PETER IS NOT SATOSHI, STRATEGIC BITCOIN RESERVE, TAIL EMISSIONS, OPENTIMESTAMPS | PETER TODD

Summary

The Bitcoin Podcast - Episode Summary: "PETER IS NOT SATOSHI, STRATEGIC BITCOIN RESERVE, TAIL EMISSIONS, OPENTIMESTAMPS | PETER TODD"

Release Date: June 30, 2025
Host: Walker America
Guest: Peter Todd

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1. Introduction and HBO Documentary Discussion

The episode opens with Peter Todd addressing the recent HBO documentary that controversially suggested he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Todd provides his perspective on the documentary's intent and execution.

• Peter Todd [00:00-04:05]:
  "I think the strategic bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a wide acceptance that bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works..."

Peter expresses skepticism about the documentary's authenticity, suggesting that the filmmakers initially aimed to create a standard documentary but pivoted to the Satoshi angle last minute to enhance entertainment value.

• Peter Todd [03:16-04:05]:
  "I suspect that they set out to film a documentary on the rise of bitcoin... then added the Satoshi thing last minute."

Walker acknowledges the humorous and potentially life-impacting nature of the documentary, highlighting its widespread publicity.

• Walker [05:12-05:39]:
  "That was pretty cool... it was on the front page of HBO... really widely publicized."

2. Impact on Bitcoin and Public Perception

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of the documentary on Bitcoin's reputation. Peter Todd believes that, despite the negative portrayal, the attention ultimately benefits Bitcoin by reaffirming its legitimacy.

• Peter Todd [06:14-06:40]:
  "I think it's good for bitcoin... they get all this press, and then the press consistently say, well, obviously this is nonsense."

He hopes that future documentaries will avoid sensationalism, maintaining Bitcoin's authentic narrative.

• Peter Todd [06:40-07:19]:
  "The press consistently say, well, obviously this is nonsense... we're not gonna do another Satoshi documentary."

3. Strategic Bitcoin Reserves

Peter Todd delves into the concept of strategic Bitcoin reserves, emphasizing their significance in demonstrating Bitcoin's acceptance and technological robustness.

• Peter Todd [16:06-17:58]:
  "Strategic Bitcoin reserves... shows a wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works... it's certainly not so busted that it's likely to fail in, you know, five, 10 years."

He contrasts Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash, highlighting Bitcoin's lower technical risks due to its reliance on proven mathematical foundations.

• Peter Todd [16:06-17:58]:
  "It would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic Monero reserve or strategic Zcash reserve... you’re really relying on the math being correct in Bitcoin."

4. Government Involvement and Bitcoin Stacking

The discussion moves to governments potentially accumulating Bitcoin reserves, reflecting on whether this trend is a sign of competent governance or poses challenges to Bitcoin's decentralization.

• Peter Todd [10:35-12:29]:
  "Now, if Bitcoin goes up enough, yeah, less accountable... Bhutan is an example... they've started spending their Bitcoin reserves, filtering out political pressures."

Todd views government accumulation of Bitcoin as a testament to Bitcoin's legitimacy but raises concerns about potential mismanagement or lack of accountability.

• Peter Todd [10:46-12:29]:
  "If the US Government started aggressively stacking Bitcoin... does that logic really apply to Bitcoin?"

5. Tail Emissions and Bitcoin's Future Incentives

Peter Todd discusses the controversial topic of tail emissions in Bitcoin, drawing parallels with Monero's approach. He explains the necessity of maintaining miner incentives even as block rewards diminish.

• Peter Todd [18:21-21:37]:
  "There needs to be an incentive for miners... if transaction fees are the only way that miners get paid, why should they make a new block rather than maybe re-mine the previous block?"

He argues that without consistent block rewards, Bitcoin's consensus mechanism could become unstable, leading to potential security vulnerabilities.

• Peter Todd [21:26-21:37]:
  "Tail emission... people lose coins which gets diverted to miners to pay for the security of your own system... it's a small percentage of your total wealth."

6. Open Timestamps and Data Integrity

Peter Todd elaborates on his work with Open Timestamps and Simple Proof, emphasizing the importance of timestamping for data integrity and security.

• Peter Todd [27:50-33:57]:
  "Open Timestamps... proves that data existed in the past... used by the Guatemalan government for timestamping election records... proves that at least that claim was created when you expect it to."

He shares experiences with the Internet Archive, highlighting the challenges and resistance faced despite the clear benefits of timestamping for data authenticity.

• Peter Todd [34:42-37:15]:
  "The Internet Archive... invited me to give talks, but ultimately decided against integrating Bitcoin-based timestamping due to ideological reasons."

