Bitcoin Oasis 2024 interviews - Zucco, Rizzo, Dashjr, Prince Philip, De La Torre

I'm curious your view on that. Are the builders coming back to Bitcoin because of the spam, or is that, is that a disingenuous narrative?

Totally disingenuous. What is coming back is a set of gambler and social media manipulators and pump and dump group creators that use the typical late stage Silicon Valley builder narrative, which is basically a random buzzword, a total hype.

Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, a show brought to you by Swann dot com. Today we're doing Something a little different. I am including some mini interviews that I took while I was at Bitcoin Oasis. So, Bitcoin Oasis is a Bitcoin only conference in Dubai. I was there, as MC, and also, while I was there, I thought I'd get the opportunity to capture some mini interviews with a bunch of people who you may know, or many of them are past guests on the show. So, they are Alejandro De La Torre. Torre, Luke, Dasher, Prince Philip of Serbia, Pete Rizzo and Giacomo Zucco. So we talk about a few different things, differing approaches on spam, aka ordinals, inscriptions, BRC twenty, stamps. We talk about new mining pools, the demand mining pool and Ocean mining pool, and we talk about nationwide adoption and what does that look like, as well as technical directions in Bitcoin, biddling or so called biddling, as well as trying to grapple honestly with the trade-offs of Scaling Bitcoin. So now onto my, clipped together mini interviews.

Hi guys, we are here at Bitcoin Oasis in Dubai. I'm here with Alejandro de la Torre. He is the CEO of DemandPool, a new Bitcoin mining pool. he's also done a lot of things previously in Bitcoin long history with Bitcoin mining but let, let's first hear a little bit from you, about, what it's been like setting up your own new mining pool with Demand.

it's always a very big challenge to start a new mining pool. You need a lot of, lots of infrastructure, specifically because we're building a Stratum v2 pool from the ground up, and it's all new software. So it's been, a lot of hard work, but we're getting there, and, we're looking forward to the future. Yeah.

And you guys are doing Can you tell us a little bit about why that's a differentiator?

Sure. So it, it, it increases decentralization of Bitcoin mining by providing miners with the ability to create their own block templates and to add their own transactions in the blocks. So what that means is that in the past, mining pool operators were the one with that power. Now, the miner themselves have that power. It, it helps decentralization. I'm giving the power to the miners essentially. That will also allow for you, as a miner, to include any transaction you want, if it could be A or B, whatever it You think it's a good idea to add to the block? You can do it. You can do out of bound transactions if you're a large operator. You can also deny some transactions if you like. Yeah.

So that's, that'll be interesting. And so when you're setting up a new pool, I think one other interesting aspect is that you do need to make sure you get enough of a, you know, enough hash rate to be a viable pool. So I guess that's, that's gonna be an interesting thing for you about making sure that you build up enough to be a viable pool.

That's old school business, and I've been in the past, I've ran two large mining operations, sorry, mining pool operations, and it's a traditional business. You gotta find, you gotta find the miners, you gotta onboard them. The, the good thing is, is that Shred and V2, up-improves efficiency, improves encryption, security, doesn't allow for attacks, it's better with decentralization, as I said earlier. So already I have a very strong sell that's gonna help me. But it's a traditional business, you gotta get- Roots on the ground and find miners and, and onboard them.

Yeah. in terms of, experiences here at Bitcoin Oasis, have you had any good conversations here, any miners or anything, to share there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, important place right now for Bitcoin mining. I think the Bitcoin mining, industry is evolving to include new regions, and one of those regions is the Middle East, and UAE is a hub for everything Middle East. there's also new places coming up in Africa, Latin America. It's a little bit more established, but yeah, the Middle East and this, this particular conference is great because I'll be able to meet all those guys in this region. Yeah.

And, as you mentioned on the panel earlier, that there's different models coming and people are looking for arbitrage and profit opportunities in different ways. Sometimes that is, you know, the, the heating, aspect or using, electricity that would otherwise not be used. So can you just elaborate a little bit on some of these new models or what you're seeing there for electricity arbitrage?

One of the most important things about, Bitcoin mining as a Bitcoin miner, you need to find different revenue streams, and one of these revenue streams is heat recapture. a Bitcoin mining operation produces a lot of heat, and you can take that heat and use it for drying fruits, drying foods, heating water for the local populace, there's a whole, there's a whole, oh, you can heat your house with it. so these things will provide a new revenue stream for mining, which will allow you to offset some- Some of the risks with mining, as just, just if you just mine by yourself, you have lots of risk of the difficulty increasing, hash rate increasing, or Bitcoin price going down. But if you're selling, fruits with the heat that you make, you can offset some of that risk. Yeah. So,

when it comes to, are there any other technical or otherwise elements that, you wanna just point out about demand pool?

Sure. So it's, again, so it's built from the bottom up, trying to be two. this is the first mining To allow for your block templates to be created, increasing efficiency. So if you're a miner in a location that is a little bit, away from a local internet point or away from any large city, you can mine with Stratum v2, with demand, and, and, and gain efficiency gains and gain security. So this, this, this pool is, is very good for these miners located in regions where you might not have the best internet.

so any, as, as we've- We've spoken about in terms of regions like Middle East and Africa, but do you have any, I guess, countries in particular that you think you're, you're bullish on seeing more Bitcoin mining come to?

Sure. So Ethiopia is becoming a very large, hub right now. Kuwait is big. Bahrain is big. Saudi Arabia is becoming a little bit more on the map. there's Latin American com- countries like Paraguay, Argentina, we're starting to see some more interest in Peru and Chile, which is, I'm very interested So yeah, well, it's, it's, it's, it's a natural evolution of Bitcoin mining. whenever there's energy where it's stranded or otherwise wasted, you put a Bitcoin mining, operation there and you can generate money with it.

Yeah. And that definitely cuts against this whole, oh no, Bitcoin mining boiling the oceans, bad for the climate. I mean, it's simply not true. And that, that's, that's just not the, that's not truth. And, do you have a, how would you explain that quickly to people?

Ignorant statement, because, a lot of this, a lot of the people who use, who are mining right now are using otherwise stranded energy, as you said. But let's, let's give, let's give an example. I know I, I've worked with an operation that uses, the pig manure to generate, that generates methane. They capture that methane with, with equipment and they generate electricity. And w- so they're basically capturing that methane that otherwise would have been into the environment. Methane is much worse for sea, for global So they capture that and they generate electricity, make money off of it with the Bitcoin mining operation connected to it, and they're, they're, they're helping the environment. It's a perfect, it's a perfect match.

Yeah. And I mean, even for me, I think the global warming stuff is a scam personally, but even from their own perspective, it doesn't even make sense, right? Yeah. So, yeah. But anyway, let's finish it there. Where can people find you online?

Yeah, you can find me on Twitter, bitentrepreneur, and,

Everyone, I'm here now at Bitcoin Oasis with Luke Dasher. He is, CTO, and I believe you are chairman of Ocean Mining, right? correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. So, look, I think the, the question on a lot of people's minds will be how you're thinking about the, the spam question. So, maybe you wanna just define for people, you know, because some people have this mindset of-- Well, many people have the mindset that, okay, Bitcoin is permissionless and it's kind of difficult to non-ar

Define spam on the chain?

