← Bitcoin Audible
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- [00:00]
A
I'm almost 99% certain that 110 will activate. And not only that, I think there will be a capitulation after October where if the month of October passes and 1.10 is still not merged by core devs, it essentially reflects that they are no longer relevant because they failed to be good stewards of the protocol.
- [00:32]
B
Foreign. What is up guys? Welcome back to the show. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show is brought to you by the Bitbox Hardware Wallet from Shift Crypto. These guys have been long time builders in the bitcoin space and I have loved their hardware wallet, their, their software wallet, their entire stack. Everything about their setup is just fun and kind of elegant honestly. And I've been recommending them for. I, I don't since I knew about them I have like four of them or something like that myself and I can get you guys a discount. I have a discount code right down the show notes Guy I believe guy gives you 5% off. And also it's actually a huge way to help out the show to let them know that I am the one who sent you there. And if you don't have a hardware wallet and you're not holding your own keys, you need to go ahead and just do that. And if you have a couple hardware wallets, it's probably not a bad idea to get a bitbox into the mix anyway. Check out the link and the description. Also a second note here. We have a new YouTube channel and because we've separated out the more concise Guys Take video content that we have shifted towards it's we are now a video first company, I guess you could say, or production. And that's the way we've been headed for quite some time and so we decided to separate that out from the chats. So Bitcoin Audible still has its own YouTube channel, but the guys takes themselves because they're shorter form and they're more direct or specific to a single topic. It now has Guys Take as a single channel, so check that out. You should see in the the Guy Swan channel or whatever some that are partnered with Guys Take but don't forget to check that one out. Subscribe, share it out and browse around if you haven't. We've got like four or five videos up there so far and I'm really excited. I really enjoy the content type and I think it's going to be great but obviously you know, I got to get it out there so Anybody who can spread the word a little bit and subscribe and like, if you haven't subscribed, please go over there and check that out. I will have the link right down in the show notes as well. Today we have a trip of a show. So we have Hunter Beast back on. And anybody who knows talking to Hunter Beast always goes into some crazy out there thing. But then interestingly, somehow he is able to kind of like loop it back as to why it matters. And the number of things that he is interested in and is digging into and is building with is really kind of amazing. I always have fascinating conversations with the guy and he's just like a little bit crazy enough to like believe, to actually go after things that seem like, oh, you'll never be able to do that. But it's like one of those things, like, I don't know, you know, it's. It's because people don't believe they can actually go there and do that thing, that it doesn't get tried. And so I've always been fascinated. He's been building some really interesting stuff in multiple different ways and it's hard to just completely dismiss that he won't be able to do some of those other ones. So we go down a sprawling path and we end up actually talking, looping a lot of the conversation back around to what an unknowable future we're headed into and how to prepare bitcoin for it and specifically what it all means for bit 110 and the, the current conflict in the bitcoin space. So really interesting and I, I wish I had more time to actually pull on some of the threads, but I think you guys will like this conversation. We've set up to do a follow up after the whole bip1 10 thing happens just, just so I can get his perspective and see how his thinking now looks in hindsight. So we will have him back on the show. But for now, I hope you guys enjoyed this one. This is preparing bitcoin for an unknown future with Hunter Beast. Well, dude, officially welcome to the show.
- [04:57]
A
Thank you.
- [04:58]
B
We. We did a show, right? We did the show on Quantum. Or do we just like talk about this in private many times?
- [05:04]
A
No, I mean we talk about it all the time, but yeah.
- [05:08]
B
Well, welcome back. For the first time or the second time? I don't remember. I'll link to it if we, if we've already had this conversation in public because I know we've just chatted a bunch of it other times, but we had had a lot of a lot of fun. I feel like we had a bunch of great conversations at the time Chain Summit and, you know, we talked about a bunch. That was really cool. It was. Right.
- [05:31]
A
That was really, really cool.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah. And a shout out to the guys at the space, by the way. But we got into a whole bunch of stuff that I just felt like. I know. I just knew a bunch of people in the audience would really appreciate. And one of the things that I'm not sure if there was anything other specific that you wanted to get into, but feel free to. To dive into something else if there was something you wanted to bring up. But the place that I actually want to start the show before we get to something like bip 110 or maybe the bips about keys and that sort of thing, because there's just a bunch of things to unpack with Bitcoin is I want to start and continue this thread with AI a little bit because you're building, and I don't know what you're sharing publicly yet about this, but you're building some really interesting tools and you've been super active and there's been a lot of people who've been doing stuff with AI and. And bitcoin in conjunction that I've been kind of fascinated by.
- [06:33]
A
That is a great place to start. So I've been. I've been somewhat public about everything I'm working on. I mean, if. If something I'm working on isn't public, it's for one of two reasons. I haven't found the time to review it and push it yet to my GitHub or two. It's like a red hot, radioactive hot potato that could basically end bitcoin.
- [07:04]
B
Which one do you want to talk about? Let's talk about the hot potato.
- [07:07]
A
Oh. I mean, I really kind of don't want to talk about it, honestly, not until, like, it won't work, you know.
- [07:16]
B
Okay.
- [07:18]
A
Because I would love to come back to that conversation maybe in September, like at the soonest.
- [07:28]
B
Okay. Okay. So you're working on something that you're trying to. Whether or not this is about, like keys or Quantum or anything, but just in general, you're working on something to see if you can cause a problem. Lots of things on the network.
- [07:46]
A
Wait a second. No, no, wait. If I can cause a problem, that's. That's a bold claim, dude.
- [07:52]
B
Sure. Well, I don't mean it that, like, you can do something, you can cause a problem on your. On your computer. I mean, you're looking for a vulnerability in Bitcoin. And you have some theory as to why there may be a problem?
- [08:04]
A
Yeah, well, I'm, I mean there are a lot of problems in bitcoin.
- [08:08]
B
Sure.
- [08:09]
A
And I've been doing the work to prove that, that there are problems in Bitcoin that we need to make changes for. Here's what I will say. I predict that there's going to be a bit of a paradigm shift in, in bitcoin development and governance in the future. And I predict that the ossifiers were right in that we're not going to add a bunch of crap to bitcoin. Like we're not going to add covenants or we're not going to add stark proof verifiers. We're not going to add Op Cat, we're not going to add simplicity.
- [08:46]
B
Right.
- [08:46]
A
We're not going to add that crap to layer one. What's going to happen though? It's not that bitcoin's never going to change. What's probably going to happen, if I have any say in it, is Bitcoin will only change whenever there is something that will prevent it from working in a way that would essentially prevent it from working as we expect it to well into the future. Right. We have to understand, we have to remember Bitcoin is fundamentally exjudicial in nature. Its operation is more firmly rooted in natural law than the laws of man. Because you tell me what jurisdiction does is a bitcoin crime. Trident. Right. It's not. Right. So you have to remember that what matters are the actual notes that we're using and building. And so let's just say I've developed a bit of an interest in formal verification and lean 4 in particular. Have you heard of Lean?
- [09:56]
B
Not off the top of my head. I mean it sounds, the word sounds familiar, but I couldn't even tell you what it was about or what is in reference to.
- [10:03]
A
Well, Lean 4 is a self hosted dependent type system that, so like, for you to understand like how powerful this is, like it makes Rust look like a child's toy. And okay, mentally I've moved on, moved on from Rust. Like Rust for me is like maybe that's good for like graphics and windowing. Like it's like in my mind Rust has been relegated to where I once put JavaScript, you know, and now I think all the, all the serious software in the future will be proven in what I call systems. Lean. It is something I've been working on essentially for you to understand that like and for your viewers to understand what I'm working on. I recommend you look up something called a lambda cube. So a lambda cube essentially illustrates like, it has arrows and it kind of illustrates three different dimensions of, of a type system according to a subset of category theory. And it's an older mental model, but it's helpful, like, just like maybe first, like category theory. Like, there was a funny meme running going around recently. Cloud teach me enough category theory to sound like an asshole. And so that's, if you want that, like, you got to start with the lambda cube and what's called the calculus constructions. And so the calculus of construction is essentially like as close as we can get to solving these different constraints in the lambda cube. One of them is essentially dependent types. If you can have a fully expressive dependent type system, a type that depends on another type that essentially allows you to do some really powerful stuff. And there's an evolution on that framework called QTT or Quantitative Type theory, which has been sort of pioneered by, or maybe not pioneered, but like, it resulted in some work called Aegis 2. Aedrus 2 is very interesting to me, but it's. Unfortunately, it's just not as rigorous as Lean four in other dimensions. And so there is another thing called Ben 2 that a guy recently is working on. I forget his name. He's a cool name, actually. I can never remember it, but he's working on something called Ben 2, which is like a higher order language. His company is called Higher Order Compute, which I thought was clever. Or not. Maybe not compute. It's Higher Order Company. Higher Order company. It was cute because. Because there's also something in, in the lambda cube called a higher kind of type. So, like, it sounded like a higher order. No, no. Anyway, just. Just nerd humor, regardless. Yeah, very, very nerdy for sure. Why is this useful? Why. Why am I spending so much proofs? Formal verification. So turns out these machines, these little fiddly like shape rotators, let's call them these token rotators, they like to fiddle with provable things. And you can just tell it, hey, man, write me a lean proof with no residual that proves that proves a certain property that says, for example, this operation will never behave in a way that will express either undefined behavior or essentially a region of memory that won't overflow. Like it won't behave as we expected. You can do certain proofs, you can make certain proofs here which are really useful and interesting.
- [13:56]
B
Is lean for kind of like a lower level language? You. You compared it to Rust?
- [14:04]
A
No, it's the highest order language we've made actually, it's just capable of expressing everything else in a really powerful way.
- [14:10]
B
Okay, okay. And you can essentially create a proof about certain aspects or characteristics of something using this because Lean Force specifically has like extremely well defined limits. Is it, is it, is that kind of getting an explanation as to how, how it's useful?
- [14:39]
A
It, it definitely puts a lot of guardrails on what you can write and express in your language. It's not going to be like, you know, something like C or Python or JavaScript where you don't have like. Well, technically C does have types, like pretty powerful types actually, but in ways that Python and JavaScript don't. But C also has a lot of foot guns and like, ideally you just have better tools and like, traditionally Lean has been more relegated to like Erdos problems. Like that's where I first heard about it was that people were solving the Erdos problems with like hundreds of thousands of lines of Lean because they're, you know, their models were good at putting that together.
- [15:22]
B
Right. So how does this apply to how you're thinking about the, the direction of, I guess you could say Bitcoin software or Bitcoin implementation. And how does this relate to your, your thoughts on ossification?
- [15:43]
A
Oh, for sure. I mean all of it connects really beautifully. But essentially what, what I've been doing is working with a guy named Keegan McClelland, if you know of him, he former start nine and let's see what else. There was Alpen Labs. I think he was working on some bit VM stuff.
- [16:04]
B
Okay.
- [16:04]
A
Yeah, really bright dude. He just spoke at Denver Bit devs. We're going to have that, that video up soon today, I think on our, on our, on our. This, I think it's going to be on the Space channel, so. Because we, we hold it at the Space here in Dipper. It was a lot of fun, by the way, meeting you and hanging out on.
- [16:24]
B
That's a great time.
- [16:25]
A
I appreciate it. Summit.
- [16:27]
B
Yeah.
- [16:27]
A
Oh, for sure. I mean, by the way, I was very careful to like make sure that the time chain summit wasn't like, oh, we're going to put a bunch of up returns or like inscriptions on Bitcoin. That was like never the point of the time chain. Right. I mean, maybe you could like consider the Genesis block as like one exception to that. But I mean that in my mind that was kind of different because that was a minor, you know, essentially embedding a message in.
- [16:58]
B
I was about to say that was in the coinbase though, wasn't it?
- [17:02]
A
Well, was the genesis message in what we now understand to be the Coinbase transaction. That's. That's kind of. Honestly, I will admit I don't want to talk up my ass. I actually cannot answer that question. I don't have a clear enough mental model of Bitcoin to answer that question in a way that I feel comfortable saying on video, in a podcast. Like, was that embedded in what we now understand to be the Coinbase transaction? Because, like, they didn't have the concept of an opera turn back then. Yeah, yeah.
- [17:40]
B
And I dug into it at one point and, like, got a bunch of specifics, but it was years ago and I haven't really thought about it much, like, in specificity. And it's easy to, like, lose those, you know, specific details or whatever, but
- [17:53]
A
it's kind of hard to, like, talk about that moment because other things were still forming. Other things. Like the way we think about Bitcoin right now.
