we remove the filter at all, right?
And you get into these, like, what ifs and this way and that way
and how much and quantifying it and all this other stuff,
and it just becomes this really long, prolonged thing,
but the unfortunate part about it, or, you know, depending on your perspective,
I think at this point in the debate we're now looking at there's two sides
of the argument, one that says it's almost like a, I don't know
if the right word is ontological, but it's like a telos kind of, like,
what's the meaning of Bitcoin, right?
Like, what's the purpose of this?
Why are we doing this?
Like, what's this all about, right?
So the high-level debate is now, or this debate has now escalated
to a high-level debate.
What's the purpose of Bitcoin, the telos?
Which is, on one camp, they're basically saying it's a technical,
this is a technical thing that because they're using it anyway,
it doesn't matter, and let's just be honest about what the code can
and can't do and what, like, if we can push all this stuff
in this area, well, then that's going to be safer
and have all these other technical kind of things.
And then the other side, the other camp, basically takes a different,
like a completely different tact, a different telos,
which is that Bitcoin is money, and because Bitcoin's money,
that means that it should be filtering out every single possible thing
that is not money.
Therefore, it makes no sense that we would, one, think it's okay
to remove the filter, two, think it's okay to just change whatever
the setting is on the filter at all, right?
So one camp is basically saying, if this goes through,
the telos of Bitcoin changes, and the other camp is saying,
this has nothing to do with the telos at all.
This is strictly a technical change.
Now, I don't know if I introduced that well or put it succinctly,
but that's kind of where I see it presently.
J.D., does that line up with where you're at and what you know
about this debate?
Yeah, and I have some background.
I'm going to be muting and unmuting, and I think you may have a text
of somebody you might be able to join if you want to tell them to jump in,
but yes, that sounds accurate, and I think it's an interesting debate
because it's one of those moments where it's kind of like, you know,
you go in to the doctor for a solution to, it's like, oh,
I have this pain in my arm or whatever it is.
Actually, I'd probably say it's more akin to maybe the way I have heard
of a lot of people who've gotten lymphoma,
like have just discovered that they had some type of lymphoma.
It's like, oh, I was sick for a long period of time, and I went in,
and then they're like, I just think I have a cough,
and then they end up going, oh, dude, you have stage four lymphoma.
You're about to die.
I'm using that as an example because it's like something really, really,
like it's not about the filter.
It's the whole thing where the filter just kind of brought to light something
that really needed to be solved but wasn't really solved,
and it sounds like a conversation that actually happened when you
and a lot of other folk was like, I'm still a baby and learning all this stuff,
but during the block size war,
which was a discussion around the fundamental premise of is Bitcoin money
or is it a database, right?
Because that's kind of what my understanding of the big changes
for the big blockers would have essentially done
because it would have made this problem exponentially worse
if this was now gone and then we had even bigger blocks than we have now.
And so, yeah, that's kind of I think the top line is they're kind of talking
across each other because each of them is approaching it from a different way.
Somebody's approaching it from the this is what the code can do,
and somebody's approaching it, but why?
And so it's like neither of them I would say is wrong,
but they do have to have a shared conclusion to solve the problem.
Yeah, yeah.
I think having this debate also having this debate on Twitter doesn't lend itself well to just
because I mean, we got in this last week, too,
but like there is so much nuance to Bitcoin and you literally cannot you can't just be like,
like, thank God for Luke's contributions and guys brilliant, et cetera.
But when he says that when you are adding spam to the to my node, you're raping like that's rape.
It's like, bro, that's that's a lot of that.
But I agree with that.
But like it's a lot of hyperbole that doesn't like if like, OK, great.
You believe that that's the case, but it's taken in context of everybody else watching online
and figuring out it's like that is not the right like way to sell your point.
Right. Like you may believe that that's that's fine.
That can be totally justified in your head, but it's not the right like way to sell that point.
Now, therefore, Twitter has a problem.
Like there's a problem in terms of the medium that allows us to get through this,
because in Luke's mind, it's it's totally valid point.
Anton, what's up, man? We're live, by the way.
So one of the things that comes out of that is like, OK, well, you really have to get the nuance.
And again, Twitter doesn't do the nuance very well. So it's good to have a conversation like this.
It's good to do offline and just kind of like or sideline like talks.
J.D., you and I have been going back and forth on text, which I think is super helpful.
Like it allows you to like actually get into somebody's headspace and all that stuff.
But one of the things I think is fascinating is just, again, that the missing each other piece.
Right. Like when Luke says this is right.
Well, probably somebody is going to take that and just be like, actually, you know what?
You still like there's no debate there. There's no argument there.
Right. As opposed to. A more level headed.
Hey, how do we like get into this and get into this correctly and like actually pose and actually,
actually pose an argument and actually refute the argument and not just attack the person or whatever the thing is.
Right. So like and then all the pleads and everyone else just like losing their minds over whatever the thing is.
And just like, oh, my goodness, you try it. You've got to try and keep an even head on it.
