← The Peter McCormack Show
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- [00:00]
Dan Held
Going to see a moment where the narrative gets really, really good. It's sort of the, the moment where people wake up. It's the moment where Andreas Antonopoulos was an amazing speaker and now we see this new wave of like Nick Carter's and BJ's. And then we're going to see one more wave where the narrative gets so simple that everyone gets it. And that narrative will be broadcast at just the right moment when people are starting to lose faith in their governments, where it'll finally hit that chord. It'll finally hit that resonance frequency.
- [00:36]
Peter McCormack
Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast. Hi there, how are you all?
- [00:43]
Welcome to the what Bitcoin did podcast where you get to hear from the best minds in bitcoin and crypto. I'm your host, Peter McCormack and today I'm releasing a special bonus episode I recorded with Dan Held from Picks and Shovels. I've left the firewire connector for my laptop at home. I'm in Vegas. So sorry, this intro might sound a bit weird, but yeah, I recorded this with Dan last week. It was a very cool interview where we're talking about his article on the planting of bitcoin. And as Today is the 10th anniversary of Satoshi releasing the white paper, I felt it was a very cool interview and a very fitting one to release on the day.
- [01:15]
So, yes, I hope you enjoy it.
- [01:16]
You've got any questions, feel free to give me a shout. You can email me. I'm hello@whatbitcoindid.com and please do check out the show notes or Dan's articles and how you can help the show.
- [01:27]
Hi Dan, how are you Doing well.
- [01:29]
Dan Held
How about yourself?
- [01:30]
Peter McCormack
Pretty good, thanks. So you've just got back from Vegas, you're at Money 20 20.
- [01:34]
Dan Held
That's right. I've survived four days in Vegas. Yes.
- [01:38]
Peter McCormack
And it was good. It was successful trip for you?
- [01:40]
Dan Held
Yeah, my co founder Matt and I went there was a good crypto contingent contingency there. We had a lot of, I think really, really intimate, good meetings with some people that we'd been been meaning to meet. So overall, very productive for us. You know, I think it also gives you a good perspective of how small crypto is relative to the larger fintech landscape. It's good to zoom out sometimes.
- [02:02]
Peter McCormack
And did you feel like the outliers at Money20 20? Was there an interest from other people from the wider financial community?
- [02:09]
Dan Held
Well, yeah, I think I heard the word blockchain about 10,000 times. You know, I think blockchain has become the shelling point for all tech innovation. So obviously that's kind of first and foremost, like, I think, kind of like the most popular word at the conference. It is. You know, I was attracted to bitcoin back in the day because I'm the rebel. So I kind of like being the weird. The weird cryptocurrency or the weird. The weird startup sort of focused in this niche, more niche market.
- [02:39]
Peter McCormack
And I don't normally do the origin stories because they usually exist somewhere else. And I'll share them out in the show notes, but I don't really know yours that well, so it would be great to know your background, how you came into bitcoin and crypto. That'd be really useful for me to hear.
- [02:54]
Dan Held
Yeah, absolutely. So back in. Back in 2012, when I lived in Dallas, I'm originally from Texas.
- [03:00]
Peter McCormack
I've been to Dallas.
- [03:01]
Dan Held
Oh, really? Nice.
- [03:03]
Peter McCormack
Yes. Very cool place. When I went to south by Southwest, I flew into Dallas and decided to have a night there.
- [03:08]
Dan Held
Oh, cool.
- [03:09]
Peter McCormack
And it's probably one of my favorite. Yeah, it's one of my favorite places I've been to.
- [03:12]
Dan Held
I grew up in Uptown, which is kind of a fun, kind of younger place to go. Go hang out and live.
- [03:17]
Peter McCormack
I went out on. Is it Elm Street? Ellam Street?
- [03:21]
Dan Held
There's mckinney Avenue.
- [03:23]
Peter McCormack
Mckinney Avenue.
- [03:24]
Dan Held
There's a couple spots.
- [03:25]
Peter McCormack
Yeah.
- [03:25]
Dan Held
But mckinney's kind of the main one over there. Yeah. You know, growing up in Dallas is a great place. I think in Texas, there's a very strong libertarian culture of. Of Texas is a very funny place. So. So in Texas, in high school, you pledge allegiance to the American flag and the Texas flag, and a lot of people consider, you know, Texas was its own country for 50 years, and a lot of Texans consider themselves as their own country. So it has a very, very fierce libertarian culture kind of baked in from school to where I think a lot of people really respect freedom. You know, I think Texas as a whole is a rather conservative state, but I think there are, like, kind of those really cool tenants of libertarianism that exists there.
- [04:17]
Peter McCormack
Right?
- [04:17]
Dan Held
Yeah. And so, you know, that gives you, like, a little bit of background on where I grew up. And so Alden got interested in Bitcoin in 2012. I worked at a small investment firm in Dallas as an analyst. And, you know, for me, going through finance school during the 2008 financial crisis really kind of rocked my perspective of the leaders, both in political parties and in the economy. It really kind of shook my fundamental belief or trust in them because I saw that everything I had read in my textbooks and all the professors and all of the. All of the leaders had no idea what they were doing. And so that kind of fundamentally shook my belief in Keynesian economics. And I had turned to Austrian School of economics as kind of the, I think, alternative or better source of truth. And so in Texas, you know, while working at the small investment firm, a buddy of mine introduced me to Bitcoin in the form of a cessious coin. So after we went out for a night, night of the bars, night out at the bars, he paid me back in two cassacious coins. And so that was my first. Bitcoin was a cassacious coin, the obnoxiously shiny physical gold coin that we see in all those, all those articles. And of course, I didn't immediately go buy as much as I could. I think I. I think I lost one of them and I'm not sure what happened to the other one. I think I redeemed one of them. And what made me most interested was that while I didn't understand how it worked because I wasn't in tech and I wasn't technical, I did know if it facilitated uncensorable payments, that this was going to be something incredibly big. That if a marketplace for certain types of illicit activity could be facilitated by this currency, that it was onto something really, really powerful. And so through a serendipitous roll of the dice, my company relocated me out to San Francisco. And this was January 2013, and went out there and went to the bitcoin meetup. And at that time, you know, this was when Bitcoin was $10. So there was. There's only 15 of us at that meetup. And it was like Brian and Fred from Coinbase, Charlie Lee, you had Ryan Singer and, and Jared Kenna from Trade Hill, which was the first US exchange. It was like Jed McCaleb was there and there's just a cooler of PBRs and a whole field of dreams. You know, people were. It was exciting to have finally, if you, you know, if you equate Bitcoin to a religion, it was exciting to finally go to a church, like a church meeting where I met other believers in what I believed in March 2013 hit and the price spiked to 260. And then there was like 150 people there and there's VCs almost making it rain business cards. I mean, honestly, I think I remember one moment where they just walked around handing them out and that kind of sparked my interest at that moment. To go build something the space. And so in May 2013, my co founder Kevin Johnson and I built the first real time market data and newsfeed aggregator on mobile called ZeroBlock. And so Zero Block is like the Blockfolio equivalent of 2013. And later that year we got acquired by Blockchain.info and I came on board at Blockchain as the first employee outside of Nick Carey, the original CEO and the two support staff. So joined there December 2013 and was product manager there for the next year. Left there to go to Change Tip. Change Tip was a micropayments company that tried to facilitate micropay bitcoin micropayments over social media. And then after that went to Uber where I was on the writer growth team led by Andrew Chen and the global data team where we piped in external data to color in certain competitive sort of landscapes. So last, last fall decided I wanted to return to my first love, crypto, and decided to go build Picks and Shovels, which is the company I co founded. And we're building something called Interchange, which is a portfolio management tool for institutional crypto traders. So we take all of their complex trade and transaction history, pull it all together, sanitize it, standardize it, and then calculate different complex portfolio metrics which enables fund managers that were previously flying blind to now have visibility. So that's, that's the full A to Z story of me.
