Bitcoiners Are Waking Up To The BTC Hijacking

so hey everyone I'm joined by the one and only uh Roger ver Bitcoin Legend crypto Legend Bitcoin Jesus how's it going man yeah another another day more excitement in the world of crypto uh hard to believe someone pointed out to me that uh I'm coming up on 15 years now I'm not quite at 15 years but uh you know more than 14 so it's a long time yeah for sure um I think it's 11 for me and it was uh I think it's 12 since I started started talking about Bitcoin but never actually used it so yeah it's long in the tooth people um these kids these days I don't know yeah actually I was at the soul uh ethereum Soul or whatever is going on uh this week and so yesterday I was there hanging out with some old old old you know longtime crypto friends and some uh new guy with some newer project came up and he's you know I'm just talking with people that have been around you know Bitcoin for I don't know like a decade plus and he's like so are you involved in Bitcoin or what are you focused on and like you know just didn't know who I was which which was fine but we all kind of got a a chuckle out of it as well so uh and he was you ready to to tell me about his project which is fine I I listened but it was kind of a amusing because there's lots of new people that that that don't know the history of Bitcoin but that's why I I have a new book coming out that is I think the main thing we're going to talk about today uh because it's nice to have a book to to teach the history because a lot of people don't actually know what happened within Bitcoin and don't even realize that uh this will piss off some people that only if they don't know the history like Bitcoin cash very nearly kept the Bitcoin name and would have kept the BTC ticker symbol and very nearly was what everyone was calling Bitcoin today and it was just razor razor thin that it wound up going the other way to where the thing that's called Bitcoin today could have just as easily been called something else yeah and what we're calling Bitcoin cash today could have been called Bitcoin yeah which is um a pretty interesting Dynamic especially how you know differently things turned out but um yeah when I heard you were writing a book on this kind of stuff of course I've heard you know I was there you know I was there Gandalf I was there during the block size Wars I experienced my transactions that I was using for everyday purchases changed in real time and where I had personal hardship like I had I had all that kind of experience and so for me this is like old old hat story but and if it was maybe 2019 2020 at the latest if this book came out I it might have been a little I would say easier to ignore maybe but just the timing of now when not only is it fresh for so many people it's not something anyone knows of a lot of the crypto generation now it's also coming to an interesting time of soul searching with BTC the whole Bitcoin Community it's kind of interestingly timed so why don't you just go through quickly about just go down the rundown of the book more than you already have yeah um and I I guess I'll have point out it's just luck with the timing that it's coming out now but you know sometimes better luck than good but uh the book itself basically covers the entire you know origin of Bitcoin and the history of Bitcoin all the way up until like you know after the the split and so many people don't realize the amount of censorship and dirty tricks and underhanded you know closed door manipulation that went on to fool people and so you and I were right there when this all happened when the block size War really heated up the big blockers the people that wanted Bitcoin to scale to be money for the world was like 90 plus% of the ecosystem it was almost all the businesses and almost all the actual users that were using it and there was just a very very loud vocal very small minority of people that were going to do everything that they could to block Bitcoin from being able to scale to be money for the world not because I I think some of them probably understood it but a lot of them were just useful idiots uh in that respect and a lot of them thought that like oh you know limiting the block size that'll keep Bitcoin decentralized and keep it free whereas now we have you know almost a decade you know to look in the rearview mirror there it had the exact opposite effect the small blocks led to more centralization more censorship everybody's using a custodian people can't afford to transact themselves so it had the exact opposite effect of what those people were claiming and so like I think a lot of them are now starting to realize that oh maybe limiting the block size wasn't good for bitcoin's decentralization it wasn't good for its freedom promoting aspects it was actually a net negative for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem and you'll see some people that aren't thinking clearly say oh bitcoin's $70,000 today bcash is $500 it's like yeah well you're looking at what's seen what's not seen is where could the entire market cap of all cryptocurrencies have been had Bitcoin not run into these intentionally designed scaling issues right when you had companies like Microsoft and xedia uh literally stop accepting Bitcoin and some of them still don't accept Bitcoin again to this very day and so like the entire world could have been in a much better position today than it is uh had we not ran into that scaling uh issue that was literally done with a bunch of censorship and dirty tricks that are outlined and cited right there directly in the book and I think a lot of people's Jaws will drop when they realize just how many dirty tricks were played and how much censorship went on within the community and if I had to pick one single mistake that I made in my strategy and history in involvement in Bitcoin is like I underestimated how incredibly effective censorship is uh because at the time when the censorship first started everybody knew the truth and I didn't think who's going to fall for the censorship but now that so much time has gone by a lot of people think like oh Rogers you know Bitcoin Judas and didn't ever do anything for Bitcoin and the Big Blocks were stupid and the bcash is stupid and like they don't know the censorship was so in ibly effective and that's why even today like if you take a step back and take off your censorship you know influenced goggles you can see Julian Assange is a hero Edward Snowden is a hero yet the government propaganda against these people have fooled the majority of citizens into thinking that these people are bad people and that they did something wrong and so the same is true with the Block siiz Wars the censorship was so effective into tricking people via the censorship into thinking that Big Blocks were a bad idea or that Bitcoin was never supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash even though it's right there in the title of the white paper uh and that Satoshi himself he literally wrote the software code to increase the block size on bitcoin so it could scale to be money for the world to compete directly with uh you know PayPal and visa and MasterCard and these sorts of things whereas nowadays you know and a lot of new people won't know like I was one of the if not the main face of Bitcoin for quite a number of years there and now we have people like Michael sailor as one of the main faces of Bitcoin literally telling people hey let's not compete with the US dollar let's all pay our taxes let's not Rock the you know let's not you know rock the boat at all with this it's like you've missed the entire point of Bitcoin if you think it's not going to rock the boat and it's not going to disrupt the way the entire world works and sadly at this point Bitcoin isn't nearly as as disruptive as it otherwise could have been If people could still use it as peer-to-peer electronic cash so anyhow the book covers all the ways in which the Civil War uh you know dirty tricks and tactics that were employed to literally undermine bitcoin's usefulness is peer-to-peer cash for the world and uh it's already you know at the top of its category on Amazon and I invite people to go over there and order it uh you can go to hijacking bitcoin.com and you can buy it with cryptocur currency or you can buy it directly on Amazon with uh you know traditional Legacy payments whatever you want whatever's easiest for you uh it's right there available uh so please go and grab it give it a read if you're old to crypto it'll be a wonderful walk down memory lane if you're new to crypto it it's worth your time to learn the history of how we got to where we are today because uh as the saying goes if you don't know your history you're doomed to repeat it maybe something uh similar could even potentially happen again which I'm I'm sad to say but uh anyhow I thought it was important to get the word out and uh myself and Steve Patterson I I think did a really good job uh with this book and so hijacking bitcoin.com yeah so as far as the whole story how early does it start the book and how late does it end like what's kind of like