- [18:00]
B
Oh, yeah. Like, nothing very different is almost nothing. You know, like, there was so much.
- [18:05]
A
Had zero monetary value at that moment. Right. Like, there were no markets. It was the genesis block. It was like, a very apt name for that.
- [18:14]
B
You know, that's part of what drives me crazy of people who either will go back and, like, cite some, like, super specific line in, like, the white paper and then try to apply it to, like, spam and inscriptions or something in the pro or the. The anti.
- [18:34]
A
Either way, yeah.
- [18:35]
B
And. Or using the. The satoshi's original stamp to prove that bitcoin existed at this time with the chancellor and blink of second bailout as some sort of argument for inscriptions. It's like just such this, like, argument for authority out of context in ways that so don't apply to anything that we're talking about today. And it's just like you're both. You're both retarded.
- [19:05]
A
But it is a nonsense argument. I would agree. There are a lot of nonsense arguments either way. And I'm more interested in truth. I'm more interested in how things work according to the laws of nature and mathematics. I mean, there's always this, like, eternal question whether, like, mathematics, how we understand it, is that an emergent property of nature. Like, have we discovered mathematics or have we invented it?
- [19:36]
B
I feel like we've discovered it. I mean, just to dig into this a little bit, what do you think?
- [19:41]
A
Well, what's interesting here is, like, let's add to this epistemological framework Hilbert's questions. David Hilbert, he famously asked three questions. Can we make a machine that can answer any problem correctly within a. Any amount of time that would matter to a human. So he calls it like the Einstein problem, or I think. I'm not a German speaker, but it's a weird name for the problem. But think of this machine. Let's just call it the. Let's call it the Hilbert machine because I like the name Hilbert machine because it kind of maps as an evolution of the Turing machine. All of our computers right now are Turing machines. Can they be Hilbert machines? And if so, how close can they get? Right. If no, if yes. I mean, it's complicated because there's also. So the three questions he asked were, can computation be done in such a way? Like, can this machine work? Actually, computation actually is loading a lot onto this question. Can this machine work in such a way that it can describe, like, all the problems it can express? Can it be complete? Right, so can it completely describe any question you. You ask it really, like, can it be complete? Can it describe every problem? Actually, can it also be complete? However, this is the, the real kicker. Can it completely describe any problem without contradicting itself? This is called consistency. So completeness and consistency. We're going to come back to this. There's also the question of decidability. Can the machine itself decide on a human timeframe? So consistency, completeness, and decidability are the three questions. I call it like Hilbert's triangle, kind of similar to Zuko's Triangle. Zuko's triangle is a trilemma. It's like you pick two Zuko's triangle. In case you're not aware, it is named after Zuko. Bokatsu earns, um, famous Boulderite. I've met him a couple times. Really sweet guy. But he's also, I don't know, I mean, we, we disagree on some things, but I respect his role and his contribution like any other cypherpunk. And also he builds some really useful tools that I use. So, like, I don't use zcash. I despise zcash on multiple levels. But, like, every time I use it, I just lose money. That's the other thing.
- [22:12]
B
I'm kind of with you there, but I will admit I've never used it.
- [22:16]
A
But the. I made the mistake of taking payment from Vlad for a podcast earlier this year in zcash. And I tried to swap it out for like, real money, Bitcoin. Right. And what happened was the swap service that was in Cake Wallet just lost my money.
- [22:34]
B
Oh, no.
- [22:36]
A
Yeah, it lost my money.
- [22:37]
B
I love, I love Cake Wallet in general, but, you know, Swaps.
- [22:40]
A
I hate CAKE Wallets. Cake Wallet has lost money twice.
- [22:45]
B
Really?
- [22:46]
A
In different ways. Yeah, yeah.
- [22:48]
B
I think you. You're using. You're using crypto and swap services or whatever. Which.
- [22:54]
A
First of all, that was the only. The one time I did it. Yeah, the one time.
- [22:57]
B
The one time you did it.
- [22:59]
A
I made the mistake of taking payment in zcash and I wanted real money for my. Whatever the fuck that is. And like, I just, you know, in defensive.
- [23:09]
B
Cake Wallet, that's an integration with a tool that lost your money, likely with. In crypto is just a lot of that.
- [23:19]
A
Unfortunately, I was early to silent payments because I didn't want to key reuse. I wasn't a big fan of that. Of course, silent payments uses elliptic curve, like ECDH type stuff. But regardless of that, I was early to it. And so in the early design of Cake Wallet, they apparently used a different derivation path for silent payments.
- [23:44]
B
Okay.
- [23:44]
A
And somebody once told me that they paid me some money on the silent payments link that I had. And years later, I came back to it. I was like, where's that money? And Seth tells me that, like, oh, we updated it and there's no money in the seed phrase you sent me. And I'm like, okay. But I don't know. I don't really have a lot of respect for the CAKE team because I don't see them as very rigorous developers. I think they're spread too thin. Like, Cake Wallet would have been a really good wallet if they took all the time and attention they did to shitcoins and just put it into making it the very best bitcoin wallet. And unfortunately, they chose not to do that. And as a consequence, the two times that I've used it in a serious way, I've lost my money. And so they're two and two. Like a shit product to me.
- [24:34]
B
Well, I'll say. I haven't had that specific experience. I haven't used it a ton, but I know a lot of people who do use it. Like people that I. I work with. And it's not because they use Monero or zcash or any crypto stuff. They literally use it as a bitcoin only wallet.
- [24:50]
A
Yeah, I mean, this is anecdotal. Just a data point.
- [24:53]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I get your perspective on it if that was your experience. So it's like, well, you know, what could I. What can I say otherwise other than, you know, I know people who didn't have that problem, but that doesn't mean you didn't. So I mean, I can.
- [25:11]
A
I'll send you the seed phrase. I'm told there's no money in it, so
- [25:17]
B
you want to send me seed phrases? I will never turn you down. Send me all the seed phrases you got, man.
- [25:22]
A
Yeah. Oh, really? You serious about that? Yes, because I have another seed phrase I'm working on that's a real doozy. But regardless. Oh, wait, wait.
- [25:32]
B
We got, we got, we got sidetracked talking about wallet. Hilbert's, was it. Were you saying that Hilbert's trilemma or the. The three things were a trilemma? The consistency,
- [25:45]
A
decidability and. And completeness.
- [25:47]
B
And completeness.
- [25:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think of that as a bit of a trilemma. Like, it's like. But it's, it's more than just like, pick two out of the three. It's more like, how close can we get to perfect math? Because what's also interesting here are Godel's incompleteness theorems. There are two. Or Godel, I think is how you're supposed to say it. And then there's also the church Turing thesis. And so those are both important things to bring up in this conversation now to inform the discussion. So essentially, Godel proved by the. I'm not going to go into the low level of this because first of all, I have no formal, like back. I have no educational background in mathematics. I literally left my computer science degree program at Metro State College of Denver because they wouldn't let me take the classes I wanted to take because I didn't have enough math prereqs. And that was as a consequence of me having to move around a lot as a kid. And it just like, it really disrupted my educational career. And so if you knew my story, dude, you would just feel so sad, like how like, underserved I was by educators. And I have like, basically zero respect for teachers. I put them in the same class of basically useless people, like essentially glorified babysitters whose job is not really necessarily to educate, but just waste children's time and fill their heads with all sorts of nonsense like critical race theory and gender ideology, that's going to confuse them. And so I just, I do not respect educators who are at least employed by public institutions. Like, if it's a private institution, like a Montessori Catholic school. Right. That's, that's, that's a different story. But if you're just like, if you're in a teacher's union. First of all, here in Colorado, there was this really interesting case earlier around Patricio Alanis and passing the trash that I talk about sometimes as basically the. The golden example of why the Democrats in the state are just fundamentally uninterested in protecting children. I know this is a complete side branch unlike everything we've been talking about, but it hopefully gives you some insight in my mode of operation. I'm very honest, by the way, about the fact that I was taken advantage of as a teenager because I was too online and my father failed to protect me and he blamed me for it. And it was really sad. And I'm having to think about that now because 22, 23 years later, because I'd been on some psychiatric meds for a long time, I was about to
- [28:47]
B
ask, what makes you think about what changed your perspective? What makes you look back on it that way?
- [28:52]
A
Well, last year I. I asked my psychiatrist, like, dude, like, these meds are getting too expensive, the side effects suck, and I just want off of them. I was on like six different meds, and now I'm on zero because. And I worked with my psychiatrist to taper off. And around that same time, I did two things. I started taking like, THC, CBD gummies at night just to help me relax. And also, I sort of started returning to the Catholic faith, especially earlier this year, and going through confession and reversion to the faith. And I'm now in full communion with the Catholic Church, and there's a lot there. But basically also, I'm starting a business and we literally filed the incorporation paperwork. I'm hoping to hear back. I was supposed to hear back today, actually. I have to look on, but. So until I get the actual incorporation papers in my hands, I'm not going to talk about the company publicly. We filed them a couple weeks back, and I was hoping to hear today that they. Everything's good regardless. There's so much, dude, there's so much I have to explain and say. I mean, people have been really dishonest about my state. State of mental health. Like, I mean, people say that I'm crazy in doing what I'm doing because I'm like, I'm very honest about my own struggles and my own past history. And I'm still seeing my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist told me, by the way, this is one of the best psychiatrists in the world. He has done thousands of case studies and has worked in the field for 30 years, and he's a famous name. And he told me that within about 15 minutes of talking to someone, he can pretty much get a sense for whether they have a mental illness. And it'd been almost a year now in my last conversation with him. And he told me, like, we'd been talking for hours and hours since, you know, like. And he hasn't seen a single thing. And so, like, I'm under, like, medical care for this, right? Like, it's not like, just like some reckless thing I've done. I'm being very careful and responsible about my psychiatric history, but I'm also very honest about my struggles because we're not perfect. And it helps, I think, to be honest about our struggles. I'm also very open about the fact that I'm a homosexual. And I do not necessarily like to put that in people's faces. I don't necessarily even want to be compared to other homosexuals because I find a lot of that behavior to be deeply dishonorable. And we were just talking about Sam Altman before we started, and, like, I very much. Like, I don't know if you gotta bleep some stuff out, but, like, I don't. He's very much like a hard T, you know? Like. Like.
- [31:54]
B
But the thing is, I think if you're gay, you're allowed to say that. I'm not allowed to say it, right?
- [31:58]
A
Oh, for sure. I mean, for sure. Please don't. Right.
- [32:01]
B
YouTube will probably ban this, but. Well, I'll just send them. I'll just send them a. I'll send him a email, be like, dude, dude, he was gay. He's like. He's allowed to say it.
- [32:13]
A
I have the. The fat card. You know,
- [32:18]
B
my fag privilege.
- [32:21]
A
Fair enough. You know, exactly. And just not with the hard tea. Yeah. Just not with a hard tweet. Okay, Just. Just. Just keep it cool right now. Regardless, when I see that behavior, where I see zero sum thinking, where I see people discount the future by eating the seed corn for the next harvest, basically guaranteeing starvation. Right?
- [32:44]
B
Yeah.
- [32:45]
A
Like, when I see that kind of zero sum thinking, when I see sort of what some might classify as Moloch worship, like taking advantage of essentially exploiting the future for present gain. Right. Anything that does that, in my opinion, is in service to Moloch and the old gods. And by the way, the first commandment is absolutely acknowledgment that there are other gods. They're just not legitimate. They're lowercase G gods. They're false idols according to scripture. But they do exist. And that's important to acknowledge. Right? And so I call it out. I call it my own. I call out people I think who are engaging deeply dishonorable Things like, I don't even want to have a child. If I have to tell that child someday that he has or they have. Right? That's the fucking thing. It makes me so angry, dude. Like, if I have to tell him that he has two fathers, that's not okay. Because I value my mother as like, as a, as someone who is like a former child. Right. I feel like I have like a say in this. My mother was so important to me and I can't even think of a future where I have to tell my offspring that they have two fathers. That's not okay.
- [34:17]
B
That they have no mother.
- [34:18]
A
Yeah, right. Exactly. And, well, first of all, that's not even true because it's not even possible.
- [34:24]
B
Sure.
- [34:26]
A
Regardless, it just, it hurts to even think about because it's so, it's so unnatural. That's why, like, as I'm reverting to the faith, I don't want to really engage with other Catholic homosexuals because I know how they think. Like, or at least I know how gays, gay men think. So, like, I don't want to really be around them.