- [09:22]
Peter McCormack
It's a great name. Picks and Shovels. I really like it.
- [09:25]
Dan Held
It's very cutesy.
- [09:27]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. And also I think you have the best name in crypto.
- [09:30]
Dan Held
Thank you. We didn't use the word. We vehemently removed the words coin or bit as part of the name. I refused to have coin or bit as part of our name.
- [09:41]
Peter McCormack
So when you first came up on my radar, I assumed your surname was. You were like on a non account and Held, like Dan Held. The Held bit was just like a joke.
- [09:50]
Dan Held
Yeah, Held's my real name.
- [09:52]
Peter McCormack
I know it's brilliant but. Okay. And so is Interchange out in the market now? Is it being used?
- [09:58]
Dan Held
We have been building this over the last year. We're getting close to releasing it with a few select clients. Portfolio management is a particularly tricky problem to tackle because it's only useful in its entirety. So if a fund has data from five exchanges and we only have four, it's not exactly useful for them. So it's a slow long tail process of adding all of those disparate data sets. So yes, we are launching soon functionality somewhat more limited but exciting to Kind of get this in the hands of customers here. You know, we've incorporated them throughout the process, but excited to be kind of taking the next leap with the alpha.
- [10:40]
Peter McCormack
Which exchanges are you interfacing with?
- [10:43]
Dan Held
When we launch we'll have the top five US Exchanges.
- [10:47]
Peter McCormack
Crypto exchanges, correct?
- [10:49]
Dan Held
Yes, sorry. The product is for only crypto assets.
- [10:51]
Peter McCormack
And therefore will you also then be interfacing with ice?
- [10:56]
Dan Held
We haven't engaged in dialogue with them, but ideally yes. Whether it be, whether it be Bakkt or any of these other professional trading platforms that are popping up that if they have a fixed API we could pull in this data, which I'm assuming all of them will. But we haven't, we haven't talked to them yet.
- [11:14]
Peter McCormack
So looking at the current news landscape, your timing is quite good really.
- [11:19]
Dan Held
We're hoping so. I mean the bed of the company is that as Pomp says, you know, the virus is spreading or Novogratz the herd is coming. We think we're well positioned to where if we build this tool and iterate with kind of the smaller funds because right now a lot of these funds are pretty small. Iterate with the smaller funds, we'll be ready for that institutional herd when they come in. So we think the timings, timings on point. We'll see what the market gods play out.
- [11:49]
Peter McCormack
Looking at the Picks and Shovels website, I get the feeling you're going to be working on a suite of products.
- [11:55]
Dan Held
Yeah, we're hoping so. We're hoping Interchange find a strong product market fit and we wanted the flexibility of being able to brand other products differently. We're not sure yet but that, that was kind of the idea behind the dual branding of Picks and Shovels. Picks and Shovels the company and Interchange the product.
- [12:14]
Peter McCormack
Okay, well I'll share some links to that out in the show notes so people can find out more information about Picks and Shovels. I do though want to talk to you about some of your content. You've been writing like a maniac recently.
- [12:25]
Dan Held
I have, I have.
- [12:27]
Peter McCormack
We've got the upcoming 10 year anniversary of Satoshi releasing the white paper which I as I told you is on my 40th birthday, so be a double celebration. But yes, you've been right on a maniac. Very interesting stuff actually. What triggered this, all this writing?
- [12:42]
Dan Held
Well, it's actually a distinct moment. So Jill Carlson Meltem and I were skiing in Tahoe earlier this year and on, on the car ride back, Jill and I are like jamming, just talking constantly in the front seat on the way back about A wide variety of things. And Jill goes, you know, she goes, you know, Satoshi was, was really brilliant right in the, in coating up the white, coding up bitcoin and writing the white paper. But she goes, it's a very underappreciated how precise his timing was that his go to market strategy was equally as brilliant as the code itself. And that just kind of blew my mind. I had been in this space for six years, but I hadn't really thought about it that way. And, and that idea was incepted and I couldn't get it out of my head. So I sat down and I started to compile. I started to read a bunch of medium posts. I'd already. Twitter is kind of my favorite channel, so I already had a bunch of. A bunch of content on Twitter like that I had previously flagged. And so I just started to ingest all this information around bitcoin's origin story and other aspects of bitcoin and it ballooned into this giant, this giant Google Doc. And I was like, okay, this is gonna, it's gonna take a little while. So I started to chunkify each piece and, and then they kind of coalesced into planting bitcoin, which the first article was, was released yesterday on CoinDesk. So it's part of CoinDesk's 10 year anniversary content section. And so planting bitcoin is kind of the, the major piece that came out of all of this research, which is essentially bitcoin's origin story. That satoshi's brilliance wasn't just in the species of tree that he chose to plant, the bitcoin code. It was the season, the soil, and the gardening techniques that were equally as important.
- [14:46]
Peter McCormack
And so where did that come from? Was that like your own brainwave?
- [14:52]
Dan Held
I think I made it up, but.
- [14:55]
Peter McCormack
It works really well.
- [14:56]
Dan Held
Oh, thank you, thank you. I've been bouncing it off. I'd like to call out that I stand on the shoulders of giants. My job, I think, is in the, like, my value that I bring is in the connectivity of all of everyone else's thoughts and the kind of stitching together of that more easy to read narrative. To the best of my knowledge, I think I made up plankton bitcoin, but it's certainly an idea that I bounced off a lot of other people before I went public with it.
- [15:22]
Peter McCormack
I also quite liked, when we were chatting on Twitter beforehand, I think you refer to it as bitcoin's immaculate conception. Was that Nick Carter who came up with that?
