{ "episodeId": "SLP121", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "yan_pritzker": { "name": "Yan Pritzker", "role": "guest", "tag": "YAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.53, "text": "Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today we are speaking with Jan Pritzker, author of Inventing Bitcoin. But first, a word for the sponsors. So firstly, Kraken, one of the premier Bitcoin exchanges, one of the longest standing Bitcoin exchanges, they're consistently rated the best, they have a high quality platform, they've got high trading volume and low- low fees with no minimum or hidden fees. Don't forget they've got twenty four seven support, they offer best in class accounting, reconciliation and reporting services. They've recently just launched Kraken Pro mobile app where you generate an API key from the Kraken website. 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It comes in a wheel shape that masks the words of your seed, and it's actually got a tamper-evident seal. So make sure your seed is backed up to help you in case your paper seed backup is waterlogged or tampered or goes up in a fire. Make sure your loved ones" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:30", "start": 150.0, "text": "signature situation. So the product is available for pre-order, check out the website ciphersafe dot io, the link is in the show notes. So today we've got an episode targeted for beginners. Yan was previously CTO of Reverb, but as he fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, he wanted to create a resource to teach Bitcoin beginners. I've had the opportunity to read his book, Inventing Bitcoin, and wanted to get him on the show to provide an intro on Bitcoin mining. His explanation on Bitcoin mining is very intuitive to grasp for a beginner, so make sure you share this episode. Episode with your Bitcoin beginner family and friends. Here's the interview. Jan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Stefan. It's great to be on. Yeah, so Jan, I know you've done a lot of cool stuff, particularly with your book, Inventing Bitcoin, but, I'd love to have you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what was some of your background before you got into all this." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "03:20", "start": 200.27, "text": "Yeah, sure. So I have a little bit of an interesting story. I came here to the United States when I was seven years old. came And, with my parents obviously, and they got into computers at an early age. My dad, saved up, what money we had, a little bit of money, and bought me a computer. So I grew up kind of coding, things like that, and then, you know, went to school for computer science and linguistics, and, thought I was gonna do, AI and things like that, but then I really got into startups. So I spent about, you know, fifteen to twenty years, depending when you start counting, doing startups and, A lot of startups. my last one was Reverb, Reverb dot com, which was a marketplace for musicians, basically we sold gear, drums, guitars, things like that, and just got acquired by Etsy actually, so I'm real proud of, of the team there. but around, 2016, I, I kind of started falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, as many people do once they really start understanding Bitcoin. I had actually known about Bitcoin, since 2011, and I'm ashamed to About Bitcoin to actually like understanding what it was or even bothering to research it. so, you know, it took me a while, but in 2016 I finally kind of sat down and started looking at, you know, Andreas' videos and reading every article I could get my hands on, listening to podcasts, and really started getting educated on this, and, you know, very quickly became kind of the Bitcoin guy in my group of friends, obviously, which a lot of people have experienced that sort of, you know, that effect, right? And started shilling Bitcoin at every opportunity, got really annoying, and, decided that, you know, I wanted to kind of figure out a way to, to explain Bitcoin to people a little bit better. And, I actually started giving talks at a few high schools. I had friends who had been teachers, and, based on these talks, I started realizing that, I wanted to have a really simple way to explain Bitcoin, and that's kind of how I, I came to the book. I, I decided to, to basically write down those thoughts, Possible, so the book's, you know, it's about a hundred pages, try to make it as digestible as possible for the regular sort of person, but at the same time, make it technical enough so you can understand how Bitcoin actually works. so yeah, that was, that was kind of my journey. I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, that happened in the middle. I kind of had, you know, some time where I explored, blockchain and ICO and Ethereum and all that kind of stuff, but eventually came around to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:00", "start": 360.02, "text": "So, Jan, you mentioned as well that you were from a former Soviet nation. So, did that also play into your own understanding of Bitcoin as, money?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "06:11", "start": 371.25, "text": "Yeah, I have to say that, you know, my experience was, in the Soviet Union, I, I grew up there, so my experience was as a kid. And as a kid, I didn't really understand that the environment I was in, you know, there was something wrong with it, right? I just had a normal childhood. but my parents, you know, stood in line for bread, there were but later on when I got into Bitcoin, I started asking, I started sort of thinking back to what the Soviet Union was like, and asking my parents about it. and one of the most interesting things I asked them about was what happened to our money when we left, right? and what happened, as it turns out, is that the government allowed us to exchange about one hundred dollars per person, worth of currency, what the Soviet ruble, at the government-controlled exchange rate. Obviously, the government-controlled exchange rate wasn't the real exchange rate Street, because nobody wanted those rubles. So effectively, we were able to keep one hundred dollars per person. And so when I heard that, I started really thinking about what would life have been like if we had Bitcoin, at that time, right? We would have been able to put a password into our head and, and walk out of the country with all the Bitcoin in our head, right? So it started to really kind of connect for me that, Bitcoin is exactly that. It's not really, I mean, if it's an inflation hedge, maybe that's It's much more, what's much more important about Bitcoin is that it's a freedom hedge, right? It's a, it's a hedge against the government like wanting to take all your stuff or not allowing you to leave the country with your wealth intact. and that's, that's what really clicked for me when I, understood our condition and how we kind of escaped the Soviet Union. We were lucky enough to be able to leave, with what little we had, but if we had Bitcoin and we had been saving, you know, a little bit of our income in Bitcoin," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:00", "start": 480.02, "text": "Bitcoin as a kind of technolibertarian answer to the techno-authoritarians. Yes," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "08:05", "start": 484.92, "text": "exactly. Right, it's exactly right. It changes the nature of the relationship, I think, between people and their government, right? Because, in the Soviet Union, we were, we were powerless to do anything because we had no economic freedom. So the government imposed the currency on us, right? The Soviet ruble. they managed the, the whole economy, they planned everything, and so of course, the, all kinds of things were screwed up, shortages and everything. the, Many, many times, by many factors of a hundred, a thousand, and so on. but we weren't even allowed to own, for example, US dollars, right? It was complete currency control. and you see this even today. This isn't like something that happened back in the day. This is happening all over the world. I mean, Argentina, Venezuela, countries like that, they're not gonna want you to, flee the country with all that capital, so they need to lock things down. And when they lose that power, I think that really changes how It puts a real check on the government's ability to even try to do something like this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:05", "start": 544.86, "text": "What I really enjoyed about your book is that it was really short and gives a high level explanation on different concepts, and one of which is Bitcoin mining. I think it'd be good to walk through some of the examples from that. So maybe we'll just, role play. So I'm, I'm gonna be the Bitcoin beginner, and I'm gonna ask you, Jan. So, look, I heard about Bitcoin. Should I do Bitcoin mining?