← TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
#702: The State of Bitcoin Protocol Development in 2026 with Coinjoined Chris
01:18:45
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- [00:07]
A
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
- [00:11]
B
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
- [00:16]
C
So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
B
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:37]
C
Chris, I've been. I've been enjoying your game, sir, online. I had to reach out and say, I need to get you on the podcast to talk about bitcoin. How are you doing?
- [00:46]
B
Well, I'm very slattered, thank you.
- [00:49]
C
You're. You're the tallest troll on. On bitcoin Twitter. How's it feel?
- [00:53]
B
That is actually something I've never heard. Like, I've. I've heard like tallest shit poster, but tallest troll like that. That makes a lot of sense, I take it. Yeah.
- [01:06]
C
I was thinking, guess what? We're three days past the 17th anniversary of the Genesis block, and I think you've been in bitcoin for quite a while. We had the pleasure of meeting in person in Riga, Latvia, at the Baltic honey badger conference in 2024. Haven't caught up since. And like I said, I've been observing your game on X. And I think 2025 particularly was a crab year in bitcoin. Price. We sort of ranged and people get very crabby when they range. We had narratives popping up, whether it was the up return limits getting lifted. Bit 444 bitcoin knots and we tied the year up with quantum fud. What are your thoughts on just the state of discourse around bitcoin Protocol development specifically.
- [01:57]
B
So protocol development I think is doing like, it's just chugging along just fine. Besides this critical bug that they just found in Bitcoin version 30 that deletes legacy wallets. But other than that, I tried to make light of the filter situation the entire last year, I think, and very happy that we moved on now to like the quantum FUD. Like, I think February 1st is like before four signaling day or something. I have not seen a single node signal on that or like a single miner. Yeah, that's not going to happen. But.
- [02:36]
C
Why do you think these narratives manifest within bitcoin Quantum specifically for me was like, come on guys, we've been talking about this for years now.
- [02:49]
B
Yes, some people suffer from like main character syndrome. And then it's a good angle to remind people hey, I'm still around. I mean the, the irony like I have nothing against Nicota even though he blocked me. But like he, he like came up with these very nice dice. The FUD bitcoin dice where Quantum was one side and now he's investing with his VC fund or he led an invest in a company that makes blockchains Quantum Secure and that company stocked it on LinkedIn. Now proudly says we are making Solana Quantum Secure. Which sure scams NBCs. I'm fine with that. But preaching or he ended with everybody's going to dump on bitcoin now because I said so and I wrote this blog post and I think that's too much. I mean it's worthwhile having these conversations and I like to see that our smartest cryptographers are working on something and that we're not unprepared and we actually have contingency plans. But yeah, I mean it's just boredom I think because not that much happens and everything has been going too well. Price has been quite high. Need a new narrative.
- [04:07]
C
Yeah. And now as the price is drifting higher to start the year people. I haven't heard any Quantum FUD since around Christmas time.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah, I mean it's going to happen soon that they are factoring larger numbers. There was this paper I think Reardon Brand Black, he went through it and who was the physicist from Fidelity? Bob. What's his name?
- [04:36]
C
Miguel Rass.
- [04:37]
B
Yes, Miguel Rath. There was a paper claiming oh we have a broken a 6 bit ECC key, like an Elliptikov key. And then he went through this paper and he saw okay, you guys guessed 100 times and a six bit key to the power of six is like 64, like 2, 2. There's 64 possibilities and you guessed 100 times. So I'm not that flustered that any sort of key is being broken in the near term future, let alone like 128 bits.
- [05:13]
C
Again, what do you think of just like the broad state of Bitcoin itself, not the protocol? Well, the protocol and the industry you've been working as we were discussing before this on Satskeeper, you're working on a bitcoin insurance company.
- [05:27]
B
I mean I have like a few companies that deal with self custody, with inheritance and insurance of Bitcoin mainly I'm focusing my energy on the store value aspect of Bitcoin. I wish more people would use it as a medium of exchange, but that simply is not the reality. I use my Bitbox and they have a bit refill integration and from time to time I use bitrefill to purchase goods and stuff. But I know that I'm in the absolute minority and I would have thought like 10 years ago, in 10 years from now we would see a lot more adoption that way. And again, I'm Europe poor. I was not blessed with like 4 million square terminals where you can now pay with bitcoin everywhere. I think this is like the most enormous news that has happened last year. But yeah, I think so. More companies are coming in, more like retail investors. The interest is not really there or isn't back like it was in 2021. But we have a lot of interest from institutional holders to have bitcoin on the balance and have it properly in self custody. So that's what I observe.
- [06:40]
C
You mentioned that you're euro poor. What is the state of the bitcoin industry and the posturing towards bitcoin as an asset from European officials? And what are the boots on the ground reports of individuals?
- [06:55]
B
So I reside here in the small Grand Ducy of Luxembourg. I'm sure you can point it on a map. As an American high school educated person and our finance minister, he just spoke in Bitcoin. Bitcoin Amsterdam, the sovereign wealth fund of Luxembourg purchased 1% of their holdings into IBIT, which is a ginormous step, I would say. Luxembourg is a small country, 600,000 inhabitants, but ton and ton of people from Belgium and France and Germany come here to work. And there is this thing where if you work for 10 years, even if it's minimum wage, you are entitled to a fat pension once you reach retirement age. And that was paid out from this wealth fund that this. It's not a kingdom. We have a grand duke and that was set to expire in 2045 or something because markets, whatever, and they're spending too much money, as all governments do. So I think it's like the right choice to pivot a little bit into bitcoin exposure. So I'm bullish on that. I'm natively German. I'm not that bullish on that country. We have a really strong bitcoin community and I would say of all the European countries, we have the most toxic bitcoin only maximal crowd. Like if I go to a French bitcoin meetup, it will be a bitcoin meetup, but people will. Yeah, showed you Iota and Ethereum and Solana and all those good things.
- [08:30]
C
Iota is still around.
- [08:32]
B
Yeah, Iota is German, by the way. And it is quantum secure because I know that I invested like in 2015, 2016 when it did come out, I bought that whole bullshit. David Sonsiber was his name. Like, oh, it's not binary, it's ternary. Like you have minus 1 plus 1 and 0. And I bought this whole quantum bullshit like 10 years ago. And my iota bags during my shitcoin period, yeah, those would have been some cool bitcoin. But yeah, it's still around. Just yesterday I saw a paid ad for iota which is insane to me, but they were funded in bitcoin. I guess.
- [09:20]
C
I remember the iota day, my shitcoiner day around days around that time too. It seems like we've been in bitcoin around the same amount of time. What drew you to it originally?
