June 30, 2025 • 41 mins
In this live stream from the Rumble booth in Vegas, Walker from THE Bitcoin Podcast interviews Bitcoin developer Peter Todd on topics ranging from the HBO documentary where Todd was portrayed as Satoshi Nakamoto to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to open timestamps to tail emissions to the filtering debate and much more.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I think the strategic Bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works.
(00:11):
You know, there's two sides to this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow it to be a thing.
We value it. We recognize why other people value it.
And then the other part of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough.
It's going to keep working in maybe another 10 years.
Now, of course, I might be sort of personal, give you five reasons why, well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years.
(00:32):
But it's certainly not so busted that it's likely to fail in five, 10 years.
Now, a counterexample of that is imagine you had created Bitcoin back in the 90s, when we were very early into cryptography.
You could have made the plausible arguments in the 90s.
You know what? We're not really sure cryptography works.
(00:52):
Like we're putting all our trust in this Bitcoin thing, you know, but in the 90s, you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms that were broken later.
And that could have ended quite badly depending on how you navigated those breakages.
This is also, I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic Monero reserve or strategic Zcash reserve.
(01:13):
Those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices they've made is they've vastly increased the technical risk of failure because the privacy check means you're really relying on the math being correct.
In Bitcoin, you're relying on arithmetic being correct.
Any smart six-year-old could add up the numbers on a Bitcoin transaction and, like, figure out whether or not it's correct.
(01:35):
A smart six-year-old could do that even without you telling them what it is.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes,
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
(01:58):
If you are listening to this right now, remember, you are still early.
If you're feeling the urge to support this show with some sats,
quick reminder that you can do that on Fountain app by boosting this show
or becoming a paid subscriber, or give it a zap on Noster,
or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care.
This episode was a live stream
with the one and only Peter Todd
(02:19):
at the Rumble booth in Vegas.
The audio is a little bit weird at times,
so I do apologize for that,
but hopefully you still enjoy the content.
Peter and I get into a bunch of different topics
from the HBO documentary
where they claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto
to what he's working on with open timestamps
to his thoughts on tail emissions.
Shout out to Peter.
This was a very impromptu rip
(02:41):
and I appreciate him sharing his scarce time with me.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Peter Todd.
Greetings and salutations.
I am Walker.
I am joined here by Craig Wright, I believe.
Someone who is not Satoshi Nakamoto is all I know.
Peter Todd, star of the hit HBO hit piece about Bitcoin.
(03:07):
Peter, thank you for joining me.
We were, I was a little bit hungover this morning and I don't want to blame you, but you were there.
And so I'm going to kind of, I'm going to blame you.
I didn't stop you.
You know, I believe in freedom.
You may have been, that you do, that you do.
So, you know, Peter, I always enjoy talking to you.
As we were saying before this, like, I never know if I'm being trolled by you.
(03:27):
I don't think.
You are.
I am.
I don't think the HBO guys knew that you were trolling them.
at what point in that whole process did you realize like these guys are trying to make this
into a story that's going to make my life a pain in the ass well so my theory on this
is i suspect that they set out to film a documentary on the rise bitcoin and
(03:52):
they probably filmed you know 5 000 hours footage as you say 5 000 yeah that's that's kind of a
normal number for...
That's mind-blowing.
Obviously, you have not done video production.
Clearly, I'm a novice at this.
No, it is like,
even just with me, they just film
hours and hours and hours of interviews,
(04:13):
talking about all kinds of different things, talking about the same thing
over and over again, and
this seemed totally normal to me,
but it was only at the very end,
the last interview,
towards the end of the last interview,
then they finally bring up the Satoshi stuff.
And my suspicion is,
Of course, they filmed all this footage, started trying to edit it, realized it sucked, and then added the Stoshi thing last minute.
(04:37):
Now, Samson Mao claims otherwise, but it's just not the impression I got from them.
And also, this is why I am not sure, like, I should say, I suspect that they fully understood they were being trolled.
Because, remember, they're entertainers.
they're not quote-unquote documentary filmmakers even though technically are maybe they are but
(05:01):
their job is entertainment and if they go see someone trolling them they're probably thinking
all right how are we going to turn this into entertaining footage and the answer to that is
often yeah there's a way but i mean i've got to say it was pretty cool to like i watched this and
as it came out uh you made me laugh countless times throughout it and i realized too i was like
(05:22):
okay this is going to make Peter's life a pain in the ass probably.
Hildly annoying.
Yeah yeah but like at the same time it was like okay this was on the front page of you know HBO
like this was really widely publicized it got a ton of publicity.
I was told that it was I think it was on the order like their first their most popular thing
(05:47):
in the documentary category for, you know, two or three days.
And overall, something like, say, third most total views for a brief period.
Obviously, you know, I'm going to go lose in the long run to Game of Thrones.
But I mean, that's a hard one to measure.
Yeah, that's a little hard, you know.
I mean, like, that's kind of incredible.
Did you have, I mean, do you think this was ultimately a beneficial thing?
(06:11):
Like, was this good for Bitcoin?
Like, it probably was not.
For Bitcoin, I think it's good for Bitcoin.
And this is one of the reasons why, you know, when they brought up, I mean, Chris, one way I could approach this is, you know, they bring it up and I just immediately go shut it down.
Right. Like that's that's a way I could have handled it.
But I thought it would be much more valuable to play along with it, to control it, hope, you know, hoping that they would take the bait.
(06:36):
Although, like I say, I don't I don't think like, you know, they're smart people.
They know what I'm doing. Yeah. And I you know, when they say they believe this, I don't believe I don't believe it for one second.
you know he's smart enough to know fully well he's playing a role too and the good thing about it
though is he gets all this press and then the press consistently say well obviously this is
(06:57):
nonsense and my hope is that the next round of director when he goes to you know hbo 2.0 or
whatever it works out to be they're gonna go hate to say this but the other guy already did it better
than you and it's just not gonna you know the magic's gone it ain't gonna happen again we're
not going to do another Sochi documentary. Now, I've heard there is actually one that's happened,
but it sounds like it got way less press. Interesting. I mean, it's fascinating to watch
(07:22):
this because it's like this. I mean, you've been involved in Bitcoin. Well, if you listen to the
documentary, you know, 2008, obviously. But I mean, you've been involved in developing Bitcoin
for a very, very long time. One of the original folks there. Is it kind of wild to see this? I
I mean, could you ever have imagined at that point when you're like in these rooms, you know, like some of the footage that they had, the old footage was pretty cool.
(07:47):
Like you guys are just hacking away in these, you know, back rooms together.
Could you ever have imagined that you'd be like sitting in a giant conference?
No, easily.
So you did.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously, it may not be the highest probability outcome, but quite famous, like I think was Al Finney as an example, correctly estimated Bitcoin price within an order of magnitude or two now.
(08:10):
purely by going, well, all right, how big could it get?
What's the size of world economy?
What percentage of stuff could be in Bitcoin?
Let's look at gold.
These are all predictable things.
You just got to sit down there with some numbers
and make some reasonable estimations.
This is also why I will, and sort of the counterpoint, say,
well, obviously, Bitcoin isn't actually going to the moon
(08:32):
because the world economy is not big enough
to get that much more growth.
You know, will Bitcoin add another zero to the price?
Plausible.
Will Bitcoin add another zero on top of that?
Plausible.
But will Bitcoin add five more zeros?
Only if you're measuring in US dollars, not real value.