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "09:31", "start": 571.02, "text": "It's funny, it's a funny question because I actually have gotten this question from beginners. It's a very common question. and I think the, the problem with this question is the perception that Bitcoin mining is like, well, it's, it's a- honestly, it's the media's fault because if you read articles, it says Bitcoin mining is done by computers by solving complex equations. Okay, so of course everybody's like, \"Well, why can't, you know, why can't my computer solve complex equations?\" and it really misses the point of what mining is, right? So I think, the first thing I actually start with is by giving people a realistic, a realistic view of what mining looks like nowadays. people have to understand that mining is an industrial process. It's done by fairly large companies, and, and at, at large scale, with huge amounts of power, they need to be negotiating their power contracts to get a very, very cheap cost of power. They need to be buying their hardware in bulk to get cheaper hardware. They need to have, you know, the right tax structures in place. To be able, like, right off that hardware, all this kind of stuff. These things need to happen, in order for mining to be profitable at scale. so the answer to whether you should mine is no. as an individual, you should likely not mine. I mean, you may have some reasons to mine, for example, if you want to get your hands on, quote unquote, clean bitcoins, right? Because by mining, you are generating the bitcoins yourself, and that's kind of nice because, there, you haven't logged into any exchange, you haven Anybody, you're literally generating them sort of out of thin air, but, you know, you're using, you're using your electricity to pay for that. but the downside of that is that you're not gonna be profitable. You need specialized hardware and you need very cheap power. So unless you're willing to pay for that sort of anonymity, through essentially over, overspending compared to what you would have paid for at an exchange, I wouldn't recommend mining." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:22", "start": 682.22, "text": "Right. And I think it, it also plays into that idea of what is the upfront capital cost required? Required, typically it might be much, much higher than the typical individual would be able to spend." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "11:35", "start": 694.78, "text": "Right. I mean, and, you know, even a, a, a brand new, mining machine might cost you a couple thousand dollars, or even if you pick up a, an old one on the secondary market, well, that old one will take a lot longer to pay off because, you know, it's, it's not as efficient. so mining is kind of, you can think of it as a race to the bottom." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "11:56", "start": 715.66, "text": "everybody's kind The cheapest power, and if you're not in that top echelon of people with the cheapest power and the fastest hardware and the best operations team, you know, being able to repair these things at scale, you're not gonna be profitable. It's gonna be very difficult for you to be profitable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:11", "start": 730.63, "text": "Right. Okay. So, again, if I'm a Bitcoin beginner, I might have seen some ads online, about cloud mining. Should I do cloud mining, Jan?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "12:20", "start": 740.28, "text": "again, you know, I personally have never done cloud mining. I, I don't think it's Historically, a lot of cloud mining companies have been scams, like just outright scams. there's no real way for you to know what the company's doing with your money. You send them money and then you just, you know, you assume they're mining, but maybe they're just pocketing it and paying, previous users in a, some kind of, you know, Ponzi scheme, right? but as far as I know, there are a few companies that do quote-unquote legit cloud mining, but even still, you're basically just splitting the profits that are already marginal Stay in, in profit, and you're locking yourself up, in a contract that, you know, will last a year or however long the contract is, and at the same time, the price of Bitcoin could go up, it could go down, the hash rate, which is the difficulty, effectively controls the difficulty of, and profitability of mining could go up or down, things could change drastically, and it's, you know, you're basically locked into a contract. So from what I understand, I don't think anybody's ever made money on this, except for the mine-- but yeah, I, I, I wouldn't recommend it, especially now for Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:31", "start": 811.26, "text": "Okay, so, so we're not gonna do Bitcoin mining and we're not gonna do cloud mining, but just as a curious Bitcoin beginner, can you just give us an overview, how does Bitcoin mining work? Yeah, for" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "13:43", "start": 823.07, "text": "sure. I think, again, to dispel the myth of this kind of complex equations thing that you hear about in the media, mining isn't a, it's not really a mathematical, problem that needs to be solved. What really happens with mining That we are creating a lottery system because we need a way to distribute Bitcoin, right? So, we're creating this new type of money, and the question is, how do we distribute it, quote-unquote, fairly? well, we could have a bunch of people, you know, sign up to, to receive it, and we can give our names, and you can say, you know, my, I'm Stephan, here's the proof of my ID. But the idea of, of Bitcoin is that there is no central party in charge of this distribution, and so who responsible in giving out this money. Well, Bitcoin uses a very clever idea called proof of work, and so the idea there is that we're gonna distribute the bitcoins using a lottery system, but instead of having a sort of centrally run lot-lottery system like you might have, in your state run, you know, lotto, here in America at least we have, you know, the idea that you, you just basically buy a, a ticket and then, you know, they roll some numbers and they show them on TV and whoever won gets to claim the prize. We want to do the same idea in Bitcoin, but we don't want to have anybody in charge of running those numbers or, ascertaining whether you've won or not. So what Bitcoin does very cleverly is uses the idea of proof of work. Proof of work essentially means, playing a lottery system where you generate numbers, but these numbers have to be very specific. the way it works is we have essentially a, a very large space in which we are trying to find a very small, subset of things that, that make make sense. So for example, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, okay? We're basically rolling a die and we're generating a random number and we're putting it through-- it is a mathematical formula, but it's not a complex equation, it's