- [09:31]
B
So I had a friend in university who was really into this, he was really paranoid and he gave me bitcoin for free. A ton of bitcoin. And I was thinking, hey, I don't need this. I have PayPal. I have all the means to pay for stuff and goods and services. And once it reached not euro parity was at 50 cents or so I sold my bag for a graphics card and then neglected it for two years. And then it came back and I was fuck, should I have kept this? But I was not a cypherpunk, I was an engineer. I was at university with technical minded people and there was a lot of conversation about bitcoin but I didn't grock it until let's say 2017 when I realized, hey, hang on, all my stock gains like I came in and I always, I'm gladly imitous. Like I came in for number go up. Like I always say, like there's two, two kinds of bitcoiners, people that come for number go up and fucking liars. And I admit that like people come into it and then they change and then they stay for the sovereignty and they stay for the freedom money and like the fuck you money and those great, great aspects. But. And maybe today with all the education that we have, like a lot more people come into it from that side without this number go up. But back then I would wager everybody went into bitcoin because wow, this is an asset that goes up. And that's why my genesis number go.
- [11:05]
C
Up is the best technology that humans have ever come into contact with. It is somebody. Because we were discussing this earlier, like I, I use bitcoin as a medium exchange pay. Logan is on here now. He gets paid in Bitcoin every two weeks. Other other members of our staff get paid in bitcoin by my VPN service with bitcoin and the, the payments aspect is very useful, incredibly important. But I think people try to over index on that. Even though I use it every day literally as a payments means, people over index on that and try to fade number go up because it's like we just sound greedy here. But I think it's. You get down to bitcoin's sort of path towards success, you need number to go up massively over time.
- [12:00]
B
Yeah, I mean it's inevitably people will have more eyeballs on it and more people will accept bitcoin and want to be paid in bitcoin. If it's like crab walking for five years, I'd be fine. But I would assume that adoption would not grow as steadily. I use bitcoin daily again in my company. I pay people in Canada and in Australia and I'd rather put a bullet in my brain to do a wire transfer and wait three or five days and pay like 50 bucks in fees from a German bank to a Luxembourg bank to a Singaporean and it takes ages. And with bitcoin and it doesn't get old every time I get a separate invoice and I just pay it in a couple seconds and then the guy texts me, man, are you ever asleep or what? No. It's like sending this bearer asset like this digital cash at the end of the globe in a second and there's nothing I can do to take or claw it back. And that guy is paid and no intermediary has been paid. Maybe like, I don't know, lightning or an on chain fee of like a couple cents right now. That's amazing. But I get that. I'm like an enthusiast. Like I run my own nodes. I have enough liquidity management to pay any invoice. I pay several million sats easily. When other people struggle with that, the technology is not or the UX is not there yet. I'm really bullish on Arcade on all these things and I'm happy that people like smarter people work on that. But yeah, I want to see more people use it.
- [13:32]
C
Are we a dying breed? People have run our own nodes and self custody.
- [13:38]
B
I think if the last year taught us anything is that running a node makes you a bitcoin. There's a lot of LARP bound around that. But every customer that I get, they're really privacy conscious these days. It used to be only the tinfoil wearing weirdos. We're into this us, I'm using a vpn. That is weird nowadays. It's absolutely normal. And now when I onboard people, I'm a big fan of Liana Wallet, I always explain the privacy implications of connecting your wallet descriptor to an external node. Because then of course you leak your holdings. Like there's no loss of your keys, but you lose some privacy. And especially with like a wallet like Liana, you can like it's a single click and have a prune node installed fully. Like there's no porting magic. Like everything happens in the background and you have like 35 gigabytes of blockchain data downloaded over the next two, three days or so. And I show this to people and they're excited. Wow. Now I have my own full node. I can onboard People now 100% the right way. They get like a hardware signer, they get like a multisig, they get a node and I think that interest has grown. So no, we're not a dying breed. Not on my one.
- [15:02]
C
That's good to know. What do you think about. Obviously Jameson Lopp has been following the wrench attacks on bitcoiners and I think that is. And then as somebody who's really focused on self custody, multi sig. Self custody specifically. What do you think about the conversation around self custody and the fears that are beginning to increase because of these wrench attacks, which if you look at it, you take 8 billion people into account and all right, maybe we'll shrink the total addressable market to the amount of people that hold bitcoin or wider crypto to maybe hundreds of millions. I think there was 35, $5 wrench tax last year. How do you.
- [15:48]
B
I think it was even more like. I think Jameson Lopp actually, like he used to manage this GitHub all by himself and now he has like somebody who puts all those data entries in there. Because it was like one a week, like 52 or something, at least. Yeah, I mean that drove me to launch Bitsurance. Like I know how to perfectly protect my Bitcoin against any form of cyber threats that is solved. Like we have hardware signups, we have geographically distributed multisigs. I would say it is because the magic of Bitcoin script, as opposed to any other shitcoin. Like you have all the primitives, all the security built in natively on Bitcoin to be protected against hacking. You can be socially engineered. But most of these hackings, again, they are down to user error. In the end, the person being hacked signed the transaction because he was Duped. That is solved. I would wager. Actually, there has not been a hardware signing device that has been hacked. We all wear these tinfoil hats. I don't know, cold card with a ton of secure elements, et cetera. Everything that is solved. But I, for the life of me could not figure out what I would do in the event somebody kicks in my door. If somebody comes in and threatens me, my family, or anybody I love.
- [17:11]
C
I.
- [17:12]
B
Can of course, start drawing a chart and tell them, hey, I have a five or six, whatever multisig. I have this time decaying thing. You can't physically have to abduct me to different places for me to sign the transaction. Wouldn't it be great if I could give them an old ledger or something with some bitcoin, even a larger sum, and they would be happy and left me alone maybe. Why can't they insure something like this? We're looking around, like in 2022, 2021, when we launched the idea, like, the company was founded in 2022, and nobody would want to touch bitcoin as a insurable medium. Whereas you can insure your gold boss against like a robbery, you can insure your fine art against robbery. That's no problem. But bitcoin back then was uninsurable. And that's why we launched insurance with the hope to give you a bargaining chip in the event of a $5 wrench attack. And since then, like, Anchor Watch has also come along, and I think that is the last missing mosaic, like the puzzle piece in your perfect security setup if you have cyber protection plus $5 wrench protection.
- [18:23]
C
And what do you think changed the minds of Lloyds of London and other insurers out there that are getting them comfortable too?