7. Future Developments and Excitement

Towards the end of the conversation, Peter Todd shares his enthusiasm for ongoing developments with Open Timestamps, aiming to enhance its scalability and applicability.

• Peter Todd [37:40-39:19]:
  "Still open timestamps... working on making the software scalable... aiming to timestamp the world's data... it's easy, private, and secure."

Walker echoes the importance of data timestamping in an increasingly digital and AI-driven future.

• Walker [39:26-39:47]:
  "For people listening, if you haven't checked out Open Timestamps, you should timestamp everything... it really is easy."

8. Conclusion

The episode concludes with final thoughts from both hosts, reinforcing the significance of Bitcoin's technological advancements and the importance of maintaining its integrity and security.

• Walker [39:47-40:02]:
  "Peter, thank you so much, man. It's great talking to you."

---

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Bitcoin Reserves: Serve as a validation of Bitcoin's legitimacy and technological robustness, contrasting with higher-risk cryptocurrencies.

• HBO Documentary Impact: While initially portraying Bitcoin negatively, the documentary inadvertently reinforced Bitcoin's resilience by attracting critical scrutiny.

• Government Involvement: Accumulation of Bitcoin by governments signifies acceptance but raises questions about accountability and long-term management.

• Tail Emissions Debate: Essential for ensuring ongoing miner incentives, but controversial due to potential impacts on Bitcoin's scarcity narrative.

• Open Timestamps: A crucial tool for data integrity, offering verifiable proof of existence at specific times, with applications ranging from secure elections to digital archiving.

• Future Prospects: Ongoing enhancements in Open Timestamps aim to make data verification more scalable and accessible, addressing challenges posed by the digital age.

---

Notable Quotes

• Peter Todd on Strategic Reserves [16:06]:
  "Strategic Bitcoin reserves... shows a wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works."

• Peter Todd on Tail Emissions [21:26]:
  "Tail emission... people lose coins which gets diverted to miners to pay for the security of your own system."

• Peter Todd on Open Timestamps [27:50]:
  "Open Timestamps... proves that data existed in the past... used by the Guatemalan government for timestamping election records."

• Walker on Open Timestamps [39:26]:
  "If you haven't checked out Open Timestamps, you should timestamp everything... it really is easy."

---

Final Thoughts

This episode provides an in-depth exploration of Peter Todd's insights on Bitcoin's strategic reserves, the ramifications of public media portrayals, and the technological innovations aimed at safeguarding data integrity. Todd's candid discussions shed light on both the challenges and advancements within the Bitcoin ecosystem, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape and future directions.

Transcript

[Peter Todd]

I think the strategic bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a wide acceptance that bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works. You know, there's two sides of this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow it to be a thing. We value it, we recognize why other people value it, and then the other part of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough, it's going to keep working in maybe another 10 years. Now, of course, I might be sort of personal, give, you know, five reasons why. Well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years, but it's certainly not so busted that it's likely to fail in, you know, five, 10 years. Now, a counterexample that is. Imagine you had created Bitcoin back in the 90s when very early into cryptography, you could have made the plausible arguments in the 90s. You know what, we're not really sure cryptography works like we're putting all our trust in this bitcoin thing, you know, but in the 90s, you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms that were broken later and that could have ended quite badly depending on how you navigated those breakages. This is also I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic Monero reserve or strategic zcash reserve. Those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices they've made is they vastly increased the technical risk of failure. Because the privacy check means you're really relying on the math being correct in Bitcoin, you're relying on arithmetic being correct. Any smart 6 year old could add up the numbers on a bitcoin transaction and like figure out whether or not it it's correct for a smart six year old could do that even without you telling them what it is.

[Walker]

Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're feeling the urge to support this show with some sats, quick reminder that you can do that on Fountain app by boosting this show or becoming a paid subscriber. Or give it a zap on Noster or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care. This episode was a live stream with the one and only Peter Todd at the Rumble booth in Vegas. The audio is a little bit weird at times, so I do apologize for that, but hopefully you still enjoy the content. Peter and I get into a bunch of different topics, from the HBO documentary where they claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto to what he's working on with open timestamps to his thoughts on tail emissions. Shout out to Peter. This was a very impromptu rip, and I appreciate him sharing his scarce time with me. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk with Peter Todd.

Greetings and salutations. I am Walker. I am joined here by Craig Wright, I believe someone who is not Satoshi Nakamoto is all I know. Peter Todd, star of the hit HBO hit piece about bitcoin. Peter, thank you for joining me. We were. I was a little bit hungover this morning, and I don't want to blame you, but you were there. And so I'm going to kind of. I'm going to play you.