the beginning and the end just to to encapsulate kind of what's in there yeah it it starts at the beginning of Bitcoin with Satoshi releasing it to the world and and the history there which was even time and my involvement in Bitcoin and then it ends after the the bsv split so um so there was a lot so years is that yeah 13 years or something I know a while so well it's kind of been interesting because the last couple of years some interesting new things have kind of cropped up uh one thing that was kind of interesting was the uh on the bsv kind of subject was uh Craig R versus Copa the trial that happened in the UK and um obviously it's interesting for a few reasons to me uh one thing is the court um decided that Craig is not Satoshi but also but as a result a a good chunk of the bsv community agreed with the court as a like they were waiting for the court to tell them whether or not he was Satoshi and once the court said that they took that as face value when a week prior they thought he was and so that's an interesting thing but the other thing is as a result of of this court case a lot of the real Satoshi you know um emails and stuff and Communications were brought into the trial and brought out and uh we anyone who had you know in it's my bias perspective but it's one you'd agree with right anyone who had two brain cells could tell from satoshi's work that he was what would be called today as a onchain scaler or a big blocker it was pretty clear but the emails made it more clear much more clear much more clear the vision for scaling and stuff like that and as a result I've seen first of all a lot of the old guard of the the the let's call the Maxi cult right the BTC kind of um Old Guard kind of covering and say Satoshi wasn't perfect we shouldn't take everything he said Is Gospel but then also a lot of newer bitcoiners who miss the blocksize wars kind of like getting what they call Red pilled right kind of getting like oh this is interesting yeah we should make the blocks bigger like yeah we should this kind of and it's an interesting Coincidence of that happening and this bombshell of a book coming out kind of around the same time isn't it kind of an interesting coincidence yeah sometimes sometimes Universe just kind of works out that way it was a fantastic timing for the release of the book to happen at the moment but it was just uh just good luck in in that respect but yeah there's new emails from Satoshi coming out like even a lot of these Bitcoin maximalist exactly like you said they they read that they realized oh you know Satoshi clearly was a a big blocker there and it's fine to have a different opinion it's fine to think that like blocks small blocks are a good idea but like they literally hijacked the Bitcoin name and the Bitcoin project and morphed it into a project that doesn't even remotely resemble the project that I got so excited about the project you got so excited about the project so Satoshi was excited about building and they've morphed it into something else and like if you want your own project go and start your own project don't hijack an existing project and then Gaslight everybody into saying that it was never supposed to be peer-to-peer cash for the world like but that's exactly what happened and again this book covers all the details there everything from probably one of the juiciest bits that maybe a lot of people don't know is that a man openly claiming to work for a US intelligence agency literally paid David uh Peter Todd to produce small block propaganda and to introduce this thing called replace by fee which makes Bitcoin far less useful for payments so literally a guy claiming to work for us intelligence agencies was there undermining bitcoin's usefulness as cash from you know the earliest days of Bitcoin and that's covered right there in the book it's not even disputed there's all the citations right there like uh for the whole world to see for anybody that's actually paying attention it's like ask yourself why would us intelligence agencies want Bitcoin to be would they want it to be more useful or less useful right like it undermines the US dollar of course they want to do everything they can to make it less useful and less valuable to the world and the best way they were able to come up with to do that was to trick people into thinking that oh let's make the transaction slow expensive and unreliable and force everybody to use these custodial platforms but we'll still call the platforms wallets even though they're not like wallet of Satoshi and strike and Sh none of them are wallets they're all custodial accounts where the government can freeze your money at any time or maybe they don't even have your money maybe they're already engaged in factional reserve Bitcoin we don't know uh and so it's really uh really been disappointing to see how many people have uh drank the Kool-Aid and been fooled by it one thing I think has been interesting it kind of reminded me when you mentioned replace by fee is replace by fee is an optional thing and I remember in years past bit refill which is one of my favorite services for living off of crypto um would accept instant Bitcoin transactions if your wallet had RBF disabled and I remember that Sergey good friend of mine right of the CEO of bit refill uh kind of coming out on the other side of the issue when RBF by default was sort of pushed to bitcoin core I'm still not clear if that's part of the code today or not but it was definitely a big sticking point with a lot of people where a lot of old school Maxis as it were started be like wait a second but we're still needing zero conf to be reliable for some things even though you can RBF we want to be able to do no RBF if we need to and so um how much have you paid attention to bitcoin BTC I should say over the last like let's just say two to three years because there's been some interesting developments there with like the ordinals situation and then a a lot of Mind share shifts yeah I haven't paid nearly as close attention as I have in the past but I did notice that like now there trying to make replace by fee all the time for every BTC transaction like you said some people are waiting realizing whoa whoa whoa maybe that's not such a good idea and then the other thing that I I'm kind of like I don't know chuckling to myself about too because like when when segwit first came they gave a discount for the segwit included data versus like the regular base part of the block siiz data and like myself and Jihan and a number of others were complaining like the segwit transactions are unfairly cheap because like for a th000 kilobytes worth of data they'll pay less than a th in Segway you'll pay less than a th000 kilobytes of data in the rest of the block even though it's a th000 kilobytes of data the network has to transmit it and do everything the same and like I don't know like people weren't paying close to enough attention or that argument was too complicated or too nuanced for them to say like segwit data segt transactions are unfairly cheap now they're making my exact same arguments about the segt data being unfairly cheap and that there's a subsidy for the segt data because they're mad about the ordinals and all the other stuff that's going on with the segt data so it's like I don't know I was ahead of the curve complaining about that one I think I was ahead of the curve complaining about the block size limit I was ahead of the curve in promoting Bitcoin to the world and uh you know I I I guess you know what do they say like uh there's some expression that people Visionaries are always demonized in their own time or something I I feel like I was ahead of the curve on on all of those arguments and now the you know now I can point back in history and say see told you so but uh yeah I'd ra rather than being able to say C told you so I'd rather be living in a world where we have all these you know better useful Technologies and more peer-to-peer cash for the world to use for everybody uh at the moment but uh uh one more thing that maybe I'll be able to look back on time and say see I told you so that I'm excited and interested about though um in the early days everybody thought Bitcoin was totally Anonymous uh and when people found out that it wasn't basically totally Anonymous we saw a huge amount of Commerce switch from Bitcoin to Monero because of the privacy and some of it to bitcoin cash with cash fusion and there's some other you know zcoin and zcash and some other things like that and so but the reason why is people wanted privacy so they switched from BTC with no privacy uh and tried they tried to use Wasabi wallet and some other things like that as well um but we've seen you know there's a real desire for that transactional privacy so we saw a huge amount of Commerce moved from BTC to XMR for example and then ethereum came along and everybody in their uncle's doing uh tokens on ethereum so you have tokens tokens tokens there's usdt there's usdc there's a zillion and one tokens out there everybody's doing tokens my question is where are the Privacy tokens what is the Privacy token platform right there