← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
Beginner’s Guide #17: F**k You, Bitcoin! with John Carvalho - WBD202
01:12:17
Location: Skype Date: Friday, 6th March Project: Role: N/A Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be aggressive and unforgiving, silly mistakes can lose...
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- [00:01]
Peter McCormack
Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast.
- [00:06]
John Carvalho
Hi there, how are you all? Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Kraken, the best place to buy, sell and trade bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I've got an interview with John Carvalho to discuss why bitcoin is fuck you, money. But before that, I have a message from my show sponsors. So first up today we have the amazing blockfi, my longest ever sponsor and they are the future of bitcoin and financial services. And this week they just announced an update to their interest accounts. Customers can now send USD wires to the platform to purchase the Gemini $GUSD and begin earning 8.6% on USD denominated assets. Now, with their interest accounts you can already earn interest on your bitcoin ether and gUSD. But this addition to allow you to send wires directly into the account makes it a lot easier to earn interest on your dollars. They already have their crypto back and they've already made some other huge announcements this year. They've got their bitcoin satsback credit card come in and they've also got a mobile app coming. So much happening there, all these amazing announcements. BlockFi are gonna have a massive year. If you want to find out more, head over to blockfi.com which is B L O C K F I dot com. And today's show is also brought to you by the mighty, mighty Kraken. The best place to buy, sell and trade Bitcoin. I say this every week, but why is it? Why is it the one I use? Why isn't it the one you use? Come on. If you're not using Kraken, tell me why. They are consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency, exchange and whatever level of your experience. Kraken has designed and built a streamlined bitcoin exchange for newcomers and experts alike. Their platform provides world class financial stability because they maintain full reserves, healthy banking relationships and have the highest standards of legal compliance. They also pair their 247365 live chat with an extensive customer support center to help ensure your questions are answered and your needs are met around the clock, no matter who you are, no matter where you are. And with Kraken Pro, their beautiful mobile first app, you can trade Bitcoin wherever you want. There is no better place to trade Bitcoin. If you're not using Kraken, what are you doing with your life? If you want to find out more, head over to kraken.com or search for the Kraken Pro app, which is available for the iPhone and Android. Just search for Kraken Pro, which is K R A K E N, P R O. Okay, so onto the show and we have reached the end of the Beginner's Guide. It's a couple of shows longer than I anticipated, but I think everything in here is everything I wanted people to hear. We've got 17 shows, 17 episodes to introduce people to bitcoin. So listen, if you've got friends and you want to get them involved, you want them to understand what bitcoin is, you've got to send them to the Beginner's Guide. I do need to say a massive thank you also to every guest who's come on. Everyone has helped. Some have been very last minute, you know, some have been planned with plenty of time in the diary. I've had help from people getting it together. I've had some help in the background. A lot has gone into this. So a massive thanks to everyone who's been involved, anyone who's listened the feedback you sent me. I really think it's been worth doing. So to end it all, though, to finish it off, we've got probably the most bitcoin man I know. My favorite bitcoiner in all of this is John Carvalho. We've got him on to discuss bitcoin as fuck you, money. This is the conclusion, this is the end. This is what it all came down to. And now, the first time I heard this phrase was with a tweet by Jameson Lopp last year. It comes from the fact that if someone wants to close your bank account, they want to stop you paying for something or they want to inflate away your wealth. Bitcoin gives anyone the ability to say fuck you. I think it's the perfect way to round things up. I think John is the perfect person to round things up. And if you've got any questions about this series, do reach out to me. My email address is hellohatbitcoindid.com and please do just share it out with your friends and family. Let's get this out to as many people as possible.
- [04:02]
Jameson Lopp
Welcome back, John. How are you?
- [04:04]
Peter McCormack
Oh, I'm good. Thanks for having me.
- [04:05]
Jameson Lopp
Always a pleasure to have you on. So I've been doing this beginner's guide to bitcoin. It's proved pretty popular and from the very start, you knew I wanted you on. At the end, I wanted to conclude it with you for a number of reasons, but mainly Because I think you're just the most hardcore bitcoiner I know. I've covered a lot of subjects. I started off with Andreas. I covered why we need bitcoin. I did the technical size with Shinobi. I've done monetary policy with Dan Held. I've done macroeconomics with Travis Kling. So many shows. We've done 16 shows. But here we are. This is the final one. This is the conclusion to wrap it all up. And, yeah, I just want. I want to get as much John Carvalho hardcore bitcoin ness I can into one show. I want everyone listening to this as a final one to be bullish as fuck about bitcoin. Have absolute, no doubt you're right for this. Are you ready for this?
- [04:51]
Peter McCormack
I am. I'm actually quite honored that you're choosing me for this aspect of your series, because to me, it's like, absolutely the most important thing. Like, the fuck you side of bitcoin is bitcoin, to me.
- [05:04]
Jameson Lopp
All right, so listen, we're going to start off, though, for anyone listening. John, why bitcoin for you?
- [05:12]
Peter McCormack
Like I started to say just then, it is pretty much that I think that we have a lot of human rights talk and a lot of freedoms and a lot of, like, achievements we've made as a species. You know, overcoming our own idiocy and greed and evilness that we can sometimes have. But I don't actually think we've ever achieved true freedom for ourselves. I think the current government dynamic, with the way things operate, with border controls and money controls and all of the situation, we're all still kind of slaves in a way. And it feels that way when you're traveling and you're crossing these borders or getting letters from the government about your taxes or whatever. Just every interaction, for me at least, there's this underlying paranoia because, you know, you're kind of their slave in a way that, like, they. At any moment, if there's something they don't like about your behavior, they can just lock you up and it's over. It'll kill you or whatever. And for most people in most situations, it never gets to that point. But bitcoin is like the first time I have ever in my whole life. And probably all of us have had an opportunity of achieving an ideal, a kind of better setup that maybe dismantles the power of governments in one way and makes them have to behave more like what we designed them to, you know, like, to serve the people and provide, you know, centralized deficiencies for us, which I think is what they're really supposed to be for. And I'm not like anti government. I'm just anti evil and anti corruption. I think the current design allows for too much corruption, too much inefficiency, too much basically arbitrage of ignorance and that bitcoin helps cure that.
- [06:57]
Jameson Lopp
And how relevant right now? I mean, over the last. Quite. Well, you know, I've been traveling a lot over the last year, but especially recently, I've been out South America. I've seen the riots in Chile. I've seen, you know, the problems in Bolivia. I've been out to Venezuela, you know, under an authoritarian rule. I've just been out to Turkey and at the border with both Syria and Greece. And, like, it feels like there's chaos everywhere right now. And I know people have said to me, like my father said to me.
- [07:25]
John Carvalho
Said, oh, it always feels like that.
- [07:26]
Jameson Lopp
But right now, for myself personally, I feel like this is the most chaotic time I've ever lived through. So how much more relevant is bitcoin now in this kind of current environment?