Using Bitcoin, I would agree is permissionless, but attacking Bitcoin is quite different. Spam is generally and broadly defined as anything that people have not consented to participate in, or don't want to participate in, but they're being forced to against their will. And so everybody who's adopted Bitcoin has agreed to this monetary use case and financial transactions, even to an extent, smart contracts, but nobody has- Well, I'm not, not nobody, but everybody hasn't all agreed to storing other data, processing altcoin stuff that's not even part of Bitcoin, like the ordinals and inscriptions. And so the fact that there isn't this unanimous support for these things means that they are spam. I see.

And so I guess in a sense, it's like a, almost like a opt-in social contract kind of argument you're making here that basically if you're using Bitcoin, you've agreed to the mon- Monetary uses, and arguably even if it's a monetary use that you disagree with, right? If it's like terrorism or things like that, you would say technically everyone's opted in for that, but not for the, the spam of the inscriptions, et cetera.

Right.

I see. And

it's possible to put these things on a new blockchain that isn't even tied into Bitcoin, and people can opt into that. So, but the only reason to be putting it on Bitcoin's main blockchain is if the intention is to attack Bitcoin and force this on people who don't consent. And

I see. And so I think the other question a lot of people will have is the viability of actually filtering it out, because, you know, a lot of people, as, as I'm sure you've seen, that people share that meme, the information theory, et cetera, or that, if you try to stop them in one way, that they, the spammers will basically find another way to get their spam included, you know, as arbitrary file inclusion into the, you know, Taproot, the witness component or in- In the case of stamps or BRC20, it's just into the UTXO set. So could you just comment a little bit on how you believe it's viable to even, you know, stop the spam?

first, you have to understand that ultimately it is possible to do a soft fork that completely, maybe not completely eliminates it, but makes it much more expensive to the point where ordinary transactions can compete. But you don't even have to get that far. There's several stages before that with the spam filtration, which can all individually be Effective and have been effective for the last decade plus, which Bitcoin has been using them. They just need, there, there just happens to be a bug that was introduced at the same time as, but not by Taproot, that these inscriptions are using to bypass the existing filters.

So I guess I partially agree and partially disagree. I'm curious to hear where you disagree. So I agree that it's spam. I personally just don't view it as being possible to really meaningfully filter it out. And here's how I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it like even if If you were to adapt some of these things like stop bare multisig equals zero or the data carrier size issue in Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Core only has releases on average every six months, right? And so that means you're kind of relying on the network updating to that, but then the spammers can just basically rely on the fact that not everybody's updated and also use this kind of API method of, you know, out-of-band inclusion, by basically going to the miners and paying them to include their spam in the blocks. So I'm curious what you see there and why you still think it's feasible, even if-- Okay, I guess let me put, let me put the question this way. How many nodes do you think would need to update to using, let's say, knots or some kind of filtering version at the mempool layer before filtering could be realistically, you know, stopped or at least massively lowered?

It's to a large extent on the miners to do the spam filtering. Once the nodes upgrade, it gradually will make it harder and harder to get the transactions through. miners. And when you say that miners can just bypass the nodes, that's technically true, but at that point we're dealing with hostile miners, and what per—percent of the network are these hostile miners? And then it's a completely different problem from just spam. It's an existential threat.

So in one reading of Bitcoin, it could be also seen that it's like, it's take-- it takes two to tango, right? The spammers are there providing a monetary incentive, but a lot of the miners are maybe not That is aligned with, let's say, you and I on the monetary view of Bitcoin, and they see it as more like, "Hey, we're just a bunch of profit maximizers here, and we'll just take whatever people give us." And my, I guess, the way I'm seeing it is, it's more gonna become like a stalemate where, let's say, those of us who believe in the monetary use of Bitcoin aren't gonna be able to enforce what we want onto the miners, and they're just gonna say, "Screw you, I'm gonna take spammer money, In a different way.

Again, that gets back to miners that are essentially malicious. And also, by filtering the spam and resisting this attack, it not only does it potentially impact what the miners have available to them and how the miners behave, but also it makes it harder for spammers to pass this off as something legitimate being built on Bitcoin, which it really isn't. And so it also impacts their ability to get funding for these

attacks. I see. Yeah. And so I guess that's maybe a, an aspect of criticism at the social layer, and I probably, I probably agree with you on the social layer aspect of it. I just maybe I'm a bit more bearish on actually being able to stop them. but, I, I'm curious as well. So let's hypothetically say, you know, some of these changes were made, we did node mempool level filtering, but not consensus level filtering. what's, you know, or even, or even if we, even if I gave

A soft fork, a filter that stops, let's say, inscriptions and some of these ordinal people. What's to stop them finding another way to package things into a transaction in a way that, you know, is not so easy to filter or stop? Like, let's say, let's say we do one round of filtering, they, they do another round of response. What, what then? Well, it's

stopped before the consensus level. Spam filters. The benefit of doing it with policy is that we can just continually update and we can hypothetically update faster than the- if it really comes down to it.

But even in the context where Bitcoin Core does, let's say, six monthly releases, I mean, the spammers could just-- Okay, they could see, okay, Bitcoin Core has this new spam filter coming out in the next release, oh, let's just change our, our meta protocol. Sure, it's

possible to have a-- Maybe not the main Bitcoin Core releases, but just spam filter updates regularly. It, it wouldn't take a whole release to do that.

But do you see the network at the whole updating to that? Like, think about Protocols out, all the node, you know, whether it's Umbral and Raspiblitz and all the different ones out there, as well as just everyday users out there, you think they're all gonna update their filter protocol to sort of go along with, with the, with the filtering plan?

Well, that's the beauty of it being a policy, it doesn't require everyone to update, the more people update, the more effective it becomes.

Yeah. So, at the end of the day, how many people do you think, like, if you had to estimate,

Of them, do you think we need to get to do this spamming, spam filtering?

It's not even a threshold. The more nodes that update, the better. Okay.

All right. Well, okay. So I guess, you know, let's, let's leave that there, but let's talk a little bit more generally about Ocean, what you guys are doing, any, any, any updates there on, Stratum v2?

No significant updates yet. Yeah. Yeah. we don't wanna prematurely say we're gonna have it in two weeks and then, yeah, something comes up and it's not ready in two weeks, you know?

Yeah, fair enough. And so on, any other question or any other point you wanna share around, this is actually, this is an interesting point for discussion. I've seen some people say that, and I believe it might even be in mechanic actually, but, some people were saying that the amount you get based on the amount of hash rate you're The pools is not as much as what you're getting if you're mining with Ocean. Can you explain why that might be? The

FPBS payout system, it's based on the average of rewards and fees in all the miners' blocks, which is tends to be lower than a pool that's like Ocean and doesn't have huge fees.

I see. Yeah. Okay. and so, I guess it just comes down to, so basically you're saying it comes down to the way the mining, payout structure is done one, that actually there are some miners who are finding that they're getting more using Ocean even with, even with, let's say, filtering out spam transactions.

Right. The spam transactions really make a very small difference, maybe point two percent. And Just not having a fee counters that, but the way-- because of the FPPS overheads, it's just been shocking how much difference miners are telling us they're making so much more on Ocean.

Yeah, interesting. And I'm also curious as well, when it comes to spam, I guess I've seen different arguments on why it's bad. So some people say, "Well, it's adding to the growth in the UTXO set, and that, you know, especially BRC20 and stamps have really contributed to the growth in the UTXO set, but not as much, let's say, the vanilla ordinals and inscriptions." but, others say maybe the impact is more that it's, that it's prematurely pricing Because the BRC twenty people are so high time preference, they spend so much to get into the next block because they wanna do the mint that it prices out self custodial users. From your perspective, what do you see as like the really-- what are the big objections you have against the spam in terms of what it means for monetary, you know, Bitcoin adoption?

yeah, I guess there's several things. The biggest one with blockchain growth in general has always been that it, it makes it harder for people to run nodes and things like spam That pollute the UTXO set in addition are especially bad in that regard. Yeah.