isn't one yet that I'm aware of so I started looking we saw a bunch of Commerce move from Bitcoin with no privacy to chains with privacy I think we'll see tokens move from chains with no privacy to change with privacy and the best one that I've been able to see that's already out there right now available for people to use is one called zenos Theo and it has user us user creatable so anybody can make their own token and the token has the same sort of level as of privacy as like a Monero transaction and it's actually maybe even better than that because when you're looking at the Zeno blockchain all you can see like let's say I send Roger token to you and Joel sends you know Joel token to somebody else and someone sends a stable coin token to someone else on the blockchain all you can see is that a transaction happened you don't know which token was transacted in you don't know you know who was sent from who it was sent to you don't know how many of the tokens all you can see is that some sort of a transaction happened and the really I think interesting other exciting part about it though too is that all the network fees on that Network become burned so as everybody makes these transactions they get burned which means at some point if the network becomes popular the entire network will be burning more uh of the gas token which is Zeno than we'll be emitting it so like I think you know we're we already announced a couple of days ago we're integrating this into the bitcoin.com wallet so bitcoin.com users will have user creatable privacy tokens and I'm really excited to see what the world will be able to do in regards to that sort of thing so uh if people are interested in privacy tokens please check out zeno.org yeah um the Privacy thing is definitely something that's been booming lately I mean um I mean last year uh there was a podcast speci on this channel sponsored by zcash and I did a big deep dive into the whole zcash world uh now A friend of mine U works for a project called rail gun which adds basically zcash level privacy to anything and it's interesting if he's probably been in crypto for longer than you have which is a very hard thing to to achieve and yeah we're starting to see this kind of coalesence around uh the whole privacy thing but just on the on the the Bitcoin the BTC developments um it's very interesting how first of all a couple years ago I saw a few prominent Maxi influencers I can't remember the specific ones but mention very negative things about segwit in in retrospect saying that part of it was very good as far as like malleability fixes whatever but the whole block weight kind of you know um UNF the econom code and this is before ordinals by the way there was a few that were saying man that was a big mistake on our part that was that was really bad so there's a couple who came around that then ordinals hit which I'm semi convinced was an intentional move to try to kind of like poke Bitcoin and see what happens kind of thing kind of like force the question that has taken so many years to really force and I I kind of mentioned today on a space I was on about uh Bitcoin fees were unreasonable for a lot of people but still reasonable for some people and until ordinal hit and then that that kind of forced the question on everyone of the experience that I had in 2016 was everyone's experience in 2023 for example and as a result I've seen a lot of people a lot of Bitcoin people whether it's s bit refill or you know some other people um kind of coming around to this we need to do something thing an interesting thing is um I'm sure your dear friend uh John carvalo I'm sure you remember that guy he is almost sounding like a Bitcoin Casher today and a lot of the stuff he's saying he's still and you know I'll afford everyone there you know quirks and biases he's still very much BTC only everything else is a shitcoin okay whatever but he's saying some stuff that's very interesting about needing to increase the block size basically and so it's kind of it's kind of funny right because of how Full Circle the whole thing comes from that initial interview and I'm trying to give a lot of credit to someone who I disagree with on a lot of things um he did publish the entire script for the interview that he had with you publicly so everyone could see all the questions he asked and was going to ask and yeah in my personal opinion I think it's um I think your reaction was very um reasonable in that case but it's kind of interesting to see there be a lot of people that maybe they've only seen the meme we should we should you know recap what happened so I don't know what year that was 20 2018 or something like that uh this guy he contacted me asking to do an interview which is fine like I'm happy to do interviews and I'm happy to do debates like I've had plenty of people say hey let's debate something or let's have a debate I'm happy to do both but this guy contacted me for an interview and then it turned out it wasn't an interview it was the same sort of interview you would see like Borat do when he gets some you know famous person he he punked exactly was and he just pushed my buttons and pushed my buttons for 45 minutes and after 45 minutes I lost my temper gave him the middle finger and hung up on him and uh you know and then that middle finger photo unfortunately became a meme that's all over the Internet to this day but like I think his intention was to to push my buttons and he succeeded so congratulations to him for that but uh it is interesting I saw one of his recent interviews it feels like today he's making almost all the exact same arguments that I was making to him back then and uh interesting to see that come full full circle as well yeah maybe just a little earlier um there's a lot of other people like uh um some of maybe the newer Bitcoin era people like Russ like Russell o who's an NFL player was an NFL player and he's famous for receiving a salary entire entirely in Bitcoin decided to experiment with ordinals then got sort of cancelled by the maximalist bunch and is sticking with his guns and there's just a bunch of like these mainstream voices that are sort mainstream in the Bitcoin world that are sort of migrating a little bit more to a we need to do something and one thing for sure um the ordinals effect on lightning is a big part of that so like I used to run a lightning node just because I I don't want to form opinions without having firsthand experience and I just want to know what I'm dealing with and um a lot of people were using lightning being very happy with it because a12 $3 transaction to re open or rebalance a channel is fine as long as you know you save on the other end but then when you start to get 50 60 $80 transactions lightning kind of breaks down as of course I'm sure you are aware in the the lightning white paper that was kind of Big Blocks were kind of part of that and I think that's sort of kicked a lot of people in high gear on this sort of thing seeing that we need a bigger change and um oddly enough it's pushed a little Resurgence in blockstream's liquid offering which still is very much not used but it's kind of peing its head back in but kind of the the whole in all this context um do you think that Bitcoin BTC as Bitcoin I should say is going to move in a positive direction as a result of this do you think that there's hope to be bullish on the future of Etc based on kind of some of these mind share shifts or do you remain sort of bearish on BTC and think that other things like Bitcoin cash and the pathora of other cryptocurrencies that want to scale on chain are are probably going to win out instead cryptocurrencies as a whole are going to win for sure like that I think is kind of undeniable at this point um my biggest fear with BTC is that all these people that are building on top of it are building the the financial Prison Walls around themselves because with the small blocks and the high fees that come along with that everyone just gets forced into using custodial platforms and if you're using a custodial platform that's exactly what governments want because they can control everybody on that platform whereas if you're able to interact directly with the chain itself and not need a custodian you're you're free to do what you want with your own money and so that's a huge huge difference and like I don't know maybe maybe the next cultural shift in the Zeitgeist will people will be people realizing wait a minute Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin BTC are equally scarce but Bitcoin cash you can actually transact in directly yourself and not need to use a custodian like maybe there'll be a shift on that at some point as well but uh there's a lot of different you know cryptocurrencies out there competing with for mind share and then you know as I'm sure you're aware too like AGI seems to be right around the corner and uh you know one of the opinions that people have out there is that like the only problem that us humans have that we need to be working on is to create intelligence smarter than ourselves and any problem after that isn't our problem to solve and like I