[Peter Todd]

I didn't stop you. You know, I believe in freedom you may have.

[Walker]

That you do. That you do. So, you know, Peter, I always enjoy talking to you. As we were saying before this, like, I never know if I'm being trolled by you. I don't.

[Peter Todd]

You are.

[Walker]

I am. I don't think the HBO guys knew that you were trolling them. At what point in that whole process did you realize, like, these guys are trying to make this into a story that's going to make my life a pain in the ass?

[Peter Todd]

Well, so my theory on this is, I suspect that they set out to film a documentary on the rise of bitcoin, and they probably filmed, you know, 5,000 hours footage as.

[Walker]

Did you say 5,000?

[Peter Todd]

Yeah, that's. That's kind of a normal number for.

[Walker]

That's mind blowing.

[Peter Todd]

Obviously, you have not done video production.

[Walker]

Clearly, I'm. I'm a novice at this.

[Peter Todd]

No, no. It is like, you know, even just with me, they just film hours and hours and hours of interviews, talking about all kinds of different things, talking about the same thing over and over again. And, you know, this seemed totally normal to me, but it was only at the very end, the last interview, towards the end of the last interview, then they finally bring up the satoshi stuff. And my suspicion is, of course, they filmed all this footage, started trying to edit it, realize it sucked, and then added the Stoshi thing last minute. Now, Samson Mao claims otherwise, but it's just not the impression I got from them. And also, this is why I am not sure, like, I should say, I suspect that they fully Understood they were being trolled because, remember, they're entertainers. They're not, quote, unquote, documentary filmmakers, even though technically maybe they are. But their job is entertainment. And if they go see someone trolling them, they're probably thinking, all right, how are we going to turn this into entertaining footage? And the answer to that is often, yeah, there's a way.

[Walker]

I mean, I've got to say, it was pretty cool to, like, I watched as soon as it came out. You made me laugh countless times throughout it. And I realized, too, I was like, okay, this is going to make Peter's life a pain in the ass.

[Peter Todd]

Probably mildly annoying.

[Walker]

Yeah.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah.

[Walker]

But like, at the same time, it was like, okay, this was on the front page of, you know, hbo. Like, this was really widely publicized. It got a ton of publicity.

[Peter Todd]

I was told that it was, I think it was on the order, like, their fur, their most popular thing in the documentary category for, you know, two or three days. And overall, something like, say, third most total views for a brief period. Obviously, you know, I'm gonna go lose the long run to Game of Thrones, but, I mean, that's.

[Walker]

That's a. That's a hard one to measure.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah, that's a little hard.

[Walker]

You know, I mean, like, that's kind of incredible. Did you have. I mean, do you think this was ultimately a beneficial thing? Like, was this good for bitcoin? Like, it probably was not for bitcoin.

[Peter Todd]

I think it's good for bitcoin.

[Walker]

Okay.

[Peter Todd]

And this is one of the reasons why, you know, when they brought up. I mean, of course, one way I could approach this is, you know, they bring it up and I just immediately go shut it down. Right. Like, that's. That's a way I could have handled it, but I thought it would be much more valuable to play along with it, to go troll it, hope, you know, hoping that they would take the bait. Although, like I say, I don't. I don't think, like, you know, they're smart people. They know what I'm doing.

[Walker]

Yeah.

[Peter Todd]

And I, you know, when they say they believe this, I don't believe. I don't believe it for one second. You know, he's smart enough to know fully well he's playing a role, too. And the good thing about it, though, is it gets all this press, and then the press consistently say, well, obviously this is nonsense. And my hope is that the next round of director, when he goes to, you know, HBO 2.0 or whatever it works out to be, they're gonna go I hate to say this, but the other guy already did it better than you. And it's just not gonna. You know, the magic's gone. It ain't gonna happen again. We're not gonna do another Sochi documentary. Now, I've heard there is actually one that's happened where. But it sounds like it got way less press.

[Walker]

Really interesting. I mean, it's fascinating to watch this because it's like this. I mean, you've been involved in bitcoin. Well, if you listen to the documentary.

[Peter Todd]

You know, 2008, obviously, but I mean, you've.

[Walker]

You've been involved in and developing bitcoin for a. A very, very long time. One of the original folks there. Is it kind of wild to see this? I mean, could you ever have imagined at that point when you're, like, in these rooms, you know, like, some of the footage that they had, the old footage was pretty cool. Like, you guys are just hacking away in these, you know, back rooms together. Could you ever have imagined that you'd be like, giant conference?