I would say the node aspect, it doesn't seem to have bloated the, you know, the blockchain growth that much, but it has seemed to have bloated the UTXO set a lot, at least in terms of, you know, last I checked, the chain size is about six hundred and twenty gigabytes, and, you know, hard drive space isn't that expensive nowadays, but it seems to me the UTXO set growth is maybe a little bit more of a issue, but I know you're, you're also a, you know, a known small block guy as well. do you wanna respond to any of that?

The hard drive space has never been the concern for blockchain size. It's really just the, the processing time to do an initial sync for a new node, and that the blockchain currently is growing much faster than the technology has been improving to keep up with it.

Yeah.

I see.

and so, when it comes to, Ocean, are you seeing-- because you're offering, as I believe there's three main templates you're currently offering for people, do you wanna comment a little bit on how-- what the adoption has been like with those three templates, like what, what are you seeing there?

Almost everyone is sticking to the Ocean recommended template, the default.

Okay. great. Okay, so any other things you want to mention about Ocean and Bitcoin mining just while we're here?

our hash rate's growing, hopefully it'll be enough for a block a day soon.

Great. Well, okay, well, we'll leave it there. we'll just leave it where, where can listeners, or anyone watching find you guys out if they wanna find more info?

we're on Twitter as ocean underscore mining and the website for the pool is ocean dot x y z. Fantastic, thanks, Luke.

Back to the show in a moment. The lead sponsor of this show is Swann dot com, a leading Bitcoin only financial services brand. This is an amazing way to get started with Bitcoin. You can send And in your dirty fiat using ACH or wire, and then start buying Bitcoin that way. Now, you can do that either with a smash buy, just purchase a lump sum, or you can set up an automated savings plan or a Bitcoin savings plan. So it's common for many people, they might start out with a lump sum and then proceed to using an automated recurring s-savings plan or Bitcoin purchase plan that also can help you deal with the volatility. Now, for those of you who are buying larger amounts- amounts of Bitcoin, let's say over a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, check out Swan Private over at swanprivate dot com. Swan Private will provide you a concierge level service, and this is a great way for those of you who want some additional guidance, if you want, additional support for other kinds of account types, whether that's retirement accounts or trust accounts or business and corporate accounts, Swan Private can help you there. Swan also makes a range of free learning resources available to you and also- Also, Swan wants you to withdraw to your own self custody with free automated withdrawals, so you can set that up, and you can even set up a threshold for your withdrawals, generally above one million satoshis or five million sats or ten million sats, you can set up your thresholds so that way you can be regularly buying Bitcoin but withdraw on a threshold that makes sense to you. So to go and sign up for that, go and check out the website over at swan dot com. This show also brought to you by mempool dot space, the leading Bitcoin and blockchain Visualizer. You can use mempool dot space to target the fee for your transaction, depending on where things are with the fees and the block space at that time. It can be very beneficial for you to make sure you target your fee appropriately. So I use mempool dot space all the time. I'm often just checking out the mempool just to see what's in there, and they are always adding new features and ways to visualize things and see what's going on. I like that they've got the mempool goggles, which is a new feature that allows you to tell Toggle on and off some of the different filters and views to see what kind of transactions are moving through the mempool, whether they are, you know, multisig or not, whether they're inscriptions or not, or various, different things, whether they are signaling RBF, Replace By Fee. And so there's a lot of cool things you can see there over on the website at mempool dot space. And don't forget, they've got an accelerator coming out, so if you wanna get on the waitlist for that, go to mempool dot space slash accelerator. And now back to the Hi guys, I'm here with Prince Philip of Serbia. He is also the CSO, Chief Strategy Officer of Jan3. So, let's start with a little bit on-- obviously, you're focused on nation state adoption. So, Philip, tell us a little bit about what you're, you're seeing there on the nation state adoption front.

Sure, hey Stephan, it's good to be here. Good to see you in Dubai, in your hometown right now. yeah, nation state adoption in Bitcoin. So, as, as, as we all know, that Bitcoin is I feel that there needs to be a little bit of a hand top down, and that's where Jan three comes in. It's a, I mean, people should know it by now, it's a, it's a Bitcoin technology company focused on, on the, on the speeding up of the hyperbitcoinization. And we are out there trying to speak to politicians, leaders, individuals, anyone who has access to policymakers, to, to local authorities about any form of, Bitcoin adoption, whether it is trying to, tell them about the, the benefits of using as legal tender, to constructing some sort of, Bitcoin bond, or merely just improve-- helping them to improve about the, the, the regulations and understanding the difference between Bitcoin and crypto, for example. Bitcoin adoptions gonna, is gonna be done in so many shapes and forms. I personally think that one of the big, biggest ways it's gonna be done in the next few years is going to be through, mining. I think that if you-- that countries as we are, as, as countries realize that Energy resources, that that energy can then be turned into money, and I think a lot of people are gonna be orange-pilled on the whole fact that Bitcoin, is not, is not just a monetary revolution, but an energy revolution as well. And that drive for the need for more energy is actually gonna make our energy situation not, globally, a much, a much better place. And so, yeah, I think there's gonna be some exciting news in the next couple of years. I don't know where exactly it's gonna come from, but we've had

It's not new anymore. It's been around for a year now. Our COO were, they were in Suriname meeting with the president. if you don't know where Suriname is, it's in northern, South America. And it's not a massive country, like six hundred thou-- five hundred thousand people, but they are financially in a bad position. Inflation's in double digits, maybe fifty, sixty percent. But they, they're energy rich. They found some oil recently. And of course, the oil vultures are there surrounding them. And we wanna

Strategies of ways of, of, of regaining, of, of retaining their sovereignty, and also, maybe that they can allocate maybe a percent or two of their, of their global, of their, reserves, central bank reserves into Bitcoin. Also, we're in conversations with Montenegro with the Prime Minister of Montenegro, who's a, who's a friend, and he's into crypto, he's not fully orange-pilled yet, but he understands, he under, he gets it, and we talked, last June, we had a meeting loads of different things, from, a community like a Bitcoin beach, to putting, to buying Bitcoin on the, on the, on their reserves, to mining it. So I think we are now gonna go in meeting with him in the next couple of months, talk, to talk about some mining project. As you know, the European Union is-- Sorry, I should say that he was, he is formed a new government and, and he's a European centric party, and he, in order to, to, to, In order for them to, to, to gain those funds from the European Union, they need to, they need to meet certain goals. And some of these goals are these, and crazy energy goals for, for twenty thirty net zero bullshit stuff. Sorry, I swear. and, because of this, Montenegro has had to cut back on their, on their coal consumption. It was their base load of about eighty percent, and now they've cut back to maybe about twenty, thirty percent, and it's causing a real big headache for, for the- Energy producers there, and they've ramped up their solar and wind energy, and as you know, that's a disaster. So we wanna go in there with a plan of high-- of, of improving this energy mix and finding ways of, of, of tapping the hydroelectricity, maybe even geothermal, and making their base load much more manageable, for example, and maybe structuring some, some Bitcoin bond, some, public, private partnership. We're still in figuring out what we wanna do over there, but, so there's exciting things Happening here and there. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I mean, lots of other conversations. We have Telegram groups in lo-loads of other countries, New Zealand, South Africa, I mean, Brazil, you name it. We have, we have groups, chatting about how we're gonna get to these, to, to politicians and, and, and decision makers all over the world.

