{
  "episodeId": "SLP379",
  "speakers": {
    "stephan": {
      "name": "Stephan Livera",
      "role": "host",
      "tag": "STEPHAN"
    },
    "gigi": {
      "name": "Gigi",
      "role": "guest",
      "tag": "GIGI"
    }
  },
  "segments": [
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "00:09",
      "start": 8.53,
      "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. Master sure about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today, Gigi rejoins me on the show. Now, for those of you who don't know, Gigi is a well-known author, educator, and also a developer in the space, and we're talking today about linguistic attacks on Bitcoin and how to deal with some of these. So we talk through some of the terminology and why they can be inaccurate in the way the words are used. So we talk about things like this terminology of so-called unhosted wallets, and we also talk about this Bitcoin and wallet Fair language, and we also talk a little bit about proof of work and mining. And I think this episode will be a really good one just for you, if you are newer to Bitcoin or to share with your friends so they understand a little bit more about the ways in which language can be twisted and turned to attack Bitcoin. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the easy way to buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin. Now with Swan, for those of you who are high net worth investors or working with an entity such as a business or a trust, Swan Private is the service For you. With Swan Private, you will have your dedicated one-on-one expert who you can call, text, email, and ask all your questions about Bitcoin and make it easy for you. Whether that is giving you expert guidance on choosing the right custody option for your Bitcoin or giving you the right tips and tricks or access to the right people in the space, your Swan Private rep can help you. So if you're interested in this and you are a high net worth investor or a business and you want to work with a leading world-class team that consistently receives excellent feedback and reviews, go to swanprivate dot com. Now, if you are a builder in the space and looking to set up your Bitcoin node or Lightning node and have that professionally run, check out Voltage. Voltage has constructed the leading enterprise-grade Lightning solution for Bitcoin builders who are building the future of financial technology and Layer 2 applications, so the decision to integrate Lightning no longer has to be an afterthought. Voltage makes it really easy for any organization to integrate or build on Lightning. You can scale nodes instantly By the thousands, get high quality liquidity easily and much more. What was once a headache is now simplified. You can go and get your node up and running in two minutes by visiting voltage dot cloud. HodlHodl has a platform that you can use to lend or borrow against your Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer way. It's called Lend. So with Lend at HodlHodl, you don't have to sell your Bitcoin to get some liquidity, you can put up some Bitcoin into an overcollateralized loan and receive stablecoins, and then at the end of that term You pay back the loan and you receive your Bitcoin back. So with lend at hoddlehoddle, all the deals are happening directly between users, and you are the one to set the terms and put up offers depending on how long you want to borrow and the interest rate you're looking to pay. That website is lend dot hoddlehoddle dot com. And I'll also note here that hoddlehoddle are hosting Baltic Honey Badger, so this is an excellent conference, especially for those of you in or around Europe. It's on in the start of September in Latvia,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "03:11",
      "start": 190.58,
      "text": "Tom. Now onto the show with Gigi. Gigi, welcome back to the show. Hey, Stefan. Thanks so much for having me back again. Oh, it's always great to chat with you, Gigi. And we've got a theme for today. It's around Bitcoin and language, because- It's very confusing when people first start learning about Bitcoin. They just have to rely on various metaphors, and it, it ends up being very inaccurate if people try to reason using that same metaphor. So I think today would be good to chat about some of these ideas and where some common confusion points come up. And so we were chatting about this, and obviously this, you and I see this online almost every day when we're discussing about Bitcoin. So tell us a little bit A little bit from your point of view, how are you seeing this idea of Bitcoin and language?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "04:00",
      "start": 239.89,
      "text": "Yeah, it's, it's easy to forget how kind of confusing it all is, especially if you're, you know, like in Bitcoin all day, every day, and it's like second nature. You, you don't really step back and, and kind of reflect on, on the words that we use and the terminology and, and how truly confusing it is for, for newcomers. And I feel like currently this confusion or a lot of this confusion is being- Used to kind of, yeah, attack Bitcoin in a way linguistically. And, I think there is no, there is no shortcut to kind of understanding Bitcoin, you have to dig a bit, a bit and understand how everything works and understand how public key cryptography works. And, you know, like that's the first word already, like public key and private key. Like, what are those things? Are they actual keys? You know, if, if someone who isn't versed in computer science and, cryptography and those kind of things, a key is usually some- Something that unlocks something. And in Bitcoin, we use keys like Bitcoin uses no encryption, you know, we, we use keys to sign things. So that's, that's already super confusing. And everyone, everyone kind of knows this, you know, that like there, there always comes this point of a Bitcoiner's life where you try to explain Bitcoin to other people and then, you know, like you maybe set up a wallet for them or, or what have you, and then it's like, okay, but, you know, your bitcoins aren't actually in your wallet. Right. You get the Like, what, what is that? Yeah, exactly. Like, what, what's going on? And so I think it's, you know, it's, it's a good time to kind of reflect and have this conversation about the terminology. And I, I, I'm saying this because, you know, like I'm from Europe, and it's, it's such a shame that the European Union is just so opposed to everything that has to do with the financial innovation that is currently going on. And for example, they proposed legislation to ban unhosted- Wallets. Okay, so what does this mean? You know, like you're very confused about what a wallet is if you're even dreaming up the idea of an unhosted wallet. Like, like this is so disingenuous. This is so-- It, it is, it truly is a linguistic attack on Bitcoin. And so we should kind of get our terms straight ourselves and just realize this as well, you know? Like, if unhosted wallet, what, what does this even mean? Like, what is a wallet in the first place, you know? Exactly. When it comes down to Interact with the Bitcoin network, but you don't need much, you know, like you need a large number. That's the, that's the basis of, of it all. And, and so yeah, that's, that's what I wanna talk about."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "06:35",
      "start": 395.15,
      "text": "Yeah, for sure. And as you point out, it's really mathematics and passing messages between each other, right? Like at a very boiled down level, obviously we're oversimplifying a bit, but you can think of it like it's mathematics and people are passing messages to each other, but in a special way."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "06:52",
      "start": 412.16,
      "text": "Yeah, exactly. You know, like it's, like make, make no mistake, the, the re- the reality of how Bitcoin operates is exactly that. Like it's, it's just numbers and computers crunching numbers and computers doing, like, a computer gets an input, he, the computer does certain calculations and then an output is produced and this output is passed to other computers. You know, like that's always all that is happening in, in network computing. And this is true for mining, this is true for, you know, broadcasting transactions, this is true for absolutely everything. And so- So we use these kind of words and these metaphors to more quickly kind of explain and kind of get an idea into people's heads what is going on. That's why we speak of keys and of wallets and of signing and, and so on and so forth. And all, all these, all these kind of words are imprecise and all these metaphors break down. Like the, I, I put a tweet out the other day and, and I was like, okay, what's the, what's the most confusing term in Bitcoin? And basically every, every term in Bitcoin was mentioned. Right, yeah. And, I kind of have to agree, you know, like all of it is, is kind of confusing. But two of the terms that were highest up probably, that were mentioned most often was wallet and address. And address specifically because there is even a bit that wants to change address to something else, because address is just entirely wrong almost, you know? It's, it's not how Bitcoin works. You don't, you don't send Bitcoin to addresses really. You, in- voice would be more precise, you know, and like all of this hangs together because people think about it as addresses, and so they reuse addresses. But Bitcoin, like the fact that you can reuse an address is, is more or less like almost a bug in Bitcoin, you know, like you should never reuse addresses basically, and it also gives you the wrong idea because you think there is an address where the Bitcoin came from. So, you know, there, there is a, there is a famous, to me at least, it's famous, a Bitcoin wiki entry, about the And it basically explains to you in great detail why, why there is no from address in Bitcoin. You know, like you can't send Bitcoin back to the add-address where, where it came from. You shouldn't ever do that because you can't ever be sure if, if this Bitcoin can be spent again. You know, like you, you might, you might as well burn it and so on. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's, it's all confusing, you know, and, and just the fact that we are talking about addresses now and, and I'm telling you there is no"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "09:25",