Yeah. It's a moment. Quick recapping.
And if you didn't have a chance to hear the top of it, but basically the core of the discussion today is the fact that the two sides are kind of talking past each other.
One is talking about technical. One is talking about cultural aspects of Bitcoin.
But then I would say that the big deduction for me is even though they're talking past each other,
they actually do have to have an alignment in my particular case on the culture side of the equation,
because the culture in my mind is the North Star and my culture, I mean, story.
If you get the story, is it a medium of exchange and store of value?
Or is it a like my my my premise would be Bitcoin is a store of value, medium of exchange, period, full stop.
Or is it a database? And that is, in my mind, the crux of this story argument is it's a database or it's this.
And I and I think that's kind of a mechanic in the other thing, and there really can't be it has to be one of the two.
It can't. It is a binary. Is that you have any thoughts on that?
Well, yeah, Bitcoin was made to be money. It was made to be a peer to peer digital currency.
It has the ability to put things like smart contracts on it and things like that.
Satoshi didn't know when Bitcoin was created that there would be 20,000 altcoins.
The altcoins can be used for all kinds of experiment conservative estimate.
It's infinite, really. I mean, it can be infinite and just copy and paste the code and like it sort of exists.
But we have all these altcoins to experiment on.
That doesn't mean that Bitcoin needs to have every single thing that is possible that you can put on an altcoin.
And. The question that I have, and I'm curious what you guys thoughts are on this is.
If we get it wrong. Because ultimately, we're not in control of what happens, like the three of us are not in control,
what whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Is there any danger to Bitcoin if the wrong decisions are made,
like legitimate danger to the future of Bitcoin existing?
So, I mean, from a technical perspective, you'd really have to go down and you have to make assumptions about.
Hard drive costs like what it costs to run a node, you have to make because you can't really ultimately predict into a few years,
but then there's there's economic catastrophes, random tariffs, as we're seeing,
and all sorts of other unknown unknowns that could affect the price of a hard drive cost and price of ultimately a node cost.
However, in Bitcoin, there are knowns and there are no knowns.
It's like, well, OK, we know that if every block is always full,
that means that there's going to be 210 gigabytes of information added to the block chain every year.
If every block is always full. Right. That's a that's a hard.
This is this is what it is. There's nothing that anybody is going to be able to do to change that.
Well, that's in a worst case scenario. Presently, we have blocks there, whatever.
I don't know what it was today. I think I checked it yesterday, but it was the average block was something like one point six megabytes.
Yeah. So one point six megabytes is not even halfway to four megabytes and four megabytes is when you get the two hundred and ten gigabytes per year.
OK, so. We are presently and obviously the mempool is is getting flushed out regularly,
maybe not regularly, but it was flushed out recently, which is great. Fantastic.
Now, to your original question, are there real dangers to this?
Well, you can do that. You can do the math on it. What's your assumption about hard drive costs?
Right. Storage costs for this stuff. If your assumption is that like if your assumption is a generous assumption that says something like,
well, it's going to be eight percent decrease in the cost of solid state storage like per year for the next however many years.
Well, then there's no world in which year over year the cost of storing Bitcoin is more expensive than the previous year because the cost grows linearly.
And so the cost of the Bitcoin blockchain grows linearly, whereas the reduction in costs for the solid state hard drives are reduced at an exponential rate,
eight percent this year, eight percent the next year, eight percent, eight percent goes on and on. Right.
And it's not exponential. It's something like exponential decay or logarithmic or something.
But you compare these things is like, OK, this is these are not comparable in the worst case scenario.
They're not comparable. But if your assumption is that like we're going to have like crazy tariffs and things are going to get way worse than it might make sense to say,
well, maybe the cost of hard drives like go up. Right. Like two percent, four percent.
I don't know. One hundred and fifty percent. Well, that's that's going to be real problematic to run a node. Right.
Also, the cost of. Transmission, like you have to be able to sink a node in a certain amount of time or else it's just not worth it for anybody,
like sinking a node, for instance, on a spinning rust hard drive like will take you forever at this point.
I don't know how long it takes, but it takes forever. It's such a long time. It's crazy, like unbelievable.
I just so like in on my note, I have here at home, I, you know, killed one of my containers and re-spun up a Bitcoin node.
It took me about maybe 17 hours to to sink the whole block chain in an IBD.
So that's that gives you an idea of where we're at. Like, yeah, 17 hours. That's pretty good.
I've gotten, you know, in years ago, I remember getting like twenty five hours or like two weeks and like on a hard drive or spinning rust hard drive.
And then like you go through, like I've had if you set the cash to super big and get it in eight hours and like all that stuff.
So that's just like the practical stuff with a node. Does does this affect?
Well, OK, so you got to look at the cost. Well, OK, if if all the box are full and all these costs are going up, well, how much are they going up by?
OK, so maybe it costs like, I don't know, eight thousand dollars in 10 years to run another.
It's like, OK, what's inflation going to be like in 10 years?
Like like how much is that accounted for?