- [07:38]
Peter McCormack
I mean, I have kind of a side comment on all that. You know, I have a saying, if you're looking for trouble, you're definitely going to find it. And I think that maybe, you know, you do a little bit of that because it's your job. You know, you're looking for the chaos and you're covering the chaos. So of course the world is going to look extremely chaotic to you. It doesn't. I see it too, but I don't think it's all bad. But in the context of what I think you were really asking, yes, obviously, if you can get your hands on some bitcoin in a situation where there are other people in your environment that will accept the bitcoin or do business with you and kind of skirt the system that is oppressing you at the moment. Yeah, Bitcoin serving a great purpose there. It is providing a little added freedom, a little more mobility, little more security and safety for you, hopefully. But as you've come to learn and now report it to others, this is not always as easy as it might seem. Bitcoin isn't always the perfect answer for every situation of oppression and this kind of thing. It can be, and it gets better at it every year. And everything we do, every amount, we build out this economy. But for now, it's just doing what it can and as best it can. And all we can do is help educate people that it exists and how to use it and what kind of purposes it does serve. But you know, things like volatility and other shortcomings to people in these situations that need this kind of freedom out of their money, those have kind of solutions that are coming around the corner too. And even then, for now, tether isn't so bad, you know, for short term trust, risk, if you, if you don't want volatility. And a lot of other solutions are coming around. We can get into this a little bit more later as well, with lightning.
- [09:30]
Jameson Lopp
Well, so I had to moderate a panel in the summer at an event and it was brave New World versus 1984. And I'd never read Brave New World, I'd read 1984 and I understood that kind of Orwellian future, which very much reflects, I think, a lot more, I would say a lot more somewhere like China. Whereas Brave New World feels a lot more like the US But I do feel like we are slipping closer and closer to the art becoming reality. The futures that these books have predicted. And I feel like the growth of technology, while it's been great for us, enable so many things. The Internet's amazing in some ways. Mobile devices are amazing. We also, what's come with that has been more technology for the government, for the state, more surveillance, more control. And with the digitization of money outside of bitcoin, it feels like we've got even more financial surveillance, less privacy. So I'm feeling like I'm seeing that dystopian future, those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle coming together now more than ever. And that's why I'm. That was kind of like the point I was, I was asking you about is that even now bitcoin is even more relevant as control and surveillance over our money is growing.
- [10:47]
Peter McCormack
Well, I mean, it's tricky because, you know, a lot. There are also people who argue that bitcoin makes surveillance easier and there are dangerous sides to that as well. Yeah, I think that bitcoin at the base layer probably is better off being transparent and not private and people can seek their fungibility and privacy better on layers and kind of detaching from the blockchain system. So, yeah, I don't know. It's tough.
- [11:15]
Jameson Lopp
So for you it's a lot more about the taking control away from the government and less so about taking corruption away, less so about than offering that immediate privacy.
- [11:25]
Peter McCormack
Now, don't get me wrong, this is more. I'm making this point because I think that as a design for bitcoin that it's necessary. It's not that I don't Value privacy. I just feel like to do privacy properly, you probably need to have the base layer still be transparent. That's all you need to make sure everybody can rely on this kind of, for lack of a better way to put it, visually auditable ledger as like the basis for your money. Because this is the only thing that bitcoin's for. It's a store of value. And if you want to store value, you want it to be like dead transparent and know that everything is legit. And if you want to achieve privacy and other things, I think we can find other ways. And we already are finding other ways. So, yeah, I think that privacy is super important and that you can still achieve it if you're smart. Mostly people, I think, try to achieve more privacy than they really need. And there's a little bit of privacy larping on like crypto, Twitter and stuff like this. The people who really need privacy, you're going to have to do a lot of advanced things to try to stay truly safe and private on the Internet that go beyond just how you manage your Bitcoin.
- [12:40]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah. So I think right now, true privacy for any bitcoin user is kind of. It's beyond the technical means of most people. It's probably. Yeah, but it's something I hope will be abstracted away in the future and become almost natural. It'll be built into the product. But can you give me a window into. Because you've got this kind of grand vision of the future. The way I look at you, John, is that your picture in a bitcoin world a few steps ahead of everybody else? Can you give me a window into that kind of future you're seeing and where you're seeing this kind of bitcoin world?
- [13:14]
Peter McCormack
I don't know that I see something steps ahead of other people's, but I'm certainly trying to at least maybe create models of how it could actually work and be practical about these models and maybe play a role in architecting, helping bitcoin reach these, you know, a model of basically alternative economy for bitcoin. So if I were to zoom into the future, what I would say is I want to make sure, and I want to help be a force to make sure that anybody always has an option. An alternative economy where they don't even have to think about bank accounts, they don't have to think about the government, whatever it may be. There is just a free market, an alternative market, a permissionless market that I can enter, where all of the rules are entirely transparent. I know what to expect and any trust relationship is completely obvious. If I'm holding, say, a tether token, I know that tether is dollars issued by this central entity. The relationship is very clear. And those kinds of things maybe, I think could end up tolerable. Maybe we could do something better than tether, I don't know. But yeah, in the end, I think that the future for Bitcoin is an entirely alternative economy where people can completely opt out of the banking system, any limitations on money, traditional money, and just be able to completely operate internationally and be fully agile within this economy without needing permission.
- [14:44]
Jameson Lopp
So you see in that future whereby we have no need to go to a bank account, give them our information to create an account and have permission to take money in and out, or perhaps have limitations on what we can take, or some scenarios that we've seen recently where I think in the U.S. i saw recently that FinCEN went into somebody's bank account and took money out, which something amazed me or somebody else who was traveling from one country to another with some gold and they wanted answers where it's come from and they had to hand it over. You'll see in the future where it's just like, fuck you, this is my money. You don't know what I've got and you can't touch it. I can completely operate outside of you and you hold no control over me.
- [15:23]
Peter McCormack
Right? I mean, the only way you can have freedom is if you operate in a system where you're free. And Bitcoin isn't free either. It has a lot of rules, but they're completely transparent rules that you can rely on and you don't have to trust will change or be disrupted. So, you know, you're getting into from the start and it's fully optional. You know, you opt in. Whereas the system we're born into for most of us is not like that. We're born into a whole government system and tax system and, you know, payroll and, you know, borders and all of these things that affect basically keeping us as cattle or slaves, you know, for lack of a softer term. And I don't think that having money, private money, is a crime. I don't think privacy is a crime. I think it's the only way you can have freedom. And I don't think that regulating is a way to fight crime. And so fighting crime, yeah, it was nice and convenient to be able to tap people's cell phones and you know, spy on their Internets and, you know, seize their accounts, but it was never really crime fighting. It was never really, you know, fixing societal ills, right? It was just like catching. Just putting out a net on the public and seeing if you could catch some bad guys while you caught good guys, too. And it's just, to me, it's lazy. It's lazy management of society. It's lazy governmenting for lack of an editor's term. Again, like, I feel like bitcoin could really realign things to get people to behave much more properly with, like, incentives, you know?
- [17:01]
Jameson Lopp
So do you think people are ready for this? I mean, I know that's a broad question because some people are and some people are not. Someone like Matt O'Dell is ready now. Someone like you is ready now. I'm kind of like on my way there, but do you think the world is ready for people to have this completely separate economy where you can. You can operate outside all traditional systems?
- [17:23]
Peter McCormack
You know, my first answer is, I don't give a shit. It doesn't matter. It's ready. It's going to happen when it happens, whenever. It doesn't matter.
- [17:30]
Jameson Lopp
Fuck you, Bitcoin.
- [17:31]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, it's true. And in the end, sometimes I said this on. I don't know if it was our interview or another interview, but sometimes I wonder if all of our debating about bitcoin and kicking and screaming and debating and arguing, if it's all just completely meaningless and all the things were going to happen the way they were going to happen, regardless of how much we debated why they happen or when they'll happen, that kind of deterministic thing. But I think that my guess is it's probably not even the right way to form the question. I think what's probably. That's like a misleading question. I don't think the world has to be ready for this. I think this is the world the way the world already is. All of the stuff that's happening that you're worried is going to happen because of bitcoin already happens, just not on bitcoin.