- [15:31]
Dan Held
You know, it's funny Nick and I were chatting about the origination of that, that phrase. So Nick, I think popularized it, but we found a reference to it, I think from a few years ago on Reddit. So I'm not sure if we can claim origination for that, that phrase, but Nick has certainly been popularizing it recently.
- [15:51]
Peter McCormack
I really, I really liked it. It kind of, it helps you put into context so many other altcoins and other al projects and how you compare them. Quite interestingly actually. Before we delve into this article, how much of a bitcoin maximalist are you? Are you like fully there? Are you semi there?
- [16:14]
Dan Held
I'm a bitcoin realist. So look, I've been in this space for six years. I lived through the first 2014 altcoin boom bust cycle. I'm a, I think going to Uber and working at Uber was great because I'm one of the few crypto people that actually went to go outside of crypto in between and went to go see how product and marketing works at a hundred million monthly active user scale. I've seen the next wave. I've seen what it takes to scale what we're doing here. And so I have, I think, a good rationale reason to, to kind of push back on some of this, like I'd say irrational exuberance. So that's why I call myself a realist. I think bitcoin was always designed to do what it did, which is to be sound money. And it's achieving that purpose. It's incredibly exciting what that means. I, you know, even if, if bitcoin's the only thing that we make here, that would still be immensely, immensely important. So I think I'm, to put it this way, I'm most excited about bitcoin. I'm still excited about the other things as well.
- [17:26]
Peter McCormack
So before we go in, what other things excite you? What other projects?
- [17:30]
Dan Held
Well, you know, I think if we look at cryptocurrency or like crypto assets as a species of money, you know, what are the parameters or traits that are going to, that might, you know, that we could kind of use as a rough guideline to see what, what type of organism might survive in this new paradigm. You know, certainly some of like, look, I'm an, I'm an old school crypto guy, so I like some of the more ecchi stuff. You know, I think like market certain marketplaces that, that helped certain types of activities. Having like a completely decentralized marketplace would be cool, whether that be like an auger or Silk Road. I Think those are pretty interesting. I think blockchains, or at least the bitcoin blockchain and other blockchains, they're not that valuable until you store data that has a high value per byte on it. So there has to be financial data. So I don't see many use cases outside of ones that focus on the high value per byte and that are solving a problem that inherently doesn't make someone happy. Because if you, if you're doing everything above board, I don't see why you can't just use a centralized system. So TBD on what those things that emerge, you know, what things emerge that I find that will be compelling, but what I hope it is is something that isn't something that asks for permission. I mean, that's not why we came here, right? We came here to go build a new world. And that's also why I liked working at Uber, as Uber was illegal in every single city it launched in. Uber was fiercely libertarian. So I like that sort of mentality. I think the world becomes a better place when we stop asking for permission and we start, start building.
- [19:17]
Peter McCormack
Did Uber accept bitcoin at one point?
- [19:19]
Dan Held
It did not. I know there was that, that news around Argentina, but I'm pretty sure that Uber had no payment rails lined up for bitcoin.
- [19:28]
Peter McCormack
Okay, fine. Okay, so back to the article.
- [19:32]
Dan Held
Yeah.
- [19:32]
Peter McCormack
And like you say, Satoshi got so much right. And what's quite interesting, I thought was recently with the change in the Ethereum inflation policy. Yeah, I thought that was quite interesting because that's never had to happen with bitcoin and it always feels like altcoins are trying to replicate what's been achieved with bitcoin. Right. They're trying to achieve the same success, but they are unable to get certain parts of their algorithm, certain parts of certain cogs in their system to work correctly. Yet bitcoin hasn't ever had to change its inflation policy and it has worked. So it does appear that Satoshi got so much right early on. And what I also felt was quite interesting was you put in the quote into the article. I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem. Then I wrote the paper. I thought that was very interesting.
- [20:28]
Dan Held
Well, you know, Satoshi there is kind of, that's a nod of appreciate appreciation to the cypherpunks, because the cypherpunks manifesto starts with cypherpunks write code. So, you know, Satoshi is giving a nod to that community, which by the way, is. That's the soil section. And in my four part series, it's, it was the perfect soil to then go plant the seed. It was the only group that would give a shit about bitcoin. And the way that he wrote the white paper was purposely made to resonate with his target audience, the cypherpunks. And it's, it's pretty fascinating, you know, like this satoshi going further and further down this rabbit hole has made me appreciate satoshi's brilliance even more and more. That that immaculate conception was not just an incredible amount of intelligence, but also just a really lucky roll of the dice. Bitcoin was a random aberration. It was like the first form of life, right, where it was a random, you know, mix of soup of different atoms and energy and something emerged from that. And so it was super fascinating to see how many, you know, he was a polymath, right. He had all these different disciplines and, and the more I read into it, the more I realized the breadth of those different knowledge bases, like pulling all that together was incredible.
- [21:55]
Peter McCormack
So looking back at your article then, so what do you think are the most important things within bitcoin's design that Satoshi got right? Obviously decentralized is important and proof of work, but for you, when you went through it, what do you think of those things that are critical to bitcoin having worked?
- [22:11]
Dan Held
Yeah. So I'll go back to the first, first thing that made me most excited too, which was the 21 million hard cap. That, that is by far, I think the most exciting thing about this. One, it was the first provably scarce digital good. Two we had. What's incredible about it is that it's a complete rejection of Keynesian economics. And what's interesting, I've got an article about deflation coming out after I take a brief hiatus from, from planting bitcoin because that took a lot of energy to write and put out there. Satoshi has commented in, in the early forums where he goes, in his early forum post where he goes, you know, I would have picked an inflation rate if we could have trusted a third party. Which I think he's kind of being sarcastic in that moment when he's, he's saying essentially choosing an inflation rate is impossible. And that's where I've got an article coming out called Deflation is Good, where it goes into the idea that it's not that I disagree that inflation might be useful, it's the idea that picking an inflation rate is mathematically impossible. And it's because of that that I think Satoshi realized in his like infinite brilliance that not choosing an inflation rate or just having a 21 million hard cap was the way to do it. That required no external data to be piped into the blockchain, the bitcoin blockchain, in order to have it have a response to certain fluctuations in demand. And you know, in combination of it being a data problem, Satoshi brilliantly, you know, align these incentives to where he primed it to pump. Because there's no supply response when demand increases. You know, if gold became 3x more valuable, there'd be a lot more gold being mined out of the ground, but there's no more Bitcoin are mined on a, on a very fixed, you know, issuance schedule. So that fluctuation in demand causes the prices to pump. And when those prices pump, everyone who bought in early brags about it to their friends. Their friends go buy it and FOMO buy in. Now they become bitcoiners. So it was a brilliant viral loop mechanism built by Satoshi and, and he actually references that. He goes, you know, it might make sense to buy a little bit when, when people buy it and it goes up, it's a net benefit for the system. And, and he goes, it's basically this, this feedback loop that happens. And so he had, he's publicly commented how he, he originally designed it that way. So I, I thought that was brilliant.