There is like there's a lot that goes into this equation. Right.
So. For me personally, what are the costs?
It's like, well, the bandwidth costs and hard drive costs and the consequences of those costs, I don't think they go up at a rate that's just super crazy.
I think that there's still going to be enough people to be able to afford this stuff.
Now. Do we like enough people that can afford to run a node, but does.
Is that what we want or do we want to be able to have more people run nodes?
We want to make nodes far more. Affordable. Right.
So that's the technical perspective, J.D., you have a different perspective because you're way more in tune with the like the cultural side of it.
So I want to hear your like the cultural side, like the cultural argument.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you give a good breakdown.
And actually, I think what I love, actually, I'll give the cultural side and that I'd love your take on this to answer.
But the the cultural side of it is that the tape that the mechanic was making is, I think, the thing that people are missing.
Because at the end of the day, people are invested in Bitcoin and I'm saying invested in Bitcoin because now we have institutional buyers buying this money because it is money.
They don't care about block space. They don't care about all this stuff.
They are going to be institutionally incentivized to start doing things that will make them more money.
So I do understand that aspect of things. But in my mind, that is actually why it is imperative to get the north star.
Of what it is airtight, because that's how you're going to go through and do everything like a few quick stories on this would be like the first one would be my space.
Right. Nobody uses my space anymore. Why?
Because the story died. The story from my space became you use my space.
Like originally it was, oh, you can use my space to connect to your friends.
But it was originally you can use it to connect to your fans.
If you're a band, you can start like going out there and, you know, because I remember the band that I was like with when I was in high school, they like used it to to show all of their events or it's all going to be.
So it's a great place for you to connect for your fans and grow your audience.
Like that was the story. But then the story became, oh, well, there's a better place to do connecting with your fans and everything is called Facebook.
And then my space just died because people just became disinterested with it.
And so I think the 2140 end of Bitcoin issuance schedule does actually have to be a part of this calculus because we need a story that's going to be a hundred year story for Bitcoin.
Period. That's fully my my belief on this.
And Bitcoin is money is a hundred year story.
I do think the story needs fine tuning, and I actually think that's why it's so imperative, like people like us who are in entertainment are now kind of coming in now, like we were too regarded to understand this in the beginning.
And so we don't get to reap the rewards of that. Right. That's fine. OK, cool.
Like we are we are the second wave of of of of comers to the strike, the 40th wave, if you're actually looking at it.
But that's how it was supposed to be, because we are not here to protect the the technical fundamentals, which I do think need to be debated.
And I think that was the bigger piece of this is they blocked mechanic and Luke, who has more commits to Bitcoin than anybody in existence outside of Stoshi.
All right. I mean, he has more than even existence. But, you know, it's like the number one contributor to all of Bitcoin was blocked from from commenting on this thing.
Right. And he is a contributor because Jameson Lopp was like, they're only blocking like non contributors.
It looks like I happen to be the number one contributor and they've blocked me.
So where I'm going with this, though, is the story is the most important thing.
And it's like the Christianity story, right? The Christian story is that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man and was on a cross and died for your sins.
And three days later, he rose again. That is it. Jesus, the simplest version of it is Jesus died and rose from the dead.
If that is not true, then Christianity is not true.
And so it needs to be something as simple as that in my mind.
And so landing the plane on Bitcoin and an answer, I'd be curious to take Bitcoin is and I think there needs to be like a moniker like this.
It's like Bitcoin is the medium of exchange and store of value for the digital age.
Like and I do think money or monetary or like the monetary network, like the preeminent monetary network, that is a medium of exchange and store value for the digital age needs to kind of get codified and put out there because that lens will be how everyone filters everything.
So all those technical arguments will have to go through that filter of what the story is, what you're trying to accomplish before they get to the other side.
In what I said, I think it's really hard to put monkey JPEGs into that framework.
Like I see no way to make monkey JPEGs work in medium exchange or or store value.
And so, yeah, but that's that's my that's my take.
That's my thing is I think the story now has kind of come to light as the most important thing.
And I think we need to solve that problem. And that's why I'm excited, actually, personally, to be adding to the space.
Yeah, people are I mean, people are very impatient.
And I understand they want I mean, lots of people want various things from Bitcoin.
They want you know, I kind of want fiat money to fail.
And for Bitcoin to be what we use to transact value.
And we're not there yet.
You can't you know, you can't buy a house currently in the United States and just pay some like see a house on Redfin and then pay for it with Bitcoin.
There was a time period where you could do that with a Tesla.
You can't even do that anymore.
It's like I want that future, but that doesn't exist yet.
And we know.
Well, together, we don't talk about the price of Bitcoin a lot.
We talk more about the philosophy behind it.
The price is important.
And part of the reason why it's important is because Bitcoin is a mathematically scarce asset.
And as it becomes more and more scarce and more distributed into the hands of more people across the earth, the value of it is going to go up in a fairly predictable fashion.
And so that's hard for a lot of people who just want to get rich really quick off of Bitcoin to wait for that.