(08:55):
Like the value of Bitcoin in terms of Big Macs,
unless McDonald's has some amazing improvements in efficiency,
it's not going to go up that much
because the entire world economy just isn't that big.
I mean, it's an interesting perspective to take. It's like we have this fiat measuring stick, which is inherently flawed. And I mean, okay, I want to ask you something.
(09:16):
Well, I mean, well, this is why the McDonald's like Big Mac index exists, precisely because McDonald's is really standardized. And that's actually a reasonable way to measure different economies.
and it turns out that dollars they can print out of thin air or not even print, just keystrokes,
are not. Do you subscribe to this hyper-Bitcoinization idea that at a certain point,
(09:36):
it's like, it is ubiquitous. It is the only money. I mean, do you think fiat goes away or do you
think we're always saddled with fiat? Well, I will say that is a possible outcome.
Okay. It is clearly a possible outcome. It is not guaranteed. And I don't think the incentives
guarantee that happening.
And one reason why I would say that is,
of course, we didn't wind up with that happening with gold.
(09:59):
Now maybe the tech is different.
Maybe the fact you can easily send a Bitcoin
over the internet is enough to make it
be hyper-Bitcoinization rather than hyper-goldization.
But it all clear how it turns out The other thing I think Bitcoiners underestimate is governments aren that incompetent Like we all want to believe they all incompetent
(10:22):
But like or not, you know, the U.S. dollar, as an example,
has existed for a very long time.
And obviously they're doing something right enough
that, you know, easy 50-50 chance it exists in another 100 years.
Do you enjoy the fact or do you,
what do you think about the fact that governments are now potentially stacking Bitcoin?
(10:44):
Like, is that was this also just inevitable?
Well, you realize that's actually a sign of governments being competent.
OK, touche. So they're not as dumb as they look.
Yeah, they're not as dumb as they look.
Like, now, I got to make the point that, for instance, for the U.S. government,
they have enough debts in a big enough economy and diversified enough economy.
If they started really aggressively stacking Bitcoin, you kind of you kind of wonder what's really going on.
(11:08):
because the U.S. government can borrow money on reasonable terms.
So, you know, I mean, let's look at, say, the strategic oil reserve.
That is a physical asset that you absolutely need.
If you don't have it, really bad stuff happens really quickly.
Like, it makes sense to have a strategic reserve of oil because it's a useful thing.
(11:31):
Does that logic really apply to Bitcoin that well?
Sort of, but it's not in the same category.
I mean, it's not unlike having a strategic gold reserve.
Yeah, it kind of helps in certain cases, but you ain't going to eat your gold.
Would it impose any sort of additional accountability on government?
(11:52):
Or would it just allow them perhaps to be even less accountable?
Well, if Bitcoin goes up and up, yeah, less accountable.
So actually, I believe Bhutan is an example of this, where they famously started mining kind of in secret.
We find out a few years into this.
oh, actually, they've got a bunch of Bitcoin.
And from what I've heard, they started spending it.
(12:13):
Because the knowledge kind of filters out,
political pressure's on them to do something with the money.
I'm not going to make the claim that for sure they're spending it recklessly.
But it sounds like maybe that's what's happened.
0It's interesting.
Okay, so this has been a very big topic of conversation
(12:33):
with the strategic reserves and everything.
I'm asking you about it.
But I'm also curious, like, is this kind of a just like, do you view this as a distraction from other things that are far more important happening in Bitcoin right now?
Or is this actually, is it correct that this should be the hot topic of every conversation?
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(16:06):
I think the strategic Bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a
wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works. So,
you know, there's two sides to this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow
it to be a thing. We value it. We recognize why other people value it. And then the other part
(16:29):
of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough. It's going to keep
working in maybe another 10 years. Now, of course, I might be the sort of person who will give you
five reasons why, well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years, but it's certainly not
so busted that it's likely to fail in five, 10 years. Now, a counter example of that is imagine
(16:51):
even you had created Bitcoin back in the 90s,
when we were very early into cryptography,
you could have made the plausible argument in the 90s,
you know what, we're not really sure cryptography works.
Like we're putting all our trust in this Bitcoin thing,
you know, but in the 90s,
(17:12):
you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms
that were broken later.
And that could have ended quite badly,
depending on how you navigated those breakages.
is also, I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic
Monero reserve or a strategic Zcash reserve. Those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices
(17:32):
they've made is they've vastly increased the technical risk of failure because the privacy
check means you're really relying on the math being correct. In Bitcoin, you're relying on
arithmetic being correct. Any smart six-year-old could add up the numbers on a Bitcoin transaction,
and like figure out whether or not it's correct.
(17:54):
You brought a smart six-year-old to do that
even without you telling them what it is.
Well, okay, let me ask you something.
Speaking of, let's say, potential technical issues
or technical complexity,
you have perhaps been,
well, you're often a controversial figure, let's say.
You, again, never sure when you're trolling
and when you're not.
(18:14):
You have thrown things out there like,
hey, Bitcoin may need tail emissions at some point.
is that is that a troll or do you actually know that that one's not a troll um explain that well so
there's a couple issues there um first and foremost obviously there needs to be a incentive
for miners if there's not an incentive for miners clearly bitcoin doesn't work because the proof of
(18:37):
work drops the point where it's just broken and some will you know some asshole will go through
our centacket so we can certainly say that's true but the more subtle technical point is
not only do we want there to be incentive for miners in general,
we want there to be a consistent incentive.
We always want miners to want to make the next block.
(18:59):
Now, they should be getting paid to do that,
and that should be how they earn the most money.
So ask the question,
if transaction fees are the only way that miners get paid,
why exactly should they make a new block
rather than maybe re-mine the previous block?
and it's very easy with only transaction fees for these incentives not to work.
(19:22):
Well, okay, and I hear that point,
but isn't it if we're talking about this fiat measuring stick
that is inherently unreliable?
As we get into the future, it's like, okay, yeah, there's no more block reward,
but aren't these transaction fees going to be like,
are we measuring them wrong right now to think this isn't sustainable?
The problem is, even if transaction fees overall create an on-average mining reward,
(19:49):
there's no way to make them have a completely consistent mining reward.
And inevitably, fees come in bursts.
That's just, well, because blocks themselves are found in bursts,
fees then come in bursts as well.
Because if a block takes a while to be found, fees naturally go up
as people outbid each other, try to get into the next block.
(20:09):
This is just one of those things that happens.
But of course, if that happens, now fees are very high.
Now the incentive is for a large miner to try their hand at mining two blocks in a row
and sweeping up those transaction fees.
And this is just a fundamental issue.
And the way you solve that or at least try to mitigate it is by always having a big enough reward that fees aren that important And this is why we haven seen this in Bitcoin
(20:36):
because the times when fees are higher than reward are very rare.
Even with inscriptions and so on, it was still a very rare thing.
In the future, that will not be the case.
And all our mathematical modeling of how incentives work
indicates that at that point, Bitcoin's consensus starts to become unstable.
Now, that by itself would be okay,
(20:57):
except that only large miners can profit off this.
You know, if you have a bid axe, you find a block,
the chances of you finding another block are so low,
you put all your hopes in one block.
If you're Ant Pool, you have enough hatch power,
you have a reasonable chance finding two blocks in a row.
(21:17):
Thus, a reorg can make sense.
But of course, if they do a reorg, your block got reorgs out,
and you just lost a million bucks.
I mean, and I hear that,
but my worry is don't you think
this kind of like a tail emission proposal,
doesn't that undercut the actual credibility?