[Peter Todd]

No. Easily.

[Walker]

So you did.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah. You know, this, this. I mean, obviously it may not be the highest probability outcome, but quite famous, like, I think was Hal Finney, as an example, correctly estimated bitcoin price within, I don't know, an order magnitude or two. Now, purely by going, well, all right, how big could it get? Right? What's the size of world economy? What percentage of stuff could be in bitcoin? Let's look at gold. These are all predictable things. You just got to sit down there with some numbers, make some reasonable estimations. This is also why I will, in the counterpoint, say, well, obviously bitcoin isn't actually going to the moon because the world economy is not big enough to get that much more growth. You know, will bitcoin add another. Another zero to the price? Plausible. Will bitcoin add another zero on top of that? Plausible. But will bitcoin add five more zeros? Only if you're measuring in US Dollars, not real value.

[Walker]

Right.

[Peter Todd]

Like the value of bitcoin in terms of big Macs. Unless McDonald's has some amazing improvements in efficiency, it's not going to go up that much because the entire world economy just isn't that big.

[Walker]

I mean, it's an interesting perspective to take. It's like we have this fiat measuring stick, which is inherently flawed. And I mean, at a certain. Okay, I want to ask you.

[Peter Todd]

Well, I mean. Well, this is why the McDonald's, like, Big Mac index exists, precisely because McDonald's is really standardized and that's actually a reasonable way to measure different economies.

[Walker]

And it turns out that dollars, they can print out of thin air or not even print, just keystrokes are not like. Do you subscribe to the, like this hyper bitcoinization idea that at a certain point it's like it is ubiquitous, it is the only money. I mean, do you think fiat goes away or do you think we're always saddled with.

[Peter Todd]

Well, I will say that is a possible outcome. Okay, it is clearly a possible outcome. It is not guaranteed. And I don't think the way I, I don't think the incentives guarantee that happening. And one reason why I would say that is of course we didn't wind up that happening with gold. Now maybe the tech is different. Maybe the fact you can easily send a bitcoin over the Internet is enough to make it be hyper bitcoinization rather than hyper goldization. But it's not clear how, how it turns out. The other thing I think bitcoiners underestimate is governments aren't that incompetent. Like, we all want to believe they're all incompetent. But like or not, you know, the US Dollar as an example has existed for a very long time and obviously they're doing something right enough that it will, that, you know, easy 50, 50 chance it exists in another hundred years.

[Walker]

Do you, as a, do you, do you enjoy the fact or do you, what do you think about the fact that governments are now potentially stacking bitcoin? Like, is it, was this also just inevitable?

[Peter Todd]

Well, you realize that's actually a sign of governments being competent.

[Walker]

Okay, so they're not as dumb as they look like.

[Peter Todd]

Now I got to make the point that for instance, for the US Government, they have enough debts in a big enough economy and diversified enough economy, if they started really aggressively stacking bitcoin, you'd kind of wonder what's really going on. Because the US Government can borrow money on reasonable terms. Let's look at say the strategic oil reserve. That is a physical asset that you absolutely need. If you don't have it, really bad stuff happens really quickly. Like it makes sense to have a strategic reserve oil because it's a useful thing. Does that, does that logic really apply to bitcoin?

[Walker]

That.

[Peter Todd]

Well, sort of, but it's not, it's not in the same category. I mean, it's not unlike having a strategic gold reserve that, yeah, it kind of helps in certain cases, but you ain't going to eat your gold.

[Walker]

Does, does. Would it impose any sort of additional accountability on government? Or would it allow them perhaps to be even less accountable?

[Peter Todd]

Because, well, if bitcoin goes up enough, yeah, less accountable. So actually, I believe Bhutan is an example of this, where they famously started mining kind of in secret. We find out a few years into this. Oh, actually they've got a bunch of bitcoin and from what I've heard, they started spending it because the knowledge kind of filters out political pressures on them to do something with the money. Yeah, you know, I'm not going to make the claim that for sure they're spending it recklessly, but it sounds like maybe that's what's happening.

[Walker]

It's interesting. Okay, so this has been like a, a very big topic of conversation with the strategic reserves and everything. I'm asking you about it. But I'm also curious, like, is this kind of a just like, do you view this as a distraction from other things that are far more important happening in bitcoin right now? Or is this actually, is it correct that this should be the hot topic of every conversation?