And so what I see happening is people are trying to force every single feature possible onto Bitcoin before waiting 10, 15 years for Bitcoin to be much, much more valuable.
And that's a completely understandable human impulse.
But I find it very annoying just personally knowing everything, the history of what's happened so far in Bitcoin, because it's kind of been.
Yeah, it's been done over and over again.
It's like when you've been in it for a while and you've bought into cloud mining or, you know, you watched NFTs become ordinals and whatever, like one thing after another.
It's like, yeah, you just see everything is a scam and you just want the newcomers to understand that everything is a scam.
And yet they just seem to not understand it.
And so it's like Groundhog Day where we just keep experiencing this over and over and over again because everybody is greedy and everybody wants to get rich quick.
That's pretty much all I have to say about it.
I just find the whole thing so annoying.
I wish it didn't exist.
And it's a little bit out of our control.
So at this point, I'm just kind of watching it happen, kind of knowing what's going to happen.
Yeah, I love.
Yeah.
I was just gonna say I'm not existentially scared for Bitcoin.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah.
I love that you brought that up because that's in many ways.
That's kind of how I'm thinking about it, too.
Which is to say when you think about these things on a long time frames and people coming into the space, I'm hesitant to say or hesitant to know if they get this yet.
But it's the exact same thing you're referencing, Anton.
Like, I've been scammed.
I've been hacked.
Like, I know what that's like.
And I know, oh, cool.
I've touched the burnt stove.
Okay.
Have those guys touched the stove yet that's burning?
Or have they seen anybody touch the stove that's burning?
Right.
I don't know.
Probably not.
Like, the consequences there are, like, just profound because once you touch the stove, you know, it's just it's just you're just going to get burned.
And it's, like, stupid to touch the stove.
There's no justifiable reason for it.
And when you play that out on a long time frame because you know it's all just a scam and you know all these people are just going to touch the stove and they're all going to get scammed, well, what happens when they get scammed?
They either quit or, well, they try and become the scammers, which is a thing, of course.
But most of the people, most of the people are going to touch the stove and they're going to learn the lesson, which is don't touch the stove.
Just, no, this isn't the way.
This isn't the right thing.
It's just going to blow up in your face, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So they're going to learn.
Like, this is, I think, JD, I mentioned this in one of our texts today, which was, like, I would not be surprised if in 50 years, like, not today, definitely not today, but in a long time from now, 50 years, we start to see, like, community agreement around, oh, yeah, obviously, we should obviously reduce the block size by, like, a megabyte.
Just because that'll, like, remove some of the spam or cut out some of the chaff, this, like, horrendous thing that's kind of festering, right?
And, like, everybody just agrees except for the, whatever, marginal, like, 1% scammers who are, like, relegated to the sidelines anyway, right?
Like, they have no voice because they've lost all their money and they can't afford to have a voice anymore.
So, like, in 50 years, yeah, that's where I see it.
It's, like, this issue kind of, like, in my head kind of resolves itself at that point.
I think that's an interesting take, but here's my opposite side of that, though.
Nothing ever resolves itself.
Somebody somewhere needs to make a choice.
As a perfect example, it's, like, I have a garden right now, and Mechanic made this argument in his thing, but it's, like, if you have a garden, you know, you don't just give up weeding it because you know that more weeds are going to come.
Like, you have to tend it.
You have to actually do it.
And I think this actually goes to the argument of, like, the, you know, the Second Amendment thing about, you know, somebody, it's always the NIMBY type thing where it's, like, well, somebody else will solve that problem.
Well, somebody else will solve that problem.
Well, somebody else will solve that problem.
And I think the problem we have in our current world is we're too removed from violence.
I do think that in the medieval world when people were literally just, like, mauled constantly in these, like, really violent conflicts.
Constantly in duels.
I challenge you to a duel.
Yeah, right.
Like, it forced you to, one, be really good at a skill, like shooting a gun, or, two, be really cunning and good and, you know, apt at your articulation, which is part of why we're doing this, right, so we can get better at it.
But where I'm going with this is one degree off, you know, if I'm trying to go to Australia and I start in Los Angeles and I just basically set the direction this should get me straight to Australia.
But if I'm one degree off and I don't touch the rudder the entire time, I will probably end up in Antarctica.
Or if I'm one degree off, I will end up in Japan.
And so the issue with this is the necessity, because I will call it necessity, of a discussion around the greater endpoint.
Because if we do get the endpoint wrong, we risk ending up nowhere.
And that would actually be worse in my mind for Bitcoin, which is, like, I would venture to say what Luke and what Jason and what Mechanic are all kind of saying is that if Bitcoin becomes not money and just becomes a database, 50 years from now it will be worthless.
It will be worthless.
Because again, it's going to be a MySpace.
Or another good example for people right now is Six Flags, right?
Like, why is nobody going to Six Flags?
Because they have a shitty story.
That's it.
That's the brass tacks.
Fundamentally, Six Flags and Disneyland are the same place.
They are the same place.