Well, so tail emission specifically,
(21:40):
that's a fascinating proposal.
And of course, Monero does this.
It's fascinating because the rate of new coin supply
actually converges towards a rate at which coins are lost or destroyed.
And this comes down to basically how the math of this works.
(22:01):
So the analogy I like to use is like imagine a leaky bucket.
All right.
You have a bucket.
Water is coming into the bucket at a fixed rate,
and there's a hole at the bottom of the bucket.
The amount of water coming out of that hole is proportional
to the depth of water in the bucket.
So there will always be a depth.
where it converges.
(22:22):
If the depth is really low, not much water comes out,
more water fills up.
The depth is very high, more water gets forced out,
it goes down.
So there's a fixed level.
And a natural equilibrium, basically,
because people do lose coins.
Yeah, they will always lose coins.
And also, for other reasons,
coins will naturally get destroyed, too.
But mostly it's loss.
(22:43):
There's just no avoiding it.
People will lose coins.
What percentage per year?
probably on the order of 0.1ish percent, maybe 1%, maybe.
So probably somewhere in that region.
So if you have a tail emission
that starts off at something like that,
what actually happens effectively
is that the value increase that you would have otherwise gotten
(23:08):
by other people losing their coins
gets effectively diverted to miners
to pay for the security of your own system.
Now I'm not making the claim
that that amount of money is guaranteed to make Bitcoin work.
I'm just saying that's an amount of money
that clearly we can afford
because people don't protect their coins well enough
to not lose their money.
So like, obviously this is amount of money low enough,
(23:31):
really, who cares?
Another argument I always make is like,
let's suppose we're talking about numbers like 0.1%.
0.1% compounded over your entire lifetime.
I forget the number off the top of my head,
but something like 20%.
You can do it on your calculator, right?
I believe you're best.
That ain't mental math.
I can know how to multiply that means in a row.
(23:53):
But the point is, it's a small percentage of your total wealth.
And the argument there is, if you can't dedicate that amount of your entire savings over your entire lifetime to keeping those same savings secure, what are you doing?
This doesn't make any economic sense.
You can afford this.
(24:14):
Equally.
but can can bitcoin as a network afford it when it comes like well that just undercuts
credibility right undercut credibility because idiots who don't understand how this stuff works
go on podcasts and go yammer on about how terrible tail mission is most of us are idiots well
i know i we should be that's and that's why i'm talking to you uh okay let me ask another question
(24:39):
And there's a lot of debate around all this, you know, spamming, fix the filters, all these things.
I don't actually know where you stand on that.
Do you think this is a, like, is this an argument that is actually matters and need to be had?
Or is this something that just sorts itself out?
Well, the way I would put it is we know there is no principled way to stop people putting data in the Bitcoin chain.
(25:10):
And furthermore, there's no principled way to stop people from using Bitcoin in ways we don't consider are real.
So, and notably, Luke Jr., back in the day, he wasn't just trying to censor, quote unquote, spam transactions that had data in them.
He was actually trying to censor, quote unquote, spam transactions that were actual monetary transactions.
(25:34):
Satoshi Dice being your example.
So, maybe you're too young for this.
I am, but I have read about this.
So back in the day, there was this thing called Stoshi Dice where you'd send them Bitcoin on a particular address.
I mean, actually, a bunch of addresses with different betting odds.
(25:54):
And they'd do the math on whether you won or lost.
They actually did it in a provable way, which was nice.
And then if you win, they send you back your winnings.
If you lose, they send you back a small amount of money just to let you know that they processed bets and you lost.
(26:15):
So that is a financial transaction.
You're making a bet.
You win or lose.
If you win, you get your money back.
No data was otherwise.
No data whatsoever.
Other than maybe the data in the sense of you did a financial transaction.
It's still data, yeah.
But there were no monkey attacks.
In the sort of inscription sense, there's certainly no data in there.
(26:39):
So for a while, this became so popular that like, you know, over half of all Bitcoin transactions were Satoshi dice.
I didn't know it was that popular.
Wow.
I mean, you know, we're in Vegas right now.
Like there's a lot of degenerate gamblers out there.
There's a lot.
Yeah.
And a lot of people looked at this and said, well, obviously this is stupid.
(27:03):
Why are you spending so much money in transaction fees?
Why are you using all this precious block space?
But of course, at the time, transaction fees were low, so it didn't really matter.
And my view on it was, well, whatever, people are going to use Bitcoin for what they want to use it for.
This is why we have a block size limit.
You know, we've decided how much data Bitcoin no needs process to keep up with the blockchain and how people choose to use it within that, leave it up to the free market.
(27:37):
Luke Jr. already had Bitcoin OTS at the time and he had a blacklist to filter out Satoshi Dice.
Okay.
Yeah, man, this was running on Elogius, so Elogius would not mind Satoshi Dice transactions.
well you know it's interesting because you also developed something open timestamps
which is a very different take on how to use the bitcoins blockchain for uh let's say non-monetary
(28:01):
use but very clearly non-monetary very clearly but in a very optimized way can you talk about
that a little bit because it's also how simple proof is doing what they're open timestamps
in a nutshell its assistants make a math proof that data existed in the past why is this useful
Well, bad guys don't have time machines.
So if you can prove that something existed prior to when an attack could have happened, you can rule out the attack happening.
(28:27):
Now, there's a lot of cases of this.
A very clear example, at least for a technical audience, is if you have a digital signature, obviously the private key used to create the digital signature could get compromised.
You know, maybe you leave your PHP key on a server.
Not that any Bitcoin devs would have done that.
He could possibly do that.
(28:49):
But just like Junior, he isn't the only one who screwed this up.
It's happened.
So Bitcoin Core does have signing of Git commits.
And some of the Bitcoin Core contributors use open timestamps to prove that their signatures on their Git commits were created prior to when hopefully, well, hopefully never.
(29:12):
But if their key does get compromised, hopefully we know when it got compromised and still validate these old signatures.
Now, another example, you know, I mean, maybe a broader example is if you're storing data in general for a later, like, archival, why aren't you timestamping?
I mean, why wouldn't you want to be able to say, hey, obviously this hasn't been touched for this amount of period of time.
(29:33):
Maybe it was, you know, born fake to begin with, but at least it hasn't been faked since.
Now, with SimpleProof, they offer this as commercial service.
And, you know, open timestamps, open source software, you have to store this like one kilobyte proof file.
Not a big deal, but in a lot of use cases, that's annoying enough.
(29:55):
You'd rather pay SimpleProof to do it for you.
So, SimpleProof, among other things, they were hired by the Guatemalan government to do timestamping of election records.
specifically its paper ballot system, but obviously the ballots are counted.
You get a little sheet with that paper, and that's where the numbers are,
(30:19):
however many votes for each candidate.
That sheet gets scanned into a database, and they timestamped it right then.
What does that prove?
Well, it proves that at least that claim was created when you expect it to be,
which should be roughly an hour after polling.
Because, you know, Guatemala isn't some sort of third world country
(30:41):
that takes weeks to decide they come to their elections Not that I would know of any Like yeah like america yeah oh okay all right so remind me is that first or third world which is just yeah sidebar just
yeah absurd that we can't seem to figure that out and like a country like guatemala can somehow do
it in literally if people fail to do something that easy it might not be because they're dumb
(31:04):
i'll say that much well that's that's the sad thing i remember seeing the documentary and seeing
and you working on that with them,
and I thought that should have been a way bigger story
than it was, because I thought that was amazing.