      "start": 565.42,
      "text": "That's quite mind-blowing, and I know for a long time that was, in fact, the subject line in the Bitcoin IRC channel. It was saying, \"There is no from address,\" and it's obviously very confusing because people who are newer to Bitcoin haven't really deeply thought more about that, and they see a block explorer and they see, \"Oh, look, it's coming from this address into that one,\" or they might say, \"Let me send you my address,\" and so they're used to thinking of it like, \"Oh, this is my home. I live at one two Whatever, that's my address. Oh, okay, so let me just give you my address and you can send me a mail, right? 'Cause that's, in their mind, that's what they're thinking. Oh, that's what this address is. And okay, maybe there's some loose parallels there, but other ways in which you can go very, very wrong if you're thinking of it in those terms, as you said. Yeah. So I think it's important to, yeah, let's sort of break some of these down and explain really what's going on, and hopefully that will be But what is a public and a private key? And so, you know, like as an example, the way you might teach somebody who's new, you might say, \"Look, when you want to, you know, spend this Bitcoin, you have to use your key to pr- you know, to sort of unlock, or people use that analogy, and we can think of it kind of like this Bitcoin has an encumbrance placed on it, and the way you release that encumbrance is you sign a message proving that you control the private key.\" But you do it in such a-- and using cryptography, you do it in such a way that you can sign the message without actually revealing your private key, because that's the other really important part, right? That's, that's kind of like this idea that you start with the private key, it can-- you can create an address, and there are steps involved with that. It might be like a base fifty-eight and a checksum, or using the base thirty-two encoding to create what's actually the address that you can receive to, like B C one blah blah blah. Whatever. So I think those are some interesting points that have to be explained and thought about, because with keys and cryptography, it's not intuitive to the average person."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "11:34",
      "start": 694.26,
      "text": "Yeah. So what's, what's important to understand, I think, is that, you know, again, these are all just metaphors. When it comes down to it, it's all just information, information, it's all just numbers. It's, a private key is a large number, a public key is a large number. And, and the, the, the reason why this is true, and, and also, you know Seed phrase. Your, your seed phrase is, a private key, and everything is, everything else, all the other keys are derived from it, and the seed phrase is just an encoding of this large number. You know, like you can transform, like, just take the letters of the alphabet, you know, A, B, C, and so on, you can encode this as one, two, three. And, and just if you know this and you have a table and lookup table, then you can, I can speak to you with just numbers, and this is actually how computers work basically Binary encoding is at the base of it all."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "12:26",
      "start": 745.93,
      "text": "And, and so yeah, so we can think of it like it's different representations, right? You can have a number, you can have hexadecimal, you can have all these different ways of representing the same thing. Or in the, in the seed case, it can be your twenty-four words, like you were saying."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "12:38",
      "start": 758.5,
      "text": "Yeah, yeah. And, and so it's, so it's always about the information content, you know? It's, like it's very different than a key in the physical world, you know? Like, a picture of"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "12:54",
      "start": 773.61,
      "text": "So immediately you have to think about these things differently, and that's why a private key, you know, it, it can be stored in your head, it can be, stored as a QR code, it can be in your hardware wallet, you can generate it by flipping a coin, you can generate it by rolling some dice, and so on. You know, the important part is, you mentioned that, that, you know, like the private key without revealing the private key. So the way all public key cryptography works and the way also that, where Bitcoin derives its power from"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "13:24",
      "start": 803.55,
      "text": "Asymmetry. You have publicly available information and private information, and the private information has to stay private, and the public information is shared by everyone. So you have the public ledger, and you have your private key, and ownership is kind of simulated via control of these private keys. But it immediately gets complicated because, as you also mentioned, you know, like you, you usually spend, spend Bitcoin by signing a message with your private key, which proves that you have ownership or at least like control of this private key. You know, ownership is already a tricky concept in, in Bitcoin, because there is no Real physical ownership, because we're not dealing with physical things, we're dealing with, with information. And the thing that's, that's important to understand kind of is that, that's what's, that's what's so tricky. You kind of, you have to keep certain information, you, you have to keep this information private on your side. No one can see it. If someone sees your private key, they have your Bitcoin, they have, they, they can control and spend your Bitcoin and so on. But you need to interact with the public network to make use of it. So depending on Depending on how you use Bitcoin, the public and the private information are either close to each other or they are not. And what I mean by that is, like your key, if you, if you are putting your life savings into Bitcoin, it's advisable to really- Hide your private key well. And I'm mentioning all this because it helps us, I think, to think about what a wallet is, because what a wallet is is really hard to nail down. Because let's just look at all the different wallets that we came up with, you know? Like we, we have brain wallets, we have paper wallets, we have hardware wallets, we have Lightning wallets, we have multisig wallets, we have mobile wallets, we have desktop wallets, and so on and so forth, you know? I'm sure I forgot at least ten more. And so- So, so what a wallet is, it's, it's, it's basically everything I just mentioned is like, okay, what is the medium that it is stored on and so on. And I think we already made good progress in kind of changing our language to make this more clear what we actually mean. And we, for example, we are now talking about seed phrases and seed plates and, and cold storage and so on and so forth, you know? So, so a wallet might be just a plate of steel with twelve or twenty-four words stamped on it, like that's, that's also-- you In a sense, you know, like you, you still need to have something, like if you actually want to use it and spend it, then, then you, you need a way to take this private information and have it interact with the public face-facing information. And again, take everything I say with a grain of salt because you can also, you know, like put this away forever and just use a derived information to check your balance, for example, then you have a watch-only wallet, you know?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "16:02",
      "start": 962.02,
      "text": "Yeah, right, right."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "16:03",
      "start": 962.92,
      "text": "So, but, but that immediately should make obvious that, okay If they want to ban unhosted wallets, you know, a wallet might be twelve words in your, in your head, and that's by definition of the European Union, unhosted wallet, okay, are twelve words in your head now banned? So it's, it is really stupid and it is, it is actually a linguistic attack on Bitcoin. And so I really like, for example, the idea of, of NVK of just moving away from the term wallet completely, for example, for hardware signing devices and call them signing devices, because that's what they are. It gets Software wallet, it's not a signing device really, you know, like your-- it's, it's, I think it's a stretch to call Bitcoin Core on, on, on your laptop a signing device, you know what I mean? Like, you-- I mean, it's, it's not a clean, it's not a clean terminology. I mean, your, your, your laptop will be the, the signing device, but, yeah, the software is doing the signing. And, but I really like, I really like the idea of, of calling hardware wallets signing devices, because Of your seed phrase, for example, and then you, you know, like you have a, you have a seed backup or, or like a steel plate somewhere, a seed plate, call it whatever you want, but, but you have the seed and you have the signing device and you, you have some software that helps you to interact with the network, you know, because you need to access this public information as well. And so I think using these more precise terms will, will be helpful to kind of understand what's going on. And there's so many things related to this, you know, I, Yeah,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "17:40",
      "start": 1059.56,
      "text": "right. But it's, it's all interrelated, right? And so- Yeah, yeah, it's all interrelated, everything hangs"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "17:43",
      "start": 1063.22,
      "text": "together. And for example, I don't like the term, and I never did, I, I don't like the term private key and public key, because you, the, the two things are very, very, very different. It's like, it, it sounds the same, it's private key and public key, you know? And, and that's why people s-sent, like, they sometimes sent their private key,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "18:04",
      "start": 1083.58,
      "text": "you know"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "18:08",
      "start": 1088.3,