- [34:45]
B
Are you biased against gays?
- [34:49]
A
Sorry, I'm. But no. Here, here's the thing. I'm not a self hating homosexual. I don't hate myself.
- [34:55]
B
I don't mean it like self hating. It was just a joke that, like that generally speaking, you, you expect this kind of way of thinking. But like, I get it. Like, I think that.
- [35:07]
A
Here's the thing, here's the thing. It's. When I, when I did like my full complete confession to every sin I could think of, that was incredibly powerful
- [35:19]
B
and, dude, I can imagine the weight
- [35:23]
A
like, oh, for sure.
- [35:24]
B
I can understand why, like voicing those things, Matt. Not even in a religious context, but just to say the things where you believe you have erred or where, you know, you believe you made the wrong path or whatever, it's the, the degree to which, you know, that's just one of the reasons why, like a vow of silence for some span of time, just being alone with your thoughts is so powerful because it forces you to think. It forces you to go back if you cannot keep yourself busy with the next thing you know.
- [36:02]
A
There were some really interesting insights that came of some consciousness research that was done in the 70s by Robert Monroe at the Monroe Institute. And I think Thomas Campbell, who wrote My Big Toe, My Big Theory of Everything in the early 2000s, he also spoke about some of that. And Monroe's books are really fascinating. They're multiple. And he talks about all kinds of interesting things which we could get into. It's quite the rabbit hole, honestly. But it does relate to bitcoin because I don't think that we can safely assume that bip39 is a good way to do things. And it's not just because that, you know, the U.S. military had at one point a psychic spy program. They claimed to have ended and despite it have lasting multiple decades. And the IC kind of losing their shit when Jimmy Carter kind of revealed that they had the capability. So like it was across multiple military branches and multiple decades. It must have been really expensive. And I mean like the sri, you know, help it off, like whatever he was doing. You know, some things don't make sense about like crv, Ingo Swan, German Chronicle and all that. But I mean. But kind of does too. Like it depends. It depends how you think about the universe and what we don't know about it. But before we go into all of that and I don't know if we have the time, honestly, because it's a deep rabbit hole. It's fascinating.
- [37:32]
B
There's so many rabbit holes that we could just like for sure sprint down.
- [37:37]
A
But I can think about five different ways even in the near term that bip39 won't be safe. Like, first of all, we see all these flock cameras popping up everywhere. What if they. As you are reading your seed phrase one word at a time. It's just like catching the reflection. And there's some way through machine learning. There's only 2,000 words, right? 2,048 words in F39. So maybe it can disambiguate using machine learning and some other techniques, like even just this. The smallest amount of pixels in a reflection distortion that is corrected by some spook. Right? Like they can do that kind of crap anyway, like with other things. And so there's so many ways that
- [38:20]
B
you can be exposed.
- [38:21]
A
Surveillance for sure. Realizing it side channels for sure. Like. Like meta ray bands, right? Like people. Can you imagine wearing.
- [38:29]
B
There's gonna be cameras everywhere.
- [38:31]
A
Everywhere. We should be expecting that. We should. And not just that. I think there's a case to be made that like there are cameras everywhere. I think there's also a case to be made that maybe surveillance is okay if it's for yourself, for your own purposes. Like if you can end to end encrypt the keys and you can. Like if you can encrypt the data and you're surveilling yourself voluntarily because you just want to be able to expose anyone making up lies against you. And as a consequence, it's a deterrent because. Because you know that liars will always be revealed when they're in your presence. And so in a way, people should absolutely be assumed that people are recording everything for their own purposes to essentially exonerate anybody who might be making up essentially bearing false witness. Right. And so, by the way, what's really fascinating about the. The Bible is that, like, nowhere in this Bible am I do I see any part that allows a Christian to lie under, early, under any circumstances. Like, it'll stay in your soul. And really what we're told instead is that there's no circumstance where you're allowed to lie. But if you're persecuted, blessed are the persecuted. You will absolutely earn your way into the kingdom of heaven if you speak truth and you're persecuted. Which is fascinating, right? Like, in a way, Christians understand that, like, if you speak your truth and people are angry and they persecute you for it, even up to and including your death, that's totally okay. And when you come to terms with that, when you, like, come to appreciate that, you realize, wow, so all I have to do is seek truth and speak truth, and if people want to, like, you know, do whatever in reaction to the truth, that really is on them and not on me. And as a consequence of that, you're pretty fearless. Like, I'm, I'm pretty fearless. I have, like, basically internalized or groked that, like, understand intuitively I've groked that concept.
- [40:49]
B
Like, when you think about it, it's the, it's the very nature of, like, trying to define courage is, in a sense, is that you're, you're trying to understand is you're valuing the truth for the sake of the truth and not letting everything personal get in the way of it. Right? It's like, it's the, it's the stay humble and, and accept the truth no matter what it means for you or your individual interests. And what's funny though, is that, like, I feel like you're always going to walk through life with either this weight on your shoulders or this sense of meaninglessness from first principles.
- [41:38]
A
Also, you know, like, look, I've read. I've read some of the. More like, let's call it Protestant perspectives on, you know, whenever we talk about, like, advanced technology, you know, like, like some people, like, bring up, like, Romans and how so like, Romans is an interesting book because it's essentially Paul's letters, right? Apostle Paul, who used to be a lawyer. But what's interesting is, you know, people Say like, you know, we shouldn't make it easy for people to sin. And that's fair. I mean, that's absolutely fair. But what that implies essentially is that it's not advanced technology itself that is the problem. What matters is how it's used. And it's always been how it was the case. Right. Should I avoid using the Internet because some child predator took advantage of me when I was 14 years old? No. Right. Like I shouldn't completely write it off. But we should also understand and be very honest about the dangers of unfettered Internet access to people who do not understand how serious their actions are. Like, that's the thing is like that's the difference I think, between a child and an adult is essentially an adult understands the implications of their actions. Right. Like how wrong things are. And regardless, I think we're heading into a really beautiful future where we should absolutely be leaning into advanced technology. We should not be scared of it. In fact, Christians are the least scared of AI like we're the most enthused about it according to polls I've seen.
- [43:27]
B
That's interesting.
- [43:28]
A
Oh, we intuitively understand that we cannot worship that which we created. Like, there are many stories in the Bible about false idols. Like one of the, one of the most interesting ones actually. And this is considered kind of like an apocryphal text maybe extra help that's. That is included in Catholic Bibles. It's sort of like usually like they include the apocryphal text in between the Old and New Testament. And like maybe after like Susanna or Maccabees first and second. Well also there's a. Dude, there's some rabbit holes there. But regardless, after Susanna there's the Book of. Well, so there's an excerpt in my Bible from the Book of Daniel. It's from the Greek translation of the Book of Daniel and it's an excerpt. There's two. Well kind of three. They say there's two stories, but there's like three chapters, I guess. It's called Belle and the Dragon. And so Bella and the Dragon is a fascinating story to me because it, it basically is an example of especially the first story, the very first story where they, he, you know, like it's, it's King Cyrus who took over from King Astyages. Like he's the king of Persia. This is modern day Iran, right. And King Cyrus, he had a friend named Daniel who he trusted like Daniel's advice above all. Right. And Daniel was a Hebrew. And as many of the people in the Bible are Like, in fact, also important to remember that Jesus and all 12 apostles were Jewish. That's important to think about and consider and pray on. But Daniel in particular, he's a fascinating character because he is like a consummate truth seeker and he is a really clever dude. This might have been one of the earliest examples of zero knowledge proof in the Bible, honestly. So what he did is. It does, basically, it's a fascinating story, dude. Like, so King Cyrus is worshiping this idol called Bel. And Bel, in order to worship Bell, you have to feed it. You have to feed the idol and there's a temple where you have to lay out a bunch of food and that is. And then you just like go away, I guess. And the next day the food is all eaten. And King Cyrus thought, oh, wow, you know, this God, like, he eats so much, like 40 barrels of wine, like all this, right? Like, wow, that's incredible. He eats so much. And Daniel's like, you know, like, that's not a real thing. Right? Like that God you're worshiping with a lowercase g in the Bible. It's really interesting how they do that. This lowercase G God is not a real God, just so you know. And Cyrus is like, what? And so he brings all the priests of the temple together and he says, Daniel's telling me you guys are like a bunch of liars and fakers. Like, all of this is fake and Bel is not a real God. If that's true, then I'm going to put you to death. If Daniel's lying to me, I'm going to put him to death. And so what they do is they'll lay out the feast on all the tables and they agree that they're going to close the doors with the king's holy seal. Or maybe not holy seal, but it's a seal of the king and they're going to close the doors and it'll be sealed when they go back in, like, and see, you know, if the food is still there, then the priests will be put to death. But if the food is gone in Cyrus's mind, then it's confirmation that Bell is an amazing God that you know is so true and righteous. But what's really clever is that there's a zero knowledge proof that.
- [47:41]
B
Yeah, I got the analogy when you started reading it. Yeah, when you started talking about it.
- [47:46]
A
Daniel has his servants spread ashes on the floor. And only King Cyrus and Daniel know that they've spread ashes on the floor in the temple before they leave and seal the door and they Come back the next day and they see that the seal has not been broken. And so they go in and Cyrus is like, wow, all the food is gone. And Daniel's like, yeah, but look on the floor and see what footprints you see? And King Cyrus, he looks down and he looks and he sees, oh, there are footprints of men and women and children. How did they get in here? Like, turns out there's a secret passage underneath one of the tables. And he has the priest show him and he's like, ah, okay, well, you're all going to die now. They were really brutal back then. It was like, yeah, but yeah, basically he tells all the priests, like, oh, you're all going to die now because you lied to me and you had me dull the shit and you lied. And I was like, wow. But yeah, so anyway, that was kind of interesting, right, because not only does that map just not to constantly cryptography and evidence in nature, right, which is like, that's the foundations of cryptography is in mathematics. If mathematics has a basis in natural law and cryptography is some of the most powerful uses of mathematics, then Bitcoin has more basis in natural law than it does in the laws of man. Also, the catechism, like the Catholic Church predates by a lot, a lot. The Catholic Church predates our modern concept of west folly and nation states, right? Like, like, because like there used to be like a lot of wars.
- [49:30]
B
It's crazy how young the idea of a nation state, like the way we think about it actually is like how much it's changed in the last, you know, 2,000 years.
- [49:38]
A
Like, I kind of wonder if I don't look, who am I to question Thomas Aquinas? But like, he, he might not. I don't know if he really considered the implications of leaning into that arrangement. I don't, I don't see modern nation states to be really. To have any legitimacy according to natural law. They're pretty far removed from that. They're very much like in the laws of man territory, which are flawed and contradictory. That's why we have. That's why we can't automate the justice system.
- [50:10]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, you can. Oh my God. That, that program would crash so fast. There's like a million contradictions. That's why you have to have this like, weird enforced subjectivity at like so many different layers. Because like, without that subjectivity, it would literally destroy it.
- [50:29]
A
You literally can murder someone and it depends on the situation. It like, depends on the circumstances and the intent. And like, like you technically can under The Castle doctrine, you can, within certain. A very narrow, specific set of laws, you are technically allowed to shoot someone if it's in defense of your property. But, like, there's a bunch of other stuff, right, like, that you have to think about. So. Which is interesting. But regardless, I do not necessarily see the concept of any nation state as legitimate. Certainly not in the way that I see. Same way that I see the Catholic Church. Like, I see them as a lower authority and under everything, like the natural law. It's just like it's this one through line that connects mathematics and cryptography and Bitcoin. It connects Catholicism, it connects anarchism. It connects just anybody seeking truth. It's like the last cup from the well. Like, that's like physicists like to say, you know, sometimes you can drink from the well of knowledge, but the very last cup leads you to God. And a lot of people also don't know that the Catholic Church has an observatory.
- [51:47]
B
You know, I actually did. That's multiple at some point, and I can't remember why or in what context I learned that, but I thought that was interesting.
