LIVE Pomp Podcast #351: Roger Ver on Personal Freedom and the Early Days of Bitcoin

wow this is preparing to live stream the meeting setting up meeting oh live streaming right we are here uh roger is here as well i believe everyone can see both of us uh we're gonna wait a minute or two for people to get in here um but roger thanks so much for doing this obviously um let's wait a second and see as people come in let's see all right we should be uh we should get started here as people kind of trickle in um but maybe let's just start with uh your background and kind of where you grew up what you did uh before you'd ever heard of uh bitcoin or cryptocurrencies or anything yeah so i i was born and raised in silicon valley uh it didn't seem like any sort of a special place to me uh because i was i was born there um but i was around computers my whole life i ran one of the more popular uh bulletin board systems uh in silicon valley for those of us that are old enough to remember what a bbs was for those that aren't enough to remember before the internet people ran little local bulletin board systems on their computers where everybody in your local town would connect to and you could only have one person connected at a time per phone line that the bbs had and uh but you had a lot more of a sense of community on these bbs's than you have on the internet now because with the internet anyone can be from anywhere whereas on bbs as you knew that most of the people were from your own little local town uh anyhow i was kind of coming of age right when the dot-com bubble was bursting and all these businesses were going bankrupt and uh they were having going out of business sales where you could buy uh you know their their computer parts for pennies on the dollar and i wanted a hard drive for my own computer and i went to one of these auctions and they were selling nine gigabytes because the hard drives for a hundred dollars each and this is when ebay was just getting started this is probably 1998 or so and i saw these same hard drives that were a hundred dollars each at the going out of business sale were almost 400 each on on ebay so i took all the money that i had saved up which is about fourteen hundred dollars i'd earned mostly from changing oil at a jiffy loop type place as a teenager and then bought all those hard drives and then i resold them on ebay and this is before paypal and i remember people literally had to go to the post office get a post to money order and then ship the postal money order in the mail with a stamp not email and you'd wait for the postal money order to show up and then you'd have to go to the bank and deposit in the bank there were none of these there was no iphone you couldn't just take a picture of the check and deposit it it was a giant headache and i started selling these computer parts all over the world because i figured out i could make a lot more money doing that than you know going to college and getting a job at some you know big company uh and so been around computers my whole life and started a company called memory dealers selling computer memory mainly from these companies that were going out of business or updating their systems and we were selling this memory all over the world and a lot of people won't realize this but before right now if anybody has a stolen credit card one of the top things people try and do with a stolen credit card is buy cryptocurrency but back then the top thing that people were trying to do with stolen credit cards would buy computer memory and so we were selling computer memory and every single day we had people with stolen credit cards trying to trick us into selling our computer memory to them with these stolen credit cards so i understood firsthand what a giant headache it was dealing with online payments on the internet and payment fraud and chargebacks and all this nonsense and then you know years later when bitcoin came along i was like wow this solves every single online payment problem that people i remember when paypal first came along too actually i was one of paypal's biggest you know uh you know affiliate marketers there getting everybody to sign up for paypal they were paying you you know five dollars a person that would sign up and i got hundreds if not thousands of people to sign up for uh for paypal there and then for those that are older remember eagle that was the same thing when eagle came along i was a giant fan of e-gold and i sold my computer memory for e-gold people paid me with e-gold for those that don't know e-gold was this awesome platform that allowed you to buy and sell things on the internet would pay in x number of dollars worth of gold and the gold physically stayed put in you know different vaults but you would just transfer the ownership of the gold around online and that was really starting to get traction and really picking up steam until the us government came in and stole all the gold and i didn't you know i was real young i didn't have a huge amount of gold had a few thousand dollars worth um but that was gone and so because some people on the platform use some of the you know e-gold payment services for some bad things the government stole everybody's gold and then tossed the founder of it in jail and so that made me realize like as wonderful as gold is his money is if you're having to store it in somebody else's vault and trust them with it you're kind of at their mercy and so i lost all my gold and so did every other gold customer and then maybe if you jumped through a million hoops and filled out a bunch of forms for the lawyers maybe maybe a decade later you might have gotten some of your money back but i never uh you know followed up on that just because it was too much work it's a war of attrition there but uh been involved in tech and payments uh for you know decades i'm one of the older people in the cryptocurrency space so that's a little bit about me although we left out one of the more interesting uh facts maybe in my life so uh i wasn't born a libertarian but i i started studying these economics books as a young man and the more economics i studied the more i realized wow government intervening in the economy is just retarding the world's rate of economic growth and preventing the world from being as prosperous and wealthy as it otherwise would have been and uh it became really really clear as i studied this i thought wow if everybody realized this they would want the government to intervene in the economy a whole lot less so the world can be at a better place so uh maybe saying i made a mistake is a little bit too strong of a word but uh i took an interesting course in life and i ran for california state assembly as a libertarian and my campaign platform was that i would repeal as many laws as i possibly could i would repeal as many taxes as i possibly could and even if i were to be elected i said i wouldn't accept any salary whatsoever because my potential salary would come from taxpayers and maybe those taxpayers wouldn't want to pay my salary so i don't think that it would be legitimate for the government to force people to pay my salary if they don't want to so i said even if i was elected i wouldn't accept a salary and then in my campaign i got to debate the republican and democratic candidates and i called the atf and fbi a bunch of jack-booted thugs and murderers in reference to all these children that they murdered in a church in waco texas and yeah the parents were you know religious nuts but even if the parents are religious nuts you don't burn to death all their kids in a church and for those that aren't old enough to remember in like 1994 or something like that there was this uh you know church group in in waco texas and the united states federal government literally burnt to death i think it was like something like 30 kids were less than 12 years old that were in the building and about 100 people total so uh absolute uh you know black eye in american history there and anyhow the atf and fbi don't like it when you call them jack-booted thugs and murderers so i wound up being the only person in the entire country to be prosecuted for selling these firecrackers on ebay i was buying them initially from cabela's sporting goods catalog and then reselling them on ebay so buying from one website selling on another uh i didn't know i needed any sort of permit or license the company i was buying them from i asked them specifically do i need a license to sell they said no they're legal in all 50 states uh for agricultural use only so i put right there in the ads of you know these for agriculture use only of course everybody that knew that was buying them new that like yeah use them for agriculture but they also work just like a firecracker and you know people like firecrackers this is back when ebay had a guns and ammo section anyhow really long story to a shorter story i wound up doing 10 months in federal prison for selling these firecrackers on ebay and even while i was in prison the company that was manufacturing the company i was buying them from was we're still selling the exact same product with no license while i was in prison for doing the exact same thing so it left a really really bad taste to my mouth for uh you know american law enforcement because i've been brought up being told oh in america yeah freedom of speech you can say whatever you want and you're allowed to do that it turns out maybe you have a little bit more freedom of speech in america than you know north korea or other places but not that much and look what they're doing to julian assange now or edward snowden for telling the taxpayers what the government was doing with their tax money it's just a crazy crazy world and uh anyhow the day i was allowed to leave the country after my 10-month federal prison since uh i left the united states haven't lived in the united states ever since renounced my u.s citizenship back in 2014 and uh yeah that brings us i guess to where we are today so so let's back up for a second right just so people have a understanding of timeline um you grew up in silicon valley at what point uh did you actually run what was the year that you ran for a political seat yeah so the election was november of the year 2000. okay and then uh when were you um arrested or tried on the uh on the federal charges uh my i forget the exact date of when everything started my prison sentence started in 2002 and i got out in 2003 and it took some time for everything to you know wind through the gears of injustice there got it okay and then um in terms of that there's a you know you get out of prison in 2003 uh obviously you've got this kind of sour taste in your mouth with the government law enforcement kind of everything you just articulated uh bitcoin doesn't come around until 2008 2009. what are you doing in the five-year kind of window between getting out of prison and bitcoin never being released into the world yeah so um we should probably talk about some of the books that i read during that time that really influenced me so like one of those books was a kryptonomicron by neil stevenson uh i'm sure lots of people are familiar with neil stevenson one of the best science fiction authors around and in this book basically there are all these people that are using this it's been more than a decade since i read the book almost two decades probably um but i think it was called cyber cash in the book and basically it was this peer-to-peer electronic cash that people were using on the internet to buy and sell things and and mainly in the book they were using to pay for secret data centers where people could host their you know data beyond the reach of governments to be able to control or censor or shut down these uh websites and that sort of thing and it was really really interesting and then another book uh was future imperfect by david friedman in which it talks all about public key cryptography and how it works and he's uh he's a physicist by training but he's i guess a teacher's law by profession um and so the example he gave was once anonymous peer-to-peer digital cash comes around uh he was gonna he was talking about how people could practice law without a license on the internet and using digital signatures that you could prove that you're dealing with the same person over and over and so he basically described something like the silk road but for lawyers to give legal advice rather than drug dealers to sell drugs but it was just so incredibly fascinating how all this stuff is going to become possible once and all the pieces of the puzzle were in place except for the anonymous peer-to-peer electronic cash and and so i was you know basically just kind of waiting in my life for the peer-to-peer anonymous digital cash to come into existence and then when i heard about bitcoin boom there it was this thing i've been waiting for but to answer your question in the interim i've been focusing on my business so memory dealers uh grew up to you know have million multiple millions of dollars in sales every single year we employed you know dozens of people around the world had you know thousands of happy customers all around the world everybody from uh from nasa to the bureau of prisons uh were our customers for our parts um what were you selling what what is memory dealers so initially we were selling memory uh computer memory and then later on we actually wound up focusing a lot more on fiber optic transceivers and so we uh worked with a number of contract manufacturers and uh we started selling agile star branded uh optical transceivers and if you go on ebay today you'll still see a whole bunch of our used parts being sold all over the world so it was really fun to see uh just that's one of the things i love the most about business is you get to meet people you get to meet people all over the world and you get to have friends all over the world that you deal with uh over and over so mainly we started selling optical transceivers for like the the the rest of that time even though the name of the company was still memory dealers we still sold memory but the main product were these optical transceivers uh and so i had enough capital and money from that to when bitcoin came along boom i knew this is going to change everything so first step was to buy a bunch of bitcoin next step was to start investing and bill helping build up all the businesses that would enable bitcoin to be useful for people in their actual lives to buy and sell things uh on the internet and uh everybody loves to talk about you know i'm gonna buy a lambo once with my sick crypto games well i had a lamborghini before bitcoin in fact i had two before bitcoin had ever even been invented ever and the one that i had once bitcoin came along i sold it so i could buy more bitcoin so i went the reverse route in that so so the way that i wanted to kind of do this conversation um and for those listening uh roger and i see eye to eye on a lot of problems in the world and you know i think we both believe in a digital currency future we've got definite you know different points of view or perspectives and some aspects of how that gets implemented um but what i really want to talk about first is what are those problems in the world then the early days of bitcoin and kind of rogers work there and kind of a lot of the the insights and stories and effort that many people may not be aware of just because they weren't around um paying attention to that point and then at the end of the conversation we're gonna get into bitcoin bitcoin cash um a little bit of a technical conversation and um kind of what the future looks like so um let's start with i think the things that uh 99 we're drinking before like 99 of people watching this and listening to this are going to all shake their head yes yes yes uh which is the problems in the in the legacy finance world and in kind of the non-bitcoin or crypto world uh just talk to me a little bit about like what were those issues that you had identified before you ever saw bitcoin and then what are the things that you knew could be fixed with a digital currency if it was implemented the correct way yeah so one example of that that i think probably just about everybody listen this will instinctually just feel isn't right is is inflation right when the government prints money uh it's basically stealing from everybody else that's using that money at the same time and everybody kind of feels and knows that but it's actually even more insidious than that i remember as a young man i was reading a milton friedman's book i think it was free to choose and in that book he talked about a concept called bracket creep and i i wasn't familiar with that at all but it really made me think oh that's why government is incentivized even more so to inflate the currency so everybody knows oh if the government prints money they can then spend it on you know their military stuff or you know or maybe schools and hospitals and roads and bridges like they can spend on everything and everybody is kind of aware of that but it's much much sneakier than that so in america and most countries in the world uh there's an income tax and the income tax is graduated the more money you earn uh the the higher a rate you're gonna pay in taxes so if you earn a hundred thousand dollars you're gonna pay a higher rate than somebody that's running fifty thousand dollars and uh it goes on and up up up and up and so earning a hundred thousand dollars today isn't anywhere near as much money as earning a hundred thousand dollars back in the 1980s was so what the government is incentivized to do with inflation is year after year if you have you know your spinning power is decreased by a couple percentage points before you know it earning a hundred thousand dollars isn't that big amount of money but if you go from running fifty thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars over you know ten years um now suddenly you're in a much much higher tax bracket but you're not actually earning any more money but you're having to pay a higher percentage of what you're earning to the government so governments are incentivized through inflation to bump people into higher tax brackets so the government's going to have a higher percentage of people's money and i i didn't even realize that that was the case until i was reading about this from milton friedman and so that's something that i think a lot of people when they hear about they think oh that's a sneaky way to raise people's taxes not just through the inflation you know undermining their buying power but using inflation to bump people into higher tax bracket rates so that's a really sneaky way that governments all over the world are able to to take more people's money and uh and bitcoin can help put a stop to that or any hard money where there's a limited supply can help put a stop to that if you have something with a limited supply governments can't inflate it anymore they can't bump you into a higher tax bracket without you actually having uh be able to earn more money each year and so there's obviously the inflation problem i think again every single person listening to this will say yes that makes a ton of sense um there's this element of censorship or surveillance maybe talk a little bit about how the traditional financial system has issues that many people might not think are a big deal because they feel like oh if i'm not doing anything wrong then uh you know why do i care but obviously we've seen in other countries whether it's uh in a hong kong situation or elsewhere where uh that centralized control um and surveillance and and you know issues that can stem from that so kind of what are your thoughts there or what had you thought of uh and paid attention to before you saw bitcoin yeah everything seems fine until it's not um and so i saw firsthand with a lot of these and e-gold was a great example of it they literally stole all the customers gold because some of the people were using it for payments that the government didn't like so uh everything in life is just fine until it's not that's why you know it pairs it pays to be prepared because everything's fine i'm here in the caribbean everything's fine but if a major hurricane comes it's not going to be fine so i need to prepare now and have some extra food and water and things available in case there is some you know major major disaster and the same is true you know in the different monetary systems around the world so uh i was born in 1979 so within my lifetime uh the us dollar uh was worth at one point less than the zimbabwe dollar right one zimbab zimbabwe dollar used to equal more than one us dollar and now today you know it's a couple trillion zimbabwe dollars probably for one u.s dollar and that's an example of how things overnight can change or i'm sure that you know the germans and the weimar