      "text": "Whatever, you know? And so moving away from these terms and, and, and, and just sticking with seed phrase. And, and just whenever you hear seed phrase, think, okay, no one can ever see this. No one must ever know your seed phrase. A seed phrase is something that you stamp into steel and you bury in your backyard or whatever, you know? Like, don't actually do this, but you get the idea. And, and, yeah, and the public key is something that you actually-- you don't need to think about in Bitcoin, like it's, everything is derived. And in the end, i-in the end, what you, what you should give to someone that should send you money is, is an invoice, you know? Like that's-- and we all know, you know, it The private key and you have public keys in between and so on and so forth, and it's an HD wallet, and so you have a hierarchy of keys and, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But all, all of that isn't terribly important for the end user. And I think these kind of things will help us to, to think about Bitcoin more meaningfully and have more precise language. And to be fair, like we're already moving in that direction with signing devices also on Lightning, you know, the default terminology is invoice and so on."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "19:14",
      "start": 1153.78,
      "text": "Yeah. So I think with Lightning, we're getting a second bite at the apple or the cherry or whatever the saying is. And, yeah, as you're saying, like even with, you know, the cold card, I'm starting to mention it more like a signing device, even, yeah, w- you know, when I'm talking about it, I'm trying to sort of bridge that, I, I might use both terms to sort of help bridge, and then eventually we might get to a point where it is just signing device. And so because there are"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "19:44",
      "start": 1183.76,
      "text": "Or like paper wallets as well. So paper wallets are pretty much universally not recommended, they aren't seen as a secure thing to regularly be using. But in terms of the brain wallet concept, as you said, it's almost like the EU is trying to almost criminalize the wrong thoughts, because imagine you have your twelve word seed, so again, it's a-- that twelve words is a representation of that big number, which is your private key or your seed, and those twelve words, if you just walk across a border memorizing those, you can walk around with literally billions of dollars in your head, but at the same time, the EU is almost moving against that possibility. Are they almost creating thought crime?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "20:26",
      "start": 1226.5,
      "text": "Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think legislators and basically those who are wedded to the fiat system, they, they're starting to realize what the implications of Bitcoin are and, what this all means. And I think this is a deliberate attack to-- It's all framing. It's all, it's all a, a, a narrative attack, kind of, you know? It's, it's-- Because if you hear unhosted wallet, it's like, oh, oh, that's, that's bad. It should be hosted, you know? Like, the wallet But it, it would be very, very different if you call it, you know, like every wallet has to be a slave wallet, because if you, if you just have an account on Coinbase, your Coinbase is slave, you know, you have-- And we use these terms in computing actually, you know, like you have an account"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "21:10",
      "start": 1269.65,
      "text": "as opposed to a wallet. Yeah. It's,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "21:11",
      "start": 1271.21,
      "text": "oh yeah,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "21:11",
      "start": 1271.43,
      "text": "like master and slave, and also, and also,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "21:14",
      "start": 1273.93,
      "text": "client-server, you know? But, but this is why, why this is an, a linguistic attack, because in Bitcoin, we have notes A public-private key pair, and to create a wallet, you can use open-source software, you can run everything yourself, you can do everything yourself with pen and paper, you can do it by flipping a coin. I, I always use the same example, you know, like to interact with the Bitcoin network, to, to be able to receive funds, for example. You can lock yourself into a cell or into, into, into your bathroom or what have you, flip a coin two hundred and fifty-six times, and then do some math with, with pen and paper, and out of it will come an And you can post this address anywhere. And now, now again, you know, like I'm m- making the mistake of calling this an address, but let's just stick with the old terminology so to speak. But you can, you can derive all of this, but just using math, you know, it will take some time and it's, it's not super straightforward, but you can actually do it. And then you can just announce this to the world, \"This is my, my address,\" and people can send you funds, and that's it, you know? And you can take the same"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "22:26",
      "start": 1346.16,
      "text": "Convert this to a seed phrase, and you can put this number, you can put this seed phrase into any software, any wallet basically, and you can interact with the Bitcoin network. And this is what, you know, is so foreign, and this is also why it can't be stopped and it can't be controlled. And of course, you know, like, this is very scary to the powers that be, to the politicians and bankers that want to control and surveil absolutely everything. And, and this is where this ter-terminology comes from, you know, like they want that every wallet Wallet is not an independent self serve wallet, they want you to install slave wallets. They want you to use, to use their terminology, which is terrible, hosted wallets. And it is terrible ter-terminology because there are no hosts in Bitcoin, there are only nodes. And the, the node that you interact with, it can be your own node, and you're, you're putting some trust into that node, you know? Like, but if you're interacting with a service like Coinbase, you're basically a slave to Coinbase, and your account can be frozen, your transactions- can be blocked, your funds can be stolen, and so on. Fractional reserve can happen and, and all, all of that, all the things that we want to move away from, you know, everything that makes Bitcoin great is destroyed by that. And this is why, why I think it's, it's a blatant attack on Bitcoin, you know, like forcing people to use hosted wallets. It's, let, let's call them what they, what they are. We have, we have freedom enabling wallets with se-wallets with self-serving wallets with regular Bitcoin wallets. Just, it And we have wallets that introduce dependencies, that make you dependent on a service. We-- I mean, you know, if, if we want to fight fire with fire, let's call them slave wallets from now on, you know, because it's just, if you have an account-- if, if you, if you have an account on Coinbase, you don't have Bitcoin in the first place, you know? Like you have, you have a very weak Bitcoin IOU, you know, like you can, you can be, your Bitcoin can be taken away like in, in an instant, and That Coinbase is a slave to, you know, like the, the government can step in and, and, and then Coinbase will freeze your account."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "24:32",
      "start": 1472.04,
      "text": "Yeah. So really what you have is an account, not a wallet, right? I, I think that's one way to think of it. And, like in your article, you make a really good point as well. It's just like cloud computing, right? There is no \"the cloud,\" it's somebody else's computer. And so in this case, it's somebody else's wallet, right? That's really all it is. Appropriate trade-off wise for that to be the case, like let's say you're a person in El Zanto and you have an account with Bitcoin Beach, fine, you know, that-- but just to be clear, that's, you know, that's the difference between having an account and having a wallet. And so obviously what we're seeing is this attack in terms of the regulators and legislators, and particularly in some jurisdictions like the EU, are very much going against this idea of any kind of freedom for the individual. They are trying to- Surveil everybody in terms of the chat apps on their phones, what, you know, what, what you can do with Bitcoin. They're having things, they're pushing things like the FATF travel rule to say, \"No, we're not allowing you to transact without us knowing who is sending to who in terms of regulated Bitcoin companies.\" And so that's really the challenge, that's what's at stake here, because they are seeing it like they don't like cash, and if cash were invented today, they would probably try to ban that too. Right? You know, and so they see it like they have their little, square peg that they wanna fit into the round hole. They, they see it like, \"Look, we have these AML and sanctions laws, and if this software doesn't match our conception of what the AML controls should be, because in their mind, they should be able to identify every transaction and every person who's sending anything to another person,\" and they are trying to leverage existing- Bitcoin businesses to be their surveillance vector. Yeah,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "26:31",
      "start": 1591.12,