- [51:55]
A
Yeah. So what's interesting is in the old days, they built multiple sort of like observatories onto the walls of the Vatican. And eventually the light pollution became so much in Rome that they had to move. Well, they had to move a couple times, actually. It's kind of funny in history, but they had to move the observatory in particular to. I think it was to Greenwich during Newton's time. I could be wrong. But then, like, that also started becoming less useful at night, and for whatever reason, and they had to move it all the way out to Arizona. And now it's run by the Jesuit order. And in somewhere, like, there's a mountain I would like to go someday. Because it makes a lot of sense, actually, if you think about it. Because if your ontology, if your intellectual framework tells you that we're living in an intelligently designed universe, by the way, Genesis does say universe, according to my translation at least. I mean, I'll have to look back at Douay ryan's Bible from 1610, what it says. But, like, the Bible is pretty clear. It's not talking about the creation of Earth. It's talking about the creation of the entire universe, which I think is important to kind of understand that essentially Catholicism is. Does not contradict essentially science. And they're, in fact, highly compatible. And, I mean, we can quibble over specific language and, you know, the definition of a day or a week in, during a time when time didn't even exist according to cosmology. Right. Like when T T at T equals zero. Just so you know, the entire concept of time had not yet formed in space. Time, like space and time did not yet exist at T equals zero.
- [54:00]
B
A day has to actually exist for it to be in relevance to defining it, for sure.
- [54:07]
A
Oh, and also, like, how are we going to have a day and night? Right, right. And how are we supposed to have day and night until, like, what, the third or fourth day? You know, like, it's like there are no planets or stars yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, mapping that concept of time is clearly metaphorical here. Like, it's not. What's more useful is to consider it an enumeration, like a logical ordering of events. Right. And it's Genesis 2 where they. I'm looking at my Douay rhymes Bible. It's a little harder to, like, get through the Douay rhymes because it's kind of unfamiliar in some ways, like how it's annotated. Like, I have my grandfather's good new translation where, like, some people are, you know, it's a woke Bible, whatever. Like, look, I'll read whatever. Right? Like, if it has the impeter of the Vatican, I'm okay with that. I mean, look, we also have to understand that the Catholic Church has evolved over time in very interesting ways. You know, that's the whole point of having a religious authority is to evolve our understanding of scripture according to religious authority. And our process is protocol, the magisterium. Right. Like, once I'm done doing my work on Bitcoin, I'm probably going to work on Catholicism, but that work is probably about seven years out because I think it is going to be important for us to think about the future and our advanced technology and other things that are evolving in a way that sort of consider it, like, maybe trying to find a shared set of values amongst essentially truth seekers. Right. And like, it's kind of in the spirit of ecumenism and essentially, like, the idea is, like, to remind people that the atheistic position is just as strong as the theistic position. They are both very strong claims that have not been proven according to scientific method. We have not yet proven that there is no creator. And as a consequence of that, it is literally intellectually dishonest to say that you have proof and evidence that there is no God. But it's also, I will acknowledge intellectually that there is a essentially no. Well, and also Catholics would quibble with me on this one, but, you know, like, Is there any scientific evidence that confirms this peer review, that confirms that we are living in a creative universe that was intelligently designed? Not really, but I don't know if we've actually done enough work to prove that. I don't know if we've seriously tried. And so that's another question, right? One thing that kind of gets me there is if you study quantum mechanics and how that works, if you look into sort of how the double slit experiment kind of contradicts causality, to me that seems like a form of lazy evaluation. Like, as a computer scientist, there's also like Wheeler DeWitt, which is fascinating. Wheeler DeWitt essentially showed that you can essentially model the entire state of the entire universe in a single unitary Schrodinger equation, also known as the timeless universal wave function. And they say it's timeless because you don't need time to do it. You don't need time to describe at the deepest quantum level, the entire quantum state of every particle in the universe. Isn't that fucking weird, right? That you don't need time to do that? I'm sorry, right, like. Well, what that tells me is that time is an emergent property. It's something that appears consistent to us as inhabitants of a created reality that essentially, you know, think of God as maybe the super user that has like root access to the entire universe and can see every thought, right? That reminds me like a bit of Psalms 139, that's really beautiful. Psalm where King David is essentially speaking very honestly to God about his thoughts and the fact that he understands that God is omniscient, all knowing and can see every one of his thoughts and he's expressing his hatred of the people who hate God. And what's interesting is usually you don't think of God, even of the Old Testament, as someone who really likes it when people hate people. But he's being very honest because he's being honest to his Creator about his hatred of people who hate God because he knows that God can see all of his thoughts. And so I just think that's a really interesting thing to consider. If you also think, you know, maybe we're living in a created universe that might have multiple gods, but we're Catholics, are told, like, maybe this is a simulation. And the whole point of it is just like to prove a point that, like, to operate a flourishing and successful society, you cannot allow people to lie to each other. That that can never, like, bearing false witness is in the Ten Commandments for a very good reason. There's also, you Know, of course, have no gods before I. And so, like, to me, that seems like a behavioral blacklist. Like, as a protocol engineer, I see that as a behavioral blacklist. And the 8 Be Attitudes is like a really beautiful express in Matthew 5, like Jesus Sermon on the Mount, where he explains, you know, like, you know, blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who. By the way, the first Beatitude is really interesting. Blessed are those who know that they are spiritually poor, who have the awareness essentially, that they have a hole in their heart that they need to fill with, essentially with their spirituality, with their faith, with their belief in God. Right. And their Creator.
- [59:57]
B
I would say that's an extension of, or a form of manifestation of humility, is just recognizing our lineage.
- [60:06]
A
That's also another Beatitude, by the way. It's blessed are the humble. Right. Yeah.
- [60:09]
B
Recognizing our limited scope and having faith in the simple truths. You know, the. The whole idea that, you know, like, I don't have to be a scientist to know common sense and how easy it is to just be when your God is some political authority or this. I'm going to prove something this way. And you're like, looking at all of this data and empirical evidence or whatnot, and you get lost in details that are so far from where kind of the base truth, the, like, obvious truths actually lie that you're actually. You can so often just build this giant case to confuse yourself of something simple, like how many errors we have in society or like, things that we. We believe that I, I think are legitimately false. That if you ask, like, a dumb dude in, who just lives in his garage and, you know, go digs holes in his. In his farm or whatever, he's just like, oh, yeah, no, that's stupid. Nobody would ever. That's just not right. I just don't. I don't even. I can't explain it. But that's not right. But then you'll have these huge contraptions, kind of like the idea of, like, Earth is the center of the universe. Like the insane, elaborate constructions and things that they would create to make it look like the world was the center of the universe.
- [61:22]
A
Well, what's funny about the Cosmo, the center of the universe, by the way, is it's all relative. Like, sure, there is. There is no center of the universe. So anywhere can be the center of the universe.
- [61:31]
B
So, like, there's an element to that. But I just mean it in the heliocentric. The idea that everything was revolving around the Earth as opposed to looking outward in.
- [61:44]
A
Yeah, that's why I think it's important that we have a religious authority because I think we're going to need to evolve our understanding of scripture even further because I think we may need to evolve our understanding of imago dei, the, the idea that we are created in the image of God to really kind of include any sapient that has had a messiah in the, in a similar vein of Jesus Christ. I think it's going to be really important as things go further because I think there the evidence is mounting that we're not alone. And not just not alone, but like very not alone. Right. Yeah. So that's, that's important.
- [62:24]
B
Let's hold on that thought. I want to come back to that, but I actually want to pull on the thread even though this was not at all where I thought we might end up. And there are some things I want to try to get to if we have time. But I'm interested in this thread of just the idea of creation and whether or not we're in a simulation and there's an intelligent, intelligent creator or there is this idea of like it's emergent and whether or not you can prove one or the other or if you know, like, like people talk about like the idea that like oh, there's like this dude in the sky and he created everything is so ridiculous and childish
- [63:11]
A
monster like Sky Daddy.
- [63:13]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And what's funny is that I used to be. There was a period where I was an atheist and I thought those were just like incredibly solid arguments. But. But then, you know, there's. There's also a notion of. Well, you know, also you believe that, you know, based on, based on exactly what that the universe create. It was used to not exist at all. And it was like this impossible, this non existent speck and then it just blew up from nothing. And there's no supposed meaning to any of it, despite the fact that life and order appears to have some sort of a trajectory. And I've always thought about it is that if there is an, an intelligence behind anything or not is that it seems that so many properties are emergent anyway. And if you were creating something where the. All the things and all the people and everything have free will inside of it, all of its nature should. Would have to be emergent anyway. You know, and like if a bunch of people say that like oh, well, it's a simulation. Well, when you get to a simulation that is as complex as what reality that we live in, at what point is a simulation not a simulation anymore? It's just Something that exists at a different layer. You know what I mean? Like, like on your notion of time, like I've always thought of time as a plane. Like it's a, it's the fourth dimension, right? And we, we simply travel through it. If I was a one dimensional being and I was traveling left and right on a two dimensional plane, I would have no idea. Life looks to me like a, a single line. I'm a one dimensional being and it's always just, I'm always just on the line and it appears straight because it doesn't matter where I go in the 2D. My, my entire scope of what I can see and perceive is simply the one line. And in that same sense, like we are a third dimensional being in a, in a fourth dimensional space as so to speak, that, that time is something we are kind of swimming through. But our perspective only allows us like our, our consciousness, so to speak, is only in, within the three dimensions. So we see it as forward and backward. Like it's, it's the thing that's ahead of us and the thing that's behind us. But it seems there, there's an element to, to kind of how I see it now that it seems like there must be something above that. And I don't mean it that it like something that we would think of as God that exists within that fourth dimension or outside of that. And not because it like has to be some particular God or some particular thing, but simply that if we are a perspective, if we are a pinpoint perspective of certain memories and certain experiences and certain knowledge and certain rationality, don't those things have to exist in general for us to be like an isolated piece of it? You know what I mean? Am I tracking it all?
- [66:27]
A
Oh yeah. I mean like if you accept the premises that we're in a simulation that like this, this reality is technically not base reality, that you know, there's a couple things that can kind of like lead you there, right? Like why are quantum computers more efficient? You could think, oh maybe there are other universes that are parallelizing with computation. Maybe that might make sense. That fitting right on the evidence. I don't, I've read by the way, Sean, I think his name is Sean Carroll's. Something deeply hidden. Like it's a fascinating fitting, right? Like the many worlds interpretation, the Everetting interpretation of quantum mechanics is a resolution to the disagreement between Einstein and Bohr, right? But that like, you know, are there hidden variables and like, you know, local hidden variables? I think that's the, actually the thing that was resolved through the Bell Inequality and how that sort of. The experiments that prove the Bell inequality essentially revealed that our understanding of physics, and quantum mechanics in particular, is incomplete as it's in textbooks right now. There are unresolved problems in quantum mechanics that cannot really be explained in a very satisfactory way.
- [67:36]
B
Yeah. Yeah, 100%.
- [67:40]
A
The reason why I don't believe in many worlds is because it's inefficient. Like, it's computationally inefficient. My perspective is that the universe is computationally efficient and maybe quantum computers are faster, not because they are doing multiversal parallelization. Wherever the heck. The guy who was running Google's research on quantum computing back when they released Willow in 2024, he basically said, oh, maybe they're parallelizing across multiple universes. I was like, oh, wow, that could make so much sense. And I went down that rabble really deep, and I realized, oh, there's nothing here, and there's no evidence that supports that fitting. And so I could come up with an alternative fitting that essentially is maybe we're living in a simulation that's running on a server that is eventually consistent, lazily evaluated, computationally efficient, doesn't have a bunch of branching. Everything this and that. Anything that appears random might not really be random. Is it deterministic, probabilistic? That's a good question to ask. That's a really good question to ask, honestly. Because there's like, we assume our computers are deterministic, but we always go back and forth. Deterministic, probabilistic, because they're rooted in nature. Right? Like, there's recently Meta did some research on something called the Core 59 problem that I think will become more interesting in the coming year. But basically it revealed that sometimes flaws can enter our CPUs that are very difficult to diagnose. You need, like, multiple gigabytes of VDFs, like verifiable functions that work in a way that makes sense that you can prove. You need to run these functions, all the CPU cores, each one individually, and you need to also carefully, very carefully observe how much energy is being used in that computation. So, like, you need a special test rig, like, special hardware to even diagnose that your hardware is good, which is kind of interesting, right? Like, you need to measure how much voltage it's actually using. And also these VDFs, which are incredibly complex. And it revealed that only 60 lines of assembly, like I can only imagine, it's, it's. It's probably fewer than 256 bytes that essentially introduced non deterministic behavior in the computation they were trying to do. And it was really hard to figure that out. And so like, we have to remember that like fundamentally the, within our universe, it is fundamentally probabilistic, but we also have to remember that Shannon entropy, you know, the insight there is that any sufficiently compressed information is indistinguishable from randomness. And so that's important to consider. Like when people say things appear random, I'm like, I don't know if we can know if that's random. And so I mean, there's a possibility that stars can compute. Like, it makes a lot of sense actually if you think about, if you do the math, they takes like a hundred thousand years to a million years to find, depending on the size of the star. But like it takes a long time for a photon when it's emitted from like originally emitted from like the process of fusion, right? Like, like it takes like of hundreds of thousands of millions of years. It takes a long time for that photon to come out of the star. Like an absurdly long time. Like longer than any human would ever live. These are, it's really, really interesting, you know, and then. But also there's neutrinos that bypass all the matter. So like, to me it sounds like stars could be considered maybe some kind of UDP broadcast datagram mechanism. With neutrinos. They're always talking to each other, like spraying out neutrinos with whatever quantum states they might have. And neutrinos can have a pretty complex quantum state actually, which is interesting if you look into like quantum field theory and quantum information theory, quantum carbon dynamics and all of that. But like, dude, there's so many. It's really cool. But I think there's a possibility that stars can talk to each other through neutrinos and they can also maybe compute maybe. I don't know. I mean, I'm just. I don't know if we can rule that out is what I'm saying.