- [24:58]
Peter McCormack
Have you seen Brian Selkis recently commenting on the fact that there is no inflation? Because it feels like there is still another big test coming from bitcoin. There'll always be tests, right? But one of the big tests is what happens when the inflation rate drops. Maybe not on the next halving, maybe even not the one after that. But at some point the block rewards are going to be so potentially so small that it's going to have to rely on the fee market.
- [25:21]
Dan Held
Yeah, I mean, you know, so this is. I originally started writing deflation is good and I had the decreasing block reward as a section in there, but found that to be a big enough piece on its own. So I've, I've actually sharded that out into its own piece and essentially I don't think the decreasing block, you know, Satoshi also, you know, it's funny, like you go read, I first of all, like, I don't like to be, use everything that satoshi said and just claim that as like doctrine and perfectly like sort of, hey, we should follow this to the T. I think if people want to use his quotes or they want to use his mindset, as an, as a point of, of debate, then I'm going to use those quotes. And so that's what I like to do here, that's why I'm bringing these up is a lot of people like to use this origination, the original intent, as a method of attack on Bitcoin or a method of fudding. And so if they want to use that as a data point, I'm going to use it as a data point. But Satoshi commented, you know, around the decreasing block reward and essentially said, well, either a lot of people are going to be using it or no one's going to be using it. And so he had already thought about a fee market, he had already thought about transaction fees paying for the security of the network. And so when we look at it empirically, we see there was a really cool chart that basically showed that transaction fees as a percentage of mining revenue have, have slowly increased over time. And, and there's a couple other factors that we can look at. I don't want to get too deep into this, but you know, essentially since Bitcoin's monetary policy is transparent, all future concerns around the block reward destabilizing the security the network have been factored into the current price. Right. So if it was really that big of a concern, we'd all be freaking out and selling our bitcoin. But we're not because one, it's a very far off circumstance and two, I don't, we don't, it's more of, I would actually bucket it more as concern trolling rather than legitimate feedback because we're talking about a date at 2140. It's a really far away ways away from now. You know, I don't, you know, I guess we're going to see the impact of that here sooner with the happening. But again, Satoshi thought about this. We've empirically seen transaction fees as a percentage of mining revenue slowly tick up. You know, I have a really, there's a fun quote, you know, that I like to use which is nobody goes there, it's too crowded. If Bitcoin is going to be the backbone of the world's financial system, there's going to be a ton of transactions on chain. And some people have thrown in lightning concerns here where they're like, well, will lightning suck up all on train transaction volume into layer two? And there's Javin's, Javin's Paradox I think would be a good rule to apply here, which is that as things become more and more efficient, they're used More and more, which the, there's a good equivalent which is cars miles per hour, car fuel efficiency not decreasing the amount of miles traveled with cars, but actually increasing it. So I don't see lightning negatively impacting layer one fees. And yeah, essentially, you know, we also saw that like in circumstances with high congestion that it, the fee market does work. And yeah, the fee market essentially enabled us to better predict future transaction fee revenue.
- [29:09]
Peter McCormack
Right. Okay, so we have the 21 million. Great design.
- [29:13]
Dan Held
Yep.
- [29:14]
Peter McCormack
We also have a decentralized chain of blocks, which is quite interesting. So before I interviewed Nick Carter, I read his article about blockchain and it hadn't crossed my mind or hadn't thought about it in depth that the design of the blockchain was purely to create something which governments couldn't switch off or shut down or amend. And I hadn't thought about it in that way, or it might actually have been Jimmy Song who wrote that. I can't remember which of the two, but clearly the design of a decentralized blockchain was very clever.
- [29:48]
Dan Held
Oh, totally. And I mean it was. And this is where I'd like to make sure the record is clear. Satoshi built this for one purpose, one purpose only. He didn't, he didn't come up with blockchain tech and shit out bitcoin as the first application. No, this was precisely crafted. The DNA was exactly crafted to be censorship resistant. This, this organism needed to survive in a highly adversarial environment. And so, you know, I think, I think one of my favorite quotes from Satoshi would be, you know, the root, the root problem with conventional currency is that it's all trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency. But the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. So I think, yeah, he lays it out pretty clear what he's building here. And he goes, you know, it's essentially, hey, I'm building like a nuclear resistant protocol.
- [30:47]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. Because if a nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live uncorrupted. Ralph Merkel, right, from your article.
- [30:55]
Dan Held
Yeah, yeah, Ralph, you know it's funny, is actually grabbed lunch with him two months ago. Merkle trees are named after him. He co invented public private key cryptography. He's a, he's a really nice guy, really, really cool character. Very humble, very friendly, kind of, kind of a grand grandfather sort of figure, but a grandfather with like a brilliant, brilliant grandfather sort of, sort of feel.
- [31:21]
Peter McCormack
And then the other third really important part of the design was proof of work. And this definitely was from my interview with Jimmy Song, where Jimmy Song talked about, it needs to be expensive to rewrite history. It has to be very, very expensive to rewrite history. So you can't do it totally.
- [31:38]
Dan Held
This, and this originates with Nick Szabo's writing around unforgeable costliness. That, you know, the gold that you mine out of the ground is nearly the same cost as the gold you would buy in the wholesale markets. Or at least the refined gold that I would buy is, you know, each. Each person who's touched it along the way to refine it, of course, takes a small, small premium. But essentially that the cost to mine it is somewhat close to the revenue you would get from selling it. The marginal cost means marginal revenue with a very small, small spread. And proof of work does that. The cost to mine follows the price of bitcoin. It does not lead it. It follows it, and it follows it to be that level of unforgeable costness. And I wrote a piece called Proof of work is Efficient around kind of the basics of proof of work. And that's where people, when they look at proof of stake, they forget that proof of work isn't about code. It's about physics. It's the idea that I can provably burn energy in the real world to go then build a digital wall around something I want to protect, which is the bitcoin blockchain. And the cost is exactly efficient because it's a provable digital wall that proves how much energy it would take to then go try to destroy the network. It's the proof of work, right? It's the proof of the energy and time spent to build that digital wall. And so we know exactly how much it would cost to tear down the digital wall. And we intuitively know that to build walls and vaults around things that we care about in the real world is a good thing. And so this is simply doing the same thing. And no one would tell you in the real world. They wouldn't be like, hey, that castle you built in 1500, that's such a waste of money. You know, it was. It was a very good use of money back then because it protected people and it protected things that they cared about. And we're just doing the same with digital walls around the bitcoin blockchain.
- [33:42]
Peter McCormack
And were there any other parts of the design, intrinsic parts of the design, that you think were critically important?