- [18:33]
B
Becca is very persistent. I think she changed her mind there. So, like, we, when we launched, we talked to virtually every single insurance company in Europe, and they laughed in our face and, like, closed the door. And some people reinvited us and kept, like, stringing us along. And sooner or later you realize, oh, there's like two people, three people, five people in these calls. Suddenly you realize, oh, you're being abused for educating their staff on bitcoin. But they're never going to sign or underwrite your product. And that abruptly changed in 2024. When was it like, the Bitcoin ETF launched? I think as soon as Larry Fink blessed this asset as like, okay, this is here to stay. You get a callback from Allianz, you get a call back from all these other insurance companies because they Realize, okay, this is not just some crazy assets, there is some money to be made. Insurance companies, they need to like invest in products that are of interest to be insured. And yeah, that was a blessing disguise. Like we launched in 2022, we had a white label insurer which was like kind of unknown. And yeah, they, they went under sadly not because of us, because they had like a financing round that like 50 million euros. And then by the end of 2024 they had to file chapter 11. No customers of ours was hurt by that. We could migrate and now we have Liberty Mutual, one of the largest specie insurers in the world, as an underwriter and they are not messing around. It's good to have these financialization developments. I'm not a big fan of BlackRock, but it helped bring the conversation forward.
- [20:23]
A
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- [20:33]
C
Embeds into a two or three multisig.
- [20:35]
A
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- [21:07]
C
The exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a bit.
- [21:09]
A
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- [22:26]
C
It's weird how social, the social aspect of a social signaling from those we perceive to be successful comes into play here. It is weird. I think that's another thing I've been grappling with. But just sitting back and observing over the last few years since the ETF's launch and here in the States as we've had these treasury companies launch and Michael Saylor really skyrocketed himself to the top of the bitcoin fame, if you will. For lack of a better term is this sort of confrontation with the cypherpunk fruits that bitcoin was founded in and grew up with and the suits coming and saying all right, we like this asset too and people reacting to it, I think. I mean I've always been in MBK's camp where Bitcoin is successful. Everybody's going to want to adopt it and you just have to.
- [23:24]
B
Exactly, you just have to accept great thing. What do you expect? Everybody wants a piece of pie of the pie. If we build something this good, of course nation states will come. Of course the financial players will come. Bitcoin is for anybody who wants it and it strengthens your network. The more greedy somebody is, the better it is for everybody else. But there's entirely new dynamics now, I don't know with Venezuela. I don't know if that is fake news or something. Really, really. It's really weird that like okay, there's a state with 600,000 Bitcoin and Donald has just abducted.
- [24:06]
C
We were talking before we hit record about how Odell likes to troll in the chat he's actually trolling me in the chat right now because I did a short video on the Venezuelan story and then our team here at TFTC clickbaited it and the tweet says, what if I told you a DEA informant might control access to 600,000 Bitcoin? That's a wild theory, but I don't know. Do they have 600,000 bitcoin? Maybe.
- [24:30]
B
I mean it's just like some assumption and I'm pretty sure that Maduro did not. I mean he had like five different outlook changes, maybe at like a lot of hardware signers stuck in Nike.
- [24:42]
C
What is the European perspective on what the US just did over the last five days?
- [24:47]
B
So demonstrably it's not constitutional what you did, pretending like otherwise, it's like a little bit like muddying the water is there? But these constitutional rules, they work in stable systems currently the world is not dead. And I think the general reaction in Europe would be like Orange man bad and he can't do that. But if you talk to anybody who has actually lived under Venezuelan communism, they understand viscerally, they're very relieved, they're very happy that he has been removed. And it's like one of the cleanest military operations to have ever occurred. So clean that some people might say, okay, this was like he cut a deal and voluntarily came to the drop off spot. But my take is again, this was necessary. I'm happy he's gone. And even though I believe more so than Trump, I believe in soft power and he does not believe in that at all. Like soft power only works on people that listen to reason. And there are some international players right now who would not listen to reason. And yeah, occasionally reminding everyone where the larger stick resides that recalibrates some incentives much faster than some UN statements or some European thing are wagging. So yeah, I'm on board with this move, but I would not want to be on the receiving end.
- [26:26]
C
I think there was definitely a pre range deal. If you look at how happy Maduro is when he's sitting with the DEA agents, it's like you knew something was happening. But going back to again, who knows whether or not they have 600,000 bitcoin. But people have been speculating and these stories been out there. It's been actually funny to watch the Venezuela bitcoin story hit mainstream because I'm sure as you know, if you've been in the industry for a decade, you know that Venezuelans, I think on a per capita basis were some of the largest adopters of Bitcoin simply because they needed to, because they had hyperinflation and a dictatorship that they were trying to evade. And bitcoin mining was big in Venezuela. I think they were top three country at one point, about 10 years ago. Then Maduro came in and ruined that by seizing all the mining operations. Obviously the diaspora that has resulted from the socialist dictatorship over the last 25 years, you have people sending money back to Venezuela using bitcoin and stablecoins. And so bitcoin's been a big theme in Venezuela for well over a decade now at this point. But I think the theories about how the Maduro regime may have acquired 600,000 bitcoin. Again, whether or not they did is yet to be determined. But the theory is that they were doing two things, one of which was swapping gold for bitcoin with other countries. They're gold rich country and they wanted to diversify those gold holdings into bitcoin because it allows them to do things that you can't do with gold, mainly send large amounts of money over the Internet. And then the other was they were selling oil, routing around sanctions, selling oil for tether and then converting that tether to bitcoin because they don't want tether to blacklist them. And if you think about them doing that, many, like you said, I do not like the Maduro, did not like the Maduro regime. I'm happy that he's out of power. But if let's run with the assumption that they did acquire 600,000 bitcoin and did it in that way, it's pretty cool because it highlights bitcoin's value prop, which is this neutral reserve asset outside the purview of the Five Eyes, the G8UN, whatever you want to call it.
- [28:47]
B
Yeah. I always said to me as a businessman, the number one use case is like international trade with bitcoin because it saves so much time and you can find enough crazy people on every continent that accept bitcoin and it makes things much, much quicker. I don't know. I have it not around me. I have this In Germany we're not trusted. Or in Europe in general, we're not trusted. With a shopping cart, you have to put a coin in there to release it. And I thought to get rid of the last fiat, I will create a bitcoin commemorative thing that you put in, but you can remove it immediately. You can crack essentially shopping carts. And I wanted to have this made out of brass. And I was looking where to manufacture this. And in China with Alibaba I found a brass molding company and they had commemorative coins with Ethereum and Monero et cetera already in their product lineup. And I asked them, hey, you manufacture this? Do you also accept bitcoin? And they said, yeah, sure we do. And instead of sending a wire transfer to Alibaba, it goes again. Luxembourg, Singapore, China takes at least three days and it costs me €50. I just sent Bitcoin with 22 minutes on chain. They confirmed the balance payment was not out yet. But the initial payment and like in less time than it took for them to like would have received the money via wire transfer. They already like CNC tool. They showed me pictures of like here, this is the tool. Like wow, this was fucking fast. And of course they could at any point could have like rugged me because there's no chargeback, but they wanted to have the other 50% of the money. And then they like delivered 2,000 of these like stamped brass coins to me. And I was like, wow, this is like international trade. This was like five years ago. Why would I ever use a wire transfer? People tell me, oh, I use transfer wise. Even there you pay a ton of fees and then the currency conversion and there's slippage and it takes time. And yeah, bitcoin just works globally.