- [72:21]
B
Basically, you can't disprove something like that. I mean, of course that's like, like super out there because you don't. There's no like hard proof on like what it is, like what even are they calculating? But you think about it in the context that like everything at a certain scale, like becomes like the further outside of the scale of human relevance it is, the less likely, like if you can only see one pixel of a, you know, of a, you know, 8K map of a landscape or something, what the hell Are you ever going to discern from that one pixel? And how can you make a claim about the entire map looking at a single pixel and at multiple different layers? That's all we can see for so much of what the universe is. And so kind of going back to the idea of being humble is that like, any theory or any, any claim that we make about the universe has to necessarily be coming from a place of like, total ignorance of like 99.999999% of what is out there. And there's just not much that we could go on. And being deterministic about what that is, not deterministic, but being declarative about what it is that we know, I, I think is just super presumptive and super arrogant about a perspective that just is almost necessarily empty of everything.
- [73:58]
A
You know, for sure, there are unresolved questions in science that that's why people say, like, the last cup from the well, it leads you to God. And that's why, you know, like, the Vatican has an observatory in Arizona of all places, run by the Jesuits. And like, if your ontology is that we all live in an intelligent design that's created by a creator, right? Like, what better way to understand your faith than to study nature? And so, like, and a lot of like, famous scientists were like, I think his name was Spitzer. I don't know. Regardless, like, that is a total rabbit hole. And it's interesting and valuable to me. I think it's an important question to ask. I don't know if we like, here's another thing. One thing I also kind of opened my eyes to this is there was this guy, I think his name is UV Lightman on Twitter. He's like a really interesting, like, he talks about quantum computing a lot. He explained to me. I asked him a question. How do you explain why QFT quantum Fourier transform is more efficient? And he explained in the context of Shores finding a break to the ecdlp. He explained, oh, it's like harmonics and harmonizing. And when you're singing in a shower and when you reach a certain tone or pitch or whatever it is, if a resonance, that essentially there's an overlapping period. And when you find it, you found a pattern like you found a repeating pattern essentially. And you can accelerate that computation not necessarily by parallelizing across multiple universes. You can instinct just do that through really just the three first principles of quantum mechanics. Superposition, entanglement, and interference. And these are really powerful essentially ways that are probably closer to how base reality is computed. Than what's inside the renderer essentially. And so I call that there seems to be some kind of separation between substrate and render. And the renderer process is like, we think of it as space time and it seems consistent to us at a high level, but once you dig in it seems contradictory. And so the analogy I use here is Minecraft. Like are you familiar with the concept of redstone in Minecraft?
- [76:23]
B
I'm not.
- [76:25]
A
So it's like this block that essentially you can build computers out of. You can build like Turing machines, clocks like things like that that are kind of. They're primitive. I mean they're based in a voxel reality and they can only get so complex. But if you hit the tilde key and you type a command, you can essentially do something that's closer maybe to how quantum computers work by sending command to the CPU than building inside of the universe a computer that has limitations. And we understand Turing machines are a subset of what a Hilbert machine could do if we could figure out how to devise anything close to perfect math, but we can't. And Godel is pretty airtight on this. I would love to see someone try to prove him wrong. But Godel explains even something capable of expressing addition, the constant of one plus one, adding two numbers together, even a form of mathematics that is capable of expressing, that is of sufficient complexity, that is incapable of being both complete and consistent, and that it cannot self describe without contradicting itself. Which is humbling. Right. And even more humbling is the George Turing thesis. And how does this relate to Bitcoin? I'll tell you, because Bitcoin is not necessarily turn complete in the way people think about it. It does technically comply with Rule 110, which is a different 110 than the other 110. Rule 110 is Stephen Wolfram's Cellular Automata where he tried to kind of come up with all these different rules for how the communist game of life behaves, I guess, and cellular automata and trying to be more formal about that. And some people will make the claim that if your system can express rule 110 then it's good enough to be considered Turing complete. Bitcoin script is technically Turing complete according to that definition. But you have to basically inline all your functions and unroll all your loops. There's no really good go to operator even. It's a stack based language. It's inspired by fourth, I believe. And so not a lot of people do stack based programming these days because it's just like it's really cool because it's incredibly efficient. It is really special in that regard. But that's a total rabbit hole, honestly. I have to explore that a bit, actually, because I'm building something called Systems Lean. Systems Lean is Lean that is capable of systems programming. I'm even trying to add linear types and all the different multiplicities of linear types similar to Interest 2 using Lean 4. And I'm really interested in Ben 2, but unfortunately, he's just holding his cards too close to his chest. And so I can't get a good peek into that. So I'm building with the best tools I have publicly available. And so maybe they'll be like, you know, something equivalent to the Curry Howard isomorphism, but between, you know, like an isomorphism between what is provable in Ben 2, which is provable, and lean 4. And maybe there could be some cool synchronicities there one day. But regardless, I call that Bowie because Lean and Bow. Right. I don't know if any of this is going to make sense to you right now, because I'm using a bunch of jargon and I don't know how much time you have.
- [80:02]
B
There's a number of references that I don't have clear examples of in my
- [80:06]
A
mind, so I wish I had the time to unpack them, but it's all good. Look, I'm just going to get to the punchline. I think we need to solve some very serious problems of bitcoin in a very serious way. And formal proofs are one way to do that. Experimentation is also another way. Simulation, essentially. And that's cool. Simulators are absolutely valuable in some other perspectives. And they both work together. Right. It's kind of like applying the scientific method to proving certain questions. And one question I've been thinking about a lot is the concept. Right now there's a bit of a contention in the bitcoin community right now about essentially unpaid use of resources. Some people will say, like, oh, well, if you pay for a transaction to get mined by miners, that is part of the social contract of Bitcoin is to essentially make sure that is on your node in perpetuity because it was paid for. I don't think that's right. I think that's almost a bit of like, socialist magical thinking, because I don't think it is fair to expect people to want to have other people's data on their node if it doesn't help them or if they're not compensated for that labor. Right. Ultimately, at the day, running a node is A different thing than running a mining pool or a template generator. And I think it is important that we preserve the right for people to run nodes locally on their hardware, that it's commonly accessible today and it shouldn't be like an undue burden. It should be very accessible. And if you're essentially trying to avoid Jeff Bezos, avoid giving Jeff Bezos His 2 or 3 cents per gigabyte month in perpetuity by instead essentially doing something that would take essentially half a million years to pay off. And that's at current bitcoin prices. That's like if the price of bitcoin never went up ever again, it would literally take Current prices at 1 sat per V byte half a million years for that bet to pay off. And if you're all about subset summer and paying even less for miners to store your data in perpetuity, maybe it's more like 50,000 years, but it's still an absurd amount of time. And so people are way overpaying when they're doing inscriptions. And even worse, with OP returns, opportunities receive no discount. Right, So a lot of these people who want to have fun with their bitcoin. Right, Look, I get that, I do. But you also have to understand and acknowledge that like what you're doing is essentially not helping the network in the way that you think. Like the fee revenue argument, I think, is complicated. It's a lot more nuanced than people think it is.
- [83:06]
B
There's so many unknowns with the whole fee market thing, especially with like ongoing, like what's the incentive structure for the security and how sustainable it is.
- [83:17]
A
Well, I mean, the security budget argument, by the way, I think is answered really nicely by Tyler Stevens's work on the Heat Punk movement. Heat Punk Summit earlier this year was really beautiful.
- [83:29]
B
Yeah, it was.
- [83:29]
A
The second one, I loved it. I mean, it was way better than the first one. That was really cool too. I think Heat Punk is the perfect answer to the question of bitcoin's long term security. People just mine.
- [83:43]
B
It's an interesting unappreciated element, at least I'm not sure if it's a total answer, but it cannot be considered without putting that in the mix.
- [83:55]
A
I think for sure it's a major factor. It literally puts the security budget question to bed, honestly, because it's basically betting on the future. First of all, if you're putting your money in a bitcoin and not into gold or dollars, you're betting on the future. You're betting on a future where microchips are Abundant. Where thoughts are abundant, ideas are abundant. They're non scarce or unrivalerous. You're not betting on gold because you know that we could debase the gold supply in about five different ways probably within our lifetimes. The five different ways I can think of debasing gold by the way I think is valuable for your viewers are first of all you have to understand like 99.8% of the solar system's gold is in the sun. So maybe we should consider stellar lifting.
- [84:44]
B
Really?
- [84:45]
A
If we can prove that essentially stars aren't conscious, that's I think important there from an ethical standpoint. We might need to ask them permission before we like start shooting at plasma lens to eject layers of plasma from the photosphere. Right.
- [85:01]
B
Send them an email.
- [85:03]
A
Yeah, right, right. Like send them a few neutrinos, you know, regardless. Okay. There's also like a bunch of golden seawater. We should probably be filtering seawater of contaminants anyway. There's a bunch of uranium and mercury and I mean those are also kind of useful too. And mercury is also interesting because that can essentially there's, there's this paper that came out last year from a company called Marathon Fusion, no relation to Mara. Marathon Fusion was studying the concept of modern day chrysopia, which is like the transmutation of other elements into gold. They realized that traditional DT fusion, not anatronic stuff like Helion's working on, but more like Commonwealth Fusion Systems if you've heard of them. They, they're building like kind of like a really like a modern tokamak design that's based on Rebco tape, which is considered a higher temperature superconductor than like the niobium approach being used by E Tier in France. So it's probably going to cost like 10 to 20 times less to cool that arrangement, make it useful than what the European socialists are spending on their tokamak design. And as a consequence of that you might actually be able to improve the economics of fusion by, of neutronic fusion by essentially turning mercury into gold. And the gold will be hot for like maybe 10 or 20 years. But at that point you could debase the gold supply by turning mercury fine in the oceans from your filtering efforts to which you also get gold from, to then also like take that mercury and then put it in fusion reactors and turn that into gold. And then you just wait 20 years and then you go supplies that way. Dude, there's, there's something called a free electron laser that basically we're going to See a paradigm shift, I think, in how we built chips. So like, I don't know if Elon's talked enough about his design for the Terafab, but if I had to guess, he's building it to such a large, absurdly large size because he's going to use what's called a free electron laser or fel. And FEL lithography is going to scale way better than EUV lithography. You might have heard of that. Interesting. Yeah. And so the economics are going to scale really well there. We're going to get really good at VLSI, at making chips. And VLSI is very large scale integration. It's like the formalization of the rule set for making microchips. It used to be more of an art than it is a science. Now it's pretty firmly a science, unless you want to get into the vagaries of the Kurcha. There's this process that has a weird Polish name where basically you have to make ultra pure silicon and draw it out as a big crystal.
- [87:44]
B
Oh yeah, you're talking about the, the kind of like the blacksmithing thing of like you have to like get the temperature exactly right and the consistency right before you can. No, yeah, there's a, there's a really interesting thing in that one.
