{ "episodeId": "SLP523", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "adam_back": { "name": "Adam Back", "role": "guest", "tag": "ADAM" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.61, "text": "Welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by Swann dot com. Joining me today is the CEO of Blockstream, Adam Back. Welcome back to the show, Adam." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "00:20", "start": 20.28, "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me on again." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:22", "start": 22.44, "text": "So lots of things happening. We are just recently, as, we, just coming on to this, we're, we're just seeing Bitcoin Magazine is now getting sued by the Federal Reserve. So have you seen this story?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "00:34", "start": 33.87, "text": "Yeah, I, I don't even know. I mean, it, it sounds like they are saying they don't like that they use their logo to ridicule this, thing. But I mean, like for a government to- See, see a newspaper or, you know, journalists for critiquing a government project. I mean, come on, that's not gonna go anywhere." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:57", "start": 56.7, "text": "Right. And I find it very-- it just seems very unusual that this was the point that they got really angry, right? Like Ron Paul wrote the book \"End the Fed.\" Many Bitcoiners and libertarians have been anti-the Fed for a long time, and they've been chanting \"End the Fed,\" \"End the Fed.\" How much merchandise is there out there with the words \"End the Fed,\" and this is the thing they get angry about, Yeah," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "01:18", "start": 78.17, "text": "this craziness." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:20", "start": 79.95, "text": "Yeah. and of course, recently we also saw the news about SBF, being found guilty. So I'm curious if you have any initial reactions on that and, what it might mean, in terms of where Bitcoin, market, where the Bitcoin market grows." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "01:39", "start": 98.96, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I suppose, I mean, obviously it's, bad news for him and his immediate family and so on, but, you know, it, it seemed to most people that he took extreme liberties with other people's money, basically, whether that was a rogue trader scenario where he tried to trade himself out of trouble and just got deeper and deeper, or whether he set out to- You know, abuse people's money all the way along, so I don't really know the rights or wrongs of that, but in any case, I think it, it's sort of ironic the whole thing actually that You know, 'cause his whole pitch was that he was the, you know, the well-regulated exchange. Initially they had like a lot of licenses, right? And The, US government, like, financial regulators were ex-- you know, gave them a lot of access, more than other exchanges managed to get actually. So plus, plus the political donations, right? So it's sort of egg, egg on face for all the, US financial regulators. but I think, you know, it takes people outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem a while to get over The, sort of negative news and to unhook it, you know, it, in, in a, they, they like to sort of attach negative stories to Bitcoin, like it's Bitcoin's fault that this guy stole a bunch of money, right? Well, I mean, so did Enron, you know, there wasn't actually that much crypto related about it, it's like an exchange trading things and he just took, took client money and it took people a while to realize it's more like a Madoff Kind of story almost right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:25", "start": 205.1, "text": "Right. And we wouldn't say just because Madoff happened, that people shouldn't, put anything into the financial markets, that, you know, like it would, you wouldn't make that analogy, or at least people didn't make that analogy. They said this particular fund had something wrong with it, or it was a fraud, it was a Ponzi, et cetera. Right. And I think the same will happen with Bitcoin, and we are seeing that happening with, you know, institutions actually coming. I think that's, Institutions are coming was a meme ever since, let's say twenty seventeen with, the CME Bitcoin futures, but now it seems to be happening for real, doesn't" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "04:02", "start": 242.03, "text": "it? Yeah. I mean, good timing too, because, you know, bonds are having a hard time, and of course, these sort of long dated bonds If the interest rates go up and they're like ten, twenty, thirty-year bonds, the face value of them falls enormously. So I saw some news that in the UK, some of the pension funds are exposed to a lot of those things, and it's like knocked fifty percent off the portfolio value of people's pension funds. Now, of course, you can hold to maturity and, and you get back You know, the principal plus the interest, but realistically in that kind of duration, however many years is left on those bonds, the, there'll be so much inflation that they won't be worth much. And, that's, you know, I assumed, you know, once they got going on this quantitative easing and enormous amounts of debt in the US and other countries that You know, they can't afford to pay it back. Like the only way out of this is high inflation," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "05:03", "start": 302.59, "text": "and to just inflate it away, right? So that the real world value of the debt shrinks. O-otherswise, these, you know, they print more money To pay the debt, the debt just gets deeper and deeper. So that is, you know, it makes it very difficult for people, of course, to, you know, hold on to a real rate of return on any, any investment and causes question a lot of, established kind of long term investment strategies like the sixty forty, you know, stock to bond ratio managed fund So, you know, maybe good timing for Bitcoin to be available in a spot ETF because some of the US funds could usefully pick up a Bitcoin allocation to sort of- as an alternative to their bond exposure, or at least to, offset some of the dismal, inputs there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:02", "start": 362.11, "text": "And you're right that it may start with smaller amounts. Maybe, there'll be people who go and realize, \"Oh, okay, even if I just have a small allocation, one to five percent of Bitcoin, something like that.\" Of course, you know, if you're deeper into Bitcoin, you hold a lot more than just one to five percent, but maybe for, for people, that's a starting point, that's the dipping the toe, The challenge that I see around inflation, as you pointed out, is that a lot of people are seeing right now there's a high cost of living or the cost of living is rising, but a lot of them haven't made that connection yet. Do you think there's something that will help them make that connection, or do you think that just most people won't see it and really it's gonna be down to the, more intelligent people who grasp that connection between cost of living increases and high fiat inflation?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "06:54", "start": 413.83, "text": "Well, I mean, I think for- You know, developed countries, the-- I mean, of course, the consumer price indexes are always manipulated by various factors for political reasons, but, you know, the, the actual real- Consumer price index inflation was pretty muted, you know, in previous decades, right? Maybe two to four percent or something, and so it's something that, you know, people would get a little bit of a pay rise as they got older, on average. And pay would creep up with inflation and the cost of goods in the store would creep up or they'd shrink the size of the package so that it shrink, so it doesn't, the price doesn't go up but the quantity goes down. But, you know, I think it's pretty hard to ignore or not notice when, you know, the asset price inflation is probably fifteen to twenty percent and even a lot of basic foodstuffs are, or, or, you know, fuel But ran like just, just all the things, and of course, the interest rates been up. You know, that in, in some countries, the, the cost of housing isn't even included In a consumer price index, and yet, you know, people spend typically like fifty percent of their after-tax income on, on housing, if not more, right? So it's kind of, you know, for anybody With a mortgage payment, once they come off, fixed rate periods, if, if they have fixed rate, and that will obviously flow through to rents because the landlords, have to pay the higher interest, so yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot more people in economically developed countries will be noticing and hopefully make the connection that, you know, it's not a mystery why the, why the prices are up, it's because the government just, you know, added fifty percent to the money supply in a couple of years and, you know, what, what did anybody think would happen, kind of thing?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:57", "start": 537.33, "text": "So with, one other question kind of related to like SBF and FTX, I, I think there was a lot of talk that last cycle maybe was muted in some ways because of all the paper Bitcoin dynamic. I'm curious if you see a similar thing like, okay, does it look like we're potentially entering a new bull cycle now? Do you have any thoughts on whether the same thing can happen again? a-any comment there?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "09:25", "start": 564.92, "text": "yeah, I mean, I, I think that this cycle has been impacted by external factors which" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "09:38", "start": 577.62, "text": "You know," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "09:41", "start": 580.87, "text": "the COVIDs, geopolitical instability, supply chains, all, and, and like the deep, and the in, the in sector stuff, like the, FJX itself and the DeFi failures and the contagion through, you know, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, BlockFi, Genesis, and companies and individuals exposed to them. So there's a lot of contagion and high leverage in that stuff. So all of that, you know, got piled up as if it, if it was Bitcoin's problem, like, you know, COVID, geopolitical instability, the DeFi failures and really, you know, Bitcoin is a hedge against a lot of that stuff if you just buy Bitcoin and hold your private keys. And so I think, you know, the market can be kind of dumb for periods of time, right? And, So I think the fundamentals are coming through, you know, the Bitcoin dominance is up, Bitcoin is up over a hundred percent year to date, and it's getting more sort of credibility and recognition in traditional finance circles by, you know, the whole slew of major Wall Street firms, You're trying to get a spot ETF through, offering Bitcoin related investment products to wealth management clients or retail clients, like Fidelity even has like a retail offering these days, and that's pretty, pretty widely used savings," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "11:11", "start": 671.17, "text": "institution in the US. So, yeah, I, so I, I actually was thinking we might get, you know, that, that we would probably us-- if we hadn't had all of that craziness going on in, in the external world and in the sector itself as well, that we'd already be at a hundred thousand, you know, like this year, right? And so, or even- And, you know, last year. So, so my thought is that if, if some of that can fade and get cleared out, we could get to a hundred thousand or more before the halving either, even, and just, just get back on track of where, where Bitcoin might have been if you look at, you know, Previous cycles and the on average doubling every two years, that kind of metric, and then of course, you know, higher after, after the halving, but we'll see, we'll see how that plays out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:10", "start": 729.56, "text": "Right, that reminds me of the panel, we did at, Baltic Honey Badger recently, which was the, when one hundred K. So, yeah, although I guess you could say historically we've sort of seen like a rise into the halving and then a little bit of a drop after the halving as miners kind of get wrecked, the inefficient miners, and then sort of six to twelve months after that is sort of when we've historically seen that bull run happen, but this time maybe with a Bitcoin ETF, maybe with better understanding, maybe it's Different this time, we don't know." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "12:41", "start": 760.86, "text": "Yeah, well, I'm, I'm just saying that, you know, there are two things that, that can happen. One is, you know, the, the post-harving effect, which is, you know, it's a real effect, and people talk about it being priced in or not. I think it's generally not. and so that, that has a, an impact on the market 'cause the, the rate of new supply has shrunk, other things being equal, but I think that we're, we're due some upwards recovery, just as, you know, the economy gets back on its feet, more people realize that Bitcoin's inflation hedge, the institutions are adding credibility, so more kind of older generation investors might sort of make the leap or perhaps, I mean, I think a lot of the institutions are actually, you know, they don't, they don't necessarily- Do prop positions necessarily right? So they, some of these big institutions are, you know, they run mutual funds and they, they do asset allocation, but it's not their money, right? So if, if they, if they feel that they can make an allocation to Bitcoin, of course, could be a good time to do that, right? So in any case, I just, I just think that, you know, those factors could see a pre-hopping recovery and then the normal hopping thing afterwards, but we'll see if that plays out or not. Depends, you know, on the news flow, I guess, right? If we get some- Period of no silly news flow that's got, you know, problems misattributed to Bitcoin for a while, then I think we can keep going up." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:17", "start": 856.83, "text": "Yeah, and I think also, growing that base of stackers, the, you know, qu-quolocually people call it maybe the DCA army or the stacking, you know, hodlers, It's also interesting to see some of the s-statistics that are being shared by some of the on-chain analytics people saying, okay, you know, eighty percent of the coins haven't moved for this period, and that has historically not happened, that kind of thing. Do you put much stock into those kinds of metrics, or do you think that really once the price moves up, that will all change anyway?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "14:48", "start": 887.66, "text": "Well, I mean- It is true that there are relatively few coins remaining on exchanges, and but I think that may be part, you know, because some people were saying, \"Well,\" the effect of the halving should shrink over time because it's a smaller percentage change, right? So that's, that's the kind of typical argument against the stop to flow kind of projection and curve fit, but if the halal wave, i.e., you know, more and more people learning about cold storage, stop trading, cold store, dollar cost averaging, and there ends up being, you know, every four years, if the remaining coins on exchange more than halve, then the halving can continue to have the same effect, that's what I think. So, yeah, we-- So I think, it, it could, could continue to, to work, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:54", "start": 953.73, "text": "Yeah. Okay. So then we, we've also got to take into account some of the things that are happening in and around the Bitcoin space, right? So there are, you know, there's always lots of chatter on and ab-- about various technological things going on with Bitcoin. So I think recently there's been, a lot of chatter in the Lightning Network about replacement cycling as an, you know, a form of attack and what kind of- Mitigations are there against this and things like this. I, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this or whether you've, you know, it's not something you've looked into deeply, but do you have any high level thoughts on, where the Lightning Network is at?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "16:29", "start": 989.24, "text": "No, I mean, I haven't looked into that, and, you know, there have been a few incremental discoveries over time where, you know, additional design features have to be put in to shore up unforeseen limitations So we'll see if it, if it, presumably there will be some level of mitigation that can be made. And I, I saw some technical commentators said it's, you know, it's not that much different to some of the other issues, so they're not seeing it as a kind of, you know, showstopper kind of thing, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:02", "start": 1021.6, "text": "Right. I think, that's a fair point, and that, that seems to be what I was seeing as well from some of the more, involved developers and technical commentators also saying that there already are Known issues around Lightning that this isn't particularly, a showstopper per se, so, but it is interesting seeing some of the way people will latch onto a piece of news and then, it, it becomes part of their narrative of, \"Oh no, Lightning is failing, \"or \"It's not, it's not developing to the level that it should have.\" W-whereas on the other hand, there are people who are just continually building, it's getting better and better over time, or pointing out that actually there's a lot of people using Lightning nowadays. So I'm curious if you have any comments on, the growth in the use there." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "17:48", "start": 1067.57, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's, definitely getting, you know, continuous month-on-month high growth numbers, and so, you know, we're new ways to program and use it that make it easier to integrate. So Blockstream has something called Greenlight, which is, a sort of non-custodial way to have a, a lightweight Lightning wallet that's, easier to embed in application And things. So it, it sort of relies on a server more to, to do some of the heavy lifting, the storage, the state management, keeping up with the gossip network Doing the routing, and then it sends you enough information to sign. So in a way, it's a bit like how hardware wallets work with, on the main chain, which is the, you know, the hardware wallet, if you think about it it's, it's kind of a surprising how, how that works, but the hardware wallet doesn't actually know anything about the network, right? You just say, \"Well, I wanna pay this address this amount of money,\" and the hardware wallet knows which keys you have, but it doesn't even know which UTXO is, right? So you send it a proposal, \"I want to sign this,\" and it can verify the amount of, Bitcoin in the UTXOs you ask it to spend, and it can, and it can display for you how much you're sending and how much change is going back, but that's all it can check, right? So You have this kind of very narrow verification that can have very strong security. So, that's, basically how Greenlight works at a high level for, but for Lightning. So the trade-off is, you know, some of the wallets have done a pretty good job of You know, making it feel reasonable, but you know, still ultimately there's a, a full node and like, a pruned full node and a bunch of syncing and state going on, on, on a wallet, which is quite a lot, particularly if you, you know, if you're offline for a little while and you come back or something. So Greenlight has a kind of more Lightweight, instant on kind of experience, and it's always, you know, up to date with the network because the server is tracking that. So, and I think Lightning's also getting used for, some new things, which is a kind of A connector between different Bitcoin layer twos, which I don't necessarily anybody, saw coming, but it makes a lot of sense, you know, 'cause A lot of people will have a Lightning-enabled wallet, and then it's an easy way to move Bitcoin into, you know, liquid or FedMints or cashew and the, these new, leathers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:29", "start": 1229.42, "text": "Right. And that wasn't, that wasn't necessarily predicted, let's say, in earlier years, where maybe a lot of people were operating under this idea that everybody's gonna be running like the node at home kind of thing, but maybe it seems that Lightning is also really useful Useful at connecting between businesses. So maybe in a loose sense, you could say it's like B2B or B2C, or communities as well. I think that's something that, maybe Obi and the, and the Fedimint, kind of team are sort of pushing that vision of it as well, that it's like a community custodial thing." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "21:05", "start": 1265.12, "text": "Right, yeah. So Lightning ends up being the way that you move money in and out of those kind of community things as well, which is quite an interesting development." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:15", "start": 1275.22, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Swann dot com. You can buy Bitcoin and learn about Bitcoin over at Swann dot com or use the Swann Bitcoin apps available on Apple or Android. Swann recently announced Swann Vault. This is a two of three multi-signature vault that you can use to secure your coins, and the really cool thing here is obviously you can buy Bitcoin and buy it directly into your own vault. So the setup here is you hold two keys in different locations, and Swann can hold one key to help co-sign. For you where you need that, and also provide assistance and a very slick and easy setup experience for you. So currently, this is using Blockstream Jades, and there will be support for other devices added in the future. This is a great way for you to improve your security and not leave your coins with a custodian, but instead hold them yourself. If you are interested in signing up to get on the waiting list, go to swan dot com slash vault. This show is also brought to you by mempool dot space. This is my favorite Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer. You can You can see the mempool, you can see the blockchain, you can see second layer networks like the Lightning Network. Over at mempool dot space, you can search transactions and see historical data relating to those transactions. You can see things like the RBF replaced by fee history relating to those transactions, and of course, you can use mempool dot space to target the fee for your upcoming transactions. I use it regularly all the time when I'm about to send an on-chain transaction. Now, mempool dot space can also be run yourself. You can host Use it yourself, the code is free and open source software. So there's all kinds of features that the team are continually updating, go and check it out over at mempool dot space. And now back to the show with Adam. And so I think maybe that does bring some potential for conflict as well in, in certain, in certain people, because in their view, the whole thing should be not your keys, not your coins, and there shouldn't be any sort of acceptance of community custodial. but at the same time, there's a tension there in terms of how much, how affordable would Bitcoin be if everybody was trying to be, if, if literally every user, was non-custodial? and I think that, maybe that's going to be a, a source for future arguments in the future, just like we had with block size wars, w- you know, it may come again in the future, if, not everybody can actually self-custody." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "23:41", "start": 1420.96, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's a frequent topic of discussion, and, you know, not all of the block size war was Kind of misunderstanding or silliness or politics, some of it was a fundamental question, which is, you know, if, if you run into a limitation with Bitcoin Is it better to provide bare censorship resistant money to as many people as can use it within the current technology limits, or should we degrade it to like a very centralized thing so that everybody gets an equally You know, vaguely seasonable centralized thing, right? And so what the market said, I mean, I view the block size outcome as a market decision. The market said, you know, we value Bitcoin for what it is, and so we don't want it to get degraded. But that, you know, the free market solution is the people that can pay more are the people who get access. so yeah, it, it, it is, you know, of course, as enthusiasts for Bitcoins Use case and differentiated features, we would like if as many people that want it could get the same level of assurance. so I, but I do think the, the layer twos play, play a part there because, you know They are making a trade-off, and some users don't really need to be, you know, on-chain full of history, right? So, you know, the, the lightning kind of retail and micropayment things. I mean, of course, some of the lightning wallets are custodial even, I think maybe about fifty percent of the volume, perhaps even, right? Some of the popular wallets Actually, custodial, but e-even without the custodial factor, it still adds a lot of scale, and I think that, you know, that and, and, and another kind of layer too that has that kind of, you know Opt in, used for, optimized for different cases, liquid, which is like more about trading and stable coins and, you know, security tokens, share, but basically shares and things like that, which don't necessarily need to Happen on chain, you know, if you're moving Bitcoin, you know, for sort of like a more frequent trader between one custodial exchange and another, does the main chain really need to see that? Probably not, right? You could just move that using Liquid and You know, if you're actually using Liquid for trustless trade, probably that's safer than trusting an individual, custodial exchange, too, right? And there are, you know, there's things like SideSwap and TDEX which are So trustless limit orders, things that can even go in a hardware wallet, so you can sort of place a limit order direct from the hardware wallet, settled on a central order book until somebody takes it, and then the assets swap between the two hardware wallets settled on change. So I think the point is that each of these new- Layer two's, they make sense for the people adopting them, maybe it gives them an advantage for their particular use case, though not a trade-off that Bitcoin itself would wanna make on the main chain. But because they, they take their traffic off the main chain, they make more space so we get more capacity back for You know, for what the main chain can provide, which is the ultimate, you know, sense-resistant bearer cold storage platform and location. So, you know, maybe eventually the, the technology will evolve to To increase the on-chain capacity, you know, using SNARKs or some of these new technologies, and already, you know, incrementally Bitcoin Does quite a lot of innovation that sort of incrementally improves privacy or scalability, you know, so some of the Taproot features result in smaller transactions and Schnorr and MuSig and all these kind of things. So it's, it is incrementally Improving, and I was looking at the," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "27:42", "start": 1662.31, "text": "the average transactions per block on the graph, it looks, looks like about three thousand These days, which is, you know, probably up a bit from a few years ago, so, you know, there's still capacity there as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:55", "start": 1675.39, "text": "Right. And so the longer term vision will be that one of those transactions actually contains many transactions, as an example, because, because there's a lot of, you know, batching that can happen, or of course, things like Lightning, where the transactions are being taken off the chain or other layer twos where transactions can be taken off the chain. Some people might, I guess, you know, people who are more outsider to the community might look in and say, \"Well, it seems really Lightning focused, why is that as opposed to other layer two ideas?\"" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "28:31", "start": 1710.69, "text": "Well, I mean, Lightning provides actually, you know, a better experience on the on-chain for the retail payments, right? It's- It actually gives you pretty instant finality, which, which the main chain can't really do, and it tends to be cheaper as well and more scalable. but, you know, it's, it's still-- I think people get sort of, they hope there would be a silver bullet, right? But, I mean, Lightning itself isn't a silver bullet because if the participants- Have their own keys, they need at least one lightning channel per user, and as you know, as Rusty did the calculation, you know, if you wanna, if you wanna get a billion people On Bitcoin, it's gonna take a while to open that many channels, right? So, yeah, but there, there are sort of, you know, further on, sort of next step incremental Optimizations and channel factories and all this kind of things, so things, things are continuing to evolve." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "29:39", "start": 1779.0, "text": "and I, I think some of the" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "29:44", "start": 1784.1, "text": "zero knowledge proof things, which, which, you know, were invented after Bitcoin was released, like the, the SNARK concept was invented afterwards. And So there may be some potential there that that kind of technology could get, you know, the right, security trade-offs that they could become plausible for Bitcoin, like some of the early ones had novel- And hard to trust, security models, but-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:16", "start": 1816.18, "text": "Right, like trusted setup and things like this." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "30:18", "start": 1817.94, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So some of the more recent ones are getting a bit better. and that, that might give some new openings. I think of course you do, you know, you can't, you-- it's, it's, potentially problematic to- arrive at a situation where," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "30:38", "start": 1837.76, "text": "you know, you can't get the, get the history, right? So you've got your backup with a seed That should be it, right? So you should be able to scan something and retrieve all your unspent coins, and, you know, if you, if you have too much of this kind of snark thinking Taken too far, then that guarantee will stop being available, and it'll be, \"Well, yes, but you have to use, you know, some archival thing and trust it.\" And the problem there is, well, that's, you know, that's just a big block, right? What you're saying is that- if it gets too centralized, they might not give you the data back or there are too few copies or something, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:18", "start": 1878.29, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And as you've mentioned, in a big block scenario, if the blocks went, you know, bigger than an average, let's say a, a retail individual, then there is more of a risk that it's kind of a game over because you can't properly sync from zero, on, you know, a, an average everyday individual's hardware, I guess." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "31:38", "start": 1897.66, "text": "Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think I think a lot of people have heard of \"Not your keys, not your coins,\" but I think one of the lessons from the block size wars was that You know, if you actually want full sovereignty, then running your own node is actually important as well, because if you're not running your own node, you could, you know, the, the wallet that's using, you know, some kind of backend node or exchange, whatever you're using, could put you on the wrong chain, you know, in a, in a, in a fork scenario. So by running your own node and having your own keys, you're pretty much immune from You know, unwanted protocol changes basically." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:22", "start": 1941.8, "text": "Right. so this is something I'm seeing, maybe not again in the people who are in the hardcore Bitcoiner community, let's say, but I'm seeing people maybe one or two layers out where there's still a little bit of confusion about this. So as an example, I was reading a paper I actually came up in, Like more of it in a libertarian paper, but the guy was basically confused about this idea and saying, \"Oh, well, he seemed to be under this impression that you could just have...\" A layer one system without needing a layer two system, right? Like in, in their mind, they just think that, \"Oh, look, it looks like, you know, the B-Cash guys or some other big block-a person has maybe gotten to them and sort of given them this idea that you could have just done it without having layers.\" What would you say to that kind of person?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "33:09", "start": 1988.74, "text": "yeah, I mean- It's for anybody who comes from, let's say, a programming background or a computer science background. It's, it's, Sort of the concept of scalability is something they teach, which is like, you know, an example is, sorting. So you have a list of words and you'll sort it, and the, and the simplest algorithm is like a bubble sort, and it, it's, it's super inefficient, you know, you're like sort of n squared or something, right? So you, you take the first two words, which one's bigger, you swap them, and then you keep going through it and you do that. You know, like in over two times, and it's fine for like a small word list, but, you know, chuck in a million words and see what happens, and, you know, your, your computer starts to choke, even if you've got a fast computer, right? And so you try to explain to people that, 'cause I think the problem is the- Digital things, people don't have an intuition about the scalability of them, right? There, there's scalability in like material science, right? You can't, you know, like an-- you can have an elephant, but something too much bigger, it would break its own bones 'cause it doesn't have enough structural strength. So there's, there's sort of material limitations And there are also like computer science limitations. You can't, you know, you can't just say, \"Well, we'll just broadcast more,\" because, you know, if you got a billion humans broadcasting a few transactions A day, it'll like saturate the internet or something, right? And so, you know, it just gets worse and worse, and as it, as it gets more widely used, they have more people that they would transact with, so number transactions per person's increasing. And so, you know, that's, that's one answer that it's, it's not a good idea. And, and I think the other answer is just the kind of comparison, actually, the basically all networks that people are using are built in layers, you know, whether that's- cell phone networks, the internet, they're like switched, switched networks, so they're not broadcast, and that's because broadcast is inefficient. You know, Elon Musk has said some kind of at, at times, dumb things about scaling blockchains and, you know, even Starlink is, is switched, it's, it's also not broadcast, right? It's doing point-to-point routing because it gives you better utilization if you don't broadcast, you get, you know, more bandwidth For a given set of, network equipment, right? So, so I think that's another argument is that, you know, for sort of natural physics, mathematics Logic based reasons all networks, all digital networks have evolved to be switched and layered, and so, you know, why, why would Bitcoin suddenly be, you know, a different rule now? Of course, it's, it's hard to guarantee," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "36:03", "start": 2163.28, "text": "verisimilitude resistance in higher layers, and that's what Lightning manages to do, right? It's a switched network, even though it's like, backed or guaranteed by the base layer, so Yeah, I think people just don't realize how much, how much bandwidth that could be if, you know, there are a lot of transactions happening in the world globally, you know, retail and share trading and in, in all the systems, right? If you stuck it all on the chain, the internet would just melt down." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:35", "start": 2194.63, "text": "Yeah, of course. And related is people will say, \"Okay, well, look, hard drives are getting cheaper and network speed is getting faster and CPU is getting faster, so could you just explain why...\" Why even in spite of that, it's not enough?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "36:49", "start": 2209.14, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's a fair comment that, you know, equipment gets faster and you have this phenomenon with like, let's say, video games or software you could buy, it'll give you the minimum suggested hardware. You know, if you don't have a hardware that's got this much storage or such memory, CPU made, you know, this performance level it will perform badly, so it's kind of a recommended machine spec, and of course, computers get, you know, much faster over years, but, I think the problem with Bitcoin is it's, it's not a stationary target, so, you know, actually the, one of the challenges is you have to, Sync the node if you wanna be sure that you're on the right chain and verify it. And so I think for a number of years, the, the chain has been growing faster than hard drives and bandwidth and stuff like that, right? So some people proposed, you know, at the, you know, with the, so not, not even big block people, right? But at the time of the Block size discussion that, you know, maybe you could try to project what, what bandwidth growth would be or something, and then they came to realize, oh no, like actually The block history is growing faster than average bandwidth or something, right? And I think the other thing is because Bitcoin is aiming to be censorship resistant, you You kinda don't wanna have a minimum spec which is, you know, a hundred megabit DSL or something, right? Which maybe you can get in a major developed city, but it's gonna be pretty hard to get in like Nigeria or something. If you look on a map, there's like very few Bitcoin nodes there and The cost of even, you know, basic DSL is like more than a month's salary for, for the average person, right? So I think you want some kind of, you know, the- You can't assume nothing, so you've got to assume some kind of reasonable baseline. But yeah, I think the problem is it's growing faster. You know, there are, there are some hopes there, you know, for example One, technology that we worked with a bit is, Robin Linus and some of the developers working on this thing called zero sync, yeah. And the idea there is you You can sort of get data a bit faster with less bandwidth because you can download the UTXO set, which is, you know, I think about, quite a lot smaller than the history, 'cause it's just the currently unspent transactions, not all the historic transactions that are spent. And then you get, you download, There's a knowledge proof that proves all the transactions in history up to this point were valid, and the current proof doesn't include signatures, but, you know, Bitcoin By default, doesn't verify signatures further back than, you know, some, some watermark is called a \"seen valid,\" which is, I don't know, like a year or two back So you could, you could speed up a bit, like the history, catching up the history, but, you know, I don't think, I think you still wanna be able to look at the history, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:04", "start": 2404.23, "text": "Right. And so I think some of these arguments, yeah, sort of play into each other, and there are others who make that argument of, well, once we do have, let's say, the likes of Zerocoin or Utriexo and others, that maybe then at that point, people would be looking at, okay, now should there be a block size increase, not Arguments that we're hearing, people are making." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "40:30", "start": 2429.51, "text": "I mean, I think one argument which might be persuasive is if the transactions just get too expensive, so that, you know, if, if a, if a transaction fee ends up costing more than the annual cost of running a node or something, then probably the trade-off is wrong, right? Because one of the nice things about Bitcoin is it gives- It's kind of asset protection feature to anybody with a smartphone and some basic bandwidth and full node and what have you, right? Whereas people with, you know, enough money to hire lawyers and accountants and, you know, like let's say a million dollars Investable value, they can get asset protection from the current legal and banking systems, actually, right? So, you, you know, if you get, if you get to a trade-off where it's only economically accessible People with that kind of money invested, then it's lost one of its differentiators. So, but, you know, I think the, the different layers help Scale it indirectly as well, right? Because they take use cases off the chain that don't necessarily, you know, benefit from the chain guarantees as much." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:44", "start": 2504.28, "text": "This show also brought to you by CoinKite dot com. Over at CoinKite, you can get a range of Bitcoin security gear to help you secure your coins. You need hardware that will help you with securing your coins and keeping the private keys offline, and the Coldcard is a great tool to do this. With the Coldcard, you can use it in a variety of configurations. It has It's been designed to be very secure and it's actually really not that hard to use. I think people give it a bad rap in certain circles, but really, if you're a beginner, you can just buy a cold card and a USB-C cable and plug it into your computer. Now, of course, if you're intermediate or advanced, you can use more advanced features like airgapping, microSD cards, or you can use multi-signature or SeedX or and all kinds of other things, but the cold card is still quite accessible in my view, and I've managed to teach people how to Securing your coins, make sure you take them off the exchange. Go to CoinKite dot com and use code Livera for a discount on your cold cards. And now back to the show. Yeah, of course. And a great example is Lightning with small value transactions that don't necessarily all have to hit the chain, right? So, so that recent research, you know, at from the team over at River, where they've put out a report saying the lower bound estimate is six point six million per month, and so that's an example where there's all these small transactions that You know, yes, there was trade-offs, right? Those Lightning users had to take a trade-off of maybe needing an online requirement or something, but in doing so, they are taking the transactions off the chain and then they're making it cheaper for the people who still are transacting on chain. So I think that's also another point that, you know, maybe isn't appreciated by some people who are saying, \"No, just don't even use Lightning, just do everything on chain.\" In some, in some way, those people are benefiting from the Lightning users, 'cause the Lightning people have taken their transactions off the chain to make it cheaper, otherwise on the margin." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "43:37", "start": 2616.52, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think one of the challenges is it's proven to be fairly difficult to make The sort of trustless guarantees to transfer them into, into layer two's, so it works for lightning, but the Sort of, the idea to have a trustless side chain has proven challenging. You know, it requires soft fork to, to implement some opcodes, and those opcodes have some trade-offs. You know, for example, the drivetrain trade-off or The more decentralized version, which has got a fraud proof, and, you know, even so, the-- it's, it's not able to get the same assurance as the main chain, and I think people have kind of- Anchored onto the main chain as, you know, if something isn't exactly equal to the main chain, then I don't want it, right? So there's a sort of gold standard where, so I think people have to get sort of- Comfortable with trade-offs because, you know, it, it's, if, if there was a no trade-off solution, Bitcoin would Use it, right? So, so I think it might just be that, you know, the, the silver bullet no trade-off scalability solution isn't, isn't available, like we don't know how to do it, right? So- Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:04", "start": 2704.22, "text": "The other aspect to this also is paying the miners over the longer term, because even if you were to raise the block size, like imagine ten, twenty years down the line, technology has improved and there's a modest block size increase, there might still be arguments even there, because people might say, \"Well, what about the fee revenue for miners? Because the idea was that the system would transition to fees, as opposed to block subsidy, and the block subsidy, subsidy is coming down over time, and so...\" You can sort of imagine arguments on that line also that you want there to be fee revenue for miners, and so that's why you shouldn't raise the block size." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "45:45", "start": 2745.09, "text": "Yeah, well, I mean, I could, I could see that, you know, if, if some of the sort of," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "45:52", "start": 2752.48, "text": "you know, Snark type of things worked out Better than expected, we could almost have the opposite problem, right? Which is, you know, there's infinite free transactions or nearly free, you know, if there's, if there's like an excess, then" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "46:10", "start": 2770.44, "text": "the market will create a low price, right? And then, then that question comes back. So, maybe there are solutions to it too, you know? Like A minimum transaction fee or something by policy. But yeah, I mean, at the mo- so far I haven't been too worried about that because the Bitcoin price has gone up on average double Every four years, right? Yeah, so for a decade it's gone up every two times every year, and the halving is only half every four years, so it's going up eight times every four years that the, the reward for mining. So at the moment, the mining reward is growing, right? And I don't think that's about to stop either, so, you know, we probably have a few more halvings before, but Satoshi and that's quite a long time in, you know, it's, it's some time in technology, but at the same time, you know, like The adoption and awareness metrics for Bitcoin are happening, so, you know, it, it would be pretty nice to have some scaling tech round about now, right, so that we don't get a lot of You know, users stuck in custody or something. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:23", "start": 2842.92, "text": "and speaking of mining, let's talk a little bit about, what you guys are doing this Blockstream Basic Note. So as I understand, it's sort of, you know, my, I guess my layman summary of this idea is that you've observed that in Bitcoin bull runs, the price of Bitcoin mining machines, the mining rigs, goes up even harder than Bitcoin does. And so what if you made a product where people could buy this note and it's effectively Blockstream is executing that strategy? Strategy where you are buying these machines, holding them, and then selling them at a profit in the, in the bull run. Is that the broad idea here? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "47:58", "start": 2877.54, "text": "Yeah. I mean, we arrived on it because we, we bought a bunch of machines, we, we do, hosting, so co-location for- enter-enterprises, so larger customers who wanna host, you know, thousands of machines, and so one of the things we've found is that if they're new to mining They, they just, you know, they make an investment decision, we wanna do some mining, and they show up, and they expect you to, you know, order thousands of miners and have them arrive within a month, and I'm like, no, no, doesn't work that way, right? You, you know, the, the, these The ve-the, mining manufacturers who make the miners, they don't have the capitalization to have, you know, a billion dollars worth of miners sitting in a warehouse waiting for people to order them, right? It's not, you know, like laptops or cell phones where Dell and Apple have You know, supply chain and capital to make inventory. So if you want a machine, you're basically paying for it and then it gets manufactured. And, you know, in a quiet period in the market, that might take six months, but in a busy period, it might take Nine months or twelve months before you get the first machines, if you make a big order, you know, you might get, well, the first machine will arrive in nine months and then the lot, and they'll, they'll arrive in twelve batches over the twelve months after that. And so, yeah, so we, we ended up buying some miners. Just to be able to, you know, give people a better answer 'cause they, they get depressed and like go do something else 'cause they can't get the machines fast enough, right? And, and it worked out quite well, you know, we, we bought the miners at the time So the previous cycle around twenty-five and some of them, you know, we saw for sixty, and the price went all the way up to like a hundred and twenty and a hundred and thirty. These are dollars per tera hash, which is a kind of The way people look at the pricing, and so, so we're like, \"Well, that worked pretty well, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't an intent to speculate, it was just an intent to solve a problem, right? Which is to have inventory for people.\" But then we went back and looked at the metrics and did some back testing, and like, \"Wow, you know, actually, even if you bought those machines...\" Using Bitcoin before the bull run and sold them at the point where the, the price was such pricing, you, you could have doubled, you know, you could have made a two X return in Bitcoin. so in other words, the You know, the price swing, I mean, of course, Bitcoin has these enormous bull runs that shoot up ten times and stuff like that, right? but it turns out that the price in Asics is surge, surges even, even more kind of thing. And yeah, so, so, and, and actually the setup at this point is sort of in a lot of ways better than it was in the last cycle because, you know, what's happened is People got enthusiastic and bought a lot of machines, you know, on as, as Bitcoin was heading up thirty, forty, fifty thousand and up towards a sixty-nine thousand top, and they thought, you know, a hundred thousand was locked in, right? So they, they ordered a lot of machines, and it took, you know, a year or two till the machines arrived And they didn't plan ahead enough to have anywhere to power them up, there's a shortage of hosting. So what's happening at the moment is there is, What they call new on pallet, so you know, shrink wrapped, still in boxes, on shipping pallets in warehouses by, you know, people doing mining from the manufacturers, from the lenders who lent the money and had to repossess-- lent money against the miners and ended up having to repossess them. So there's a lot of inventory sitting around still that's not powered up, which is, which is why the hash rate went up even though the, the Bitcoin price was a bit depressed late last year, right? And so what's happened this year is obviously the price is up, you know, over, over a hundred percent, so over two times year to date, fifteen and a half thousand end of December last year, thirty-four to thirty-five now, and yet the price of miners actually fell, you know. So I, I'd say the manufacturing cost is probably in the twenty dollars a tera hash range, and you can buy new machines for, you know, ten to fifteen dollars. So That's, that's very interesting setup because Bitcoin price has gone up, which improves your buying power, and the price of miners has gone down, you know, so there's," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "52:29", "start": 3149.33, "text": "Probably another two times in it or more beyond the surge pricing phenomena. So, yeah, we just close the first series of the basic fund and, you know, start to put that money to work. Buying miners, and we don't, you know, we, we just store them in a bonded warehouse, we don't power them up because people don't like to buy used equipment, basically, right? You, you know, there's a much better market, new" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:57", "start": 3177.07, "text": "equipment, yes. Yeah, I mean," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "53:00", "start": 3179.75, "text": "if you, if you-- Well, I mean, the thing is, if you, if you're buying used equipment, you're always worried that You know, it's mistreated, it's overheated, it wasn't filtered properly, that kind of thing, right? So even if we said, \"Yeah, we'll, we'll treat it nicely,\" they would still prefer to pay a premium for a new one. Right. It's a trust" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:18", "start": 3198.22, "text": "exercise, you know," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "53:19", "start": 3199.26, "text": "like in, in, in this market, there are probably car manufacturers with, you know, lots of new cars sitting on, you know, car lots waiting for buyers. So it's as if somebody came along and bought a lot of them, expecting an economic recovery to Start using them or people, they, they lose their value as soon as you drive them off the lot, so it's kind of like that, right? So that's what's going on. So we did the, the, the series one, and each series is Not fungible because, you know, Bitcoin price is different going in. All, all the investors actually invested using Bitcoin itself, and the, the price, you know, the average price of the miners that gets bought will be changing over time. So, you know, but we'll keep running series as long as the, the metrics hold. And so, at the moment, that was the non-US Series one, we have a US structure that is, getting finalized, put together, so we should have a US series and then, you know, more international series that's actually, Luxembourg. Securityization vehicle at the top. the other, novel part of this fund is it has a hurdle rate, which is the Bitcoin price. So in other words, there's no performance fee unless the fund returns more Bitcoin than you put into it. so people are always, you know, rightly not interested or kind of annoyed by crypto funds That charge you a performance fee and they can carry on a Bitcoin price change because you're like, \"Well, I can get that stored in a cold wallet without the custody risk, so why should I pay you guys for, you know, Bitcoin price going up?\" So we just took that out of it, and so it's kind of Bitcoin basis effectively, plus You know, management fee and, you know, the, the warehousing fees and things like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:15", "start": 3314.58, "text": "Gotcha. And so I presume this is done on liquid as well, right? You can actually hold the note in liquid?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "55:20", "start": 3319.74, "text": "Yeah, so there's, there's a-- This time it's optional, so you can collect the security token if you want, or you can just have it with the share registration agent, which is a, a company called Stalker that has the securities licenses and expertise. And the reason we made the token optional is because it turns out that some fa- Bonds don't know how to hold tokens or can't, you know, they can't unless they can find a custodian and it gets complicated. So if they can just say, \"Well, I'll just own the instrument,\" then they don't need the token, right? but the advantage of having a token is that you can then potentially trade it on a secondary, so you can use something like, Sideswap to do an OTC trade on, as a, you know, on, on a BNM, for example, the, the previous- a slightly different product, the mining node is still running, and that's trading on Stalker, and we also have markets on, Bitfinex Securities So we'll probably look to do a bit, bit for next securities listing as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:23", "start": 3382.82, "text": "Gotcha. So in, in essence, people have the choice to use a liquid style token to hold the basic note, or they can go for the more, let's say, tradfi, style. Yeah. and then basically on the secondary, they can sell this or at the, they can hold to the maturity and, I presume, they receive their Bitcoin back at the end." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "56:43", "start": 3402.93, "text": "Yeah. I mean, that, that happened with the, the Blockstream mining note, which- It was a three-year term product, which is running until next July, so another eight months to go. And You know, because it, g-again, that was mostly bought with Bitcoin and Bitcoiners have a hodl mentality, so most of them are holding it to maturity, but there is a bit of trading, you know, so people are- You know, for tax reasons or whatever events" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:13", "start": 3433.15, "text": "happen, people need liquidity, all kinds of things. Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "57:15", "start": 3435.39, "text": "So, so the option liquidity is interesting, and of course, the, the basic Strategy is, is a kind of one shot strategy, right? So we're gonna buy them, warehouse them, and sell them back, and then wind the series down and pay out the proceeds. So there's no kind of Speculative reinvestment or so it, it's a one shot strategy type of thing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:39", "start": 3458.65, "text": "Right. Right. And because it's a point in time, right? Like it, it made sense at this time in the market, maybe in two years' time it won't make sense. Right. Or maybe you'd have to wait again till the next cycle around, and then maybe then it makes sense again, who knows?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "57:50", "start": 3470.29, "text": "Yeah. I mean, I think it might also be, you know, as well as being an opportunity It might be useful, you know, to the people that are stuck with excess inventory, 'cause it's quite hard to sell, you know, like the prices are low. so they either hold it or they accept, you know, less than they paid for it, let's say, right? and so this will provide liquidity for them as well, and, you know, so you're sort of smoothing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:18", "start": 3498.23, "text": "out some of the variation in the Bitcoin mining rig market, let's say. Yeah, I mean, if you" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "58:23", "start": 3502.69, "text": "buy a lot, you'll, you'll support the market a bit, There's also Bitcoin basis, and, you know, most Bitcoiners are fairly all in, so that, you know, the prospect of investing in something with dollars is like, well, where, where, where are they gonna go back to fiat? Dollars, like, do they have any Bitcoin? What's that? They don't have any of it, right? Whereas Bitcoin, okay, they could, they could make a small allocation to that and see if the strategy works out. Of course, there are risks, you know, associated, but, yeah. Of course." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:55", "start": 3534.53, "text": "Okay, so we've spoken about One other thing, are there any updates you have on Blockstream Green, on the, you know, wallet side?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "59:04", "start": 3544.16, "text": "yeah, so we're continuing to sort of, add features and improve usability also, y- the Blockstream Jade hardware wallet integrations with that, that works on a number of other software wallets as well. and one recent, new feature for- For the green wallet is the introduction of Lightning, using the green light, sort of lightweight Lightning experience, and one of the Sort of new features of that is the ability to use this kind of hosted node, so kind of lightweight node hosted in the cloud, and to import it into a full node later, so you can kind of move it off the cloud and move it into your own core Lightning node." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:53", "start": 3593.35, "text": "The offboarding process," }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "59:55", "start": 3594.97, "text": "yeah. Yeah, yeah, and, I mean, I don't know if people realize, but typically Lightning implementations, it's, it's not like Bitcoin where you have a seed, maybe you have a seed, but you've got to keep the state to make it not necessarily" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:06", "start": 3606.02, "text": "cross compatible. Yeah, that's the" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "01:00:07", "start": 3607.66, "text": "problem, right? So now Greenlight, of course, you know, it has, it, it's has compatibility with Core Lightning, and there are a number of other wallets starting to use Greenlight, so you'll be able to import it into Greenlight-based wallets, so you won't, you know, you won't have to use that backup only on Green, you could Oh, but that, that feature is still there. So, yeah, that's, that's a new feature for Green as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:34", "start": 3634.71, "text": "Fantastic. Well, I think that's pretty much all we've got time for. So, I guess any, any final comments from your side?" }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "01:00:40", "start": 3640.6, "text": "yeah, I mean, it's, interesting time in the market for Bitcoin. things are picking up pretty well. I mean, you know, one of the concerns that people would traditionally have as you head towards a halving is the, The mining death spiral theory, but I think the Bitcoin market has debunked that already because, you know, the price appreciated this year by more than two times, so clearly, you know, miners were operating at fifteen and a half thousand in December And mining profitability has got to be better now than at, at that time. So the halving is, you know, could again become a non-event in terms of, you know, impact on hash rate or transaction processings. Sort of throughput and stuff like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:26", "start": 3686.66, "text": "Great. Well, yeah, so listeners can find the show notes at stephanalivera dot com slash five two three. Adam, thanks for joining me, and, I'll see you all in the citadels." }, { "speaker": "adam_back", "time": "01:01:35", "start": 3695.73, "text": "Yeah, alright," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:37", "start": 3697.07, "text": "thanks." } ] }