- [30:59]
C
But now we have stablecoins, Stablecoins are here. Why do we need bitcoin at all?
- [31:06]
B
When people say Michael Saylor has done the most for bitcoin adoption, I always challenge that idea. He has done more than you and I probably, definitely.
- [31:15]
C
Ouch.
- [31:17]
B
I mean he has again also a very big stick. But Paolo Aruino, to me, he is the one guy in the space who discovered and understands product market fit. Like I'm not, I don't care about tether. Like I have no use for it myself. But I 100% understand why everybody in Argentina prefers the brand of dollar attached to something than like oh, this volatile asset of bitcoin. He has probably driven crypto adoption and with that also bitcoin adoption more than any other person.
- [31:53]
C
I would say globally, I would co sign that. And it's funny listening to him tell the origin story of tether and the stablecoin specifically because he's like, we had some customers asking for it and we thought it would be like $100 million market cap coin. So we did it and lo and behold, now we're one of the largest buyer of U.S. treasuries in the world. Competing.
- [32:17]
B
He wrote that entirely without cloud. Like he didn't wipe code it. Imagine you get to create this like before LLMs.
- [32:28]
C
And it's been funny watching over the years the tether FUD, obviously at Bitfinex. Who emerged after the 2016 Bitfinex hack?
- [32:39]
B
Again, I fell for the quantum, I fell for the Bitfinex. I felt, oh, you fell from Bitfinex, of course. I fully have thought, oh yeah, why is there no big four audit? Why aren't it? And then you see, okay, they had liquidation events where they paid out like 20% without flinching an eye. No bank would have survived that. They are fully funded nowadays. I believe that. But back then, I mean again, I'm a gullible person. I guess I believe that for some time.
- [33:12]
C
What was it? I think around the ftx? Yeah, I think the summer before the FTX blow up in summer 22, I think they had like a three day redemption of like 20 billion tether and handled it, handled it seamlessly.
- [33:29]
B
They are very, very liquid. I think like pound for pound, like with 200 employees or so, like they are the most profitable company on this face of the planet. I mean who's beating Tether as a company like in profitability?
- [33:42]
C
I don't think there's some vibe coder out there who's got a fire under his ass right now that's saying I'm going to be a company of one that is more profitable. I think it's going to be very hard to be more profitable than Tether. They're buying 8888.888888 Bitcoin per quarter. It's insane.
- [34:03]
B
I used to work in China and there they are really big into the number eight because it brings luck. And you had to pay like more if your phone number that you were assigned to had more aids. Like is there an association with that? Like what is the reason why? I mean I know the port is.
- [34:19]
C
Like 88883 but I'm assuming there's some. They're paying an homage to the Chinese tradition of admiring the number eight. That's just my assumption.
- [34:34]
B
But yeah, some superstition. Like I would also buy 8880 Bitcoin if I could, but different size pockets.
- [34:45]
C
You mentioned earlier you're excited about Arcade and that's something. Whether it's arcade or just arc. Generally you have competing ARC protocols, but ARC as a sort of high level protocol bringing new extensibility to bitcoin via second layer and being interoperable lightning, another second layer protocols. That's something that I've been really excited about and I think it's happening relatively under the radar behind the scenes. Not many people are paying attention, but I think the foundations for sci fi banking stack of the future are being built right in front of our eyes. If you combine Lightning E Cash Mints, Arkansas Liquid Liquid's having its day. It's been around for a decade now. People are finally starting to use it and then what else is there? You have Spark as well. It feels like we're getting to the point where you can really begin to build out the sovereign banking stack on top of the protocol.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah, I mean Bitcoin is like we have the scarcity with the limitedness through that and we can verify it and then yeah, I've been using Arcade OS like the Arc implementation from not second btc. What's their name? I think they're called arc. ARC Labs.
- [36:04]
C
Arc Labs, yeah.
- [36:05]
B
The wonderful ux like with Lightning always hey, I have this bitcoin, why can't I receive? You need inbound liquidity. Like this conversation alone you would not pick up a normie onto anything non custodial. They were fine with Wallet of Satoshi. Speaking of Europa, Wallet of Satoshi closed their custodial wallets in Europe like like one week ago or so. Like the European Union asked for some data on the users and they said yeah, fuck it, we only like you get to withdraw your funds and you can move on to the semi self custodial world of Satoshi version.
- [36:42]
C
And they're using Spark right, Because they shut down the US years ago but they just came back with their noncustodial Spark implementation.
- [36:50]
B
So I think it's like some form of super not private multi sig thing. I have not looked all too much into it like I onboard people if it's custodial onboard them with Blynk. But yeah, I mean it's again the tangent I was on was like Lightning is too non user friendly and Arcade is amazing like for that. I mean it's again like beta but you can use Arcade OS and just deposit bitcoin and then you can pay Lightning invoices and it just works. It's like amazing. The only downside you have to be like come online like every month or so. Which for some people is too much of a hassle I guess. But it's amazing that this works without any soft fork which is like a nice thing.
- [37:34]
C
Yeah, I think they're working on that liveliness UX problem. Both the protocols where you can just automatically push things into the next round. What doesn't exist yet that you want to exist within bitcoin.
- [37:54]
B
I mean so I'm facing like we work with a traditional bank here in Germany, one of the first traditional banks to adopt a bitcoin only education program. And there we had like a very like 3,000 people German Bitcoin conference like just in October of last year. And there I had a ton like I had a couple of workshops and I did my quiz show and then in the workshops I was like flabbergasted and taken aback. How many older people attended? There was like 80 people and they were like 50, 60, 70 years old. Into bitcoin I was like wow. And the number one question that came up was always, how do I make sure that my kids get to my bitcoin? And I was like, yeah, we are kind of young. We are not really thinking about inheritance planning. We're not thinking about writing a will or something. But bitcoin is a special asset where if you want to inherit it properly, it's in self custody. It's not on Coinbase. On Coinbase it's trivial to have your death certificate and your family gets your bitcoin maybe. But with self custody bitcoin there are so many foot guns and in the audience there are so many really smart people asking these questions and think there needs to be much more user friendly experience for this kind of customer because you can do it with a cold card with a Bitbox Liana wallet I think is the best go to way to do bitcoin inheritance where you can just have a multisig that degrades essentially if you're inactive for 15 months. And there I would wish but this is only possible the soft fork that this 15 month relative time lock window would be increased to like 5 years or 10 years or something like that. So in the event that I kick the bucket that my air just has to wait. Can have a pre registered hardware signing device and just have to plug it in the UX there needs to improve like a little bit. And yeah, I mean Jack Dorsey is working on something cool there.