So I'm curious because obviously in some ways, Bitcoin can reduce the power of the state. So how do you sort of abroach that conversation with them when it could reduce- Use their power. Is it more just about sort of finding a way to have a win-win, like, is finding a way that maybe if that nation state were to, to Bitcoin mining now they've got income out of it or, you know?

That's exactly it. It's, it's a tough one. Bitcoin's all about decentralization. It's about taking power away from the centralized forces and, distributing it through the de-decentralized, the, ethos of this Bitcoin. So yes, there has to be a sort of a win-win That's what he said. But you use this to their advantage and say, "Look, through something like mining, if you create a Bitcoin bond, you can reduce the tax on people. You can find ways of, of putting money back into the economy without having to raise one, without having to raise one tax or having to, having to print any more money or go into debt. It's beautiful. There's many things that you can do on Bitcoin that will benefit people and benefit, the politicians."

Yeah. So let's chat a bit about Aqua. I know this is a new wallet You guys put out, and you can sort of, as I understand it, you can have Bitcoin on chain, you can also have LBTC with self custody, and then it's also got swaps built into it. So it has Tether, but across multiple chains, it has Liquid Tether and also, Ethereum Tether and Tron Tether, and also it has a swap infrastructure for Lightning. So, that's my understanding of it. go on.

Oh, from that's, No, it's just the ability to be able to transfer out into ECR2 You're transferring, you can use that, but it will, we'll hold it on Bitcoin cent, on Bitcoin, on, on, on liquid.

On liquid. We

don't hold those tokens, we just have the, we use SideSwap to be able to do that swap.

Yeah, yeah. To be clear, it's, it's kind of like keeping the balance in LBTC or in LUSD, but swapping using a swap service to kind of swap in and out if you, if you need that service. So I, I'm curious, you know, what your hope is

is primed for Bitcoin adoption. Latin America, when I was, in Argentina in, November 2022, I saw that you-- that they really need to use the US dollar, and they'd like to have exposure to the US dollar because their peso has had horrible inflation. When I was there, it wasn't as bad as it was recently, but it was, you know, definitely double digits, and everyone has wants dollar exposure to some extent, and this isn't just in Latin America, but all-- most Latin American countries. So we saw a Sampson saw the gap that, there's no wallet out there that is predominantly Bitcoin centric with USDT on Liquid that allows people to have their saving, savings account in Bitcoin, but also their spending account in USDT on Liquid, but also Bitcoin on Liquid and, and, and Lightning. So it's trying to, it's trying to fill that gap that where people want the dollar exposure, but also that savings account, and they can go between in and out of one and the other. And you can use that, I mean, it's- Mac, I'm a Max, you're right. I'm a Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Max who's doing it through, but I see the need of USDT, Tether, because it kind of is that gateway to Bitcoin adoption. People will see, will, will, will, who aren't really sure about Bitcoin but need to use USDT Tether, but need to download that wallet that has Bitcoin, will then see, oh, what's this Bitcoin? And then they'll start put, maybe putting their, their assets into Bitcoin and start getting more entangled by that

So I can see it like the, definitely the positive is that, people can maybe have a smoother pathway into Bitcoin. I think one challenge I see though is that, maybe it's hard to communicate to people what exactly the trade-off is around liquid, right? Because ultimately, when you hold LBTC, yes, you're self-custodying it, but really it's kind of held by the Liquid Federation, right? And so there's kind of, it's, I guess it's a bit of a challenge of like trying to explain to a new coiner, "Oh, hey This LBTC and some of the Tether is kind of custodied for you by this federation, like, could you just explain a bit how can we approach that conversation for, you know, new coiners to kind of help them understand, but at the same time, you'll-- I, I know you don't wanna scare them off with too much complexity, right?

I don't wanna get into complexity 'cause I don't know really how to get into complexity, but I would say that, the federated model of,

of, of, of liquid is, it, it w-- We've had right now, and it's lowered the fees for a lot of people transacting in Bitcoin. So I only see a positive there. Yes, it centralizes, centralizes Bitcoin, but you could argue that, Lightning has its issues as well. So there are some trade-offs that you have to bear, but at the end of the day, it is still backed by Bitcoin itself, and the federations is dis-- I believe it's decentralized, are decentralized enough for there not to be a, a, a, a proper centralized point of attack? So I think this is something that we can talk about more in, in, in a more technical conversation, but I'm not that person. Yeah, of course, of

course. Yeah. I think it's, it's more just about, you know, when we're bringing new, new coins in and it's kind of the difficulty of explaining to them what exactly they're holding. But at the same time, it's

all about our, wallets all about, use, user experience, you know, I think to onboard the next billion people on, onto Bitcoin is we have to make the That is number one. Those two, I mean, without those, you know, you're not really a Bitcoin, you're not really doing Bitcoin. So that's really important. But we want to make the user interface experience so easy for them to go in from out, from one, from one a-- from one form of Bitcoin to the other, and also with USDT tether, and make it as seamless as possible, that your grandmother can use. Yeah.

how has the conversation gone on getting nation states to actually adopt Bitcoin as a savings, as a reserve asset? It's,

it Conversations with the Suriname, we, Sampson spoke to the president of, of Colombia as well. I said, as I said, I spoke to the pre- to the prime minister of Montenegro, but really that's, we try to get people on to, on to, on to understanding, but it's something that, central, central banks are not gonna be very, transparent about what they're holding.

Yeah.

All we know, many central banks are already holding Bitcoin as we speak, if they see that fiat is going to one day And there's a threat from Bitcoin, then the best insurance head against Bitcoin is to buy Bitcoin. So if they, they see it as a, like a one percent threat, they'll buy one percent Bitcoin. And then if they see it like a hundred percent threat, then they'll get, they'll, they'll start stacking Bitcoin. And I see, and I know a lot of, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure some nations there are holding Bitcoin. Yeah.

Okay. how about just conversations at the, at Bitcoin Oasis?

are there any, what's, Level of understanding of Bitcoin is here?

High level understanding, really happy to be at a Bitcoin only event and in Dubai, it's my first time here. Very impressed by Dubai, I'm very impressed by how safe, clean, and orderly it, it is. maybe has to do something that they're a monarchy or not, which that's another, that's another conversation. But so the people, the attendees over here, a great level of conversation, some really knowledgeable people like yourself, and really, real, industry people that have been in the space for many, many- Many years. And as I said, I'm not very technical, but I'm hearing a lot of technical conversations, but also a lot of philosophical and, and ideological conversations happening on the side as well. So I've been thoroughly entertained. And I believe the size of the conference is, is great. Not too many people, it feels, personal enough that you can like, kind of get to speak to everybody, but not, in, in person enough that it's just like, wh-where there's too many people and you are always have to bump into someone else personal experience over here. Yeah.

Great. Well, those are the key questions I had. So where can people find you online?

People can find me on, on Twitter or X at, princephilip1, that's P R I N C F I L I P 1 and jant3com.

All great. Yeah. Great. I'll put the links in the show notes. Thanks. Okay, here we are. I've got Pete Rizzo, who's at Bitcoin Magazine, and, we're gonna chat a little bit and have a kind of debate

What's good for Bitcoin, you know? but let, let's start with this question of, you know, the spam, as I like to call it, or maybe the ordinals, as you like to call it. in your view, is it good or bad for Bitcoin? What do you think?