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[Peter Todd]

I think the strategic Bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works. So, you know, there's two sides of this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow it to be a thing. We value it, we recognize why other people value it, and then the other part of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough, it's going to keep working in maybe another 10 years. Now, of course, I might be the sort of person who will give, you know, five reasons why. Well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years, but it's certainly not so busted that it's likely to fail in, you know, five, 10 years. Now, a counter example that is, imagine you'd create a Bitcoin back in the 90s when very early into Cryptography could have made the plausible argument in the 90s. You know what, we're not really sure cryptography works like we're putting all our trust in this bitcoin thing, you know, but in the 90s, you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms that were broken later. And that could have ended quite badly depending on how you navigated those breakages. This is also I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic Monero reserve or strategic zcash reserve. You know, those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices they've made is they vastly increased the technical risk of failure. Because the privacy check means you're really relying on the math for being correct in Bitcoin, you're relying on arithmetic being correct. You know, any smart six year old could add up the numbers on a bitcoin transaction and like figure out whether or not it's correct. You brought a smart six year old could do that even without you telling them what it is.

[Walker]

Like, well, okay, let me ask you something. Speaking of, let's say, potential technical issues or technical complexity, you have perhaps been, well, you're often a controversial figure. Let's say you again, never sure when you're trolling and when you're not, you have thrown things out there like, hey, bitcoin may need tail emissions at some point. Is that, is that a troll or.

[Peter Todd]

Do you actually know that that one's not a troll?

[Walker]

Explain that.

[Peter Todd]

Well, so there's a couple issues there. First and foremost, obviously there needs to be a incentive for miners. If there's not an incentive for miners, clearly bitcoin doesn't work because the proof of work drops to the point where it's just broken and someone you know, some will go 51 centak it. So we can certainly say that's true. But the more subtle technical point is not only do we want there to be incentive for miners, in general, we want there to be a consistent incentive. We always want miners to want to make the next block. Now they should be getting paid to do that, and that should be how they earn the most money. So ask the question. If transaction fees are the only way that miners get paid, why exactly should they make a new block rather than maybe re remind the previous block? And it's very easy with only transaction fees for these incentives not to work.

[Walker]

Well, okay, and I hear that point, but isn't it if we're talking about this fiat measuring stick that is inherently unreliable, as we get into the future, it's like, okay, yeah, there's no more block reward. But aren't these transaction fees going to be, are we measuring them wrong right now?

[Peter Todd]

Well, the problem is, even if transaction fees overall create an on average mining reward, there's no way to make them have a completely consistent reminding ward. And inevitably, fee is coming, you know, come in burst. That's just, well, because blocks themselves are founded first, fees then come in burst as well. Because if a block takes a while to be found, fees naturally go up as people outbid each other, try to get into the next block. This is just one of those things that happens. Of course, if that happens now, fees are very high. Now the incentive is for a large miner to try their hand at mining two blocks in a row and sweeping up those transaction fees. And this, you know, this is just a fundamental issue. And the, the way you solve that, or at least try to mitigate it, is by always having a big enough reward that fees aren't that important. And this is why we haven't seen this in Bitcoin, because the times when fees are higher than reward are very rare. Even with inscriptions and so on, it was still a very rare thing. In the future, that will not be the case. And all our mathematical modeling of how incentives work indicates that at that point, Bitcoin's consensus starts to become unstable. Now that by itself would be okay, accept that only large miners can profit off this. You know, if you have a bit ax, you find a block, the chances of you finding another block are so low, you put all, you know, you put all your hopes at one block. If your ant pool, you have enough hash power, you have a reasonable chance finding two blocks in a row. Thus a reorg makes sense. But of course, if they do a reorg, your block got reorged out and you just lost, you know, a million bucks.

[Walker]

I mean, and, and I, I, I hear that, but my worry is, don't you think this kind of like a tail emission proposal does that, doesn't that undercut the actual, like the credibility?

[Peter Todd]

Well, so tail emission, specifically, that's a fascinating proposal. And of course Monero does this. It's fascinating because the rate of coin, of new coin supply actually converges towards a race at which coins are lost or lost or destroyed. And this comes down to basically how the math of this works. So the analogy I like to use is like imagine a leaky bucket. All right, you have a bucket, water is coming into the bucket at a fixed rate, and there's a hole at the bottom of the bucket. The amount of water Coming out of that hole is proportional to the depth of water in the bucket. So there will always be a depth where it converges. If the depth is really low, not much water comes out. More water fills up, the depth is very high. More water gets forced out if it goes down.

[Walker]

So there's a fixed level, a natural equilibrium, basically, because people do, they will.