just a very simple thing called a hash function. and what the hash function does is it produces, essentially, it takes some data, which is the, the transactional data that's happening in Bitcoin, things like people trying to send Bitcoins to each other, as well as, you know, the, the Bitcoins Being put through this hash function to generate a very large number, and we're trying to find a specific number that's in a very, very small range in a very, very large space. Okay? So what I usually say is that there's As many outcomes to this as there are atoms in the universe. It's roughly on that order of magnitude. So think about the number of atoms in the universe and think about finding a number, you know, if I'm, if I'm thinking of a specific atom. You know, you have to find that atom, right? So how many rolls of the die will it take you to find that atom? It will take you many, many, many rolls, right? and every time you roll that die, you spend a little bit of energy. so the idea is we're basically having a lottery system where miners buy lottery tickets, but instead of buying those lottery tickets from some central party, they buy them from the universe by spending energy to generate randomness. And then that randomness has to fall into, like I said, a small range. And if they find the right magic number, that's in that specific range, they, they ex- they show it to the rest of the network. And then the network, which is everybody else, nodes, anybody who's running a node in the- Bitcoin network, which could be you or me or, you know, you don't have to have anything special, just a computer, or even a phone, that, everybody on the network verifies whether that miner did the right thing by seeing if, if they actually, you know, with the evidence that they present does actually lead to that number." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:23", "start": 1042.63, "text": "Excellent. So you mentioned the SHA two fifty-six hashing, can you explain for us what is actually being hashed together?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "17:31", "start": 1050.96, "text": "Yeah. So again, hashing is the process of taking some data and producing Producing essentially a random looking number. and what's special about a hash function is that you can put in a very small variation to that data. So let's say I take the word, you know, \"Yan\" and I hash that word, I might get some really, really large, number. And then I'll, use the word \"Stefan\" and hash that word, I'll get a completely different, very, very large number. And even if it's like \"Stefan\" with a space, I'll get a completely different number, right? So, in Bitcoin, what we do is we take the transactional data, which is any tran- any, movement of bitcoins that, that needs to happen. So, for example, Yan is sending, you know, point one bitcoins to Stefan, right? I've announced this transaction to the network. Everybody who is mining on the network has heard about it. And then what they're gonna do is they're gonna take that transaction and they're going to add a random number to it. This is like the idea of rolling a die, and they're going to hash Hash it, right? So we're gonna put it through the hash function, and they're gonna see if the number that comes out of the other side is in the right target range, meaning is it in that small space of acceptable answers within the larger space of, you know, the number of atoms in the universe. that's kind of the idea. That's, that's what happens to produce essentially the first block is we just, we just hash that transaction. Now, i-before Bitcoin was, you know, widely available, what pe-people had it, miners were just generating bitcoins, they weren Bitcoin around to anybody. So one of the transactions in each, block, right? A block is just essentially this list of transactions that's being hashed. one of these transactions is a special one that's called the Coinbase, and that's the one that actually produces new bitcoins. So As a miner, you essentially take any transactions that do wanna go into the block, plus a special one that grants you, the block reward, the reward for mining that Bitcoin, and, you hash that together to produce, a block. Now, that's for the first block. Now, every subsequent block does that as well, but it also, attaches a hash of the previous block during that hashing process. So what that does is it creates essentially a chain, a block chain, if you will. This is where we get the word block. Blockchain, right? It's a very sexy sounding word, but all it is is it's telling us that blocks in Bitcoin are linked together by their hashes, and the hash essentially is proving to us what the contents of that block are, and that the contents haven't changed. And then every hash subsequent, and every block subsequent to that block, is telling us that nothing prior to that block has changed leading up to it. So we can verify essentially the, all the transactions, where the Bitcoin was generated, at which block it was generated, at which block it was spent, we can kind of- Followed the trace of any bitcoins that have e- ever existed in Bitcoin because of this idea that blocks are chained together." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:28", "start": 1228.41, "text": "And putting on my Bitcoin beginner hat again, I might be thinking, \"Well, hang on, Jan, it's all well and good that you've got to get within this certain target range, but couldn't I, as a miner, cheat that system? Couldn't I just write a number that's below the nonce? What's stopping me from doing that?\"" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "20:46", "start": 1246.0, "text": "Yeah, so, the word nonce you just used just for the beginners, it means a random number. So We're doing is, it's called, it's a number used only once. That's, that's what \"nonce\" stands for. so we're rolling this die, we're generating this number. Yeah, miners are welcome to do what they want, right? So a miner produces this hash. what is a miner trying to prove in order to, quote unquote, win the lottery? They're trying to prove that they're taking transactions which are valid transactions, meaning they're spending coins that actually exist, meaning that the people spending those coins have provided signatures which essentially say, And they're not spending any coins that have been previously spent, right? That's called double spending. Those are kind of the basic things that make, make transactions valid. So when a, when a miner produces a block, they're telling us, \"Uh, here are all the things, all the transactions that I put into there, including that special Coinbase transaction, which grants them today a twelve and a half Bitcoin reward.\" So every block contains in it twelve and a half bitcoins of reward. Now, let's say they wanted to cheat that, and instead of that twelve and a half bitcoin reward, they produce one with, you know, a thousand bitcoins in it. what's to stop them from doing that? Well, nothing, they can totally do that. however, when they broadcast that block, they-- the trick is they need to get everybody else on the network to accept that block and put it into their block database. which means that any-- remember, all blocks are chained together, to Right? so the network comes to consensus on what the previous blocks have been. So if I as a miner produce a block that is essentially invalid because it doesn't follow the rules of Bitcoin, well, no other miner will take that block into their database, and so they won't mine on top of it, they won't ever link new transactions to it. and also if I as a miner, try to spend those coins to somebody who's running a node, so let's say an exchange or a merchant selling, you know, alpaca socks or whatever it may be, If you try to spend those coins, then that node will also reject those coins because they will never have that block in their database. Their node software will say, \"This is a counterfeit, this is a forgery, and we don't want it in our database,\" so nobody will ever consider those coins valid." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:00", "start": 1380.05, "text": "How does mining work in terms of the reducing reward over time? I guess there's two components to that, right? So what we're referring to here specifically is the block subsidy component of the block reward. So why- Why is that block subsidy going down over time?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "23:16", "start": 1395.56, "text": "Right. So we have two components to the block reward, as you said. One of them is the subsidy, which is these twelve and a half bitcoins that we generate per, per block, and then we also have the fees, which are, essentially anybody who's sending a Bitcoin transaction can voluntarily select a fee, zero or more, and essentially miners decide which transactions they want based on fees. So it's kind of a market-based solution. But to talk about the reward, so what happened- Happened with, Bitcoin is Satoshi decided to have it distributed over time. Now, we don't know the exact motivations of, you know, why he chose this specific, distribution curve, but the way that it's designed is that Bitcoin's block reward is cut in half every four years. So the very first Bitcoin block that was produced had fifty bitcoins generated. And that happened for the first four years. after that, we went to twenty five bitcoins for the next four years, and then we went to twelve and a half bitcoins, which is where we are now, and we're just about to come up to, another halving which is happening, in around May of next year, which will bring us to six and a quarter bitcoins. So why, why does this happen? Well, again, this is enforced by the rules in the software. So In the software, we know that, that at a certain block height, we-- the block reward should be this or that, right? and so if you try to produce a block reward that is Outside of those parameters, you're gonna get rejected. So today, miners have to produce twelve and a half blocks, bitcoins per block. If they produce one that has, you know, fifty, then that block won't be valid. That was valid, you know, eight years ago or whenever Bitcoin was born, ten years ago." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:04", "start": 1503.95, "text": "Okay, so what are some other things that might make a block invalid? So one, as you mentioned, is if the miner tries to give themselves too much reward, let's say, or too much block subsidy. are there any other things you can think of there that? would be, make it an invalid block, and, w- would that, I guess, would that make it still Bitcoin, or could someone, would that make it something else?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "25:29", "start": 1529.16, "text": "Yeah, I mean, a, a, a block has a number of validity rules. I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of things, but I think the ones that I mentioned are probably the most important. signatures are really, really important, right? Because the way that we determine who gets to spend bitcoins is that we essentially lock them up into boxes. Where people have the keys to them, that's what we call a private key. So when I send bitcoins to Stefan, Stefan, those are locked with Bitcoin, with Stefan's public key essentially. That's corresponding to his address. And then, when he wants to spend those, he has to unlock them by providing the private key to that, mailbox. Now, he doesn't actually show anybody the key, he just shows people a signature. And a signature is kind of an encrypted version, of the key that tells us that he does in fact control it without actually revealing it. That's kind of in layman's terms. So the, the idea is if you're spending bitcoins, you have to absolutely provide the signatures, and so those are controlling who gets to move what, and those absolutely must be valid for the block. The block reward has to be correct, and obviously, any, any miscalculation really in the block is could, could trigger, it to be invalid. We actually recently experienced some miner that potentially had a bug in their software and granted themselves the wrong amount of reward, and No, that was like a fifty thousand dollar mistake right there, where they had generated a block and, and basically lost all that money, mining and not having received the reward. So that does happen even by accident." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:03", "start": 1623.46, "text": "Okay, so how about now the hash rate? So what is the hash rate, and what's the relationship there with the dollar value of Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "27:13", "start": 1632.85, "text": "Yeah, so, as we said, you know, mining is an industrial process and, and it's about miners basically burning energy, and/or burning electricity. And, what they're doing there is they're playing that lottery and they're producing, Bitcoin by, by proving some-- to somebody that they've generated a number that is statistically improbable, right? So, the issue there is, well, what happens if we have more miners, right? So let's imagine that there's just, you know, ten miners on the network and they're all mining away, all have the equivalent amount of hardware, they're all doing the same thing, and then all of a sudden- the price of Bitcoin is going up, and so everybody's looking around, they're saying, \"Hey, this is really cool, we can make a lot of money. Let's go make some money.\" So we have ten more miners that join the network, and they start mining as well, because they're, you know, they wanna generate Bitcoins. So That would cause Bitcoin to produce blocks too quickly, right? remember the idea is that Satoshi programmed in this every four years we reduce the block interval and we want to, we want Bitcoin to take a long time to actually distribute all the way to the end. It actually will be somewhere in the year 2140 that we'll finish distributing it. So if every time the price goes up and more miners wanna mine and we start doing producing blocks too fast, that's, that's an issue, right? We're not, we're not, we're gonna violate that issuance schedule. and one of the most important things about Bitcoin is its credibility with its monetary policy. So we know exactly how many bitcoins are gonna be issued at any given time, we know exactly how many total there will be, and all these kind of rules, right? So more miners come into the network, what happens? How does the network deal with that? How do we prevent Bitcoin from being issued too quickly? This is, I think, the most interesting and clever part of Bitcoin, and it's called the difficulty adjustment. So This idea of how many, how many, die rolls the, the miners can do per second is called the hash rate. Right? How many hashes we can do per second equals how many lottery tickets we can buy per second equals how many bitcoins we can eventually produce. So if too much hash rate comes on board, then the difficulty adjusts. So what does that mean? Well, every two thousand sixteen blocks, which is approximately two weeks, we essentially look back in history and we say, \"Well, how fast have we been?