- [18:19]
Jameson Lopp
Okay?
- [18:20]
Peter McCormack
I don't think bitcoin creates crime. I don't think bitcoin creates evil. It's just a tool. And so if evil decides to remap itself onto bitcoin because there are incentives for it to do so, then, yes, maybe the world, maybe that's getting it to the heart of Is the world ready? Is the world ready for, you know, money that actually suppose bitcoin becomes confidently private? Is the world ready for money that allows, you know, terrorists to transact with each other, pedophiles to transact with each Other, you know, is the world ready for that? I think my answer remains the same. Those people are already doing those, that business and they're already using some means. And so bitcoin doesn't cure or, or create those behaviors. You know, it's just a format. So the world doesn't need to be ready. It doesn't matter. This stuff's already happening. Bitcoin is not going to happen. Probably not going to make it happen, more or less. It's just going to make it maybe more apparent, maybe more topical, you know.
- [19:26]
Jameson Lopp
Okay.
- [19:27]
Peter McCormack
I'd rather have the society talking about why pedophiles are a problem and what to do about it, then being very proud that we caught pedophiles sending money to each other.
- [19:38]
Jameson Lopp
Right, because the money's not the problem. Because if you're going to do that, you can blame computers, mobile phones, right? Electricity and every other part of the jigsaw puzzle.
- [19:47]
Peter McCormack
The knife doesn't do the stabbing.
- [19:48]
Jameson Lopp
You know, guns don't kill people. People kill people.
- [19:53]
John Carvalho
Okay.
- [19:53]
Jameson Lopp
No, that makes sense. Okay, so back into the format because this is a conclusion show. I, I've kind of have a bunch of people listen to this, John, who've gone through the series and they might still have some questions for themselves, but I just want to run through them and I want to get your version of them. And this gets kind of almost summary of all the shows I've done. But what is it that makes bitcoin unique for you?
- [20:17]
Peter McCormack
You know, the asinine answer is cryptography is what makes bitcoin unique. But you know, this gets into. I think maybe people talk about like the bitcoin being a shelling point, having network, network effect, you know, being the first. And, and I think that is true. I think that is kind of what makes it unique. You can't be the first rare cryptographic blockchain, you can't be the second one. And then also claim that there's a digital scarcity concept because then there's a third one and a fourth one and it just gets silly. So there is that kind of advantage of being first. There's a network effect advantage and the fact that it's probably going to be really hard to unseat this shelling point. Like you can make as many shitcoins as you want and it just makes, it's just more shitcoins in a sea of shitcoins. And at some point people are going to want to like stick their head out of the water and see where the lighthouse is. And the only thing sticking out is bitcoin. You know, like every other thing that sticks out to somebody is like an oasis and illusion. It's just because they had. They're greedy or they're delusional. You know, they just think they, they can make more money off of the second bitcoin than they can make cooperating with the first one. And it has nothing to do with technology. And this is kind of a scam that people want you to believe that you're being anti intellectual, anti technology if you don't support altcoins. But yeah, this is what. Bitcoin is unique. It is the only bitcoin. You can make forks and you can make new versions and new names and new brands and new designs, but they just can't be bitcoin because you can't. No two things are actually fungible in the end. And so bitcoin is definitely unique. Bitcoin is, in my opinion, our best chance, you know, if we all the way Bitcoin maximalism is. I mentioned this recently online on Twitter and stuff. Bitcoin maximalism, part of the idea here, it was never about like being scared of competition or thinking that new tech can't be improved on. You can't improve on bitcoin tech. It's nothing to do with that. It was that this works. If you actually understand that Bitcoin is a Ponzi for the people, it is a headless Ponzi. And the more everybody converges on this, the more everybody benefits out of it. Like, the only way to get central efficiency out of Bitcoin is by getting everybody to use it. You want maximal decentralization at the node level and you want as many. But the way to truly achieve decentralization is not via Bitcoin nodes, it's via human nodes. You need as many people in here as possible.
- [23:01]
Jameson Lopp
It's funny, you say Ponzi for the people and the more people will join, the more benefit we get. But it isn't just a financial benefit, right? I mean, obviously there is the financial benefit. The number goes down.
- [23:11]
Peter McCormack
It's the circular economy benefit. It's like literally like when we talk about a circular economy, this concept doesn't come from, you know, just from keeping everybody locked in here. It's an efficiency concept. It's about recycling. It's about keeping things within the loop and not creating redundancies where you're doing exchanges and transfers in and out and having to always, you know, have this, this entropy, this grind on everything you're doing. If you keep it all in one loop, then things are much more efficient. You reuse things. It's a better way to do an economy. It's economical, you know, and that's really.
- [23:48]
Jameson Lopp
What it's about there. We can, we can safely say that with every other shitcoin that has ever existed, every factor of bitcoins try to be improved upon. They've tried to improve upon the block size and the speed.
- [24:00]
Peter McCormack
Yes, every knob has been turned, every magic number has been adjusted. But maybe I'll jump ahead. I think you wanted to ask about altcoins.
- [24:10]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, I mean, that's leading.
- [24:12]
Peter McCormack
This topic is overlapping a lot. Should we care about altcoins? Should we, you know, that question, if you want to talk about it as an investment, I would say, well, no, you know, in the context of why people care about Bitcoin and why bitcoin is important for humanity's future, no, you shouldn't care about altcoins. Probably not. But I'm not trying, trying to say that altcoins and their developers can't come up with cool ideas and cool applications for blockchain. Whether it be by mistake or through the creativity that say Ethereum allows them, they might feel more free there. They've definitely found some use cases that bitcoin probably would have found them on its own too if that work had been just diverted back to bitcoin. But there is some things to care about with altcoins just to watch what they're doing. But the issue is that they never needed to, you know, make this a speculative asset in order to explore these things. And a lot of. And this is where the whole scam comes in and even the delusion, you know, these are developers that they create these coins and they buy their own bullshit, you know, they think these coins are maybe could unseat Bitcoin, that these coins maybe are a better investment than bitcoin because they have more TPS or whatever, but it's just not true. Bitcoin is going to keep trumping all of them. It's going to take whatever you make that's useful and put it on a layer. It's going to take any amount of traction you get for your store of value and just eat it up. Over the years, as our havings come and bitcoin becomes more, we get more and more people in here. It's just you literally cannot win by having two monies. You have to commit. Because if you really think there's going to be appreciation of the money, thus more network effect, you have to choose the right money. And if you want to make your business choosing the right money every day, then you're just a trader and you're trying to predict the future. And that's a different conversation.
- [26:21]
Jameson Lopp
And if you get tempted by any shitcoin due to some technical factor, you've missed the point.
- [26:28]
Peter McCormack
Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by attracted. If attracted means attracted to buy it, then yeah, you probably missed the point. But even then you, you know, investing is just a matter of time preference. If I, if I think something is going to go up tomorrow and I have a high confidence and a low risk, I will buy that thing and sell it tomorrow. You know, this is just, it's hard to deny an arbitrage opportunity like that or such profit opportunity. But you know, in the context of bitcoin and why this conversation we're having. Yeah, you would be making a big mistake to buy any other coin but bitcoin. If you were looking for like, you know, this, this having this freedom money, having this, this security, this decentralized money being a part of an alternative system and knowing you can rely on it still being there years into the future, I don't think you can get that with any other coin.