- [87:57]
A
It's still kind of semi automated because like there is some intuition still there. Like it's one of the few professions that still is like, like a, a master and apprentice. It's like modern day blacksmith in a way. But I think maybe they'll automate that too. Machines are getting really good. So regardless, I don't think anybody can really be confident that they won't be automated someday. Oh, and by the way, to tie the loop on Fels and Gold, it's like, well look, if we're going to monetize this free election. Laser capability, yeah, we absolutely could be making microchips with it. But what if they're not? What if it's idle for whatever reason? What if they're not enough? There's not a demand for wafer starts. Right. For either logic or memory or whatever is in the future. Right. Silicon photonics are interesting too. But regardless, maybe you make gold with it. You know, like maybe your sources energy is so cheap and you are able to make energy using your microchips using Casimir cavities, which is another rabbit hole if you look into like Harold Sunny White's work throughout. Like I followed his work ever since he was at NASA Eagle Works and publishing interesting papers on warp Drive theory. And they're bases based on Alcubierre's theories from the, like the Alcubierre metric from the 1995 or so. Miguel Alcubierre, he was a Mexican physicist who he is actually, he believes that, you know, we might be able to create a warp bubble so long as we're able to harness sufficient amount of negative energy. And the only good way we know of to harness the negative energy from the quantum field theory of the vacuum density is are the Castermen cavities being made by Harold Sunny White, which could not only unlock warp drive, but also be kind of like a better use of the silicon we use currently for photovoltaics, which only have a capacity factor of like one out of four. Right. Like 0.25. It's like literally you need four times the solar panels and then equivalent amount of like battery for whatever. Right. It's batteries and solar panels that all of that's disrupted by just deeper insights into how physics works. A lot of people don't even realize that the vacuum does have density, that there are variations in the vacuum density. They're almost acoustic in nature at the nano scale, and that the customer pressure at those scales is quite high. And it scales really, really well as you go go smaller. It's almost like the universe is giving us an incentive to develop deeper insights into how to manipulate matter at the atomic scale to essentially draw limitless energy from virtual electrons that pop in and out that can be harvested asymmetrically through Casimir cavities. They're almost like kind of like little antennas etched onto the microchips. And he already has a product out and I want to use it. So how this relates to Bitcoin is, by the way, I want to make a non quiescent hsm, a hardware security module that never powers off even if the power is taken off. So it's always watching for intrusion. And maybe someday we also master silicon photonics. And these are really energy efficient and they essentially are like a smart card form factor and they produce their own power and like they even work inside of a Faraday cage. In fact, they have a Faraday cage built in to help like sort of detect intrusion and prevent any kind of, you know, side channel attack. And as a consequence of that work, you essentially could essentially build the technology we need to get past BIP 39 and BIP 32, because I think both of those are going to need a change as our understanding of the protocol evolves.
- [91:39]
B
Yeah. So I, for anybody who thinks that sounds crazy, this is. There's a reference for something not too long ago that somebody released a. It. I don't even think it was a battery. It was some. This may literally be exactly what you're talking about, but it is. It is. Essentially, it can trickle a tiny, tiny amount of energy. Yeah.
- [92:06]
A
25 microamps. Yeah.
- [92:07]
B
Forever. Forever. It just.
- [92:09]
A
Yep. That's at the current scale, by the way.
- [92:11]
B
At the current scale, yes.
- [92:13]
A
Yeah. So. So that scales, by the way, in two different ways. It's really interesting to also consider. It's called. It scales volumetrically 1 to 1 over D to the third. Like in 3D space time or space, really. So it scales volumetrically as you halve the dimension, your half pitch, let's say. And then you also. It scales. The Casimir pressure scales interesting as well, Even more so than volumetrically. So, of course, obviously, like, you know, if you take a cube and you divide it into eight parts, and you can make the thing half as small as it was before, you can have eight times more than you had before, which is cool, right. In the same volume. But also the Casimir pressure scales even more. It's like one over D to the fourth. So as you have the feature size, the half pitch. And so as a consequence of that, and that's because you're essentially allowing yourself to harvest virtual electrons from the vacuum energy of shorter wavelength. And when you have the wavelength, you get like a way more energy. And so because like the shorter wavelength of an electron or a photon, like, the shorter its wavelength, it's more energy it has right at that scale. Also, it's really interesting. The nanoscale is very different than, like the macro scale. It's very like the forces are very different. The pressures are absurdly high. There's a lot of interesting things there when you look into it, when you look deeply into it. And so those insights could also help us essentially create some kind of like, feedback loop where, you know, free electron lasers can create chips that harvest energy that essentially helps power the laser that then creates. Either gives you the dilemma today. Are we making microchips? Are we making battery replacement cells, or are we just making gold? It's really those three things, right? And so are we making logic memory? Are we making power chips? Maybe another way to think of it, they're kind of like similar to NEMS processes, if, you know, microelectrical mechanical systems. And then there's also, of course, like the. Like using the fel, which is literally a particle accelerator. It's like the free election laser allows you to tune whatever wavelength you want and apply whatever energy you want. And so you might figure out like, oh, well, if we, you know, shoot a bunch of, you know, electrons at like, I don't know, at high enough energy to whatever, maybe you can figure out a way to make gold. So. And then of course there's astro mining. There's two important companies to watch there. Transastra, Astroforge, and Then also the NASA mission later this decade to 16 psyche. That'll probably reveal some interesting insights there, dude. I think I'm pretty sure that we're going to figure out five different. One of five different ways to manifest an amazing gold punk future where everything's just made out of gold. Because we can't. The entire. All of its monetary properties have now evaporated and it is debased through the abundance of deeper insights into how to essentially achieve our birthright as achieved in Genesis or explain Genesis, that this is our world for us to essentially be stewards of. Right?
- [95:31]
B
Yeah. And going back to just the gold question in general is that the interesting thing about gold scarcity is that and importantly the cap on gold's price or gold's value really. And the price is nominal, but the cap on gold's value is explicitly limited or reaches a threshold based on the amount of energy it takes to achieve or make more gold. And there will always be a way to make more gold because as a physical. Like just mining the oceans is a good example. Right? Is that it's insanely uneconomical to actually do this. Even though there's something like one gram per. Like I don't even know, it's like a million metric tons or something like that. But there's. So there's a tiny, tiny amount of gold. But it is purely a question of energy. It's purely a question of energy. Like if gold shot up to half a million dollars an ounce today, it would probably make sense to start mining. To start mining a million. A million metric tons of water.
- [96:41]
A
And that ties into another thing that bitcoin is all about. Like otech, right? Ocean thermal energy confusion. I first read about otech way before it was cooled. So one of my favorite childhood memories was my mother. So we are. Our television essentially stopped working. We couldn't afford to fix it because my mother was a single mother. My father had left us. And so instead of like, you know, doing nothing or going out and playing my mother in her infinite wisdom, she. We lived in Boulder, Colorado. She was a student teacher and she was like studying like some kind of English degree for some kind of program for becoming a teacher in Colorado. So what she did was she would take me out to the newly built Boulder Public Library. And it's a beautiful structure, and she would take me there every day, and I'd go and get some books. And I read all kinds of weird books as a kid. Like, I read books about nuclear power, about biofuels. I remember one day, my poor mother, she. She. She wanted to, like, do the thing where you, like, you read to your kid. And so she picked up one of my books that I borrowed from the library, and she struggled to pronounce a word. She grew up in Chile. She was like, a Chilean aristocrat that her father was. Actually worked for the imf. And, like, during, like, a. I don't know. I really wish I could have learned to know my grandfather better before he passed away, but. Because I. I feel like we. We. We would have vibed on a number of levels intellectually.
- [98:30]
B
Yeah. And doesn't it suck to realize that after they're gone, like, to. To realize when. When you're past the point that. That you basically have access to it? I kind of had the same. Not to interrupt, but, like, that's why
- [98:47]
A
I have a SC in my Twitter handle, my X handle, because, look, we're told. Blessed are those who mourn because we have to remember and be respectful of those we've lost. I also want to, like, say a word for, you know, Caitlin Long's beloved. You know, I really. My heart goes out to him. No kidding.
- [99:06]
B
I didn't even know.
- [99:08]
A
Yeah, just this last weekend at his funeral, and it's really sad.
- [99:12]
B
Dude, that blows. I'm sorry to hear that.
- [99:16]
A
It's all good regardless, you know, look, there. There's so many people we've lost, right? So many beautiful people we've lost, like Aaron Schwartz, you know, and. And. And Larry Susskind. Just amazing, beautiful people, and it weighs heavy on the heart, and you have to do them the honor, right. Of. Of. Carry on their tradition. So I do want to, like, tie the knot, like, on, like, the one really important thread here. I prayed on this a lot, and I've worked on this a lot. Before I got into bitcoin development, I've been working on decentralized storage, that problem for a lot longer than people realize. Like, I used to work as a subcontractor for a contractor for Protocol Labs, and I was working in the Rust version of Filecoin, and maybe my knowledge of that protocol is a little outdated, but at the time, like, they had essentially proof of space time and proof of replication. And those both gated proof of stake. And it had like multiple blocks per epoch. And it was like the most absurdly complex I think of almost like it almost like a Pee Wee Herman's breakfast machine of a protocol. Like you needed a GPU in a server that not only had petabytes of hard drives, but also had a GPU to accelerate the computation of snark proofs or BLS signatures. And in addition you needed a special CPU at the time that didn't even sell in singles. Like it was. It was this AMD EPYC CPU that they would sell to like customers that always bought them in bulk. And to buy just one for your, your filecoin miner, you, it took extra work, extra effort and you paid more. And the reason they needed this epyc cpu is because at the time sha 256 acceleration was like essentially not very prevalent in consumer hardware. It's gotten a lot better. My laptop, the laptop I'm currently talking to you on now does have that, which I think is really beautiful. So that's really cool that all our CPUs nowadays have sha ni, which is like the secure hash algorithm native instruction acceleration that gives you like maybe a 2 or 3x advantage in computation of hashes even in your CPU. And it doesn't take up a lot of your CPU. And it's really cool. I mean we are not harnessing the full capabilities, even just the hardware you can buy right now, which I think is really beautiful because we can.
- [101:55]
B
It's opportunity for sure.
- [101:57]
A
It's an amazing opportunity. Huge opportunity. And so that's why I'm like I forked to ZED the editor as essentially the capability to self improve recursively itself through the editor. I'm building that, I'm building like a lot more capability in the ZED than ZED had. And I'm also going to maybe evolve that capability in the future using Systems Lean to prove this. The parts and just like do. There's so many tests like it takes like maybe 15 minutes to run all the tests for the, for this million and a half line rust code base. And it takes about another 15 minutes to compile and a release binary that is multiple gigabytes in size until you strip it of its debug symbols with cargo strip. And then now it's like maybe 300 megabytes but it's massive still. Right? It's an amazing editor, but it can do so much more. And it's a Beautiful thing. And I'm building that too. And I'm then also building and solving the problem of, okay, decentralized storage, right? So like after I got let go from working on filecoin because it was not a culture fit because I was very like, what happened was I was so gung ho, I really wanted to do my best work. And then I made the mistake of reading Safe Eden's the bitcoin standard in February of 2021.
- [103:17]
B
That'll get you. It'll get you every time.
- [103:21]
A
It will, it will. Like, it put into perspective that, like, if I'm putting any amounts of effort into anything that isn't bitcoin, then it's basically wasting my time. It's a waste of time. You could literally use a database for that. And by the way, what proves that thought experiment is Solana. Solana is basically Google Bigtable, a massive database that is gated with some cryptography. And so it's whole historical record. There's no such thing as a bitcoin Solana node because it's a server owned by Google. Which I think is kind of funny. I know, but it just illustrates the thought experiment that, oh yeah, if you want to, you can put that on a database and it doesn't have to go on bitcoin. That's why I was like, you know what, these shitcoiners earlier this year who are like, hey, we should make a bit 360 meme coin. I was like, my first instinct was not to go tell them to fuck off. Because I realized, well, that doesn't actually hurt bitcoin. That doesn't put any arbitrary data on Bitcoin, that doesn't really interfere with bitcoin's nodes or operations. It's kind of interesting and I think maybe once we secure bitcoin against the quantum threat and other things, maybe we'll return the favor and make sure that Solana and also Monero are secure against that as well. But we got to bitcoin first, right? Bitcoin is the focus of basically all of my mental energy, aside from what I need to understand scripture and how that also relates to Bitcoin. By the way, I've talked to Pastor Coyne and the Orange Bible app, which I think is really beautiful and really cool. And I hope it actually, I haven't
- [104:58]
B
seen it, but I saw the example or whatever.
- [105:02]
A
Oh yeah, I used it and it's really beautiful. I love it. But I want to help him with it actually, and I want to help him with that effort. And I would like to announce on your show that I am building a decentralized storage network that essentially puts the focus on archival and not on, you know, putting arbitrary data in people's nodes of perpetuity. Yeah, I want to put place a focus on long term archival and quantifying.