\" producing blocks. Is it more or less than ten, minutes on average? We wanna have blocks be about ten minutes apart on average. So if blocks are coming too quickly, then we're going to increase the difficulty, which means that we're essentially shrinking that acceptable range for what those lottery tickets can end up being in. So again, imagine we're trying to hit a number in the space of all atoms in the universe, and at first the range is acceptable range is like from zero to a billion, and then we shrink it to from zero to to a million, right? We've dramatically shrunk that, that range and now we've made it a lot more difficult to mine. And so essentially that's what's happening with mining is that whenever, the blocks are coming too fast, we adjust the difficulty upwards and then essentially miners become less, you know, less profitable because it takes them more hashes to generate the same amount of bitcoins. And then the same thing happens in the other direction. So let's say the price of, of the Bitcoin is falling and now all of a sudden it's- miners too much in hardware, electricity, operational costs, and they're starting to become unprofitable. And this, this happens, especially in areas where, for example, energy costs can be variable. So let's say you're in a place that gets really hot in the summer, energy costs go up, heating costs go up, and all of a sudden you're actually spending more money to produce that Bitcoin than, than, the Bitcoin's worth. Well, that's-- that doesn't make any sense, for you as an economic, you know, as Unless you wanna, speculatively, speculatively run them, but most people would just curtail at that point, turn those off. And then that means the hash rate is coming off of the network. So now all of a sudden the blocks are getting too slow. Okay, well, how do we compensate for that? We make the difficulty lower, which means we make the target range bigger, so we make it easier to find that needle in the haystack because the, the, the space of needles is larger. So now we're letting people, you know, we're making it more profitable to Bitcoin, so again, we're balancing in the other direction. And this is kind of a thing that happens all the time, if you look at the, charts that estimate hash rate and, to be clear, we, we don't know what the hash rate actually is, we kind of estimate it based on the number of, blocks we're finding and, and how often we're finding them and, that kind of thing. So we are, taking a guess at what the hash rate is, but we can kind of figure that out," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "32:02", "start": 1922.27, "text": "Yeah, that, that essentially, adjusts up and down all the time, and over time as the price of Bitcoin goes up, we just get more and more miners. So that's what we've been getting, for the last, ten years almost, on a exponential curve." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:16", "start": 1935.92, "text": "Right. Yeah. so I guess that, that rise in the hash rate is coming from a number of things, right? So part of that is just better technology, part of that is more people trying to do mining and more resources being devoted to mining, which I guess some of technical component of it itself. Do you have any just comments for the beginner in terms of how that has looked over the history of Bitcoin, like how miners have tried to somewhat play the cycle? Well, I'm not sure what-- Can you be a little bit more specific about that? just around how some miners are effectively, they're sort of speculating into the future of, yeah. So they have to somewhat speculate, oh, okay, I think the hash rate is gonna rise this much, and that's why I need to be careful what projects I- I undertake, because, you know, this number of machinery. Right," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "33:06", "start": 1985.53, "text": "we've definitely seen, I mean, to, you know, the history of Bitcoin, mining, it started with just people on laptops, right? We used to have, it was okay to mine with CPUs because the difficulty was very low, so everybody was just mining on their computer, and then eventually it turned into GPUs, which are, you know, graphics cards, and eventually we got to the point where everybody was manufacturing custom hardware, and this is, again, that sort of race to the bottom where everybody's trying to get The more you can kind of outcompete the other guy. but it's also possible to grow too quickly. and if you grow very, very, very fast and, you know, you, you kind of, balloon your operation, then all of a sudden a bear market hits and the price of Bitcoin tanks, now you may be in a bad spot. So it's actually very tricky. I mean, we've seen miners go out of business, we've seen new miners come on board in places, you know, like Iceland or, far reaches of, you" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "34:02", "start": 2042.33, "text": "Cheaper power. So I think the, the interesting thing about the, the, the business cycle here is that, the price of Bitcoin, as it goes up, creates more mining, interest. People wanna mine, they think it's kind of free money, they start building businesses around it, and then a bear market hits, and if it's a brutal bear market, it really does a great job of washing away any ineffi-inefficiency, because, you know, unless you're, you're able to sustain, long-term operations throughout, you know, you're, you're out of luck and you're going out of business. And we've seen even giants, companies like Bitmain, who was a huge player, suffer tremendous losses, especially since they of course took a position in, in Bitcoin Cash or B-Cash, as we like to call it, that was a mistake. But, you know, that if you make a mistake as a miner, you don't have a lot of room for error really, because you are really competing in a hyper-efficient, market where somebody was got slightly cheaper power than you" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "35:02", "start": 2102.25, "text": "Better operations team, you know, you're toast. so I think, what we're gonna see in mining is very exciting because, we recently just heard the announcement about Layer One, which is a company building a data center out in Texas where they're gonna try to vertically integrate, they're gonna produce their own hardware, they're gonna essentially have their own power plant or substation, and they're gonna run that whole operation vertically integrated. So what that's gonna do is it's going to make their cost of producing Bitcoin very, very low compared to other players, and so It's gonna mean that everybody's gotta step up their game, because otherwise they're gonna be left in the dust, the difficulty will adjust upwards, and everybody will become unprofitable. So I think the next couple years of mining are gonna be very interesting to see that play out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:44", "start": 2144.02, "text": "Great, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about mining attacks now. So there's one attack known as an empty blocks attack. What's that? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "35:53", "start": 2153.12, "text": "so, people talk about a fifty-one percent attack in mining, which is essentially the idea that if you have more than half of the hash power of the network You can dominate the production of blocks, right? Because if you think about it as a lottery, then, you know, you toss a coin, and if that coin isn't fair, and, more, you're getting heads more of the time, then you're winning those blocks, you're being able to produce, more blocks than the next guy. and then the way that the Bitcoin consensus works is that we just go with whatever chain has the most proof of work, right? meaning that whoever's expended the most amount of hash rate gets to, produce those blocks considered valid by the system as long as they follow all the other rules. So, what does it mean if you have more than half of the, the hash power of the network? Well, it means you can dominate the rights to the ledger. So, let's say, you know, you're producing the, the chain is five blocks long and you're producing the sixth block and the seventh block, and the rest of the network isn't able to keep up with you, right? So, now that you're producing essentially every block or you can eventually make a longer" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "37:02", "start": 2222.39, "text": "So one of the things you can do is you can mine empty blocks, which essentially will pre-prevent Bitcoin from working because, you know, no-nobody will be able to transact, they won't Submit transactions, but they'll never make it into the database, they'll never make it into the actual ledger of Bitcoin, which is those blocks. So that's an attack that you can definitely do, however, it's very, very expensive to do. So it requires you to not only control half, half of the, well, in order to control half of the hash rate, you pretty much have to have half of the hardware and, you know, half of the, the energy expenditure of the network. And, you know, as, as people like to say, When they, when they're like making fun of Bitcoin as, we spend like as much energy as, as a small or medium-sized country on this thing. and that's great, that's, that's how we keep it secure, right? Because in order to attack Bitcoin, you're gonna need to amass the resources of a country to, to produce those, blocks faster than the competition. and while you're doing that, of course, the competition is going to also step up their game and try to compete with you. So it's a very interesting system that way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:11", "start": 2290.97, "text": "Right And the point there that it's not a one time shot attack. In order to do this sort of attack, it's a sustained expenditure enough that people, I guess, lost faith in the idea of Bitcoin ever coming back." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "38:26", "start": 2305.84, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, people will, will talk about this a lot, but the, the, they'll talk about the fifty one percent attack as if it's something that's like we could just do it any day. First of all, we haven't really seen it. and part of the reason might be that, you know, all the miners are mining Bitcoin and they don't wanna attack it, but I think the real reason is that you can't really sustain it indefinitely, right? I mean, you can sustain it for an hour, a day, you know, maybe even a week, right? Depending on how much, how much-- it's, it's all about the resources. If it's a nation state and they wanna like print money infinitely to sustain an attack on Bitcoin, I mean, they could do it. the question is what, what does that do, though, right? So yes, you can prevent the chain An attack that's sustained for weeks. First of all, you're, you're essentially competing against every other player on the planet. I mean, there will be mining operations that can just add hardware and, and, overcome you. But even if somehow, by some magic, you have a, you know, essentially so much money that you're printing these ASIC, mining machines and you're printing your own electricity, essentially, you know, you're, you're gen- you're wasting the resources of the state to do that. I mean, still- We could fork, we could fork the algorithm that we use, right? And that would instantly invalidate all of your attack. and so I think even the, the fact that that kind of thing could be ha- could happen makes any kind of even attempt at attack sort of impractical, 'cause, and what's the point? You're, you may, you get to do it once, and then what? You start all over, right? You have to build your hardware from scratch, everything from scratch, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:07", "start": 2406.79, "text": "It could be thought of like that's the, that's the going nuclear option, right? That's the, if everything else fails, switch the proof of work algorithm." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "40:14", "start": 2414.26, "text": "Yeah. And I don't think it's gonna be easy. I mean, I don't think it's gonna be easy to do that, but if Bitcoin is truly, quote unquote, broken and like there's nothing we can do about it, then I think we will find consensus around some variation of that algo-algorithm that will system, but, you know, we will destroy the entire mining industry if we do that. we'll have to start from scratch. But, again, it, it would be possible and Bitcoin will be reborn, even if it takes years to rebuild it, it'll b- be reborn. So I think even the idea that it's impossible to kill it that way prevents, these attacks from happening because it doesn't really make sense to, to waste all your resources. You might as well just, like, amass Bitcoin and join the, join the party." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:00", "start": 2460.45, "text": "Exactly right. Yeah, I think, maybe put it another way, it's like it's part of the threat of a proof of work change might be enough to stop somebody trying to attack Bitcoin, because they know even if they did, then all the Bitcoin people might just switch out to another algorithm. Right. I mean, and that wouldn't be a simple task, but it would at least act as some kind of deterrent against somebody trying to do that attack." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "41:25", "start": 2485.45, "text": "Yeah, I, I, I think so. you know, we don't have any proof of this. We don't know what It's gonna happen in speculation, but, you know, if you kind of play out the game theory intuitively, it kind of makes sense because if you're gonna kill Bitcoin, you have to kill it dead, and I don't see any way that you can kill it in a way that it won't, you know, resurrect in some other form, right? so what's the point?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:46", "start": 2506.26, "text": "Right. Yeah. and I guess the other question that somebody might be worried about if they're a Bitcoin beginner, the risk of centralization or, you know, and mining centralization And so I guess there are probably three main axes on which to consider this, right? So one of them is literally the mining pools, another one is the geographic, you know, location of mining, and another one might be around the manufacturer of the hardware of mining. So do you have any thoughts just on that and whether we're seeing increasing decentralization in that over time?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "42:22", "start": 2541.88, "text": "Yeah, so with pools, to-- for the newbies out there, a pool is basically the idea that, you know, because Bitcoin mining is a lottery it's possible you can just play this lottery and never win it. So you can just s-sit there, you know, with your computer churning, burning energy, you just never-- you'll never land a block. so pools have arisen as a way to share that risk. So people basically connect to the pool and they share their hash rate, and then if a block is found by a member of the pool, then everybody gets paid out proportionally to what they've contributed. but we've seen over the years that pools have really changed. I mean, pools have" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "42:59", "start": 2579.25, "text": "I believe in twenty fourteen this happened, with GHash that did amass close to fifty percent of the hash, but people left it. so it's important to realize that pools are simply, they're temporary structures and they're essentially voluntary associations of people, of, of smaller mining operations. So those mining operations, if they suspect the pool is acting maliciously or doing something they don't like, could simply leave. and I think we're gonna see, more interesting evolution of pools with, the better hash proposal, right? Right now, that's kind of a thing that, MacKrell put together. it's an idea that, right now the pool itself decides what is going into the block that you're mining. So you're literally just being kind of a dumb, you know, hash producer. You're just, y-y, they give you data and you hash it. with better hash, you as the miner have more control over what goes into the block, so that prevents the pool from doing a lot of malicious things. So hopefully we'll see that. I know that there's a with better hash enabled. So, I think once that happens, we'll, we'll probably see miners, choose that because it's, it's way better for Bitcoin, it's better for decentralization. So I'm, I'm hopeful that that will really change the pool story, because today it is true that there's probably three or four pools you could put together that would be, fifty percent of, of the hash rate, but