- [27:18]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, because it's the only one that has that kind of real focus on maximum decentralization. I talk about, I've done it a few times talking about. So people have said decentralization is a spectrum. When you say something like, oh, Ethereum is quite centralized. And I actually say, no, it's directional. Yeah, centralization is a spectrum. And if something's becoming more centralized, then directionally it's heading in the wrong way. It feels like bitcoin is the only one that directionally is always moving towards even more decentralization. Does that make sense?
- [27:50]
Peter McCormack
That's one of the better ways I've heard, not heard before, that I've heard it described. Yeah, I think it's a great way to describe it is bitcoin is striving for maximal decentralization and altcoins just simply aren't. And the incentive, just by literally tweaking these designs, mostly what they end up doing is changing that direction. It's a very good way to put it.
- [28:17]
John Carvalho
Next up, I talked to John Moore about bitcoin being fuck you, money. But before that, I got a message from my sponsors. So firstly, let's talk about my new sponsor, Satstreet, who have now officially launched. Satstreet is the easiest way to send bitcoin to everyone. You know, with satstreet, you can gift Bitcoin to people by email. And not only that, Satstreet gives you many ways to earn bitcoin by bringing together all the top referral programs in the industry in just one place. Satstreet will also reward you for every person you invite that earns bitcoin. So newcomers get to learn about bitcoin and earn sats. And the same time you get rewarded for helping grow the network. I think this is pretty cool. I like the service. I met the guys out in Uruguay and when they explained it to me, I was like, yeah, that sounds pretty cool. Now I've seen it. I see what they're up to. So if you want to earn bitcoin while helping grow the network, make sure you check out Satstreet today by visiting satstreet.com which is S A T S T R-E-E-T.com and also today we have Cointracker and I'm also going to be recording a show with Chandam from Cointracker. Some people have got in touch with me. They've been like, pete, what are you doing? Supporting tax, you status, you supporting the government, taxes, theft, what the hell are you doing? And look, the reality is tax is a choice. You can choose to pay it, you can choose not to pay it. Whether you like it or not. Though, if you choose not to pay it and the government come after you, you're going to have to face the consequences. Look, I don't want to pay tax. Of course I don't want to fucking pay tax. But I don't want to go to prison either. So I do pay my tax.
- [29:46]
Jameson Lopp
I pay my tax every year, as.
- [29:47]
John Carvalho
Much as I hate it. And to do my tax calculations for my bitcoin this year I did use Cointracker and it was so easy to use. All I had to do was plug in my wallet, plug in my exchanges and in like two minutes it calculated my tax, which I just sent off to my accountant. And now I reluctantly have to pay the man, which is bullshit. But I talked to Chandan about this. I said, come on man, everyone's moaning. Come on the show. So we are going to record a.
- [30:12]
Jameson Lopp
Show about this and we're going to.
- [30:13]
John Carvalho
Talk about the implications of tax, you know, what are the things that the various governments are up to and some of the case studies that he knows about, some of the trouble people have got into. So yes, it is optional. Tax is optional. But I do support Cointracker for those who are interested in paying their tax. Now, filings work for the us, uk, Canada and Australia. And the service is free for Those who have 200 or fewer transactions in.
- [30:36]
Jameson Lopp
A year and listeners of the show.
- [30:37]
John Carvalho
If you've got more than 200 transactions, then you can get a 10% discount by using the link CointrackerIO forward slash, a forward slash. WBD Cointracker is C O I N T R A C K E R IO and they also have apps in the Apple and Android store, so you can go and check that out. But if you want to actually use the service, you do have to use their website.
- [31:00]
Jameson Lopp
Okay, so listen, if, if, if Bitcoin is king and it's not about the technology and it's more about, you know, the fact that it is first is the kind of trust that's already been embedded and built into it. I'm still going to have people, they're going to come in, they're going to be tempted by shitcoins, they're going to look at them and they're going to hear different stories. What is it like if you could crystallize it down? Very simple message, why Bitcoin? Just to keep it really simple for them.
- [31:29]
Peter McCormack
So the only reason to use a blockchain is because you want to have. It comes out to understand what a blockchain is. A blockchain is just a database that keeps track of a key and a value that's assigned to that key. The miners and the whole protocol of Bitcoin is just only for securely having a way to make updates to those key assignments. And that's the only thing a blockchain is actually for. It's just a way for everybody to have a copy of a database be able to reflect the public key version of their private key, to show control over a number in a database. And Bitcoin only really means something when you have two people that agree on this. So it can be me and you each have a node, we connect, we say, this is what I think the history is. You say, I agree, and that's it. We don't even need miners at that point. We already agree. But if I want to have a kind of secure process for now updating this database, that's where proof of work comes in and where mining comes in and where we're giving the reward to the miners for basically just making it really, really expensive, change this database. And if we make it really expensive to change this database, it allows us to create a situation where we can have a money that does not require escrow, does not require middleman. So there's no trust in escrow. And Bitcoin becomes the middleman. Bitcoin is this trusted escrow agent of our entire ledger. And so you have to understand, every single blockchain is this, they all this. And so every other blockchain, the only thing they're trying to do differently is they're trying to tweak what the rules are for changing the database. And typically the only way to make this better is by making it more centralized, somehow, more risky somehow, because then you can make it faster, you can make it cooler, you know, you can make it more complicated, etc. So all these blockchains, they're taking this very primitive design and they're elaborating on it on the base layer. So no matter what, all these shitcoins, they're all going to fail Bitcoin because immediately they're either accepting more centralization, which means going the direction you mentioned, they're all choosing the wrong direction. So that's one reason to just not give a shit about them. They'll always fail, or they are adding more attack surface. They're just making the thing more complicated and more likely to be attacked. Less, less reliable. And the truth is, we're already using cryptographic key schemes and bitcoin core developers and lightning, and these people are the best in the world at making really, really interesting tools with cryptographic key schemes where you can start chaining these things together and embedding them and making commitments and timestamps. And they're giving us so many things to make things with. But everybody is so greedy that they're trying to just fast forward. They don't want to work on Bitcoin. It's too hard to work on Bitcoin. I don't have time, I don't have the patience to wait for this to be possible on Bitcoin. So they're just jumping ahead and they're saying, I choose risk, I choose centralization so I can sell this fucking shit to people. And that's what's really going on about coins. So if there was really an innovative tech that simply could not be built on top of Bitcoin the way it is right now. But it was, but you knew it would be better if Bitcoin had it. If you were sincere, you could probably raise money from sincere Bitcoin people that think that your idea was worth having on Bitcoin, even if it required a hard fork, and they would get behind you and fund creating that technology for Bitcoin. So Bitcoin could have it. Because Bitcoin is super valuable to a lot of people with a lot of money and resources. And so unless you're just trying to arbitrage ignorance and, and exploit people's interest in Bitcoin instead of exploit Bitcoin's actual features, then you're probably just making a shitcoin that is actually truly shit and either delusional or a scam.
- [35:37]
Jameson Lopp
All right, that's exactly why I wanted you on John. Okay, so we covered the base chain there a little bit, but I know for you the kind of big broad vision involves lightning. And I haven't covered Lightning too much in the series like it was. It's a big leap. But I've covered mainly the base chain. But I did do one show with Jack Mallers to give people a picture of it. But it would be good to just cover that again. So firstly, if you could just explain to, to the audience now, like what Lightning means to you and why you think this takes bitcoin to the next level.