      "text": "absolutely. And I think, you know, it's, we should all fight back against this. It's absolutely nonsensical, and it's-- Bitcoin was designed to do away with all this nonsense. But it also only works if you shoulder the responsibility yourself, and you actually hold your own keys, and you run your own node. And holding your own keys is the most important part, like you mentioned, you know, like you have an account, it's, it's not your Bitcoin. It's like-- That, that's why this mantra is-- That's, that's why Bitcoiners keep harping on about this all the time, you know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. If you don't hold your own keys, you don't own Bitcoin, period. Like, that's, it's as easy as that. And the, the reason why Bitcoin is so valuable and so important is precisely because enough users hold their own keys, and that's what we, like, we need to absolutely normalize this. We need to encourage everyone to hold their own keys, and we need to educate people to hold their own keys, and we need to also educ How important this is, because if we don't manage to, to, to do this, this is how Bitcoin will get captured, you know? Like, I, I mean, that's, that's, that's clear as day, I think. That was, that has been very clear for many, many, many years, you know, if, if most users and most economic activity is happening just on Coinbase accounts, for example, then Coinbase effectively becomes the central bank, and we have, you know, a capture system just like Goldcut capture, and then we have fractional reserve banking and so on and On shouldering this responsibility of actually taking this seriously, holding your own keys, running your own node, verifying for yourself that what you're using is aligned with your idea of Bitcoin, and the first step is always to hold your own keys. And it's also, it's also not hard. And I think, you know, like we've been so, so coddled to always give away this, like, let, let someone else take care of it. Like someone, like I, I just, I don't wanna, I don't wanna think about it, I don't want to be responsible for"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "28:26",
      "start": 1706.22,
      "text": "Can phone a number and so on. Like, I, I, I feel like we have to return to foster, just a, a better relationship with, with ourselves and our future selves and adopt this responsibility. Like, you can actually do it. You can hold your own keys. It's not that difficult. You can, you can even go fancy and, and, you know, like, set up a, a multisig wallet, which brings me to, again, you know, like, what is a self-hosted wallet? It's, it's so stupid, you know? Like, They know exactly what they are doing, because I was about to say they don't know how Bitcoin works, but I think they know how Bitcoin works, and it is a deliberate attack. And the, the beauty of Bitcoin is that you can actually set up contracts that where you are still in full control, but it's also failsafe, you know? And I'm obviously talking about multisig and also taproot contracts and so on and so forth. And so it is way, way better than the legacy banking system, it's way better than everything we had before, it's also way better than gold was,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "29:26",
      "start": 1766.16,
      "text": "You can store in your head, like you said, twelve words in your head, and you walk across the border. And just think for a minute about that, what it says about the people that want to ban all this and want to- Do not want to grant these kind of economic freedoms to people that absolutely need it, you know? Like we are in a situation now where the fiat ponzi is kind of in, in, in the last stages, you know, and, and- Yeah, it's really"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "29:50",
      "start": 1789.73,
      "text": "accelerating."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "29:50",
      "start": 1790.37,
      "text": "Yeah, probably, probably about to impl- implode. I mean, you know, like the gold bug- the gold bugs have said this for decades, so maybe we have another ten or twenty years in the system, who knows? But Bitcoin is insanely useful to, to millions and millions of people, you know, and it's It's working, Bitcoin will be there for you. So I, I, I think it's absolutely disgraceful that politicians try to ban having twelve words in your head. They try to ban, like, you're not allowed to generate your own entropy and lock yourself in the bathroom to flip a, a coin two hundred and fifty-six times, you know? Like, what the hell? What, what is going on? And I think we should all fight back and call this out and also make use of our, of our self-surrender and actually do this and actually hold our own keys and, and I If everyone does this, then, then, you know, like the other regulations will be moot."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "30:43",
      "start": 1842.95,
      "text": "Back to the show with Gigi in a moment. Have you thought about improving your security to multi-signature with Unchained Capital? And remember, with Unchained Capital, they are teaching you how to hold your own key, so none of this unhosted wallet nonsense. You can hold two of three keys, and in doing so, you can remove single points of failure. So don't leave your coins with custodians or exchanges, learn to self-custody and use Unchained's conc to help you. So you pay upfront, they'll ship you the hardware wallets or the signing devices, and then you will have a call to teach you how to do this, and they'll deposit a thousand dollars of Bitcoin in your vault. And on top of that, there's some ongoing support and education. Unchained Capital are putting up a lot of educational material in general, which you can all find over at unchained dot com. And on top of that, they've got other services as well, such as loans. So if you're interested, go to unchained dot com slash concierge"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "31:37",
      "start": 1897.12,
      "text": "My favorite is the Coldcard, and you can get this over at coinkite dot com. So they've got the new version, the Coldcard MK4, which is available for pre-order right now, and some of the first few orders are going out. I've managed to get mine, and I've been playing around, I'm really enjoying using it, and it has that same look and feel as you know and love from the earlier Coldcard versions, but with new features. It's faster, it's got more RAM, it has two secure elements, it also has NFC support, so I'm"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "32:07",
      "start": 1927.42,
      "text": "And there are all kinds of features that you can use in your cold card. I like that it has an address explorer so you can even check that you actually control that address before you receive into it. So go to coinkite dot com and order your cold card there. And finally, Brains. Brains are a Bitcoin mining company through and through, and they've got a range of products, most notably Brains OS Plus. So this is custom firmware that you can install on your ASIC mining machine. So go to the website brains dot com and check out which models are supported. But if you use this You may be able to improve your efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. Now, you can use BrainzOS Plus and point your hash rate towards any pool, but if you point your hash rate towards Slashpool, you also receive zero percent pool fees. So, over on the website, you can find a lot of material. They've also got this really cool Insights dashboard, which I spoke about recently with Daniel from the team. You can use the Insights dashboard to do all kinds of things like profitability calculations and just keep an eye on the Bitcoin mining industry. So, that website is brains dot com, it a i i n s dot com. Back to the show with Gigi. Yeah, there are all kinds of ways to push back as well. Like, I think some of it is on that political regulatory front, some of it is also just going to better jurisdictions, right? Like, part of that is just, look, if this jurisdiction isn't giving you a good overall mix in terms of the trade-offs that you want, go somewhere else. And, you know, sometimes you, you can't, in certain situations, you can't stay and fix it, and you're better off going and building something Bitcoin is building a new financial system. So I think these are all really valuable points for people to really think about and really stand up and push back, and part of that is educating ourselves so we understand what's the difference, like really what's going on, and then educating other people about, hey, this is actually what happens, right? This is actually what's happening under the hood. Now, look, for some people, maybe it's too far beyond them, but you have to try at least with what you can. I think another one that would be really good to chat about is this whole concept, So-called from address, right? Because that is a big con point of confusion, and that arguably is also one of the entry vector points for chain surveillance companies, right? Because they are trying to say, \"Look, look, mister regulator, look, mister politician, or look, mister central bank, I can help you by tracking down the coins because I know where it came from per se.\" And so, when in reality, Bitcoin is kind of like a coin smelter. So, do you wanna elaborate a little bit on that idea?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "34:37",
      "start": 2077.26,
      "text": "Yeah, exactly, and it's, that's such an important point to understand, you know, like all the change surveillance heuristics, like they will always be just approximations of what's going on. They, they will always be just heuristics. They're trying to say what happened maybe, but it can always be wrong. And a very easy way to show this is like, for example, a Bitcoin transaction is just like you have certain inputs, and then, as you said, like, you can think of it, I always think of it as a smelting process, you It's like a, a very, currently a very regular Bitcoin transaction, and this produces, let's say one output or doesn't matter, two outputs. And what happens is that the two things, the inputs always get destroyed and new outputs always get generated. And how you can visualize this is like you, you have, let's say, two coins and you throw them into a pot and you, you smelt it down and you create two new, new coins of different size, for example. And this immediately shows you that it's very, very hard to, like, it's, it's It's basically impossible to, to kind of track what's, what's going on. It's like you can't tag the molecules and the, the, the gold atoms. Let's pick gold, gold coins as, as a metaphor, you know? In bitcoins, a-again, it's, it's all just numbers. So you've certain numbers, and then, you know, there's this process which kind of destroys these things and new numbers are, are created. And so every Bitcoin transaction is a smelting process, period. It doesn't matter how many inputs and outputs there are, even"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "36:07",
      "start": 2167.14,