again, pools aren't miners, right? So they could, if we, if that were to happen and those pools" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "44:29", "start": 2669.27, "text": "Again, this is an attack they get to do once, and then it's quite known, and nobody will ever use those pools again. So it's the same kind of nuclear option as, as the, you know, empty block attack or anything like that, where, you know, what's the point? Why are they doing that? if they're being coerced by some state, again, what's the point? Why, how are they gonna kill Bitcoin this way? They're not really going to. so yeah, that's, that's addressing pools," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "44:56", "start": 2696.47, "text": "as far Say where mining is, because a lot of these things are undisclosed operations. So a lot of it's from, you know, just known operations or voluntary disclosure. we do know that China is a leader in mining, it doesn't mean that that's gonna be the case forever. Obviously, like I mentioned, the Layer One, is an interesting effort to bring a lot of mining power to America, and if that's successful, I don't see why we wouldn't replicate that in all over the, America, all over Canada, other places where we can get cheaper power. And I think we're gonna see a lot of innovation too. We're gonna see power innovation, we're gonna see people setting up mining in places that we didn't think were gonna be profitable before. we're gonna see energy companies maybe reclaiming some of their curtailed, energy, 'cause we have companies like shutting down power production because they're overproducing. perhaps mining, starts to live inside of, energy producers. perhaps we see mining on, oil fields like we're, we're doing with Upstream Data and other companies like I think that's going to really change the decentralization game with mining. And then, what was the third one?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:07", "start": 2766.71, "text": "around hardware manufacturers. Oh, hardware manufacturers. I think in this case it would be around, fab, like, so I guess there's a few things. There's the miners themselves, and then there's the chip fab, the underlying chip fab, so there's components around that. Well, we've heard" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "46:18", "start": 2777.72, "text": "about Samsung supposedly entering the game. I don't know where they are with this. I've kind of not followed it. I know there's been some touch" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "46:26", "start": 2786.17, "text": "and go Little early, and I think that we're in a place where there was massive gains to be had early on and, and people build out these labs and try to, you know, kind of front run, generating new generations of these things, people like Bitmain would produce the, the chips and then run their own miners, but, we're getting to the point where mining hardware is getting commoditized, the designs, are well known, how far we can shrink those transistors is kind of, hitting a wall. So Once that happens, we're gonna see more companies play, and, it'll be a commodity, you know, like anything else, right? Like GPUs are now. and so we will see, I think, more decentralization there as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:11", "start": 2830.56, "text": "Yeah. And now, as a Bitcoin beginner, let's say I have sent a Bitcoin transaction, and sometimes it can confirm really quickly, and other times it confirms really-- it takes a long time. Now, what is a Poisson distribution, and how does that apply? yeah, so," }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "47:29", "start": 2848.77, "text": "you might hear I hear that Bitcoin blocks come ten minutes apart on average. So what, what does that mean? Does that mean, we release a block every ten minutes? No, because it's, again, it's a probability game, right? Bitcoin mining is a statistical, game where we're rolling a die and we're trying to guess a number, and again, it could, it could take, it could theoretically take all day, it could take all month, right? so Bitcoin blocks are produced ten minutes on average, if you take all the blocks and you average them out over You will find that it is about ten minutes, but, unless of course there's been more or less hash power added or subtracted. But the reality is that for any given block, right, the time to the next block could be twenty minutes, it could be an hour, right? We, we don't know when a block is coming. so the real answer is like, if you ask, you know, at this point in time, when is the next, when are we likely to see the next block? The answer is always ten minutes, right? It's always gonna take ten" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "48:29", "start": 2909.27, "text": "But, because of the way that blocks are, you know, sometimes they're very close together, they could be seconds apart, sometimes it could be an hour apart. if you were to throw a dart, like let's imagine that the, the block times are all written out on a, on a line, right? And you kind of see the blocks coming close together, close together, very, a few seconds apart, then you see a really big space for one that took, you know, thirty minutes or forty minutes. if you were just to throw a dart" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "48:59", "start": 2939.27, "text": "You are in a smaller space, and so this is why there's this effect of like, that your transactions always actually take longer to confirm than, than the average, right? Because, you know, by sampling it that way, it's actually more like twenty minutes. so it's kind of a weird statistical, statistical thing that's hard to understand. But I think for the, for the beginner, the more relevant thing to understand is that there is no guarantee whatsoever about when your block, when your transaction will be- Confirmed, which is a little bit scary, but also kind of fun. it also depends on the block times, right? sorry, the block, sorry, the block capacity, right? So when you're, when you're submitting a transaction, you're waiting for the next block to come, and that block may or may not include your transaction. If there's a lot of demand and other people are paying more in fees, well, they're gonna get included and you're gonna have to wait until the next block. So it's very, it's a little bit random" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "49:59", "start": 2999.33, "text": "Within, you know, let's say an hour, it's almost certainly gonna be confirmed, and, the more you wait, the more certainty you get with that. And with the, the way that the blockchain is structured, with the proof of work, the more blocks that are mined on top of your transaction, the more final it becomes, right? The, the harder it becomes to reverse, because in order to reverse, you'd have to, do one of these sort of fifty-one percent attacks and expend lots and lots of energy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:24", "start": 3023.66, "text": "Yeah. So basically what we've spoken through is one Bitcoin. Did you mind telling us what are your thoughts on where should the listener think of situating this book if they're trying to learn about Bitcoin? What's the book that you should read before this, and then what's the book that you should read next? Yeah, I, after inventing Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "50:43", "start": 3042.54, "text": "Yeah, I think that, well, the book that I read that really resonated with me the most in the space was, The Bitcoin Standard, which I think is a great book for people without a, economic background, like myself, like I'm more really understand how money works in general. So I would really recommend to readers, to read the, the Bitcoin Standard to understand the economics of Bitcoin, because that's something that I don't really, talk about as much in the book. My book is more about how Bitcoin works, from, you