- [33:49]
Dan Held
Yeah, I think so. Proof of work. Proof of work and 21 million hard cap, I think were kind of the biggest. I would also say, you know, I think that those two of them I kind of would consider the most enamoring. I think the, you know, I made a good ref. I think I made kind of a fun reference to the block time being like the metabolic rate. And this is where I. Yeah, this is probably a good time to highlight the really annoying part in the cryptocurrency world where people claim they have faster transactions than bitcoin. Like, you're not. You don't. You don't have faster. You simply have. You're like less confident that it'll be. You require more confirmations, which essentially ends up more confirmations with a network with less hashing power, which means essentially you're less confident in the finality of that result. But yes, Satoshi, I think early on realized to build this nuclear grade protocol, things are going to take a little while to come to consensus. And it's about those. Those layers of those blocks every 10 minutes, that being like a new layer of amber. I think Andreas coined the term originally. Andreas antonopoulos and so 10 minutes is sort of an arbitrary time, but it is an interesting one chosen because it's sort of like the metabolic rate of the bitcoin organism.
- [35:17]
Peter McCormack
I remember once when Charlie Lee put out a tweet once he put out a question, he said, if a block was found five minutes ago, how long will it be till the next block is found?
- [35:28]
Dan Held
It's sort of a distribution, right. We can have a probabilistic weighting of when we think that next block might be found.
- [35:36]
Peter McCormack
Well, So I assume five minutes, right. Because it's meant to be every 10 minutes, but actually it doesn't matter what point it is, it's always 10 minutes, right?
- [35:44]
Dan Held
Yep. Yeah. I don't know if you. How meta meta you want to get here, but there's a. There's a really cool article about how bitcoin is a universal clock, which we all think is silly because you just had a good reference of like one block being found in five minutes. But due to the laws of relativity, all time is localized. And so through with Bitcoin, by burning that energy to generate these blocks, we sort of provably use the random energy of the universe to then create a time stamping function to where we could use a time stamping function as the not localized time, but universal time, since that time is the same time everywhere.
- [36:32]
Peter McCormack
Wow, that's insane. I think you would enjoy the podcast Ask a Spaceman. Do you know it?
- [36:38]
Dan Held
I Don't.
- [36:40]
Peter McCormack
You should check it out. I'll send you a link afterwards.
- [36:42]
Dan Held
Okay, cool.
- [36:43]
Peter McCormack
So what was quite interesting in the article as well is where you have the comparison table between bitcoin, fiat and gold, and it's only negative is its established history.
- [36:55]
Dan Held
Right.
- [36:56]
Peter McCormack
It's 10 years old, whereas fiat, money and gold for centuries. I guess that was the only real negative factor.
- [37:03]
Dan Held
That's right. I think when we look at the genetic. When we look at the genetic code of Bitcoin, how that was purposely delicately crafted, that that bitcoin would then have. That genetic code would then be manifested into traits or traits that give it survivability and competitive. A competitive edge against the other species of money. It's incredible. It's an apex predator of money. It's a ruthless, ruthless organism, sort of. This didn't make it into the final article, but a buddy of mine was like, hey, it's kind of like the alien in the Aliens movies. You know, it's got like acid for blood. It's. It's almost impossible to kill, you know, and I thought that was funny. I. I didn't include in the final piece, but it is kind of. And it's a new type of life form to where all previous life forms will likely go extinct due to, one, their lack of the proper traits necessary to be competitive. And two, yeah, you're right. The established history is the only thing that bitcoin doesn't have, but that is changing. And due to its genetic sequencing, it's been primed to pump and it's been primed to grow as fast as possible. I mean, if we think about what's happened in 10 years, it's magnificent. Well, actually, the last five are the ones that really had the growth, maybe last two, actually, if you really want to go down to the metal. But yeah, I think it's. It's incredible to see how far it's come. And this may be the established history is probably a good, good segue into, you know, money isn't just numbers in your bank account. Money isn't. It's not just paper in your hand or shiny gold. Money, more importantly, is a representation of energy and time. To have earned that money, energy and time had to be used. And so the ledger, which, in that value that money is stored, it's incredibly important that that record stay true and accurate because it's a sort of thermodynamics issue here. We need to accurately preserve that state change of energy and time being used. And it's about the efficient allocation of that stored energy and time. And so yeah, I think the established history is sort of the continuity of that ledger or that score, that scorebook of all of that energy and time being written down. And I think bitcoins inherently is in a really cool spot because like Nick Szabo says, this is the. Nick Szabo essentially highlights that this is the socially scalable solution because anyone can participate. There are no restrictions. And inherently I think that gives it an awesome start of it didn't have an established history, but it can really grow rapidly to have one because anyone can participate.
- [40:05]
Peter McCormack
And it's interesting because everybody seems to go on a very similar journey with it. You first hear about it and you're like kind of sounds a bit weird what made up money? Like, yeah, that's not gonna be worth anything. And then you buy a little bit and you send a bit and you're like, okay, that was kind of cool. And then you start going down the rabbit hole and start reading about it and learn about politics and philosophy and you really start to see, I don't know, you just go so far down the rabbit hole you start to realize how big an important thing is. But I don't think anyone can get to that point quickly.
- [40:40]
Dan Held
No, no they can't. And part of the reason why I wrote some of this. So one planting bitcoin was. Was kind of the key, that inception moment and was kind of key. And then all these other pieces were basically written to counter a lot of the FUD that I've been hearing in the space. Just because I got really annoyed after a while. Look at Uber and being early in Crypto. Like I've experimented with a lot of this at working at blockchain and change tip. Like I've tried micropayments. Okay. I mean out of all the people who know what work or what my network, I've got to pretty good idea of like, hey, maybe we should go focus on this versus this.
- [41:17]
Peter McCormack
And my favorite question I get from people like friends who don't know much, they're like, are you still doing that bitcoin thing? Hasn't it died? Hasn't it stopped working? You know, people just don't understand and you can't even. And it's, it's probably for you similar with like no coiners or people of no experience. It's a common conversation at the dinner table. People want to know about it, but you can't explain it in one sitting. The people have to, you have to go down this kind of multi month rabbit hole to Fully get your head around it. And even still now, like, I'm two years in, Dan, I'm still learning.