republic weren't expecting their currency just go to absolutely nothing you have to carry around wheelbarrows of it uh don't think it can't happen to you and that's why it's so important to be prepared to have something that's there and uh is is safe and so traditionally that's been hard money like gold and silver uh but more recently it's now gold silver and cryptocurrency because there's this other option and all over the world people used to use gold and silver as money and then later they started using banknotes uh for it and then governments managed to successfully basically sever the tie between gold and silver and the banknotes now the banknotes you know aren't tied to gold or silver anymore but now we have this wonderful thing in the form of cryptocurrency and as long as we don't allow whatever things out there in the world to sever the cryptocurrency asset itself from whatever ious or whatever ways people are using it uh we won't have the same problem that we had when the gold you know the dollar went off the gold standard or when you know roosevelt literally told everybody private citizens you're no longer allowed to own gold turn in your gold we're going to take it all like if if everybody's using custodial solutions for cryptocurrency stuff the government can do the exact same thing so it's important to have cryptocurrencies available where people can hold and use and be in control of it themselves and not just trust it with some you know central custodian uh like they used to do with gold and then have the gold i used them before you knew it the dollar and the gold were separated and so you talked earlier about um kind of your experience with e-gold uh and for those that didn't hear it it was basically gold sitting in a vault and then rather than paper claims on the gold silver the gold back dollar it was basically electronic claims for over generalized description and you could trade around those electronic claims on that gold that sat in a centralized vault that system fell apart because they were centralized control and the government stepped in and ultimately confiscated arrested people et cetera what was your relationship if any with kind of traditional gold it's not the eagle but did you ever hold regular gold buy gold interested in it at all yeah um my parents actually my mother had a purse in her closet was filled with a whole bunch of pre 19 i don't know 1967 like two silver dollars and quarters or whatever the year was that they stopped actually being made of silver and she had a whole bunch of those and i thought that was really interesting as a kid but actually more recently when i first got involved in bitcoin i helped set up the silicon valley bitcoin meetup and then the tokyo bitcoin meetup and there was a real interesting guy that showed up the tokyo bitcoin meetup this is back in 2011 and uh i don't have one in front of me but everybody's familiar with a penny from the u.s right everyone knows what a penny looks like in japan there's a one yen coin that's worth about a penny today and it's it's it's made of it feels like it's piece of plastic coated in aluminum or something it feels even cheaper than a penny if that's possible and and for the most part you know they have the you know leave one take one type jars around like it's it's worth it it's a penny so it's not much but what this guy did he showed up to the bitcoin meetup and he had a u.s silver dollar from you know 19 whatever and he had a one yen japanese coin for right before world war ii and today a one yen coin is worth one painting it's really it's it's hard to overstate how chintzy a little tiny cheap piece of uh i think it might actually be plastic inside to be honest looks like it's plastic coated in aluminum foil it's a really cheapy little thing but he brought a one yen coin from right before world war ii and back then a one yen coin was one ounce of silver so he had a u.s silver dollar which was one ounce of silver and a one yen coin which was one ounce of silver and right now the exchange rate for you know dollars to you and one u.s dollar is around 110 yen and so a one ounce silver coin is around twenty dollars a one yen coin today right you're gonna have to have what twenty thousand of them there to to be quite what it means is that one dollar used to equal one yen and for someone who's been living in japan for a long time the current exchange rate's over a hundred to one but it used to be one to one that was a real eye opener for me so what it means and the us government we know has inflated the currency a huge amount since world war ii just huge amount the japanese government inflated the currency even more is what it meant and then he also had the one yen paper notes the paper bills and he showed me this and he explained to me that you know during the war people that saved the one yen silver coins after the war they still had some assets the people that saved the one yen paper notes had nothing after the war they had absolutely nothing they were wiped out and so that's why it's so important to if you're trying to store wealth you have to store it in an actual asset not an iou representation of that asset so uh it was a fantastic example uh i think of just how destructive governments inflating the currency can be and how destructive to to the world's economy but to individual lives of the people that are living in the world and this is from somebody that you know his family had lived to that and he had these examples and that's why he was so interested in in bitcoin uh early on and i thought that was a really powerful example uh and and it had a big impact on me so i want to start talking about bitcoin now but before we do that uh everyone who's watching on the live stream please hit the like button that thumbs up so that more people on youtube can watch this and we can kind of share this information roger you were uh very early in bitcoin and i think early in two different things so one was timing right in terms of uh my understanding is about 2011 when you really kind of made a big move into bitcoin but two also early in conviction meaning that you didn't just say oh this is an interesting thing let me put you know twenty dollars in and see what happens you made a pretty substantial shift in in your uh wealth and kind of your portfolio if you will at the time talk first about like when was the first time that you came across bitcoin did you read the white paper did somebody tell you about it and what was your reaction yeah so like everybody the first time i heard about it i didn't pay as much attention as i would have liked to so um i was listening to a libertarian radio show called free talk live out of new hampshire and they mentioned it in reference to the silk road and i was you know eating breakfast at the time and i just kind of you know googled it real quickly and the price of bitcoin that point there wasn't really a price so the price was like somewhere between one and ten cents and there wasn't an actual price it was just kind of a range like whatever someone's willing to pay you for it in that ballpark is what the price was and i yeah i only spent maybe five minutes looking i thought oh this is kind of interesting but too bad nobody's using it and i didn't dig in deep and i didn't fully understand how it's this decentralized system and can't be shut down or controlled and then uh that was late in 2010 and then early in 2011 i heard about it again and then i googled it again and that's when i've figured out i put all the pieces together oh there's a limited supply oh it's a distributed network nobody can shut it down like this this this is amazing and that's when uh i literally got so excited about bitcoin that uh i i i i'm not exaggerating here i i'm someone who needs my full night of sleep every night but i was planning to go to work that morning when i when i read about it i didn't go to work i stayed home all day reading about it i stayed up all night that night reading about it into the next day until maybe 4 p.m the next day and then went to sleep for only maybe half an hour and woke up again and had to read more about it and stayed up all night again the next night until maybe 10 a.m the next morning and then only went to sleep for you know maybe 45 minutes and that went on for about a week of me only sleeping about you know an hour a night and then after about a week of hardly sleeping at all didn't leave my house once that entire time only microwaved some food and just focused on reading everything i could find on the internet about bitcoin uh i got really really really sick from lack of sleep then i literally had to call my friend and say i lost my voice too even though i wasn't talking to anybody i was only reading i called and said help me i need you to take me to the hospital and she was nice enough to come and drive to my house and and pick me up and drive me to the hospital and they gave me some kind of sedative and i passed out for i don't know maybe 18 hours straight or something like that and then i woke up and it's been all bitcoin uh all day every day for the last decade and the guy that actually drove me to the hospital that day uh he now owns uh one of the the main bitcoin and bitcoin cash and ethereum accepting restaurants in silicon valley so if you like korean bbq you can head on over to korean spring barbecue right there in santa clara it's fantastic food and you can pay for it in cryptocurrency as well and uh you can tell me you heard the story about the time you drove me to the hospital in 2011 because i was so excited about bitcoin that's a great story um and so when you're sitting and reading for that week and you're kind of diving into all the information what's your reaction like why are you so excited about the information that you're consuming yeah so i've always been interested in people having control over their own lives being able to do what they want with their own money and their own career and their own jobs their own buying and selling of things and we've had the internet for a long time where people were able to share information for the most part unrestricted and uh there's platforms where people can buy and sell things and advertise their things but the payments that was always the missing piece of the puzzle right if if paypal closes your account you can't use it anymore if bank of america closes your account you can't use it anymore if you get on the you know olfact blacklist you can't do anything anymore and now suddenly we had censorship resistant money that people could use to buy and sell things it's like i never bought or sold a single thing on the silk road but philosophically it was one of the most interesting things that had ever happened in my entire lifetime and i was i spent a huge amount of time reading their forms and looking at all over the website and keeping track of the different stuff that people were starting to buy and sell and that's what kicked off the entire bitcoin and cryptocurrency ecosystem where people buying and selling things on the silk road using bitcoins for payments and in fact everybody today knows that bitcoins aren't anonymous and aren't uh are very easily traceable by law enforcement but back then everybody thought that bitcoin was basically anonymous in fact like most of the time it was even advertised as anonymous i don't even think they were really particularly using the word uh pseudoanonymous like uh it wasn't until much later people realized just how public the transactions on the bitcoin blockchain are but back then everybody thought that it was basically anonymous so people were just you know going wild buying and selling things on these different dark net markets it was just such an interesting interesting thing to watch happen and that's what kicked off bitcoin and gave it its initial price and that's what made it grow and grow and grow and there's such an interesting uh and so my my fear at that point when people were only using bitcoin to buy and sell you know cocaine or marijuana or different things on these things as well governments don't like that governments can demonize that so my goal was to get people to use bitcoin in commerce for things that aren't illegal and so i had a long background in e-commerce buying and selling things so i set up this website called bitcoinstore.com which was the very first mainstream websites selling products that people would actually be interested in because before i was selling fiber optic transceivers not too many people are interested we advertise i put up a billboard in silicon valley in 2011 saying we accept bitcoin for you know fiber optic transceivers get your you know x2s and zinfax and sfp plus is from us but nobody even knows what those are unless you're really deep in that industry uh but so what i did is i got i made contracts with inger micro and tech data which are the first and the third largest consumer electronics distributors in the entire united states and i listed their entire line cards for sale for bitcoin and we only accepted bitcoin and this is back when the price of bitcoin was like you know 12 bucks each or something like that um and so now there are more than half a million consumer electronic products that you could buy for bitcoin and we listed them all at our cost so actually our prices for the most part on most products probably 80 of the products our prices were cheaper than amazon so that was a really big deal so you could buy all these things more than you know any computer phone any computer gadget you would want which is what all crypto people are interested in you can buy them for bitcoin it price is cheaper than amazon and so now suddenly we were getting attention from fox news and cnn and the wall street journal and everybody because we were selling millions of dollars worth of these parts and you know i was on there on social media you know tagging amazon and tagging newegg and tagging tiger direct saying hey look at all this stuff we're selling for bitcoin you guys are missing out on all these sales you guys should be accepting bitcoin too and that's what really helped drive off this uh worldwide adoption of bitcoin being used in commerce and once bitcoin was used in normal commerce where you had the microsofts and the expedias and the new eggs accepting bitcoin it was then much much harder for the politicians to demonize bitcoin oh that's a currency only for drug dealers and money launderers you could say no that's a currency for people to book their next vacation on you know expedia or that's a currency for people to buy their new you know uh home home computer system on new ag right or tiger director all these things so it made it much much much harder for governments to demonize bitcoin or try and shut it down so everyone loves talking about censorship resistance of bitcoin i think one of the things that really helps with the censorship resistance is mass adoption the more people you have using it the more difficult it is to censor and there's a great quote from mike hearn another early bitcoiner he said even outlaws can't use an outlaw currency and so if the currency is only used for illegal things then you can't use it anywhere you have if you want to use a currency for illegal things it has to be legal useful for legal things as well just like the u.s dollar you can use it to buy cocaine you can use it to buy dog food uh and if it wasn't usable for legal things nobody would be able to use the us dollar to buy illegal things either it has to be for both or it'll be for for neither so when you kind of wrapped your head around this and you're like wow this is really impressive i think that there's a big big future for this uh i'm going to intentionally make a move into bitcoin was your first inclination to buy a bunch of bitcoin to set up the store you just described where you would just accept it for parts like what were the what was like the first thing that you actually did once you kind of have made the decision okay like this is the future and i want to go um and be a part of that yeah it was all of those things in parallel but i remember one kind of additional turning point uh i was talking on the phone to a friend of mine telling him and this i just made my first bitcoin purchase and i was just getting ex excite you know into all this and and it was you know a big purchase but uh i was telling him all about bitcoin and he was not convinced and he told me very sarcastically at the end of our you know maybe 45 minute long long phone call where i'm telling him all about bitcoin he says roger if you really think bitcoin's so great why don't you buy more of it and you know he said it in a real snarky way and when he said that to me on the phone i told him you're right and so i went out the next day and i bought it even more bitcoin uh so i should thank him for for doing that but uh to answer your question it was all those things right buy some bitcoin and then build all the software tools to make it useful for people to use bitcoin in their daily lives for absolutely everything and when we talk about buying a lot are you thinking of it in terms of a lot of dollars a lot of your net worth like how did you think about um kind of the risk reward so you it sounds like intellectually uh convinced that um this is something that solves an issue uh that i've been paying attention to i'm very intellectually curious about this i'm intrigued by this type of solution uh i'm kind of convinced enough that it has legs that i'm willing to put my own capital at risk but did you have kind of it as like an investment idea was it like let me go convert all of my fiat currency into bitcoin you know on day one like just how did you think about um what risk you were willing to take at that point given that you know most people would have argued like there was a very very high chance i don't know 99 chance it was gonna fail right and it kind of wouldn't be it wouldn't actually become what it has become yeah so i i put just about all of my liquid net worth at that time into bitcoin and bitcoin startups and just plowed every every last bit of everything uh into that time energy and money uh that i could so uh and one of the very first in fact the first investment i made was into a company called bit instant which allowed anybody at any walgreens or 711 or walmart to walk in with a handful of cash and uh within an hour or two they'd have a bitcoins right there in their wallet and so it made it really really easy for people to buy their bitcoins and then they could go and do what they want and there was this you know wave of uh you know merchant adoption and people that were getting more and more excited about using it for payments because anybody that had been involved in e-commerce like payments are a problem uh another interesting example of that and i still remember this to this very day it's been this is pre bitcoin maybe this is 15 years ago but i got an email from a guy and i to this day i feel sad for the guy he emailed me and his email started out he says i am in nigeria and i know you don't believe me but i honestly want to buy some of your optical transceivers or computer memory i forget what parts you wanted but uh and because you know for better or worse nigeria has such a horrible online reputation like almost all the credit card fraud and stuff is coming out of nigeria so what this guy did he sent me the email and he said i'm going to pay you everything in advance buy wire transfer once you receive the payment you can wait a couple more days and make sure the wire doesn't get reversed and then you can send me the parts that i'm ordering and i i and turned out his order was totally legitimate we got the wire everything was fine we sent him the parts and i think he ordered a couple more times after that but i thought what an absolute headache for that poor guy being in nigeria anytime he wants to buy anything from somebody he literally has to send them an email saying i'm in nigeria and i know you don't believe me but here's what i want so imagine if that guy he's probably a giant bitcoin you know cryptocurrency fan today because now he can use it for all the payments and he can contact these people outside nigeria and say hey i want to buy something from you i'm going to pay you in advance from cryptocurrency my shipping address is in nigeria but i'm paying you in advance with cryptocurrency so you don't have anything to worry about and people are saying sure no problem it's not even an issue whereas back then even for a wire transfer you're going to be skeptical because they have these elaborate other you know schemes that they do with you know tricking people to send fake wire transfers to the wrong person and whatnot so uh anyhow cryptocurrencies just solve so many problems for online payments and that's that's what started the whole thing