Do you think that's something that,
I know in the US these elections are handled
on a local basis in terms of how they handle things,
(31:25):
but do you think that's ever something
that would actually become widespread in the US?
Or is the insist?
So in the more recent presidential election in the US,
one county did in fact use open timestamps
to help prove the integrity of their vote.
And there's actually one of the guys
from Simple Proof, Carlino,
(31:46):
he did an interview with the woman in charge of that.
And I gotta admit, it's such a hilarious interview
in a way because, Chris, I know the tech details behind it,
and they're going on and on about integrity of elections,
how the process works, and so on.
But what it boiled down to is,
she paid Simple Proof 12 bucks for the service,
(32:06):
which is a standard rate for the amount of data they were doing.
Then she did all her actual work and sent them three emails
with the documents that needed to be timestamped,
which took all of 30 seconds.
Because timestamping is really, really easy.
Like I say, if you're archiving data, what's your excuse?
And in her case, she'd actually gone to the election board and said,
(32:30):
you know, here's the thing.
Here's why we should do it.
It's really dead easy.
It's going to cost us $12.
bucks. We're spending more money on pizza.
Why
aren't we doing this? And furthermore, if you
say no, I'm just going to do it anyway
because I'm legally responsible for these numbers.
I want
one more layer of protection
to show that they
(32:51):
weren't changed later.
Of course, obviously, this is one of many
interlocking checks and balances.
Another example being, well,
they're legally required to publish the numbers
once the
sums come in.
well, of course, how do they do it?
Well, like post on Facebook, post on Twitter.
And it sounds kind of silly in a way,
but actually, you know,
(33:11):
like that is a communication mechanism.
Why wouldn't you do that?
Timestamping it is just one more way
of putting in that authentic record saying,
yeah, no, it really did happen here.
Someone didn't change it later.
Because imagine, for instance,
if you reported on Facebook
and someone changes the figures on Facebook.
(33:32):
Facebook's not digitally signed.
you're trusting Facebook.
Well, if you're able to go show a timestamp,
you can at least say, hey, here's my copy.
I created this prior to this point in time.
Yeah, all right, maybe I created five different versions of it.
But now you have to make the arguments
that why my copy is still invalid too.
(33:54):
You're in a much better position with a timestamp.
I mean, it seems like, again, one of those things that's so obvious
and that it's like, why wouldn't you do that?
like unless you
well unless you don't want
yeah
so one of the very first things I added
to opens timestamps was support for Git
okay
(34:14):
and I personally keep all my emails
and other datas
in Git repositories
you know every email I have
winds up in a Git repository
well
since I created
since I created the software
it was just dead easy for me
to make it possible to just press a button
(34:35):
and my Git repos are timestamps.
In every single file in them,
I can get timestamps for every single one.
In kind of this AI future that we're suddenly living in,
it feels like that's gonna be more important than ever.
Well, I gotta say, one of my biggest regrets
with Open Timestamps was in around, I think, 2017,
(34:55):
I downloaded the metadata for the Internet Archive,
which is just, it's an enormous amount of data.
It was like-
How much data was it?
Oh, I think terabytes even.
There was a certain amount of data.
So I go, crunch for all this metadata,
and the metadata has hashes of their actual data,
and I put this all into a big Merkle tree
(35:17):
and I timestamp it, and I tried at least
to create a system to download more metadata as it came
and keep timestamping it, but honestly,
the internet archive is just so big,
I couldn't reasonably do that with the software I had
in the budget I had for servers.
So I eventually gave up.
But in the meantime, the Internet Archive themselves
found out about this.
(35:38):
And remember they actually sent me an email saying,
wait, you timestamped the Internet Archive?
And I explained how I did it.
It's like, yeah, ma'am, I guess you could actually do that.
And they invited me to go to San Francisco
at their headquarters to go talk to them.
But how would they integrate this
into the Internet Archive themselves?
Every single person in the room, except one,
loved the idea.
(35:59):
And that one asshole who came in at the end of the meeting
and heard the word Bitcoin just said,
well, it's Bitcoin, we're not going to do it.
Seriously.
Yep.
We could have had all of the Internet Archive
timestamped properly in an easy to prove way
prior to AI being a thing.
And they fumbled that ball.
That just seems like such a moronic thing.
(36:21):
It really is.
This is like this Bitcoin deranged.
You are actively shooting yourself in the foot.
It was no technical.
There was no technical.
You know,
criticism of this.
It was purely,
we will not advocate for anything involving Bitcoin.
It is just fundamentally evil.
End of story.
(36:43):
Dear Lord.
Do you think they'll ever come around?
Very unlikely.
It's a shame.
Maybe,
you know,
maybe in a few more years,
but my contacts there,
last I've talked to them,
basically say it's the same thing,
even now.
Even as big as Bitcoin's gotten.
I mean, I hate to say this, but the Internet Archive, it's a bunch of left-wing people.
And I don't think they're happy seeing Trump rise in parts on Bitcoin becoming an issue in U.S. politics.
(37:11):
I mean, it's just like you're only hurting yourself, though.
And that's the sad thing.
No one cares what your political views are with Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, though, the nature of Bitcoin is only compatible with certain political views.
Because like it or not, not everyone actually likes freedom.
which is a sad reality to discover we got to wrap up here in a sec but i want to ask you
(37:34):
is there something that you're really excited about now or something else that like you're
working on like what excites you these days i got to admit it's actually still open timestamps
um because so simple proof you know they've been trying to go and raise uh raise funding
um they've gotten uh i'm not gonna get a term right like i think it's pre-seed round or whatever
it is and they were able to in turn give me some funding to go do a bunch more work on open
(37:56):
timestamps because the protocol, the math behind it scales, but the software to actually
make it scale didn't actually work.
Like it worked, but if someone tried to make 10,000 timestamp requests per second, it would
have just fallen over because they couldn't scale it horizontally.
I couldn't throw servers at the problem.
(38:17):
So I fixed half of that already, which is to create new timestamps, I can throw servers
at the problem.
just have more and more servers making
Merkle trees and Merkle trees and so on.
Right?
Yeah. I mean,
it's a pretty obvious thing if you understand the cryptography.
It's just someone's got to sit down
and write that software. But then I did
(38:38):
and that's fine. If
Microsoft
timestamps every single file on every single
computer in the world as some new
feature, it'll be fine. The
catch is
the other part of timestamping
is to then get the proof back.
and that part still doesn't scale.
And for technical reasons,
(39:00):
that's a lot harder to do,
but hopefully I'll be able to,
if I don't go to too many conferences,
spend a couple months worth of work
to make all this stuff happen.
And then I'll be able to truly say,
yeah, please timestamp the world's data.
Well, I hope that the world does timestamp its data.
Me too.
Thanks so much, man.
Thank you.
(39:20):
For people that are listening to this,
if you haven't checked out open timestamps,
you should go timestamp everything like or everything that you it really is easy you get
to open timestamps.org scroll down there's a button timestamp your file it is hashed on your
computer it does not upload to anyone else very private and you'll get back like a little one
(39:40):
kilobyte file that you know 20 years in the future you can prove you did it right then
i love it peter thank you so much man it's great talking to you all right
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
(40:07):
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(40:31):
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(40:52):
Until next time, stay free.
I think the strategic Bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works.
(00:11):
You know, there's two sides to this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow it to be a thing.
We value it. We recognize why other people value it.