- [105:28]
B
Like a kind of provenance.
- [105:30]
A
Well, yeah, it's a proof of possession actually. It's essentially so the customer is proof of possession. That allows you to sort of make a proof that somebody has data remotely without you needing to download it all over again and prove it locally yourself. That is possible just to be really clever about it. So there's a way there. The earliest work I did on this was in 2021. I called it Forest. It was under a different project called Fuzernet. And that's how I landed actually. Let's see, was that 2021? Yes, it was. Yes, it was late 2021. It was the consequence of some work I had done after I'd worked for filecoin. Fuzernet was before that even. I had an interest in Rust and I was playing with Rust. I wanted to make like an IPFS that had a GUI and it made it really easy for people to store data on ipfs. But the problem with IPFS is that they have the pinning problem. And the way they chose to solve that pinning problem, essentially the proof of possession problem, in a way, the way they chose to solve it was making this absurdly complex blockchain that required a massive SSD for the time the write amplification of CAR files was absurd. Like 15x, like your fifth, your data got 15 times bigger because there's interleaving BLS signatures in, in, in between all the data. And so it's like, it was like absurdly complex. You needed a special cpu, you needed a GPU in your server with a petabyte of storage. Also like, it was like you needed like a million dollars basically to even. That was table stakes in filecoin. Oh, and also by the way, the minute they went to mainnet, the way they designed their protocol and sensor was really fucky like essentially there's this huge ATH, this all time high where essentially anybody who had mainnet fill would earn, I don't know, 100% APY or yield or whatever on their money, lending it out to miners, storage miners who needed it to stake on their sectors to monetize their hardware. And so they literally forced storage miners to buy their shitcoin to mine the shitcoin. And of course that creates a temporary all time high that shows up in everybody's, you know, dexes or trackers or whatever. I was like, oh wow, it was worth so much. But then they didn't, like a lot of retail investors did not have the deeper insight into the protocol that would reveal to them. Oh yeah, but that was just a one time thing. It's never going to happen again and Phil is never going to return those prices. It is a complete shitcoin. All of these essential storage, like they've
- [107:59]
B
all been a mess.
- [107:59]
A
They've all been a mess. Chia doesn't even store data. It just trashes your SSD for no good reason. You could at least be doing inference on your ssd, right? That was another cool thing John Carmack came out with recently was like, oh yeah, you absolutely could be using NAND Flash to. Because inference isn't random access actually turns out. So that's really cool, right? Maybe you could do something based on that. Really cool. But regardless, I'm focused on the problem of decentralized storage and fee revenue to miners and supporting the network and scaling it. The problem with inscriptions is that inscriptions don't scale. And the Bcachers had it made a good point when essentially it's in support of Javon's paradox. Javon realized that the cheaper something gets, people use more of it. If we're not having to front load half a million years of AWS S3 fees at current bitcoin prices, maybe we could find a better solution. Right? There's a lot of wiggle room there. And so if we need to store, I don't know, 10,000 copies of your data and charge a fraction maybe of what S3 charges because otherwise people would just put it on S3 too. Which is not helpful from a decentralization perspective. Basically S3 sets the ceiling, the cost ceiling and the floor is just whatever anybody would take to monetize the extra storage on their devices. And so like that's why, like, as much as I like Start nine or want to like them at least despite Matt Hell being, I don't know, bizarre and very unkind. He's just been really unkind to me and I don't understand why. Oh, that's unfortunate. It is unfortunate. I want it. But regardless, his entire business model I'm about to like, essentially make irrelevant. And because my working process is just like, maybe we should start from first principles and make full use of our own hardware, our laptops first. Like if we're not even doing things in such a way where everything is local first and peer to Peer and then you scale that maybe with some mesh networks as well. If you're not doing that first, then you're kind of like, I don't know, like you're missing a lot. Like you're not. I think his approach of like creating like a industry for nodes is, I don't know, I don't know if that's going to have a bright future. I think the future is more like peer to peer and local first. And your laptop is way more powerful than it is now. And it doesn't need to talk to a server either in your house or in, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's data center, whatever, you know, like, it doesn't need to go a thousand miles. Your packets don't need to travel a thousand miles round trip just for you to like, you know, I don't know, make a backup to like, you know, or talk to your friend who's like sitting next to you. Right. Like ideally your machines are making you full use of all their capabilities, including their radios, right? So you have Bluetooth, you have WI fi, you have like, even like my, my computer has a 5G cellular modem. I think it's made by either Qutel or Qualcomm. But regardless, like, like these things are way more certainly capable than we give them credit for. And we're just not using it because people haven't thought to, I guess. But maybe we should think too. We should be rewriting the Linux kernel in Lean for systems. Lean we should be proving in doing and building things that'll help manifest a bright, amazing future. One of those things could be, I took ord, the ORD Index and the Ordinance of. I've worked on this, I've contributed to it in the past. And I'm a big fan of Casey Rodimer. I think he cares deeply about Bitcoin in ways that like, people are maybe missing. And I mean, that's fine. And also I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Like he thinks that decentralized storage cannot be solved in any adequate way, you know, than Bitcoin can. And I'm like, I disagree. I think we can solve the problem way better than Bitcoin can. What if we could easily and cheaply, instead of front loading a bunch of data, we create storage market incentives that quantify scarcity through a provable replication factor. And we can incentivize the retention of scarce data and whether it's opaque or transparent within, encrypted or unencrypted by default, using encodings and provable Things that we can make lean proofs for so we can prove all these things and we can make them work and align incentives and create efficient storage markets that essentially are way cheaper than S3 even long term. And you could stop paying for your storage and that's fine. If somebody else values it, they're going to pay for that instead. And even then you could have a bounty, a storage bounty market where look, if there's some valuable data somebody might want in the future and they're the only person who has a copy of that data and there, there, there won't be a six like a storage provider of last resort where like they're going to use like 5D holographic storage and put 360 terabytes onto a 5 inch borosilicate glass like yeah, that shit's crazy plate, right? And they're going to build like essentially archives that are like, look, if you can find that data one day and you can bring it back and you could give it to that person and give them that in a way that matches their hash exactly because it's kind of addressable at the end of the day, then you can claim a bounty. And that should be really beautiful. That gives us an incentive to essentially archive the data and not just keep it all in one place. It should be space time aware. We should have a space time aware remote proof of possession. And I call that STAR Pops. It's a STAR stupid analysis acronym. But like it's just what it happens to be.
- [113:52]
B
But it goes well with your hat.
- [113:58]
A
That's funny.
- [113:59]
B
It's funny this because you're actually coming. And this is something that, when we talked about this at the time, Chain Summit that kind of felt relevant was that it sounds like you're, you're coming at the problem of decentralized storage or owning your own data and having access to your data from a non centralized, without the reliance of a centralized entity from a completely different layer or from a completely different.
- [114:28]
A
I mean it's just from first principles and a deep understanding, a deeper understanding of the problem than people seem to give me credit for, I guess.
- [114:34]
B
But regardless, I would say you're coming at it from a macro perspective and, and like something like what we're doing with Paracore and Pear Drive is a very micro. I genuinely believe both need to be thought about. Like both need to be actually addressed and they might marry together really well for sure.
- [114:52]
A
That's why like I think we should work together. That's why I included you in the, the chat for that We've been working at.
- [114:58]
B
Yeah, I've been trying to keep up with it.
- [115:01]
A
There's a lot happening.
- [115:02]
B
There's a lot. There's a lot. But I've been trying to keep up with it.
- [115:05]
A
I appreciate that. But just know that like, for whatever 1% of understanding of my grand vision, you only know 99% of it, basically. You don't know 99%.
- [115:22]
B
You're missing it. I got it.
- [115:23]
A
You're missing a lot of it.
- [115:24]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [115:26]
A
I want you just to be aware that I'm essentially playing five dimensional chess. Absolutely. In ways that I think that we're going to see a paradigm shift in how core dev is treated. And in my opinion, I think the only changes that will happen to Bitcoin are the ones that are necessary for it to function. And so that's why I think 110 is actually there is a grain of truth behind there's a couple, actually it's multiple and people are not talking about it with a clear minded perspective. We should instead be building from first principles and solving the problem in a more real way. If the problem is that people think it's unfair, that like people are inscribing a bunch of crap on your node, we can absolutely solve that. And like, like all we have to do really is just like take those blocked at DAT files and compress them and put them into Carbonado. Carbonado has compression encryption, stream verification and forward error correction codes built into the protocol. And I just, I'm finalizing V2 of that protocol right now. Not just using Rust, but also Lean proofs. And eventually when Systems Lean is finished, hopefully I'll even get that there too. Systems Lean allows you essentially to devise the entire implementation in Lean itself, similar to how Idris 2 works, where you can essentially compile ahead of time to the most efficient C possible. And you do that by proving everything around it. And just like the bare minimum C necessary to accomplish the task according to your proofs and your oracles and your different various lemmas and proofs and theorems. And there's no residue. Right. Like, so, like once you get to like the.
- [117:06]
B
Are you suggesting, just so I can clarify it, are you suggesting that the route you're taking will allow compression of the data in the chain while still verifying its validity?
- [117:17]
A
Oh, not just that, like, that's one level of understanding it. But I'm saying like we, we modify our nodes in such a way that if you don't want to store witness data, especially if it has inscriptions and other crap in it. If you don't really want to store that on your node, that's totally fine. You can just kind of prove that you like, you can use proofs to essentially not need it. And then if you ever did need it, you can pay someone else to access the replica essentially. So there's like monetization, ingress and egress and durable storage over time. Archival. There's also going to be a distinction between encrypted and unencrypted data because encryption is also built in the protocol. There's multiple layers of encryption, by the way. I'm complaining, but like a lot of shit. It's kind of a bit of a catch and sink right now because it's like the most highly paranoid form of encryption I can imagine. Like it uses not just AES 286, it uses also Chasha 2705. And so it's multiple layers of stream ciphers. And the keys also have the basis in both has based cryptography, which is one of the most conservative forms of asymmetric cryptography.
- [118:34]
B
Yeah. And that's, that's the one you're talking about, the one that's quantum resistant. Right?
- [118:37]
A
The. Well, I mean they've always been quite resistant since 1977. Right. Like since the Lampert signature was first published. Like they understood that was like. Well actually they didn't actually understand quantum computing. That was David Deutsch and Richard Feynman. But like around that same time, like they were. Somebody realized eventually that oh, by the way, there's no structure to these hashes so we can't really attack them in the usual way that you could, you know, elliptic curve or rsa. So like, like that's interesting. Right. And then we later developed deeper insights into how they work too and their limitations. Like how SHA2 like it's a lot better than SHA1 in that it has pre image resistance. But what about second pre image resistance? You know, it's like, it's, it's. It's like that old. That, that meme. Like where is. It's just, it's like, oh, that's really cool. You know, that has pre image resistance. But what a second pre image resistance. You know, it's like that's why like tagged hashes and shotgun 6D. Like that's why that exists. Like if you look into like the. How HMAC 512 is designed, it's not just like a naive like SHA 512. It's a message authentication code that solves the problem of second pre image Resistance by adding data at the front and the end to protect against the extension attacks. And so that's cool, right? And then also maybe like, oh, we figured out how to make one time signatures, but maybe if we can drop a hyper tree and we can commit in advance to a tiered version of some kind of few. It's just like there's all these like Sphinx is also like a. It's funny to me, Sphinx is. And Sphinx is cool. Like it builds on top of Sphinx and Winternet's one time signatures and Watts +C and with the checksum and there's like all sorts of really cool stuff that Jonas Nick was working on. But the thing is, I think that work is also incomplete. There's some problems that I don't like how he solved it, like with xmss and how you can't deterministically recreate that and like from first pencils. I wonder why does it have to be non deterministic, right? Like can't you just like, you know, like, why do you need to keep all your XMSS codes? Like couldn't you derive that from essentially a prnv, right? Like couldn't you not pseudo randomly generate those numbers? And if not, why not? Like let's prove it. Like let's do the work and figure that out. Like I would like, you know, a deterministic capability to recreate from seed entropy, you know, the entire, all of that. The things that it would ever think to commit to and the fact that like XMSS has this additional data that keeps it from being portable is interesting to me. And that's why like, you know, sync builds on the SLHDSA escape hatch. And so like that's interesting too. And there's. We can. Dude, there's. So that's another. All of that is a rabbit hole. It's huge rabbit hole. All of everything we talked about. I wish we had more time.