don't know if that's entirely true but like it's an interesting way of looking at the world right because once there's something that's you know smarter than all human beings combined like we don't have any problems left to solve in the world that thing's going to figure out even like we won't even be able to understand what the problems are that it's solving at that point so hopefully it'll still be kind to us and uh you know leave us our little corner of the world to exist in but uh it's uh the world's about to change more than like pretty much any of us can even imagine at this point is kind of the way I see the the next you know 10 to 20 30 years yeah for sure maybe even faster right so five years five years could be trippy because I use a lot of different AI tools from um images to video to writing scripts to doing voiceovers and stuff yeah yeah it's very interesting um on that sort of note of so going the premise of the book and of course something that I think that for for people like us who you know were were there the hijacking of Bitcoin seems to be very deliberate and orchestrated to a certain extent however I'd like to kind of go in the opposite kind of challenge that assertion not necessarily specifically on bitcoin but the context of this is ethereum right ethereum came out did a bunch of things different from Bitcoin I think it succeeded a lot because it was kind of left alone by a lot of the Bitcoin people in the beginning because it did something different it wasn't competing in the same domain and was showing a lot of Promise in the 2017 bull cycle came relatively close to flippening Bitcoin in market cap U because it did a lot of stuff that you could not do on bitcoin however then ethereum today seems to be a lot like Bitcoin where the gas limit has been intentionally limited the you know the block size for ethereum has been intentionally limited uh execution sharding was on the ethereum road map and it got kind of quietly removed to where most ethereum don't even know that happened that they're not trying to scale the base layer anymore and ethereum is now there's a lot of money into um L2 scaling and the most recent upgrade um Denon or whatever was called uh significantly made things better and easier for l2s but did nothing for the base layer so ethereum is kind of become a subset of the Bitcoin problem where it seems to be captured by a lot of Co corporate interests seeking to make you know rent Seekers seeking to make profit off of these second layer Solutions and I I kind of I had a a podcast with uh Justin bonds today that I I just released that kind of breaks this down because he's much more technically minded on these kinds of things it sort of blew my mind and in the context of okay there's a conspiracy against Bitcoin for sure but was there a same conspiracy against ethereum or is there something fundamental that is like maybe a flaw or a weakness in the design of both of those in the governance design maybe that allows rent Seekers to come in and sort of take it over and restrict its capacity so they can make money in selling their their custodial centralized Solutions where they make all the money I don't have you thought about that concept yeah uh I the biggest and most clear example of the rent Seekers were was blockstream right they intentionally did everything they could to Bitcoin and then tried to sell the world on their liquid uh you know side chain where they make money on every single fee so like that was clear as clear can be with uh with with ethereum hard to know like it's happened twice now you can argue with you know Bitcoin and then again with ethereum maybe that's just the way the the world works and the way things are going to play out anytime anything gets big enough uh maybe maybe not maybe maybe maybe we'll be wrong I that's that's two examples but maybe there'll be a third that goes the other way and uh we'll wait and see uh and you know you have Salas you know the the hot coin of the moment that seems to have outages every couple of months and nobody seems to care one bit and uh the short aners uh I don't know uh the longer answer is like you know build the future you want to see as well and so you know go out get out there and look for something that needs doing and do it if you want to have it exist yeah it kind of it's an interesting point with um for example um Bitcoin cash had a bunch of different U let's just say governance eras let's be nice and say governance eras of you know was this way and then a certain group branched out and then another certain group the founding group in fact branched out and then now we have something right now um everything was very peaceful for like a year or so and then there was some like Reddit drama but I don't know how seriously to take that but um basically uh what I'm worried about I guess is the um inability of if maybe this V this is a vulnerability in the system and um obviously like for example if you are you know in combat or something and someone bests you um the wrong move is to blame your opponent for being better than you the right move is to say what it weakness of Mind did he exploit and so I'm wondering if there's a weakness in these decentralized cryptocurrencies that someone's able to come in and rent seek and have an inability or or in ability to sort of manipulate public opinion and do some astroturfing and troll farms and stuff and then just sort of take that over on the one hand yes they're bad people yes they took it over yes they did something wrong on the other hand is do you think there's some sort of a a weakness in the system that they exploited so uh as a Libertarian I I think you'll agree with me like I think you could make that argument about human society as a whole we have this weakness in that a small group of people can come in and trick everybody else and think that we need a ruling class to ballish us around and tax us and draft us and enslave us and and do all those things and like the majority of people say oh yeah if we didn't have a ruling class to boss us around society would fall apart and like maybe that's just an argument about any big enough group of humans that uh they can be tricked and and manipulated into thinking that you need to be bossed around by some people that are you know the basically the overlords of the system and so I don't know how do we change that maybe a maybe AI will figure that out and AI won't be susceptible to the same ISS isues but uh I I don't know I'm just I'm just a human yeah for sure now the one thing I think is very interesting about this last decade or so because um I come into crypto knowing you know a lot about some things but nothing about crypto and then I expected Bitcoin to last forever as I wanted it to and it didn't it changed and there's a bunch of things that I'm learning along the way and one thing that I maybe didn't fully anticipate was as soon as Bitcoin did not turn out the way that I thought the global economy would reward right it and then there's Alternatives that objectively if you're saying what is more secure what is faster what is easier to use what has more utility a lot of these kinds of things I mean Bitcoin cash is kind of the flagship bearer of this but there's so many other chains whether it's a dash whether it's a Monero whether it's zcash whether it's which zcash traded for significantly higher than Bitcoin in the beginning and now is like exponentially lower it's just so much lower and you have so many of these examples of projects that showed a lot of Promise showed a lot of utility but for some reason face tof face with Bitcoin the the the free market did not reward nearly as well um do you have any kind of what are what are your thoughts on that like why did you know the free market that's always right that always should reward the good things they always whatever why did it keep on dumping Capital into the thing that doesn't work the broken thing and the things that do work that work well clearly some people are using them but it it just hasn't competed nearly as well in the free in the let's say relatively free market do you have any theories on how things turned out that way yeah so I I I kind of roll my eyes every time I hear the Bitcoin maximal say the free market has spoken it just chosen Bitcoin it's like are you people really that stupid and that shortsighted to think the free market has spoken and chosen Bitcoin like the free market is never ever ever done deciding it's constantly deciding right last year you know the dollar was was the most popular thing next year it'll be something else before iPhone it was you know Nokia before Nokia it was something else before Nintendo it was uh Atari or and then after Nintendo it's you know PlayStation like the free market is never ever ever done deciding so like say oh the free Market's decided it's chosen Bitcoin like you're either an idiot or you're willfully blind trying to like pump your own bags there like to say oh the free margets decided like get off of it right um and so in regards to that and like the other side too this isn't a free market it's not even close to a free