- [39:59]
C
Sup freaks?
- [39:59]
A
This rep is brought to you by good friends at Silent Silent creates every day Faraday gear that protects your hardware.
- [40:04]
C
We're in bitcoin, we have a lot of hardware that we need to secure your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable. You want to pick up silence gear, put your hardware in that. I have a tap signer right here. I got the silent card holder replace my wallet.
- [40:17]
A
I was using ridge wallet because it.
- [40:18]
C
Secured against RFID signal jacking silent. The cardholder does the Same thing. It's much sleeker. Fits in my pocket much easier. I also have the Faraday phone sleeve which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a bitcoin company. They're running on a bitcoin standard. They have a bitcoin treasury. They accept bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.comtftc to get 15% off anything or simply just use the code TFTC when shopping@slnt.com, patented technology, special operations approved. It has free shipping as well. So go check it out. Sup freaks? Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. You're looking fit these days. How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more, trying to get my swell on. Trying to be a good example for my young son to fit.
- [41:08]
A
Healthy dad.
- [41:09]
C
But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the earth. I drink probably three of these a day. With one packet of salt of the earth, I'm like in the pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. This is their creatine. I've added this to my regimen. They have it in these packets as well. Makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling. You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa. It's very, very nerve wracking. At times you have to explain hates. It's not what you think it is. It's creatine. I'm trying to get my swell on. Make sure you're staying hydrated. Have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement. I can bring the creatine wherever I need to. Just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym. Bring this to the gym drinking out of a glass bottle. Make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics into my body. Go to drinksoute.com, use the code TFTC and you'll get 15% off anything in the store. That's drinksoute.com, code TFTC. What software would you need like some sort of covenant?
- [42:24]
B
So yeah, covenants would be great. I mean, covenants essentially solve everything. They would make lightning better, they would make self custody better. Like we would have reactive instead of proactive security again. Yeah, I'm like, just fucking ship CTV now, please. Or from me, like CTV just in French, like template hash. Like, I'm fine with all of these, but like the development and that's like very slow. It's good that it's slow, I would say. But yeah, I'm afraid that too many people, Saylor being one of them, are like preaching the ossification of bitcoin, which in my opinion is way too early. Like, we're not there yet.
- [43:11]
C
We have the 20. What is it? The 2064 bug. We need a hard fork at least once.
- [43:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, eventually we need to have those again. We wasted the Entire year of 2025 talking about a fucking nothing burger, about a data carrier size limit increase, which is like there are so many strong economic incentives that this will not be used or abused. And like all these. Whatever. I'm not going to repeat Matt Kretter's favorite word now. But like all these things were such a distraction. We could have spent so much more time on actually improving bitcoin. And we know there are bugs like bip54 right now reached also some maturity. Like two years ago, three years ago, Matt Carollo had the great consensus cleanup proposal. And I think Antoine also worked on this now where we have the inflation. Not inflation, but the time warp bug, like the time warp attack that a miner can do. That has been fixed on testnet. Now this needs to be merged into bitcoin like in bit 50 forest layer. It's like a bunch of known bugs, known critical bugs that can be exploited now. And we should focus on actually discussing those instead of like, oh, nodes versus core or whatever. In my opinion. No.
- [44:28]
C
And you said CTV development slow, but CTV's been sort of in an end state for years now and it's been tested and bounties.
- [44:35]
B
I mean, they did. Everybody made this meme. Like this sort saw guy. Welcome to my saw trap. You're a bitcoin developer. There's a perfectly fine covenant proposal in front of you. Your challenge is it to leave the room and leave it untouched. It's perfectly fine. And everybody comes along, oh, let's have TX hash. It doesn't do enough. Let's do checkstick from stack two and this and let's put template hash. There's so many. It's the engineering CTV is good enough. It has been around, I think like 10 years now, 20, 15 or so. There's a big bounty. Nobody has come up with any way to exploit is safe. It will improve bitcoin dramatically. Yeah, I don't know how you could be opposed to this kind of thing.
- [45:27]
C
Well, make the sell. You mentioned reactive versus proactive, sort of defense and security. How would you describe those? And why would you argue that reactive is preferable?
- [45:39]
B
So right now, the way bitcoin works, we have coins, UTXOs. So if you have a big UTXO and you spend it, you risk all of your wealth and hope that 99% comes back as a change output. Which is a crazy design if you think about it. It's not like Ethereum is account based. You have a number and it goes up and down. But bitcoin is UTXO based. And every time you spend something, you risk your entire, like you dump out your entire bucket of gold and hope that the UTXO comes back and we make sure hardware signers check that the change output has not been tampered with, that there's some kind of attack that replaces the change output. And with all the security premise that we right now have. I make my living selling steel wallets. Like you embossed your 1224 words into steel and that is your backup that you need. If your hardware center fails, you go back to this and you can recover everything. But what if somebody else finds it? He has access to all of your bitcoin that is a single point of failure. And with a covenant. You can define, this is my vault. I put my bitcoin in here. I can define something like velocity, meaning I can only spend this much of my bitcoin per day, even if there is a breach, like the thief cannot steal all of the funds. Or I can define this is my vault. And from here I can only spend to this known address, like a hot wallet with like Kraken or another address that is also secure. There's an intermediate step and if I spend to any other address, I have this big red button that I can push and that will claw back the transaction and will send it to another 24 words hammered on steel hidden underneath a tree or somewhere. You have these options where you see, okay, somebody's happening and I have an undo option now. Or I can limit the amount of bitcoin that I can spend and all of these things if I point them out. Everybody, yeah, I want that. Everybody tells me, yeah, this sounds great. I want that. How do we Achieve this and we jump through a lot of hoops right now with these decaying multisigs with miniscript. Just having a covenant would make this much easier, much smaller and yeah, the UX much better.
- [47:59]
C
I've always been partial to James o' Byrne's framing of it. Obviously he had OP Vault, which looked at CTV and was like, okay, if people are afraid of check template, verify because they think it's going to bring too much, let's just focus on the vaulting aspect and bring it to bitcoin and make it so that his framing was make it so exchanges can never get hacked again. And I think that's if that's exactly what it does or that's one of the products of implementing something like opvault is you have the potential to create these sort of transaction structures that make it very hard to get hacked or not to get hacked. But to lose bitcoin after getting hacked, that seems like something that is very obvious. Like we should all want that. But we have the social aspects of bitcoin development that there is a wrench in that, which is good. It's a double edged sword. You want that sort of rough consensus gridlock.