They are a place you go to ride a ride.
However, Disney has done a great job at crafting the story.
Like, I went actually on the website for Six Flags today because I was talking to someone else about this.
And I was reading their mission statement.
Go online and read the mission statement for Six Flags.
You can read that entire mission statement and not feel a thing.
Not feel a thing.
Because, like, volunteerism and all these big buzzwords, right?
It's like this was literally written by a committee in a room that was ticking a bunch of boxes.
But what's Disneyland?
We are the happiest place on Earth.
Yep.
I don't know about you, but I want to go there.
I want to go there more than I want to care about volunteers who do whatever.
So I actually have an interesting take on putting story as the most important thing.
Like, the story is king idea for this.
And that is story is king, like, with regard to film.
Like, absolutely.
You don't have a film without a story.
J.D., you probably take that even further, and you'd probably say something like,
you don't have a business unless you have a story, right?
Like, you don't have a, like, in its extremes, you might even say something like,
you don't have a family if you don't have a story, right?
Because, oh, we're not on the same page.
We're, like, no mission, no, like, connected, no shared values.
The vision of the people perished.
Proverbs.
Exactly, yeah.
So is that the case with Bitcoin?
Now, this is a very strange question because, again, getting back to the telos thing,
what is Bitcoin?
Like, what are we doing here?
Like, what's the whole thing?
Like, how does this blah, blah, blah?
It just goes on and on and on.
Now, I might argue that it's not about this.
Like, no, no, no, you're right.
It is about the story.
Story is king.
But the story, there's two stories with regard to money.
There's always going to be two stories with regard to money.
Like, with a business, there's the one story.
Hey, what do we exist to do?
We're here to be the happiest place on earth.
That's the story.
Bam.
Okay, cool.
With money itself, you have to process, like, you could have, think about it like this.
Gold.
Our story is to, like, human civilization and flourishing and all this, like, all of human civilization was built on us.
And, you know, you could probably spend a few hours and come up with the absolute mind-bogglingly best tagline for gold that completely explains the story of gold, right?
And you could do that very well and nail it and just, this is gold, this is what it does.
Like, come on, everybody, get on board.
But there's a problem because the practical technicality of gold, using it physically, like, as gold, like, invalidates the story.
Like, the story for gold is not something you put on top that you can try and build towards, right?
Like, with Disneyland, yeah, half the park was shut down because it was under construction, right?
That's not the happiest place on earth.
But when the stuff comes back online, it's going to be awesome, and you're going to know because you're going to go, right?
Like, it's a whole, like, a whole thing.
But with gold, you can't do that.
With Bitcoin, it's the exact same.
So the story of Bitcoin, and this, I think this applies to, maybe, and this is all theoretical flying off the top of my head, maybe this applies to all technological innovation.
Because you can have the story that says this is the thing that's going to solve all your problems, right, or whatever it is.
The Theranos, Thanos, Thanos, we're going to solve cancer, and it's all a total scam.
Okay, so with Bitcoin, it's, like, here's the question.
How far can you push where the story doesn't matter?
Because the technology is the thing that actually matters.
Because when you use Bitcoin, it's a better money than gold.
It's a better money than USD, and here's the technical reasons.
It goes faster.
It's more secure.
It is, like, far more easier to defend.
It has, like, all these qualities that might not make it into the story, that might not make it into the culture, that might not, like, somebody might not internalize those and just think you can do wizard dick pics or whatever.
But, like, this is the fundamental value over here and the story that you can use with that.
The guy holding Bitcoin in his head and crossing a border is a way, like, you can't just write a story like that, right?
That's a fundamental nature of the protocol.
These are the qualities of Bitcoin itself.
You hit me with the one thing that, like, so here's the one side of the Bitcoin argument in the story sense that I would say Jameson and those guys are getting correct, which is Bitcoin is unassailable property rights for everyone.
And, like, the thing that I had in my mind was with no barrier of entry, right?
You're at a very little barrier of entry.
You get a phone also.
But yeah, the thing that I had in my head, though, was Bitcoin is the monetary network for the digital age that makes the world smaller.
And I hate all the words in there.
Like, it needs to be something grippier than that.
But it's like this is a brainstorm.
We got to get this out there.
But it needs to be one of those things where the point of this is the story needs to be so compelling that people are like forever.
I want to work on that.
Like, I can say words like Apple and you think about Apple and like, what does Apple conjure up in your mind?
Secrecy.
It conjures up an insane attention to detail, right?
All of the lore.
Like, this is literally why I started Cyberpunk Cinema, was building Bitcoin lore.
And I think this is where we are.
I think, honestly, what this watershed moment is, is a kind of the canary in the coal mine being like, we need to build this lore or Bitcoin will fail because it will be co-opted by someone.
And so I'm curious for take, Anson.
Yeah, the story is incredibly important with Bitcoin.
In fact, I would venture to say that without the lore of Satoshi, I don't know if Bitcoin would be where it is.
There's a lot to that.
And I was just looking in the white paper and I looked up, I did a search for the word trust.