the silk road is what got this entire ecosystem uh started without any doubt and so many people who are early um you know one didn't have a capital base like you had obviously uh but two when they started to buy bitcoin or acquire bitcoin through earning or mining or whatever their method was uh and let's say that they started doing that five cents ten cents a dollar five dollars when all of a sudden it's hitting twenty twenty five dollars if you were getting bitcoin at you know five or ten cents it looks like wow my in us dollar terms you know i just made an absolute killing financially why not sell why not kind of walk away in terms of um seeing the us dollar value of how many bitcoin you had going up so much and so aggressively over the coming you know two three four five years why not at some point just take the profits and go do something else uh because well and you could go do something else but i can't think of anything that's more interesting uh that i could have an impact on than cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer electronic cash for the worldline ai is probably gonna be more interesting but other than investing in ai startups i'm not gonna have you know a much of a direct impact there whereas cryptocurrency uh in peer-to-peer cash world i can have a big not only can i have i have had a big impact on that adoption in the world and especially back then i remember very clear when bitcoin hit 30 for the first time in june of 2011. the user experienced like it wasn't as refined but the transactions were literally basically instant not basically free they were free for just about all transactions all the time if you hadn't moved your bitcoins more than uh you know within the last i forget how many blocks the transaction was completely free and zero satoshis uh totally free so the transactions were totally free uh basically instant and uh and irreversible that was amazing and the supply was limited why would i want to sell those for a bunch of dollars that uh you're guaranteed the us dollar is going to go down in value over time you're not guaranteed that cryptocurrency is going to go up but you are guaranteed the dollar is going to go down and if at that point for sure bitcoin looked like it had this amazing amazing amazing future in front of it because the user experience was so incredibly good there's no way you're going to get me to sell any of those backed into dollars that would be a that would be ridiculous and and i know i'm not a professional trader i've just been a long-term value holder i look at the things that are going to be the most useful to the most number of people around the world i'm going to hold that for the long term because the long-term price trend of those things are going to be up uh the things that aren't useful to people well uh i maybe i'll sell those so okay and and so um at some point you go from what i'll consider just one person who's buying bitcoin investing in companies um to you end up getting the title of bitcoin jesus right and and that was i think a combination of the work that you had done in investing in companies um kind of the the um amount of time and energy you had spent going and telling people about bitcoin and trying to convince them that this was the future tell us the story of like what was the first time you ever heard uh that as a description for yourself or a name for yourself kind of what was your reaction when somebody started to call you bitcoin jesus um yeah two questions are so the first time i i i heard about it or heard someone refer to me i think uh was i was uh at like a there was another startup that i invested in cryptocurrency startup and there was like a barbecue with like the founders and some of the other investors and it was this you know beautiful lake house up in washington state and a bunch of high school kids from the neighboring house had come over and they were you know maybe 15 20 high school kids or something i was telling all these kids about bitcoin and setting up wallets for them and giving them all some some bitcoin on their wallets and they were all really excited because you know young people digital currency yeah this makes sense why would i why would i use you know anything other than you know online stuff and so they were all really excited about it and i was talking about you know you can use bit instant to go out and buy more you know bitcoin at the 7 11 tomorrow and all these kids are saying yeah i'm going to go out and buy more this is great like you know these kids maybe were too young to open a bank account or get a credit card so this was finally a payment method they can use and then one of the other adults kind of walked up and you know i was surrounded by all these kids and setting them up on their phones and sending them some uh bitcoin one of the adults said roger it's like you're it's like you're a bitcoin jesus and you have all your disciples around you because all these kids were there you know really excited about it too and uh i guess somehow along the way it just kind of more and more people started calling me that but i never called myself that i didn't choose that name for myself uh i'm an atheist and if you look at what happened to the original jesus uh he was murdered by the government of his day so things didn't turn out too well for the original jesus i hope not to meet the the same fate there uh but uh it was basically impossible from you know 2011 until and still to this day for the most part it's mostly impossible unless i'm i'm in a real public setting that's not crypt i want to be left on uh but for sure up until probably 2015 or 16 it was impossible to meet me and not hear about bitcoin and if you would allow me i would set you up with a wallet and send you some it was impossible to meet me uh through that point and it wasn't until the fees on bitcoin started to become a problem and the blocks became full uh that uh it was a little bit harder for me to start to continue giving bitcoin to anybody i i met but that's that's maybe that'll be part two of our conversations yeah what was the thing that drove you to do that right cause i think that that is it takes a certain type of personality it takes a certain type of life experience and a certain type of person to not only say hey this is something that i personally am interested in want to do but i'm actually going to go and every person i meet i'm going to tell them about it i'm going to give them a wallet i'm going to send them some bitcoin like what what drove you to do that or why do you think you had the inclination to do that versus you know the hundreds or thousands of other people who were into bitcoin at the time but they weren't doing that i think it was every single thing that i was interested in life is pushed forward by people adopting bitcoin or cryptocurrency now uh in actual you know day-to-day life in commerce and so those things if i had to you know name off some of them it's like i'm incredibly interested in the singularity right when computers exceed human intelligence wow what an exciting exciting world we're going to be in there and so the best way to speak or one of the ways to speed up the the the advent of you know superhuman intelligences is uh through more economic growth right the faster the economy grows the more resources there are to devote this sort of things the faster we're going to get there so uh and cryptocurrency helps enable that because it enables more economic freedom more economic freedom leads to more economic growth more economic growth leads to you know a a faster advent of superhuman intelligences the same thing with life extension technologies right i don't want to die if you die that's the most boring thing that can possibly happen to you right because if you're dead you can't have interesting conversations like this or do anything at all about anything so i want anybody who wants to be able to to be able to live forever the best way to do that is through more economic growth so you can have more research scientists and more you know capital be devoted to figuring out a way for people to be able to live forever so you can enjoy wonderful times with your friends and family and people on the internet and interesting conversations for as long as you want to and at any point if you decide you're bored of life it's easy to end it if that's what you want to do right so like that's another thing that i want people to do to be able to live forever if they want to so superhuman intelligence you know uh living forever uh and then just more economic freedom lifts everybody out of poverty you look around the world like i'm i'm having this absolutely amazing life right i can go anywhere i want do whatever i want you know eat whatever i want live wherever i want i'm fortunate i'm incredibly fortunate to do that right but there's other people that are having really really hard times in life right there's people i was lucky enough to have been born in silicon valley what if i had been born in some other part of the world right it would have been much more difficult and other people think oh what if you were born in some other part of the u.s no i'm talking about what if you were born in some you know poverty strict in third world country i would have had a really really really hard time well the best thing we can do for these countries around the world or these places around the world that are poverty-stricken is bring them more economic freedom if you look at the different countries around the world the ones with the lowest standard of living are the ones with the least amount of economic freedom and because they have less economic freedom they have less economic growth so it's so clear for those that are old enough to remember you can look at east and west germany right in west germany they had a whole lot more economic freedom uh and and they were producing you know porsches and mercedes and bmws and people had a very high standard of living in east germany you had way less economic freedom the government controlled everything and about the only thing they were able to produce in east germany was a great big giant wall to prevent people from to being from being able to escape because things were so horrible there or today you know you can look at north korea and south korea south korea is wonderful they have a lot of economic freedom there compared to north korea where they have hardly any economic freedom it's clear which one of those two koreas you would rather live in and so anywhere around the world you look at the places the places with the most economic freedom have the most economic growth and the most economic growth leads to the highest standard of living so if we want to help people all over the world it's by bringing more the tools that enable more economic freedom around the world and so like you know the singapores and in the hong kongs until recently have been fantastic you know beacons around the world of those sorts of things so let's bring more economic freedom to the world the places around the world that don't have it and i don't think the most effective way to do that is to beg politicians oh can you please you know lower tariffs and lower taxes and lower restrictions on businesses i think the best way to do that is to build the censorship resistant tools that enable people to engage in commerce to buy and sell whatever it is that they want so long as it's peaceful with anybody else anywhere in the world and not need permission from the bureaucrats not need permission from the politicians have the ability to either say no directly or just have it be completely hidden from the politicians and the regulators and the bureaucrats that you know maybe they raised some chickens and they sold them to their neighbor or they you know they made something on the internet or designed a website and center received a payment for it like let's build the tools that enable people to engage in free trade around the world and not need permission from these politicians around the world that's how we make the world a better place for everybody and if we can make the world a better place for everybody else out there that makes the world a better place for me too because this is the same world that i'm living in so bitcoin or cryptocurrencies that's the best thing that i could possibly do to make the lives of everybody in the entire planet better and mine all at the same time so i'm as motivated as i possibly could be to bring peer-to-peer electronic cash that's censorship resistant where anybody can buy and sell whatever they want for the entire world and that's why here i am i've been in space almost 10 years full-time and i'm still excited about it every single day i've been working on this for almost a decade now and i think i'm going to continue going for another decade here as well uh what could possibly be more exciting about this so that that's my rant as to why i'm so excited about this but uh i hope the rest of you are listening to this like this is the most exciting technology that we have available to make the world a better place for everybody and it's here right now today don't waste any more time right we're all getting colder day by day let's hurry up and bring this to the world before we start talking about um kind of bitcoin and bitcoin cash and the differences there uh my last question about the early days of bitcoin is how would you describe the bitcoin community right it was obviously small um there was kind of loose coordination and um you know some conferences and things like that but like how would you having seen from 2011 to maybe 2015-16 like how did that evolve over time and how would you talk about that that community that was being built around this asset yeah in the early days it was really really really a wonderful wonderful uh community i remember just being so excited to just wake up every day and say and look online and see what new cool things that people build for people to be able to use bitcoin for and you know uh metaphorically speaking it just felt like everybody was holding hands and seeing kumbaya all day every day about bitcoin because all of us were on you know this this team of bring peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world that was going to enable more economic freedom for the world and tear down you know government barriers to people uh engaging in trade and making the world a better place like that's the thing that i think a lot of people in cryptocurrency will already appreciate but a lot of people don't understand anytime anybody buys or sells anything with anybody uh both people are better off after the trade when you buy a new tv it's because the person that sold you the tv values the money you gave them more than they value the tv it's because you value the tv more than the money you gave them so after the trade both people have something that they value more than before the trade otherwise the trade wouldn't have taken place so the more trade we can enable in the world the better off everybody's going to be so we need to build the tools cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency tools to enable people to be able to trade with each other because that's how you make everybody better off all over the world and i bought some you know fantastic little nuts earlier today i value the nuts more than i value the money i paid for them the person that sold me the nuts values the money more than the nuts both of us are now wealthier after i you know bought these nuts from them so we need to build the tools where people can do this without needing permission from from anybody anywhere and uh and that's been the goal for me and that was absolutely without any doubt the goal of the early bitcoin community was building the tools for people to be able to buy and sell anything uh with anyone anywhere in the world and not need permission and uh the you know the payments were supposed to be fast cheap and reliable and that's what it was uh all the way up until maybe 2015 issue that really started to change all right so we're going to have a conversation about bitcoin and bitcoin cash uh i want to kind of put a couple caveats for those that are listening uh roger and i again 99.9 of what we just talked about uh we agree on in terms of the problems in the pollution it's not just a kind of a inflation type thing there's multiple impact that can happen from this being coming globally adopted what i don't want to have is people to think that roger and i are here to argue over all kinds of different things uh i think that roger and i have uh a view of the world where the question is how do we get there right it's kind of like we we agree on all the problems and i think we agree actually on like the finish line if you will or or the goal that everyone is working towards the difference of opinion is uh what is the path to pursue and um i think roger would agree with this and i'll give you a chance here to agree or disagree in a second but i'm of the belief that like experimentation and innovation and all of these things should be encouraged even when you disagree with the way that somebody's going to do something right and there's plenty of people who may not like that but but i generally think that there's ideas that come from those you agree with and those that you don't agree with and so understanding both the way that you think and also the way that other people think is really important so that's kind of the goal here is to talk through it now with that said uh as we can see in the live chat uh through twitter previously there's tons of people who have tons of opinions here and so we're gonna try to do our best to navigate this uh in kind of the most um intelligent way and stay out of what i'll call all of the troll type content although yes you guys make us all laugh uh roger and i were joking about it before we started um you know the memes the jokes like we get it uh but we are going to try to kind of keep this as high value of a conversation as possible so with that all said um roger talk to us about you go from 2011 to you know 15 16 into 17 uh and you are one of if not the most recognized supporters of bitcoin and at some point you start to change your mind in terms of is bitcoin the solution that can solve these problems um when did that start and kind of where did you start to diverge in terms of wait a second this may not be going the way that i think it should go or this may not be the actual solution that we need yeah there were a couple of steps in that process but i remember one of the the bigger epiphanies i guess in in that process there was a i was hosting a bitcoin meet up in silicon valley was at the korean barbecue restaurant there again and you know probably about a hundred people showed up that night there were a bunch of people there and that you everybody was paying this is before bitcoin cash or i think this might have been before ethereum existed uh as well um this is you know pretty early days everybody was there was excited they were paying with their their blockchain.info wallet i think was the main mobile wallet back then that everybody was using anyhow they're paying for their meal in bitcoin the owner of the store was super happy to be accepting bitcoin for all the payments it was a really fun time so like 100 people showed up there and of the 100 people that were there 97 uh were in favor of hey yeah this is great i'm going to pay for my meal on bitcoin bitcoin is gonna be money for the world everyone pretty soon is gonna be using bitcoin to buy and sell and pay for everything with everybody but there were three uh bitcoin core developers that showed up there uh that evening uh and it was luke jr uh eric lombroso and uh brian bishop were their names and they literally spent the entire evening there arguing with the other 97 people there were only three of them that had that opinion that evening and there were about 100 people there they spent the entire evening telling people that they should not be using bitcoin to pay for their dinner they should be using credit cards and they spent the entire evening they're arguing with people that bitcoin is not good for payments and people shouldn't be using bitcoin to pay for things people should be using credit cards i remember uh another early bitcoin uh guy i who loves his privacy so i won't tell his name but he'll know who he is when he hears this um he asked him i was like what if i'm someone living in in venezuela and i need to pay somebody or i need to pay for something in venezuela and there's you know sanctions so i can't do a uh you know whatever and he's like well you should use a credit card and they said well what if my credit card's blocked and then you know i think it was luke jr one of these those three guys said like well you should have a backup credit