- [41:57]
Dan Held
Oh, I don't. I think everyone's still learning right in there. What's exciting recently is the complete deluge of conflict of content. You know, there's so many people writing, so many people putting together their thoughts and, and kind of distilling these narratives more and more simply. In fact, I'm. I'm really excited about the iteration of narratives. I've not talked with Nathaniel Whitmore. I've been on his podcast a few times, and he does, He's. He does an expert master weaving of what narratives are and how they emerge and, and dissipate in this space. And I think, you know, it's. I think we're going to see a moment, and I'd like to kind of call this out now. We're going to see a moment where the narrative gets really, really good. It's sort of the. The moment where people wake up. It's the moment where Andreas Antonopoulos was an amazing speaker and you had all in. And now we see this new wave of, like Nick Carter's in BJ's. And then we're going to see one more wave where the narrative gets so simple that everyone gets it. And that narrative will be broadcast at just the right moment when people are starting to lose faith in their governments to where it'll finally hit that chord. It'll finally hit that resonance frequency. And I think we get there through people writing about different topics and trying to distill that narrative and make that narrative even simpler to understand. And then someone takes that and then they write. They write and they build on the shoulders of giants and write narratives on top of that. So I'm calling it now. I think there's going to be. There's going to be a moment where there's some text published that will become immensely popular amongst the no coiners or the non bitcoiners, non crypto people. I don't know when that's going to happen, but I think there's going to be sort of an awakening moment.
- [43:53]
Peter McCormack
What a time to be alive.
- [43:54]
Dan Held
Yeah, I'm excited for it.
- [43:57]
Peter McCormack
But it is exciting as well.
- [43:58]
Dan Held
Right?
- [43:59]
Peter McCormack
Like, I mean, I would be lying if I didn't say when prices are shooting up. That's exciting because one of the things that bitcoin has brought to my life is freedom. A certain amount of freedom. I used to have an office job, and restricted. Now I travel the world, I do interviews. It's given me that freedom, which is unbelievable. It's truly a gift and a blessing if the price goes up, is going to give me more freedom to travel more and continue this, this bitcoin journey and to continue this. So, like, that is exciting. But it is also exciting just to see something this, like you said, like an organism, create, grow, that nobody can stop the governments really can't do much about. I think it's so exciting.
- [44:42]
Dan Held
It's super exciting. I mean, the way that I've been pitching bitcoin recently, which has actually worked quite well considering. Considering I've been pitching it for six years to random people, friends, families, dates to. Not sure how many times that's worked. But you know, bitcoin more than anything is a vote for freedom. It's a vote for you in a world full of volatility, of politicians that you don't like, of government policies that you find unsavory. Bitcoin is your vote out of the system and it's a vote for freedom. That's what it really is. If you boil all this down to its essence, that's what this is all about. And never before in human history have we had such an easy vote for freedom before. A vote for freedom might have meant, you know, migrating out of your country or grabbing a gun and being a revolutionary. But no, this is a passive movement. This is a opt in, nonviolent passive movement to opt out of a system. And it's incredible. I think when people wake up and they realize the opportunity in front of them, I think they'll only realize that opportunity when the environment has shifted to where they can see it. And I'm super excited for that moment. I think this will be the most important invention of mankind's history, which we can get really meta with it. I make an argument that proof of work pushes us forward to a type 1 energy civilization sooner due to our harnessing of disparate energy resources and fully utilizing all of the energy on the planet. Since proof of work is the bitcoin's proof of work is the buyer of last resort. And so, you know, I think not only does it push us forward to a type 1 civilization, type 1 energy civilization, but a type 1 economic system. If bitcoin does become that sound money, then the entire world's economy is centered around one unit of account and that's super, super efficient.
- [46:45]
Peter McCormack
I like your narrative, the one I always use slightly different. Do you know John Pfeffer?
- [46:52]
Dan Held
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:53]
Peter McCormack
Have you met him?
- [46:54]
Dan Held
No. We've conversed on the Internets.
- [46:58]
Peter McCormack
He's a great guy. I met with him in London last year and he said to me, he said, do you really think and 200 years time when we're all flying around in our millennium Falcons, we're going to be sending bits of lumps of yellow metal to each other?
- [47:14]
Dan Held
You know, that's a really good soft pitch that you gave me there. My co founder at Picks and Shovels, Clark Moody, he's got a PhD in aerospace engineering and he's OGOG, he's from 2011 in crypto. He was the first guy to visualize Mt. Gox trading data into charts. So Clark has been around a long time. He just wrote something about bitcoin in space. Because he has a PhD in aerospace engineering, he's calculated how sending bitcoin transactions in space would work between planets.
- [47:54]
Peter McCormack
Man, this is, this is. Yeah, you're blowing my mind here a bit now, Dan. Okay. But I'm going to get you back to the content.
- [48:02]
Dan Held
Okay.
- [48:02]
Peter McCormack
Because I have got a question for you. Actually, that's quite a specific one because you also talk about evolution, right? The future of bitcoin. Some people still refer to it as an experiment. I don't consider it an experiment anymore. I think it's proven itself. It works. Nothing's guaranteed forever. Right. I think you said in one of your articles the average Fiat currency has 27 year lifespan. So nothing's guaranteed forever. Something better might come along, but I think it's proved itself as a technology. I think it's proved itself as a form of value transfer. But talking about the future, there are some important things to think about. Where do you stand on fungibility? Because I noticed you wrote about that and you said there is no price model for tainted bitcoin. So they are highly fungible. And also Tim Draper bought the Silk Road bitcoin. Right?
- [48:54]
Dan Held
Right. Yeah. I think fungibility is an argument that's going to be coming up over the next couple years. I think smartly, the bitcoin community as a whole has decided not to engage in it because I think we just survived the civil war with bitcoin cash. I think we're done with wars for now. So yeah, I think fungibility is going to be an important question as the network matures. And that's where a lot of people have talked to. Have been kind of talking about it recently though. A lot of people outside of bitcoin have been talking about it recently. Like people who are more enthusiastic about other protocols. And I kind of like. And that's where I had that Realization of there is no sec. There's no market for other coins. Like I haven't. If there is one, let me know because I will buy. If they're at a discount, I will buy a bunch. I will buy, buy it and then bounce it off two addresses. And now it'll be. Then someone's else, right? The. The whole two. So two hops is a general way that a lot of companies have been flagging tainted coins is if it's, if it's clean for the last two hops, then it's okay. And so, you know, it's. It's pretty impossible to go and point to certain coins and be like, those are bad coins and those are good coins. And we haven't seen the market bifurcate and have different pricing for those two. So I, I don't think it's an issue right now. I think the bitcoin network needs to stay transparent and identifiable to get big banks on board. I think that's a good thing. I think they're going to want that transparent ledger and that in that, you know, easily trackable history or origin of these coins. I think that's that this is what we need to do right now to get institutions in. But the protocol maybe five years from now goes dark.
- [50:49]
Peter McCormack
And so yeah, it's come up on a couple of my podcasts recently. I almost want to do a specific show on it. So I brought it up with Seifer Dean and Caitlin Long when I was talking to them in that a private base chain, fully anonymized base chain would make fractional reserve Bitcoin a lot easier because you could not verify the wallets of the people operating a fractional reserve. And it also came up in my interview with Jimmy Song. And I think more importantly with the CVE bug, which was an inflation bug, right. With a fully private base chain, you might not be able to detect where the coins have been inflated. And that was probably the most concerning for me. I had originally wanted a private Bitcoin, but actually I think now I don't. I think I am happy. I think I have a preference for it to be an open ledger and if it can be achieved in on sidechains core. I actually like Monero and actually happy to use Monero if I have ever need for private transactions. But the inflation bug coupled with a private base chain scared the crap out of me.