And then the other part of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough.
It's going to keep working in maybe another 10 years.
Now, of course, I might be sort of personal, give you five reasons why, well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years.
(00:32):
But it's certainly not so busted that it's likely to fail in five, 10 years.
Now, a counterexample of that is imagine you had created Bitcoin back in the 90s, when we were very early into cryptography.
You could have made the plausible arguments in the 90s.
You know what? We're not really sure cryptography works.
(00:52):
Like we're putting all our trust in this Bitcoin thing, you know, but in the 90s, you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms that were broken later.
And that could have ended quite badly depending on how you navigated those breakages.
This is also, I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic Monero reserve or strategic Zcash reserve.
(01:13):
Those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices they've made is they've vastly increased the technical risk of failure because the privacy check means you're really relying on the math being correct.
In Bitcoin, you're relying on arithmetic being correct.
Any smart six-year-old could add up the numbers on a Bitcoin transaction and, like, figure out whether or not it's correct.
(01:35):
A smart six-year-old could do that even without you telling them what it is.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes,
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
(01:58):
If you are listening to this right now, remember, you are still early.
If you're feeling the urge to support this show with some sats,
quick reminder that you can do that on Fountain app by boosting this show
or becoming a paid subscriber, or give it a zap on Noster,
or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care.
This episode was a live stream
with the one and only Peter Todd
(02:19):
at the Rumble booth in Vegas.
The audio is a little bit weird at times,
so I do apologize for that,
but hopefully you still enjoy the content.
Peter and I get into a bunch of different topics
from the HBO documentary
where they claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto
to what he's working on with open timestamps
to his thoughts on tail emissions.
Shout out to Peter.
This was a very impromptu rip
(02:41):
and I appreciate him sharing his scarce time with me.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Peter Todd.
Greetings and salutations.
I am Walker.
I am joined here by Craig Wright, I believe.
Someone who is not Satoshi Nakamoto is all I know.
Peter Todd, star of the hit HBO hit piece about Bitcoin.
(03:07):
Peter, thank you for joining me.
We were, I was a little bit hungover this morning and I don't want to blame you, but you were there.
And so I'm going to kind of, I'm going to blame you.
I didn't stop you.
You know, I believe in freedom.
You may have been, that you do, that you do.
So, you know, Peter, I always enjoy talking to you.
As we were saying before this, like, I never know if I'm being trolled by you.
(03:27):
I don't think.
You are.
I am.
I don't think the HBO guys knew that you were trolling them.
at what point in that whole process did you realize like these guys are trying to make this
into a story that's going to make my life a pain in the ass well so my theory on this
is i suspect that they set out to film a documentary on the rise bitcoin and
(03:52):
they probably filmed you know 5 000 hours footage as you say 5 000 yeah that's that's kind of a
normal number for...
That's mind-blowing.
Obviously, you have not done video production.
Clearly, I'm a novice at this.
No, it is like,
even just with me, they just film
hours and hours and hours of interviews,
(04:13):
talking about all kinds of different things, talking about the same thing
over and over again, and
this seemed totally normal to me,
but it was only at the very end,
the last interview,
towards the end of the last interview,
then they finally bring up the Satoshi stuff.
And my suspicion is,
Of course, they filmed all this footage, started trying to edit it, realized it sucked, and then added the Stoshi thing last minute.
(04:37):
Now, Samson Mao claims otherwise, but it's just not the impression I got from them.
And also, this is why I am not sure, like, I should say, I suspect that they fully understood they were being trolled.
Because, remember, they're entertainers.
they're not quote-unquote documentary filmmakers even though technically are maybe they are but
(05:01):
their job is entertainment and if they go see someone trolling them they're probably thinking
all right how are we going to turn this into entertaining footage and the answer to that is
often yeah there's a way but i mean i've got to say it was pretty cool to like i watched this and
as it came out uh you made me laugh countless times throughout it and i realized too i was like
(05:22):
okay this is going to make Peter's life a pain in the ass probably.
Hildly annoying.
Yeah yeah but like at the same time it was like okay this was on the front page of you know HBO
like this was really widely publicized it got a ton of publicity.
I was told that it was I think it was on the order like their first their most popular thing
(05:47):
in the documentary category for, you know, two or three days.
And overall, something like, say, third most total views for a brief period.
Obviously, you know, I'm going to go lose in the long run to Game of Thrones.
But I mean, that's a hard one to measure.
Yeah, that's a little hard, you know.
I mean, like, that's kind of incredible.
Did you have, I mean, do you think this was ultimately a beneficial thing?
(06:11):
Like, was this good for Bitcoin?
Like, it probably was not.
For Bitcoin, I think it's good for Bitcoin.
And this is one of the reasons why, you know, when they brought up, I mean, Chris, one way I could approach this is, you know, they bring it up and I just immediately go shut it down.
Right. Like that's that's a way I could have handled it.
But I thought it would be much more valuable to play along with it, to control it, hope, you know, hoping that they would take the bait.
(06:36):
Although, like I say, I don't I don't think like, you know, they're smart people.
They know what I'm doing. Yeah. And I you know, when they say they believe this, I don't believe I don't believe it for one second.
you know he's smart enough to know fully well he's playing a role too and the good thing about it
though is he gets all this press and then the press consistently say well obviously this is
(06:57):
nonsense and my hope is that the next round of director when he goes to you know hbo 2.0 or
whatever it works out to be they're gonna go hate to say this but the other guy already did it better
than you and it's just not gonna you know the magic's gone it ain't gonna happen again we're
not going to do another Sochi documentary. Now, I've heard there is actually one that's happened,
but it sounds like it got way less press. Interesting. I mean, it's fascinating to watch
(07:22):
this because it's like this. I mean, you've been involved in Bitcoin. Well, if you listen to the
documentary, you know, 2008, obviously. But I mean, you've been involved in developing Bitcoin
for a very, very long time. One of the original folks there. Is it kind of wild to see this? I
I mean, could you ever have imagined at that point when you're like in these rooms, you know, like some of the footage that they had, the old footage was pretty cool.
(07:47):
Like you guys are just hacking away in these, you know, back rooms together.
Could you ever have imagined that you'd be like sitting in a giant conference?
No, easily.
So you did.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously, it may not be the highest probability outcome, but quite famous, like I think was Al Finney as an example, correctly estimated Bitcoin price within an order of magnitude or two now.
(08:10):
purely by going, well, all right, how big could it get?
What's the size of world economy?
What percentage of stuff could be in Bitcoin?
Let's look at gold.
These are all predictable things.
You just got to sit down there with some numbers
and make some reasonable estimations.
This is also why I will, and sort of the counterpoint, say,
well, obviously, Bitcoin isn't actually going to the moon
(08:32):
because the world economy is not big enough
to get that much more growth.
You know, will Bitcoin add another zero to the price?
Plausible.
Will Bitcoin add another zero on top of that?
Plausible.
But will Bitcoin add five more zeros?
Only if you're measuring in US dollars, not real value.
(08:55):
Like the value of Bitcoin in terms of Big Macs,
unless McDonald's has some amazing improvements in efficiency,
it's not going to go up that much
because the entire world economy just isn't that big.
I mean, it's an interesting perspective to take. It's like we have this fiat measuring stick, which is inherently flawed. And I mean, okay, I want to ask you something.