- [36:07]
Peter McCormack
Sure. So, you know, I said this before, I'll say it again. I think it's kind of impossible right now, you know, to overstate the importance of Lightning for bitcoin. You know, I've been a hype man for Lightning for about a year now and you know, at Bitrefill and just on my own as a bitcoiner, you know, and the more I got to understand Lightning, the more I saw what people were building, I just kept getting more and more excited and projecting more and more expectations onto Lightning and now onto myself as well, to build, to keep building some of these things for Lightning. So the reason why I feel this way and it's unfolding this way is bitcoin was never actually peer to peer in the sense that people thought when we were saying there are peer to peer aspects to how bitcoin works but not how people use it. Bitcoin was never instant. We kind of got that wrong in the first few years. And yeah, I actually think that. And from working at Bitrefill I did learn that, you know, accepting zero confirmation transactions is actually something probably manageable if you're, if you're, you know, a revenue generating business, you know, like you can probably manage your risk of how much risk you want to take with accepting zero conf. So there was, there is still kind of an ability to do instant, but it's not user friendly at all, at all. And what Lightning did is it brought everything that was missing for Bitcoin for like the retail side of commerce. It brought it all to Bitcoin, like we didn't have it before and now we do. We didn't have exact amount invoicing, we didn't have any way to like communicate as peers on the network. We didn't have instantaneousness, we didn't have high frequency payments for low cost and now we have all these things and like we've entirely unlocked this whole other side of Bitcoin for commerce, for B2B, for consumers, for maybe micro task applications, for streaming payment applications, for streaming data applications. This peer to peer network, I think we're going to see it used not just for transacting and not just for maybe some of the layered 3ish things people already know about. But I think we could use this for peering for normal networking needs. And you probably see things like, you know, torrents being, you know, propagated across the Lightning network and monetized and messaging and social media, maybe even, you know, there's a lot you can do when you build in monetization and you make it instantly responsive, you know, close to instant. There'll be some limitations because I don't think Lightning will be as affordable as everybody is predicting. There's some expense there, especially when you're routing across multiple peers. But, but the promise of Lightning is big and I certainly have a lot of expectations for it and I have no problem with it with, with continuing to hype this and letting other people expectations for it because I do think this is like Bitcoin's first playground. You don't need consensus here. Like all of the Ethereum people that jumped the gun felt like they needed to leave Bitcoin to make cool risky things. They can come back now. They really can. We don't have Turing complete smart contracts and rich statefulness and such but with things like RGB and Spectrum and tokens on Lightning, this is coming all stuff that's coming around the corner. Messaging on Lightning already being functional in more than one way. You have to be nuts. If this isn't enough for you to get creative and make cool products and think of new business ideas, then I don't know, you just got to be a little bit dense in my opinion.
- [39:59]
Jameson Lopp
But that's, that's cool for the devs. But say me as a user, how's my experience going to change with Lightning? Try and take me a few years ahead and give me a picture of what I'm going to be doing. Will it be built into my browser? Is it, will I have a Lightning wallet built built into Chrome or in Brave? Will I Be will have it with my. How. How do you see this playing out?
- [40:20]
Peter McCormack
The odds are it will play out a lot like how other things have played out that are similar in the past. In other words, probably will start off, you know, with trading, trading off some convenience for trust and centralization. You know, we already see some custodial wallets and things like this. It's not something I think is really necessary or vital to the growth of Bitcoin Coin and Lightning to have these custodial things. But there will be some cases where we need centralization as glue. But as a user, what you're going to have is the user experience is finally getting some good attention, the product design is finally getting more attention, and you're going to have, basically, you're going to be able to use an app without knowing too much about what's going on. You're just going to be able to say, I want to be able to own, you know, decentralized dollars. And maybe you want to learn about, you know, maybe there'll be like a DAI option on Lightning or something someday, you know, you know, some kind of stablecoin that is algorithmic. But in the end, you'll have Tether, you'll have Bitcoin, you'll have all these things and you'll be able to use them without thinking about it. You just go to the store and you will pay. You know, you can use your NFC like you do with your credit cards, or you can put your PayPal and your Google Pay and you'll probably start to see user experiences like this for Bitcoin. Whether you'll just have your Bitcoin plugged in to your Google Pay or you'll have your Google Pay plugged into your Bitcoin Pay thing. You know, like you're going to start seeing Bitcoin create mirror versions of the current reality, because that's how humans are. We're just going to mimic what we see and try to make a Bitcoin version. But you also see people getting more creative and realizing what the actual difference is here and creating even new user experiences. Very simple example, paying to any. Your phone. You don't know what the hell that QR code is. It might be a QR code for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Lightning, it could be whatever. But your phone scans it and reliably pays it. All you have to do is on Bitcoin, you know, situations like this, some, some of that might be facilitated by payment processing and exchanging behind the scenes. And maybe, you know, if you want a Lot of convenience. You end up asking for some KYC or for people who want total freedom and, you know, independence. They're just using normal bitcoin, you know.
- [42:49]
Jameson Lopp
So you see in both scenarios, one in this shadow world of new products that will pop up in a. That just exists within this kind of bitcoin lightning world. But there's also that this bitcoin lightning world will also bleed into the traditional world. Well, it'll be an option alongside what, PayPal and credit cards and you can just choose whatever you want, sort of.
- [43:08]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. The way you describe it, I'm okay with. But I do want to make a distinction in that I feel like the industry so far, all of the money, the VC money, Silicon Valley, the big bitcoin companies, many of them are on a path to where they're trying to exploit people's interest in bitcoin and kind of amass custody of all their assets. And this is indicative of. Because I think they want all those assets to be theirs eventually. Their idea is that you keep spending money until you have none left and then they milked you and they're done. And I want, for bitcoin, I want more companies to be thinking, you know, who cares about Fiat? Who cares about banks? Who. I don't want to make a new bank. I have no interest in competing with Coinbase or competing with, you know, JP Morgan or Bank of America. That's. That's boring as fuck to me. What I want to make is a complete alternative. And I think you're going to see that more and more.
- [44:04]
Jameson Lopp
What a bit like Jack has done with Cash App and square.
- [44:07]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. So I guess what I was getting at is not check, not necessarily Cash App and Square Square, more the direction thing again, like strike from Jack Mallers. He's going in one direction, right? He's saying, I'll help you pay Lightning invoices with your cash. This is not something that like tons of people are asking for right now, but it is, it is like an important, you know, part of the circular economy that that tube needs to be there. And so, and that's an on ramp, you know, that's an on ramp to bitcoin. I have a lot less interest in off ramps, at least, at least fiat off ramps. We're trying to get people in here. We're not trying to get people to just exploit the interest in bitcoin. And I think that's a mistake. We don't want everybody, all bitcoiners to be here for trading. That's not how we're going to improve the world.
- [44:58]
Jameson Lopp
And not all just Hodling.
- [45:01]
Peter McCormack
And even just Hodling. There's nothing wrong with trading. Well, there's nothing wrong with trading as long as you're not fooling yourself in ignoring that you might actually be gambling that part of it. But there's nothing wrong with Hodling either. There is a problem with people who think that hodling doesn't ultimately result in spending. And I don't like any kind of spend shaming. It's ridiculous.
- [45:24]
Jameson Lopp
Well, no, no, I said. And not just Hodling. I've seen. There's some people who talk about, like. Like it's just a store of value and we. That's all we need to do. And that doesn't actually make any sense to me. I think there has to be some spending. There has to be the movement of bitcoin wealth around.