[Peter Todd]

Always lose coins and also for other reasons. Coins get. Will naturally get destroyed too, but mostly it's loss. Like there's just no avoiding it. People will lose coins. How? You know what percentage per year? Probably on the order of 0.1 ish percent, maybe 1%, maybe some. Probably somewhere in that. In that region. So if you have a tail emission that starts off at something like that, what actually happens effectively is that the value increase that you would have otherwise gotten by other people losing their coins gets effectively diverted to miners to pay for the security of your own system. Now, I'm not making the claim that that amount of money is guaranteed to make bitcoin work. I'm just saying that's an amount of money that clearly we can afford because people don't protect their coins well enough to not lose their money. So, like, obviously this is amount of money low enough. Really, who cares? Another argument I always make is like, let's suppose we're talking about numbers like 0.1%, 0.1% compounded over your entire lifetime. I forget the number off top of my head, but something like 20%, you can do it on your calculator, right?

[Walker]

I believe you're.

[Peter Todd]

Well, that ain't mental math. I can know how to deal, multiply, that means in a row. But the point is it's a small percentage of your total wealth. And the argument there is if you can't dedicate that amount of your entire savings over your entire lifetime to keeping those safes, those same savings secure. What are you doing? Like this. This doesn't make any economic sense. You can afford this equally.

[Walker]

But can. Can Bitcoin as a. A network afford it when it comes to like. Well, undercuts credibility.

[Peter Todd]

Credibility. Because idiots who don't understand how this stuff works go on podcasts and go yammer on about how terrible tail mission is.

[Walker]

Most of us are idiots.

[Peter Todd]

Well, that's better.

[Walker]

I know we should be. That's. And that's why I'm talking to you. Okay, let me ask another question. There's a lot of debate around all this, you know, spamming, fix the filters, all these things. I don't actually know where you stand on that. Do you think this is a. Like, is this an argument that is actually matters and need to be had, or is this something that just fit, sorts itself out?

[Peter Todd]

Well, the way I would put it is we know there is no principled way to stop people putting data in the bitcoin chain. And furthermore, there's no principal way to stop people from using bitcoin in ways we don't consider are real. And notably Luke Jr. Back in the day, he wasn't just trying to censor, quote unquote spam transactions that, you know, had data in them. He was actually trying to censor quote unquote spam transactions that were actual monetary transactions. Satoshi dice being your example. So maybe you're too young for this.

[Walker]

I am, but I. But I have read about this.

[Peter Todd]

So back in the day, there was this thing called satoshi dice where you'd send them bitcoin on a particular address. I mean, actually a bunch of addresses with different betting, betting odds. And they do the math on whether you won or lost. They actually did in a trust, you know, in a provable way, which was nice. And then if you win, they send you back your winnings. If you lose, they send you back a small amount of money just to let you know that they process bets and you lost. Okay. So that is a financial transaction. You're making a bet, you win or lose. If you win, you get your money back. No data was otherwise whatsoever, other than maybe the data in the sense of you did. You did a financial transaction.

[Walker]

It's still data.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah, but, you know, in the sort of inscription sense. There's certainly no data in there. So for a while, this became so popular that like, you know, over half of all bitcoin transactions were satoshi dice.

[Walker]

I didn't know it was that incredibly popular. Wow.

[Peter Todd]

I mean, you know, we're in Vegas right now. Like, there's a lot of degenerate gamblers out there.

[Walker]

There's a lot.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah. And a lot of people looked at this and said, well, obviously this is stupid. Why are you spending so much money in transaction fees? Why are you using all this precious block space? But of course, at the time, transaction fees were low, so it didn't really matter. And my, you know, my view on it was, well, whatever. People are going to use bitcoin for what they want to use it for. Like, this is why we have a block size limit. You know, we've decided how much, how much, how much data. Bitcoin no needs process to keep up with the blockchain and how people choose to use it within that, leave it up to the free market. Luke Jr. Already had Bitcoin knots at the time and he added blacklists to filter out satoshi dice. Okay, yeah, and this was running on Elijah so logis would not mind satoshi dice transactions.

[Walker]

Well you know it's interesting because you also developed something open timestamps, which is a very different take on how to use the bitcoin's blockchain for let's say non monetary use, but very clearly non monetary but in a very optimized way. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because it's also how simple proof is.

