{ "episodeId": "SLP155", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "clark_moody": { "name": "Clark Moody", "role": "guest", "tag": "CLARK" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 7.79, "text": "Hi, you're listening to the Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today my guest is Clark Moody, Bitcoin entrepreneur and the man behind one of the best Bitcoin dashboards going out there. This podcast is brought to you by Kraken. If you're looking for a place to buy and sell Bitcoin, Kraken is the place for you. Kraken offer a high quality platform with high trading volume and low fees. They also offer twenty four seven support, so it's really easy to sign up or get help if you need it. And there's also Kraken Pro mobile app and Kraken Futures mobile app, delivering all the security and features you love about the Kraken exchange in a beautiful mobile first design for Bitcoin trading. 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Unchained are producing awesome content, and they've got open-source tools such as Hermit and Caravan. I think you'll enjoy partnering with them. Go and learn more: unchained-dashcapital.com. Bitcoin is better money, and you want to stack it regularly without manual processing, right? If you're in the US, you must look up Swan Bitcoin at swanbitcoin dot com. You can link any major US bank account via ACH and auto-buy weekly or monthly, and it's delivered to your wallet or stored with a licensed and regulated custodian. Swan Bitcoin's focus is on education and Bitcoin advocacy. Jan Pritzker, he's the author of Inventing Bitcoin, he's their CTO, and Brady from Citizen Bitcoin is head of education. I'm involved as an advisor with a small equity stake Also, so there's GiveBitcoin dot io for your Bitcoin gifting and go to SwanBitcoin dot com for your automated Bitcoin stacking. So if you've got a hardware wallet, have you backed up the seed? 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So today with Clark, we talk about his history in Bitcoin, why he started this dashboard, and we talk through a bunch of these different statistics which I think will be really handy for those of you who are newer to Bitcoin to give you some perspective on the statistics what you should be looking at and some different ways that you might think of those, whether they are blockchain stats, node stats, mining, stock to flow, output types, or future directions that Clark could take it. Here's the interview. Clark, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. So, Clark, I'm a fan of your work. I know you've been around the Bitcoin game for a while. You've done various startups, you've worked with Dan Held as well, and also you've got this awesome dashboard which we're gonna talk to as well. But just, tell us a little bit about yourself. what are you working on these days?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "03:52", "start": 231.75, "text": "Yeah, so- I started my Bitcoin journey in 2011, built a Mount Gox live chart and order book and all of that stuff. And at the same time, I was working on a project called RTBTC, which, was a web-based trading platform interface so you could trade any of the exchanges you wanted with the same UI. It's a really nice chart, really nice UI. during that time is when I first met up with Dan, and we actually collaborated on his zero- block mobile app. So he needed a chart, I had charts, so we embedded my charts in his app, you know, simple web view, but it was the fastest way to get charts in there. And it was good that we worked together because, we were both acquired by Blockchain late 2013, early 2014, kind of that first big eleven hundred bubble, run up. And so we worked together on that, rebranded my product from RTBTC, which is like the worst name ever, to Zero Block Trading, and so that was fun to work, you know, get to know him, work, work with him, and then we got back together in twenty seventeen and, co-founded Interchange along with Matt Gallagher to build institutional back office tools, for managing any, any crypto asset. Answering the questions, what do I own? Where is it? What's it worth right now? Doing accounting on that. And, we-- that was acquired by Kraken last year, mid twenty nineteen. So we're still, still going strong at Kraken. And, yeah. So been in the space a while, worked with Dan for a while." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:33", "start": 333.03, "text": "Yeah, like I said, I'm a big fan of your dashboard. I use it quite often myself when I wanna check out stats on Bitcoin network. And I even use it as a teaching tool when I'm working with the new coinor and they've got different questions like, \"Oh, how many bitcoins have been issued?\" I'll go, \"Okay, one sec, let me just pull up the dashboard.\" And then, boom, you can show them, \"Okay, this is the money supply today, some of the different statistics.\" So why did you start this dashboard?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "05:58", "start": 358.43, "text": "Well, yeah, first of all, it was, you know, I built all my products for me first. it's the kind of thing that, it's like I've got it sitting up on one of my monitors for two or three months before I even tell anybody about it. but yeah, I just wanted that quick glance, broad overview of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem so that you could just say, \"I wonder where the hash rate's sitting, I wonder where this is sitting, where the mempool is, whatever.\" And You, you know, instead of pulling up your bookmarks folder on your browser, you've got just the numbers refined down. Now, during the, the, the SegWit activation time, you know, you were going and checking out block version numbers and what's the miner signaling, and we don't have any, in-flight soft works right now, but I'll, I'll sure have that stuff when the time comes. but you're looking at block sizes, you're looking at fees, you're looking at everything, and, you know, I'm sure you did, like, found yourself going to ten different sites, and you had them all up. So I wanted to bring those all into one place. I'd also like to give a shout out to Ansel at Bitcoin and Markets podcast. So during 2017, he was like my go-to podcast, and he would rattle off these various figures throughout the show, and you could tell he was going to different sites. And so I was like, \"Man, it'd be nice if there was that one place, where all of these things were.\" one of the, the most interesting stats that he had, which I don't have on my dashboard, but one of his was the chain value density, was this like the block size divided by the market cap or market cap divided by block size, you get this kind of like dollar per megabyte of block space. Number, and you could use it to compare chains, you know, Bitcoin Cash at the time. Anyway, so that was just one of those really interesting ones that's kind of, kind of a weird stat that'd be fun to have." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:50", "start": 469.88, "text": "Yeah, that's great. And Ansel, Ansel is another OG in the space, and he's done a, a great job with his podcast and the work he shares on Twitter and so on. in terms of your dashboard, then, do you see it as, monitoring tool and then also somewhat of an education tool? Would you" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "08:08", "start": 487.87, "text": "say that's But I've got those descriptions on each field. Like when you click a field in the dashboard, there's a small description of what it is. You know, like that takes writing like actual sentences, which is a lot harder for me than writing code, so some of those could be improved. But yeah, so you could, you could just pop open. I found myself at meetups, my, our local meetup, saying, \"You know, we're talking about block size, we're talking about something,\" and I'd pull out the dashboard two or three times during the conversation just to say, \"You Awesome. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:41", "start": 521.06, "text": "yeah, so let's talk through some of the different statistics and maybe what we can do today is also not just talk through the statistic, but also what's the deeper meaning of it and how, how are you thinking about it? Because I think that will be useful for listeners, maybe for the beginner and intermediate level listeners, for them to get a, get their own, improve their own grasp of what's going on with the blockchain and so on. So look, high level, I guess, when we first look at the dashboard in the top left, you got the price, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:10", "start": 550.02, "text": "Block height, right? So Bitcoin has a blockchain, and we can see exactly how many blocks there are. It's funny you've also got here the gBTC premium, and so right now as we record this, it's sitting around twenty percent, twenty point eight percent. what do you make of that gBTC premium? Is it just that people are willing to pay that much more for easy access to synthetic Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "09:31", "start": 570.73, "text": "Yeah, so gBTC is, traditional ticker that you can buy through your brokerage, and it kind of represents that, just like you said, that, that convenient- It's premium of, I don't know how to custody Bitcoin, I just want some exposure, I can just go into my standard brokerage, I've got Apple stock, I've got whatever, and I've got GBTC. So the premium kind of represents that opportunity that, that people are willing to pay for that convenience. Yeah. And, in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:00", "start": 600.01, "text": "terms of the price and then the market cap, obviously that's not-- One funny thing I find is that the longer someone's been around in Bitcoin, they tend to talk about price less often. Right? Because they're just more focused on development or the community building or some other aspect of it. But I, I suppose it, it, it is, in fairness, the bigger Bitcoin's price goes and the bigger the market capitalization goes, the more use value somebody has with Bitcoin, because now they can actually transfer more money, without necessarily moving, the price of Bitcoin up and down with like slippage. Do you have any, comments on that kind of idea?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "10:36", "start": 636.11, "text": "Yeah, sure. So Liquidity is a measure that I'm not showing here, but, liquidity is this interesting word that it really represents how much is available to buy or sell right now. It's time based. There's not just, you can say, \"Oh, that market's liquid,\" what you're really saying is, \"That market has buyers and sellers at size all the time.\" And it might look, you know, the dashboard now has that markets block is pretty small, and it's the first thing. I do plan on putting more things up there in, in the markets related stuff. There's tons of stuff you could do there. But so it's, you know, you lead with the price because maybe that's the first thing that people are gonna kind of glance at on their phone. It's the top thing on the site, you look at it quick. But the market cap does represent that kind of- Easy to grasp how big is Bitcoin? How big is it right now? And, you know, when it's sitting at a trillion, the Bitcoin's like forty-four thousand dollars or whatever. And so if it's seven trillion, it's as big as gold, and you could just have that really quick- Glance at, \"Wow, Bitcoin's pretty big,\" you know? So for maybe the, maybe the person looking at it for the first time say, \"Oh, this is a hundred sixty billion, as we're recording, hundred sixty billion dollar thing. That's not insignificant, right?\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:57", "start": 716.99, "text": "Right. Yeah. and so the next one down is the blockchain, and so we've got the block height, we've got the money supply, very important, percentage issued. So I find this, now personally, when I'm trying to teach, new coiner, it's quite a interesting thing Point out to them that, look, on this dashboard you can see, again, at the time of recording, percentage issued eighty-six point nine percent, eighteen point two five million of the bitcoins that will ever be mined is already out there existing today, and that, that's perhaps counterintuitive for some." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "12:31", "start": 750.88, "text": "Yeah, fully auditable supply hugely important. It's, it's one of the fundamental value propositions of Bitcoin, is that there's the supply Exactly, fully audited. You can audit it for yourself, and you don't have to trust anybody else that says, \"Hey, trust us, we've got eighteen point two four nine Bitcoin, million Bitcoin in the bank.\" No! It's fully audited cryptographically that that's how many Bitcoin there are. And so that's-- that is really important to, to know coming into the space that, that yeah, it-- you have this fully audited guarantee of supply and, nobody can change that without significant, you know, hard fork of the network. And, and, and if you're running your own node You don't have to follow that. You're gonna stick to, you can stick to the chain that, that only has twenty-one million total. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:23", "start": 803.09, "text": "And, and you don't even have to rely on the dashboard if you run your own node, right? Because you can do, I forgot the exact command, I think it's get tx outset, and I think that's, there's like a command you can run and basically check, this is the exact outstanding number right now. So let's talk a little bit about the UTXO set size. So that's about sixty-six" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "13:47", "start": 826.65, "text": "Unspent transaction output, and that represents a portion of Bitcoin that's available to spend. And so the number of those, sixty-six million, I like to think of it as You could kind of think of it as a soft upper bound on the total number of people who hold Bitcoin. So that's kind of individual addresses that have a balance, roughly. It's, you know, addresses could be multisig, so that's multiple parties controlling the same coins. But roughly, you could think of it as an upper bound on total people self-custodying their, you know, independent bitcoins. Now, your wallet is made up of UTXOs, so your wallet has multiple UTXOs in it, that's why this number could be seen as an upper bound. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:34", "start": 873.93, "text": "And, it's also, I guess, when we think about Bitcoin into the future and how Bitcoin scales and so on, that's also an important consideration because it's not merely the blockchain size. So today, as we, as we speak, it's about- About three hundred and one gigabytes, but it's also about each device who wants to run a full node, are they able to contain that UTXO set in their own memory and do all the calculations of incomings and outgoings?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "15:00", "start": 899.96, "text": "And one thing to note That set, the blockchain gets you there, but that set in essence is Bitcoin. That's the current state of the ledger, is that UTXO set. So if there's a way to- You know, trustlessly get there, you can actually delete the whole blockchain, keep the headers, delete the whole chain, and just have that UTXO set, and that's what pruned, pruned full nodes do. So if you can stand downloading that, that chain and verifying it, you can actually throw it away and just keep that UTXO set up to date, and you're up to date with Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:37", "start": 936.69, "text": "Yeah. And so I guess one way to think through that is, right now, if you wanna run the full node, that's about three hundred gigabytes at the time of recording In time, and people can run pruned nodes at like five gigabytes of storage, let's say, and now then you would have the complete picture for yourself that you have verified. But then if you're running a pruned node and you don't have the full node, the rest of the blockchain, you couldn't forward, you couldn't give that on to other people. So there's kind of an interesting aspect there around- Not the" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "16:07", "start": 967.45, "text": "past history." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:09", "start": 969.15, "text": "Yeah, that's right. And so another very counterintuitive statistic here for some people, it might be this one here, one year average block time. And so, but, but Clark, I thought Bitcoin blocks were only every" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "16:23", "start": 983.21, "text": "ten minutes. What's going on with that? Well, we have this thing called difficulty adjustment. That targets ten minutes. So if you see this number below ten minutes, that means that hash power has been coming online continually, making blocks happen faster. And the network is trying to adjust downward. If we had no growth in hash rate, that number would be right around ten minutes. So, you know, the way that I-- the way that I, calculate this is I go back Go back one year, what's, what was the block one year ago, and just divide through by the number of, that total time by the number of blocks to get this long average. But yeah, so the hash power Since the beginning of Bitcoin, has increased eighteen orders of magnitude or something, some, maybe not that much, six, seven, fifteen, I don't know, a huge number of orders of magnitude increase in the power of the network. So if you didn't have the difficulty adjustment, the blocks would just be zipping by once every couple milliseconds. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:28", "start": 1048.23, "text": "we spoke about it before, the chain size, so that's about three hundred and one gigabytes, and that's also, interesting from a scaling perspective, and how, how quickly is that growing every year? Right? So again, a couple years ago, for the, for the listeners who are maybe a little newer to Bitcoin There was a big debate a couple years ago around how, what direction should Bitcoin go, and one of the big arguments was, \"Oh, hard drive space is really cheap.\" But there were other factors there to that little, well, large debate as well. So things like, miner centralization, the ability of the network to remain in a decentralized consensus even with bigger blocks. so, do you have any thoughts to share with the listeners there on the chain? Chain size and how quickly that's growing, what are the implications of that?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "18:20", "start": 1100.0, "text": "Yeah, so two things, if the chain is large, just in its on disk size, then it takes a long time to get caught up. But the bigger problem is if the blocks are too big, you can never catch up if you have constrained bandwidth. So bandwidth is probably the limiting factor for many places around the world. If you can't catch up with bandwidth and associated hardware requirements to validate the chain, you know, larger, larger and larger blocks take more resources to validate. If you can't validate each block on average in ten minutes, or you know, download it, validate it in ten minutes, you're gonna fall behind on average, and you'll never actually catch up if the changes keeps Rolling on ahead. So the on-chain storage size is one thing to keep in mind if you wanna run a full archival node, but hard drive space isn't really cheap, and there are other computer resources that are more limiting than, than total hard drive space." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:22", "start": 1161.54, "text": "Yeah. and I suppose there's also, it might be interesting as well for some listeners just to understand the per-some of the different perspectives amongst Bitcoin developers. So famously, Luke Dashow has the point of view of, \"We need to lower the block size down to three hundred kilobytes.\" And on the, and then there's probably a bunch of Bitcoin and Lightning developers who think, you know, where we are now is okay. And then there are some who might, like, who might believe, not right now, but maybe ten years time, fifteen years time. years time that there should be a block size increase, because for whatever reason they want people to be able to interact in a more trust minimized way at the current size of the blocks Like eventually, like if you go out to millions and millions of people, then it might not actually be enough for every person to have their own UTXO, and then that might impact on the ability of people to participate in Bitcoin. did you have any thoughts to share on, on that kind of, that range in opinions?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "20:24", "start": 1223.75, "text": "My, my thinking is that Kind of to jump to the end, Bitcoin has one hard fork, and that's it. we have to, we have to hard fork the timestamp before it overflows a thirty-two bit unsigned integer. So that's a for sure hard fork. Other than that, you know, there's, the-- there's a market, right? Prices, prices allocate scarce resources. The block size is what it is. To raise it too far requires a hard fork. We could raise it again with a soft fork, I don't know, you know, like we did with SegWit, effectively allowing more block weight, as it were. But you, you just can't hard fork this sort of system. someone posted a while back a great comparison to the IPv4, IPv5, IPv6, protocol development wars in the nineties, and Go read up on that for kind of an equivalent idea of how hard it is to change a protocol. You know, Bitcoin's a protocol, Bitcoin's not a technology. I think this is maybe what a lot of investors don't understand Is that it's not a technology, you know, it's not a tech company, it's a protocol, and so that, you know, that should, that should inform your thinking about hard forks, you know, everybody has to upgrade for a hard fork. so I think Bitcoin has one, I think it will be the sort of thing where, where the, the timer starts and it's, and it's like, everybody, we're upgrading in five years, you know, it's a, it's a five or ten year runway, and it's like, take the next five years to House in order before this thing's upgrading. Here we go." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "22:08", "start": 1327.85, "text": "it's not, it's not gonna be a quick thing unless there's some emergency change that has to happen, but hopefully we don't have that. again, we had the, The database indexing problem in twenty thirteen, but hopefully we don't have any other, other sort of problems like that. anyway, that's kind of my thinking on, on forks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:25", "start": 1344.86, "text": "Yeah. And just for the listeners who aren't familiar, the fork that Clark is referring to there, the one hard fork that we know for sure is coming, is known as the \"Why two thousand and thirty-eight\" bug, but it's a bit of a misnomer. It's not actually happening in the year two thousand and thirty-eight. It's actually happening, I think, in like eighty years or something" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:46", "start": 1365.96, "text": "To get solved by then. So" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "22:47", "start": 1367.42, "text": "Bitcoin's going to the stars, we'll have to fix this problem before then." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:51", "start": 1371.2, "text": "So it may not be us, but it may be, you know, children and grandchildren generation who are dealing with that, but that is a hard fork that we know is coming. Okay, and so- There is also this question of the op-return data. So today, that is two point three gigabytes. And again, for the listeners, the op-return is like a special kind of unspendable output that allows people to essentially write into the chain a certain small amount of information. I think there are some other, maybe more hipster or ghetto ways to do it, but the main way to do it is op-return. So what's, what's the deal with this op-return stuff? Does that mean every full node has to now maintain op-return? Data for now and forevermore." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "23:32", "start": 1412.11, "text": "Operational data is safely discardable by the node since it is, i-i-in, Bitcoin core node calls it null data. So it's literally just a piece of data and nodes could throw it away. I included it on the dashboard just so that people kind of are aware of the size because Some people say that the blockchain isn't a public storage space, we're not putting images on it, et cetera. So just to know how big it actually is is good for the discussion, right? So as it stands, every full node is carrying around two point three gigabytes of this data. Sure, it could get thrown away in later versions, but that's the way it is now. And some really important, really important applications could be anchored into this operation data, like open timestamps. And, the identity work that Microsoft is doing, you can, you can hook billions of records into the chain with just one thirty-two byte piece of data as a, you know, the root of a Merkle tree can anchor A huge amount of data into the chain in these other protocols." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:42", "start": 1482.11, "text": "And on that, it might be, at first glance, people would think, \"Oh, hold on, pretty much everything else will get priced out of Bitcoin, right? Like, unless you are doing real economic value transactions, you're just gonna get priced out. You can't just rely on being able to put this stuff into the chain for free or very cheap. It's gonna go up in time.\" but I think to the point you were making is that some of the guys at Microsoft, I think his name, Daniel- Buckner or Buechner, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. and he's got the decentralized ID, ID approach, and as you were saying, you would sort of anchor in with one hash the information relating to say, billions of information, billions of people or millions of people, and so that is how it might be cost effective." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "25:25", "start": 1524.67, "text": "That's right. He says, you know, even if it cost a hundred dollars to anchor a decentralized identity system to the blockchain It would be worth it, 'cause now your identity isn't tied to a company or a state, it's tied to the blockchain, which is apolitical, anti-political, you know? free, free from, from interference." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:46", "start": 1546.46, "text": "Another interesting conception and idea for listeners, maybe this is revision for the advanced listeners, but for the beginners and intermediates, this idea of container ships. So this idea that a Bitcoin transaction isn't necessarily always a single payment, and that it may eventually over time, it will contain many payments, whether that is a Lightning channel open and close transaction, or whether that is a payment between, let's say, two Bitcoin banks, and really inside that is actually contained a lot more transaction data. How are you thinking about that kind of idea?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "26:21", "start": 1581.09, "text": "Yeah, I thought about the custodial Bitcoin bank idea, and you would, you would have two banks settle on chain daily, weekly, whatever, but, you know, they have cryptographically signed messages to one another throughout the week, and then they settle up just like banks used to settle in gold. You know, we were-- Here's a bunch of your checks back. Give us the gold from your vault. Could be exactly the same thing, and that's worth it to a bank to settle billions and billions of dollars of transactions on chain. Maybe, maybe they're moving a couple million, they're, they're willing to pay a hundred dollar transaction fee for that, a thousand dollar transaction fee for that, to have that final settlement guarantee. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:03", "start": 1623.02, "text": "And, Dan Helter has done some work on this as well, his, article, about Bitcoin security long term, relying on more transaction Fees than miners, but we'll, we'll get to that. I think we've got a section on mining, so we'll probably leave that for then. but let's talk about the Bitcoin network now. So we've got about ten thousand reachable Bitcoin nodes, and how does this compare with some of the other statistics, such as Luke Dash's statistics?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "27:31", "start": 1650.92, "text": "This box is from the Bitnodes, Bitnodes.io, Twenty One Co, Earn Co, whatever it is now, from their scanner of the chain, and it's, I think it's just listening nodes. So the- This is the number of nodes that have an open network port that can accept incoming transactions." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "27:49", "start": 1669.22, "text": "Luke has a scanner that seems to report over a hundred thousand nodes. And it, it may be using a different methodology of finding those." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "28:01", "start": 1681.32, "text": "either way, the, you know, it's important that this number is large. And it's also, I, I don't think this number has changed all that much. I remember it being around this, this count back in 2017. You know, everyone's running their UASF nodes and we're counting those user agents and things like that. It seemed, if I recall, it was about ten thousand, like it wasn't five and it wasn't thirty, you know, so maybe this number is stable and it represents kind of hardcore Bitcoiners and I don't know, we'll see. It'll be interesting to watch this one going into the future, like where are we in a couple decades, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:40", "start": 1719.66, "text": "Yeah, and, it, it also, because there's a few points here, and I think Bitcoin's community, as it were, for want of a better word, has become more aware around this idea that it's not just the mere number of nodes, right? Like someone can just go spin up on AWS a whole bunch of cloud nodes, but really what matters is an economic node. Are you using that node to accept or Action and say, \"No, that's fake Bitcoin, I'm not accepting that. \"Or, \"Yes, that's real Bitcoin, I've trust, I've validated, I ha- I have validated that on my own Bitcoin node. \" I guess that's the, important way to think for, the listeners there." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "29:18", "start": 1757.97, "text": "Right. Yeah, we've, we've seen that tactic of spinning up a thousand nodes for other, other fork projects and it, no, everybody sees right through it. Again, I, I don't, I don't know" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:27", "start": 1766.94, "text": "exactly," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:32", "start": 1771.84, "text": "here, but Nodes for new nodes who are spinning up on the network when they're starting. Yeah, he, he might be, he might be able to use some of the statistics from that to then figure out a more accurate pic-picture of, how many actual nodes are there out there in the world, because as you said, this is reachable Bitcoin nodes. So for listeners who aren't familiar, if you just- Double-click Bitcoin Core and just run that, and you haven't opened a port, your node won't come up in the statistic because you haven't forwarded the port to open that port. So there may be many, many more nodes out there, but they just don't have an open port, and maybe that's a good thing, right? We've got more people who have a copy of the Bitcoin no-- a bull, you know, a Bitcoin blockchain, and are transacting, but we just don't, don't necessarily know who they are." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "30:21", "start": 1820.53, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Your node is, Chain, and using, using tools like Samurai Dojo, for instance, you could host your family and friends, they can hook to your dojo, and so your node is powering a local community of people, or your node could be powering a business, and it represents Thousands, millions of users, you know, their entry into the network. So it's not one user per node. Yeah, that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:50", "start": 1850.06, "text": "a great point to remember. and so Lightning Network, so similarly, we've got, about six thousand five hundred Lightning nodes. So where are you getting that stat from?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "31:02", "start": 1862.31, "text": "I'm running an LND node. On a server, and I've connected to a few peers, and I'm just processing the, describe graph RPC call. that gives us tour capacity, tour channels, total nodes, so that's, that's where I'm getting that data. Awesome." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:22", "start": 1881.86, "text": "And so today we have about eight hundred and sixty-four bitcoins that have been, you know, funded into Lightning channels, and I guess there is some amount of debate, and sometimes on the new-- on the, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, crypto news, quote unquote, they'll say things like, \"Oh, look, the capacity has gone up,\" or sometimes people might say, \"Oh, look, there's more More locked up in some other, you know, some other cryptocurrency. How are you thinking about that? Is that a measure of, you know, real transactional volume? Is it just an experimental thing? These, these are people who wanna play around with the Lightning Network? Or, or here's another take, maybe it might be actually using less bitcoins to achieve more, it's more capital efficient. So what, what's your thought there?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "32:10", "start": 1930.35, "text": "My thought is that I'd like to see this number rising. It's been around this 8.50, 8.30 coins for a couple months, so we're not seeing the explosive growth like we saw at the beginning of the Lightning Network. you're right, you can, you can anchor Two billion transactions to the chain with two on-chain transactions, so there could be huge amounts of, of activity happening, we just don't see it. Also, this is public capacity, so there are private channels that my node wouldn't know about. So there is hidden capacity, and as people say, mobile wallets now are defaulting to, private channels, so you're not gonna necessarily have a correspondence with the more people who, who sign on. So those are some caveats, no, but the Lightning Network, and who knows what they do in the future? I mean There's so many, you had a podcast a little while back talking about Lightning privacy, which was excellent, and there was just all these different ways of shielding the amounts, who's transacting with whom, all these things. So they're continually thinking about those, those issues on Lightning, and it's very interesting to see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:23", "start": 2002.54, "text": "Right, because there's so many developments still to come, right? So if we get Taproot and Schnorr, and as Rusty Russell mentioned on that episode, there's all these different changes that could come to the protocol. So for- For example, we might have point time locking, and we might have, better ways of doing MPP, multi-part payment. So there, there's just a couple ideas there, and also there is just that factor of maybe a lot of people are just hodling, right? They're not necessarily caring about trying to spend right now, they're planning to spend in five, ten, fifteen years, who knows? So there, that, that's an important factor as well that maybe" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "33:57", "start": 2037.11, "text": "we're just early. And fees are, fees are pretty low too. So lower valued economic activity can still happen on chain with very low fees if you're willing to wait until night or weekend times. so if we see continually full blocks, if we see base fee rates rising, then we could see an uptake in Lightning as people move that activity off chain." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:22", "start": 2061.59, "text": "Right. And I think that's a good parallel to what happened in twenty seventeen, because there was a lot of on chain volume. Now, it's also fair to say that there may have been actors trying to basically spam the chain, right, just to make it look like it was overly full and there really weren't that many people, but there has also been- been to acknowledge the efforts of people, from Bitcoin Optech and so on, working with exchanges saying, \"Hey, let's get you using SegWit, let's get, let's get you using batching, let's let, let's get you guys doing low fee, low balling the fee, and then RBF replaced by fee, the fee higher if you can't get it confirmed in a certain period of time.\" And so it's kind of like this weird sort of tension because in one way the- Put it this way, the-- what drives people to look for those engineering improvements is the chain getting congested, but then the more engineering talent that gets put into it, then you can start cramming more and more into it and get more for less, right?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "35:20", "start": 2120.5, "text": "Right? Yeah. Comp-compact Compact representations, you know, shorter addresses, shorter hashes, and all these things. You know, there was an article about scaling Bitcoin came out in twenty seventeen, I think, on the Bitcoin Core blog. And it talked about all the improvements in just the node technology to be able to validate the chain faster, which is makes you able to scale to more consistent throughput. So running a zero point eight node or a zero point three node right now, probably, you know, definitely couldn't have kept up with the chain in twenty seventeen, because there was just too much to validate and, and the software itself has gotten so much better." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:04", "start": 2163.81, "text": "Yeah, I think there was also a very interesting BitMEX research piece where they compared the different versions of Bitcoin Core, and they-- I think there was one that had like a big drop in, time, i.e. there was a big efficiency gain in terms of initial download and sync of the Bitcoin blockchain. So, also with the Lightning Network, I know this is one of Madhur's favorite topics, is the Tork percentage. So currently we're at forty percent of Tork capacity. So what does that mean for a listener who doesn't really know? What Lightning Network and Tor is. So a Lightning" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "36:37", "start": 2196.9, "text": "channel has two nodes. If one of the nodes is listening on Tor On at least one of its listening addresses, then I count it to-- I count that whole channel toward Tor capacity, which means that at least part of a payment could be routed through a Lightning node that's listening on Tor. Tor is an-- the Onion Router, T O R. is an, a routing system on the internet to try to hide the s-- the source IP that's making a request. So if you can get into Tor, your request pops out the other side, and hopefully, no one can put the two together. So you could route a payment on the Lightning Network and route it in such a way that your internet service provider doesn't know that it was you. So that-- so there, there are multiple stats you could report here, like number of channels where both sides are in tour, both sides are only listening on, you know, solely on tour. That's a lot smaller, but I reported the biggest number in only one of them, so you could have, you could have six or seven more, six and seven more metrics in this box about, about just this topic." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:52", "start": 2271.85, "text": "Right. But your role is a curator as well, and it's important that you just put kind of the key statistics and not bombard with too many, and then it just becomes-- it's, it's not useful anymore. Right. So I, I like that, I appreciate that you've done, a fair bit of curation. obviously, the trade-off then is the, the, the user That you're kind of selecting, okay, these are the important statistics, and, right, but, yeah, that's an important, statistic as well, in terms of the privacy of Lightning Network, and hopefully that advances as we go. So let's talk about transactions. So this is sort of recently, we just passed, five hundred million transactions, so today we're sitting around five hundred and eight thou-- sorry, million, seven hundred and eighty-seven thousand transactions, and there's this statistic there where you've got the, the rate, which is really- Interesting as all 'cause we've got three point eight transactions per second, so the famous seven transactions per second of Bitcoin isn't even, we're not even using that. Right." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "38:52", "start": 2332.27, "text": "Yeah. So this comes from a Bitcoin Core RPC call that you can give it Give it a block height and it'll spit out these, these statistics for you. So I just gave it thirty days, and that's, that's that, three point eight transactions per second if you just average it across all the blocks in the last thirty days. So that, what that tells us is that the blocks aren't full, maybe they're a little more than half full on average. and then it, it does report the total all the time, which is really nice. it's also a fast RPC call for you developers. Some of, some of the RPC calls are slow, but this one is fast." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:29", "start": 2368.93, "text": "Very nice. and then you've got here chain security. So we've got the hash rate, one hundred and five x hash, and the chain rewrite days, which is an interesting one. What's that?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "39:39", "start": 2379.28, "text": "Chain rewrite days is If you took the total work of the chain, so the total number of hashes in the whole chain, and you divide through by that hundred five exahash per second, how many seconds and hence days would it take? To produce an equivalent amount of work. So you could say that you could rewrite the chain from genesis till now in only four hundred and twenty-one days. What we would like to see is that number increasing one day every day, so that, it takes longer and longer to rewrite the whole chain because hash power is growing. If hash power shrunk That number would shrink, so that it's, it's less time. Now, if someone spun up enough computers for that many days, to rewrite the whole chain, that would essentially just-- you know, you could rewrite a lot less of the chain to destroy Bitcoin, but this is just kind of a nice, like, re-represents the total amount of hashes done in all of Bitcoin's history. Gotcha. Yep." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:40", "start": 2440.38, "text": "and, and let's go into-- now, you've got the two, some boxes around mining, so mining and mining economics. So I think- An interesting one to talk through is the, some of the mining economics stuff. So we've got the block subsidy and the block subsidy value. So what are these statistics getting" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "40:57", "start": 2457.08, "text": "at? Subsidy is that money supply function. So every block right now gets twelve and a half Bitcoin. The block subsidy value is basically the market rate of twelve and a half Bitcoin at the current price. As well, next box is halving, so that, that will soon drop to six and a quarter. it started at fifty, then it went to twenty five, now it's twelve and a half. And so that's just every block a miner is incentivized with twelve and a half brand new Bitcoin for finding the block. Plus transaction fees." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:33", "start": 2492.51, "text": "Right, right. And so that's the point around how there's the block reward, which is comprised of both the block subsidy plus the transaction fees. And so another really interesting stat, and this is coming back to what we were mentioning before, is the amount of fees per block. So, so for listeners who are unfamiliar, one of the debates that happens in Bitcoin is, will Bitcoin be secure decades into the future? Because over time, as the halving, happens, essentially There will be less and less of a block subsidy value, right? So that's why you got the block subsidy value. And I guess there's a few different things to think about here. So first of all, price increases, right? So theoretically, if the price doubles every four years, well then that block subsidy value in fiat terms stays the same. But But obviously we know that's not gonna happen forever, right? I don't know, maybe it will, who knows, right? But we shouldn't anticipate that it will happen forever. A thousand year bull" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "42:30", "start": 2550.06, "text": "run." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:32", "start": 2551.86, "text": "That's right. Bitcoin was designed to pump forever. I don't know if doubling every four years forever is sustainable though. but yeah, so a really interesting statistic is this idea of how many, how much of each block is made up, or how much of the reward is made up by fees and versus how much of that is subsidy, and that ties into one of Dan H Well-known articles about Bitcoin security. So how are you thinking about that and kind of where are we today in terms of fees as a percentage of subsidy?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "43:00", "start": 2579.6, "text": "So the current value is one point three percent average fee versus subsidy. So With a percentage, you could do it multiple ways. This one is, if the fee is equal to the block reward, then this reads a hundred percent. We saw that in twenty seventeen. Some blocks had more than twelve and a half bitcoins of fees, so this number would have been a hundred ten percent or something. If we maintained a constant fee level in absolute terms, and we have a halving, then this number doubles, so we'd be at two point six percent if the block subsidy were halved. eventually this must go over a hundred percent because the subsidies get vanishingly small. So it's just kind of a, just a metric to keep your eyes on, like How much is the network transaction activity offsetting the diminishing subsidy?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:53", "start": 2633.34, "text": "Yeah, and it's also probably a good call out or point to raise here, which is that we don't want in the future. So imagine twenty, thirty years into the future, we wouldn't want the-- we wouldn't want that stat or average fees per block to be really lumpy. Like what we really want is kind of a stable backlog of transactions, because if it's really lumpy, what does that imply? Apply then in terms of mining." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "44:19", "start": 2659.2, "text": "Yeah, variance in your, variance in your revenue. You can't, you can't operate a, a business, you know, you can't make payments on your, on your capital investment. someone said elsewhere. reserve demand for block space. I don't know which, I don't know which podcast that was on, but reserve demand for block space is an incredible idea, and that hopefully you always have at any, at any fee level, you always have transactions that are ready to go for different use cases. Yeah, so kind" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:49", "start": 2688.99, "text": "of like a backlog of transactions basically." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "44:51", "start": 2691.39, "text": "Right. And then they may not even be in a mempool, they may just be in independent applications looking for an opportune time, waiting till Fees start to drop and then they push transactions back through at a slightly lower fee rate, but they keep those fee levels relatively, relatively constant." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:08", "start": 2707.74, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And I guess some other factors there could be things like imagining in the future, let's say, you know, everyone's using Lightning Network, they might opportunistically wait for a low fee time to open their channels, and that's an example there where maybe if you've already got a bunch of channels open and you just wanna open one more, you're not necessarily gonna put really high fee on that, you might just put it at low Fee and just leave it until it gets confirmed, that kind of idea." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "45:33", "start": 2732.82, "text": "The marginal channel opener." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:35", "start": 2735.38, "text": "That's right. The, the marginal channel opener is helping smooth out the fees of Bitcoin. That's right. Yeah. And I mean, a similar thing could be said for coin joining as well, right? So people might be waiting for a low fee and then go, \"Okay, now I'm gonna try and do my coin join.\" Right. So," }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "45:49", "start": 2749.35, "text": "'cause it's a transaction you don't have to make, it's a lot bigger," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:54", "start": 2753.67, "text": "et cetera, et cetera. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:59", "start": 2759.18, "text": "Years time they'll look back on this podcast and be like, \"Yeah, those guys were right.\" So, we'll see. but, yeah, so look, we got the halving coming up, and there's a lot of debate around this halving estimate. So, what's your current" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "46:11", "start": 2771.09, "text": "estimate for the halving? May ninth, twenty twenty. This is one of the first numbers I wanted to compute with the dashboard. And the way I'm doing it is I'm taking the last, I'm taking that one year average block time and just projecting it forward. So I'm kind of assuming, it's, it's a, maybe a big assumption, but I'm just assuming that hash rate growth will be constant. So as it was in the past one year, so it will be for the next year. When this, when the having happens, this will be projecting out four years in the future, so this will be a really noisy prediction. I may take that interval farther back. Maybe you go back to the last- The distance from the halving to project to the next one. interestingly enough, we're within a day of being ten thousand blocks to the halving. So that's kind of a, you know, the big countdown goes from ten thousand to ninety-nine, ninety-nine, and we keep chugging along. others have put this in, in late May. I think that's just like the naive Ten minute block forward estimate, so I kind of wanted a little bit more, maybe an accuracy, a little bit more accurate estimate. Who knows, you know, or the last difficulty adjustment was actually down, so we had greater than ten minute block times, so we'll see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:24", "start": 2843.97, "text": "Yeah. And so you've, so you've, you've got a bunch of different statistics here around, the next block as well. So how many transactions are there in there? What's the value of it? And then some fee estimates as well. So this is another one where I think if you're a little newer to Bitcoin, you might not understand that idea of, okay, how high should I set the fee for this transaction? And if I want it to go through in a day, I can put it through a bit lower than if I want it in the next block. so can you tell us a little bit about that and the fee estimates?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "47:53", "start": 2873.05, "text": "Yeah, so the very next block stuff is coming from the getblocktemplate RPC call. So it's basically asking Bitcoin Core construct a block for me. That I can mine on. I'm not mining on it, but it constructs this block and I, I output, you know, what, what it's doing. So right now we're looking at, you know, twenty-five million dollars of value. On a, on a point one Bitcoin fee. So a lot of value is moving in the next block, and not very many, not very much fee is paying for it, zero point eight four percent over subsidy. So Below that, I've got a box with these fee estimates, immediate, one hour, one day, one week. And so immediate is kind of like if you wanted it in the next block or two blocks. One hour is six blocks, you know. interesting, since I've launched this dashboard, the day and week numbers haven't climbed above one satoshi per byte. So at no time in the last couple months Could you not get a transaction in with one Satoshi if you're willing to wait a day? so that's interesting. And, you know, most, most full nodes purge their mempool after Three days, maybe three days or two weeks or something, so the transaction can sit there a long time, just waiting for low fees. so if, if you don't have to transact right now, don't pay high fees. It's another trick that maybe will keep us out of trouble. when, when the usage goes up." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:22", "start": 2961.91, "text": "Okay. And, I guess one other thing that's interesting there is some people might, depending on what business they're using or what they're doing, they might have different needs to try and get into the next block or into a reasonable timed block. And so, if you're- Waiting for a confirmation, maybe you're an exchange, you're waiting for a deposit or, you're an exchange and you wanna make the payout to the customer and you don't-- and that customer might be a little bit newer, they necessarily don't understand some of these things, they just wanna see the, the money hit their wallet and they, if it hasn't come in in a certain time, they might feel like, \"Oh, hang on, what? You didn't pay me? Like, where's my money?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "49:58", "start": 2998.25, "text": "Where's my money?\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:00", "start": 2999.59, "text": "Yeah, exactly. So I think that's, those are some of the different dynamics there, and also, you, it might, you might have this weird dynamic of it kind of gets away from you, right? So you might have put it in at a certain time, but then straight after you put your transaction through, it then kind of climbs a little bit. Have you seen that happen? I'm sure you have, right?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "50:17", "start": 3016.59, "text": "It's happened to me. I've, I've, I've paid for an invoice, it didn't confirm in time, I had to pay more 'cause the price was moving. So, you know, exchanges, if you're listening, Lightning Network Instant, instant withdrawals, telling you. Most people, you know, have less than point one six coins coming in and out, and they can get their five hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin out instantaneously. Better UX, fewer support tickets. Let's make it happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:46", "start": 3046.18, "text": "Yep. And, also liquid between exchanges as well is another, good one as well. so these are some examples of things where exchanges who are forward-thinking can really, get ahead of the game and, be ready for this sort, this sort of thing. But in fairness, there are many different competing priorities for the exchange that don't necessarily care about, what a couple of, engi-people who are more focused on the engineering of it, are thinking and talking about. So let's now change to economics. So what's the current inflation rate? And you've got here the forward monetary inflation. Tell us a little bit about that." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "51:24", "start": 3083.69, "text": "Current inflation is if you go back one year, look at the supply then. And then look at the supply now, how much has the supply increased over that one year? So we're sitting at three point eight seven percent monetary inflation. Different than price inflation or price, you know, consumer price index stuff. This is monetary base inflation. the forward inflation is the same, I'm taking that, one year average block time again and projecting out one year, dividing by block time to get number of blocks, and then how much new, how much new supply came on through the subsidy in that time. And right now it's at two point two one percent, so we're-- the forward inflation is significantly lower. Some would say almost half the current inflation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:13", "start": 3133.2, "text": "Yeah, that's great. And, this might also be a little bit counterintuitive for some people as well because Every year will go down, it's not just the halving factor, it's just the factor that you're coming off a higher base now every year, so, so the actual percentage is actually coming down over time. So that's, an interesting one for people to keep an eye on there. And then stock to flow. So stock to flow is obviously very hotly debated, obviously Plan B and, has been on the show and has spoken about that, so there's a lot of People who are interested in, say, the investment aspect of Bitcoin aren't really focused on this stock to flow stuff. can you tell us a little bit about how you've calculated the ratios and the prices here?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "52:55", "start": 3175.49, "text": "Stock to flow simply is one over the inflation rate. So one over two point two one percent gives us a stock to flow of forty five going forward, and that's the number of years it would take to replenish the current supply at current inflation values. The Plan B model also has a price, and my price, I'm showing a stock to flow predicted price of seventy-six forty-seven, which is currently lower than the market price. And that one is based on some coefficients I found on one of Plan B's blog posts. This is on my to-do list to like go back and do the regression myself to produce my own coefficients, but I just found some to get a price. There it is, take it or leave it, you know." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:42", "start": 3222.13, "text": "Cool, cool. No, that's, that's cool. Let's move on to output type. So this one is interesting as well. So, I guess I'll just do a quick summary just for the listeners what, what that is. So you've got here pub key hash, script hash, segwit v0 pub key hash, and segwit v0 script hash. So, if you're just thinking in terms of Bitcoin wallets, maybe just like an easy way to think of it, those one addresses, Hash. Most of the three addresses types are like a script hash, and then these other SegWit ones, the SegWit v0, are the BC1 addresses. so yeah, I, I like how you've got a, a split and a breakdown. So can you tell us a little bit about the split there?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "54:24", "start": 3263.6, "text": "Yeah, so we're seeing that It's forty percent pub key hash, those are those one addresses, kind of like standard wallet. The script hash, forty four percent, and those are probably multisig, probably exchanges. This is, this is the reported percentage of output volume, so not number of, number of outputs, but output volumes of value. And so ScriptHash, forty-four percent, probably exchanges. Then SegWit v zero, the P2PKH addresses, sums up to sixteen, seventeen percent, and so that's that kind of like SegWit, SegWit usage percentage in terms of value throughput, and that's a number that You could chart and see it climb and say, you know, oh, fifty percent of the transactions in this block were, were using SegWit, et cetera. this is on a value basis, but it's good to keep an eye on that. And when Taproot launches, I'll add a, I'll add a Taproot out-output type here as well. So we can see that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:26", "start": 3325.75, "text": "Yeah, that's great. And, I, I presume as well, because you can actually do multisig on the new, you know, SegWit v0, it's just that many clients might, a lot of software right now does it on the three addresses or on the P2SH or the script hash type, as you say. So it's probably the case that over time, people will shift over to using SegWit multisig anyway, and then we'll probably see a lot of that percentage shift into using the newest type as well. And I suppose Out, outputs that will take some time as well for adoption and multisig, using mu sig, m u sig, as well to show up, that will be, a type that shows up into the taproot output once we, once we have that, well, assuming we do get that, right? yeah. so let's talk a bit about the future supply. So I think this is another one of those really counterintuitive boxes, and people might not really appreciate that without seeing this dashboard. So can you tell us a little bit about what's going on" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "56:25", "start": 3384.67, "text": "Twenty-one forty thrown about. Bitcoin supply increases till twenty-one forty. Well, true, but it's not exactly twenty-one forty, and it's, and it's almost nothing at the, at that time. So it's a geometric series that the slope of the curve drops in half every four years. And so what I've got is, is just dates of when we expect ninety, ninety-five, ninety-nine, ninety-nine point nine percent supply. and that ninety-nine point nine is twenty forty-seven. So twenty-seven years from now, we're less-- we have point one percent of Bitcoin to get us the next hundred years So people, you know, it, it's gonna happen a lot faster than people, think. And, you know, the ninety and ninety-five percent levels were kind of requests from people on Twitter like, \"I need, I need hodl targets, right? I need some short term, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not gonna go until it's after ninety percent or ninety-five.\" So those are, you know, one and five years out, give people some short-term stuff. And then I've got this last full Bitcoin, so that's when the supply is Is twenty one million minus one coin, one full coin, and I'm, I'm looking at twenty one hundred two, so year twenty one oh two, a full thirty years to get that last coin. So if you're thinking, \"Oh, you know, This, you know, we have until twenty-one forty to get all the coins, it's gonna take thirty years to get the last one." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "58:03", "start": 3482.55, "text": "now if it's worth a trillion dollars, then that's one thing, but, you know. Hahahahah. Well, that's what" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:08", "start": 3487.99, "text": "we hope, that's what we think it will be. and also to some interesting, I guess, trivia and so on, there were some examples, and I'm sure you're aware of this, Clark, but there were some examples in Bitcoin's history where a miner has, Reward and then got zero for it. I think there was one example where an OG Bitcoin user, I won't, dox the name just in case, but this user intentionally took one sat less than they were entitled to, and it was kind of like a bit of a joke, but that's an example which permanently reduced the supply. So the actual, like, once you count all these kind of examples, it's actually a bit less than twenty-one million. It's like, I don't know, a hundred and fifty or two hundred or a bit le- bit less than Twenty-one million." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "58:52", "start": 3532.05, "text": "Well, my, my money supply number is actually, it, it counts, it counts the block subsidies all the way through, and it removes-- some people send op returns with a value, and that's provably unspendable coin, and so I remove that from this supply number as well. If you look at other places, you'll see a higher number, so mine's, mine's a little bit lower. I should probably put like a coins lost, you know, provably unspendable supply, but I don't have that yet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:21", "start": 3561.42, "text": "Right, yeah. And then there's also, I guess, on that point, that's also the point around how there's, whatever, three or four years ago, a chain analysis came out with some work saying that apparently three to four million bitcoins have already been lost and so on. So, who knows? But again, that's, that's a bit more conjecture, and we don't exactly know for sure. So What about the future direction for the dashboard? Have you got any other ideas that you're thinking about working on?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "59:47", "start": 3586.9, "text": "Yeah, I wanna, I wanna flesh out the market section a little bit. Most of my other sites have been market data sites, so the futures, you know, forward curve, maybe an options curve, some, maybe, maybe a picture, maybe a table, transaction fee analysis. So I don't have anything on like average transaction fee. and that's a number that people are gonna bandy about, and so I've gotta report it so they can, first of all, come here and use it and not have to go elsewhere, but then it's just an informative thing, so not only like a percentage in terms of like how much Percentage are we paying, but also just dollar terms, like what's the average dollar transaction fee? UTXO set analysis, so like distribution of value? I haven't quite found a way to get, get at that UTXO set. It's, it's a couple gigabytes, you know, I'd like to analyze it. maybe looking at side chains, how much is wrapped up in liquid, how much is wrapped up in wrapped BTC on Ethereum, et cetera. Maybe some of the, the, the coin join pools, you know, it'd be cool to analyze the chain looking for wasabi and samurai and coin, coin market or join market transactions, maybe report on that, those volumes. And then, traditional market, so I'd like to do correlation with S&P 500, gold, oil And bonds, let's say, just to, just to see how correlated Bitcoin is, 'cause part of, part of the value proposition is this is uncorrelated. Well, I don't know, we saw it, we saw it drop with the S&P recently, so maybe it's not as correlated as- Not, not as uncorrelated as people would like. And then I've got kind of like a G-Wiz, module. I want to do an interplanetary Bitcoin module so that it's latency times to Mars and Jupiter, so So in the far future, you can check, you know, is it a good, is this a good time in the orbit of the planet to send a, to send a Bitcoin transaction? But that's--" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:47", "start": 3707.29, "text": "That reminds me of, Drew Bursell's work from Unchained. I think he did some work about center of hash. And so I think basically he was-- I think the, the upshot of it was basically that We won't be able to use Bitcoin on Mars, unless there's some kind of fancy side chain thing going on. We might actually need a shitcoin, we might actually need a Marscoin, right? But I think that's basically the only permissible shitcoins is if you get, if you get to another planet, you get to start your own shitcoin." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "01:02:14", "start": 3734.31, "text": "Yeah. The-- I wrote a blog post, \"Bitcoin in the Interplanetary Frontier,\" that goes into that a little bit. You could use Lightning on Mars just fine, right? 'Cause it's local, it's local network basically But then all you have to do is wait four, four confirmations once your transaction goes to, goes to Earth to get to the main chain, just wait four confirmations ex-extra and then you're there. So, it's maybe not that bad to use it. Because you would have to still" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:43", "start": 3763.19, "text": "monitor for like, you know, bridge transaction, and then you need to broadcast your justice transaction and so on. So maybe you would have to set longer, what's the word? Penalty windows or longer, I think they use CSV and CLTV window. So maybe if you Mars, and you got a lightning node, you're gonna have to set longer windows." }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "01:03:02", "start": 3782.25, "text": "Yeah, and you could use main chain Bitcoin, it would, you'd just be a little bit behind. You couldn't mine, but you could run a full node, right? Of course, you have to make sure that you have multiple comms channels, back to Earth so that they can't embargo your comms or anything like that. It gets, it gets crazy. It gets crazy. Yeah, it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:20", "start": 3800.81, "text": "gets pretty wild when you start thinking about it. No, that's awesome. Look, I, I think that's pretty much it, but, did you have any, closing thoughts for the listeners? Anything they should look out for when they're using the dashboard?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "01:03:33", "start": 3813.32, "text": "You can set favorites right now. You can click it and put a couple, put a Refer to a few things. stay tuned, you know, there's a lot more to come. Everybody's been asking about time series data on this stuff, but I don't know, it's a point in time, it's a, it's a point in time and it's gone forever, maybe, so we'll see. But yeah, it's, it's, it's really fun. One of the things as a developer that I love about this sort of thing is that you can just launch something new, right? You know, I'm kind of my own boss on, on I'll use it and, and it's just a little, it's like my, my free time I spend writing code, so I'm just a huge nerd." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:20", "start": 3860.5, "text": "As, as, many of, myself and my listeners are as well. So, so look, where can we find you online? Where can they find the dashboard and find you online?" }, { "speaker": "clark_moody", "time": "01:04:30", "start": 3870.89, "text": "At clarkmoody on Twitter and then bitcoin dot clarkmoody dot com slash dashboard." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:36", "start": 3876.45, "text": "Fantastic. Well, I've really enjoyed chatting with you, Clark. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you. Subscribe to the show, read the transcript, and find the show notes at stephanlivera.com/155 for this episode. Thanks for listening, see you in the citadels." } ] }