- [45:42]
Peter McCormack
Well, like Sergey put the first half of this. Sergey Catlier put it perfectly. He said all bitcoin is always being hodled. All of it, all the time. There's just no paradigm where you talk about whether you're hodling our spending. It's all being hodled. That's the way bitcoin works. It's a database of who's hodling what. And so the spending is just a matter of when, that's all.
- [46:06]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, the moving of from one Hodler to another.
- [46:10]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [46:11]
Jameson Lopp
All right, so people have been listening to this. They've gone through 16 episodes. Hopefully they've got to hear. They're bored in. They think they're in, John, but they want to get involved. But look, the first stage you get involved is you can very easily just go and buy some bitcoin. But, like, how else can people get involved? Because I get it to me sometimes, like, oh, probably like once or twice a month, I'll get an email and say, I really want to get involved in bitcoin. How do I do it, Pete, what's your advice?
- [46:37]
Peter McCormack
You know, it's one of the hardest questions, man. I spend a lot of time myself, like, educating online, on Twitter, and I've even written some blog posts and I've done these podcasts and I do my. I do my part. I think I could. Anybody could always do more. But the thought of, like, getting an email of somebody saying, hey, John, I'm new to bitcoin, you know, what should I do? Like, that's not an email. I really want to answer. That's not. Like that is such a fucking chore, you know, it is. There's no, like, there's no Easy way to respond to that person without doing a responsible amount of work.
- [47:15]
Jameson Lopp
Well, actually, I have a standard response now, and I think I stole this off Meltem. I say to them, just start writing. Start a medium blog. Find an era of bitcoin you like, start writing about it and then start, you know, put that out there. Get some responses, Get a feel for the area of bitcoin you want to be involved in. Because it is broad. Yeah. There is technical side of things. There's marketing side of things. There's doing what I do, doing what you like. There's a lot of different ways. That's always been my advice.
- [47:40]
Peter McCormack
And people show up for different reasons, too. You know, like, if they showed up for bitcoin, it's a lot easier. You know, if they showed up for some other reason. It gets really complicated really fast. You know, trying to somebody who's never experienced trading, never experienced gambling, never experienced investing. And now they come in here and they hear there's a better bitcoin and that. And they're. They're experiencing all those things and more for the first time. Cryptography, you know, cryptocurrency, like, they just piled on, like, 20 different disciplines, and they're suddenly having to behave as if they're experts. And if they misbehave, people immediately attack their egos. And so, like, there's not. This is not a good environment for, like, cultivating positivity and cultivating, you know, safety, because they're coming in from greed. Other people want to take their money. They're trying to take other people's money. It's just like, the incentives are all over the place. So, yeah, I don't know how to answer that question. I think maybe the series like this, you know, your podcast series, where you're covering everything in a comprehensive way. You know, a lot of people were sharing, like, Jameson's Law, Jameson Lopp's link page. That was a popular thing. But after a while, I started. I stopped sharing that because you go to that link page, it's overwhelming. Like, you don't know what to click on. Like, this is, like, okay, this is, like, more than I would ever have in, like, a college course or maybe even a whole semester of college courses. Like, I don't even know where to start. And so I think that maybe my advice would be you have to identify a few people that are worthy, you know, are trustworthy, peers, reputable. Kind of like, the easiest thing to do is go to Hive one, maybe, and just click on bitcoin and, like, follow the top, like 100 people. And that's pretty, pretty great. Star probably, probably. But there's so much to learn. Don't jump in. Don't act like you can fix anything. Don't create anything. You know, wait, wait, wait. If you're a programmer, sure, you know, like get involved and start learning how to program and make stuff. But like, don't go and start like your first bitcoin company three months after you discover bitcoin. You're going to get it wrong for sure.
- [49:54]
Jameson Lopp
Well, even on opinions, you know, we can go back to the first time we recorded that was after you removed your mute of me because, yeah, I did that. I threw myself in, came in with a bunch of opinions and you know, it. It's a very hard world to come into, and I think it's getting harder to come into. Another thing I notice is that I don't have the patience. I used to. I used to look at people like you and think, can you just be a little more fucking patient with me? Give me some time. I'm like, I've really heard this great thing about DASH and I think it's this kind of. It's got these master and like, you wouldn't have any patience. I'm there now. I don't have the patience. I actually just block and mute a bunch of people going against what I felt previously. I think it's getting even harder to get involved.
- [50:34]
Peter McCormack
It is. Especially when you have a longer bear market. What happens is a lot of the people with free time start disappearing and so you have less volunteers helping with bitcoin. And like me, through this bear market, I have advanced my career and gotten worked and I work even more. So I spent a lot less time on Twitter. I spent a lot less time holding anybody's hand or whatever. And so my involvement is even intermittent there. And when people ask, yeah, my tolerance is kind of gone now. Like if some, if there's somebody that actually thinks, like say BSV is actually the real bitcoin, just because they're, you know, a day old bitcoiner, a day old crypto person, I'm not even gonna take them seriously. I'm just gonna be like, mute. Like, I just never want to even have this noise in my life. And that's not very, you know, if that's a real person, which I doubt most BSV accounts are, but if that's a real person, that's real sad, right? Like just totally being dismissed on your first day.
- [51:36]
Jameson Lopp
What about becoming a good guardian of bitcoin?
- [51:41]
Peter McCormack
I Think that one important thing people really need to do is get a fucking job. You know, if you got rich off bitcoin, good for you. But if you're trading it all away slowly, that's not cool. If you have less bitcoin, you know, any trader, if you have less bitcoin now than you did a year ago, stop. Like it's just, it's just over already. It's really hard to out trade bitcoin in its own pace of growth, you know, on a four year time frame, you know, four or five years to be consistently a great trader. Just stop. I don't think it helps. So to be a good guardian of bitcoin, I think you have to be a productive human being that puts value into bitcoin. That can be as simple as just, you know, working on your career and making more money each year so you can have more money that you actually can save long term. You know, participating in the bitcoin world, you have to be able to store value and that means you have to be in a financial position to save money long term. You don't want to have to sell the bottom. You don't want to have to only have enough bitcoin to where like, you know, you have maybe one month of float in your life and if anything goes wrong, you have to sell all your bitcoin. You have to be a productive human being, contribute to society and so you can keep saving money and storing value. That's the simplest form and the kind of thing that anybody can do. And many of many of you out there are not doing even doing that, like just caring about being productive human being beyond that is to take it. The next step to now develop skills that allow you to specialize within this world. You know, whether they be becoming a better programmer or learning more about economics or product design, or just basically doing what you can to have skills to get a bitcoin job. You get a bitcoin job now you're helping bitcoin within the industry. And that's like you kind of gone to the next level, right? And then eventually you just want to keep. Like I've been here not eight years yet, this year will be eight at the end. And I've always, always upped my game for how much I feel like I'm doing for bitcoin every year. There's always more you can do to just help bitcoin. And it might sound a little obsessive or something, and maybe it is, but like I feel totally impotent to participate in Politics, to vote to make the world a better place, to volunteer to make the world a better place, it just feels totally minuscule. But when I help bitcoin, when I do something, even just buying a little bit of bitcoin just feels way more powerful. Like I'm doing way more for the future of everybody. Just with that. Because you're just supporting this whole movement just by buying more of it. That's just a raw thing you can do that helps. But if you can start working for a bitcoin company, helping bitcoin grow through infrastructure, etc. Running a node, running a lightning node, contributing to code, whatever. The closer you get to bitcoin, the more you can help it. And I've never personally, every time I dived deeper into the rabbit hole, it's never drowned me, you know, it's only felt warmer.