market the government's controlling everything you have to get permission for this and permission for that and they're arresting people for this and throwing software developers in jail for that so it's not even remotely a free market and then there's all the censorship on top of that so like the whole the whole idea that the market has decided it's decide on bitcoin like today Bitcoin has the biggest like market cap of the cryptocurrencies there is absolutely no guarantee that that's going to be the case tomorrow and I think the one tomorrow that'll have the biggest market cap will be the one that's the most useful to the most number of people for whatever it is they're trying to accomplish and is it going to be Bitcoin maybe maybe it's going to be something else but uh if you're just like an investor trying to make money on cryptocurrency stuff too uh you know take the advice from the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky you don't skate to where the money or you don't invest where the money already is you invest to where the money is going to be right so he said why do you good at hockey because he skates to where the Puck's going to be not to where it is currently so if you want to make money in cryptocurrency today invest in where the money is going to be not where it already is and so like what's the usefulness of Bitcoin I don't know maybe they'll get their act together and make it useful for people to actually use for all sorts of things but uh from my point of view I think people want privacy uh on their financial transaction I think people want privacy tokens and so like uh I'm interested in those sorts of things and so how good a job will governments do it disrupting privacy tokens and disrupting privacy you know chains like pretty good they've already you know I'm recording this from South Korea it's already illegal for every Exchange in the country to list Monero or zcash or or any of these privacy tokens um I should also add to that as far as I know lightcoin got delisted from some exchanges in Korea because wimble yeah so and and that's frustrating uh but you know people people want that and like if you want privacy on bitcoin I guess you can use Wasabi wallet but what are the for that you know $100 or something whereas on bitcoin cash you can use cash Fusion for less than a penny on you know Monero I think the fees are a couple of pennies Z know it's a couple of pennies zcash out there like and I I you were talking about uh earlier we're talking about people attacking like their allies like I'd like to see within the crypto Community like there's been a huge amount of rivalry between zash and Monero stop it you guys are both awesome there's room for both you guys to exist in the world like people deserve privacy people people can use both right it's not one or the other rather than fighting with each other let's get more people into crypto that haven't used crypto at all period so like uh I'd love to see the the the fighting the infighting stop within the cryptos there as well and I'd love to see uh more uh discussion be allowed to take place than censorship and unfortunately uh there's been way way way more censorship of uh of ideas within what I thought was supposed to be a a a community of people that were freeth thinkers and open to new ideas uh why are you busy censoring people we we' seen a lot of that happen unfortunately yeah that all of that is true and I I keep trying to think of like one thing that's been very useful in my life is whenever I run into a frustration is not think about the blame of someone else but to think about even though it is accurate by the way that someone else has wronged me in this case what can you do to fix it in your life the situation and so it is very interesting to see with like as soon as Bitcoin pivoted away from digital cash digital cash turned into so many different projects and rather than unite they seem to have all fought against each other for that shrinking piece of the pie rather than kind of come together yeah yeah and hope hopefully that's kind of um over in soon but um it it is has been a little bit frustrating for sure yeah although I I guess one caveat like if if you do see people build building like the financial Prison Walls they're going to be imprisoned in it's probably okay to sound the alarm and attack that and call that out so like uh some of these custodial platforms that they're tricking people into thinking are wallets that aren't wallets like call them out like if you're a custodial platform don't call yourself a wallet call yourself an account so that people aren't uh deceived by that yeah which it's interesting because I think that the government's going to force that anyway because a wallet aosi is not available to us users right now because it's because it's not a wallet service um the EU just passed some legislation I I don't know how when it's going to take effect probably I've heard people say about 3 years from now but that basically forbids Anonymous custodial crypto accounts and specifically exempts self-hosted as they call it right is in non-custodial cryptos from having to do any kyc requirements but says that if you are a custodian you need to kyc your customers in which case then ball of stoi can't operate in Europe either and then pretty soon you start to see the the fragmentation of the experience of like what is real and what isn't yeah all the more reason to actually use a wallet rather than an account so well put yeah absolutely it's so I know you've mentioned a bunch of times um the whole privacy angle um obviously I think it's very important a lot of people think it's very important but where did where did that become a particular thing for you it's always been important not not privacy for privacy sake but like one of the characteristics that makes money money is fungibility and fungibility is just a fancier word for privacy right like if your money's not fungible it's not good money so if you want money to be fungible to work as money it also has to be private and uh so just purely from an economic standpoint just looking at what makes something money privacy has to be there right so like that's why Monero is better money uh from that privacy aspect or fungibility aspect than something like BTC right but uh The Limited Supply is also incredibly important Monero doesn't have that beat on uh Bitcoin but Bitcoin you know maybe they're going to have some security issues as well as the block reward uh dwindles over time and the price doesn't continue to go up uh to keep in Pace with that so like we we'll see there's all these you know different metrics here that you have to keep an eye on all of them but like one of the really important things that makes money money is fungibility and fungibility like I said it's just a fancy name for privacy so if your coin doesn't have privacy it's not good money yeah for sure um I've actually noticed a big research in s privacy over the recent years of course I've been involved in privacy stuff since forever but it's um I've noticed for example zcash is much more usable today than it ever was I remember friend of mine was doing command line transactions that took 10 minutes to process the zero knowledge proof back way back in the day to buy something and now it's like a few seconds u i remember when Monero didn't have a GUI wallet much less a mobile wallet and now there's plenty of mobile wallets um the we're probably going to get that in the bitcoin.com wallet here soon as well just to promote that as well so and it's a real Wallet account yeah so yes um Co there's I'm currently helping test the um the Privacy beta of the dash wallet right now that's coming and there's some internal talks to the community to give a big privacy boost maybe on par more than banero we'll see again this is all you know not decided upon but um it seems like there's a lot of this and there's a lot of um privacy smart contract kind of things projects coming up there's I can't namada penumbra there's a few others I've heard about uh it seems like this is kind of uh coming up on the Golden Age of privacy but it's still not something that the average person or the average crypto user cares about as a prediction timeline when do you think privacy is going to be the number one it's because of course there was like the Ico boom and there's the nft boom and there's ordinals and all this kind of stuff and then there's defi when do you think privacy is goingon to hit as like the big thing that the crypto world is going crazy over I wish I could say that it would hit but I I I don't think it ever is going to because I think the fact of the matter is that most people just pling don't care and look at all the stuff that Edward SC told us about all the spying that was going on did anything change no not I the only thing that Chang is he can't come to America now um so like I wish people would care more but uh and I appreciate you know people like Naomi Brockwell getting the word out and so the people that do care can be informed but I'm not very optimistic about the the world as a whole suddenly deciding to