- [52:04]
Dan Held
You know, that's a great point that I hadn't previously considered, which is if you're fully private and, and there's an issue with the with the protocol, it's going to be really hard to verify that certain coins belong to certain individuals and that more haven't been printed or minted. And the idea that like. Well, I think there are. This is getting a bit beyond my depth understanding in terms of like encryption and protocol tech. But I think there are technologies like ZK snarks which are kind of an in between which can validate that some you have something or it exists but you don't necessarily have to show it. So I'm, I'm not sure if there's novel encryption techniques that enable us to have both because I agree with you. Anything that would threaten the security of the protocol or the trust in it, that's paramount. So I don't know what's going to come out. If there's a way to walk the fine line between those two, that'd be cool. If not, I kind of agree. I would side more with you of being concerned about around that being a kind of a critical flaw.
- [53:15]
Peter McCormack
What else do you think is important for bitcoin coming up?
- [53:19]
Dan Held
Well, bitcoin is like a, like a cockroach that survived like three nuclear bomb blasts. It's, it's. I'm, I'm pretty excited because back in the day it was a much more fragile ecosystem. And so I, I'm just excited to see how far it's gotten. So like to hear I man, I mean when Mount Gox got shut down and when Silk Road got shut down, those were critical moments where you know, with, with Silk Road we, we weren't sure what the demand was for bitcoin. And we hypothesized that dark markets or like black markets were a really big significant demand side pressure or at least a lot of individuals would be interested in purchasing bitcoin to then use it on there. And that would buoy the price. And then when Silk Road got shut down, that was 90% of trading volume. Now these were all kind of healthy things that the market needed. And this is where I like to. I have an analogy where a lot of people look at Bitcoin as being volatile. Bitcoin has a 99.9927% uptime, which is greater than the US dollar and greater than almost any other software in the world. And bitcoin is stable. The price of fiat to Bitcoin is the instability of the world flowing into the stability of the bitcoin protocol in ebbs and flows.
- [54:45]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, it's kind of like it's this anti fragility is like its immune system.
- [54:50]
Dan Held
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's where I think people see like bitcoin maximalist and they get. I don't know why people get up in arms about a group of individuals who choose to believe what they want to believe in vehemently. You know, that's up to them. It's opt in. You know, I think that strong bitcoin community is a, is a bonus, not a negative. It makes it super, super resilient.
- [55:14]
Peter McCormack
But these kind of nuclear moments. Mount Gox, Silk Road, potential of SegWit2x, the New York agreement, China. These are all. It's almost like these are good that it happened because it is a test on the network and it does build up its immune system.
- [55:32]
Dan Held
The way that I like to phrase it is that bitcoin is my stablecoin and inherently a stablecoin must absorb volatility rather than reject it. It's the only way for it to ultimately become one. Is it. If it become more into, if it becomes more anti fragile with the increasing amount of amounts of volatility that it, that it ingests, that it eats and absorbs. It's. Bitcoin has been through so much. I mean you really couldn't pick worse narratives for bitcoin. Right. Like my, my CPA dad thought I was getting into like money laundering and drugs in 2013 because that's all he read in the mainstream press. Right. I get it. And so this bitcoin, despite Mount Gox, Silk Road, terrible, terrible negatives, despite blockchain, not bitcoin, despite tens of thousands of other currencies being created, it has, despite a civil war, despite itself. The biggest threat to itself was itself its own community and it survived that. So I'm, I'm incredibly bullish. I. It's. There's a lot, there's some big, big battles that are going to come, but I think we've survived so much now that like a lot has been de risked.
- [56:47]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, it's so, it's so super interesting looking at everything that has happened to it over time. And it's also interesting you mentioned stablecoins. Right. I'm just going to talk a little bit about stable coins. I don't want to get into detail, but specifically related to bitcoin, they. I think stablecoins prove that people will print money if they can, in the amount that have been created now.
- [57:11]
Dan Held
It's irresistible.
- [57:12]
Peter McCormack
Yeah. And there was a time a few months ago I thought stablecoins would be a good thing. I was thinking ICOs that were for legitimate projects would benefit from a stablecoin because a stablecoin would reduce price risk of price volatility when making the investment. Right within the different periods. You don't want to buy something, invest 10 million and then suddenly realize you've got 8 million a week later or something else. But what I've come to think, and one of the things I've been theorizing over the last week is that governments will probably like stablecoins because stablecoins are essentially an attack on Bitcoin because state. But Bitcoin for me was like the base layer cryptocurrency and any stablecoin like Richard Hart put out a great tweet the other day listing all the things it isn't, you know, it isn't, I'd have to dig up. But all the things it isn't, you know, and the fact that also like the USDC has a blacklist, right. That's openly in the FAQ on the Circle website. Like this is everything that bitcoin isn't and it's for me, therefore it is an attack on bitcoin.
- [58:28]
Dan Held
Yeah, I'm kind of split on my opinion with stablecoins. Well, with the construction of them. I'm not super bullish. One, you have 100% fiat backed stable coins which will be stable. There's no, you can't have speculative tax on that, but you will have those blacklists because they're going to need to adhere to KYC AML and that inherently will limit their social scalability because there will be certain types of transactions that are muted but that are censored because of certain government beliefs. Also there's an issue there that I don't think a lot of people talked about around malicious tainting since I don't think the. I don't think USDC or any of these newer stable coins, 100% fiat backed stablecoins, I don't think they have a function where you have to accept a payment. I think you can send any payment to any address. Which means if I wanted to, I could go taint everyone's wallet. Right? Like, and then what happens? Then like the government doesn't care if it limits the social scalability of the protocol because you freeze 10 million accounts, they just care about freezing the accounts.
- [59:41]
Peter McCormack
Right.