[Peter Todd]

Doing what they're doing timestamps in a nutshell, its assistance make a math proof that data existed in the past. Why is this useful? Well bad guys don't have time machines. So if you can prove that something existed prior to when an attack could have happened, you can rule out the attack happening now. There's a lot of cases of this. A very clear example, at least for a technical audience is if you have a digital signature, obviously the private key used to create the digital signature could get compromised. You know, maybe you leave your PHP key on, on a server. Not that devs would have done that possibly do that. Junior he isn't the only one who screwed this up. It's, it's happened. So bitcoin core does have signing of git commits and some of the bitcoin core contributors use open timestamps to prove that their signatures on their git commits were created prior to when hopefully, well, hopefully never. But if their key does get compromised, hopefully we know when it got compromised and still validate these old signatures. Now another example, you know, I mean maybe a broader example is if you're storing data in general for a later like archival, why aren't you timestamping? Why wouldn't you want to be able to say hey obviously this hasn't been touched for this amount of period of time. Maybe it was, you know, born faked to begin with, but at least it hasn't been faked since. Now with simple proof they offer this as a commercial service and you know, open timestamps, open source software, you have to store this like one kilobyte proof file. Not a big deal. But in a lot of use cases that's annoying enough, you'd rather pay simple proof to do it for you. So simple proof, among other things they was, they were hired by the Guatemalan government to do timestamping of election records. Specifically it's paper ballot system. But Obviously the ballots are counted. You get a little sheet with that paper and that's where the numbers are. You know, however many votes for each candidate, that sheet gets scanned into a database and they time stamped it. Right. Then what does that prove? Well, proves that at least that claim was created when you expect it to be, which should be roughly an hour after polling. Because, you know, Guatemala isn't some sort of third world country that takes weeks to decide. They'll come to their elections. Not that I would know of any like America. Okay, so remind me, is that first or third world?

[Walker]

Which is just, yeah, sidebar. Justly absurd that we can't seem to figure that out. And like a country like Guatemala can somehow do it. And literally if people fail to do.

[Peter Todd]

Something that easy, it might not be because they're dumb, I'll say that much.

[Walker]

Well, that's, that's the sad thing. So I remember seeing the documentary and seeing you like, you know, working on that with them and that like, I thought that should have been a way bigger story than it was because I thought that was amazing. Do you think that's something that I know in the U.S. you know, these elections are handled on a, like a local basis in terms of how they handle things, but do you think that's ever something that would actually become widespread in the US or is the new.

[Peter Todd]

So in the more recent presidential election in the U.S. one county did in fact use open timestamps to help prove, you know, prove the integrity of their, their vote. And there's actually one of the guys from Simple Proof Carlinio, he did interview with the woman in charge of that. And I gotta admit, it's, it's such a hilarious interview in a way because I know the tech details behind it and they're going on and on about integrity of elections, how the process works and so on. But what it boiled down to is she paid simple proof 12 bucks for the service, which is their standard rate for the amount of data they were doing. Then she did all her, all her actual work and sent them three emails with the documents that needed to be timestamped, which took all of 30 seconds. Because time stamping is really, really easy. Like I say, if you're archiving data, what's your excuse, right? And in her case, she'd actually gone to the election board and said, you know, here's the thing, here's why we should do it. It's really dead easy. It's going to cost us 12 bucks. You know, we're spending more money on pizza, like like, why aren't we doing this? And furthermore, if you say, no, I'm just going to do it anyway because I'm legally responsible for these numbers, right? Like, I want one more layer of protection to show that they weren't changed later. And of course, obviously this is one of many interlocking checks and balances. Another example being, well, they're legally required to publish the numbers when, you know, once the summary, you know, once the sums come in. Well, of course. How do they do it? Well, like post on Facebook, post on Twitter. And it sounds kind of silly in a way, but actually, you know, like, that is a communication mechanism, right? Why wouldn't you do that? Yeah, time stamping. It is just one more way of putting in that authentic record saying, yeah, no, it really did happen here. Someone didn't change it later. Because imagine, for instance, if you reported on Facebook and someone changes the figures on Facebook. Facebook's not digitally signed. You're trusting Facebook. Well, if you're able to go show a timestamp, you can at least say, hey, here's my copy. I created this prior to this point in time. Yeah, all right, maybe I created five different versions of it. But now you have to make the arguments that why my copy is still invalid too. You're in a much better position with a timestamp.

[Walker]

I mean, it seems like, again, one of those things that's so obvious and that it's like, yes, why wouldn't you like, unless you. Well, unless you don't want.

[Peter Todd]

So one of the very first things I added to open timestamps was support for git. Okay. And I personally keep all my emails and other datas in git repositories. You know, every email I have winds up in a git repository. Well, since I created, since I created the software, it was just dead easy for me to make it possible to just press a button. And my git repos are timestamps in every single file in them, I can get timestamps for every single one.

[Walker]

In an. In a kind of this AI future that we're suddenly living in, it feels like that's going to be more important.