care and start to care but I think the way we can move the needle on that though is to have the the businesses that you know have millions and millions of users build these privacy tools right into it but like I think you're a pgp user as well as as am I why is that not built into Gmail why is that not built into the you know OSX operating system why it's not built into Windows because of pressure by governments for them not to do that and so that's part of one of the big problems whenever these institutions get big enough governments pressured them directly not to introduce privacy tools directly into their platform for millions of users so like it's just relegated to you know people that are really motivated to go and install some extra software from some more obscure place to be able to use it and so like I'd like to see some of these big giant you know crypto businesses really support privacy in a big way um but especially as soon as like a publicly traded company or the cap table has too many you know holders in it like it it becomes really hard to do that so but uh you know maybe maybe Dash will be able to do it maybe the mono Community maybe bitcoin.com will do it like or maybe all of them will be able to do it I'd like to see it come into existence but the the bigger an organization gets the more outside pressure there is and you know nobody wants to go to jail uh and I guess we should mention that uh yesterday was Ross bricks 40th birthday he's been in jail more than a decade literally all of us are here talking about cryptocurrencies today because of that website that that he figured out how to build called the sil road that allowed people to buy and sell you know bit I'm sorry buy and sell anything they wanted that was peaceful uh without needing govern permission and so he's in jail until he dies they're never planning to never let him out and then I heard about Bitcoin thanks to Ian Freeman who heard about Bitcoin because of Ross HRI in the Silk Road Ian Freeman is now in federal prison as well for running a Bitcoin yeah so like both those guys are absolute Heroes and both those guys are in federal prison which I think just shows like what evil empire the US federal government is it's one of the most evil entities ever in the history of humankind it's right up there uh you know murdering people by the millions and incarcerating people by the millions that uh that don't deserve it and so like uh just want to point that out to like people like just because you went to you know the US you know public school which is just a euphemism for a mandatory youth propaganda Camp don't think those people are your friends don't think they care about you don't think they're here to make the world a better place any way whatsoever they don't care about you want darn bit they're just out for themselves and they'll you know literally murder people to get their way so uh that's why crypto is so important because it empowers individuals have to control of their own lives and basically bypass and replace that sort of existing system where with a system where people are control of their own lives yeah which is a sort of sobering reminder of sort of the cost of being early on this kind of thing of being early to be principled and right and um I do remember I think I got my first Bitcoin started using it a month or two before the Silk Road is officially shut down and so my entire experience has been kind of like married to the the idea of this is a something for the Silk Road for example and uh it kind of it's kind of interesting because that led into other things such as open bizaar back in the day and then the U very good friend of mine Chris paccia who's the the back backend developer of opar is at the end of the year now launching his own zero knowledge privacy project and so there's there's like as I try to tell people um you know Liberty is going to win um crypto is going to win but that doesn't mean that just because those are unstoppable and unkillable it doesn't mean that the people involved with them are and just be very careful about what you do as you go along because you could be one of those people that pays the ultimate price for this and uh it is it is know it's sad it's a little somber kind of footnote but I I am seeing a lot of very healthy things in the good direction I don't know how much you've kept up with the cross chain um defi space um pioneered by thorchain but then which Eric Vorhees is very big into um it's and if I can Circle back to one other topic related to that though too like maybe crypto is indestructible maybe Liberty's GNA win in the end for sure but that doesn't mean individuals within those movements are indestructible and like one other example that you know we talked about Ian Freeman the the host of free talk live where probably one of the other you know just really really powerful tools to drive crypto adoption to the world and spread the word about Bitcoin is in jail right now there uh you know two other people uh from that were living in New Hampshire I won't name them by name because I don't want the government to go after them anymore but like I think they fled New Hampshire just in time they were running a a payment processing business for crypto in New Hampshire and when they saw Ian get arrested uh they fled and uh they're living somewhere else now I think that they're going to be fine for the rest of their lives because they fled and like you know don't be the the Jew in Germany think oh they're never going to come for me like I'm just going to stay put like if things look like they're getting too hot leave uh you only get one life uh you know don't spend it in prison uh if where you're at it's looking like it's getting too dangerous go and flee and go somewhere else uh looking to getting as many citizenships as you can from countries that are likely to leave you alone don't just have one passport because then you're at the mercy of that one country uh really look to like you know diversifying yourself in terms of uh you know citizenships and and passports and that sort of thing as well and uh if things are looking bad where you're at leave I think that's the the safest and best thing to do is just plain leave if it looks too dangerous where you're at yeah and that's a great not only is a great advice for life but it's also a great allegory for crypto right and that's kind of what I did because I joined Bitcoin I was very much F even though I was I was never a maximalist I was very much focused on bitcoin for a while and when it became too hot from a can I still use this to live without a bank account without kyc without all the kind of stuff then I I jumped and I think that a lot of people are starting to sort of do the same thing um but yeah as far as like the as I was mentioning the cross chain type space I don't know how familiar with thorchain um that really facilitates a lot of that kind of stuff but then already there's many Thor children as it were um the Maya protocol is one that I'm very familiar with because they're a a fork of Thor chain the complimentary Fork that is uh focusing on listing Dash and zcash and some others and then there's another one coming up hopefully by the end of year called the Sarai Sarai decks which will list Monero and they'll all be interoperable with each other so then now you can be delisted from all the centralized exchanges you want as long as you're somewhere in crypto you can get access to all these things and so that's kind of a beautiful thing I see coming up um there's been a lot of I guess conversation about how Anonymous the teams are U associated with this because of the tornado cach kind of incidents um I know for a fact that the Maya protocol team is doesn't have bank accounts or anything because I've done some work with them and they they don't have any of that stuff because they're they don't exist according to you know those structures but uh do you think that what do you think about the future of the centralized exchange versus The decentralized Exchange because binance has gotten really bad treatment right and I'm not how deserved I don't again I don't I'm not into binance's business right but as far as it seems like they've been shaken down in a serious way um a lot of exchanges like bitrex I believe shut down I can't remember which which one of those was one that shut down a bunch okx shutting down a bunch of things um and it seems like the it's kind of a DEX or die situation these days now are you optimistic are you optimistic about the crypto world just shifting the centralized exchanges kind of going away and transitioning to the centralized or do you think there's still like a battle we haven't yet fought um I don't think and again I'm just just guessing but I don't think the centralized exchanges are going to go away I think those will continue exist but I think that the amount of decentralized exchanges including I was just talking with the guys yesterday here at the the eth conference they're building a decentralized exchange with literally an order book right where you can have an order book right there and like I think that's