And the word trust is in the white paper 14 times.
And if you think about the idea of betrayal, like every soap opera is about a betrayal.
And so story is kind of built into the, I can't even say it without saying the story of Bitcoin, because the development of it and the history so far has been full of drama.
The thing that made me look it up was I was trying to figure out where this quote came from.
It's from the P2P Foundation.
So this isn't from the Bitcoin talk forum.
So I'm not sure where Satoshi wrote this, but it was written on February 11, 2009.
He said the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work.
The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.
So Satoshi's own story about Bitcoin is about the betrayal by central banks of our trust.
And so Bitcoin is a solution to betrayal.
And so story is built into Bitcoin.
And yeah, it's just easy to forget all of that and to just take for granted that Bitcoin is here now and not feel a loyalty to what Bitcoin actually is.
And that's when we become the betrayers.
And that's very possible because our hearts are so greedy.
And it's why Bitcoin is so beautiful, because Bitcoin is just math and it's code and it's hardwired.
And as much as we want to betray it because we are these greedy, sinful creatures that want it all for ourselves and want to get rich quick and just want to have more than other people.
Bitcoin doesn't allow us to do it.
It's like every time somebody tries to spam the Bitcoin network, all of a sudden the fees go up.
And every time somebody tries to pull money out because the price has gone up, then the price goes up and they lose.
You know, it's like everything you do to try to fight and trick Bitcoin, Bitcoin naturally has a built in code to fight against that.
And that's part of the thing that's so beautiful about it.
And in fact, that kind of wants me to or causes me to jump into how does how does this get better?
How did like where does this get better?
Like, you know, like what are we doing about this that makes it better?
How does Bitcoin make this better?
And I think that that is such a fantastic point because, bro, we were 100 percent betrayed for like 100 years by central banks.
From day one, we were betrayed.
And because of Bitcoin, we we no longer have to suffer that betrayal.
We no longer have to participate.
We no longer have to suffer inflation.
Like, bro, like and you want to do fucking wizard dick pics like, dude, grow up.
Come on.
I think it gets better.
And I think what's interesting in that is like you conjured up the image of, you know, Jekyll Island and the monetary debacle that we're in.
Right, because that was a betrayal of all people by the bankers.
Right. The central bankers knew that they could take over the monetary system from the Austrians and make it a fully Keynesian style economic system that was inflationary, that they could control with monetary levers with Jekyll Island.
And they just slowly swung all the votes to to do that.
And I would say what's interesting about this whole story debate, though, is, you know, I think there is a corollary to be made that.
You know, shoving a bunch of stuff into a return is essentially akin to essentially akin to a form of inflation, and it's akin to a form of coin clipping, because if you're looking at it as a monetary network, you are limiting somebody's ability to get a transaction in a block and you are limiting somebody's ability to to do the monetary facilitation.
Of what Bitcoin is. And so, you know, I do think Luke's term is inflammatory intentionally of like you are raping my node.
But I don't think he's wrong for that reason, because at the end of the day, it's like I am trying to.
Facilitate the monetary exchange or store of value in the digital age to make the world smaller and better.
And if you are doing that against my will because you're exploiting a technical.
You know, it's a technical flaw, essentially, in the code, which, again, is like it's valid.
Right. I'm not saying it's invalid, but it's incongruous with the story he believes.
And I think that's the key here is like what comes out of the story you believe.
Is it a big is it a is it a database?
Or is it a money landing the plan on that is it gets better because we're having this discussion.
I do think clarity from this discussion will set things up.
And I'm hoping for the better for the next thousand years.
I have never thought about about trying to increase the block size or trying to make transactions faster or trying to make fees cheaper as a form of inflation, a form of coin clipping.
And it's a really good analogy.
I mean, think about it.
It's like we think, oh, you know, hard drives just get cheaper and cheaper and just get bigger and bigger.
Why not just make the block chain bigger and bigger, make the the fees lower, make transactions faster?
And we can. But that literally means you have to pay more for hard drives.
You have to update your node.
And I'm speaking as somebody who's completely non-technical about this.
So fill me in if I say something wrong.
But I'm thinking right now about, like, the continent of Africa and how hard it would be to get the components to build a node in some of those places.
And you want nodes. You want as many nodes as possible.
You want to be everywhere.
Why are we causing inflation on the on the cost of running a node when it's unnecessary to do so?
We were so we've been so brainwashed by inflation that we literally think we have to create it ourselves.
And now we have Bitcoin where you have deflation, where the value actually increases over time.
And here we are trying to cause inflation.
It's like we've been Stockholm syndrome into thinking we just have to have inflation when we don't anymore.
One hundred percent. And that really touches, I think, so much of this particular debate.
Like there are so many. JD, I mentioned this in some of the text messages.
It was like, wait a second. Like this idea is like super high time preference.
Like it's the end of the world, bro. That is so high time preference.
Like there's going to there's going to be some time between now and then it's not 100 percent right now.