- [54:55]
Jameson Lopp
Well, it's always. I find it hard to actually keep up with everything.
- [54:59]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [55:01]
Jameson Lopp
Producing two shows a week and now trying to make films, trying to look at how people are using bitcoin around the world, which has become a really important thing for me. I want to know how people are using it in El Salvador or Venezuela and the ones who are using it is very different from those in New York or London. It's a completely different experience. I find it almost impossible to do that whilst trying to understand the tech. Keep in mind where the tech's going, understand where the previous privacy, where privacy is heading, following economics, understanding what KYC regulations are like. There is so much. I feel like you almost have to pick an area and focus on that.
- [55:37]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, I mean the, the. But I see that as like why it's so awesome. Like the opportunities are overwhelmingly large. You know, that's how I see it. And so I see no obstacles here. I only see opportunities and I really hope everybody starts to look at it that way too.
- [55:55]
Jameson Lopp
Do you think also as somebody coming into bitcoin, it's important to have that skepticism for the government and be somebody who cares about freedom and questions the role of the state. Do you think that's an important part to become a real bit?
- [56:11]
Peter McCormack
I mean, as, as a raw answer, I'll just say like, you know, probably not. It's not required.
- [56:18]
Jameson Lopp
But you know what?
- [56:18]
Peter McCormack
I, I think you'll find an extremely high correlation. You know, like this is I think maybe a huge part of, not the only thing, but indicative of the cultural divide between Ethereum and Bitcoin. I don't think Ethereum people, you know, you'll find the same quantity of them that are Anti, you know, anti being government slaves. These are the people that will look to the government for safety. These are the people that will trust the government. These are the people that, you know, are baked in, you know, Silicon Valley. You know, they were disruptors for the Internet, for our generation, but then they kind of thought they could just keep being magical wizards and keep waving their wand and keep getting pats on the back. And now they've all just become like this whole ego trip and they totally missed the point on Bitcoin. They're missing the point, they're missing the boat. They've done a great job exploiting people's interest in Bitcoin and taking all of their money, but they haven't really done much to help Bitcoin or advance humanity.
- [57:24]
Jameson Lopp
Well, I, I refer to it in my Venezuela film where I said, bitcoin has been subverting the legacy financial system. And there is that kind of the reason I asked, I said, do you have to be. Because I think, can you really understand the key properties of Bitcoin and why they're important so much? If you don't have that disdain towards the government because you want censorship resistance, you want seizure resistance. Whereas I think Ethereum for me is more, more like a coder's toy to make little games, little apps with. But there's no real desire to subvert the legacy financial system. If anything, it feels like just a way to enrich themselves.
- [58:05]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna, I'm not a psychologist or a scientist or something, but I've been contemplating lately whether or not humans can actually learn anything without pain. And if you, if you define pain abstractly enough that I'm not actually not sure anymore. And that's kind of what I'm getting at with like, Ethereum, people, like, they'll be happy to throw away their censorship resistance and embrace centralization and have all of their nodes be on one cloud, etc. Because they don't. They haven't felt the pain, they haven't been censored, they haven't had, like, like, I, I don't even know why to this day, but I've been kicked off of multiple exchanges. I've never given, been. One exchange gave me lies. The other one kicked me off. I think because of the first one kicked me off. And it was just, they were sharing information to my knowledge. I'm not a criminal, but I was treated like one. And just that experience alone just made me double down more Bitcoin. I'm like, man, you know what? This is the whole fucking point. Like, that was my money. And they're. They're like, they're oppressing me and they're giving me a reason, like, I have no power in this situation, you know, And I think that if you. Until you've felt pain, you're not going to properly design things safely, you know?
- [59:26]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah. Or maybe see pain. See pain on others. And you. I think you have the right.
- [59:31]
Peter McCormack
Maybe I'm a little bit worried with seeing pain where there's a little bit too much ego there, where you're. You think you're gonna save people and you'll save them by any means. And, like, ego is so tricky right now. I have, like. I think about these things a lot and, like, the line between arrogance and confidence and conviction and, you know, being a fool, you know, and it's really hard. You know, you get philosophical about this stuff and. And I think that. That I really. There's a lot missing in the culture for these shitcoiners. You know, I just think there's a real cultural gap, and this is. It comes from. You know, I've been through a lot of shit in my life, and I've. I've dealt with authorities, I've dealt with, you know, all kinds of different problems. And I know you have stories, too, and all of these things just make me feel more confident about this. You know, I just feel like humans need a way to fucking escape and be free and have their own shit and be left alone, you know, like, we need this. We need to create a better environment where the incentives work the way you know, they should. I don't know.
- [60:41]
Jameson Lopp
I think. I think a little bit of ego is okay, because, look, I have a bit of ego.
- [60:45]
Peter McCormack
I don't think you can get anything done without ego.
- [60:47]
Jameson Lopp
You know, it drives you forward. There's, you know, but like, you say, it depends where it's placed, but a little bit of ego that drives you forward, where you're kind of proud of what you've created and you want other people to see it and congratulate you. And I always think that's. I don't think that's unhealthy.
- [61:04]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, well, this is what's tricky, is these people all will Gaslight the fuck out of you on this level. You know, Like, I go around and I act very confident for bitcoin on Twitter, and people think I like Ethereum. They think I am a fucking idiot. They think, like, wow, I can't believe how stupid you actually are. Like, they say this to me, you know, and like I say dumb shit all the time, I know this. But I also know that I've put in like thousands more hours than many of these people on thinking about and reading about and understanding this on whole other levels. And yes, I still feel stupid and I still say dumb shit, but I'm not gonna let some random Ethereum people make me feel insecure about what I'm saying because no matter how they say it, because I just know where things stand, I know how they actually work.
- [61:50]
Jameson Lopp
You bitcoin again? All right, are there any blind spots here in our world of bitcoin? Do you believe we've got any blind spots? Have you got any blind spots? Do you think there's any skill sets that are particularly missing? We have some of the best, if not the best developers in the world working on this. We have some of the hardest working people I know and also just people who really genuinely care and they do. I've met so many good people in this world and I know there's some who screw up or have the wrong incentives. But do you believe there's any blind spots and do you believe there's certain skill sets we don't have enough of.
- [62:22]
Peter McCormack
In this world for the blind spots? I think they're always there and they always will. The desire to, the temptation to move towards centralization and trust, it's just like always going to be there. It's going to always be pulling on everything all the time. So I don't think we can really get rid of that.
- [62:43]
Jameson Lopp
But that means you're going to fight it, right? You're going to fight it when it happens?
- [62:47]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. So it's like a constant battle. It's, it's, you know, it will never end. It's relentless. Everybody's always going to be fighting against it because everybody's always going to be trying to scam everybody out of their bitcoin.
- [62:58]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, people should, people should go back and listen to our first show. It was called Defending Bitcoin. It was based on, you know, you in the trenches defend bitcoin during the scaling defense debate. So I think people should, should go and listen to that. The, the other point was, you know, what skill sets do you think there are particular areas you think we're missing skill sets?