a really big deal and so like I think you'll see the institutions continue to use centralized exchanges but like just individuals like any day of the week I would rather you know trade something on Unis swap than on any centralized exchange like it's just so much easier to use Unis swap than I don't even have to log in right just click connect and then swap whatever I want and boom I'm I'm done so just uh the user experience is so much better like uh other than like you know I guess some of these gas fees that are an issue but uh I think yeah I think we'll see the the main just average user will be using these dexes and then maybe you'll still see like the the big institutions will still use the centralized exchanges but there there's definitely room for both without any doubt but uh as the infrastructure gets better and better on the dexes I think we'll see more and more people using the dexes and I hadn't heard the the term uh you know Dex or die but uh I think for the for for the freedom aspect of the world like bringing freedom to the world yeah the decks are die yeah absolutely and I think it's kind of interesting because uh trust wallet which is I believe a binance product um uses thorchain for its backend swaps for cross chain swaps and I I remember some Twitter thread somewhere where CZ again min's founder and CEO or former CEO I should say I think he's former um he was not aware that trust wal was even using Thor you didn't know what thorchain was but yet his company product was kind of using that back end and it's kind of an interesting sort of back it's kind of interesting how like Dex rails are starting to get integrated into these Legacy Solutions without them even know it yeah and when a company or organization gets as big as binance is like there's no way anybody could expect CZ to know everything that's going on at an institution that big and like another example of like us just you know CES he's one of the best entrepreneurs in the history of the world tossing him in jail right they find him what4 billion dollar of his personal money I think that's the most anybody's ever had to pay in a personal fine and still do jail time on top of it so it just shows just uh how evil and V vindictive the US government can be to to do something like that to CZ yeah one of the most interesting parts of that obviously that's a it's tragedy Etc but one of the most interesting fallouts from that is after that binance um cracked down on privacy assets anded recently the price dropped by you know like a third and recovered yeah yeah but I think it was interesting because I'm I'm good friends with um Ruben of FOH which used to be called zcoin and as well as I'm very close to the zcat um community and they managed to avoid delisting through some sort of a an adding an exchange only address format so it just has transactions have to come from a transparent address so the exchange can say this is the address it came from and that's it and it's kind of interesting how that's not a legal requirement because Gemini which is probably the most regulated Exchange in the world um supports fully fully encrypted zcash transactions but binance can have any more legal restrictions but because they're kind of being held hostage by the government right now they can have their arm Twisted a little bit more extra legally beyond what the law requires and then they're kind of doing this yeah a lot of people don't realize just how big a deal like the extra legal arm twisting of businesses are like businesses are terrified and even if there's no enforcement action and even if they're not required to by law they still have to bend over backwards to do all sorts of things so there's a huge amount of pressure and like you know why why do you think like it's not illegal for coinbase to integrate Monero right why do you think they haven't right why do you think like you know these other companies haven't it's because they're scared right the fear is is a real thing so yeah for sure well and it's Justified fear it's not unjustified fear like if they did do something like that they probably would be gone after so and that's one thing I I respect uh Jesse Powell of Kraken for doing is he's in the same boat as Gemini as coinbase as everyone else he just seems to be a lot more vocal about the actual threats coming at him you's like look we got to do this because of this and uh while you know voice of support for you know privacy is a human right voice of support for Monero while at the same time in the UK Kraken cannot list Monero and so you know obviously it'd be better if it was a completely decentralized exchange but like as far as doing a good job right there that's a good sign yeah so maybe um actually we were talking about everybody trying to you know help the ecosystem as a whole grow I didn't realize that you were friends with some of the bit refill people but uh for a longest time they haven't taken Bitcoin cash Bitcoin cash is awesome as peer-to-peer cash maybe you can mention to them hey the Bitcoin Civil War is Over people know the difference like it's time to let all the Bitcoin cash users be able to use their great product because bit refill has an awesome product and they accept a whole bunch of coins uh I think Bitcoin cash has never been one of them uh I think maybe now is a good time to to change that and uh I'll gladly make sure we do a real nice article about them on bitcoin.com promoting that when that happens so you can uh maybe reach out and and see if they're open to you know yeah branch on that front as well because yeah you know crypto should be for everybody well definitely um and I mean not to reveal too much stuff but they they did come to me at some point asking about Bitcoin cash in particular at some point well evaluating so it's not like they're completely shunning it they're they have their eye on and they're they're I can't speak for them obviously but it seems like they they're appraising the whole situation right they're they're not they're not being crazy Maxis I can just say that and then one other example too that I love like Bitcoin cash has this thing called Cash fusion and I was talking to another guy he's like oh chainalysis can track all your Bitcoin cash transactions they know everything you're doing and I said no no no no you don't know about cash Fusion I like no what's that and I explained to him it's basically you're shuffling your inputs and outputs with a whole bunch of other people's I said give me your address I'll send you some Bitcoin cash and you can have your friends at chain analysis do an analysis on it and so I withdrew funds from a normal exchange everybody's heard of sent it through only a single round of cash fusion and then sent those funds to him and then he had chainalysis do their analysis he sent me the report chain analysis got every single thing wrong they knew nothing about the origin of the fund so it was really nice and need to see that and again it cost you like you know less PNY to have privacy uh on bitcoin cash using cash Fusion the electron cash it's crazy because according to like the I guess the Privacy landscape of things that's one of the what one could call one of the weaker privacy functions there because for example like the minimum dashcoin joining thing is four rounds mostly it's 16 rounds before you're kind of safe to do Monero has stealth addresses as well that or confidential transactions you don't even see Amounts zcash is completely zero knowledge and stuff I'm sure a state level actor could maybe start to correlate some offchain data or something like that but as far as like any explicit privacy function and maybe this is like a preaching moment rather than just an interview moment right if you're out there using cryptocurrency use any kind of privacy enhancing technique at all any of them and you will probably be a lot safer than you were before Petty thieves won't be able to track you etc etc you know are you hiding from the IRS that's a different story maybe but as far as like just do whatever you can just do something I think it'll work and yeah and I guess that's why I want to promote the idea of privacy tokens again so just yesterday I was buying some other you know stuff uh tokens and I was paying with usdt uh and I really didn't I really didn't feel comfortable like oh I'm sending these guys you know a smallish amount of money compared to the amount of tether that's in the wallet and I know this guy can see exactly how much tether is in my wallet every time I'm sending a transaction to him and like that guy's fine but maybe somebody else is going to see or like you know it's really an uncomfortable feeling and so that's why I'm really bullish on the idea of privacy tokens and I would much rather use uh you know tether or whatever else on something like a on Zeno uh or whatever rail gun gets their act together and has it you know easy to use stuff like I want to use privacy tokens like I think privacy tokens are the next big craze uh in in crypto and so it won't be privacy for privacy sake but like nobody wants the other person they're paying to know exactly how