know, the nuts and bolts, you know, how does mining work, how do transactions get into the ledger, that kind of thing. but on the other hand, it is very short, and I also do cover the motivations for Bitcoin. So I cover some of the whys I think those are, valuable in understanding why he wanted to create the system. So, I like my book as an intro book, and I give it to people who are slightly technically minded, whereas to people who are more, sort of generalists, I really like to give Safe's book, The Bitcoin Standard, because it does give them that nice economic overview. as far as afterwards, I think some of the deeper books, obviously if you're a developer, I would recommend Andreas' Mastering Bitcoin, that's always popular, very- It goes very much in depth, it's, it's, you know, there's code and stuff like that. My book doesn't get into code, it really just very high level. And, yeah, I think, Andreas' book would be a good one, as well as Jimmy Song's Programming Block-Blockchain, if you're, or sorry, Programming Bitcoin. he used to have a course called Programming Blockchain, but, yeah, the book's called Programming Bitcoin. very good book, relating to that course as well. But yeah, that's for technical people. If you're, if you're not technical, I think you'd get by with, the Bitcoin standard as well as my book, I think you'd get by just fine." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:32", "start": 3152.03, "text": "Great. I also was curious, I think you, you had some interesting comments around how Silicon Valley and tech people, they often make a certain error in reasoning or thinking about Bitcoin because they accidentally make a new money without realizing. What were you getting at there?" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.42, "text": "yeah, actually, you know, I went through this process myself effectively because when I got into Bitcoin In 2016, Ethereum was making a big, a lot of noise, right? And, I heard about Bitcoin in 2011, but again, I never researched it. So, in 2016, when I did start researching, I looked at Ethereum first, and they had really good marketing, and it was all, you know, you can create a bank in a hundred lines of code. It was very exciting as a developer for me, it looked very, very attractive. and I asked other developers as well, and they, So I really went down that rabbit hole for probably six months studying Ethereum, studying all these other, blockchain projects and stuff like that. And it wasn't really until, I started reading some of the economic thought, around Bitcoin, actually part of the reason why I found your podcast, Stephan, I started understanding the, the economics of Bitcoin, the monetary aspects, the Austrian economic stuff. And what that led me to is understanding that Bitcoin is money. And so if it is money, right? what crypto has done is it's, it's created a free market competition for money, which we've never really had, well, not in recent times, right? Back in the day, we did have free market money, which was gold. we had other metals that competed for that, and but they lost that battle because gold was the hardest and the most saleable. And so If you think about that, in crypto we have no barriers, right? We don't have a nation state, we don't have the government saying you must use this currency here. Because if you go to Venezuela today, nobody in Venezuela wants to use bolivars, right? That's something imposed by the government. If they could have their choice, they would much rather take US dollars. That's a much better currency, right? It's more liquid, it's more saleable, it holds its value better. and that's why the world, frankly, always uses US dollars, right Such a US dollar black market, because, as far as fiat currencies go, the US dollar is the most liquid, the most saleable, and the best, store of value. But in crypto, we don't have nation states, so nobody's protecting one crypto from competing with another on its monetary properties. And so what does that mean? Well, basically, if you buy Ethereum, well, you either think that Ethereum is money, that Ether is money, right? Or you're speculating on Ether as a project of some kind, and you're eventually going to- To sell that Ether for money, well, what is money? Well, money is the most saleable and hardest thing in a free market, which is Bitcoin, right? So you're either gonna be selling that Ether, Ether for Bitcoin, or you're gonna be selling it for US dollars if you don't believe in Bitcoin. which makes it so that any of these projects, that maybe they're interesting ideas, maybe they have some technical merit, right? But by virtue of the fact that they produce a coin, something that trades like a money in a free market against Bitcoin, they're basically creating a losing proposition for themselves because nobody wants to hold those things long term, and this was kind of the idea of this, you know, people tried to create this utility token thesis where they said, \"Well, people are going to hold these tokens because they're gonna appreciate in value for this or that reason,\" but Maybe in a closed ecosystem they would, but you're always forgetting that they're competing against Bitcoin, which is the hardest and most saleable money. So, from that perspective, I think anybody who's creating these projects with, these sort of native tokens, they're kind of forgetting that, they're inadvertently creating money, and, people are going to eventually have to hold the money that's actually appreciating value, which is, or at least holding its value, which is Bitcoin. So that's gonna cause all these tokens to reduce in value, and if that happens, then Something like providing security for, for the system, like Ether is supposed to be the money of Ethereum because it has to provide, security, it has to pay the miners, right? So that's security for E-Ethereum. And then, it also has to act as money for any of these sort of DeFi, ideas that are floating around, right? Like people are saying we can issue loans on, on Ethereum. Well, you have to lock up Ether and, and pretend that it's money. but if it's not money, which means it's" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "57:01", "start": 3420.84, "text": "Retain the, the monetary premium and it's gonna go down in price and the whole thing's gonna fall apart. And so that's kind of what I've realized, and I think that, it's funny because tech people, of which I am one, I would, I would definitely classify myself as, as a tech person, they actually fall into these scams like much more readily than, than people with an economic background. so once I started listening to people with economic background, I started realizing how, how none of this makes any sense, which it does, it does on paper. On paper, it totally does. I mean, the marketing's very good, but the, the reality of it, yeah, it's free market competition, and people are just not gonna hold this stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:38", "start": 3457.88, "text": "Right. Yeah, no, that's great. Look, I think we're pretty much coming out of time, running out of time here. but Jan, before we let you go, can you make sure you tell the listeners" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "57:52", "start": 3471.63, "text": "my handle is SkwP, which is S K W P. It's a very strange name I chose when I was fourteen. If you hit me in DMs, I'll explain it. and then you can also get the book on Amazon or at inventingbitcoin dot com, where you can pay with Bitcoin if you want, but I don't recommend it, because I have to go through all the work of sending you the book, plus you have to KYC yourself to me. You don't wanna do that, just buy it on Amazon. But if you do wanna give me your" }, { "speaker": "yan_pritzker", "time": "58:21", "start": 3501.33, "text": "Or Amazon, and, find me on Twitter, S K W P. Alright, thank you very much for joining me. Alright, thank you, Stephan. It was, it was a pleasure." } ] }