(09:16):
Well, I mean, well, this is why the McDonald's like Big Mac index exists, precisely because McDonald's is really standardized. And that's actually a reasonable way to measure different economies.
and it turns out that dollars they can print out of thin air or not even print, just keystrokes,
are not. Do you subscribe to this hyper-Bitcoinization idea that at a certain point,
(09:36):
it's like, it is ubiquitous. It is the only money. I mean, do you think fiat goes away or do you
think we're always saddled with fiat? Well, I will say that is a possible outcome.
Okay. It is clearly a possible outcome. It is not guaranteed. And I don't think the incentives
guarantee that happening.
And one reason why I would say that is,
of course, we didn't wind up with that happening with gold.
(09:59):
Now maybe the tech is different.
Maybe the fact you can easily send a Bitcoin
over the internet is enough to make it
be hyper-Bitcoinization rather than hyper-goldization.
But it all clear how it turns out The other thing I think Bitcoiners underestimate is governments aren that incompetent Like we all want to believe they all incompetent
(10:22):
But like or not, you know, the U.S. dollar, as an example,
has existed for a very long time.
And obviously they're doing something right enough
that, you know, easy 50-50 chance it exists in another 100 years.
Do you enjoy the fact or do you,
what do you think about the fact that governments are now potentially stacking Bitcoin?
(10:44):
Like, is that was this also just inevitable?
Well, you realize that's actually a sign of governments being competent.
OK, touche. So they're not as dumb as they look.
Yeah, they're not as dumb as they look.
Like, now, I got to make the point that, for instance, for the U.S. government,
they have enough debts in a big enough economy and diversified enough economy.
If they started really aggressively stacking Bitcoin, you kind of you kind of wonder what's really going on.
(11:08):
because the U.S. government can borrow money on reasonable terms.
So, you know, I mean, let's look at, say, the strategic oil reserve.
That is a physical asset that you absolutely need.
If you don't have it, really bad stuff happens really quickly.
Like, it makes sense to have a strategic reserve of oil because it's a useful thing.
(11:31):
Does that logic really apply to Bitcoin that well?
Sort of, but it's not in the same category.
I mean, it's not unlike having a strategic gold reserve.
Yeah, it kind of helps in certain cases, but you ain't going to eat your gold.
Would it impose any sort of additional accountability on government?
(11:52):
Or would it just allow them perhaps to be even less accountable?
Well, if Bitcoin goes up and up, yeah, less accountable.
So actually, I believe Bhutan is an example of this, where they famously started mining kind of in secret.
We find out a few years into this.
oh, actually, they've got a bunch of Bitcoin.
And from what I've heard, they started spending it.
(12:13):
Because the knowledge kind of filters out,
political pressure's on them to do something with the money.
I'm not going to make the claim that for sure they're spending it recklessly.
But it sounds like maybe that's what's happened.
0It's interesting.
Okay, so this has been a very big topic of conversation
(12:33):
with the strategic reserves and everything.
I'm asking you about it.
But I'm also curious, like, is this kind of a just like, do you view this as a distraction from other things that are far more important happening in Bitcoin right now?
Or is this actually, is it correct that this should be the hot topic of every conversation?
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(16:06):
I think the strategic Bitcoin reserves, they are important in that it goes and shows a
wide acceptance that Bitcoin is a legitimate thing and the tech legitimately works. So,
you know, there's two sides to this. One is legitimate in the sense as we're going to allow
it to be a thing. We value it. We recognize why other people value it. And then the other part
(16:29):
of it being we recognize that the technology actually works well enough. It's going to keep
working in maybe another 10 years. Now, of course, I might be the sort of person who will give you
five reasons why, well, maybe it's not going to work so well in 30 years, but it's certainly not
so busted that it's likely to fail in five, 10 years. Now, a counter example of that is imagine
(16:51):
even you had created Bitcoin back in the 90s,
when we were very early into cryptography,
you could have made the plausible argument in the 90s,
you know what, we're not really sure cryptography works.
Like we're putting all our trust in this Bitcoin thing,
you know, but in the 90s,
(17:12):
you probably would have picked cryptography algorithms
that were broken later.
And that could have ended quite badly,
depending on how you navigated those breakages.
is also, I got to point out why it would be very surprising to see governments make, say, a strategic
Monero reserve or a strategic Zcash reserve. Those coins have their purpose, but one of the choices
(17:32):
they've made is they've vastly increased the technical risk of failure because the privacy
check means you're really relying on the math being correct. In Bitcoin, you're relying on
arithmetic being correct. Any smart six-year-old could add up the numbers on a Bitcoin transaction,
and like figure out whether or not it's correct.
(17:54):
You brought a smart six-year-old to do that
even without you telling them what it is.
Well, okay, let me ask you something.
Speaking of, let's say, potential technical issues
or technical complexity,
you have perhaps been,
well, you're often a controversial figure, let's say.
You, again, never sure when you're trolling
and when you're not.
(18:14):
You have thrown things out there like,
hey, Bitcoin may need tail emissions at some point.
is that is that a troll or do you actually know that that one's not a troll um explain that well so
there's a couple issues there um first and foremost obviously there needs to be a incentive
for miners if there's not an incentive for miners clearly bitcoin doesn't work because the proof of
(18:37):
work drops the point where it's just broken and some will you know some asshole will go through
our centacket so we can certainly say that's true but the more subtle technical point is
not only do we want there to be incentive for miners in general,
we want there to be a consistent incentive.
We always want miners to want to make the next block.
(18:59):
Now, they should be getting paid to do that,
and that should be how they earn the most money.
So ask the question,
if transaction fees are the only way that miners get paid,
why exactly should they make a new block
rather than maybe re-mine the previous block?
and it's very easy with only transaction fees for these incentives not to work.
(19:22):
Well, okay, and I hear that point,
but isn't it if we're talking about this fiat measuring stick
that is inherently unreliable?
As we get into the future, it's like, okay, yeah, there's no more block reward,
but aren't these transaction fees going to be like,
are we measuring them wrong right now to think this isn't sustainable?
The problem is, even if transaction fees overall create an on-average mining reward,
(19:49):
there's no way to make them have a completely consistent mining reward.
And inevitably, fees come in bursts.
That's just, well, because blocks themselves are found in bursts,
fees then come in bursts as well.
Because if a block takes a while to be found, fees naturally go up
as people outbid each other, try to get into the next block.
(20:09):
This is just one of those things that happens.
But of course, if that happens, now fees are very high.
Now the incentive is for a large miner to try their hand at mining two blocks in a row
and sweeping up those transaction fees.
And this is just a fundamental issue.
And the way you solve that or at least try to mitigate it is by always having a big enough reward that fees aren that important And this is why we haven seen this in Bitcoin
(20:36):
because the times when fees are higher than reward are very rare.
Even with inscriptions and so on, it was still a very rare thing.
In the future, that will not be the case.
And all our mathematical modeling of how incentives work
indicates that at that point, Bitcoin's consensus starts to become unstable.
Now, that by itself would be okay,
(20:57):
except that only large miners can profit off this.
You know, if you have a bid axe, you find a block,
the chances of you finding another block are so low,
you put all your hopes in one block.
If you're Ant Pool, you have enough hatch power,
you have a reasonable chance finding two blocks in a row.
(21:17):
Thus, a reorg can make sense.
But of course, if they do a reorg, your block got reorgs out,
and you just lost a million bucks.
I mean, and I hear that,
but my worry is don't you think
this kind of like a tail emission proposal,
doesn't that undercut the actual credibility?
Well, so tail emission specifically,
(21:40):
that's a fascinating proposal.