card and it just seems so bizarre to me that these guys came to a bitcoin meetup and spent the entire evening arguing with people they shouldn't have used bitcoin to pay for their meal and they shouldn't be using bitcoin for payments they should be using credit cards instead and that was kind of where like i thought wow there's a a new group of people in bitcoin that don't think bitcoin should be used as money and aren't interested in bitcoin being usable to buy or sell things and they want people to use credit cards instead so hold on a second i want to go slow here just so we can kind of really get into the details uh i wasn't there right obviously you're recounting an experience that um i i wasn't there for and why do you think that was their opinion or why were they talking about that and obviously you're not them right so there's gonna be some speculation but what do you think was driving that um conversation or that point of view yeah so there's there's a great clip i think that's on youtube people can search like roger ver luke jr bitcoin opinions or something like that and so you know there's this girl in japan uh who asked me why are you interested in bitcoin or and i said because this is like one of the most amazing technologies ever like we summed up you know in the first you know half hour of our chat here and then she asked luke jr the exact same question why are you interested in bitcoin and this is what luke jr is one of the guys that was there telling people you should use credit cards not bitcoin uh and he's pauses for ein it's a really long awkward pause maybe you know 20 full seconds and it's a long pause and then finally the answer it comes up with is that it's interesting technology and like yeah okay bitcoins and blockchains it's interesting technology but the reason it's interesting technology is because it enables more economic freedom for the entire world which enables more economic growth which enables all the wonderful things that people want to have in the world and luke just thinks it's interesting technology and luke was somebody who literally believed in bitcoin so little that he i need to hardly held on to any at all he had to have a fundraiser recently to pay for a dsl line for his house whereas anybody you know i believed in it so much i put you know almost every you know almost all of my liquid net worth i put right into bitcoin and i think that that's another kind of interesting thing out there is that so many of the people that before bitcoin had split were in favor of not using bitcoin for payments and just using credit cards for everything they hardly held any bitcoin at all there was a really interesting voting website where people could sign with their bitcoins at an address and vote on different topics and like it was like 97 or 98 of of the bitcoins that vote it was this huge amount of bitcoins hundreds of thousands of bitcoins it was lots of bitcoins hundreds of thousands of bitcoins had voted and they were almost all in favor of you know bitcoin being able to scale on chain uh for to become money for the world and yet that's not what wound up happening eventually so okay okay so we have the kind of the the first you know incident i guess where um you hear people talking about not using bitcoin as cash and kind of having a different perspective where how do we get from that to eventually um having a fork and um the more detail and kind of you know timeline based you can go so people understand because there's frankly whether people remember this or not there wasn't that many people that are in bitcoin and cryptocurrency today uh they weren't around that so they kind of didn't get to live through this like you did um and so maybe walk us through um you know you leave that dinner what are the next events that transpire that kind of continue to push you further and further into uh wait a second this may not be the solution that uh that you wanted yeah so there was another kind of turning point as well that i remember so uh there's this thing that bitcoin has that bitcoin cash doesn't have it's called replace by fee or rbf for short and bitcoin that's that's new to bitcoin i think i think that was probably implemented in 2015 or so so and what that does is it made it all the time in the early days that once i sent you bitcoin that's the end of the transaction there's no way for me to get that bitcoin back once i broadcasted the network the network rule was called first scene first safe which meant the net the transaction that the network sees first that's the one that's going in the block and even if it sees a different transaction later with a much higher fee ignores that one because it didn't see it first and so peter todd and a number of other you know core developers really pushed to have this thing called replaced by fee implemented which made it so that if i send you some bitcoin and let's say i pay you know a one cent fee i can then any point up until when the transaction is uh including the next block i can then instead of that bitcoin going to you i can send it back to me or send it to some other person or do whatever with it and pay a two cent fee or a two dollar fee or whatever fee that's more than the amount that i send a tour initially with which makes bitcoin much much much less useful for people to buy and sell things in much less commerce hold on before we get into kind of the different bitcoin and bitcoin cash come back to um as you are kind of becoming convinced that hey there there might have to be something else were there other moments that you remember that kind of drove you to to think that or was this kind of you have that one initial dinner and then you know over time you just slowly become convinced that there needs to be another solution no th this is one of the moments so because there when this rb rbf was happening there was no bitcoin cash there ethereum wasn't i don't know if it even even launched yet or not right and so there's a big argument within the bitcoin community though people are arguing like hey please don't do this this makes you know bitcoin less useful for commerce so eric voorhees wrote a fantastic essay like an open letter to peter todd asking him you know i know you're a really smart guy you're a good you know cryptographer and you know brilliant mind i think is what the the word that eric used he said but this please understand that this severely damages the use case so eric had started a website or bought a website called satoshi dice in like 2012 it got integrated into the blockchain.net info wallet and that if you can look on the the blockchain history that's when bitcoin transactions really went through the roof because everybody was busy playing satoshi dice because you would send in your 100 bucks if you won you would get back 200 bucks instantly worth of bitcoin and it was just boom boom boom boom boom on chain instantly just like that it was a really magical experience where people all over the world were busy playing this and rbf not only ruined that but it ruined you know businesses like uh bitpay trying to accept payments and all sorts of businesses all over the world it made it much more difficult to accept bitcoin for payment so myself and eric and a whole bunch of other people were saying hey we need to be really really careful about doing anything that makes bitcoin less useful in commerce because the entire goal at that point for at least myself and a big majority of the bitcoin community was get as many people using bitcoin in commerce as quickly as we possibly could so the regulators wouldn't have time to realize oh wait the dollar might lose its you know world reserve currency status everybody might start using you know free market money rather than our you know uh you know pieces of paper that we can print as many as we want at for any time and so by integrating that lots of people were upset within the bitcoin community but there was still just one bitcoin and things were still moving ahead and then the other big turning point to answer your question there that really made me worry about the future of bitcoin was the fees were getting higher and higher like you know at first the fees were zero and then the fee started being a penny and then two pennies and then you know a nickel and then a dime and then you know 20 cents and they were creeping higher and higher and there was some sort of an interview or or some online comment somewhere and i forget exactly where it was but it really made me think oh my god this is a big problem and i think it was adam back when i realized that he wanted the fees to be high and they were excited for the fees to be high and that's when i realized oh my god if they intentionally make the fees on bitcoin high nobody's going to use it because anybody that studies economics when you'll know that when something costs more people use less of it if you're if your electricity costs more per kilowatt hour you're going to use less electricity than if it costs less if bitcoin transactions are more expensive to make people are going to make fewer bitcoin transactions and that was the real big turning point when you say that you thought that they wanted to make the fees high why exactly did you think that uh they started openly saying it uh there's maybe this is news to you maybe you didn't realize it but you can actually see quotes from people like adam back the founder of block stream where he says he can't wait for for you know the fees to get up to a hundred dollars per bitcoin transaction or you know maybe even get up to hopefully they can even get up to a thousand dollars someday and then greg maxwell one of the founders of block stream and the cto there there's a email from the mailing list there where he's talking about you know hooray pop the champagne the bitcoin fees are over fifty dollars a transaction this is you know this is a great fit step for bitcoin i'm summarizing a little bit but he literally said you know pop the champagne this is such a big success for bitcoin and for people like myself that have been accepting payments from people all over the world in bitcoin and then more times than i can count i had to pay more you know thousands of dollars in fees for a single bitcoin transaction then you'll see all some of these people that you know disagree with me they say oh roger's lying about that i'm not lying you can see the transactions there's like hundreds of thousands of transactions in which people paid more than fifty dollars i i didn't have the data in front of but i i think it may even been i think they're like more than 30 000 transactions in which people had to pay more than a thousand dollars in fees to send a single bitcoin transaction and i remember one of the convoluted roger so let's back up for a second um again i don't know what quotes those are right so so i can't kind of um agree or disagree on it so we'll just leave that as it is let's maybe for people to understand when you're talking about fees and transactions and all this stuff walk people through the design of bitcoin and where you think that the design is flawed right so i think this is one of the key pieces that eventually led to bitcoin cash and some technical changes that happened but in terms of how bitcoin works when you're talking about the high fees where did the high fees come from so the high fees came from having an artificially imposed limit on the amount of block space that the miners are allowed to produce on the bitcoin blockchain so the blocks on bitcoin are limited to about one megabyte there's a little bit extra because of segwit so in the ballpark of one megabyte 1.2 megabytes and so inside that one megabyte you can fit about 2 500 transactions every 10 minutes if more than 2 500 people want to make a transaction every 10 minutes on bitcoin only the 2 500 people that pay the most money in fees will be the transactions that are included in the block so everybody has to bid against everybody else so if you're if there's 5 000 people that want to make a transaction only the top 2 500 that paid the most will be included in the next block and then the other 2 500 hat will have to wait until a future block and and there's this thing called the mimpool which is basically the queue of transactions that are waiting to be included in the next block and only the top 2 500 transactions approximately are included in each block so at the end of 2017 when everybody was trying to use bitcoin and people were trying to move it in and out of the exchanges and things were really busy on the bitcoin network the average fee for the transaction got to be over 50 dollars for a single transaction and the average confirmation time to be included in a block wound up being more than two weeks right so that's absolute disaster for anybody that's trying to use bitcoin for payments fifty dollars on average per transaction and more than two weeks on average for a confirmation time and remember in that two week period you could potentially reverse the payment using this replaced by fee stuff that had been added into bitcoin as well it was an absolute master so you just described bitcoin's design at some point you and a bunch of other people decide hey we can create a technical version that is similar but different that we think has advantages to it walk us through um what forget how it's designed for a second how did that come about right is that you make a phone call to somebody and then all of a sudden you know people start calling each other and say hey this is a good idea does somebody call you like just walk me through kind of operationally how does the idea come together to fork bitcoin and create something else it's actually the reverse of that so the plan from bitcoin from its inception all the way up until later was that the blocks would just get as big as they needed to be in order to accommodate their transactions so it was people like the bitcoin core developers and the block stream guys and those guys they're the ones who got together and said hey i have an idea on how we can make bitcoin better than what it was originally and the ideas they came up with to make it better was this replace by fee thing that i told you about and by limiting the block size they thought that by limiting the amount of transactions that the bitcoin network could could handle that would make bitcoin better and people like myself and everybody else disagreed and we wanted to go on the original path for bitcoin which was to allow as many transactions on chain as possible okay so part of this and i think why i wanted to do this is i think you and i both have the ability to state our opinion and then also flip around the table and say hey the people who disagree with me believe x because of y right the people who wanted to limit the block size what is their argument as to why that is a good thing to do right so understand that you disagree with it but what is it their argument in terms of why they believe that to be a good thing sure so their argument as to why they think that's a good thing is because if you allow the blocks to get bigger and bigger it will require a more expensive computer to run a full node where you have the entire blockchain there and if you keep the blocks small you'll be able to run a full node on a much smaller cheaper computer potentially on a home internet connection or even a raspberry pi and so in their view of the world that's a really really good thing because more people all around the world will be able to run full nodes and if you have more full nodes around the world it'll be harder for governments to shut down all of those full nodes i agree with that but i think that they didn't if i can give the other side of the the point of view there the other side of that is if you get everybody around the world using bitcoin for commerce you'll have you know companies like walmart and amazon and tiger direct and everybody else that's using it you'll have all sorts of businesses that have an economic need to run a full node and i don't and even today almost nobody's running a full node there's you know maybe a couple of tens of thousands of full nodes in the world if that on the bitcoin network and there's tens of millions of users so it's a very small percent are using them and so my point of view is if you want to give bitcoin more censorship resistance you need to get as many people around the world using bitcoin in commerce in their daily lives as possible whereas the other side of the the view here is that we need as many people on the network running full nodes as possible but we don't care about what the total number of people using the network as a whole is okay uh those are the kind of the two world views on each side for uh the purpose of this conversation i'm gonna generalize those two arguments as security and convenience right and and i know that those aren't necessarily dead-on descriptions but basically one is the decentralization of the network based on the full nodes ends up being a related argument that says hey decentralization is really really important the other argument is that you can have the convenience so fast if i can have a little bit i think the other side of the argument is that actually by having more people use it in commerce that adds additional security so i think that they're both security arguments the small block is a security argument but the big block side is also a security argument that you get more security by more adoption okay so so fair in terms of uh you're getting security from two different areas right one is more of a deterrent and one is the computer science type security so now let's talk um in terms of uh when the small block big block debate goes on obviously very very contentious uh literally to the point where um you know i call it the the multi-faceted intellectual war played out there was everything from the memes on the internet to like some very ugly debates both publicly and privately um and ultimately it came down to the market trying to decide what to do right and so maybe describe kind of how the market how that process works and then ultimately um the the beginning of bitcoin cash and kind of how that uh played out or became uh into reality yeah so the the online discussion about bitcoin scaling you know started brewing maybe it started to heat up in 2015 i would say and then by 2016 and 2017 it was starting to really get heated and for the most part i was just watching and so like in my heart and with my economics background like i know when you have a production quota which is what i view the block size limit is it's just not externally imposed production quota that leads to inefficient outcomes uh there so but uh i was for the most part keeping quiet and just watching because i thought maybe there's some really you know good other argument as to why the block should be kept small and i wanted to see and understand that and then evaluate both sides and then and then decide so i was pretty much silent in regards to the debate and then what actually made me decide to start speaking up was when i watched the the small block side of the debate openly start to censor and delete the posts and try and silence the people that were on the big block side of the debate and when i saw their two camps one side is supporting free and open discussion the other side is doing everything they can to silence the other side's opinions from being heard well that was everything i needed to know about which side has a stronger argument and that's when i decided to start speaking up myself okay so um i've heard you say this before explain where you saw that happening um and again there's a lot of people who are listening to this who just they weren't around then right so they don't know kind of how the debate was playing out uh i can say it's all i'm blue in the face that like it was heated and controversial and played out in every nook and cranny on the internet behind closed doors like it was a real deal but kind of what were the things that you were seeing that led you to say hey wait there's uh your belief was that there was censorship going on yeah so there so now there's a lot of different platforms you have crypto twitter and there's a bunch of different subreddits and there's more stuff in the ecosystem now than there used to be but back then there was our bitcoin on reddit and that had more traffic for people learning about bitcoin and cryptocurrency than probably every single other website in the world combined that's how big of a deal our bitcoin was and then the second place thing was this other website called bitcointalk.org uh and so both of those uh definitely had more people new people coming to crypto and learning about it than every single other website even every coin desk and coin telegraph and you know there wasn't any bitcoin.com i don't think