- [48:58]
B
What does that exist?
- [49:00]
C
What is it?
- [49:01]
B
What is rough consensus?
- [49:02]
C
That's a great question. I think we're still trying to figure it out. I think it depends on what you're trying to get into. Bitcoin.
- [49:06]
B
Right. Rough consensus is if all the gray beards are agreed and then the plebs podcasters are also on board. That is rough.
- [49:19]
C
Well, let's dive into that. How do you view it? As a plebslop podcaster that has deferred to the graybeards in the past. What else am I supposed to do?
- [49:34]
B
That's the million dollar question. So I see it as my relative to educate as many people and have this, not astroturf. What is the grassroots like? People want this and people in institutions want this. And if there's enough incentive from a monetary perspective, people, again, you vote by having Bitcoin. Like if you are an economic player in this, you can vote and be vocal about it and then we can achieve another soft fork, I think. But for that we need proper code, property tests, benchmarks, fuzzing and a lot of checkboxes need to be ticked. And the problem with bitcoin is that every four years we have this big halving event and a lot of new people come in. And if we talk for four years, more new people come in and they say bitcoin is perfect. And then we just start from anew. So I think, yeah, to achieve another soft fork we need to figure out a way to get everybody on board in like one to two years to signal for something. But yeah, I'm kind of bearish on that.
- [50:52]
C
I am too. I mean, I'm also an advocate for Covenants. I know some people may find that blasphemous, but I think having been around for a while and understanding that reactive versus proactive sort of security posture that you just described, I mean, I think that's objectively preferable in my mind. And I think there's a lot of people who look at the magnitude of the changes that came with Segwit and Taproot and they have shell shock or post traumatic stress syndrome from the unintended consequences of those upgrades and they assume that something similar may happen with any other future soft fork, whether it be ctv, cat, whatever it may be. Which is not to say there isn't any unintended consequences that may arise. But I think people do not appreciate how relatively small of a change something like CTV is to Segwit or Taproot.
- [51:53]
B
Then again, block size increase is like three lines of code, like one parameter, so that is never a good indicator. Oh, it's just a teeny tiny bit of code. But yeah, the unintended consequences. I hear this a lot and to quote my favorite shitcoiner Jameson lopping, the unintended consequences are not quantifiable if you do it. And also they are not quantifiable if you don't do it. We don't know if you don't do this upgrade. Maybe bitcoin apathy will kill it or people will move on to other things and therefore because you can't quantify both of them, they even out. So unintended consequences always exist and that's why we move slowly and have a lot of eyes on there, so that they are not large mistakes being forked into Bitcoin. That's why I'm also not all too keen on having a quantum fork that is now with some non hardened post quantum algorithms or whatever. We need to take time and we need to improve it because there will be a lot of tech debt if introduce a new post quantum scheme that is way too heavy and way too difficult to verify.
- [53:17]
C
I just had Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudanov on talk about their hash based signatures, the research paper the Trinks. Yeah, and I don't think people understand or appreciate how much you need. You're going to need to overhaul every Wallet software that exists because. Yeah, that's why standards like psbt, you're.
- [53:41]
B
Gonna have to change.
- [53:45]
C
It's not like you just get quantum resistant addresses. You can use everything that's existed before. And that was the most disheartening thing about the narrative and the main character syndrome sort of forcing itself into the conversation. It's just like nobody's talking about this. It's like we've been talking about it for years.
- [54:03]
B
Yes. Like Steve Lee had an entire conference and invited you and he didn't come.
- [54:12]
C
Because if the rush to upgrade is, I would argue, riskier than being slow. Because like you mentioned earlier, like, who knows when quantum is actually going to manifest? And you can really.
- [54:25]
B
There are so many, there's so many canaries that will drop before, like ECDSA is threatened. Like again, we know with the Snowden leagues, the NSA is working on quantum computers for quite some time. And you can't assume that not everything will be out in the public. Not every achievement. But with all these other companies, these private companies like Google and Psiquantum and Microsoft and these small ionq, as soon as they factor a larger number and they need a bridge loan from a vc, they would come back and look what we did. They will, they will telegraph their advances. Oh, I'm just kicking my lap here. And we have more than a decade at least. And in that time again, journalists and Tim Roofing, they improved on the post quantum algorithms that the National Institute of Standardization and Technology suggested and said, yeah, we have these I think they call Sphinx algorithms. And then they said, hey, we take this out and we can shrink them, make them smaller. They're still way too large to have proper throughput in a block. But you see, there is steady progress and then there's like Lara Sheikhelman, a lot of other really smart people that are not VCs are working on it. Give them some time and do not distract them with bullshit discussions.
- [55:48]
C
I mean, that was the illuminating thing from my conversation with Jonas and Mikhail. Just like the wallet, like, particularly if you have low power, relatively low power hardware wallets, the amount of time it's going to take to sign those signatures is going to be significantly longer than it takes today. And if you've ever done something like a dlc, even on a mobile wallet, the signature sort of rounds for that take a minute, up to two minutes sometimes.
- [56:15]
B
Yeah, I mean like a multi sig with like 50 cosigners or something. Like you can test it. Like, you realize, I mean NDK is not cheap. It's like a security. The design decision to not have a fully functioning computer in there. You could add more oomph into this, of course, but you want to have it purpose built and now it's purpose built for that. But for post quantum we have to change mining, QR codes, wallets, nodes. There's a ton and ton of things and we need upgrade hooks so everybody's on board and like nothing breaks. It's these things where you realize, yeah, a decentralized system has a lot of advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages if you want to move into one direction quickly. Like a bank can do key rotation. A bank can easily become post quantum and not a weekend maybe, but it's possible with the centralized exchange with Bitcoin there will be a two year process.
- [57:12]
C
Wallet software has been built up over some projects more than a decade and they're literally going to have to just throw out the engine essentially and rebuild from scratch.
- [57:24]
B
Yeah, I mean, Jonas. And they're working on the sccp256k1 library like libsec p that is the central part of every node and wallet. And that I think is an amazing work. And a lot of people don't know this and they don't know about who Jonas Nick is. I think I'm always amazed that these are the people that keep a low profile and these are the actual builders and not the people that are the loudest on Twitter.
- [57:59]
C
I was very impressed with him. I think it was the first time we've. Definitely the first time we recorded. I'm pretty sure it's the first time we ever met too. But he's like, he can explain things very easily. He is very personable. You can tell he cares deeply about this and understands the third or second, third order effects of these changes that people are flippantly trying to rush bitcoiners into.
- [58:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, so in Germany we have a bitcoin community and they recently made.
- [58:31]
C
How do you say. Because I've had people on rhr Rabbit Hole recap. I've had people zap us and pump the. The German speaking bitcoin podcast. How do you say it?