And of course, Monero does this.
It's fascinating because the rate of new coin supply
actually converges towards a rate at which coins are lost or destroyed.
And this comes down to basically how the math of this works.
(22:01):
So the analogy I like to use is like imagine a leaky bucket.
All right.
You have a bucket.
Water is coming into the bucket at a fixed rate,
and there's a hole at the bottom of the bucket.
The amount of water coming out of that hole is proportional
to the depth of water in the bucket.
So there will always be a depth.
where it converges.
(22:22):
If the depth is really low, not much water comes out,
more water fills up.
The depth is very high, more water gets forced out,
it goes down.
So there's a fixed level.
And a natural equilibrium, basically,
because people do lose coins.
Yeah, they will always lose coins.
And also, for other reasons,
coins will naturally get destroyed, too.
But mostly it's loss.
(22:43):
There's just no avoiding it.
People will lose coins.
What percentage per year?
probably on the order of 0.1ish percent, maybe 1%, maybe.
So probably somewhere in that region.
So if you have a tail emission
that starts off at something like that,
what actually happens effectively
is that the value increase that you would have otherwise gotten
(23:08):
by other people losing their coins
gets effectively diverted to miners
to pay for the security of your own system.
Now I'm not making the claim
that that amount of money is guaranteed to make Bitcoin work.
I'm just saying that's an amount of money
that clearly we can afford
because people don't protect their coins well enough
to not lose their money.
So like, obviously this is amount of money low enough,
(23:31):
really, who cares?
Another argument I always make is like,
let's suppose we're talking about numbers like 0.1%.
0.1% compounded over your entire lifetime.
I forget the number off the top of my head,
but something like 20%.
You can do it on your calculator, right?
I believe you're best.
That ain't mental math.
I can know how to multiply that means in a row.
(23:53):
But the point is, it's a small percentage of your total wealth.
And the argument there is, if you can't dedicate that amount of your entire savings over your entire lifetime to keeping those same savings secure, what are you doing?
This doesn't make any economic sense.
You can afford this.
(24:14):
Equally.
but can can bitcoin as a network afford it when it comes like well that just undercuts
credibility right undercut credibility because idiots who don't understand how this stuff works
go on podcasts and go yammer on about how terrible tail mission is most of us are idiots well
i know i we should be that's and that's why i'm talking to you uh okay let me ask another question
(24:39):
And there's a lot of debate around all this, you know, spamming, fix the filters, all these things.
I don't actually know where you stand on that.
Do you think this is a, like, is this an argument that is actually matters and need to be had?
Or is this something that just sorts itself out?
Well, the way I would put it is we know there is no principled way to stop people putting data in the Bitcoin chain.
(25:10):
And furthermore, there's no principled way to stop people from using Bitcoin in ways we don't consider are real.
So, and notably, Luke Jr., back in the day, he wasn't just trying to censor, quote unquote, spam transactions that had data in them.
He was actually trying to censor, quote unquote, spam transactions that were actual monetary transactions.
(25:34):
Satoshi Dice being your example.
So, maybe you're too young for this.
I am, but I have read about this.
So back in the day, there was this thing called Stoshi Dice where you'd send them Bitcoin on a particular address.
I mean, actually, a bunch of addresses with different betting odds.
(25:54):
And they'd do the math on whether you won or lost.
They actually did it in a provable way, which was nice.
And then if you win, they send you back your winnings.
If you lose, they send you back a small amount of money just to let you know that they processed bets and you lost.
(26:15):
So that is a financial transaction.
You're making a bet.
You win or lose.
If you win, you get your money back.
No data was otherwise.
No data whatsoever.
Other than maybe the data in the sense of you did a financial transaction.
It's still data, yeah.
But there were no monkey attacks.
In the sort of inscription sense, there's certainly no data in there.
(26:39):
So for a while, this became so popular that like, you know, over half of all Bitcoin transactions were Satoshi dice.
I didn't know it was that popular.
Wow.
I mean, you know, we're in Vegas right now.
Like there's a lot of degenerate gamblers out there.
There's a lot.
Yeah.
And a lot of people looked at this and said, well, obviously this is stupid.
(27:03):
Why are you spending so much money in transaction fees?
Why are you using all this precious block space?
But of course, at the time, transaction fees were low, so it didn't really matter.
And my view on it was, well, whatever, people are going to use Bitcoin for what they want to use it for.
This is why we have a block size limit.
You know, we've decided how much data Bitcoin no needs process to keep up with the blockchain and how people choose to use it within that, leave it up to the free market.
(27:37):
Luke Jr. already had Bitcoin OTS at the time and he had a blacklist to filter out Satoshi Dice.
Okay.
Yeah, man, this was running on Elogius, so Elogius would not mind Satoshi Dice transactions.
well you know it's interesting because you also developed something open timestamps
which is a very different take on how to use the bitcoins blockchain for uh let's say non-monetary
(28:01):
use but very clearly non-monetary very clearly but in a very optimized way can you talk about
that a little bit because it's also how simple proof is doing what they're open timestamps
in a nutshell its assistants make a math proof that data existed in the past why is this useful
Well, bad guys don't have time machines.
So if you can prove that something existed prior to when an attack could have happened, you can rule out the attack happening.
(28:27):
Now, there's a lot of cases of this.
A very clear example, at least for a technical audience, is if you have a digital signature, obviously the private key used to create the digital signature could get compromised.
You know, maybe you leave your PHP key on a server.
Not that any Bitcoin devs would have done that.
He could possibly do that.
(28:49):
But just like Junior, he isn't the only one who screwed this up.
It's happened.
So Bitcoin Core does have signing of Git commits.
And some of the Bitcoin Core contributors use open timestamps to prove that their signatures on their Git commits were created prior to when hopefully, well, hopefully never.
(29:12):
But if their key does get compromised, hopefully we know when it got compromised and still validate these old signatures.
Now, another example, you know, I mean, maybe a broader example is if you're storing data in general for a later, like, archival, why aren't you timestamping?
I mean, why wouldn't you want to be able to say, hey, obviously this hasn't been touched for this amount of period of time.
(29:33):
Maybe it was, you know, born fake to begin with, but at least it hasn't been faked since.
Now, with SimpleProof, they offer this as commercial service.
And, you know, open timestamps, open source software, you have to store this like one kilobyte proof file.
Not a big deal, but in a lot of use cases, that's annoying enough.
(29:55):
You'd rather pay SimpleProof to do it for you.
So, SimpleProof, among other things, they were hired by the Guatemalan government to do timestamping of election records.
specifically its paper ballot system, but obviously the ballots are counted.
You get a little sheet with that paper, and that's where the numbers are,
(30:19):
however many votes for each candidate.
That sheet gets scanned into a database, and they timestamped it right then.
What does that prove?
Well, it proves that at least that claim was created when you expect it to be,
which should be roughly an hour after polling.
Because, you know, Guatemala isn't some sort of third world country
(30:41):
that takes weeks to decide they come to their elections Not that I would know of any Like yeah like america yeah oh okay all right so remind me is that first or third world which is just yeah sidebar just
yeah absurd that we can't seem to figure that out and like a country like guatemala can somehow do
it in literally if people fail to do something that easy it might not be because they're dumb
(31:04):
i'll say that much well that's that's the sad thing i remember seeing the documentary and seeing
and you working on that with them,
and I thought that should have been a way bigger story
than it was, because I thought that was amazing.