Well, I think when we're talking about whether it's good or bad, you know, you sort of have to ask to whom or for what, right? So that implies some sort of goal there. you know, my whole point in trying to popularize this conversation around ordinals is that Whether you think it's good or bad, it's objectively happening, right? So we've kind of insulated ourselves from reality a bit because, you know, essentially there is arbitrary data being added to the blockchain. It's being added at a rate that far exceeds kind of any historical precedent. and there's a much different-- This is a much different context than any time where this has happened before, right? So, one of the things I've tried to do is broaden the discussion and say, you know, we as Bitcoiners, like, Bitcoin isn't a DAO, right? You don't have a vote on what Bitcoin does. That's not how it functions, right? Bitcoin has a crypto-anarchic governance. Bitcoin is permissionless, and now a new group of people is doing things with Bitcoin, and they have different goals than the current users. and I would invite people to consider that Bitcoin might be accommodating both of those people very well right now, with less- headaches than would have otherwise been possible. but yeah, look, I think that we-- before we can have a conversation about whether it's good or bad, we have to agree that it's happening, and we have to talk about why it's happening, and then we have to have a, an effective conversation about like specifically what is going on. Because, you know, the Ordinals conversation, Ordinals gets a lot of the kind of attention, but there's BitVM, which is a tremendous advance in how Bitcoin L2s can be structured. There's Stamps, which There's BRC20, which again is like a fairly inefficient protocol that has contributed to a lot of the kind of angst around ordinals, but, you know, again, because we aren't having a conversation that is grounded in observable logic, like what is actually happening, who is doing what to whom, we can't separate all these things, right? So I'm really trying to move the conversation more to just a grounded reality. Let's just agree and talk about what's happening.

Yeah. So, so let me put it this way, I think the reason-- when people are talking about Those things, right? They don't just mean the, the Casey Rodama style ordinals, but they mean inclusive of stamps, BRC20 and some of these other more pollutive or purposely inefficient protocols that are arguably making it harder for new users to sync a node. And so I guess that's, maybe that's where some of the criticism lies. I, I think, and I mean, to be fair, there is an element here of it takes two to tango, right? Like the spammers wanna spam, and the miners want to accept their- Payments, right? They wanna sell block space to the spammers, and I think that is where, I mean, personally, that's why I'm not pro-filtering personally, because I don't think it would work. But I think maybe there is some level of social layer here where if I view that as spam, I wouldn't want to, you know, like that example I made when we were, you know, kind of discussing back and forth online, I see them more like, they're kind of like email spammers. And if we were hosting early conferences about email, in the early days of

That's spam, and we're just gonna leave that to the side, and we're gonna move on with like advancing the email protocol or something like that, right? What, what do you think about that?

I think the idea that you can be indifferent to what's happening is incredibly naive. I think that while you may make the suggestive arg-subjective argument that this is the case, you're not going to discourage the current group of people who are using Bitcoin for what they're using it for from doing that. so again, I've tried to construct this argument in such a way Objectively, what is happening is that the crypto intellectual capital is coming back to Bitcoin. So there was a wall that we built, right? We built sort of a Berlin Wall. There was crypto, and then there was Bitcoin, and there was a big and in the middle. So I think what people have failed because, again, we've had a very insular conversation, there's a whole group of Bitcoin, sorry, Ethereum developers, Solana developers, who've looked at stuff like centralization of, with Lido, the move to proof of stake, and just sort of how that's led to a lot of centralization in Ethereum, and they're looking at their monetary policy and move to staking, and they see that those, those haven't been affected, right? So those are all real incentives that are driving intellectual capital from one group to another group. and they are going to start using, they want to start moving the things that they were working on to Bitcoin, right? And so they're starting that, by doing what you would expect them to do, which is they're bringing their existing ideas and they're moving them over to Bitcoin to see if they're possible. And so, you know, my question really is, how I would flip that back is, okay, why should we stop that migration? Like, what is inherently negative about that? because in order to think that that's negative, you have to think that this- A whole group of people can't solve any problems for us.

So let me put it this way, I think that maybe there's a slight confusion that, you know, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I think the way people are trying to use rhetoric is say, "Oh, look, you're against the builders. We're builders here, and you, you know, you hodlers and you monetary users only want a certain type of building." And maybe for the monetary users, they see it like, "Nah, that stuff isn't useful to us. We care about

This stuff is kind of contradictory to the money aspects, right?

So I think there are very few people who have adopted Bitcoin, through sound money, through education, without priorly kind of speculating or engaging in some other crypto market. If you look at most of the people who kind of within the, even the Bitcoin Maximals community, a lot of us, you know, have stories about how we used to be confident in the crypto market, we were enthusiastic about it, and we stopped doing that. And I think an interesting thing to consider is that maybe we're fighting what is a natural Adoption path. Like maybe it is simply true that people, you know, need to take a lot of time to understand Bitcoin and that, you know, something that gets their interest initially. So I find it weird that the people who argue for like the sound money kind of like, okay, Bitcoin changes incentives, kind of rhetoric, don't apply this to, okay, well, obviously that's, if that's true, and I, I believe that's true, then over time Bitcoin aligns everyone's incentives. then we're simply dealing with a group of people who right now aren't

Things that aren't useful, but they're not adding transactions or bringing capital to the crypto apparatus, which we agree is negative. I'll give you a simple example. Tether is widely seen very positively in the Bitcoin ecosystem when it, as a blockchain, net reduces the amount of transactions that occur on Bitcoin. So Tether moves the US dollar to a Bitcoin-type decentralized payment rail, and because it offers that stability, it, reduces transaction demand for Bitcoin Bitcoin. There's a group of users who would otherwise use Bitcoin that use Tether, but we seem to think that that's positive. And then I think what's interesting about, you know, especially when you get to Ordinals and BitVM, it's like these are schemes that are actually net reducing the number of transactions on things like Ethereum and Solana that we have kind of, you know, set ourselves up as adversarial against, and they're bringing that net activity to Bitcoin. And I think it's really interesting that we find one of those positive and one of those negative, because when I describe them as such, it would seem to me that the one that is bringing net ac-demand to Bitcoin and reducing the demand from things that have been destructive, you know, to our event-- our advancing of the technology, why we can't celebrate that, you know, so, I don't know, that's my perspective on that. Yeah.

I mean, I guess let me try to resolve a contradiction, I guess. again, it depends on your own Some people actually do view Tether as, you know, you shouldn't promote that or, I, I know others at Bitcoin Magazine are sort of critical of stablecoins, let's say, and so maybe from their perspective, Tether is a downside too, but I mean, personally, I see it as, I don't promote stablecoins, I understand why people use them, though, and, I think it's just, you know, I, it's kind of like, yeah, they're, they're gonna, they're gonna do what they're gonna do or spam, as I would rather call it, so I, I think there is a difference there, right? Between, you know, I have a question about spam,

okay? So, recently came out that Peter Todd went to Guatemala and he helped the judicial committee of that country certify an election on Bitcoin. So this is a non-monetary use case of Bitcoin that clearly has positive implications and it has, it seems to have product market fit. So that also added arbitrary data to the blockchain. So is that an attack on Bitcoin? In your view?

That's a good question, and I think the way I see it, there's also kind of the element of, it matters if they're using efficient ways of, you know, using the chain, right? Like Peter Todd and some of the other guys who are using those things are at least doing it in more chain efficient ways, whereas like to me, the BRC20 and stamps is the more objectionable aspect, where they are quite literally doing it in the, you know, in a purposely or, let's say, well, in this, in the case Of stamps, I would argue it's intentionally being done in a destructive way, right? And whereas maybe with BRC20, it was maybe just done in a very, let's say, inefficient but not necessarily intentionally malicious way, right? I think probably fair to say.