much money they have in their account when they pay them and like privacy tokens are are the answer and by tokens I mean like user issuable tokens it's not a privacy token like a zcash or Monero but like where you can make your you Joel token or desert links or whatever you want to call it and I'll make my Roger token and we we have total privacy in regards to that and I'm I'm real excited and interested in that that's why I've been a you know I I think most of your audience are you know libertarian types that are probably focused on that check out zeno.org I'm I'm pretty excited interested in that yeah to sort of add to something you're saying about like not knowing how much money you have uh there's a a Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam that I went to last year that I'm going to certainly visit again that accepts Bitcoin for payments the BTC it's the only crypto they accepted they've accepted for quite some time in a static address and static QR code and so after paying them of course I looked up you know how many people have paid them and you know uh it's a great fodder for saying like oh wow this they get like a couple maybe crypto payments a year it's not that much which is unfortunate but then at also at the same time why do I know how much money you have you know this is not this is um yeah um on that sort of subject of living on crypto and stuff um have you noticed in my sphere because I've been my voice has getting been getting bigger and I've encountered more people who are living on crypto as well just decid to spend mostly crypto or all crypto or close our bank accounts or whatever I know quite a few people including some people doing this with BTC which is you know an interesting choice but they're but they're still doing it and Etc um so my vision is is from my you know eyesight many more people are living on crypto than were just a few years ago but I'm very I have a very small Vision I'm very biased Etc what are you seeing are you seeing more people start to use this is it kind of a couple more are you seeing fewer people living on crypto like as far as like I don't need I don't need Fiat anymore I'm just using crypto kind of thing where's the where's the trend going as far as you've been able to observe I I think the trend is definitely going the in the direction of people being able to use more and more crypto uh but when I say crypto in this case I have to include like usdt and usdc like uh in my own life too like I've had a number of you know like big recurring like monthly bills or even for example like lawyers I pay all of my lawyers in crypto some of them take Bitcoin cash other ones just want like usdt or usdc but like I'm not using a bank I'm sending them crypto to pay for for that sort of thing too and of course like normal stuff too like I can do all my shopping online with crypto and and and pay for most things like sometimes it's a little bit of extra work but like doing it in crypto but the the other nice part too like I'm not an American anymore I don't have to deal with like all the you know crazy reporting laws anymore like it makes it so much easier uh consider you know going and getting a second citizenship and and not having to deal with you know what if depending on what country you're from like if you're from you're from America like man I I I feel like you're in the kettle that's about to start to boil right be that frog that jumps out not the frog that sits there and continues to wait so you can actually uh head on over to passports forc crypto.com and uh you know I set up that website to help people I kind of feel like it's a a modern day you know Underground Railroad where like you know it's not Harriet Tubman or Silk Road yeah but helping people uh you know escape from the oppressive systems into systems that are less oppressive and uh and you can pay for the whole thing in crypto nowadays so yeah so why don't we just wrap up on um what are you working on these days and what are you most excited about going forward I mean we talked a lot about a big spectrum of things but there A lot of it was you know oh bad things happened but what what's the the light at the end of the tunnel what are you super excited about that you're and what are you actually working on yourself as far as you canul bad bad things happen but you have to deal with it in your own life and make sure that you're going to be okay so uh the main things I guess I'd love to promote to people that I've involved in directly is that passports for crypto.com if you want to get citizenship somewhere else that's the place to start and I'll connect you with whatever you need to know on that front uh go and buy my book if you want to learn about the history of Bitcoins hijacking bitcoin.com uh so hijacking bitcoin.com on that of course uh I still love Bitcoin cash like Bitcoin cash has lots of great usefulness going on like all sorts of features it really works well as cash but I want to point out to people I was never a Bitcoin maximalist I was never a Bitcoin cash maximalist I put up the seed money to start zcoin uh the second round of zcash I I'm literally like the co-founder of Ripple like a lot of people don't know that like I was literally the second person ever involved in there as well of course uh Bitcoin Cas more recently I'm I'm getting more and more excited about the Privacy tokens that I keep mentioned with zeno.org and uh yeah I think those are the main things and then like man AI is just about to change the whole world there too you know AI is not going to be opening a bank account AI is not going to be passing any ayc checks it's going to be using crypto to pay other AIS and gonna pay humans to do its bidding and like us humans are going to be paying AI with crypto so like it's not the Legacy system it's it's crypto that AI is going to be using his money and so that's really interesting exciting to me as well and who knows maybe AI will set up the next Silk Road competitor and then who other prosecutor is going to prosecute at that point that'll be pretty interesting as as well um so yeah I don't know check out all those ideas and just uh keep an open mind right just because somebody tells you something's true doesn't mean it is true so go ahead and think for yourself uh and and yeah I guess that's the best advice I can give anybody think for yourself and just because the the common narrative out there or something or other doesn't mean it's true right every kid that's less than seven years old believes that Santa Claus is real it's not true well maybe there's something else that every 70-year-old and Below believes is true maybe that's not true also so you need to stop and and think for yourself yeah definitely do as as the old adage is Dior or do your own research um which is kind of used as a sort of throw way but it's something that very few people actually do um yeah it's definitely interesting to to see how things have gone and um I definitely agree with a non- maximalist sort of take um one thing that's definitely been very um I would say maligned oh going back to sort of like the book and the the the history of the Takeover Bitcoin and all that is I remember a time when there was a big block camp and you were not in it yet you were not the public figure head of it yet but most people The Narrative doesn't say that and I remember there was a time I believe I interviewed you at one point and Bitcoin cash was a thing and you were not involved at all in the slightest yet I was still focused on bitcoin because I thought Bitcoin had a chance at scaling to become money for the world and it wasn't until it became clear that it wasn't that's when I decided okay Bitcoin cash seems to have the best shot but I bought a bunch of Dash as well and Monero and zcoin and zcash and you know hedged my bets across a bunch of different things that I thought uh had a good chance make coming money for the world yeah as an intelligent person would do well this been quite um interesting very very good chat I think um a lot of people learn a lot from this where can people follow you and your work more closely yeah uh I don't know I've been trying to take a step back into private life mostly so like occasionally I'll tweet something on Twitter I'm Roger kir on Twitter um if you want to see just my personal life not particularly crypto related I'm just Roger on Instagram and I have roger.com but uh I'm kind of looking forward to you know having my private life back a bit and just being able to uh enjoy things I'm 45 years old now right like not that young anymore so I want to enjoy the the time I have left until AI figures out how to do this you know extreme life EXP and stuff so I would have thought 33 but that's that's good thank you Joel and thank you for the platform today I I appreciate it and I always enjoy my uh conversations with you so thank you so much yeah well thanks for chatting and thanks everyone for [Music] watching

Channel: Roger Ver

Views: 15,136

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Id: m6p3GLkuQoc

Length: 67min 2sec (4022 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024