[Peter Todd]

I gotta say, one of my biggest regrets with open timestamps was in around, I think, 2017, I downloaded the metadata for the Internet Archive, which is just. It's an enormous amount of data. It was like data was, oh, I think terabytes, even those absurd amount of data. So I go crunch for all this metadata and the metadata has hashes of their actual data. And I put this all into a big merkle tree. And I timestamp it and I tried at least to create a system to download more metadata as it came and keep time stamping it, but honestly, this archive is just so big, I couldn't reasonably do that with the software I had and the budget I had for servers. So I eventually gave up. But in the meantime, the Internet archive themselves found out about this. And remember, they actually sent me an email saying, wait, you timestamped the Internet archive? And I explained how it is like, yeah, ma' am, but guess you could actually do that. And they invited me to go to San Francisco at their headquarters to go give it, you know, to go talk to them. But how would they integrate this into the entire archive themselves? Every single person in the room, except one, love the idea. And that one who came in at the end of the meeting and heard the word bitcoin just said, well, it's bitcoin, we're not going to do it.

[Walker]

Seriously.

[Peter Todd]

Yep. We could have had all of the Internet archive timestamp properly in an easy to get, you know, easy to prove way prior to AI being a thing. And they fumbled that ball.

[Walker]

That just seems like such a moronic thing, really is like this bitcoin derang you are, you are actively shooting yourself in the foot.

[Peter Todd]

There was no technical, you know, criticism of this. It was purely, we will not advocate for anything involving bitcoin. It is just fundamentally evil, end of story.

[Walker]

Dear lord.

[Peter Todd]

Yeah.

[Walker]

Do you think they'll ever come around?

[Peter Todd]

Very unlikely. It's a shame, may, you know, maybe in a few more years. But my contacts there, last I've talked to them, basically say it's the same thing. Even now, even as big as bitcoin's gotten. This, I mean, I hate to say this, but the Internet archive, it's a bunch of left wing people and I don't think they're happy seeing Trump rise in parts on, yeah, bitcoin becoming an issue in u. S. Politics.

[Walker]

I mean, it's just like you're only hurting yourself though, and that's the sad thing.

[Peter Todd]

So, yeah, no one cares what your political views are with bitcoin. Unfortunately though, the nature of bitcoin is only compatible with certain political views. Because like it or not, not everyone.

[Walker]

Actually likes freedom, which is a sad reality to discover. We gotta wrap up here in a sec, but I want to ask you, is there something that you're really excited about now or something else that like, you're working on? Like what excites.

[Peter Todd]

I gotta admit, it's Actually still open timestamps because. So simple proof, you know, they've been trying to go and raise. Raise funding. They've gotten. I'm not gonna go term. Right. Like, I think it's pre seed round or whatever it is. And they were able to in turn give me some funding to go do a bunch more work on open timestamps because the protocol, the math behind it scales, but the software to actually make it scale didn't actually work.

[Walker]

Okay.

[Peter Todd]

Like, it worked, but, you know, if someone tried to make 10,000 timestamp requests per second, it would have just fallen over because they couldn't scale it horizontally. Like, I couldn't throw servers at the problem. So I fixed half of that already, which is to create new timestamps. I can throw servers at the problem and you just have more and more servers making merkle trees and merkle trees and so on, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty obvious thing if you understand the cryptography. It's just, someone's out of here. I've got to sit down and write that software. So. But then I did, and that's fine if, you know, if Microsoft timestamps every single file on every single computer in the world as some new features, it'll be fine. The catch is the other part of timestamping is to then get the proof back. And that part still doesn't scale. And for technical reasons, that's a lot harder to do. But hopefully I'll be able to, if I don't go to too many conferences, spend the, you know, couple months worth of work to make all this stuff happen, and then I'll be able to truly say, yeah, please timestamp the world's data.

[Walker]

Well, I hope that the world does timestamp its data.

[Peter Todd]

Me too.

[Walker]

Thanks so much, Matt.

[Peter Todd]

Thank you.

[Walker]

For people that are listening to this, if you haven't checked out open timestamps, you should go timestamp everything like, or everything that you.

[Peter Todd]

It really is easy. You get to open timestamps.org, scroll down, there's a button, timestamp your file. It is hashed on your computer. It does not upload to anyone else. Very private. And you'll get back like a little one kilobyte file that, you know, 20 years in the future, you can prove you did it right then.

[Walker]

I love it. Peter, thank you so much, man. It's great talking to you. All right.

And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the Internet. Find me on [e-mail] Walker and this [e-mail] Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram @titcoin podcast. Head to the Show Notes to to grab sponsor links, head to substack.com walkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.