Right. Like other other things about it, just like very high time preference, like this, this like black and white nature to it.
It's like, well, that's that's really high time preference, too.
What if what if there is like she's a great here?
Like what if like, hey, how how do all of these things come about?
But no, we're trained in this this mindset of like this ultra you versus me.
We have to fight. We have to like one of us, like one of us has to die.
Like it's just that's what we're that's what it has to be.
It has to like there's no world where you and me can possibly exist because literally we're a trained Stockholm syndrome.
We're trained by inflation to believe these absurd things about everybody who's around us, that they exist to to suck value out of our lives.
Because everything we've all only ever known is that, well, when I get a job, they're going to suck value out of my life.
When I get married, it's just my marriage is going to suck value out of my life.
When I have kids, they're just going to suck value.
I'm like everything. Everything just sucks.
But there's no such thing. And it's all because of inflation.
And we're just so wrapped up in it and it cuts on every single like it cuts in ways like I don't even know how it cuts me.
Like I toss all the time. That's probably because of inflation. Right.
Like like there's all sorts of stuff just goes. It just goes so many places.
And we're on generation like four of this. Right.
It's it's inflation affected my dad and I learned from my dad.
Inflation affected my affected my grandpa and my dad learned from my grandpa and I learned from my dad.
It's just like it just goes on. It's mind boggling. Total Stockholm.
I will. One thing I will say, though, for me personally, is I do actually think it needs to be black and white, though.
And the reason I say that, though, is because it's like, you know, and I say this not in a derogatory sense,
but just look at African-American culture in the United States.
It's really degraded from, you know, again, like people go back.
Oh, you're in a slavery. I understand they're like, you know, complications with how African-American culture came to America.
Right. So let's let's start there. But the binary of making abortion.
Legal, but not just legal, but like a non sequitur, like a societal non sequitur of like, oh, it doesn't really matter kind of thing.
It's like like just like like it's just like it doesn't matter.
And then some of the things are sitting down with the marriage debate. I mean, it doesn't matter like that is a degradation of the foundation you're standing on,
which comes back to the whole thing of like we do need to get this thing right in terms of the story, the foundation we're building on.
Like, I do believe it needs to be. Is it a monetary medium of exchange and store of value or is it something else?
Because I do things not. Airtight and binary, it's got to be black or white.
We're going to get to that one percent drift that 50 years from now, we're going to end up in Japan when we want to go to Australia.
There's a I don't know what song this is. I was trying to find this.
I was trying to use grok the other day. So maybe if somebody hears this, they can tell me what this is from.
There's this rap song. It's probably late 90s or early 2000s.
And you know how sometimes at the beginning of a rap song, they're just shouting stuff out.
They're not rapping yet. They're just like talking. And in this song, they say we be spending it how we get it, meaning we get it fast and we spend it fast.
And that's how people have been living. That's the negative of the culture of, you know, things are going to be more expensive later.
So if you have any money, you just need to find something to spend it on now, which is so high time preference.
And and Bond or you brought up your dad. Boomers are are so just as a generation are so bad in the sense that they all plan.
They plan on having a retirement and spending every last penny to zero before they die.
Not thinking like in the Bible, there's a proverb that says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
And for the boomers, they were that they were that generation after 1971, when when inflation really kicked off and they just watch things getting more and more expensive.
And so they were like, OK, I can invest my money in the S&P and I will get a return that beats inflation.
But then I'll have this time period. I'll have 20 years or whatever from the time that I retire to the time that I die and things are going to keep getting more expensive.
And so the longer I live, the less time I have to spend this money.
And so I just need to make sure that the money lasts until the day I die and I'm not leaving anything to my kids.
You you just broke my brain with a thought that I've never had before.
But the current stock market as it exists would not exist without inflation.
Period. Oh, yeah, that's like for you can actually like plot that out and like go through the whole like it's it's a whole thing.
All like you plot M zero divided by the stock market.
And it's like it's basically just a flat line.
It's incredible because what's interesting about that thought, though, I never thought of that before.
It was like the stock market has essentially lulled people into a false sense of growth.
It's made people lazy because the thing is like, you know, it's the story of the talents.
Right. The parable of talents is essentially the stock market has made everybody the guy with the one talent as they buried it in the ground.
And the stock market is the ground. And you're not actually being a good and faithful servant.
You're literally just being a miserly person that thinks that I can just kind of skate titled.
Yeah, I'm entitled to these returns like it's bonkers.
OK, so. One thing we got to always got to bring it back to, which is how does Bitcoin make this better?
And like for me, it's it's just so painfully obvious.
How does Bitcoin make this better? It literally invalidates and inverses all of this.
It basically just says, bro, you can't like the inflation thing is garbage.
You can't just rely on that. You literally have to build and you have to sow and reap and and participate and and like create value for other people.
And like, whoa, this is like we're talking about big, big changes to the whole to the whole thing.
And, you know, I mean. Oh, yeah, it's good, but.
Yeah, otherwise it's like, yeah, put your money in the in the S&P and give your money over to Raytheon or to Coca-Cola or to Pfizer.