quite yet at this point um uh there was there was more of that uh you know people learning on those websites than everywhere else combined and then all of a sudden what happened overnight the main moderator of our bitcoin was this guy named thamos that we don't really we're not really sure what his real name is there were a bunch of moderators that people knew so there was like a you know one example this is jason king who had been running like a homeless outreach thing called sean's outpost down in florida and people were donating bitcoins to him and he was using the bitcoins to buy food and you know clothes and helping homeless people in florida it was fantastic he was one of the moderators and he's an early early bitcoiner since maybe you know 2011 or something as well and everybody knew and liked him and everybody knew and liked the other moderators there and there was a people disagreed but that's part of the fun part about internet forums people can type back and forth and state their opinions and then all of a sudden overnight they most removed all the moderators that people knew and liked and respected and put in a bunch of new moderators that nobody knew who they were they were all using fake names nobody knows who these before and then anybody that even tried to post any sort of opinion in favor of bitcoin being able to scale on chain they would have their post deleted and their account banned from being able to post there and they did the same thing on bitcointalk.org so you had the two biggest websites that had more people learning about bitcoin and discussing this and every other website combined suddenly silencing anybody from being able to state an opinion that wasn't in lockstep with uh this guy famous in the small block position which was clearly at that time the minority position and then right after the censorship started there or the new you know moderation policy or whatever they tried to disguise uh disguise it as the one of the posts there was like hey we need to bring back free speech and we need to allow the discussion it was the most uploaded post ever and they they called for famous to step down as the moderator it had more upvotes i think than any other post ever to this very day on our bitcoin and everybody was saying yeah we want free speech and then what did they do they deleted that post as well and censored that one as well so it was just a really just shocking thing for me where bitcoin was supposed to be censorship resistant money for the world and now suddenly the bitcoin community is engaging in massive censorship within about even talking about bitcoin it was it was absolutely heartbreaking for me to see that happen so again i wasn't there right i can't confirm or deny uh as in most things that are controversial uh there's your side and then there's people who would yell and scream and say all kinds of other stuff but i think it's important for people to hear your perspective as to what happened at that situation and so coming out of that um you and a number of other people decide uh okay there's going to be limited block size moving forward talk a little bit about how uh that process ends up determining you know because there's kind of like the internet debate and then there's ultimately uh people have to make a decision are there going to be big blocks or small blocks and like how does that happen right some people may think that like you go to a place and actually vote with a piece of paper obviously that's not how this works so describe the process of how that decision kind of gets cemented and then what the ramifications of that were yeah so there was lots of negotiating between the the big block and small block camp so to speak and so like uh initially and i i forget what bip number it was now but like there was a plan to like double the block size every 18 months or something all the way up to i think it was two or eight gigabyte blocks in the future and then like the small block is no no that's way too big and so then like there was some other you know plan with the lower cap closer in the future and then like the one of the first like major major proposals that actually started to get some traction was to just i think a one-time increase to 20 megabytes but the small blocker said no that's that's way too big and then the next compromise was okay we'll do uh eight megabytes and then they said no no that's too big and then the next compromise was okay we'll go two four eight megabytes over the next like five years or something like that and they said no no that's too big and then the the final compromise was okay we'll go to two megabytes and then uh even the two megabyte compromise there's this thing called the segwit2x agreement or new agreement where there's supposed to be segregated witness and two megabyte block size and for whatever reason and i wasn't there in person when the agreement was made i think that everybody should have agreed to do both at the same time but for whatever reason they agreed that segwit would happen first and then the two megabytes would happen second like a couple months later and so what happened everybody agreed to that you had 90 plus percent of the you know hash rate all the businesses signed off um the segwit part happened smooth everything was fine and then the two megabyte as soon as the segment happened there was this giant uproar from a bunch of people on the net saying don't do two megabytes you know you had people posting photos of them all you know holding axes with bandanas around their faces and just all this you know crazy nemours on the internet uh and then eventually the memories were so wild and crazy that the the two megabytes part didn't happen and so at some point before that though and i had nothing to do with this supply and there's plenty of lies about me on the internet but probably the biggest lie is that i created bitcoin cash uh the truth of the matter is i had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of bitcoin gash i i hardly even knew that it had been created at all to be honest uh i had zero to do with the creation and i don't even think i was aware like when the genesis block of the bitcoin cash split had happened i i i think i found out maybe a couple of weeks later and i was kind of keeping an eye on it in the side and then it wasn't until the two megabyte part failed with the segwit2x agreement which was months after after bitcoin cash had already existed that's when i said well it doesn't look like bitcoin is going to scale to be money for the world with a one megabyte block size the next best looking opportunity to bring more economic freedom to the world and all the wonderful things that enables looks to me to be bitcoin cash so that's when i focused my time and effort on bitcoin cash but i had zero to do with the creation of bitcoin cash okay so um for again i'm gonna try to dumb down a lot of what you just said for folks um is basically the argument ended up being there was the bitcoin cash community that for all the technical reasons that roger described believed that you could solve scaling on a layer one technology move forward the legacy um bitcoin if you will um or what is called bitcoin today uh is a belief that there is layer 1 layer 2 and onwards and scaling can be done on other layers now again i'm i'm heavily over generalizing this because i want to kind of not get into a super technical things i think we'll lose a lot of people and if i can clarify one small thing so both the small blockers they believe that you can scale with layers on top of bitcoin the big blockers also believe that you can scale with layers on top of bitcoin but they don't believe in strangling the base layer whereas the small blockers want to limit the base layer and only have layers on top the big blockers want to do both so to kind of zoom out even further before we go into this next part is basically what you have is um when you look at bitcoin there is a belief that having the block size constrained allows anyone to run a full node and then you're going to get scalability through layers on top when you look at bitcoin cache there is the ability to have an expansive block size that may or may not lead to only people with access to expensive computers being able to run the nodes but you can have scalability uh through layers as well so that's kind of where we are at the moment um and if i can add one additional interesting fact related to that too if you go back to and look at the internet archive and look at bitcoin.org from 2011 or 2012 or 2013 and look at the faq over there they literally go over all the math with what the current internet speeds are in the world and the current cpu speeds are and a hard drive costs and they explain they give you the math on the bitcoin.org website from 2011 12 or 13 as to how bitcoin on chain through bigger blocks could scale to be money for the entire world so if you look at that bitcoin cash much more closely resembles what was on the bitcoin website in 2011 than the current version of what everyone's calling bitcoin which i think is an important thing for people to realize because i think a lot of people maybe thought that the plan had always been to to limit the the base layer uh and then only have layers on top and it's it's also worth pointing out the companies that did that the lightning labs and the the block streams the products that those companies are selling only have a market if you limit the the base layer if you don't limit the base layer we're going to get that kind of is what i'm saying yeah we're going to get to all this so um one of the things that people watching may be like wait a second roger you're one of the most uh well-known people in the space um this fork of bitcoin cash happens how could you not have known or how could no one have told you about it um talk a little bit about um because i think that this is probably one of the areas where um you know i don't know the answer right frankly you're probably one of the only people who knows the answer um if i think of like the devil's advocate was sitting here talking to you what they would say is roger helped create this and and he created all this stuff and you know yada yada whatever your argument is like look i didn't even know i wasn't involved help people kind of understand like how is that possible and then also um at what point did you come across bitcoin cash and start to realize wait a second this is worth spending more time on right because there's almost this element of like it sounds like there was issues with bitcoin that or things that were happening that you disagreed with and so that then sent you looking somewhere else so kind of talk just through that transition for you and kind of how did that occur and what was the information you were consuming at the time or thinking through yeah so i think a lot of people today don't realize it but early on nobody cared about altcoins at all like all coins were just like totally off the radar bitcoin had you know 90 plus percent market share nobody cared about any altcoin for anything at all it wasn't even and even on my radar like i hardly cared at all like i i should have taken uh taken part in the ethereum ipo but i didn't i i waited until it was still like you know seven or eight bucks which still did all right for me but uh should have bought it at the ipo but you know you win some you lose some but nobody cared about any of this at all until bitcoin's user experience started to degrade because of things like replace by fee and the high fees that were caused being caused by the blocks starting to fill up and that's when people started to look at altcoins and they started to look at things you know like dash and monaro and zcash and there started to be this you know whole wave of people like hey i can start an altcoin that can improve on some of the problems that bitcoin is having so mainly you know privacy fees you know transaction reliability these sorts of things but before that nobody cared about it at all and so people and so bitcoin had 90 plus percent market share uh and it wasn't until the user experience of bitcoin started to degrade that people started divesting some of their money that used to be in bitcoin into altcoins myself included so that's why i bought some ethereum that's why i bought someone air that's why i bought some dashes because the future roadmap for bitcoin wasn't looking bright in terms of having a good user experience okay so are you making the argument and i'm trying to understand to make sure that i kind of understand your thought process are you making the argument that people started to divest from bitcoin into things like ethereum because they thought ethereum could be a bitcoin replacement or was it something else driving them being interested in ethereum or other all coins i think mainly the first one so even even vitalik the creator of ethereum he would have built it probably all on bitcoin but he looked at bitcoin and the block size and opera turn wars which is a little bit there's you know whole other videos on that but basically there people were already starting to argue about should we restrict the block size on bitcoin and vitalik saw the restrictions starting to happen on bitcoins they said well i guess i won't build ethereum on bitcoin i'll build it on my own chain and so in other people like everybody knows about the ico boom all that happened on ethereum all of that would have happened on bitcoin if it wasn't for the bitcoin core developers limiting the size of the operating data and so for people that's getting a little bit techy but to describe that all these tokens that are on ethereum everyone knows you know ethereum erc20 tokens all of that was starting to happen on top of bitcoin there were these things called colored coins and a group of guys called counterparty and they had a protocol doing tokens on top of bitcoin and then it was really started to take off and lots of stuff was starting to happen and then the bitcoin core developers chopped and reduced the amount of space the data that people could put in the operation of bitcoin which basically just gutted this entire token ecosystem that was starting to bloom on top of bitcoin and so all this entire ico stuff would have happened on top of bitcoin had not been for for that what i think was a mistake off on bitcoin's part so that decision let's go back to flip around the table what is their argument as to why they did that and why was a good thing uh it was the exact same argument there they said they want people to be able to run a full node on a really cheap computer on a really horrible internet connection in in you know rural rural south dakota or you know to take your place as people are going to see this ends up being one of the key points of difference of opinion that drives all kinds of different decisions is is running a full node individually at the lowest level in terms of cost and infrastructure a necessity or something that uh could be kind of a nice to have right so that repeats itself over and over and over again over the years when we go to bitcoin cash um you decided hey i'm going to take some percent of the the money and wealth that i have and i'm going to put it into bitcoin cash to start to migrate that way um talk a little bit about the decision you made kind of how did you come up with i don't think you sold all of your bitcoin but you sold some of it and kind of why some not all and then percentage-wise how did you think about that yeah so i'm i'm not a good trader i'm not good at timing the market i'm a long-term value investor i look at the things that i think are going to be useful long-term but the main reason that happened is because i up to that point i've been telling every single person i meet if i get in a taxi i'm going to tell the taxi driver about bitcoin and i'm going to give him some bitcoin for free right and like anybody everywhere in fact you know losses some of the taxi drivers just pay me everything in bitcoin like it was really interesting because i could tell people yeah this money you can send and receive with anyone anywhere in the world instantly basically for free no one can freeze your account nobody can block it nobody can control it in any way and it's so fast super easy and reliable to use and when the blocks became full that pitch wasn't there i would now have to tell people hey there's this thing called bitcoin you can pay sometimes it's ten dollars sometimes it's a dollar sometimes it's fifty dollars in fees sometimes the transactions go through kind of fast sometimes it takes two weeks on average sometimes they can be reversed how can i how can i be excited about that right i couldn't be excited about that so i needed if i wanted to have anything to do with cryptocurrency anymore i'd need to be able to tell somebody about a cryptocurrency that's actually exciting and interesting and useful to people and and bitcoin cash had it with its fast cheap reliable transactions uh even if you you know couldn't potentially run it on a raspberry pi on a crappy internet connection somewhere so let me ask there's two pieces here that i think are important so obviously bitcoin at some point um was similar to bitcoin cash in terms when you say fast cheap all these things um and there was much less people using it then then at the point where you're saying uh it was slower it had higher fees whatever on the layer one um one were you ever worried that bitcoin cash would run into the same thing there was very few people using in the beginning but over a number of years if it became popular there would be issues and the second piece of this is i actually go backwards to kind of analyze this and the way that i think about it is gold was money for thousands of years it's not very portable it's not very divisible it actually sucks as a medium of exchange in terms of you know if you've got to shave off gold or kind of do anything like that in order to improve that people built paper claims on the gold rights kind of a dollar backed by the gold eventually they built electronic money credit and kind of all these layers up on top of uh that gold now as we already discussed and kind of agree on maybe removing the gold from the dollar was not the smartest decision it led to all these issues but history has kind of repeated itself where over a long period of time uh people would push a currency to become more efficient more usable etc is this a situation where you thought okay understand the argument of there's going to be future layers on top of bitcoin and that could make it more usable but i don't agree that that is the right solution or was it a thing where hey that might work but timing is important and so we need to be able to do this now but that's going to take too long to actually build out like was it a that's not possible or was it that's not ready today and therefore that's why i'm i need to go somewhere else yeah so definitely the second part there so like i hope lightning works but it's not usable today and in fact if anything it seems like ethereum's winding up being bitcoin's layer two scaling solution like there's way there i think several times more bitcoin is wrapped on ethereum than there are you know total liquidity in the lightning network but to go back to about gold but just i just want to make sure that i got this so it wasn't hey layer two layer through there for on a bitcoin can't work it's just i don't it's not ready they weren't ready they're still not ready yeah so basically it was a it was a timing thing not a possibility thing right which i think is exactly the timing thing we need to rush because the politicians are going to do everything they can to keep the dollar as the world's reserve currency they don't want some you know non-government-controlled currency to become the world's you know reserve currency that everybody's using in commerce is both the medium of exchange and a store value they want that to be the dollar they want to be whatever is controlled by the government and so if we move quickly to get a mass adoption it'll be too late for governments to stop it but now we're already starting to see that the number one you know cryptocurrency is is tether at this point like hold up hold on hold on hold on let's stay focused hold on so as this is happening you decide okay bitcoin cash and bitcoin you take what percent of the bitcoin that you had at that point and move it over into bitcoin cash uh i i don't remember uh and and prior to that it was a significant percentage double good percentage right but even before that i had been concerned about bitcoin scaling so that's why i bought a bunch of ethereum i bought a bunch of dash i bought a bunch of monero i bought a bunch of zcash and zcoin and on and on and on i diversified into the cryptocurrencies that i thought would