That goes back to the point that I've tried to make is that I think Casey Rodemar has found himself with few defenders, and I think that's really sad because I think if you look at the topology of the kind of new things that are coming to the Bitcoin network, Ordinals is as a protocol, and again, this thoughtful way, and it's a interesting critique, right? Like it has a lot of argumentation built into it, but I think we've allowed ourselves to not have that discussion, like we haven't had a really authentic discussion about like what it is, he has achieved. But I think the other sociological groups, the crypto people have, they've had a really robust conversation about it, and their view is essentially, you know, that he's unlocked a new design space for them. and I think this just all goes back to, you know, we have to have authentic Because, like Luke would essentially come to the conclusion, and I asked him this over the weekend, he said, "You know, I said, 'Do you view the Guatemalan elections, you know, as spam?'" And he said, "Yes, it's arbitrary data on the blockchain, therefore it's spam." Okay. So, again, this is incredibly subjec-subjective stuff. and this is why I keep trying to frame the conversation of, "Look, this is happening. I'm not responsible for it. I'm not doing it. I'm not buying or selling

Worse, right? They're cutting off your nose to spite your face. And so if we have to live in this reality, the rhetorical question that I've essentially asked is like, how can we get something out of this that is good for Bitcoin? Like if this is going to happen, and again, it's, it seems to be happening. The, the venture capital is coming back, people are building things on Bitcoin. I agree, I don't think a lot of the things that they're gonna build are gonna be useful. But if we're not having a dialogue with this group, how

do we There are things I disagree on others, right? Like I agree that we probably can't stop it, like I would disagree with, say, Luke on the filtering aspect, right? I'm not pro filters, mainly because I think it's gonna be, it's gonna end up in a stalemate and not really stop them. But I kinda disagree about this new narrative of like, oh, we're Bitcoin L2s, and really it's kind of like this shitcoin on Bitcoin sort of

narrative, that we've seen, people do. You know, it's, there seems to be yeah. I think, yeah, this

goes back to the fact that we bedeviled, you know, the Ordinals protocol in Devee when, in fact, Ordinals adds net economic demand to Bitcoin without the introduction of a new token. I mean, you can even think about it where it's like, there's gonna be a new block mined in the next ten minutes, and that block will programmatically issue new assets like under the definition of his protocol. So again, if we can't have authentic conversations about what it is that like certain technologies do and what is better or worse These things, some of them are going to be better and, and some of them are going to be worse. And I--

But when it comes to authentic conversations, I mean, it's fair to say a bunch of us have been having them. I had Casey on my show like a year ago. I've been writing articles about it myself, and I think it's also fair to say, if we're having authentic conversations, we should also point out that the ordinal's view isn't arbitrary view. Not everybody opts into that. You have to run ordinal's software on top as an extra layer on top of

Ordinal, really, it's like a, a pointer into, the Taproot witness that, this UTX, it's like some dust that

points to a-- For those users, it's enough, right? Like those users don't want anything else, and so it's gonna be really hard to make any sort of authentic argument to them because they're saying, they're, they're saying, not only is this good enough for us, but this is dramatically better than the standard that existed on Ethereum. So from their perspective, it's, it's a massive upgrade. And so, It's really difficult to have that conversation with them because, again, these are, a lot of them are VC funded entities, they're for-profit companies, they have existing business models, existing users, and it's a whole group of community of people. But again, what's the alternative? Do you want them to never use Bitcoin? Like, I, you want them to accept Bitcoin on your terms only? Like that, that's the, that's the terms of engagement here. I, I really don't understand this idea that Bitcoin, is under attack or like is, you know, We, the users, have to do something about it.

Yeah, but I mean, to be clear, I, I'm, I, I'm not viewing it as like a showstopper issue. I'm seeing it as like a nuisance level that we can't really stop kind of thing that is slight, you know, slightly negative for Bitcoin, but it's not gonna stop us overall. And it, you know, it kind of, it's helping, like, it's allowing these spammer people and some of these DeGen people who wanna, you know, mint BRC20 tokens to try

Maybe, you know, we can't stop this thing, and it's just gonna, it's just gonna happen. And, maybe that's really the, the silver lining, maybe, is that, you know, maybe there's some technology that eventually helps monetary users, but maybe not. We don't know.

But again, what, what are monetary users? And then we know right now we don't have the technical infrastructure to fully scale to a world where we're as large as we want. Like, even if you take the, you know, peer-to-peer lightning payments in Africa, You have to accept that we don't currently have the net infrastructure to accommodate, like, let's just say, ev-every co-transaction that was taking place in Africa can't take place on the, maybe you disagree, on the lightning infrastructure and Bitcoin infrastructure.

Oh, look, I mean, I think it's uncontroversial to say that Bitcoin, if you're talking on-chain and lightning, probably doesn't support, it's probably supporting somewhere in the range of ten to a hundred million people, which is nowhere near eight billion,

right? I'll add one more thing. I, I just think a Exposed to Bitcoin will ultimately adopt a value set that is aligned with Bitcoin, and I find the lack of, you know, optimism towards that really troubling because again, we've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about how Bitcoin aligns incentives, talking about how Bitcoin changes people's lives, and I think we're gonna have to be patient with this group of people, because again, like, you know, look at the BitVM white paper, the first reference in that paper is to, an Ethereum paper, right? There's a cross-pollination of ideas that Capital. That's really, I think, my interest is that there is intellectual capital on the other side of this wall, and I think attracting that intellectual capital to Bitcoin is a net good. I, I think that's what makes me bullish about, you know, what's currently happening, is that there's a chance to get people who can help us with our mission and our cause and build things that are done in the right way. But I think we have to have a conversation with those people first.

Yeah. And I mean, personally, I'm not against, BitVM. I,

Shitcoin involved with it, but I guess let's leave it there. I think we've, you know, we've had our, back and forth about what we think, any, any closing thoughts for people and where can people find you?

Pete Rizzo, Bitcoin historian on Twitter, or now X, but yeah, closing thoughts. You know, I think, we all would like Bitcoin to be certain things and have reach a certain level of adoption, and I think we should just be open-minded in dealing with this new group of people. we should give them the benefit of the doubt and engage when, when they are being malicious, and have authentic conversations with them. So, yeah, that's my piece.