      "text": "It will be just heuristics, because you have no reliable way of linking these kind of temporary pseudonymous identities that we have in Bitcoin to real world identities. I mean, chain surveillance companies are, are trying, you know, and you can do this with, with some probabilities and so on, but I can give you an open dime and this completely destroys the heuristic, you know? Like we can move UTXOs from one person to another person without using the Bitcoin network. And also, if you just take the example again of two coins throwing into a melting pot and And just, creating two new, new coins again of, of different size, you don't know what, what was going on. You can only say, okay, something, something went on, and who controls what, you don't know. And I think this is very important, for the privacy discussion and for the contract discussion and all of that, you know? Like, w-we must realize that there, as you said, there is no from address, and Bitcoin only knows inputs and outputs, and the transaction is and always will be a smelting process. And It's a great example. Lightning has better privacy guarantees because of that, because you, you, you kind of-- you can't really see what's going on, because it, it does the important transactions off-chain, so to speak, you know? And I think i-- in the future, we might come up with better solutions and better constructs that, that even maybe have privacy as a, as, as a byproduct, you know? And it's, I, I think, I think we, we need to have these kind of discussions, because I don't, I don't want to-- I Now, encryption was an afterthought, and it took the revelations of Snowden to show that running everything on HTTPS and, and running every, every message on an un-uncrypted basis is, isn't, isn't the greatest idea, you know? And so it took us, I don't know, like thirty years to implement HTTPS by default on the internet and introduce SSL and introduce, end-to-end encryption. And it's still not done, and it's still, as you, as you mentioned before, you know, like a lot of regulators and politicians and so on are, are, are fighting To spy and control absolutely everyone and everything, and I think that's not healthy for a free and prosperous society. It, it definitely isn't, you know? Like it's, just, we, we have all these, like, we have, we have these constitutional rights and, and, and these freedoms for a reason, because if we don't have them, everything goes to shit. And, you know, like your right to free speech and your, your right to free assembly and those kind of things, they're actually important, and your, your right to privacy and to have private conversations, they're This, we learned this over many thousands of years, and that's why we have these rights, you know? And it's, it, it just boggles the mind that, that, you know, like the, the people on the power trip, they just, they just don't want to give regular people those kind of freedoms, and it, it's really sad to see. But again, coming back to the, to the input/output discussion, that's, that's all that is going on. And so I'm mentioning all this because a coin join isn't something super duper special, Action where the various inputs might be controlled by different parties. And so it breaks the chain surveillance heuristics. But it's like the best example to, to kind of show or, or one analogy I would like to kind of throw out there, you know, if you look at a encrypted connection that is, just like with HTTPS that is being made, two parties meet, they exch-change, they exchange, a certain secret, so they have a, a handshake, and then they create a secure connection and whatever, whatever they exchange, like You and your bank, for example, or you and your spouse or what have you, is private, you know? And we frame this, over the last thirty years, we managed to frame this as security, you know, like you don't want to-- you don't want others to spy on because there are bad people out there, and if they spy on you, they might learn something and they can hurt you. And this is true for financial transactions as well, you know, and we, we have certain-- like we, we learn this over and over and over again. You know, privacy is"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "40:06",
      "start": 2406.04,
      "text": "not Privacy is also about security. If someone knows exactly how many funds you control and what you're doing with these funds and where you live and so on, you're not very secure. And the same is true for messages and, and, and all the rest of it. That's why we have encrypted communication, that's why we have HTTPS, it's about security. And so to come back to, to the analogy, you know, like you have an HTTPS connection, two people meet in cyberspace, they exchange a secret, and they create a secure tunnel between themselves, you know, like they create a"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "40:37",
      "start": 2437.26,
      "text": "And you can think of it in the same way. You have a client, a merchant, and if they want to transact securely, they can exchange the secret and they, they can agree to do a certain kind of transaction, like an HTTPS transaction, and then it's very hard from the outside to see what's going on, you know, just like with encrypted communication. And like, I, I, I really want to see this implemented more across the board, because Paycoin is actually very effective of providing more privacy for everyone, you know, like you only need, I don't know the number Amber, but so please, all, all the privacy enthusiasts, please don't kill me in the comments. We'll be coming after you. No, but yeah, but the"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "41:15",
      "start": 2474.59,
      "text": "point is basically you only need a small number of people doing pay- Yeah, it's like two, two percent"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "41:18",
      "start": 2477.97,
      "text": "or five percent of, of transactions if they are pay- Yeah, it's like two, two percent or five percent of, of transactions if they are pay-"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "41:22",
      "start": 2481.71,
      "text": "It completely starts wrecking a lot of the chain surveillance heuristics basically, and I'll add another point to that, which is also that in Lightning, If you and I were using Core Lightning together and we open a channel together using that, that also, guess what, it looks like a payjoin. So even in Lightning, if we start to see this happen, then all of a sudden it really does start to play and wreck a lot of the heuristics that the snake oil chain surveillance companies are doing. And so then their ability to actually surveil the network will be diminished by that. And of course, there's other things out there, right? Things like Taproot and pTLC and all these other ideas that will help in terms of- Lightning privacy, but there's all these concepts that will basically make it more difficult for people to be surveilled in their use of Bitcoin in terms of how many coins they have, the, the his- the transaction history of their coins, because again, even with Lightning, a lot of that is happening off-chain, and so it requires more surveillance, an active surveillance, if somebody's trying to figure out what you're doing on Lightning."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "42:33",
      "start": 2553.39,
      "text": "And, a-and again, it's not about secrecy, it's about privacy and security in the end, because you don't, like, for example, if you're holding large sums of Bitcoin on your balance sheet, or if you're, in exchange, or like a Bitcoin bank or something, there are ways to, for example, do proof of reserves, you know? Like you, we-- Bitcoin is still a transparent system, and these things are important. We, we don't want to, come into a situation where, you know, like the twenty-one million are under attack,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "43:03",
      "start": 2583.25,
      "text": "And this will still be the case. It's just about, if I, if I want to transact privately, I can do that, you know? Like it's, again, it's, privacy is not secrecy. Privacy is about selectively re-revealing yourself to the world. And we, we don't want to be in a situation where everything and everyone is revealed all the time. And I think this will be increasingly important also for, you know, like just think about, like, there's a reason why we also had bank secrecy and there's a reason why, Your competition will destroy you if, if, if they, if they will see like which, which, suppliers you do bus-business with and those kind of things,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "43:42",
      "start": 2621.6,
      "text": "right? Or how much they're paying and all this. Yeah,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "43:44",
      "start": 2623.58,
      "text": "exactly. Or also just take a, the, the, the very simple example of, a company paying their employees. I don't, I don't wanna see how everyone, like how everyone else is spending their money, where, and how much they get and so on and so forth. So, so we need these kind of privacy guarantees. Like as Bitcoin is Important. And of course, you know, like, make no mistake, you can absolutely use Bitcoin very privately currently. It's just very, very involved. It's not, you know, it's-- I, I always make the, the same comparison, you know, like, you, you could use encrypted communication twenty years ago and use PGP and so on and so forth, you know, but it was very involved. You really needed, needed to know, what you were doing. And HTTP was the default, you know, and just unencrypted communication was the default and so on. And That this is necessary as well. So I'm very happy about all the developments you mentioned, and I think we will, we will soon be in a situation where this will just be the default that you basically pay join into a lightning channel or, for example, and, and then you can just, at least for certain sums, you know, Transact privately, and you yourself can choose what you want to re- what you want to re-reveal or what you don't want to reveal."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "45:03",
      "start": 2703.11,
      "text": "Yeah, of course. And I think the other big theme that we should discuss as well is this notion that somehow Bitcoin is violent, right? So this is another sort of, I think, very bad language, very clumsy way of talking about Bitcoin. and I'm sure you've got thoughts on this also. So, what do you think about this idea of Bitcoin as- This violence, Gigi."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "45:27",