give people the best user experience uh and so it wasn't only bitcoin cash the other thing that i think is important here uh if anyone is not aware of this roger's not talking about like a million dollars worth of bitcoin at the time right in 2015 16 and 17 um i believe you had hundreds of thousands of bitcoin um and the decisions that you're making here are involving you know tens of millions of dollars if not more in terms of when you're deciding to move out of bitcoin into something else right right got it okay and so when you go ahead and you move some portion you know double digit percentage whatever that ends up being into bitcoin cash you're also simultaneously doing that with other um tokens what is kind of the early days of roger bear with bitcoin cash look like right and from the outsider's perspective it almost looks like you kind of did exactly what you had been doing with bitcoin right you kind of ran around the world telling people about electronic payments and kind of all the things now it was uh you were using bitcoin cash rather than bitcoin as the thing that you would send them or the wall you'd give them or whatever is that fair to say yeah there was a little bit more work to be done because when this split happened or when you there was the one single bitcoin and then you had bitcoin cash and bitcoin bitcoin cash had all the characteristics that made bitcoin popular to begin with but the thing that everybody's calling bitcoin today had all the infrastructure even though it didn't have the good user experience so on the bitcoin cash side even though it had the good user experience we had to rebuild all the infrastructure that was that was lacking because we lost it all at the time this split so that's still an ongoing process to this very day and it's still a a catch-up game okay so so we'll we'll get to all that in a few minutes here but as this was occurring um it's a little weird i think right uh because you were bitcoin jesus right like literally you had spent years and years of your life um and very effectively promoting bitcoin talking about it pushing it um and what i a lot of people may not realize is you'd also make tons of investments in the space not just in bitcoin but in all sorts of infrastructure and so one of those things is bitcoin.com you had a bunch of other things that you had spent time on and so as you start to transition how did you think about um all of that infrastructure right was it something where in your head you said hey look i've got to go now get all of the investments that i've made there to kind of switch over and use bitcoin cash was it something where look i don't think i'm going to be able to do that so actually what i want them to do is kind of coexist and support both but like what was the thought process given that you still had these financial interests in a bunch of infrastructure um and you also had exposure to bitcoin cash and bitcoins you didn't sell all the bitcoin right so how did you kind of think about those two things and how they would um intersect with uh the equity investments or the infrastructure investments that you had made yeah i think each each individual you know i even when i invest in a company i'm not the owner the big owner of the company right the ceo gets to decide what they're going to do and what they're going to focus on i think at the end of the day the businesses are going to focus on the things that are the most useful to their their users or their customers and so anybody that you know that's listening this if you haven't if you're on the fence or you don't know or if you haven't tried using bitcoin cash try using it try using ethereum try using ripple try using everything and then use whatever is the most useful to you in your own life you don't have to be like some tribal guy and like there's some comic where they ask oh do you believe in the trinity oh yes do you believe in the resurrection yes yes yes and they get to like some really remote you know detail of like you know way down religion like oh my god heretic and they're gonna fight and it's just like i feel like that's a lot of it the same sort of stupidity in the cryptocurrency space i think all of us are trying to build or at least most of us are trying to build the tools to empower individuals to have more control over their own lives if you're excited about that bitcoin cash adds to that bitcoin adds to that ripple as that all of these add to that so the more tools that people have in the world to have more control over their own lives that's a good thing don't hate on them go and go and cheer for them all right so here's the part that i think uh before i'd ever met you talk to you anything was the most confusing was exactly the statement you just said which is you're still a fan of bitcoin bitcoin cash and many many other things right and so help people understand and unpack that a little bit right where somebody who was so convicted on bitcoin obviously now is a big proponent of bitcoin cash and there's plenty of people who agree disagree whatever what i always tell people is like look there's points of view in the world the market will ultimately determine whoever is right on this stuff but what i find fascinating and is very rare in the world frankly is somebody who um can have a belief in something right so for you bitcoin cash um and you're still able to intelligently talk about and have some level of conviction in bitcoin obviously right you still hold bitcoin um and these other things so just unpack that because i think when people see that that's just a confusing thing right of like why still have bitcoin and bitcoin cash and like how do you think about having exposure to both yeah so uh and any good investor has a diverse portfolio and it's like i've seen you know a couple of these bitcoin max was saying why don't you sell all your bitcoins like well i still have some dollars too right i still have gold i still have silver i still have other you know stocks like have a diverse portfolio like selling putting all of your net worth into one thing that's that's a that's bad investment advice so but in regards to the the bit why why bitcoin and bitcoin cash well if you look at bitcoin it has this amazing network effect you know tens of millions of users around the world the biggest market cap the most liquidity uh and this you know worldwide name recognition where people all over the world if you go to the guy on the street if you heard about bitcoin they'll say yes if you go to the guy in the street and say have you heard of ethereum they're probably gonna say no right and uh and so bitcoin has this amazing network effect but it also has this horrible user experience if you try and use it for payments the payments are slow expensive and unreliable and so then you look at bitcoin cash if you go up to somebody in the street and say have you heard of bitcoin cash they'll say well is is that different than bitcoin like they won't they won't be sure uh and so it has less liquidity a lower market cap less name recognition but it has this amazing user experience with lightning fast transactions that are a fraction of a penny and are irreversible and work you know go through reliably all the time and now you can make tokens on top of bitcoin cash as well in like 30 seconds then you can send on-chain dividend payments to the token holder so the tokens act like anonymous bearer shares that are able to receive dividend payments like i think a lot of people don't realize how big of a deal the token ecosystem on bitcoin cash is you have tether is now on top of bitcoin cash with an slp token like there's a lot happening all right hold on so this is one of the key i think differences of opinion and this isn't something that i think people will find religious in nature like in terms of emotional this is played out over and over and over again for decades in technology right what you just described is the difference between uh market forces and technology right and so i'm gonna go backwards again to go forwards which is if you go back to vhs versus betamax right there's a lot of people who'd argue betamax was the better technology vhs got adopted and even though it was inferior technology it ended up being the winner um because of all the reasons why people have studied and there was adoption now if you fast forward that to this bitcoin bitcoin cash i'm going to say that um regardless of your or my opinion is in terms of what ends up winning i think that the two arguments can be categorized as uh you would argue that bitcoin cash has superior technology which leads to that better user experience in your opinion and ultimately that will drive adoption which will lead to the market determining bitcoin cash wins i think that there's a another argument which is um you can debate what technology is superior or not superior but the network effect of money and the belief system of money and the adoption that bitcoin already has will continue to carry it to be the winner and then that adoption buys you the time to backfill and build the technology necessary to make it this global scalable thing would you agree or disagree with the categorization of those two arguments i think very very well put uh fantastically well put and that's why i hold bitcoin and bitcoin cash today because you should have some of both so if you don't know which is gonna win out for those two paths so what i would say to that right and i think that this is kind of and part of why uh i want to do this again was that we can kind of very intelligently identify like a point of disagreement right your your perspective is hey i have diversified exposure to bitcoin cash and bitcoin either one wins you win right i think that i go the opposite direction which is um history has shown that the adoption ends up being the winning strategy right is there a possibility that uh i am incorrect there's a possibility that both of us are incorrect and digital currency doesn't end up being successful right what i think though is when i look at the probability of if you gave me the choice to invest in technology or in the market adoption right as an investor even outside of digital currencies i'll always choose the market adoption right that's just how i think about this stuff how i've always thought about it and so i think for people who are watching this one of the key elements to the disagreement and all this stuff is that exactly right is does the technology buy time for the market adoption or does the market adoption buy time for building the technology so the second thing that i want to talk about is as you move past that point then we get to this world of um the infrastructure itself right and i think that um when you look at the computing power talk about how you think about the importance of the computing power actually running these networks how you see bitcoin cash today versus bitcoin and if there is a world where bitcoin cash ended up being successful in the future how would that transition occur or maybe you would even argue it doesn't need to occur like just talk a little bit about the actual computing networks and and the differences there today and kind of how you would see that playing out in the future i i don't know if i fully understand the question but i kind of view it like for those that are old enough to remember my space before facebook myspace was incredibly popular it had a huge network effect and then myspace started having the equivalent of you know slow unreliable uh and expensive in terms of time you had to wait transactions transactions meaning page loads on the site so when the true in the user experience on myspace became slow expensive and unreliable there was a mass migration to to facebook and i think we could see the exact same thing happen with everybody that's trying to use bitcoin for anything commerce related uh you could see a mass my group so let's comment on that which is um and i have a uh an unfair advantage over you because i worked at facebook and we obviously spent way too much time obsessed with why did myspace fail um the one thing that i'm hearing like please yeah well the one difference between myspace and facebook and uh i think zuck would be the first one to uh admit that like i don't know if they necessarily knew what they were doing when they created the news feed itself but with myspace it was a directory of people so you could go and you could go to people's different pages and all this stuff the thing that facebook did that actually locked people into the network was the news feed now you just went to the news feed and everyone's content got put there and so it was less of roger go navigate to all of your friends pages and check to see what they're up to and it was more of now facebook has this like integrated experience and so uh i've heard people argue it doesn't matter for this conversation you know myspace didn't have network effect because you saw the navigate to all the different pages they just had a lot of users and facebook really got the network effect and they ended up winning neither here nor there for this um what i think though that i hear you saying and confirm for me is today bitcoin has a network effect naturally money's super viral product right in whatever form it is and it's got the market share it's got the the kind of name recognition whatever but i think your argument is you can break a network effect if the product itself never meets expectations and people will eventually migrate somewhere else and you feel like there's some percentage chance that happens is that a fair characterization yeah i think there's a pretty darn good percentage chance that that happens and the user experience for payments on bitcoin is so bad today what number would you put on it it's probably somewhere in the ballpark of 50 would be my guess and so david freeman is an economist i really like and he always says look at the actions people take rather than the words they say so if you look at the actions that i've taken like my btc versus bch portfolio position it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50 50 in terms of you know dollar value uh so so my actions help lead me to even if i my word i'm telling you what my with my words what my actions have been i think it's somewhere in the ballpark of 50 50 between those two but then i also have nice positions in ethereum and ripple and dash and you know on and on and on so because i don't think we know what the the winner is guaranteed to be in the end okay so um and i want to be as respectful of your time but i i know that you've kind of committed to let's have the full conversation here um one of the things that uh i wanna i wanna always play a game right and i read through all these twitter threads and as i told you i took out every single troll and meme and all this stuff and frankly uh uh they were coming at me as much as you right so so kind of kind of we were in the same boat of under attack by the meme lords uh but but what i pulled out was a bunch of questions that i would consider the um the negative view of roger or the negative view of bitcoin cash and what i want to do is i want to ask you the questions and then allow you just to respond right and kind of it's not for me to make a judgment in many cases it's more of i want people to be able to ask the questions that um they have you respond and then people can decide you know how they how they feel from this um the first one we already addressed which was like why do you still own bitcoin right i think they kind of you clearly articulated that um the second one is uh why is bitcoin uh cash usage so low and part of that also being why are bitcoin blocks consistently bigger than bitcoin cash so kind of i think those two things are related talk through kind of how you look at that and explain it and then kind of what you think about that moving forward yeah so um there's two questions there so why are big bitcoin cash blocks smaller than bitcoin box because there's more transactions happening on bitcoin every day than on bitcoin cash so far but in terms of why are so few people using bitcoin cash that's not true at all bitcoin cash depending on the day is the second or third most transacted in chain in terms of the number of dollars being moved in the native token on chain so it's bitcoin it's number one and then depending on the day it's bitcoin cash or ethereum uh sometimes bitcoin cash has even more value moved on it than ethereum does so like that's a really really big deal so uh bitcoin cash is widely used around the world and when you go to bitcoin.com there's lots of tools to help people use bitcoin cash because it it really really works okay so um and again this goes under the like the part that i like about this conversation is there's a couple of key themes and we're going to keep revisiting them through all these different these questions that goes under the market adoption is in the favor of bitcoin today your belief is you think it'll switch the bitcoin cash there's obviously a bunch of people who think it'll save bitcoin right the next question is uh do you run a bitcoin node um still at all um i have a btc and a bch node that i can boot up from time to time and sync with the network i don't leave it on all the time but i do have those nodes yeah okay um another question was um how many bitcoin cash nodes are yours so myself personally i have the one that i can boot up and sync from time to time the bitcoin.com business i it probably has a few i'd have to ask the different tech guys how many we have but i would guess with the mining pool and everything else between 10 and 20 maybe around the world would be my guess okay um another question was um let's see here what are the metrics that you use to uh evaluate the success of bitcoin or bitcoin cash like what are the things that you think are most important in terms of determining whether something is working or not fantastic question so uh objective values would be like how much commerce is happening on chain how much money is being moved on chain how many transactions what's the average value of those transactions um the more emotional answer to that is like how empowering is this tool for more people around the world to have more control over their own lives and that that one it's a bit harder to to put a concrete number on or an objective standard but uh if you look at people in third world countries they're not going to be able to figure out how to set up a lighting node they're not going to be able to figure out how to use any of these layer 2 stuff they're either going to use bitcoin cash on chain or a custodial bitcoin solution where they're just you know someone else has their private keys and at their mercy of having their account frozen it's going to be one one of those two choices okay um in terms of bitcoin cash when you think about that that future migration right so market is winning in terms of market has adopted bitcoin that's where the name recognition is all that stuff frankly a lot of that is due to the early work that you had right in terms of going out and really talking about this and spending so much time and educating people and driving adoption um what would it take on the bitcoin cash side for you to say look i'm 50 50 right now like actually this isn't gonna work and you know give up it has like a negative connotation to it but basically just come to the the realization or identify hey bitcoin cash is and is not going to be the solution because it's not a tech then market thing okay the market's going to be the the most important thing and then you know uh walk away from bitcoin cash i guess people asked in all kinds of different ways but that's essentially what they're asking yeah bitcoin would have to start being more usable as peer-to-peer electronic cash enabling more economic freedom around the world than bitcoin cash and it's not even close at the moment but maybe that'll change in the future okay and and i think that uh if i had somebody here like if i had two technical people one from bitcoin cash and one from bitcoin the two arguments would be again layer one scalability with the potential to add layers to and above on bitcoin cache on the bitcoin side it's layer one constraint block sizes scalability comes from layer two etc as you said you're unhappy with kind of the layer two examples today but that's the the opportunity if you like everything it'll get better over time but it's questions how much time and so on that front i would love to recommend i think you'd be a fantastic host for that with an open mind and and respectful demeanor uh peter risen the chief scientist of bitcoin unlimited i'm sure would love to participate uh and he'd be you know the big block advocate there and i think would be fantastic you could get uh elizabeth stark of lightning labs