- [59:42]
Dan Held
So I haven't, I haven't heard anyone talk about that yet. Like a purposely, which I think back in the days of early bitcoin people did that or they like purposely tainted other wallets. Like dusting dust transactions across all these wallets and bitcoin don't care. So you know, I think so one, the fiat constructed ones limit the social scalability. And then the ones that are like central bank, an algorithmic central bank or ones that have, they're backed by crypto assets, I think those are inherently flawed from like a thermodynamics perspective. Like I said before, they're rejecting volatility rather than absorbing it. And as we've seen with like the bank of England and George Soros. Let's see, let's see what happens when someone has tens or hundreds of billions of dollars and is willing to stress test your, your new central bank algorithm. And I think it also highlights, I live in Silicon Valley, I'm in San Francisco and you know, I'm like, hey guys, we, there's a lot of brilliant people out here, there's a lot of brilliant people working on stablecoins. But I think we need a good healthy perspective of the traditional financial world and incorporating that into the construction of these stablecoins. And I think there's kind of been this perspective that silicon, that all this is just code, that this isn't about human behavior, this isn't about a tail risk movement, but it's all about that, it's all about psychology, human behavior, tail risk movements. And so we'll see if those, those algorithmic, those stable coins with algorithmic, algorithmic central banking that are crypto collateralized, if they're capable of surviving. I, I don't think, I think they will be stable short term, short term as in years, but I think in decades we'll see moments where they lose like 80% of their value. Which is what we've also seen empirically with my government currencies is it's possible to sacrifice long term stability for short term stability, but it's also like sacrificing, you know, if you jump off of a, off of a wall and you know, you jump 10ft, you're probably not going to break anything or hurt anything. It doesn't feel good, but you did it. Instead they're sacrificing those 10, 10 foot wall wall leaps for 100 foot wall leap and then you get crushed. And so I think that's what we're going to see with some of the crypto collateralized ones. There's a lot smarter people than I am working on these. Maybe they figured out a way, but I'm skeptical.
- [62:24]
Peter McCormack
Yeah, we've done our hour already, man.
- [62:28]
Dan Held
Nice, nice. That went by fast.
- [62:31]
Peter McCormack
It would be good to wrap up with you telling me kind of some Final thoughts on bitcoin, what it means to you, what do you think it means to the world, and where do you think we're going with it?
- [62:40]
Dan Held
Yeah, no, I had a fantastic time. Thanks for having me. And I think we could probably talk for the next 10 hours if time wasn't a constraint. Like I said before, I think bitcoin inherently is about freedom. It's about the ability to take your vote and put it somewhere else that's outside of the current governance structure of your governments or economy. And I've never been more excited than now in terms of the amount of money that's coming into this space, the amount of a players that are building things in the space. I think that we're building, I can see it now. I can see that we're building the infrastructure that's necessary for the next move up, next move up in price. And that's incredibly exciting for me because I've seen the shaky infrastructure that we had previously and it just wasn't capable of carrying the weight of that new, that new wave of adoption. And I'm super excited to see like these just amazing people build, build awesome products. And, and the amount of, you know, institutional pipes that have been plugged into this space to where we haven't had a bull market in crypto with institutional money. The biggest amount of money there is out there in terms of retail versus institutional, institutional dominates. And so we're about to see a very, very interesting next boom, bust cycle. So I think this is also probably maybe a note of caution. We've engineered viruses and that's why bitcoin was engineered the way it was, to survive, to be really, really rugged. But that also means we do have a responsibility with these other protocols. You know, I think people should, should look back and think about their moral responsibility when you have like a coin like Dogecoin that is still alive and has a couple billion market cap even though code hasn't been released in two years. They're really, really, really hard to kill. But it's the idea that I think people need to, I think really heavily consider what they're building here.
- [64:57]
Peter McCormack
Wow. Okay. All right, man. That was pretty amazing. Can you tell me what's coming up for you and tell people how they can stay in touch? And when's the next part of the article coming out?
- [65:07]
Dan Held
Yeah. So really excited that I could hop on the show today to talk about it because you're the first podcast I've talked about planting bitcoin on or I think post releasing the article, the first Podcast. I talked about it. You can find me on Twitter, which is AM Held. My name on Twitter is Dan Hedle, but the handle is Dan Held is my real last name. It's. It's a German name. And I've switched it around a little bit to Hedle here because I think it's more appropriate. But you can find me there or on Medium, just Dan Held. And those are probably the two best places if you want to learn more, if you want to read more about what I've been talking about, that those are the two places to go.
- [65:49]
Peter McCormack
Brilliant. Well, listen, look, it's funny sometimes doing this, sometimes an interview doesn't. It isn't what you expected, but this has been utterly fascinating. I've really enjoyed it.
- [65:59]
Dan Held
Me, too.
- [65:59]
Peter McCormack
I really want to do it again with you sometime. I think there's. I think you're right. We could talk for hours. I also think you would be really good on Marty Bent's show. I think Marty Bent would draw out an amazing interview with you. I think he's the. He is a master interviewer, and I think I would like to hear that.
- [66:16]
Dan Held
Yeah, I definitely think we need to do another show, maybe. Yeah, there's. There's an infinite number of topics we could cover. So. Yeah, just let me know and we'll pop on again.
- [66:25]
Peter McCormack
Okay, man. Well, listen, good luck. It was great to talk to you, and hopefully we can meet in some. Meet in person someday and grab a beer as well.
- [66:32]
Dan Held
You ever make it out to the States?
- [66:34]
Peter McCormack
I come all the time, probably 10 to 15 times a year. There's a chance I might even be going. Well, there was a chance I was going to be going to San Francisco this weekend, but I'm going to Vegas this weekend. I'm always in the States. I'm always in California. We'll make it happen.
- [66:48]
Dan Held
Cool. Yeah. If you're ever in the States, hit me up and we'll definitely go grab a beer.
- [66:51]
Peter McCormack
Anyway, thanks, Dan. That was amazing. I'll catch up with you soon.
- [66:54]
Dan Held
All right, sounds good. See you, Peter.
- [66:59]
Peter McCormack
Okay. So what did you make of that? Did you enjoy the interview with Dan? Did you enjoy everything he has to talk about with regards to the planting of bitcoin? Please do go and check out the Medium post. He's written about this. Honestly, they're all fantastic. Actually, he's written so many good posts, go and check them all out. They're all included in the show notes. As I mentioned, I've left my firewire connector cable at home, so this outro might sound a bit weird. So I apologize. I can't plug my microphone into my laptop. So if you want to support the.
- [67:24]
Show, you know, there's a bunch of things you can do.
- [67:26]
You can head over to Patreon, consider becoming a supporter of the show there. That's patreon.com what? Bitcoindid. I've got about 30 now. I'm honestly so grateful to everyone who's become one.
- [67:36]
You can become a show sponsor if.
- [67:37]
You'Re interested in doing that. You can email me on hellohatbitcoindid.com and we can organize a call and talk about that.
- [67:43]
You can leave me a review on.
- [67:44]
Itunes or you can subscribe. They both help the show. You can follow me on social media. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter. I'm on Medium. My handle is otbitcoindidoneverything. You can check out my website, which is www.whatbitcoindid.com, and you can sign up there to my newsletter and you can share this show out with your friends and family.
- [68:00]
Okay. It's my birthday.
- [68:02]
I've turned 40. I'm off to celebrate. Hope you have a great week and I'll see you soon.