Do you think that's something that,
I know in the US these elections are handled
on a local basis in terms of how they handle things,
(31:25):
but do you think that's ever something
that would actually become widespread in the US?
Or is the insist?
So in the more recent presidential election in the US,
one county did in fact use open timestamps
to help prove the integrity of their vote.
And there's actually one of the guys
from Simple Proof, Carlino,
(31:46):
he did an interview with the woman in charge of that.
And I gotta admit, it's such a hilarious interview
in a way because, Chris, I know the tech details behind it,
and they're going on and on about integrity of elections,
how the process works, and so on.
But what it boiled down to is,
she paid Simple Proof 12 bucks for the service,
(32:06):
which is a standard rate for the amount of data they were doing.
Then she did all her actual work and sent them three emails
with the documents that needed to be timestamped,
which took all of 30 seconds.
Because timestamping is really, really easy.
Like I say, if you're archiving data, what's your excuse?
And in her case, she'd actually gone to the election board and said,
(32:30):
you know, here's the thing.
Here's why we should do it.
It's really dead easy.
It's going to cost us $12.
bucks. We're spending more money on pizza.
Why
aren't we doing this? And furthermore, if you
say no, I'm just going to do it anyway
because I'm legally responsible for these numbers.
I want
one more layer of protection
to show that they
(32:51):
weren't changed later.
Of course, obviously, this is one of many
interlocking checks and balances.
Another example being, well,
they're legally required to publish the numbers
once the
sums come in.
well, of course, how do they do it?
Well, like post on Facebook, post on Twitter.
And it sounds kind of silly in a way,
but actually, you know,
(33:11):
like that is a communication mechanism.
Why wouldn't you do that?
Timestamping it is just one more way
of putting in that authentic record saying,
yeah, no, it really did happen here.
Someone didn't change it later.
Because imagine, for instance,
if you reported on Facebook
and someone changes the figures on Facebook.
(33:32):
Facebook's not digitally signed.
you're trusting Facebook.
Well, if you're able to go show a timestamp,
you can at least say, hey, here's my copy.
I created this prior to this point in time.
Yeah, all right, maybe I created five different versions of it.
But now you have to make the arguments
that why my copy is still invalid too.
(33:54):
You're in a much better position with a timestamp.
I mean, it seems like, again, one of those things that's so obvious
and that it's like, why wouldn't you do that?
like unless you
well unless you don't want
yeah
so one of the very first things I added
to opens timestamps was support for Git
okay
(34:14):
and I personally keep all my emails
and other datas
in Git repositories
you know every email I have
winds up in a Git repository
well
since I created
since I created the software
it was just dead easy for me
to make it possible to just press a button
(34:35):
and my Git repos are timestamps.
In every single file in them,
I can get timestamps for every single one.
In kind of this AI future that we're suddenly living in,
it feels like that's gonna be more important than ever.
Well, I gotta say, one of my biggest regrets
with Open Timestamps was in around, I think, 2017,
(34:55):
I downloaded the metadata for the Internet Archive,
which is just, it's an enormous amount of data.
It was like-
How much data was it?
Oh, I think terabytes even.
There was a certain amount of data.
So I go, crunch for all this metadata,
and the metadata has hashes of their actual data,
and I put this all into a big Merkle tree
(35:17):
and I timestamp it, and I tried at least
to create a system to download more metadata as it came
and keep timestamping it, but honestly,
the internet archive is just so big,
I couldn't reasonably do that with the software I had
in the budget I had for servers.
So I eventually gave up.
But in the meantime, the Internet Archive themselves
found out about this.
(35:38):
And remember they actually sent me an email saying,
wait, you timestamped the Internet Archive?
And I explained how I did it.
It's like, yeah, ma'am, I guess you could actually do that.
And they invited me to go to San Francisco
at their headquarters to go talk to them.
But how would they integrate this
into the Internet Archive themselves?
Every single person in the room, except one,
loved the idea.
(35:59):
And that one asshole who came in at the end of the meeting
and heard the word Bitcoin just said,
well, it's Bitcoin, we're not going to do it.
Seriously.
Yep.
We could have had all of the Internet Archive
timestamped properly in an easy to prove way
prior to AI being a thing.
And they fumbled that ball.
That just seems like such a moronic thing.
(36:21):
It really is.
This is like this Bitcoin deranged.
You are actively shooting yourself in the foot.
It was no technical.
There was no technical.
You know,
criticism of this.
It was purely,
we will not advocate for anything involving Bitcoin.
It is just fundamentally evil.
End of story.
(36:43):
Dear Lord.
Do you think they'll ever come around?
Very unlikely.
It's a shame.
Maybe,
you know,
maybe in a few more years,
but my contacts there,
last I've talked to them,
basically say it's the same thing,
even now.
Even as big as Bitcoin's gotten.
I mean, I hate to say this, but the Internet Archive, it's a bunch of left-wing people.
And I don't think they're happy seeing Trump rise in parts on Bitcoin becoming an issue in U.S. politics.
(37:11):
I mean, it's just like you're only hurting yourself, though.
And that's the sad thing.
No one cares what your political views are with Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, though, the nature of Bitcoin is only compatible with certain political views.
Because like it or not, not everyone actually likes freedom.
which is a sad reality to discover we got to wrap up here in a sec but i want to ask you
(37:34):
is there something that you're really excited about now or something else that like you're
working on like what excites you these days i got to admit it's actually still open timestamps
um because so simple proof you know they've been trying to go and raise uh raise funding
um they've gotten uh i'm not gonna get a term right like i think it's pre-seed round or whatever
it is and they were able to in turn give me some funding to go do a bunch more work on open
(37:56):
timestamps because the protocol, the math behind it scales, but the software to actually
make it scale didn't actually work.
Like it worked, but if someone tried to make 10,000 timestamp requests per second, it would
have just fallen over because they couldn't scale it horizontally.
I couldn't throw servers at the problem.
(38:17):
So I fixed half of that already, which is to create new timestamps, I can throw servers
at the problem.
just have more and more servers making
Merkle trees and Merkle trees and so on.
Right?
Yeah. I mean,
it's a pretty obvious thing if you understand the cryptography.
It's just someone's got to sit down
and write that software. But then I did
(38:38):
and that's fine. If
Microsoft
timestamps every single file on every single
computer in the world as some new
feature, it'll be fine. The
catch is
the other part of timestamping
is to then get the proof back.
and that part still doesn't scale.
And for technical reasons,
(39:00):
that's a lot harder to do,
but hopefully I'll be able to,
if I don't go to too many conferences,
spend a couple months worth of work
to make all this stuff happen.
And then I'll be able to truly say,
yeah, please timestamp the world's data.
Well, I hope that the world does timestamp its data.
Me too.
Thanks so much, man.
Thank you.
(39:20):
For people that are listening to this,
if you haven't checked out open timestamps,
you should go timestamp everything like or everything that you it really is easy you get
to open timestamps.org scroll down there's a button timestamp your file it is hashed on your
computer it does not upload to anyone else very private and you'll get back like a little one
(39:40):
kilobyte file that you know 20 years in the future you can prove you did it right then
i love it peter thank you so much man it's great talking to you all right
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
(40:07):
Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening
and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the internet.
Find me on Noster at primal.net slash walker and this podcast at primal.net slash titcoin.
On X, YouTube, and Rumble, just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Titcoin Podcast.
(40:31):
Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links.
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And head to Bitcoin Podcast dot net for everything else.
Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant.
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(40:52):
Until next time, stay free.
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