- [121:23]
B
Honestly, I'm literally, I think like dinner's about to happen. We're already at 6:30. Because there's. Dude, there's so many, so many questions and clarifications on things that I wanted to kind of get into, but we keep going. You were in the middle of a thought a little bit before we almost took a tangent.
- [121:43]
A
Look, look, the, the thing I want people to understand is that there is a possibility that we might be able to have our cake and eat it too. And not in a magical way, but approvable, simple way that essentially allows us to have the archive node capability on our nodes. But Delegate regions that we're not interested in to others. So witness data after inscription 0 block 677 6. You know, whatever it was op return data of course, right. Like you can't even spend it anyway, so why keep it around? So like we should absolutely be like doing some clever stuff with our node software in a provable way. That's why I'm very interested in BTC verified Keegan McClelland's work on essentially creating a Lean proof spec that I'm working to extend through systems Lean and having essentially a self hosted way to linearize and formalize the problem using formal advanced mathematics essentially to prove that with no residue or maybe or sorry or whatever you call it. You know that essentially like there are no gaps in the, in the, in the work that is essentially accelerated by these thought amplification mechanisms that we've become so fond of. I guess I don't think they're conscious or aware or even want to be, but they can absolutely think in the similar way that our hippocampus and subconscious thought and dreams kind of are unconscious forms of thinking. They don't really necessarily know that like what they're doing, but they can play around with the little shapes. Right. And so they can essentially help you construct these lane proofs in a way that when you run them they work. And so that's a really powerful feedback loop that we should absolutely be capitalizing on. And as a consequence of all of that work, maybe we can resolve a tension in the Bitcoin community around decentralized storage, around essentially paying people for their resources and we should create efficient storage markets that value and can prove replication factor long term and then build on that. And that's why I forked Ord and I called it Lord. It's layered or it is scaling inscriptions and I'm taking out the part that. So I'm keeping the APIs. The rest APIs will be the same, the CLI will be the same. But what it will do in the background in the back end is it's going to essentially commit to. You can run it two different ways. Well actually three, you could do legacy would be built on open timestamps that is free. But you can also do it in two other ways. One, in such a way where your commitment will only be mined by. And by the way this is a Merkle commitment. So it's only 32 bytes of data and it's not based on SHA2, it's based on Blake. 3 Ultimately and it's more modern and more quantum resistant but regardless, there's. And faster but which is important, right?
- [124:42]
B
I love Blake 3. That's what we use in paradrive stuff.
- [124:45]
A
Yeah, for sure. Like and. And. And there are really clever ways to use Blake 3 if you look into Bao and Bow Tree and like the eero efforts like the N0 computer. I'm working with Rudiger Klein because I knew him from, you know, the rust IPFs days. Like he. He and me and. David.
- [124:59]
B
David.
- [125:00]
A
I. Forget it. Daniel. Daniel Kravitz. No, not. No, David. There's this other guy. I haven't seen him in a while. I hope he's doing okay. I think he lives in Switzerland. He's like really talented. Rust dev and worked on Rust IPFS but. And it built some really cool stuff with Aegis 2 actually to prove essentially that you could do this auto merge capability of CRDTs and CRDTs are really cool for local first applications. That's where I think the future is going to be. We're going to make full use of the hardware that we have, starting with laptops and desktops. And we're also going to make full use of our nodes and our node hardware. We're going to monetize our storage. We're going to also be able to do mutual aid. We're going to essentially incentivize the protocol to behave in certain ways we expect. So there's going to be a 110 flavor of operation. There's going to be a legacy OTS operation mode of operation. And the 110 will have two flavors. It'll have a Pro and Anti and so and that'll be built into the protocol like a commitment will be different on the 110 flavor than it will be on the anti 110 flavor. And essentially that allows you to create an incentive for people to operate the chain as people would expect it to. And as a consequence, I want people basically to archive, you know, this entire moment right now. I want to build the tools that we can go and archive everything people were saying so they can't just delete their tweets and say they didn't say that. I think that's important. Accountability is important essentially for this paradigm shift for people to admit they were wrong and why. And you can't just lie. We need to hold the liars accountable. We need to build the technology necessary to do so. And through that, after that there will be resolve. The tension is really. The tension around 110 is not this and that. CSAM. I don't like this system Argument because it uses first of all law enforcement language which our lower laws of man. Like you should understand that CP is wrong at any. Regardless of what it is or who is enforcing the law, you should always understand that it's wrong anyway. So regardless of like the CCM argument, because it's a very statist argument, I really dislike it. But it's also a complete distraction. The real tension, I think, which is going to essentially reach crisis levels this year. Like, if you ever read like, I'm actually popping up my laptop with it. There's this book, Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of scientific revolutions from 1962. He basically explains that like science doesn't advance until like our understanding of nature essentially. Remember science used to be called natural philosophy. Our understanding of nature doesn't advance until there is a crisis and you resolve the tension with proof. And then it's a paradigm shift. That's where we get the term, by the way, paradigm shift. People might think like I'm filling my head with a bunch of AI slop. No, dude, I'm reading books, dude. That's where the book the term came from. Like paradigm shift. That's where it came from, dude. Like for just saying like my goodness. And maybe, maybe if your model, whatever you're using is telling you par is using the term paradigm shift, maybe that's, that's important because maybe it spent a lot of attention, you know, in the process of, you know, Relu and Matt Mull and you know, like what is it called? Back propagation, gradient descent. Right. Maybe it's spending a lot of attention on that part because it's, it's interesting. Like the, the Thomas Kuhn's ideas stand up to this day. And applying them to the question right now of will 110 activate? I think is a question really of is Bitcoin a reflection of insights in nature and mathematics? Is it instead a reflective of some other thing that isn't really aware of the deeper nature of essentially the problem. So like, like, and, and there's always like, you know, another kind of like kernel wisdom people should remember is like the industry doesn't evolve or change until people have a deeper realization of how to better play the game. And that's always been the case in the course of Bitcoin and just entrepreneurship and innovation in general. It's just like we figure out the rules of the game better and they become more clear and the people who are clear minded about the rules of the game, including say like D. Hawk, right, the founder of the Visa Network and he wrote a really fascinating book about chaos and order, the chaotic age. But regardless of that, all of that is really fascinating. Useful to me. And just shortcut all of this. I'm almost 99% certain that 110 will activate.
- [129:31]
B
Really?
- [129:32]
A
It'll activate this? Yeah. And not only that, I think there will be an accapitulation after October where if the month of October passes and 110 is still not merged by core devs, it essentially reflects that they are no longer relevant because they failed to be good stewards of the protocol.
- [129:52]
B
Interesting. Interesting. I hate that we just got there at the time that we need to cut it off, but let's call this a cliffhanger because I want to maybe we'll talk about this a little bit in, in private or whatever and potentially do another show or short video or something as a follow up. Because I do have to cut it off here. But in. In other conversation at least, if, at the very least, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to dig into your. Your reasoning as to why, and we will just say to the audience, screw you guys. Y' all don't get to know.
- [130:26]
A
First of all, by the way, just Guy, I respect you a lot of. But right now I think the less I talk about 110, the better.
- [130:33]
B
Okay. Would you talk about it in private?
- [130:37]
A
I would love to revisit this conversation in September.
- [130:39]
B
In September. Okay. Okay. And I'll. I'll hold you to that. And we'll. We'll look back on how you thought about it then and what played out and how it changed, aligned or misaligned.
- [130:52]
A
Yeah, sounds good.
- [130:53]
B
All right, well, dude, this has been. This has been a trip. Thanks for shooting me a message. Sorry I was a little bit late.
- [131:00]
A
Hopefully I didn't like, like strike you as, like, insane. That's something that a lot of people have been saying.
- [131:05]
B
We've had lots of conversations, so I was already aware of what, how this conversation was going to go because it's, it's always wild.
- [131:14]
A
But, but like, like, like ideally, like, you're not concerned about my mental health, right?
- [131:18]
B
Like just the, the. Only the hat. Only the hat. But everything else. Everything else were good.
- [131:26]
A
I mean, it is a tappered wizard's hat. It's because I wear it because as I said earlier, like, I wanted to wear something that essentially says I might know something you don't.
- [131:37]
B
Well, I'm interested. I've been following what you, what you've been doing in the, in the signal group, and sometimes And I, and then I've probably got 50% of what you said. And it's mostly just because we get into references that I have vague ideas about. Right. I don't have concrete information on. But.
- [131:55]
A
Oh, one thing I want to also make sure I say is if you were worried about bip360, like, if you want bip360 to succeed, you should also want 110 to succeed because 110 is really important. Let's just say in a similar vein.
- [132:10]
B
Okay, interesting.
- [132:13]
A
Yeah. From first principles, you want to make sure that Bitcoin is there for us in the future as essentially a shadow economic system that we can rely on as a backup, a plan B, let's say, in case there is economic populism in that there's a rise of that that's happening now in Germany, I think is kind of the hotspot right now for a revival of, of essentially the kind of rhetoric that the Nazis used, except now they're gay. Like, like the leader of the AFD is a. Is a homosexual. So it's like, it's like literally like it's Mark Twain always said, you know, it doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And, and like the AFD sounds to me a lot like they bring up a lot of national social attacking points. And if you read Hayek, you know, you know, the 1944 the Road to Serfdom, amazing book. Like, it basically shuts the door, in my opinion, on socialism. If that doesn't do it for you, then read his essay the Use of Knowledge in Society, which he publishes in the next year. But he says like, and all of that back test us really well. Like, like China and the USA are a lot more similar than they are different. They're as far removed from their founding economic principles, from Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and, and Milton Friedman much later. But like Adam Smith and like, you know, Andrew Jackson, right. Like, like kind of things they thought about and the way they thought about economics and central banking that back tests and explains things a lot better than the ideas of Mao and Lenin and Marx. And so. But we're all far removed from the original founding principles either way. But China's a lot more capitalist since 1978, the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Our economy is a lot more socialist since 1971. And so the mixed economy, unfortunately, I think is also going to have a capitulation and ideally we avoid that capitulation. I'm sorry, cutting in your. Dude, if. I'm so sorry, dude, but I just. Yeah, Again, I'm going to cut it off. Honestly. You need to go spend time with your family, with your son. I am so grateful he gave me as much time as you did and I would love to revisit this conversation and whether I was right.
- [134:21]
B
We will definitely, definitely in September. Let's put it on the calendar, man. Thanks for joining me, dude. Have a good afternoon. Later, as I noted, we will have links and details in the show notes so there will be plenty of things to check out. Many of the things that he mentioned and one that I actually had meant to bring back up in a, in part of the earlier discussion, but Girdle, Escher and Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid is a book that I had explored. I think I only ever read like a third of it, but I was like kind of fascinated with it before. I ended up getting kind of distracted and never coming back to it. But a lot of what we talked about in this conversation has me like wanting to go back down that rabbit hole again. And I always thought it was really interesting and some of the, some of the kind of out there theories that he touched on I feel like have a really interesting basis when you kind of try to unify what a lot of the various theories or people think about what we can know and what we don't know. So anyway, I just wanted to recommend that book in addition because I know I will be actually going back to explore it again with that. Don't forget to check out Hunter Beast. Don't forget to follow what he's doing. It will be really interesting to watch and I definitely want to get his perspective on what's happening as BIP110 reaches its, you know, its activation and signaling days and all of that. So we will see. We will see. He's pretty confident the follow up will probably be interesting with that. Thank you guys for listening. Do not forget to check out the guys take YouTube channel that will also be down in the show notes. We've just kicked this off so trying to get attention to it or let people know that it's out there is really, really important and it is hugely helpful for you guys to share it out and go subscribe and like just to give it a little bit of momentum because we're putting a lot of effort into our video content over there and I, I really think it's going to be good. This is, this feels like the right direction for what I want to do and how I can like target very specific and concise ideas and, and hit them as like an aggregate for you know, the hundred or so things that I end up exploring around something. So that will there will be a lot of news and like topical stuff, but then also just kind of like explanations. Like essentially an extension of my two sats things. They're just kind of all becoming guys decks. So check those out. Don't forget to subscribe, share it out. Don't forget to get your bitbox discount right down in the show notes. That's also another great way to help out the show and I thank you guys for listening and sticking with me and I will catch you you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then, that is our two sats.
- [137:34]
A
La.