- [58:45]
B
Ain un Swansik. Ayn swansik ein unt swansik means 21. Like ein is 1 and swanseg is 20. Ein und swanseg ein and swanseg.
- [58:56]
C
I own Swanseg. Okay.
- [59:00]
B
You can just say 21 people will know. But yeah, we have this community and an artist made a trading card game and made like 21 bitcoin personalities and for some reason I'm one of those, which is undeserved. But Jonas Nick has one, Christian Decker has one. A lot of people, like, Gigi has one. And I think it's like, these are the actual people doing stuff. Again, not VCs, not mechanics on Twitter.
- [59:28]
C
Yeah, mechanics on Twitter. What else should we cover here? What are you looking forward to in 2026? What do you think the priority should be?
- [59:40]
B
So I haven't made my prediction list yet, but I really, really want. I don't have my hat in reaching distance right now. I want to see, like, a pardon or clemency for Keon and Bill. Yeah. Again, Kian celebrated Christmas and then I saw, like, I mean, he must be happy to go into prison because the last two days before he had to be arraigned, like, he was arguing with mechanic on Twitter and said, like, I mean, this can't be it. Like, the last days in freedom. Like, he has to, like, argue with people on Twitter and, like, justify things and, oh, Nazis on your side. Like, shut the fuck up. Like, I want Donald Trump to be cool and, you know, send a message that writing code, even if it is abused by criminals, is not a crime. You're not responsible if you write privacy software. You're not responsible if people abuse technology. That's my only wish for 2026. The rest I don't know. Bitcoin can go down to 30,000 and shake out all the treasury companies. I'm fine with that, but I really want to see. Yeah. Trump doing another solid similar to Ross.
- [61:01]
C
Do you think the onus is on the industry in the United States to preserve, from a legal perspective? I guess, preserve the ability to use Bitcoin? It doesn't seem good in Europe right now.
- [61:16]
B
I mean, so I have to say the. The laws around Bitcoin in Germany are better than in the United States. But there's, I think, clearly purely by accident. So whereas you will always be tax liable in the event of you, like, selling or using Bitcoin in Germany, if I hold it for one year, I'm free. There's no capital gains. I can just spend it. And that is, like, really, really nice. And you have rights to your privacy. So I'm fine with that. But that is born. Not on purpose. I think it was done on accident. Like, they're talking about, you know, let's get rid of this. People are speculating and making money on that, and we need the cut. And they want to remove this. One year holding limits and maybe even backdated. But, yeah, so I agree it is good to have people in the White House. I mean, I wish they were more pure. I wish they wouldn't do so many crypto scams on the side. But as long as the United States allows for bitcoin to thrive, game theory is at play. Other nations will not forbid it. And that is again, America can be a shining light.
- [62:38]
C
That is this weird transitionary period, at least from my perspective, that we're in where again, the suits, the big guys, the nation states are coming and it's like, oh, what are you going to do with bitcoin? And going back to the conversation like softworks covenants. Specifically, if nation states do step in in size in the next few years, will soft forks be impossible?
- [63:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, I have this article and I think Shinobi has never published it. Why nation states need covenants. Or rather people living in nation states that have adopted bitcoin need covenants because one of the key advantages of gold is that you cannot take a pallet of gold onto a helicopter when you flee the South American country. Whereas if you amass your bitcoin off the money that you take out of your population, that is very easy to take with you if you flee to. I don't know, I mean, it has happened that some kind of dictator has rugged a population and stolen money by transferring it in a Swiss bank account. Bitcoin makes it so much more easy. And there you could have a proper covenant where like, okay, as long as you're in power, you get to sign. If you get voted out, your key will be rotated out. And I've written an article about we need covenants for nation state adopting too. The next article needs to be like, we need covenants to prevent quantum. We need to attach it somehow to fork in covenants. I think.
- [64:16]
C
Well, I think you're touching on something that I think is very important and something that bitcoiners really need to get better at is framing these things. I think of one thing that I'm passionate about and would love to see is pay join get implemented widely, particularly with large exchanges. And I know a lot of the exchanges outside of bull bitcoin shy away from it because they're like, oh, the privacy thing is too much. It's like, no, you just frame it as transaction batching. We need to save shareholder capital by being more efficient when we spend bitcoin on chain, when we're not only that to our users.
- [64:57]
B
Not only that, framing is very important. Yeah. Pip77, the bull Bitcoin integration is great. Who was it? There was an article with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Gerald Glickman wrote something and it was really like an interesting spin on that where he's saying exchanges should be mandatory COIN joining and obfuscating funds. Because you have a. From a banking law perspective, you have to have a certain level of privacy. You are mandated as a bank to have private customer funds. And with Bitcoin currently they grossly reusing addresses and they not doing these things. And he had a very interesting article a couple years ago, like four years ago or so. I need to find it, I'll send it to you. Where he's like arguing exchanges need to coin join by law.
- [65:55]
C
Yeah, it's just this aversion to private. I mean I know why the large governments of the world don't like privacy because they are losing control of many aspects of their ability to rule as they print more money, go into more debt and begin to lose the narrative in the realm of the social. But I think that's the most disheartening thing is like we have the potential, like I said earlier, especially with these second layer protocols maturing to build a completely new banking stack on top of the Bitcoin protocol. And it's desperately needed in this day and age. I think the banking infrastructure is completely antiquated and not suit for purpose in the digital age. And for some reason or another, I think mainly because they worry about losing control, we're being hindered from actually building out this sci fi banking stack.
- [66:54]
B
I just dropped off. I'm back. Sorry.
- [66:56]
C
Yeah, just you cut out a little earlier when you're giving your whole COIN join spiel. I only caught the tail end, but luckily all this is being recorded locally so it'll look good in post.
- [67:13]
B
Yeah. So yeah, coin joining the UX is great. Another thing that would improve it is cisa like signature aggregation has been discussed for quite some time. If we implemented that, I think Greg Ross said it would be cheaper than a regular transaction to do COIN joins with Pfizer or ciso.
- [67:38]
C
That was funny. Like going back to the quantum thing too. It's like, how much of this stuff are we going to focus on? And then it's like, oh, we have to do quantum resistant addresses that completely. I don't know if you could do CISA CISA with quantum resistant addresses, but if you could, that would make more sense too.
- [67:56]
B
Yeah, we need a bitcoin PR department to spin these things.
- [68:03]
C
That is.
- [68:04]
B
Yeah.
- [68:07]
C
Who should do? I mean, I don't know if you're being facetious there, but I think these things do need to be articulated to the broader market in better ways.
- [68:21]
B
Yeah. Oftentimes you see very smart, bright developers.
- [68:25]
C
We need autism translation services for bitcoin.