Interesting. So are they spammers or should we accept these people? That leaves, that's, that's an interesting question. And yeah, I think you're right. We, we don't necessarily have Hardware to secure it above certain amounts and thresholds. CoinKite dot com is my favorite here. They make the Cold Card, which I've been using for years as part of various setups. It's a very versatile and secure device. It has multiple secure elements, it has NFC support, and you'll find it really easy to use with desktop wallets such as Sparrow Wallet. Now, notably, CoinKite are also coming out with a new device, and so the pre-orders for that will be shipping out soon. Keep an eye out for that. So that device is called the Coldcard Q, and that device actually has QR code support as well. So I'm really looking forward to getting, my hands on that device and playing around with that. Thinking about Bitcoin, you need to really consider using hardware, and I believe dedicated hardware devices really make a lot of sense as opposed to using generic computing devices, because often generic computing devices are very difficult to secure, and that's why using hardware devices such as the Coldcard Or in the future, the coldcard Q can make a lot of sense for securing our coins. So if you need to get some hardware for yourself, go to coinkite dot com and use code Livera for a discount on your cold cards. And finally, nomadcapitalist dot com. So with Bitcoin, as I record this now, Bitcoin's price is crossing above forty-six thousand dollars. If you're living in a high tax Western country, you might not be getting that much for the amount of tax that you're paying. As many of you know, I left Australia. I felt locked in. I thought it's just not really a great deal here. Where if you consider your options around the world, and Nomad Capitalist can help you strategize and do this, you can And shift overseas and lower your taxes. Now, I'm in Dubai in the UAE, but for you, it doesn't have to necessarily be in the UAE. The, the experts over at Nomad Capitalist can help you craft a plan that's suitable for you and for your family. They have helped people Achieve and get passports, from dozens of different countries. They've helped people move to dozens of different countries or set up fiat bank accounts across dozens of countries. They have close to one hundred countries in terms of connections and information and help, helping you put those puzzle pieces together so they can help you out with, strategizing and implementing the plan to move overseas, and that could be from a tax perspective, it could be from a perspective of getting a plan B, residence or citizenship. And it could also just be that you want to gain additional access to im- to investments in other countries. So there's all kinds of reasons that you might want to look at this. If you're interested in this, go and check it out over at nomadcapitalist dot com slash apply. And now back to the show. Hey guys, I'm here with Giacomo Zucco. He is the director of Plan B Network, focused on Bitcoin education. he gave a talk earlier about, Bitcoin as the digital gold standard, but, wanted to get some of your views on, you know, Bitcoin technology as well as spam. We should chat about the spam. I know, you are a noted, critic of the spam. let's talk a little bit about that. How would you-- I'm curious,

how would you define spam on Twitter, spam is an information in an information sharing system which is unwanted by the receiver. That's the definition. The definition doesn't include any cost. spam isn't free because, for example, a spam in telephone calls, they will invest money in, in a center. of course, the, the definition of spam is not that nobody finds utility in that, because the attacker, the spammer, will always find utility in that. So the only definition it is unwanted by the user of the system that receive it. It could be a subset of users, because maybe they- The, the, the Twitter bots, the X bots that are just, pushing like naked women. Somebody could find it interesting, right? Somebody else that just want to have a conversation may not. So that's spam because, they, it's clear for the people selling the information that some of the users receiving it don't want it, but they do it anyway for many reasons. Reasons could be disruption, so it could be the DDoS attack. Reasons could be, commercial, so even if most people will hate it, a subset, will have a conversion rate. via outrage or trolling or having fun, but that's spam and it's, it's nothing unique to Bitcoin. it's just general problem in software because in software you can, you can have a low cost of sending information and you can have a, a, a reach a potential infinite number of user with, with a sublinear cost. In Bitcoin, that's even more true. Some, some people say that's not true in Bitcoin because you pay fees, but in Bitcoin you pay one single instance of block space once to one miner and then you will have all future Bitcoin nodes, downloading that data forever, maybe not holding, because maybe they, they could, could prune it, but they have to download it forever. So Bitcoin is in a way was deriving from anti-spam like Hashcash, but it's a perfect spam system right now because you can basically paying one single inch of, it's more effective than the call center. The call center you spend what, like one hundred K and you reach one million people by phone. In Bitcoin, you pay thirty dollars and you reach millions of Bitcoiners forever.

Yeah. Now, I mean, I'm, I'm with you on, I b- that I believe some of it is spam, although I'm maybe not convinced that filtering will work. I think it kinda will end up like a kind of like a stalemate. The reason I believe that is even if Bitcoin Core were to update some of the filters, Bitcoin Core has releases normally twice a year, and so then spammers can just change their protocol. They can change the meta protocol. They can be like, "Oh, look, we see Bitcoin Core is gonna update their filter, we'll just change our

But the miner, like the spammers want to spam, and some of the miners, they want that revenue from the spammers, whether we like it or not. So I'm curious what you see there as the realistic chances of being able to filter out the spam, even if I'm sympathetic, I think we might not be able to.

That's a totally reasonable, objection that I respect and probably even share. If somebody tells me that filters may be a long-term solution to spam, that absolutely-- that you do one filter and then everything is solved, that's not true. Trivially not Somebody could say that you, we could keep doing updates of filters, like, filtering spam. It is a cat and mouse game everywhere in email, everywhere in Twitter. So you keep the, the, the cat work, and they keep the mouse work. You, the, the advantage is a little bit asymmetrical because it's easier to fix the filters than to find a way around it, maybe, but that's, that's debatable. But anyway, we could just say we keep going. The problem is that this isn't a one-off silver bullet. That's a continuous struggle. is to say that this kind of struggle is inconceivable, or that there are some people holding con- at the same time that this, that this idea will be useless and also hurtful. that's, that's basically impossible. If it's, if it's irrelevant, it's irrelevant. People will just go off ban. If going off ban will, will kill Bitcoin, we have a total different problem because people are already paying for block space off ban. So, this, this ob- the, the, to say that spam is not a problem, but filtering Hypocritical. But to say that this is not-- there is no good solution for spam, I think it's a fair assessment. And people that expect a magic solution from filters, I think it's very, very naive. There is a subset of people, like for example, if you talk with Luke, Luke say, "Okay, spe- filters will help the problem to be clear. Like if miners are clearly going around the mempool in order to include obvious spam, then the miners are so obviously malicious that we can coordinate better a response to that." But I'm so scared to any kind of response to that, which is basically only a nuclear option, that I don't know we want clarity in that case. But that at least is a consistent, so the strategy is not naive in that case. The strategy is we filter, so you go off band in order to, to include spam, which is obvious spam, so we know you're being malicious, and so we can coordinate some response. I don't necessarily, like promote this kind of situation because that kind of war, total war with miners, is not a war It's not easy to win because any consensus change, especially on that, will require so much coordination that will basically be a strong centralization point.

Yeah, and maybe the argument would be that it's kind of like an asymmetric thing, like it would require so much effort to try to put in this spam filtering effort that the spammers could just route around. I think let's put that to the side. One other area that's kind of related is there's been this narrative of, oh, the spam, in their words, ordinals and inscriptions, is bringing the Bitcoin builders back. You know, it new L2s that kind of actually have their own token. I'm curious your view on that. Are the builders coming back to Bitcoin because of the spam, or is that, is that a disingenuous narrative?