and they can they can both discuss the pros and cons of the lightning network or or adam back the founder of blockstream i think uh either elizabeth or adam would be a fantastic person to have a discussion with uh peter risen on layer two solutions peter risen wrote some really interesting essays about why he's not bullish on the lightning network uh in the short term and i think that would be incredibly interesting and i know i'd love to watch that discussion uh but from what i've heard so far the adam back and elizabeth stark don't seem to be willing to have that conversation um which to me makes me wonder are their arguments not that strong if they're not willing to have that conversation but uh for any of them that wind up hearing this or if you know those people ask them to do it because i think all of us all over the world would be able to learn a lot from watching and listening to that conversation so another question um is how do you think through um again the market cap the number of payments transactions all that stuff why do you think people are still using bitcoin even with the issues that you've described right so so if the issues are are that big of a deal and you're basically um you think there's a 50 chance that people will end up leaving bitcoin moving to bitcoin cash what's keeping them there is it just a network effect type thing or is there other things that that you kind of um rationalize in your head as to why they're staying there and really what i think this question is getting at is like uh i had ross gerber come on who's a big tesla bull right and i asked him i said well what did the bears believe that you were able to recognize but you just disagreed with him what was ross's answer to that on tesla because tesla's been on a wild ride yeah well so he's been right right and he actually had a pretty good answer in terms of how he walked through exactly the work he did to get convicted he went to dinner with uh kind of the tesla bears and you know did all the work and then he was just like i just think they're wrong on and he had a couple of things you know in terms of what those things were i think this question is getting at why are people staying with bitcoin if there's still all the technical uh issues that uh that you've described yeah so i i think the answer to that question is you can look at it in terms of market cap so bitcoin cash's market cap is uh somewhere in the ballpark of five billion dollars and bitcoin's market cap is you know somewhere close to 200 billion dollars or some much bigger number so you have you know 200 billion dollars versus a capital of capital versus 5 billion worth of capital the people with the 5 billion in bitcoin cash are motivated to see bitcoin cash succeed but you have almost 200 billion dollars worth of capital and bitcoin that are motivated to see bitcoin succeed so that's a that's a that's a lot of capital out there that it's in favor of you know seeing bitcoin succeed but if people start seeing the writing on the wall of things like you know bitcoin not being usable in commerce and i don't have the data in front of me but i think the average transaction size on bitcoin at the moment is something like fifteen hundred dollars uh if you're somebody that needs you know cheap fast reliable payments and you live in a you know a low-income country bitcoin's not very useful to you uh as of yesterday the average fee on the bitcoin network to get included in the next vlog is five dollars right five dollars that's a lot of money to people in a lot of first world countries uh the average fee to be included in the bitcoin cash block is less than a penny that's fine for anybody anywhere in the world so i think uh part of part of this right and um uh i i i'll paraphrase the quote but it's uh yogi berra says uh oh nobody ever goes to that restaurant because it's too crowded right you're too crowded or you know whatever it is right and i think like ultimately like that's kind of what this whole debate gets to is um the reason why some of these issues come up is because everyone's using it right and everyone being still a small group of just cryptocurrency enthusiasts whatever but it sounds like um that's the thing that in order for bitcoin cash to succeed would have to change is that fair yeah yeah you'll need more more people using things but uh it is true when a restaurant's too crowded people go to other restaurants that would have originally gone to that uh first restaurant and i think that's exactly what happened with bitcoin is it could have accommodated a whole lot more people like honestly i think that the market uh the price of bitcoin today could have easily already been a hundred thousand dollars per single bitcoin if it didn't run into the scaling disaster that drove away you know businesses like microsoft stopped accepting bitcoin dell computer stopped accepting bitcoin bitcoin jesus stopped promoting bitcoin and that's how big of a deal this scaling problem was with bitcoin so so there would be some people who would be willing to admit and i don't know what percentage of bitcoin would say this which would say uh the scaling debate that the final result ended up in a place where they didn't agree with it right so for whatever reason they thought that there should be bigger blocks blah blah whatever but they still believe that bitcoin will succeed in spite of those decisions so it's a thing where hey we were on this trajectory we made some decisions they would argue that uh we made a detour but like we're eventually still gonna end up at the same place maybe we just took a detour on the way i think the argument that you would have and correct me if i'm wrong is uh hey those decisions ended up being much more than a detour and therefore i chose to to basically get another car right um what do you say to the people who just think it's like a detour type deal but ultimately bitcoin will still be successful whether you agree with those decisions or not the people that think it's just just a delay uh they very well may be right uh i i don't know if it i don't know if getting in there another and i didn't get you know i have one foot in the bitcoin cash car and one for the bitcoin car and one in ethereum and everywhere else but uh the frustrating part though is no matter what whether whether you know it's going to be a different car that gets to the finish line or the bitcoin car just gets there later whichever car gets to the finish line first it's going to get there later than it otherwise would have and that's the most frustrating part to me like we could have had this amazing peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world sooner uh instead it's gonna wind up being later than it otherwise would have been if we hadn't run into that scaling uh civil war within bitcoin that's the most frustrating part for me all right um one of the questions that i absolutely loved uh and i only saw one person ask it which i i wish that more people would ask it is when i talk to you uh i see all the people with all the you know they've got all the controversy they say all this kind of stuff it feels to me like you still have half your heart with bitcoin and half your heart with bitcoin cash but ultimately your heart is in electronic payments and kind of this um this finish line that we keep talking about where there's a world in the future that will be much better than the world we're in today and so would it be fair to say that if bitcoin cash was not successful you would gladly kind of jump back on the bitcoin bandwagon and start pushing that forward um or or maybe you found something else that you thought would ultimately get that but but you're kind of tied to the mission of getting to that future world and you're trying to figure out what is the best vehicle to get there yeah absolutely i'll be the biggest cheerleader i possibly can for whichever tool i think is going to be the one that gets us the fastest to that future in which people have control over their own money and don't need permission from you know banks or politicians to do what they want with their own funds even if it was bitcoin if it's bitcoin yeah bitcoin ripple dash if even if it was the us dollar somehow i would i started cheering the us dollar if i thought come on don't be crazy now so i i guess then that leads to the question of like what are the things that you would look at um it's kind of a i've been asked a bunch of times right like what are the things that i would identify as uh would make bitcoin fail right and i've got a whole list of everything from self-inflicted wounds of you know introducing bugs during the software process to all kinds of things i would look at what are the things for you that when you look at bitcoin cash uh either would have to happen for you to say okay you know it didn't work or two or the metrics where whether it was liquidity or market cap or something you would basically say oh you know what maybe i actually need to hedge more into something else yeah great great question um i think the thing that would make me feel the most frustrated with bitcoin cash is if it stopped being usable as cash if it no longer had fast cheap reliable payments or something else that came along that had fast cheap reliable payments and an as big or even bigger network effect because the network effect is a really really big deal uh i don't know if they're bots or if they're real people but every anytime i go on twitter i see a bunch of people tweeting me what about nano what about nano it's you know and the honest truth is i don't know about nano because i haven't really come across its network effect other than a bunch of people on twitter tweeting about it but uh you know maybe i'll spend an afternoon reading in into nano but uh as far as i know you know you can't really pay it with nano at many websites and uh i know very little about nano but like the thing about bitcoin cash that's so awesome is it has just as many if not more places that you can pay with it online and offline uh than bitcoin in fact i think almost for sure there's more physical merchants where you can pay with bitcoin cash than there is that you can pay with bitcoin and that's that's a real big deal and that's a sign of the network effect so so if you see the nano uh tweeters wait till they start dming you because they're absolutely insane uh and i definitely think that a lot of them are bots um one of the things that i just wrote down was uh probably the most used word other than bitcoin jesus to talk about you uh in the threads was just scam right and i think when people hear that you know it's easy to kind of get the mob out and everyone gets their pitchforks and just you know who are we yelling at today right type thing especially in today's society um and so what i try to do is like why right now i asked a bunch of people why and they came up with a whole bunch of different things and so i just kind of want to walk through a couple of these and in fact they just let you respond right which and the first one was bitcoin.com as a url uh promotes bitcoin cash so why not use bitcoincash.com or something else how do you think about the use of bitcoin.com um and then having bitcoin cash and promoting it on there yeah so bitcoin.com is my domain name and i can promote whatever i want on it i could turn it into a site to promote the federal reserve if i really wanted to it's my domain name if you don't like it you can make me an offer for the whole domain name i can sell you the whole thing in the whole business you can pay me a bitcoin cash for it then you can do whatever you want with it to anybody out there that doesn't like what we're doing with it currently so uh that doesn't make it now you know i have to ask what price would you sell it at i think 22 million bitcoin cash would get it 22 million bitcoin cash there's only 21 million ever so got it and so i guess what people would say is like you're absolutely right right in terms of um you're able to do whatever you want and i love the example like you can promote the federal reserve on bitcoin.com and knock yourself out um do you feel like um it's misleading to promote something other than bitcoin on there or how do you like i guess if you went to a board meeting right for bitcoin.com and you were sitting there you were talking about like hey here's why we make certain decisions like what is the logic behind the decision not can you do it of course you can do a lot of things right but like what is the logic and kind of how do you think about the advantage for bitcoin.com in doing so i guess two two points there so if we were to be promoting btc on on bitcoin.com we'd be promoting an inferior product that gives people a bad user experience and every day we still get user support requests hey why didn't my transaction go through hey you guys are ripping me off i had to pay five dollars to send my bitcoin i thought bitcoin was supposed to be you know free or cheap to send and like every day we get people doing that and so and even if you look at it historically if we were promoting btc that's not the bitcoin described in the white paper that's not the bitcoin described on bitcoin.org in 2010 2011 2012 2013 like the thing that everybody's calling bitcoin today it has the bitcoin name and it has the bitcoin network effect but it doesn't have the the characteristics that made bitcoin popular to begin with and it doesn't have the you know bitcoin cash has far more it has all that except for the most proof of work on the longest chain but it has the fast cheap reliable payments uh if you read the white paper it's clearly talking about something that more closely resembles bitcoin cash than bitcoin so i feel like if we were to promote btc only on bitcoin we'd be doing the entire world a disservice like i think bitcoin cash can bring more economic freedom to the world faster than bitcoin can today and um you guys right now do bitcoin and bitcoin cash on bitcoin.com yeah and in fact like our entire goal on bitcoin.com is to make as clear as possible the differences between bitcoin and bitcoin cash because we want everybody to know and understand the differences because we think if people understand the differences we think they'll prefer bitcoin cash just like myself i understand the differences i prefer bitcoin cash and i think that's part of maybe that was what the reason that you know our bitcoin and bitcointalk.org had to engage in so much censorship they were worried that if people were able to hear both sides of the arguments they would prefer the big block side of the argument and that's why they have to engage in the censorship all right hold on so on bitcoin.com uh you're comfortable in terms of or do you think people try to buy btc and end up buying bch or vice versa like do you think that people get confused i i think very very few people if any get confused uh so no i don't think this problem because we put it very very clearly right there so people can see and we have entire articles describing the entire history and the differences between both so anybody that spends the time to even you know do a little bit of research in the topic and understand that btc and bch are two different coins with two different characteristics and i don't think anybody's being fooled or tricked uh into you know buying one on accident instead of the other if anything i think if people buy btc thinking it's the bitcoin described in the white paper they're being fooled all right so another thing i saw was somebody tweeted a chart and i apologized that i forget it was either btc over bch or bch over btc but basically it was showing that the price appreciation of bitcoin drastically outweighs the price movement of bitcoin cash and so basically you know you said earlier like you're not a trader right and i'm in the same boat as you i'm not a trader but uh over what is now months if not you know years uh the bitcoin price has performed differently than the bitcoin cash price and so how do you think about those price movements um and do you worry at all about that as a signal i i think that uh that part of that's because i'm such a horrible trader right right after the split i'm like didn't do any dollar cost averaging from one into the other it's like hey let's move quickly and let's move a lot and so uh at one point the price of bitcoin cash was you know about half of bitcoin so that means for any bitcoins i sold that point i got two for one whereas the current ratio is like 40 or 50 to one between bitcoin cash and bitcoin so uh you know any any bitcoin core people that sold their their b cash at that point you know you're welcome you got a good deal on it uh but i remember in 2012 the entire bitcoin ecosystem was feeling really discouraged bitcoin 2011 got up to 30 and people felt like you know we're on the moon this is fantastic and the price went from 30 down to a dollar and some change over the next year and a half and there are a lot of people think oh i should get out before this goes to zero and no not me i was building and promoting and building and investing it's the same it's the same phase in bitcoin cash right now all the infrastructure's really starting to get there i'm still building i'm still investing i you know we have our 250 million bitcoin cash ecosystem fund i've deployed about 15 million of that so far we're deploying a couple million every month here uh it's a really big deal we're building out this ecosystem before you know and the overall number of people using cryptocurrency around the world is still small right so bitcoin.com we're not trying to reach existing crypto people we're trying to build the tools for to bring the rest of the entire world into using crypto and bitcoin cash is in a really good position to be the onboard ramp for all those people around the world because it's fast cheap and reliable that's what people want they don't want to you know have to calculate manually what the fee ratio needs to be and what the block time is going to be and they just want something that works but if we can build something that works that's non-custodial where bitcoin.com can't freeze their accounts and if we get subpoenaed we don't have any information about what people have going on we can provide privacy in the wallet so it's fast cheap reliable and private and easy to use boom that's going to be a winning combination for the world and i don't see bitcoin having that it just has this name recognition and bigger market cap at the moment so i promise people if we did this live i would try to take some of their questions and two of the things you just said people just went nuts with so first is hub and feel free to not answer if you want but but uh people want to know how much value you lost by being a bitcoin cash versus bitcoin with the with the funds that you diverted a lot right so like a bit you know at the high point i think bitcoin cash was two to one and now it's what 40 or 50 to one so i didn't sell all of my bitcoin into bitcoin cash at two to one but even if i sold even if i sold 10 right that's still a big chunk of money right and it was definitely more than 10. it's uh a lot okay and then the second thing is uh the second you said be cash everyone just went nuts uh so talk a little bit about be cash versus bitcoin cash and kind of like um why the preference of one over the other and and kind of explain that yeah so two i guess two points in there so the first one so that where the origin of the word be cash came is a bunch of people that didn't like the bitcoin cash and big blocks and that fork of bitcoin they went out and registered the you know be cash twitter account and r b cash on reddit and you know be cash.com all these domain names and social media accounts and then had them all pre-populated and set up with all sorts of negative information about bitcoin cash and the big block movement and then they tried to convince everybody that the name of bitcoin cash would be be cash so that when people would search for be cash they would see all this negative content about it so it was actually like a social media attack and the people that owned all the be cash social media names are people who actually hate bitcoin cash so there's no way that bitcoin cash could ever actually change its name to be cash even though be cash isn't a bad name it's it is an easier name to say but if you if if all the people that own all the domain names and social media accounts for be cash hate bitcoin cash there's no way you could ever switch to it so it was actually part of a social media attack and then there's the other you know semi-world famous photo of me you know giving the guy a middle finger at one point i invite everybody please watch the entire interview it's like it's like an hour long interview don't just watch the 40 second clip or whatever it is and you