      "start": 2727.41,
      "text": "Oh man, I, I have to gather myself for a minute for, for that one. But yeah, it's, as far as I'm concerned, it's, and, you know, like, I, I don't have any beef with, with Jason, not really. It's, but as far as I'm concerned, it's, it's another linguistic attack, if you, if you want to, think about it in, in, in that way, because the, the problem I have with Is that we went through all of this before, and we went through the crypto wars, and RSA was cl- classified as munition, and it went, you know, all the way, I think, to the Supreme Court, I don't know, but it's, you know, like this was a long, long fight, and people like Adam Beck printed T-shirts with, you know, like, Perl code or something on them that implemented RSA, and it was like, okay, look, it's just a couple of squiggles, and this is all there's to"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "46:25",
      "start": 2785.21,
      "text": "It's not a tank or an aircraft carrier or a nuclear weapon. No, it's speech, and we, we arrived at this conclusion, you know? Like code is speech, and like we, we had this fight already. So I don't want to, I don't want to relitigate that, yeah, sort of, yeah, and it's just-- No, it's like code is speech, and, and Bitcoin is speech, and this is also what, what my piece, inalienable property rights was about, you know? Like it's- Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is speech because, as we said in the very beginning, all it does is crunch numbers and send around messages, you know? And, as I've said also on, on Twitter, you know, I agree with Jason's thesis in, in broad strokes, and I, I agree with like ninety percent of what he's saying, but the conclusion is just completely asinine, you know? Like it's, it isn't violent, Bitcoin can't be violent, it's, it's very much like the only moves you can make in Bitcoin are inside the system,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "47:20",
      "start": 2840.38,
      "text": "you But you don't necessarily know where the ASICs are, you know? Like you can mine on the ground and use a satellite connection and, and what have you. So it, it, it comes back to also that security and privacy are linked. And if someone can't tell who you are or where you are, then it's very hard to attack this someone. And that's why I, why I brought up also in the piece the analogy of correspondence chess, you know? Like Bitcoin is like a game of high-speed correspondence chess that, that isn't round-based, it's always going on. And so The only thing you can do is play valid chess moves. That's really the only thing you can do, because the invalid chess moves, they will always be just dismissed, you know? Like you can't attack anyone with just an invalid chess move. And so, so it doesn't matter what happens, like if, even if you get very, very angry because you lost in a stupid way, you can't find the other person and, and exert violence on them, you know? So it's in the domain of thoughts and it's in the domain of language and it's in the domain of speech, just Violence, framing,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "48:22",
      "start": 2902.4,
      "text": "right? And I think that's why in earlier years, and of course, many people who came into Bitcoin in the earlier years had more of a cyberpunk and libertarian style of thinking, and so they were thinking of it more like, \"I'm just defending what I put into this system, that's all it is. Like, it's a very benign, right? Whereas this kind of aggressive framing of, \"Ah, see, it's an attack, and it's like we're just fighting in the digital realm,\" like it's, it's like a very, just wrong framing About what Bitcoin is, and I think that's rightly why many people were pushing back on Jason, who unfortunately wouldn't take criticism very well."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "48:59",
      "start": 2938.66,
      "text": "Yeah, and it's-- if, if you're dead set on, on using the language of war, you know, and I really don't want to do it, I, I want to reserve those terms for, for meat space where actual bombs and actual guns, kill actual people and, and bring actual pain and violence and death and destruction. But it's-- I mean, also in chess, you know, you, you, you, you have defensive"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "49:21",
      "start": 2961.3,
      "text": "Like, not everything, like, I, I said, I mentioned for example that, that, the Bitcoin is a shield. Like, if you, if you want to use this terminology, the Bitcoin is a shield, and that's all there is. And not every defensive move implies an attack on someone else, you know? Like, not everything that is defensive is a preemptive strike. Because, for example, you know, being pseudonymous online or being anonymous, is, you know, like, that's a defensive move, and it's, you're not attacking anyone, you know? Like, you Silence, for example, you know, you're not attacking anyone by, by exercising your right to silence."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "49:57",
      "start": 2996.66,
      "text": "Exactly. Or it's like if you build-- I think part of this comes down to what do you view as the just acquisition of property, right? So if you build a home and then you live in that home and then, let's say, you have some way of stopping other people, enemies from coming into your home, are you attacking them? No, this is like absurd. This whole notion is completely, just utterly wrong-headed."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "50:20",
      "start": 3020.28,
      "text": "And, and that's why I say I stopped discussing this with people on Twitter because, you know, like, after, after running into this wall for the fifth time where people told me that the, the walls of my house are actually weapons, I was like, okay, what are we even talking about? You know, like, all the, all the words lose all the meaning and, you know, like, I- Yeah."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "50:40",
      "start": 3040.45,
      "text": "Yeah, and as you said, words have meanings, right? We use words because they have certain meanings and just to sort of play around with analogies loosely and then try to See, therefore, it's violent, and I, you know, because I think for some people, it's that all they've got is a hammer, and everything looks like a nail, and so then they're, they're thinking of it in terms of warfare, guns and bombs and missiles, and then Bitcoin gets dragged into that, when really it's nothing like that at all."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "51:09",
      "start": 3068.69,
      "text": "Yeah, absolutely. And I think, as, as you just mentioned, you know, words do have meaning, and that's why I think we should be very careful with our words, and we should try to be"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "51:21",
      "start": 3081.32,
      "text": "As I said before, we, we do this kind of naturally, that's why, you know, like we're coming up with, words like seed phrase and so on, and we're moving away from keys and, and all the rest of it. You know, I, I also, I don't want to, like it's, it's important that we talk about these things because the only way to fight bad ideas is by, with more good ideas, you know? And I hope that people will realize that framing Bitcoin as violence is like, it's not the"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "51:52",
      "start": 3111.84,
      "text": "And a-again, like just read up on history, read about the, the crypto wars, understand how Bitcoin works on a technical level, you will realize that all that's happening is like Bitcoin is a messaging system, that's what it is, and we can use these messages to build up an incorruptible history, and we can use this incorruptible history as money, basically, you know, like a-as a letter which, you know, is money. And, and, and that's what's going on. So it's, it's, it's not physical. It's like-- I"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "52:22",
      "start": 3141.52,
      "text": "waxwing, Adam Gibson, who spoke about the reification of information, like Bitcoin creates this informational construct by finding a valid block, which takes-- and, and this is where Jason is, is kind of right, you know, like you, you have to take raw physical power in the sense of you have to take energy to produce this information. But once this information is produced, it's done, you know, you don't have to actively defend it really, you know, like it's just that the game is going on. But it's, it's like the, the, the, you And the Bitcoin network would stop, all the proof of work would still be there from the past. You know what I mean? Like it's still in the information itself. It's like we knew the difficulty, we knew all this, and the, the information speaks for itself. And that's why I, I also have in the piece in alienable property rights, that's why I have the potential for violence is trans-is transformed, the potential for violence in the physical world is transformed, and then all we have is messages, and all we have is information, and all we have is like, you know, How, how Bitcoin can hurt you is with loss of purchasing power. That's the only way it can hurt you, you know? And, and, and, and, and this is like the, what Asics are doing is they are transmuting the physical thing into an informational thing. but then it's done, you know? And so, like to give the devil his due, you know? But I don't think that's what, what, what Jason is, is basically talking about. But there is a physical component to Bitcoin, which is mining, and again, as I Stealthily, and then it becomes very uneconomical to do these kind of attacks, and it's always about cost benefit when it comes to attack. I mean, that's, that's, that's why, why you have shields and walls and all the, all the rest of it in the first place. Like it's, everything can be attacked basically. It's just that for, for strong cryptography, for example, like the universe will die a heat death before the attack succeeds, so it's very uneconomical, you know?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "54:15",
      "start": 3255.28,