Let them make a profit so you can have some of it. Whereas for Bitcoin, it's like, no, I'm not going to participate in inflation at all.
And then I'm going to go create value through my own ingenuity and effort.
And then I'm going to live off of that value that I create and continue to invest in Bitcoin to take to take my value out of the NPC inflation economy forever.
I'm not going to let them use it anymore. And I'm going to have a low time preference.
And I'm going to invest in the things that are truly valuable in life.
Yeah. Thank God for Bitcoin for that. Yeah.
Bitcoin promotes scare rather Bitcoin embodies scarcity.
Scarcity promotes stewardship and stewardship drives value.
That's why this gets better is if Bitcoin can be the foundation of the exchange layer, i.e. the monetary layer, because that's what we do exchange.
Right. That's what we exchange. You know, we devised money as we could exchange over a longer low time preference time horizon.
I don't have to sell my apples immediately. I can give you this money and then I'll come back later and buy your pie or whatever it is.
And so if Bitcoin can become the monetary exchange layer for the digital age, that.
Understanding of scarcity will drive a mentality of stewardship because you're going to have to think about your money differently and because you're thinking about it differently, it's going to drive you to add value and be a good steward and make things better.
Yep. And that for me, that directly ties back into the whole nature of this debate, why we got on this pod in the first place. Right.
Which was do we have the wizard dick pics like who's who's adding like how is that adding value to anybody on Earth, literally anyone on Earth?
And the answer is, well, it's only the ultra degenerate high time preference losers who suck at life anyway.
Like. Bro, just stop, just stop it, Michael Jackson, stop, get some help, right?
Like. Now that's to be distinguished from the technical debate, but we can allow for nuance here.
And also. Bro, Bitcoin is going to alter the culture. Bitcoin is going to whether you like it or not, it's going to alter the culture.
It's going to alter how people value. Their participation in reality, we're going to do the wizard pics, wizard dick pics, or I'm going to like, I don't know, be a good father.
What's your dick pics father? What's it going to be, guys? In a Bitcoin nominated world, I'm going to go out on a limb here.
It's going to be father every time, you know, in a Fiat denominated world, it's going to be dick pics.
Most of the time you get some exceptions, but most of the time dick pics. And so you really like this.
This is why I'm kind of like on the bringing it back with the debate.
I'm like. On the long time frames, bro, this Bitcoin just destroys this Fiat mentality, as long as we can protect the 21 million hard cap.
And continue adoption, which I don't think any of those things are really at play here.
Yes, node operation also stuff like comes into play, but like. I think that they come into play.
Like it's going to be difficult to run a node way.
Way further out in the future because of this, then the culture changes, the culture changes, I think is going to be way sooner.
Right. We're going to see like because because I know this because of my own life, the things I was into, the things that I thought were funny, the things that I thought were cool, like the music I listen to, like all of the movies I watch, like everything about my life is essentially changed because of Bitcoin in a way that is low time preference.
Whoa, got to do these things that are like.
Way more responsible and and because of Bitcoin, way more cool as opposed to, oh, yeah, I'm just going to smoke cigarettes and bum around 7-Eleven, which is like literally stuff I did in my 20s.
Right. Like just totally different world completely.
So it gets way better.
One last thought on this with with what something like and this doesn't even really exist in the world.
And if NFTs I'm thinking of like the gorilla face things.
What that is, is trying to hustle each other and just gambling on something and playing a game of hot potato.
And so rather than going out and doing the things that are valuable, you're sitting there glued to your computer, looking at your your little collectible garbage thing that you're just trying to see to make sure that it's not going down in value to try to pawn it off on the next person to get it out of your hands before it plummets in value.
Which is exactly like when Jesus drove out the money changers.
What the money changers were doing is they were all just trying to hustle each other with currencies and get them out of each other's hands.
They were doing the exact same thing that these NFTs or ordinals or whatever the next iteration of this garbage is going to be.
And Bitcoin with what I think is the the game theory of Bitcoin, it punishes you for trying to hustle people or gamble.
It rewards you for being low time preference and not gambling and not trying to hustle people.
It flips it all on its head.
And so, yeah, that's how that's another way that Bitcoin makes you better is it gets you out of doing degenerate things and out creating value for yourself and for others.
JD, any last words?
I think, yeah, I agree with all that.
I think it is, you know, the last take I will have is have a point, have a perspective.
I actually think this is the moment where if you want it to be money, you should make it known and define money, medium exchange, whatever it is.
But I think now is the time to start digging in and starting to to figure that out, because, again, there's so much potential for good with this.
But you have to make a decision that you're going to do something to make things good.
Good does not just happen.
The world is inherently evil.
And so it takes good people standing up and doing things for it to work.
You have to participate.
You cannot sit on the sidelines for better or worse.
You've got to participate.
All right, guys, this has been Better by Bitcoin.
Thank you for tuning in.
We'll see you next time.
Peace.
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Not financial advice. Mathematical certainty.