know if you've ever watched ali g or borat that's what was going on the guy was pushing my buttons for 45 minutes and like i shouldn't have lost my temper but after 45 minutes of him pushing my buttons i lost my temper and snapped and i shouldn't have done that but like that's what happened and it wasn't because he called it be cash the thing that pushed me over the edge made me snap was when he accused me of having paid for a whole bunch of sock puppets on the internet like me maybe the nano guys are doing that i don't have any proof but i have never ever ever paid for anything like that ever and in fact i've discouraged people from ever doing it any time i've ever heard of anything like that going on and so when he just stated as a matter of fact everybody knows that it's you roger and all the stock puppets you're paying for the only people that like be cash uh that's what set me over the edge it wasn't him using the word be cash was him accusing me of engaging in you know psyops and you know the same sort of crazy propaganda governments engaging with you know their 50 cent armies and all this other crazy stuff so so two follow-ups on that uh quick ones one uh do you laugh at the photo now like when you see it is it just kind of like uh it's stupid but at the same time like it's almost uh one of these things where i know a lot of people who have become a meme to some degree they just like whatever no i it's probably my least i regret that way more than like having you know sold firecrackers and gone to prison like that's that's not the person that i am one bit like i'm a passionate person but i'm not an angry person i almost never that's one of the few times in my life that i've lost my temper uh like that that's that's not who i am at all and it's really really disappointing to me when i see that you know pretty much anytime i tweet anything people reply to me on twitter with that picture and it's really uh it's really sad for me because that's not the person that i am at all i think that's a that's a very uh sober rational view of it um and the second piece is uh see somebody keeps asking uh how how do you handle all the stress of people um either you know again like i said like one of the most popular words is scammer right and you know i don't care who you are as a human you just got to be like this sucks right and so like how do you handle the stress of um community backlash or people disagreeing or wanting to argue and kind of all that stuff all the time yeah i don't worry about it one bit because i know the truth and the truth is far more important than being popular and anybody who's been in the ecosystem for a while too knows the truth as well so uh anybody that's busy calling me a scammer or somebody who's been fooled by uh by probably a bunch of sock puppets on the internet because don't underestimate the the the power of you know social media influence if everybody around you tells you that santa claus is real you believe it if everybody around you tells you that roger's a scammer you're going to believe it without evidence for either one of those things um i've got one more question and then i kind of want to summarize our conversation here but before i do that uh if you're watching the live stream please hit the like button so that more people can watch this uh it's super helpful for whatever reason youtube's algorithm uh enjoys that um one of the last questions i have for you before we summarize kind of the conversation is uh satoshi you were really early in bitcoin um how do you think about who satoshi is um do you want to know who it is do you know who it is just talk a little bit about satoshi yeah at one point um i was fairly convinced that craig had some role in that uh whoever or whatever satoshi is at this point like i think he deserves his privacy uh if it were to be craig i would be uh rather than improving my opinion of craig it would just uh diminish my opinion of satoshi substantially um so yeah whoever compared fair to say you don't think it's craig yeah uh extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and uh if he were satoshi he could provide that proof at any moment and he hasn't done it yet so uh no i don't i don't think he's satoshi at this point okay and then any idea as to who it could be or uh speculation on who it is space aliens right i don't know be careful in 2020 man you guys the people listening this will like this story on the early days of bitcointalk.org there's a really fun and interesting thread of people discussing one people the thread is like what's your favorite thing about bitcoin and people were talking about their favorite things about bitcoin and one guy's favorite thing about bitcoin was that now when we finally make contact with space aliens we don't have to be embarrassed about the type of money we're using anymore and i thought that that was a pretty interesting point that's awesome um so last question about satoshi is just uh there's a lot of people who want to speculate and kind of play the games of you know who is it do you do you want to know or do you think it's actually better that it's an unknown person or group there was that other video that came out a month or two ago that made a really interesting compelling case for adam back having been satoshi and it made me it definitely made me scratch my head a bit and say hmm uh yeah so uh and but do i want to know no i think that's one of the things that just kind of adds to the lure of all of cryptocurrency in general is that it's created by this mysterious figure and everybody can imagine satoshi to be the exact perfect person that they would want him to be and the fact that we don't know exactly who it is means that nobody's gonna be mad at that person so everybody can envision that oh bitcoin was created by satoshi who agrees with me on everything so he was trying to create bitcoin to be this exact perfect thing that i wanted to be so it's fantastic from a marketing standpoint yeah and so kind of in summary i think that uh i want to just you know really wrap up where i think um we agree and then where we disagree um and disagree again has a negative connotation but but it's really just a market bet right um and so as we started the conversation like there's a lot of issues in the world both economically with the monetary system and those lead into other aspects of life that are just broken right and there needs to be a solution i think you would agree with that um and i think you and i are uh dead in line with that being a digital currency right and and at some point we need to have a cryptocurrency become the global reserve uh currency and that will drive a lot of uh impact and improvement across the world where you get into kind of a difference is you've got bitcoin you've got bitcoin cash bitcoin cash has a very specific view of the world and kind of the two key things i think are one uh superior technology in the eyes of the bitcoin cash community will ultimately lead to adoption uh which will ultimately lead to kind of winning um and a key piece of that is that everyone doesn't need to uh run a bitcoin node right or that's not as important as other aspects i think in the bitcoin community um kind of this constant journey to make sure that anyone anywhere can run a node uh has always served as one of the core key tenants um and because it has all of the market adoption or a lot of market adoption has been the leader there both for early work of yours and many many other people um regardless of any technical limitations today uh that market adoption gives a head start and ultimately will allow um bitcoin to um build out what it needs to to kind of serve that function did i miss anything in kind of the categorization of where there's a different oh i think we might have lost roger let's see if he comes back here okay sorry about that oh all right no problem uh what was the last thing that you heard i think you were talking about the differences between bitcoin cash and bitcoin and then got it so uh basically what i'm saying is bitcoin cash um believes that uh in their eyes the superior technology will lead to market adoption market adoption leads to you know quote unquote winning that race uh and one of the key things is that there's a belief that not everyone needs to be able to run a node or that's not the most important thing uh on the bitcoin side um there's a you know very heavy belief that anyone anywhere should be able to run a bitcoin node uh and regardless of any technical limitations they will eventually be solved because bitcoin's market adoption and network effect uh will buy at the time to build that out in layer 2 and other technologies uh is that a fair characterization in terms of how you see um kind of the two different uh really narratives and journeys playing out yeah i actually i think that's a pretty pretty good narrative or pretty good characterization um but head's your bets right you don't have to put all your your you know don't put all your money on one horse here have some of each and especially if you're one of those people if you're you know consider if you believe in the the first argument that bitcoin the the bigger market cap will overcome the technological limitations that you have currently if you're not running a full node yourself maybe that's an indication that maybe the other the other path is okay as well and the part that'll be so frustrating for me is if those layer twos never come into use well enough and everybody's having to use custodians well you're just right back to what happened with the gold at standard and the dollar uh you know they got separated now everybody's at the mercy of the dollar what what if that happens with uh you know bitcoin everybody starts using custodial solutions and before you know it look at mount cox they're running fractional reserve for a long long time uh maybe you know maybe for years and years and years who's to say you know maybe that's going to happen with the coin bases or the zappos or the other you know custodial wallets out there in the world that's a real big problem if you're using a wallet in which you have custody of the funds yourself uh you don't have to worry nearly as much about those other sorts of problems and so would it be fair in saying that ultimately the winner here and i always tell people like my personal opinion doesn't matter in the sense of like what critical it wins right or what ends up being the globally adopted thing would you agree that it's just going to come down to whatever the market determines yeah but the market is never done determining is the other part of it too like i see people on twitter saying oh the market is decided the market's never done deciding right iphone one at one point was the number one thing in the market well it's not anymore right and the iphone 11 is one of the best the best iphone in the market today it's not going to be next year uh so the market is never ever ever done deciding even if bitcoin cash were to wind up being the top cryptocurrency that's not forever right something and people always used to ask me back in 2011 or 12 or 13 like well what if something better than bitcoin comes along and i always told them i hope something better than bitcoin does come along because then we all get to use it right it's a good thing if something better than bitcoin cash comes along if something better than bitcoin cash comes along we all get to use that too so the more things that are better than what we have today that come along the better the world is that we want as many better and new things to come along as we possibly can because that's how the world progresses into a better world so the the one of the last things that i want to talk about is uh when we get done with this i'm going to have a million people talk to me and they're going to say what what is roger bear's view of the world right and um one just thank you for spending the time to go through this i wanted to do it live so that people could um kind of ask the questions and really engage but also i think my response to that would be roger spent a good number of years of his life promoting bitcoin he sees this vision of the future where digital currency ends up creating great things in the world he made a decision to divest or diversify about 50 of the bitcoin into bitcoin cash uh that hasn't gone so well so far from a financial return perspective but his belief is that um at some point in the future there's going to be a divergence or a loss of interest in bitcoin and people will move to bitcoin cash um the current market dynamics roger would uh say show great adoption for bitcoin um but there's a belief that that will change in the future if i was to categorize it that way is anything in there inaccurate or do you feel like that's a pretty fair view of the world as to kind of how you see it i i think i need to hire you to be my new spokesperson here too such a fan i'm staying on the bitcoin side so i see all the people asking i don't know bitcoin cash that stuff but why let's ask you why why don't why don't you diversify again it comes back to when i look at um on twitter or is it a rational reason not at all it's it's look the fact that we're even having this conversation right there's a bunch of people who are all upset and you know you saw the people who get all uh worked up about it i i generally think kind of three things are really important right so when it comes to non-financial non-non-technology type stuff like free speech and lack of censorship right i i couldn't even believe in more and you know i was a uh uh soldier in the united states army i went to iraq right and so i have a very specific kind of experience in life that most people don't have um but in recent light of um a lot of the social unrest in the united states one of the things that uh has absolutely blown my mind is we're a country that hangs its hat on free speech but it seems every day like we're moving more towards a world where it's encouragement of free speech if you say the things i agree with which cancer is that's your big problem that's not free speech right and so i you know i've aired my grievances about this all over the place and basically said you know the the testing of free speech happens most when somebody is saying something you disagree with so it was important for me to have this conversation mainly because i thought a lot of people thought that we shouldn't have the conversation right and so that was kind of one one key piece the other thing is i've made you know we've invested over 100 million dollars in early stage companies over the last four years um back to all kinds of companies both in uh kind of the crypto space and a bunch of uh more that are not in the crypto space and the one thing that uh i think when i look at objectively i say i understand both arguments i personally believe and have a very deep conviction in um the idea that the market adoption ends up buying time for the technology to be built versus uh technology leading to the market adoption leading to the winning right and so is there a possibility that that's the wrong assessment of course the right you're always possible to be wrong um but the way that i invest right is i basically make an analysis and i'm willing to be very binary in nature right so i'm willing to um kind of make an assessment and it's this belief that like the concentration is actually a better strategy for me personally than diversification right so it's kind of like the warranty we're getting ethereum or any other coins or only bitcoin i know nothing else yeah and so again very rare i think in a lot of cases like there's plenty of people who kind of own all this other stuff um but but it's not a bitcoin versus bitcoin cash thing it's literally just a bitcoin versus everything else thing of like hey i've got very deep seated conviction here and and this is where where i think um i want to spend my time uh and i think the other piece of this and you hinted at this earlier and probably one of the number one questions that i get from uh institutional investors is um ultimately the competition the real battle right as i say that the crypto world is going to put forth something to be the global reserve currency right now the market's determined that that thing is bitcoin um and it's going to have to compete on a monetary policy level with fiat currencies whatever the thing ends up being put forward like that's going to be the really big battle and so it's funny to me that there's so much divisiveness and fighting and all this kind of stuff in the crypto world because i think people forget that the battle between a deflationary asset and an inflationary asset like that's a that's a big deal right like that that's the walk in the park and so um i think that that coming at some point i don't know if that's two years away 10 years away 20 years away you know whatever it is but but i think that that's the other thing i always kind of keep my eye on the prize a little bit of like ultimately that's going to be the thing that determines way more than pretty much any other debate that goes on in in kind of the crypto industry if you will yeah that would be my biggest sadness if if what winds up playing out here is that rather than the entire world winding up using a hard money asset with a limited supply uh they all just wind up using you know digital dollars on the blockchain and the federal reserve can print more digital dollars anytime they want and it seems like it could possibly head in that direction to me and that that would be really sad i will have a slightly better improved version of the dollar but uh nowhere near as good of a version of money for the world that we could have had if we had uh played our cards a bit better absolutely um listen thank you so much for doing this i i think that hopefully you got some value out of this and i can already see from people's responses that uh they got a ton of value out of just understanding not only one the work you did on the early days of bitcoin but kind of how you see the world today uh obviously i think we've got you know some diversions of opinion but but i'm happy that you and i can have kind of a very rational conversation just about what is happening right now um and so hopefully as as this continues we'll be able to do it again in the future but thank you if you like pomp's content and his channel subscribe share the video on social media tell a friend set them up with any cryptocurrency wallet you want send them a little bit show them how it works roger all right we're just going to spread the whole world as fast as we can it doesn't matter which cryptocurrency it is use the one you like the most and uh go out and uh tell a friend now roger's gonna get accused of being a pomp shill on twitter it's uh you're not gonna be able to win man up in the prompt so go out and spread this message here because we want as many people to be aware of the infrastructure and ecosystem as we possibly can and pump is one of the the best messengers the space has out there we're not like i've listened to lots of your interviews and like when you talk about the problems i'm not in my head the whole time and it's just like what's the solution to get to the world that we want to be in we have slightly different strategies but the end target seems to be almost identical there so awesome thank you so much for doing this thank you too see you next time

Channel: Anthony Pompliano

Views: 145,732

Rating: 4.7111301 out of 5

Keywords: bitcoin, btc, off the chain, podcast, pomp, anthony pompliano, crypto, cryptocurrency, blockchain, finance, investing, fintech, tech, technology, investing news, financial news, btc price, bitcoin price, markets, bitcoin news, media, bitcoin halving

Id: P9oC_goIX8I

Length: 145min 14sec (8714 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ojjordan78]

For more insight on the history of Bitcoin Cash and who was involved in creating it: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/bvj08f/an_incomplete_history_of_the_bitcoin_cashs_origin/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

[u/readcash]

Roger was asked around 1:51:10 "Why are people staying with Bitcoin still [if it's so unusable]". I immediately remembered the joke:

You hear your neighbor‘s dog, Brownie, howling like crazy on the front porch. You ask your neighbor, “What’s wrong with Brownie? Why is she howling?” Your neighbor tells you, “Brownie’s sitting on a nail.” You ask your neighbor, “Why doesn’t Brownie move?” Your neighbor answers, “I guess it doesn’t hurt bad enough.”

(Source: https://www.becomeyourownguru.com/blog/pathways-out-of-depression-part-3-shifting-old-programming/14)

[u/readcash]

Also an interesting answer: "How could you not have known [about Bitcoin Cash at fork time]?" https://youtu.be/P9oC_goIX8I?t=4880