      "text": "Exactly. Right. Yeah. And, some of this They are being funded by some shitcoiners like, the people at Ripple, for example, with, funding Greenpeace and EWG. This whole change the code idea where they lie and say proof of stake is more efficient than proof of work, when in fact they aren't comparable and proof of stake is simply insecure. so do you have anything to add in terms of the language, that's being used there?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "54:44",
      "start": 3284.02,
      "text": "Yeah, again, we, we are dealing kind of with a linguistic attack, w-with the Greenpeace stuff, you know? It's like, change It's nice that the code can't be changed. This is nonsense. It's all software. You can change the code. Like the whole, the whole thing should have been over from the start. It's like Greenpeace goes, \"Change the code.\" Bitcoiners go, \"Yeah, please go ahead, change the code.\" You know? And they could change the code, and they could create Greenpeace proof-of-stake coin and be done with it, you know? It's just about, no seriously, and people did, you know? Like, like proof-of-stake forks kind of exist."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "55:22",
      "start": 3321.9,
      "text": "I mean, ab-about the proof of stake, thing. I really regret kind of writing this tweet because now I have to talk about, like, the, the, the tweet thread that so many people liked, that compares, proof of work and proof of stake. For, for me, it's mostly about, like, you really have to understand proof of work, and then you will immediately understand that proof of stake is absolutely nonsensical and doesn't work and it doesn't solve the problems that proof of work solves. And so the short"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "55:52",
      "start": 3351.8,
      "text": "And so proof of stake always has a quorum of people that will decide what the truth was. You don't have an external reference to the, the real physical world to determine what happened in the past and, and what is true. And, just if you, if you analyze proof of stake systems and how they were attacked, you can see immediately they are insanely prone to timing attacks and also to stake grinding attacks because they have no, no, they have no trustless source of timing. What proof of work does, and I wrote about this in Bitcoin is Time, is it builds up its own arrow of time that is trustless and it can be verified by, by everyone. And you need an absolute order of events for, a ledger to work, for money to work, you know, you need to know that A came before B, came before C, and you need a way to trustlessly ver-verify this, you know, like so that everyone can agree on the order of events without relying on trust. And proof of stake can never have this, it just can't. And this is why, you know, timing attacks and stake grinding attacks are actually successful. The second part is Stake grinding is, it's very hard to select something randomly, you know, like computers can only do pseudo randomness, so to speak. And so you can't cheat random mechanisms. And so if you want, if you have a quorum of people and you want to select the next signer randomly, you know, that's a really hard problem. it's a really hard problem to solve in a way that can't be cheated. And proof of work solves this, and proof of stake doesn't. That's why these kind of systems are prone to these stake grinding attacks and so on. They can Who have the majority, then you can actually capture such a system and, and you're the, you're the king of the whole proof-of-stake system and you can give yourself more stake and more power and so on. And this happened in the past, just look at some people that are familiar with podcasting two point o and, the, the, the systems that this uses, unfortunately, they're using PodPig, which is running on the Hive blockchain. And Hive used to be called Steam, and Steam was captured by, I don't know who it was, maybe it was"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "57:51",
      "start": 3471.3,
      "text": "A bunch of it and, and bought all the validators basically, and he was the sole king of the whole thing. And so it, it became political, it was a political decision, okay? Justin Sun captured the whole system, so we're gonna fork off and Steam is now Hive, and it, it is a permission system and it always will be, you know? It's proof of work also solves, it solves so many things, but it's, it's like there is a reason why, why in these systems you need to kind of talk to someone to create an account and get permission to"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "58:21",
      "start": 3501.3,
      "text": "It's just all, I don't know, equating the two almost, almost is also, you know, a linguistic attack of sorts. Like they're not even in the same universe, proof of work and proof of stake. Proof of stake is the old system, proof of stake is the, a central banking system, proof of stake is the political system that we want to move away from. Proof of stake is, is, you have certain people, a quorum of people, that hold keys and they sign off on things. So we are back to the central bankers, the ele- And so forth. And you need proof of work to guarantee the integrity of public information without the use of private information, you know? Like there's only those two ways. If you want to guarantee the integrity of certain information, the regular way is to have a private key somewhere and sign the, the message, sign the information, then you can, then you can cryptographically guarantee that it was not tampered with. Okay. This leads you to a situation where a certain group of people has certain keys and has- The signing keys, you know, and you have to trust those people, and it's, it's gonna be a small group of people. And proof of work doesn't waive this, because proof of work doesn't need the secret information. Proof of work has a public costly signal to protect the integrity of the information. And that's, that's, that's one very important difference, you know, like that's, that's a very important part of proof of work. The other very important part is timing. It's very hard to build up a system where you have a trustless arrow of time, where What is actually, what is the current state and what, what happened in the past? And again, like I, I wrote about this at length in, in, in Bitcoinist Time, and if someone's curious, just, just look that up. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very hard, you know? Like it's, again, it's, it, it, it, it takes only ten seconds to, to spout, nonsense, and it takes like, you know,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:00:15",
      "start": 3615.22,
      "text": "a hundred X or a thousand X the, the time and, and, and the They, they have no idea what they are talking about or they are attacking Bitcoin. And, and so, and so, yeah, it, it, we just have to be very vigilant about that. And really, I think the kind of the solution to all of that is to really educate people what is going on and how these systems work and how important, like proof of work, the difficulty adjusted proof of work is the innovation in Bitcoin. It truly is everything else was there before. And the difficulty adjusted proof of work solves the timing problem first and foremost. It also solves, the problem of giving everyone The problem of issuance, the supply issuance"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:00:53",
      "start": 3653.32,
      "text": "aspect, yeah."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:00:53",
      "start": 3653.92,
      "text": "And so, so, so this is the innovation, this, this was the crooks of the matter in the past, you know, all the other systems failed because they either had to use a centralized timestamping server or they had to rely on a central party for issuance. And so, proof of work so, so, both of those things in a, in a very beautiful way."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:01:10",
      "start": 3670.21,
      "text": "Yeah. And unfortunately, what we have now is, I mean, fortunately we have Bitcoin, but unfortunately what we have now is a lot of snake oil salesmen who"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:01:21",
      "start": 3681.28,
      "text": "Mechanism, right? Like that's what they like to frame it as. Oh, see, that's just one consensus mechanism, we just have our own way. And then they start framing it like theirs is superior in some way, right? Because theirs doesn't use, as much energy or whatever, but secretly there's all these risks in that system. It's not secure. It doesn't achieve the same things. And so because they are lying or not aware about these things, they can start selling this message and the unaware public or the lesser aware people who maybe aren't haven't studied It as deeply as you have, say, then they might go along with that narrative, and that's why, again, it all comes back to education. Education is so important for people to understand really why is proof of work secure, and even then, it's only one proof of work coin or only one SHA two five six coin will be secure because all the other ones that are, have less of a hash rate, they can be easily attacked. Yeah. So, absolutely, you know, that's an important thing to understand as well, because sometimes people conflate it and say, \"Oh, Work is secure, but look at this proof of work coin that got hacked or destroyed or in some way, but actually it was not Bitcoin, it was like some altcoin that got wrecked. So it's important to sort of understand the nuances of this and to understand where proof of work wins, right? And the other big point is that proof of work, there's an objective way to find out what's the truth, right? So let's say you or me, we have our node and it falls offline for whatever reason, and we want to try to get back online and figure- figure out, hey, what's the true state of the chain? What is the true state of the ledger? Well, with proof of work, we have an answer to that question. With proof of stake, it's not so clear, because then you become-- you, you're falling down more into a model where now you are having to, quote unquote, ask a friend."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:03:06",
      "start": 3786.15,
      "text": "Yeah,"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:03:06",
      "start": 3786.55,
      "text": "exactly. And that's really the difference, and I think that's where a lot of people don't understand that difference between proof of work and proof of stake and other, you know, shitcoin mechanisms."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:03:21",
      "start": 3801.3,
      "text": "Tiebreaker mechanism, and you can, you can, you can think of it as whatever is the, Satoshi used to call it, the longest chain, but it's actually the heaviest chain, the chain with the, the most proof of work in it. It is impossible to have-- it is physically impossible to have a synchronized state across space because we have the, the limit of speed of light, for example, like that's every physicist understands this. And so you will always run into conflicts that It's, it, it, you know, there, there is what happened before and what happened after on, on, on a large enough system, it's very difficult to, to figure out. Like it's, it's impossible to have complete synchronized snapshot state of a system, because it always depends on where you are in the system. So you will always run into conflicts. This is absolutely unavoidable. And a very easy way to see this is, for example, like Bitcoin is a ten minute block time. I mean, very easy way to see this. If you, if you truly understand Bitcoin, then"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:04:19",
      "start": 3859.72,
      "text": "It has a ten minute block time, and ten minutes is long enough to land on one state that everyone can agree upon, you know? If you reduce the block time, if you make it shorter and shorter, then you will have more orphan blocks, you will run into more conflicts, and more kind of histories would be valid depending on where you are in the network, you know? Like one half of the network might have one view of history, and another part of the network might have another one, and then you have to resolve this conflict. And this is, this is just a physical reality. This is a Physical limitation of our universe. There is no universal state, that just isn't. And the, the bigger, like your network is in terms of light distance, the, the harder this problem will be to solve. And for Earth, ten minute block time, that's fine, that's enough, that, that's, like, that works. But because Earth has like a fifty-millisecond light diameter, Earth on Earth, from point A to the opposite side of the planet, it will always take fifty milliseconds for light to travel there. You know, you can't do it quicker. If we would reduce the Time to fifty milliseconds or lower, any consensus would be absolutely impossible. It would be absolutely impossible. You couldn't, you couldn't land on a synchronized state. It's absolutely impossible, you know? And so what proof of work does is, it, it creates this information that speaks for itself and that acts as a tiebreaker mechanism. If you have two histories that compete with each other, because let's say you broadcast a transaction that is in conflict with another transaction from, you know, one in Asia, one in Europe, or what have you, or one, one in the US, one in Asia, And on the one half of the network, it's, like, to, to pick the Bitcoin example, it's like two miners on opposite sides of the, of the world both find a valid block at the quote-unquote same time, you know? And then one half of the network will have the one chain tip and the other half will, will have the other chain tip. And this is an inevitable result of trying to find consensus in, in a decentralized network. There is no central point, and so there is no central truth and there is no central time. Like, look into relativity, There is no simultaneous, there, there are no simultaneous events in our universe, period. It's just that Earth is so small that we don't notice this, but there are no simultaneous events. Like this is really important to understand, because you will always run into these physical limitations with any system, any network system. And the way this is usually solved is with a central server, and that's also why everything else before Bitcoin had a central timestamping server, because you need to find out the order of events, and it's just like you have this one central authority, and it will tell you, like, Whatever, if the signal arrives there, like, then it's event A, and if the next one arrives, then it's event B, and so on, you know? And then it propagates back out to the participants, to the clients of, of, of the network. And so you have this, you have this client-server, you have this master-slave relationship. And if you want to move away from this, then you have to do what Bitcoin does, and proof of work is this tiebreaker mechanism. And in proof of stake, you have none. You have no tiebreaker mechanism that is"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:07:20",
      "start": 4040.1,
      "text": "That, that will tell you, okay, we think this is what happened, and, and we think this is what happened because this is what kind of happened in the past. But if this whole quorum was civil attacked, for example, and they, they, they have been fed wrong information, you have no idea to find out if this actually happened or not. In proof of stake, you can, you can generate two histories that are equally valid, and if the network is presented with those two histories, you would have to refer to the quorum, to the people in charge, to tell you what actually"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:07:49",
      "start": 4069.68,
      "text": "We have two competing histories. The one with the heavier chain, the one with the most proof of work, is by definition the truth. It is what happened, and you can't do that because you can't cheat work. You can't cheat this, period. You have to do the work. And if, for example, if aliens would land and they have a fusion reactor and they would, from the genesis block, generate a different history and they would overwrite the whole proof of work of, of, of Bitcoin's past If you're running like a mode consensus, you would have to accept this past, you know, like you would have to accept the alternative history, because that is actually the tie, the tiebreaker mechanism, you know, that's the, the-- and that's how all of this works, and, and that's why it's also so genius, you know, like we never had anything like this where you can look at information and say, okay, just by looking at this information, I can tell what happened in the real world, I can tell what happened in the physical world, and, and, and You can have your private information, your seed phrase in your head, and you can do something with the publicly available information that you can verify yourself just by looking at it."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:08:55",
      "start": 4135.55,
      "text": "Exactly right. And I think the key point, as you mentioned, is that you don't-- like, it's just difficult to grasp because there are various points in the system that you don't have to trust, right? You can actually relying on mathematics, relying on cryptography, you don't have to trust that this is the most valid chain, like this is Because of the proof of work. And so it's, it's a really difficult concept to convey to people, and I think that's why it's so, important, the education aspect is that people do the reading, do the listening, do the work so that you can more accurately convey this point to everybody. And so, you know, I think that's probably the key point for people. So, you know, today we've spoken a little bit about the ways there are linguistic attacks on Bitcoin and how best to respond to them. And so, yeah, so we've spoken a little Unhosted wallets. We've spoken a little bit, bit about this idea of Bitcoin as violence and why that's wrong. We've also spoken about this idea of proof of work being about, you know, physics and reality and proof of stake really being more like a political system. And so I think these are probably the key ideas for people to understand. And of course, listeners, make sure you follow Gigi. You can find him on Twitter at d e r g i g i and his website, which you can find at d e r g gigi dot com. So, Gigi, any, closing thoughts for people, and where can people find you online?"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:10:22",
      "start": 4222.78,
      "text": "yeah, as, as you mentioned, I'm, I'm best found online on Twitter, and, yeah, I think I, I really hope that we kind of get our own house in order and maybe over time come up with s-some terms that are a bit better and easier to understand for most people and not only for cryptographers and, and hackers and so on. And, yeah, I, I, I just want to urge everyone again to You know, speak up and, and, like fight, fight back against those linguistic attacks on Bitcoin. They, they will not stop. I, I think it will only get worse as Bitcoin grows and as more, people understand the implications of Bitcoin, Bitcoin will be attacked more and more, and those kind of linguistic tricks and those linguistic attacks are definitely, a part of it all. yeah, that's all I have for now, I guess."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:11:09",
      "start": 4269.31,
      "text": "Fantastic. Well, Gigi, it was a pleasure chatting with you, and you have an excellent way of explaining and clarifying these things that can be quite complex for people, but you've done a great job at distilling them down into simple terms. So thanks for that, Gigi, and, look forward to chatting again soon."
    },
    {
      "speaker": "gigi",
      "time": "01:11:24",
      "start": 4284.35,
      "text": "Yeah, thanks for having"
    },
    {
      "speaker": "stephan",
      "time": "01:11:25",
      "start": 4285.15,
      "text": "me. I hope you found that one educational and informative. I believe it is important to push back on linguistic attacks on Bitcoin because this will be used politically as an attack against Bitcoin and potentially against Bitcoiners. And so I think it's better to get on the front foot and get out there and make sure we are educating people about the truth of the matter. So that is why you should be sharing this particular episode with your family and friends just to make sure they know the truth about Bitcoin. That website is stephanlivera.com. Thanks a lot."
    }
  ]
}