- [63:17]
Peter McCormack
I think so. As long as you have a core correct understanding of bitcoin, like we're probably okay as far as skill sets go. So the, the education and the curing of ignorance probably is probably is the priority. And, and as long as we, we keep that first and we do a good job with that. We won't have to compensate too much in areas of specialization. Because one of the core things you have to understand about Bitcoin is all change is against consensus. Everything is. You can't tell an enemy apart from somebody who's trying to benefit. Bitcoin help every code change, every person trying to interact with it. You have to always assume that you can't trust them. So, like, you want to be. We need to train people to be scared to update their bitcoin code to the latest version. You know, like you probably want that version to be five years, five versions ago, to feel safe. You know, there's some kind of culture that we have to keep creating and generating where you shouldn't. You don't trust the core devs. No, the core devs are all. They're all bitcoin attackers. I'm not saying they're bad people, they don't do good things for bitcoin, but they're here to attack Bitcoin and we can all agree to let them do so and move forward with what they want, but we have to keep framing it this way. Have to make sure that education stays this way. Because this is the same reason why government doesn't work now. Because we don't want to allow development to turn into government. And it could happen if we're not careful. You know, the conspiracy theories that bcash people like to put on us, they didn't come about because they were impossible. You know, they didn't just make that shit up that could actually happen and they could even be right now. The truth is it just has to not matter. It has to be that, like, in the end, we have enough people reviewing the code, enough people caring about being scared to change the code at all that we can stay protected. That said, I do think, yeah, more way, way, way more eyeballs in the code would be great. That's probably one thing that I think would be the most important. I think, if I recall, this is what core devs kind of say also they would like a lot more code review. Yeah. Just to make sure we don't let anything bad in, you know?
- [65:38]
Jameson Lopp
Yeah. All right, cool. Look, final question on this one before we close out. What does the future hold? John.
- [65:45]
Peter McCormack
That'S very, very broad.
- [65:48]
Jameson Lopp
Means you can answer how you want.
- [65:51]
Peter McCormack
Sure. The future for bitcoin. I really hope that this next pump does actually happen to some degree. Just for the invigoration in the bitcoin economy, mostly not for personal greed reasons. I can handle another year or two of Bitcoin at 8,000, it's okay. But I would like to accelerate.
- [66:10]
John Carvalho
I'm.
- [66:11]
Peter McCormack
I'm here to make this happen faster. I want bitcoin to happen faster. I want to be alive when bitcoin happens. I think there is a bitcoin happening moment that's a whole other level than where we are now. And I want to help make it happen and I want to be alive when it happens. So the future for bitcoin, I think is disruption of maybe more and more markets. Each wave, each cycle. We saw a little bit of disruption with like high inflationary currency and some markets. You know, last, last bubble, the next one, I think we'll probably, we'll see. We'll see it happen to bigger countries than last time and we'll see. Probably, probably in the next couple years we'll see our first major aggressor to bitcoin. You know, we, we had the India banning bitcoin and now unbanning it and then now maybe rebanding it. We'll see. But that was nothing like. I think bitcoin still has some hostility coming towards it. Could be some really bad laws in places that matter. Outright bannings, probably not. I hope that we can progress bitcoin in a proper way so that there's just too many people that have bitcoin for the government to ever be interested in killing it, because they're bitcoiners too. But that's the future I hope for. And the future I want to see is just more and more people just using bitcoin as if it was like, you know, another tool in their toolbox and them all agreeing that we can't just like get rid of this or ban it or hate it. It's, it's even better than what we had. And yeah, we have to kind of poison pill the world into bitcoin. Lightning network, I think. I don't know if we'll see the big lightning network moment until we see the next big pump. I think it'll keep growing, but the pace, people might, might be a little disappointed in the pace they might continue to be disappointed because it's not, one, that we still have to make all the cool products for it and these like kind of layer 3ish stuff. So there's still a lot more work to be done. And two, the commerce isn't actually here yet. Like, people haven't made money on bitcoin since lightning. You know, we need all these people to make money, to have money to spend. We need to have a lot of new entrants and we need to have people actually wanting to do retail with bitcoin again. You know, we jumped the gun in those, in those first few years, you know, 2013 or whatever. That kind of era where we tried to get retail on board, it was way too early. There just weren't enough people that had bitcoin yet. But, yeah, that's kind of some answers, I guess, to the future of bitcoin.
- [68:48]
Jameson Lopp
Awesome, man. Well, listen, look, it's always great to have you on. It's been a great way to end this series. I know you've got some exciting things coming up. We're going to talk about those in the future. But if people want to keep an eye on you, they want to stay in touch or maybe even reach out to you, if they. If they're not going to ask you how to get involved in bitcoin, then how do people follow you, man?
- [69:06]
Peter McCormack
I'm not as scary as I seem. Generally. I'm mostly a nice guy. I'm just a little bit rude on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter as bitcoinerrolog. You can find me on the same handle on Telegram if you want to chat about anything. And yes, I have a new project, the new stealth mode, top secret project that I will hopefully be able to announce to people by the time maybe the show is out, at least with the name and some initial narrative about the vision of this company. But yeah, I am looking for any help if there are lightning enthusiasts out there and people that share my kind of rebellious view of bitcoin and its place in the world. If. If you think you can help me with this mission, get in touch.
- [69:52]
Jameson Lopp
Right. Nice one. Well, listen, I wish you the best for that. You know, if you need any help from me, if I can do anything, just reach out to me and appreciate you coming on again.
- [70:00]
Peter McCormack
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [70:03]
John Carvalho
All right, so what did you make of that? The Beginner's guide is finished. It's done. It's over. All 17 episodes are out there. I have loved doing the series. It's been really good, not only just for me to learn, not only for me personally to learn, but to get this stuff out there to some of you. You know, we're covering stuff you might already know. So whether you've learned something new, it's been a refresh. I think it's been a helpful series and I've loved all the feedback, but I want more. Look, if you've been through the series and you got some feedback Please get in touch. I am also planning to put this whole series up on a new website. I've bought the beginner's guide to bitcoin.com. when I get some time, I'm going to put it all up on there. I also want to do an animated, single narrated version of the guide. Just another way for people to consume the content. But yes, I've loved doing this, I've loved making it. But please do give me a feedback. Let me know what you think. And as I said in the intro, a massive thanks to everyone's got involved, Everyone who supported this, everyone who's come on, everyone has helped me plan in the background. I think it's been a very, very.
- [71:02]
Jameson Lopp
Good series to do.
- [71:04]
John Carvalho
Okay. A great way to round it off. Big thanks to John. I love his approach, I love his thinking. You know, bitcoin is you money. Anyone tells you he's any different, just tell them to go themselves. Okay? A lot of swearing in this episode.
- [71:16]
Jameson Lopp
Very sorry.
- [71:16]
John Carvalho
I know I get some people saying, look, I'm in the car and I'm listening to this with my children. Can you stop swearing so much? I'm sorry we can't get away from the fact that bitcoin is you money. But I'm sorry to you and I'm sorry to your kids this week, but it is what it is, right? If you want to support the show, if you like what I'm doing, if you've listened to the whole Beginner's Guide and you think, you know what, Pete, I want to help you out here. Really appreciate your work. Well, there's a couple of things you can do. Firstly, you can share this out with your friends and family. Not just this, but any show. But there's loads of other things you can do. You can leave me a review on itunes. Do you know what? It's all up on my website. If you want to help, head over there.
- [71:49]
Jameson Lopp
It's what?
- [71:50]
John Carvalho
Bitcoindig.com Click on the Support section. Everything you can do to help is listed there. Right, that's the series done. Any feedback, you can reach out to me. My email address is. Hello@whatbitcoindid.com.