Totally disingenuous. What is coming back is a set of gambler and social media, manipulators and pump and dump group creators that use the typical late stage Silicon Valley builder narrative, which is basically, ba-random buzzword, total hype, and there is this typical attitude which is you can build stuff that works, that require some initial work of design, which is very exciting because you create something new, and then a lot of toolings and tooling and documentation and testing, which is boring. And then on top of that, incre-incremental, improvement in documentation and in tooling, this is super boring. Nobody wants to do that. There are-- those are builders, but it's not exciting for anybody. Nobody would want to, gamble on that. You can't do a gamification of that. I mean, you can, but it's very So Bitcoin is already at the stage in which we have Bitcoin, we mostly have to fix documented like before we change the protocol, so many low-hanging fruits from the point of view of the non-consensus relevant tooling is, like for example, in Lightning, we could change covenants to make Lightning better. It will work, it will probably work, but before Lightning, you still, we still have to go to Vault 12 from Vault 11 because Vault 11 sucks. We still have to do a reasonable Lightning network wallet that will, for example example, give you a different risk management based on the amount that you have. A, a universal link where I can pay you and my wallet will decide if I want to pay off chain or create another challenge on the fly. All this tooling that nobody's building because everybody wants to be down in the stack because it feels more exciting, but we aren't really bringing builders. Where at, at least if that was the case, if you have too many builders trying to go low level, that's bad because now we need to fix actually. So there's this, this delusion that- So fixing lightning with tooling is hard. So just let's do something completely new that magically will not need a lot of tooling. That's bullshit. You will have go-- you will go back to square zero with dry chain, everything arcs. You will just go back to square zero, and you will have to rebuild all the stack and all the boring stuff anyway. But in the case of Ordynas, you are just attracting, speculators. You are attracting the typical Silicon Valley bullshit VC narrative of, some kind of buzzword With a lot of retail investor trying to, people have in mind the dot com bubble. Yeah. They know that retail were making money out of some technological explosion, and now they try to recreate that. So it's just narrative, like there are the builders, there is the technology, but it's bullshit, and it's in-- and you can see that because when somebody comes saying that ordinars are a novelty and innovation, you point out the 2012 Bitcoin Talk post where there was exactly the same, and they say, "Oh, I don't care," because it's not about It's all about the narrative, the hype.

Yeah, right. I mean, in fairness, I believe Casey's Bib does point to that reference at two thousand and twelve. I think it's also fair to say that at least Casey Rodama's work with Ordinals and his version of inscriptions is less pollutive or less damaging than BRC twenty and stamps. Probably fair to say that. but I guess let's focus on positive aspects, like what areas of real building are you excited about, you know, nowadays in Bitcoin and Lightning and the, the ecosystem?

So like- I think as the most exciting part, again, exciting doesn't mean important. You can have important stuff that aren't exciting at all, but exciting for me right now is async payment, async re- async, asynchronous, reception of payment. Like, Breeze is working about that a lot and other, other wallets. see, again, Breeze, Roy is working with other people, including John Carvalho and some blockchain people on a standard for LSP. LSP spec is very important because it's basically accepting that the Lightning Network Network is a two tier system. That is not new in Bitcoin, like Bitcoin base layer is a two tier system, even is a like three or four tier system. You have miners creating blocks but not validating them because they're just hashing, the, the pool is the only one validating. You have full nodes not creating blocks, you have wallets not even running full nodes, so you already have a tier system and we accepted that. So we separated the mining software from the node software, from the wallet software, for example, or hardware. In Lightning, we were starting again from a naive version Everybody will be a complete lightning node doing routing, trampoline. And now, now basically you see two tiers, which is basically the, the pure user and the LSP. Yeah. This tier is, is something inevitable, this, this tier definition is, is not complete centralization in the sense that if you kill one LSP, you can easily get your money back, so it's not like centralization, like a total risk that you lose everything. You just have to move to another LSP. But the, the way, the best way to make crisis of the central points better and less impactful is to make it interoperable, between any LSP. So the LSP spec is very, very important. Then there is RGB that I, I, I know that overlaps a lot with the Shitcoin wars, so I'm very cautious about that, but I, I see that as exciting about, the, the, the possible, a possible way to scale Bitcoin in the future, a far future, because we need a two, we need a two way peg, which we don't have a clue how to do. In that, in that field, narratives, it's objectively interesting, the fact that you can have BitVM or the, the, the, the, the, the same team created this proof to basically compactively prove the, the, the Zcash thing stuff with all the-- Now they're doing all the proof of work chain with all the others. That's very fascinating. Seems like magic. Not sure when it will become useful for syncing a node, because there's still a lot to, a lot to go.

Oh, sorry, I think it's called Zerocash, I said it wrong. I think Z

You know, fees being very variable, there is kind of talk of people pushing off to use, let's say, Liquid or use things like Fedimint. Do you see that as a concern, just because it's difficult to con- to convey that trade-off to a new coin owner? Right? Like, you teach them with this wallet, how do you teach them, "Oh, actually, it's, it's custodied by this twelve or fifteen federation or this guardians." Do you, do you see concern there, or do you see that it's just, "Look,

that's just the way It will always be a spectrum. Like you have full custody, like what Alfini were, were, was thinking, Alfini's Bitcoin banks, which doesn't mean ATF. Bitcoin banks in Alfini's mind were darknet entities, like pseudonymous entities without KYC or anything, and they can, they can exist because darknet, darknet markets, they do exist. Yeah. They are custodial or like fiduciary mixers, they do exist. Sometimes they're a pool or they get closed, but they do exist and they do work for a while with reputation and with risk of course Banks on one side, there is on-chain Bitcoin where your security is very strong and goes up exponentially with time. In between, you have a lot of compromises. Like, like the Lightning Channel, typical Dreapoon Lightning Channel, is a little bit less than a full on-chain because it's still trustless, but if the on-chain wallet, has a security that goes out, goes up exponentially with time, in your Dreapoon Channel, will security will go down with time because you have, you have to stay there with the watchtower to keep, to watch the, the chain And you can have the adversary could collude with the miners for just a, a, a while to stop you from sending the punishment. So it's a little bit less secure. Then you go, you go down and you have something like ARC. The ARC system is a system in which you can get your money back, but if you don't connect every two weeks, for example, the ARC provider can take it all, and eventually it will. Then you go down and you have something like state chain. In state chain, your coordinator can collude with the previous owner, but it's very complicated. The Like, fedimint. Fedimint, you have, sure, you have basically a Chomian mint, so it's hard to target you. You, you cannot steal my money because you don't know how much money I have. You can steal everything, but the federation will make it harder to steal everything, and then you can go down to something like, a single Chomian mint like Cashu, for example. Which, that you have Cashu, then you have basically, we can go, we can, the full Bitcoin bank like Al

If you put a federation, that's better, that's basically FedMeans. If you put a side chain kind of, full reseproof that's liquid basically, and if you go even beyond, that's a state chain, and then you can go to an arc and then to a channel. So you have this spectrum. The motivational answer is we should always push in this direction rhetorically, because people will already gravitate to the simple direction anyway, instinctively. So we, we shouldn't teach, oh, for your use case, just use custody. It's better Better if we don't, but this is not like dishonesty. Imagine in, like in, in Lord, Lord of the Rings, there is Aragorn with the, with the army. They are basically, is saying, there, there, there will come a day where we will lose, but it's not this day. This is not necessarily realistic. They were going to lose probably, but you don't say what is realistic. You say what, what people needs to hear. So we should never use custodials, but actually

we will. And of course

Find me directly on Twitter, X is probably my name, Giacomo Zucco is the, the typical way to go. right now I have many projects, but I'm trying to focus on one specifically in the next months, which is Plan B Network, Plan B dot network. You can already find a huge amount of educational material in many, many languages, mostly provided by the, Bitcoin University of, b-Discover Bitcoin. And now we are integrating a lot of other stuff, the Kubo Plus program, the Lugano Summer School program, And, the summer of Bitcoin, a lot of other cool stuff in education. So in the next months, you will be able to find also paid courses. We will intermediate professionals of teaching like, like Lisa and, and Jimmy and, and other people in the ecosystem.

Fantastic. Thanks, Giacomo. So finally, I hope you enjoyed the, that range of discussions and different viewpoints with people from the Bitcoin ecosystem based on interviews while at Bitcoin Oasis twenty twenty-four. Let me know if you enjoyed this kind of- episode, and whether you'd like to see more like this in the future, of course, check out my website at stephanlivera dot com and all the links for the people who are interviewed, you can see those in the show notes or in the description. That's it from me. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels.