{ "episodeId": "SLP612", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "stephan_livera": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "guest", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_3": { "name": "Guest 3", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_4": { "name": "Guest 4", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_5": { "name": "Guest 5", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_6": { "name": "Guest 6", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.19, "text": "Hi everyone, you're watching Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold, the best place to buy, save and store your Bitcoin. You can use a two or three vault to do that, and more about that later in the show, but you can find that at getbold.io for American listeners. So today I'm here in Lugano in Switzerland, so I'm actually just a bit About to, head back home now, but I hope you, enjoy some of the interviews that I've captured at this conference. I spoke with a few people, people like Jameson Lopp, Jimmy Song, and various others, in terms of, this conference. I think, there's, there was an interesting mix of some technical speakers and content, as well as some more economic and political aspects of what's happening with Bitcoin and Tether. So I hope you enjoyed the interview Hey guys, we're back at Plan B Forum Lugano. I'm here with my friend Jimmy Song, and, Jimmy is gonna be participating in the ossification debate. so Jimmy, what are you looking forward to, overall here at Plan B Forum?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:15", "start": 74.53, "text": "Well, I, I, I think the debate style thing is one of the first things that we've, first ones that we've ever encountered at any conference. And right. You and I have been at many different conferences. Usually have a panel, maybe a little disagreement. Yeah. Some of those go viral, but Like the only other debate that I participated in was with Roger Ver in two thousand and nineteen. Oh, that was on the cruise ship, yeah, yeah. So for me, this is, this is like the second one, and I know that other one went viral, I think it was in the Daily Mail or something. Right," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:47", "start": 106.61, "text": "okay." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:47", "start": 107.15, "text": "So then I, I'm looking forward to it just, just for the sheer spectacle." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:51", "start": 110.79, "text": "Yeah. Can you give us a preview of your ossification arguments then?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "01:54", "start": 113.98, "text": "Yeah, well, I don't wanna give the game away, but, I will say that I" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "02:00", "start": 120.42, "text": "rhetorically, it gives you sort of like a sense of something that's old, that's fossilized, that's not like, creating things at all. I, I'm going to light-- I, I'm going to have another analogy that I think will be a little bit better, and, that'll be a large part of how I frame the, that, that'll be a large part of the, how I frame the argument. Yeah. I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:21", "start": 141.01, "text": "think one thing that maybe gets confused-- and again, comes to the term ossification, I think maybe Not adding new features. I think maybe that's a more productive debate, isn't it? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "02:34", "start": 153.8, "text": "yeah. I, I mean, alright, so I'll give, I'll give a little bit of one. Yeah. So, I, I think the analogy that I like, better is something like, the foundation of a house, right? Yeah. there are situations where it's like okay to work on the foundation, but it better be, have a really, really good reason, right? Yeah. Because everything else is built on top of it, and" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "03:00", "start": 180.04, "text": "Can cost around, like changing anything like that, and, you know, part of my argument will be that, you know, I, I, I, I think this is something that we've learned over the last couple of softworks that, yeah, like, you know, not everything's as stable as we want it to be. In fact, like, a lot of other protocols, the layer two protocols and so on are still kind of in flux because of that. So, we'll, we'll talk about some of that during" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:28", "start": 208.46, "text": "the debate. Now, I know You're interested to talk about, abstracting away from the technical is more about the values conversation. So do you wanna explain a bit of your view there? Why, why is it so important to focus on the values aspect of it and not just the technical aspect?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "03:43", "start": 223.19, "text": "Yeah, so I, I think we're getting a little bit into sort of like the, what Bitcoin is, right? and for a lot of people, especially on the developer side, I think they view, Bitcoin as a technical plaything, and for them, the model-- mental model that they have is Is of software where you have to constantly add features and, compete against other, other platforms or something like that. but, you know, if you think more as an economist or somebody that understands the history of money, you understand that money is better when it doesn't change, right? It's, it's that stable foundation that needs to be there for everything else to be built. Yeah. so that, that, that is largely sort of like, like the- values of money versus the values of technical progress, and they're, they're very different, and th-this is, I think, the mistake that a lot of, developers in particular take, because they, they know the technical aspect very, very well, they don't necessarily know the economic aspect that well, and that, that's something that I'll touch on in the debate as well. And so I think if we had to kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:53", "start": 293.08, "text": "push comes to shove, does that mean you're fundamentally okay with more people just using a custodian, right? And I understand that, you Not your keys, not your coins. Of course, we want, you know, I want as many people to self-custody as possible, but at the same time, are there cases where-- I'll give you an example. Are there develop-- Sometimes I notice developers who seem a bit in their ivory tower, right? They're kind of off in their kind of theoretical world. If I design this particular thing this way, but then you look in the real world, what are traders and what are people using? A lot of them are using centralized exchanges. Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, we" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:30", "start": 330.02, "text": "Monetarism, you know, i-what, what is the right balance?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "05:34", "start": 333.76, "text": "Yeah, I, and this is something actually that I, I have a series going on with, Will Cole on my podcast, just released the second episode yesterday, talking about sort of this in-between thing. So you, you have self-custody, that's one extreme, and you have, you know, Coinbase having your coins, that's another extreme. I think there is plenty of room in between. So if you already have a trust relationship with somebody, that- It is technical, maybe they can help you, like they, they can be your custody, but, you know, like you, you have the trust relationship already. I mean, not to say that it's impossible for them to screw you over, but at least you have that trust relationship. It's not some faceless corporate entity that's vulnerable to government seizure and stuff like that. It's family or friend or something like that. I, I think, I, I, I think there's, plenty of room in this design space to come up with something that That is more balanced, you know, that doesn't necessarily expect everyone to be technical experts on how to use hardware wallets and seed phrases and all that, so, you know, that, that, that's where I think the space will end up because I think there's a demand for that, but, you know, a-at the moment, obviously, there's only one extreme or the other, so we're, we're kind of, you know, in sort of a false dichotomy, if you will." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:56", "start": 416.22, "text": "any, anything else in terms of, Anything else you're looking forward to at the forum today or tomorrow?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "07:03", "start": 423.44, "text": "well, I mean, I, I just gave a talk on, on, virtues and vices of Bitcoin, so looking forward to seeing how that's received, I, I guess. but, yeah, I mean, other than that, you know, I, I think we missed the drone show last year 'cause of the cloud, so kind of wanna see that. All right," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:22", "start": 441.73, "text": "yeah, yeah. So last year there was a drone show and it got r Hey guys, I'm here with John Carvalho. He is the CEO of Synonym. And, John, you made an an- an announcement, what, just earlier about, PubKey. So do you wanna just give us the quick, you know, what's the quick version of that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:43", "start": 463.49, "text": "Sure. PubKey is basically our solution to fixing the web. we identified that there are kind of three major problems with the web to do with poison algorithms, walled gardens, and censorship, and we've basically taken those three things and directly addressed them in a PubKey Core, and all of the PubKey Core code is now open source and released. We've been working on that for the past year, and we also announced PubKey App, which is a place where you can use an application to interface with all the features of PubKey Core. how this might be different from some things that you're used to, we have implemented-- we have introduced this concept of a social semantic graph. This kind of takes some of the ideas of old ideas of trying to do a semantic web and ideas of a social graph and combines them to where instead of Our server and where we decide what you get to look at and we try to infer what you want, you actually directly, you know, tag posts and different posts of people as what you think they are designated as. So you can just put, instead of having a like button or upvote, you can basically have anything that you wanna type into a tag and use that, including an emoji. So if you wanna do a heart emoji for a like, you just make a heart emoji tag, yeah, and if other people wanna add to that, detect that too. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:57", "start": 536.92, "text": "obvious question would be, where's the data Who stores it and shares it?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:02", "start": 541.92, "text": "So we combine two techs in, PubKeyCore called PKRR, which is P K A R R, Public Key Addressable Resource Records. You can think of these like a DNS, like if you ever had your own domain name and you had to like point the domain name to the right server. It's the same idea, except it's-- the domain name is your key, your PubKey, and the DNS records are put into mainline DHT, which is the largest, most decentralized network on the internet. It's where BitTorrent Come from. And so we combine that with what we call a home server. So what you do is, with your key, you tell people where your home server is. That can be a self-hosted server or any trusted server as well, it doesn't really matter. and the reason why this is cool is that you have one primary place where people know where to look to where to find you. But if that place is trusted and they censor you or they just somehow disrupt you, as long as you keep a copy of your data, you can actually hot swap to a different server." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:58", "start": 598.44, "text": "so" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "10:00", "start": 600.04, "text": "Record, and you say, \"Oh, my data isn't there anymore.\" So I can't effectively censor you. I can't remove your followers, I can't remove your ability to create posts, because as long as there's alternative systems, you can just move to those." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:12", "start": 611.69, "text": "Okay. Now, the obvious question most people will be thinking is, \"Look, you're trying to bootstrap a whole new network. Lots of people have tried this. Think about Blue Sky or various things, or, you know, obviously, the other comparison will be with Nostr. Do you have any thoughts on how to bootstrap a" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "10:30", "start": 630.08, "text": "Say exactly how to do it and make it work. I think that on one hand, I'm thinking we're trying to be novel in how we're solving problems and what problems we're solving, so I hope we're actually providing new utility to empower users where they can have new experiences they couldn't have in other places. I think that's the most important thing. But as far as like actual strategy, I would say I don't want to like try to take Noster users and take Blue Sky users. I wanna have our own narratives, and if those people are interesting and want to try this too We, we wanna grow the user base. We don't want to, you know, cannibalize each other. So that my strategy wouldn't be that, I would say we're not gonna do things like hire influencers and, like, you know, try to populate it. One idea I had that we might do is we might, have a series of AI agents as accounts, just so people could, like, imagine the idea, like, you and I are arguing on Twitter and we wanna tag, I don't know, Hal Finney or something, and there's a," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:30", "start": 690.0, "text": "Everyone's wrong, you know, or something like this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:32", "start": 691.8, "text": "you know. And then, in terms of Bitcoin, is there any kind of Bitcoin connection here, or is it just, it's independent of that, and this is more like social media in a decentralized way?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:41", "start": 701.33, "text": "I would say it's more like if you had-- no, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin at the moment, other than that it is a key based web, so there's a similar aspect to you being in control of your keys and having to keep them cold. And this is a, a difference with some of the other systems" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:00", "start": 720.0, "text": "Through the Picard records. sorry, what was the original question?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:04", "start": 723.88, "text": "Yeah, I was just asking about whether it's a Bitcoin connection. You answered that, yeah? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:07", "start": 727.22, "text": "Well," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:08", "start": 727.83, "text": "yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:08", "start": 728.07, "text": "To, to kind of follow up on it, I'll say we do have intentions to add abilities to monetize the posts within the system," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:15", "start": 734.89, "text": "something like a zapping or something. But you have" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:16", "start": 736.43, "text": "to think of the system, it's like, imagine if Google was social media. So if you did a Google search, if all those returns were something you could reply to or tag. Now, that's more" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:30", "start": 750.02, "text": "Posts you can make, things like that. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:32", "start": 751.62, "text": "Okay, great. Well, I think that's all we've got time for. So, where can people find it?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:35", "start": 755.48, "text": "you can find, Pubkey on Twitter as getpubkey at getgetpubkey. You can go to pubkey.org to look at Pubkey core information. Right. How's this spelled, Pubkey? P U B K Y. Thanks for asking. Gotcha. P U" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:52", "start": 772.37, "text": "B K Y dot org and P U B K Y dot app. Great. Okay, thanks, The Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Vector Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, you have a A range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrase, or you can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get a discount on your cold card. The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with next gen multi sig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only zero point nine nine percent fees and seamless- Deposits the Bitcoin direct to your Bold Vault. The Bold Vault is a two or three collaborative multisig where you hold two keys and Bold holds one as a redundant backup protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger or Coldcard hardware wallets to spin up a Bold Vault in just a few minutes, and the Bold Vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today! And upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now back to the show. Hey guys, so we're back at Plan B Forum Lugano. I'm here with Dennis Porter. He is the CEO of Satoshi Action Fund. He's working on various things in terms of Bitcoin advocacy and trying to get, let's say, Bitcoin rights, passed in, various states. So, I think, look, the question on a lot of people's minds will be, look, Dennis, are you doing a lot of this announcing the announcement? Are you sort of- you know, overly engagement farming. What's your a-answer to that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "15:36", "start": 935.64, "text": "Well, I mean, the, the answer to that is that in order for people to be aware that, you know, an announcement is gonna be made, you, you have to say that you're going to be making an announcement so that you can get people in the room and share what you're gonna be doing. but also, I think the big and most important thing that differentiates me between the people that announce to announce and they just say that there's something coming is that we actually produce results. You know," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:01", "start": 960.8, "text": "Yeah, okay. And so let's talk about the most recent one, so, Pennsylvania, yeah? So, do you wanna just tell us, just kind of a quick overview what, what is happening there, and what does it mean for Bitcoiners?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "16:12", "start": 972.47, "text": "Well, for-- In Pennsylvania, that's a really pivotal state in the, the twenty twenty-four election. Right. Like a swing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:17", "start": 976.91, "text": "state, yeah? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "16:18", "start": 977.51, "text": "I mean, it might be the most important swing state this year. Usually Ohio is the most important bellwether state, but it's, it's, And in Pennsylvania, we were able to get our legislation introduced, by Representative Cabell, to protect the rights of Bitcoiners, and then also we were able to get that through the committee process. Then we reached out to Bitcoiners, we said, \"Hey, write your Republican lawmakers and let them know you want to see this legislation move forward,\" because there were some holdouts there. Ultimately, we were able to get over two thousand letters written into the state of Pennsylvania, and then they actually put it up for a floor vote, and we were able to pass it with sweeping bipartisan support," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:00", "start": 1020.08, "text": "Right, and so, kind of the high level is the right to self-custody and run a Bitcoin node is the main thing, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "17:06", "start": 1026.42, "text": "Buy, sell, trade, you know, in Bitcoin, yeah. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:09", "start": 1028.69, "text": "fantastic. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think that's great. I think, you know, we should engage. where I kind of might disagree and also agree with you is, I guess your stance on regulation, right? So you, you had your talk just recently, I think maybe I disagree slightly, so let's talk" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:30", "start": 1050.08, "text": "But I think the disagreement I would have is more like who should set the rules, right? My disagreement would be road owners should be the ones who decide these rules. So I'm not against speed limits, but I'm more about what is the right governance structure, right? But I'm also gonna agree with you in a sense, right? I think, while I think no regulations is better and the market regulates better, I agree with you in the sense that we still have to engage, and there is also an important sense, people call it states' rights, right? Like this kind of We'll end up disagreeing or loosely or lightly fighting the federal government, and I think that's where I agree with you that having this in place helps, helps us, because, I think there are times where the federal government will, you know, there's a chance that they may go against us. So do you wanna just, expand a bit on your view? Why is that an important thing? Why does that help Bitcoinists?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "18:25", "start": 1105.22, "text": "Yeah, I mean, well, going to, you know, going on to the point of regulations, I, I mean, I definitely to an agreement than we are in disagreement. I think that regulations don't, they don't need to come necessarily from on high, and in fact, if regulations can happen from the bottom up, that's actually always, in my opinion, the, the best approach. We at Satoshi Action have even advocated for that to take place, where we said, \"Hey, let's, let's do self-regulation from the bottom up and opt-in regulations, because that usually is better in most cases.\" Now, in my opinion, there's that, you know, life isn't perfect, you know, necessary to have, you know, government step in and create regulations so that we can have a more fair and effective society that we live in. I think that's probably where we differ a little bit, but ultimately, in my opinion, regulations are good, whether they're, pr-- you know, from the bottom up or f-- designed through the policy process, through the governmental process. Now, my talk really focused on how Bitcoin is filled with regulations. In fact, I think Bitcoin is the most highly regulated monetary unit in the world. We limit the block size, we limit the We even fought a war over these regulations, and the pro-regulation camp won, right? Right. Yeah. But" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:35", "start": 1175.28, "text": "I mean, I would argue it's kind of like an opt-in rule set, let's say. But yes, I mean, we're all right, we all opt into this rule set. What" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "19:41", "start": 1180.67, "text": "about when Bitcoin is the global reserve currency, and, you know, if we live in a world where Bitcoin is really the only option, it's, I don't know if that's an opt-in society anymore, Bitcoin becomes the standard. So in a way, though going back to" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "20:00", "start": 1200.18, "text": "The more you can drive broad consensus, the better through regulations. not everyone is always gonna agree. Clearly, Roger Ver and, and Craig Wright wanted to expand the block size to a, to a limit that I think would have been, damaging to Bitcoin, and we all rejected that. We said, you know, we wanna keep the block size in place, and that also ultimately led to more innovations because, because we can't transact on the base layer in mass, we're forced to, to innovate on layer two and layer three. So in a way, regulations can also lead" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "20:30", "start": 1230.02, "text": "Also protect our freedoms as well, which is a point I made about the Constitution, because I think a lot of times we get this mixed up, we say, \"Oh, regulations, I feel like they're imposed on me,\" but also we can impose regulations on the government as well through things like the US Constitution." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:42", "start": 1241.99, "text": "Yeah, so I think that's where maybe there's sort of, again, agree, some agreement, some disagreement, right? I could say, \"Look, actually, the Constitution hasn't really done a great job restraining the state. Like, if you look at how the US government has, Disagree with that? Yeah, right. And so in that sense, it's kind of, yeah. But I, I mean, certainly people would say it's fair to say America has a strong culture of entrepreneurship, and part of that was born in the, the sense of, you know, freedom that, you know, America started under. I think the other aspect of it is with regulation, I think sometimes there are cases where maybe the government takes credit for what the market was gonna do anyway, you know? So when you showed some of your graphs, I, I sort of took a little Like these things were improving, and then maybe the government just sort of takes the credit for what the market was gonna do anyway. What do you think?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "21:37", "start": 1297.26, "text": "so in the case of the nineteen ninety six Telecommunications Act, you were able to see a, a re-regulation of the space where they were able to reduce some of the regulations and restrictions that were applied on the traditional telecommunications industry, yeah, so that they didn't apply to broadband or wireless, right, which led to a growth in those sectors and more, more investment. Yeah. Of course, you saw an upward- I think movement, but there was an acceleration of investment and the point, right. Plus the, I think regulations too, like, well, well enforced regulations, regulations which are really difficult to change, regulations which are really hard to break are even better, because then investors know with confidence where to go. Same thing with Bitcoin, right? Like, you probably-- I mean, theoretically, you could change the block size, theoretically, you can change the total supply cap. maybe one day we'll change the block size, maybe in the future. I don't think we're ever gonna change the Only co-investors now know when they buy into Bitcoin that it's twenty-one million's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:33", "start": 1353.2, "text": "part of the, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "22:34", "start": 1354.04, "text": "I mean, it's like, you know, the, the chances of that ever changing is very, very limited. I'm sure, you know, a hundred years from now, maybe when we've all passed away, there might be rigorous debates on why these people that weren't born into-- that weren't born with a chance to buy Bitcoin at low numbers will probably fight and say, \"Well, well, now we need to redistribute.\" But, I don't think that that Right. It's not a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:01", "start": 1380.66, "text": "minor democracy, which is a common confusion. you choose to go the path that you want. Yeah. But look, let's bring it back to this question about, you know, where things are going governance-wise and, you know, if it comes to, states versus the federal, could you explain a bit about what might happen there? And I know you've spoken about parallels with, let's say, drug legalization." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "23:20", "start": 1400.27, "text": "Yeah. So I'm a big fan of using the states to advocate for Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. I think that the states are where we can" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "23:31", "start": 1410.88, "text": "And, oftentimes DC is where we see, you know, good dreams and good hopes go-- that we say they go to die there, because nothing ever happens. You know, I've, I've had actually congressional staffers tell me, tell me this before, but a six out of ten is considered like an A+. If they can get you to a six or seven out of ten, they're feeling like they're doing their job really well. and I, I really sort of view it completely differently. I wanna be able to go and get all the wins that we potentially could for Bitcoin and I'm also a fan of proof of reserves, but, you know, some other people might disagree with me on that one. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:04", "start": 1443.5, "text": "Yeah. any quick thoughts? I mean, obviously you're in this world, any quick thoughts on, Trump or Harris and what it will mean for Bitcoin regulation and Bitcoin adoption in the States?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "24:13", "start": 1453.29, "text": "I think, you know, Trump certainly will be someone who, takes a very hands-off approach, is what's really gonna push for deregulation, removal of regulations, which, you know, some people might like, some people might not. And then in a Harris campaign, I think you're gonna see more thoughtful approach to, to regulations. They'll probably want more regulations on crypto, and, you're-- but you will see improvements, in my opinion. I don't think she is gonna be like the Joe Biden administration, where Elizabeth Warren was able to take hold and put her cronies into the places where they could negatively impact the, the industry writ large. I do think Gary Gensler goes out either way, he's very unpopular on both sides of the aisle." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:53", "start": 1493.3, "text": "Fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing your Plan B Forum in Lugano. I'm here with my friend BTC Sessions or Ben, aka. so, Ben, tell us a little bit about, you know, you did a talk about, you know, kind of latest in Bitcoin wallet trends and things. Do you wanna give us just a preview or just, I guess, an overview there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "25:18", "start": 1517.65, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I, I, I covered a lot. we were chatting a little bit, some of the things that are more interesting to me and some of the trends that I Automated wallets where you're, you're maybe at one point interacting with Lightning or Liquid or on-chain, but it's offskated to the background so the, the end user doesn't notice, but the wallet reacts to, the amounts that you're dealing with. And, and I think that's a, a very interesting trend that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:47", "start": 1547.27, "text": "happening here. Yeah. Yeah. I know, the Mutiny guys are playing with that, obviously Mutiny shutdown. Is it Blitz? the one, that's the one where they're trying to do this kind of multi approach, yeah. And eCash or what was it? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "26:02", "start": 1562.08, "text": "so the way Blitz has approached it is they wanted to have the ability to do micropayments. So anything sub a thousand sats, you're dealing with eCash, like eCash mints. anything above that, they're swapping from Lightning to Liquid, using Bolts in the background. And then actually, if you get above five hundred thousand sats, it will automatically open a, a, a full Lightning channel to you, and then it'll bal-- rebalance that channel on the fly as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:28", "start": 1588.22, "text": "well. Right. Yeah. Interesting 'Cause I mean, there's always this kind of crazy balance of different trade-offs of like, can you do your own infrastructure, but do you need to do an Electrum server or is it kind of just running off Bitcoin Core or like, can you point it your own way? But then also, people want something that's convenient, and then how do you find the right balance? And then also dealing with, let's say, it's a feast-bike time, right? Like, let's say there's a lot of spam or whatever, or if there's genuine monetary adoption, right? And I so I'm curious, b-but now let me balance that with the idea that people don't wanna change their wallets too often, you know? They want something that's tried and true, it's been around for a while, because they feel like it's less likely to maybe steal from them or maybe it's more reliable. I'm curious how you balance that." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "27:16", "start": 1635.57, "text": "Yeah, so I mean, I, I think where we're headed is, again, we're gonna have these, these wallets that actually utilize multiple different layers and all of them just kind of speak together, because, and Chatting with Elizabeth Stark about this a bit later on. Yeah. but, but Lightning is kind of like this translator that stands in between, so people are speaking different languages, but as you, you, you use that layer to bridge everything, it's like everything just kind of works. And so I think we're heading that direction. And so, yeah, you're right, right now, it's a difficult time because we've been used to teaching one way. Here's an on-chain wallet, this is how it works, here's your seed phrase, and then, oh, by the way" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "28:00", "start": 1680.06, "text": "Now it's becoming also there's Fedamins and eCash and Liquid and there's all these different things, and so our approach has to become different because somebody's first transaction, if there's fee spikes or if fees just go up and kind of remain up, is not gonna be an on-chain transaction. So I think we need to approach from the easiest onboarding transactionally first, and then work our way down the sovereignty stack as people build more wealth over time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:27", "start": 1706.56, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I find interesting as well, and sometimes- I guess we have to kind of get out of our echo chamber, right? And this is something where, you know, people like you and I will be on social media or Nostra, Twitter, whatever, on X, talking about a particular wallet, but then if you look in the app stores, let's say, there's some other, you know, some other thing that's like super popular because maybe that's connected to an exchange or something like that. So I'm curious, what really is the role then for the educators? Is it just more that we have to, you know" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "29:00", "start": 1740.5, "text": "yeah, I, I think a, a little bit of it is, is trying to shine a light on tools that give a path for best practices, right? Like if, if you shoehorn somebody into something that's custodial and has no way out of that, no easy way out of that other than, okay, now you're gonna have to download a different wallet. That's, that's not an, you know, nobody wants to change what they're doing. And so that's why I'm so excited about these things that, yeah, sure, you get a few thousand sats A slight trade-off there, but then internally in the wallet, as you get more money, it makes you more self-sovereign just inherently by what's happening in the background, unbeknownst to you. And so I think, like over the-- that's what I'm seeing right now, and that's what I-- where I think it's headed, where just naturally, you won't have to explain all this, you won't have to be like, \"Okay, listen, you're on a custodial Lightning wallet, later we'll get you something" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:54", "start": 1794.18, "text": "better.\" Yeah. It'll be Yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "30:01", "start": 1800.76, "text": "yeah, exactly. And, and, and so then it'll just be on us to say, \"Hey, this one, I think, has led to a great pathway where the user will be protected based on the thresholds, and there may be even just optionality in the background, or there may be a simple set of questions off the beginning of downloading the wallet, oh, do you intend on using this for very small transactions or savings? And from those questions, the wallet will then point you the right way, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:29", "start": 1828.76, "text": "Because as an example, we might- That still, you-- even today, I use different wallets for different things, right? Like I might use Phoenix for Lightning, yeah, but I use a very different setup for my cold storage multisig, yeah. You know, so how do you see that? Do you think it's, it, it's again just gonna be different tools for different jobs, or, m-- I guess some people want, people want the idea of one wallet to rule them all, but that's not in reality, is it? Not yet, not yet." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "30:52", "start": 1852.15, "text": "I think we can get there though. I think we" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "31:01", "start": 1860.54, "text": "But then it becomes, oh, if you want, you can also pair hardware with this and then just have a threshold. Hey, I'm uncomfortable above this amount, you know, thinking of it as cash in your pocket, it auto-sends over to the hardware portion of it. And you can still watch it, but it just becomes like a, the vernacular that Aqua is using is spending and saving, yeah. And that's very familiar to the average person. So I think you'll start to see that stuff, I think that's where it's going. Yeah. The bull Bitcoin wallet is They're doing liquid swaps, they're doing all of that, and, and the ability to do Lightning, but then also you're gonna have your, your hardware optionality baked in just to, your mobile wallet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:42", "start": 1901.53, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. Well, look, I, I know I'm taking your time, so we'll let you go, but, listeners go and check out BTC Sessions, you can find him on YouTube and, what is it, BTC Sessions dot ca, yeah? It is, got the Canadian flair on there. Right, fantastic. Alright, guys Accelerator program. So if you have a transaction that you sent at a fee that was too low to get confirmed, now you can fix this at-- with the mempool accelerator. The way it works, you can go and search your transaction, scroll down, click accelerator, and you don't need an account. You can pay with Lightning, and then it'll show you it's now in the process of being accelerated, and then after a few minutes, it's confirmed. And so this is a great way to help you out if you are stuck, and this can happen where maybe your wallet doesn't have R Help you in situations where it's impractical to go and re-sign, so for example, multisig with keys in different locations. And thirdly, even in some Lightning scenarios, perhaps a forced close, you might not be able to use RBF, and so in this case, the MemPool Accelerator can help you out. So keep it in mind, and you can find out more over at mempool.space/slash-accelerator. And now, back to the show. Hey guys, we're back at PlanB Forum Lugano. I'm here with Luke Dasha, he's the CTO" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:00", "start": 1980.0, "text": "Just, can you give us a quick update what's happening with DARTM?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "33:05", "start": 1985.14, "text": "it's launched, the code's available, it's working." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "33:10", "start": 1990.41, "text": "yeah. No issues to mention, so it's just working. Right. Seventy percent of the ocean hash rate is already using it. Yeah. Found several blocks this month already. Fantastic." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:20", "start": 2000.07, "text": "Yeah. So I think it's a great, step in terms of helping Bitcoin mining decentralization, and I think I, I'm curious if the-- I know we, you know, we had the debate Just earlier today, where I was moderating about, the use of Bitcoin's blockchain, I'm wondering your views on, you know, the spam question. Do you think the spam debate is gonna become less relevant over time, that people are just gonna focus more on, let's say, the mining decentralization aspect? What do you think?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "33:46", "start": 2025.79, "text": "The only way this spam debate ends is when the spammers stop, really, or at least if the community all gets on the same page as far as fighting these attacks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:55", "start": 2035.24, "text": "Yeah, I see. But do you think the question then is about the community Or just more like economic incentives playing out that, you know, it costs the spammers a lot of money or the gamblers who are gambling to do that, whatever, their BRC twenty mint or whatever, that they will kind of run out of money and run out of steam in that way." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "34:15", "start": 2055.47, "text": "but running out of money isn't the only way, it's not a viable solution to stop the gamified spam. It's gonna take the community actually paying attention to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:27", "start": 2066.72, "text": "the facts. But I, I'm curious as well because, I mean, this came up in the debate As well about prior uses of the chain that weren't monetary. So as I'm sure you're well aware, things like Satoshi Dice or even, in years gone by, there was, you know, VeriBlock. They were doing a lot of op returns. There was, Omni, which was Tether back in the day. So do you acknowledge those as non-monetary uses of the chain that existed before? And I'm not saying they were right to do it, but it's, it's been here for a while, hasn't it?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "34:56", "start": 2095.82, "text": "the non-monetary stuff For years in different forms, and it's been successfully fought off for the last decade." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:05", "start": 2104.6, "text": "I see. But think about, VeriBlock, they were doing it for a while, Omni was there for a while. I mean, I, I think for me, it's, it's not that I like the spam, it's just more that I think maybe I, I disagree about the ability to actually stop it" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "35:19", "start": 2119.05, "text": "or filter" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:19", "start": 2119.49, "text": "it." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "35:21", "start": 2120.51, "text": "The last decade shows that it's possible, and you don't have to have a hundred percent success in spam filtering. I see. Yeah, I see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:29", "start": 2129.06, "text": "Okay, I guess bringing it back to, just this conference and PlanB Forum, I'm curious, have there been any, any other talks or any interesting conversations that you're watching? I don't usually watch talks. Okay. Okay. So, I guess, but, I guess what, what, what's the most kind of interesting, what are some of the most interesting trends for you just kind of in the ecosystem right now?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "35:55", "start": 2155.08, "text": "hopefully the trend of decentralizing mining continues." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:58", "start": 2158.28, "text": "Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then, yeah, I guess what's your hope with, DARTM adoption? Do you have any thoughts on what you're hoping to see there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "36:08", "start": 2167.81, "text": "it's been pretty good so far. the fact that nobody's found any real issues with it is a good sign for the future. Hopefully, we can make it a little more easy for people to use, but it's already-- A lot of people just picked it up and ran with it without even like no support needed." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:26", "start": 2185.58, "text": "I see. And, as I understand, most of the DARTM Users for now, and the hope is in the future that there might be other" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "36:34", "start": 2194.4, "text": "using other, would be better if there were other implementations, but right now, Nots is the only one that really gives miners any choice. So if you're trying to decentralize mining, there's really not much other than Nots that makes sense. I see. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:48", "start": 2208.09, "text": "so it's that Nots allows certain, configuration settings, you know, that relate to these things. So can you explain a little bit on that, like what are some of these settings, that relate to the-" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "37:01", "start": 2220.66, "text": "This, there's like two pages full of different settings that are supported by Nots for configuring how you want to mine. Okay. One popular one is, filtering out runes. And runes is arguably monetary, but a lot of people don't like it, so a lot of people decide they, they wanna filter runes out from their mining and turn that on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:23", "start": 2242.62, "text": "I see. Yeah. And so what about any of the other, I guess ones that came up, things like, was it data carrier size? And, some of the other flags." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "37:35", "start": 2255.44, "text": "Or is that not a flag? Sorry, I'm not sure. Data carrier size is a parameter. Right. I don't know if anyone's adjusted that or not. I haven't analyzed the blocks that have been found yet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:44", "start": 2264.29, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "37:45", "start": 2264.77, "text": "I see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:46", "start": 2265.75, "text": "Okay, well, yeah, let's see. so I guess, people can find you guys at ocean, ocean dot x y z. And, Luke, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Hey guys, we're back, Plan B Forum, Lugano" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:00", "start": 2280.04, "text": "As well. so, James, any reflections on the debate you had with Jimmy?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "38:06", "start": 2286.22, "text": "Well, I think, it was cordial, you know, unlike some of the other debates that happened at this conference. and, you know, I, I think, you know, Jimmy and I are both developers, so, you know, we both want to see improvements happen, but, you know, he was put in the position to steelman the ossification side of, of- What Bitcoin could do, and, I think it's gonna be an ongoing question. So I see the Bitcoin protocol and the sort of path forward as, as having many potential branches and that we should try to explore those and try to maximize the value of Bitcoin. And, we're fighting against time because ossification is inevitable, so it's a question of how much can we get done? how much more can we kind of supercharge Bitcoin and, and make it better before we are forced to, you know, build more complex, convoluted schemes, on, you know, secondary layers?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:12", "start": 2351.85, "text": "And so I guess if we're not able to get in some of these more advanced scripting or covenants or something like this, do you think people will go for this more, let's say, interactivity or kind of more, kind of complicated approaches?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "39:29", "start": 2368.86, "text": "Well, part of it comes down to- I think developer friendliness, you-- we don't wanna lose too many developers because they get frustrated and think it's too difficult to build on Bitcoin. Another is, I think, a long-term issue of, really self-custody and what is going to be the cost of operating as a sovereign, you know, permissionless individual on Bitcoin. So I do also have a fear if we don't have the ability to build more permissionless second players Easily, where we can experiment, where we can scale, then we could end up in a position where, you know, only the, the elite OGs or the institutions can afford the ability to do that on the base chain." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:13", "start": 2412.57, "text": "Yeah. and I guess also related to your other, to your talk where you were talking about, I g- I guess the block size and kind of reflecting on, you know, I saw some, some of that talk where you were basically explaining some of the different block size, adjustment ideas, and I guess you were trying to- Recontextualize that debate, let's say, in today's terms because it's kind of like you're trying to balance a few things, right? Do you wanna just sort of explain a bit about what are the key things you're trying to balance there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "40:41", "start": 2441.0, "text": "Yeah, so the original block size debate, I think, was not sufficiently nuanced, and it was mostly people just, pulling magic numbers out of their ass and saying, \"Oh, let's go with this one.\" so the problem with block size and, and with block space in general is that there are many different stakeholders, and most people in the original block size debate, they were only really focused on this idea of, \"Do we optimize for low cost of transacting on chain?\" And low fees, or do we optimize for low cost of running a full node and validating the system? I think that going forward, the real question is gonna be, you know, what is the cost of being able to do self custody, of being able to operate without a trusted third party? Because if we do get mass adoption and we end up pricing a lot of people out of actually using the protocol directly, that's going to push them into trusted third parties, and it's going to I think make it difficult for us to credibly claim that, you know, Bitcoin is for everyone, at least in a sovereign state." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:50", "start": 2509.57, "text": "I see, yeah. And so I guess your purpose with that isn't just to, say, you know, raise the block size, but I guess you're trying to try to find a balance of having people being able to transact on chain, but also verify the chain, but also at the same time balance the mining aspect, but also not give the miners too much power. It's kind of like you're trying to find this, you're trying to thread a pretty tight needle, right? Yeah. So," }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "42:15", "start": 2535.41, "text": "you know, a lot of the block size proposals back in the day would have changed the, like, the governance of the protocol, so that's right out. pretty much all of the block size proposals would have done nothing to try to, sustain a, a robust fee market for block space. And another way of saying that is none of them were really looking at ensuring that we can continue to pay for the thermodynamic security of the network. So the short version of like how I'm looking at it is, it's, it shouldn't be about small blocks versus large blocks, but rather what I'm calling Goldie blocks, which is, you know, can we thread the needle of, balancing all of the different considerations of the stakeholders, not changing the balance of power of governance, not shooting ourselves in the foot with regard to thermodynamic security, and yet hopefully also take advantage Of the deflationary nature of computing hardware and allowing Bitcoin to scale with the, you know, increased computational resources that people should be able to get for, you know, lower and lower prices over the years and decades. So I guess one" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:26", "start": 2606.27, "text": "counterargument I'm thinking of might be, look, if we're gonna isn't it better to on the side of not, blowing up the fee market in the future, right? Like it would be better to let it, let the fee market- market happen and, you know, a fee market occur and, okay, yes, on the downside, there'll be people who are priced out and yet, so maybe it, it's better to accept the OG elites and high net worth and the big businesses who can still transact on chain and verify everything, rather than risking, you know, blowing everything up because maybe you made it too efficient and now there's no fee market because you've just let the block size grow too big." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "44:06", "start": 2645.56, "text": "Yeah. So, one thing that I brought up was, you know, Bitcoin is volatile and it- A number of different ways, not just with the exchange rate, but also with, the actual demand for block space. And there's this, cyclical, meme really that happens where, you know, when the fees are really high, people are incentivized to either not use block space or find ways to use it more efficiently. And maybe that means doing stuff off-chain on second layers, maybe it means using other networks, maybe it means just not using, using" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:35", "start": 2674.84, "text": "Custodial. So yeah, it's kind of like either use Custodial, use the shitcoin, or be" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "44:41", "start": 2680.6, "text": "Version, of kind of summing up what you're saying, is that I don't want it to be misconstrued that I'm only talking about making block sizes larger. I think we, we may very want an algor-- we might actually want an algorithm that can make block sizes smaller in certain cases." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:57", "start": 2696.85, "text": "Right. So Luke, Luke might be happy about that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so I guess that aside, any other technical developments or, you know, developments in the space that you're excited about?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "45:08", "start": 2707.86, "text": "OP-CAAT." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:09", "start": 2708.82, "text": "Right. So you're Okay, yeah. Okay, so, I'm curious as well, 'cause one other counter-argument on the ossification side, it seems to be that people are concerned, not just at the technical level, but maybe at a social level, that it's kind of gonna start getting a lot of changes through or, I, I don't know. that seems to be a s-a social criticism. I'm, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, the social aspect of it. Is- should that be considered or is it just, no, technical considerations only?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "45:41", "start": 2741.26, "text": "emotional and, and hyped up due to trolling and, and, and antics on social media, and I try to ignore that stuff as much as possible. I think w-we've already seen like the, the pace of, technical progress at the protocol layer is slowing down significantly, and, you know, due to PTSD," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:03", "start": 2762.66, "text": "right, in terms of consensus changes, and still non-consensus changes that are, you know, advancements, yeah. Well," }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "46:07", "start": 2767.4, "text": "but even, even just BIPs in general, both consensus and non- On, the rate of improvement proposals has slowed down, over the past like five, six years since the scaling debates. and even the people who have worked on consensus changes in many cases, will propose them without ever proposing activation parameters because they just don't wanna deal with having to go through the- Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:31", "start": 2790.98, "text": "They don't want the drama, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "46:33", "start": 2792.56, "text": "So, I'm in favor of things like OP-CAp because I think that that will help enable more permissionless innovation and let people actually do stuff on other layers. Which is supposedly something that we should all want. and I also, think that like Rusty Russell's, great script restoration project is great, and in fact, I don't know, I don't think I mentioned it in my talk, but I think that that would basically be a prerequisite for doing any sort of block size adjustment, because we need to have a better way of calculating what are the actual computational resources being used by full" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:04", "start": 2823.94, "text": "nodes. Right. And for listeners, you can check out my interview with Rusty on that, where we talk about VAROps as a concept And that's kind of what he's trying to prove is being safe. so I guess we'll leave it there. guys, you can find Jameson online at LOP and, links will be in the show notes. Jameson, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So I hope you enjoyed the interviews. Please do let me know if you have feedback, leave a comment, and of course, if you liked the show, press like and of course, share it out there. Thanks, and I'll see you guys." } ] }