- [68:29]
B
Yeah. We need autism to ADIQ translation services. Yeah. More and better communications. Also like a learning from 2025. If communication can be improved, lots of trauma can be avoided.
- [68:49]
C
Yeah, there's a lot of drama in 2025. Here's the hoping that there's a bear market in drama in 2026, but I won't be holding my breath for that.
- [68:58]
B
I guarantee you there will be more. I'm really, really bullish on trauma drama and trauma. But yeah, what are your hopes for 2026?
- [69:15]
C
Selfishly, I hope that bitcoin collateralized residential mortgages become a thing here in the United States. I think that would be massive. But okay, I think. No, I mean it was a big theme in 2025. I wrote about it, talked about it a lot. But again, as you may be able to tell, I think this emergence of these interoperable second layer protocols is really powerful and fascinating to me. And I guess my hope for 2026 is instead of quabbling about different protocol changes, getting distracted by OPER or quantum resistance, people begin focusing on like, okay, how can we leverage these second layers to create more extendable Bitcoin user experiences and build cooler end products at the end of the day that make Bitcoin more useful for individuals.
- [70:18]
B
Are you bullish on Citria?
- [70:27]
C
Am I going to use Citria? Probably not.
- [70:31]
B
I mean as soon as there will be a poly market calci prediction market type on Bitcoin and I think like with Citria you can build something like this. I think that will be a very big inflow into Bitcoin and there will be a lot of prediction markets not only funded by Rob Hamilton, but like actual prediction markets like you too.
- [70:55]
C
Well, what's wrong with something like predicts?
- [70:57]
B
Right?
- [70:57]
C
Do you need to do all that?
- [70:59]
B
I mean predicts is like custodial.
- [71:00]
C
Yeah.
- [71:02]
B
And with like an EVM type of layer too, which I'm always very impressed. Like Robin Linus is a close friend of mine and I really appreciate what they are building there like Alphem and Citria and like all these things that I didn't think were possible to build on Bitcoin without any changes to the code. I think it's very cypherpunk. Again, I'm not interested in any SDM whatever virtual machine. But yeah, prediction markets, I'm very surprised how big they have become. And these things Yeah, I think they will come this year.
- [71:47]
C
Are you surprised? Why are you surprised? It was predicted that prediction markets would become a thing. It's a long awaited.
- [71:55]
B
There's this great quote by Michael Saylor I think in 2018 where he's like denigrating bitcoin, says, oh, bitcoin is a fad. It will have the same future as online gambling. And online gambling is bigger than ever, as is bitcoin. He's right on the money. He took the wrong under on that bat. I'm not a, like, I played the Tone race poker tournament poorly and I'm not really into gambling, but I see what's like, it's a very nice way of finding truth because if people put their money where their mouth is, like I trust those polls more than a general Twitter poll, let's say agreed.
- [72:38]
C
And that's what it was. Actually. I'm not sure if you saw it, but Brian Armstrong came out, I believe it was yesterday or the day before and people were saying like, hey, you guys just recreated gambling. And obviously, yes, to an extent some of these prediction markets are gambling. But he acknowledged like, hey, this is actually a way to discover truth faster because you have insiders who are financially motivated to leak information playing on these prediction markets and we've seen that come true. And you have a bunch of people saying, oh my God, this is, this is, this is terrible. We don't like insider trading in traditional markets. And it's like true. Like I don't like when politicians insider trade off of information that they, they glean from subcommittee meetings that are not public. But I think this is different. I think the dynamics.
- [73:29]
B
Is it more that you don't want them to have it or is it more that you would be fine if everybody could do it?
- [73:35]
C
Exactly.
- [73:36]
B
Because I feel like, yeah, in a free market, like again, there is no such thing as like insider trading. Like, and it truly, truly, like, like doesn't exist anywhere in the world. But like in a truly free market, I think instead of trading, it's just called trading.
- [73:51]
C
Yeah, I think you articulated very well my thoughts on it. It's like as long as everybody can do it, it should be beneficial. And like you saw it with, over the weekend with Maduro, there was an insider who hopped on the poly market fat trade and made a bunch of money.
- [74:09]
B
I was looking in my signal chat whether or not I was invited to the Pete Hexseth Maduro signal group chat.
- [74:21]
C
What would you say if you, if you hopped in that group chat?
- [74:24]
B
I mean, I would be A fly on the wall and then I would put a outsized bet and then I would do the Dennis Potter style huge breaking and blow the whistle. As soon as we have like internal confirmation like that the ego has landed or something, I don't know, I would monetize it.
- [74:43]
C
I think I agree with you. I think prediction markets are going to be continue to grow. Whether or not they manifest on bitcoin. I think I would not. I mean I think they should manifest on bitcoin. I think ultimately they will. But I, I think more broadly people don't understand, still don't grasp the profundity of what's happening right now and don't grasp how this is going to change the world. Like right now we're seeing it in dinks and dunks like one off events. But once that hits scale and, and the people are conditioned to go to prediction markets to make bets about certain events, particularly insiders with knowledge of these events, it's going to really change the dynamics of how information flows and how the world actually operates.
- [75:32]
B
Yeah, I mean one of my favorite stories, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to share this, but I'm going to do it anyways. Remember the Electric Money documentary about who's Satoshi? Like hbo, this documentary like two, three years ago, Peter Todd and everybody says, oh, it's Adam Beck, it's Hal Finney, it's lan Zazaman. And there was a polymarkis and there was one very outsized bet on Peter Todd. And with like documentaries that have been recorded months in advance, people that have been part of this documentary had some insider knowledge and yeah, some people, you know, do bet on themselves, which, you know, I was a big fan when I learned that like don't hate the player, hate the game. Why would you bet on something like, I mean I get betting on like an election where everybody knows the outcome or at a certain point in the future. But why would you bet on something that has been decided in the past? Movies are generally not live streamed. There's an entire production team that knows what happened there. Yeah.
- [76:46]
C
It's a brave new world. It's a brave new world. Chris. Are anybody so curious? Find out more about you, what you're working on. Seedor bitshurance.
- [76:58]
B
Yeah. Follow me on Twitter oinjoint. I post about my rug. I do weird acquired taste memes. You can write me an email. Chrisador I.O. or idsurance I.O. always happy to talk about bitcoin. Always up for a conversation there.
- [77:21]
C
Well, keep it up. Like I said, I've been appreciating your game from across the pond here. It's very good.
- [77:27]
B
My star rising.
- [77:31]
C
I don't know if icarry. You're very tall. I don't know how, how, how high it can rise from here. But.
- [77:37]
B
Yeah.
- [77:37]
C
Thank you for doing this. This is fun.
- [77:40]
B
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Marty. All right.
- [77:42]
C
All right. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value. You so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.