The Mark Moss Show - LIVE from Miami with Austin Hill

About forty people expected to be here for the Bitcoin Conference. It has really grown into something big. It's been pretty amazing to watch it for a while. And I am joined in the studio today with Austin Hill. Austin, thanks for joining me, my pleasure, Mark, thanks for inviting me. So Austin has been around UM two in the bitcoin space for a really long time, and so I've been around a long time, not as long as him. And it's uh boy, it's grown quite a bit, hasn't it.

It's every day I wake up and I'm just kind of living gratitude in the sense that you know, there's such an active community, there's so many people lending their hand to creating the change in the world that I think we all want to see. Yeah, and you know, it's one person trying to change the world. You know the old adage, Give me a lever long, large enough

and I can move the world. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know anyone who has you know, the weight or the kind of density of intensity to do the change that

the community is actually doing together. Let's let's talk about you know, one thing that I get frustrated with people a lot is that, um They're like, oh, bitcoin can never be the you know, reserve current, you can never be the medium exchange, you can never be whatever whatever fill in the blank, right, And it's like, um, just because it's not that today, it doesn't mean it can't grow into that eventually. It's like if I saw like a little oak tree that was this big, I would

never go back. It's like, well, it is an oak tree, right, So let's talk about that. I was at a I was at a at the at the Trammel Venture Partners UM Fund yesterday meeting, and there was a Trammel and uh Lop, Jamison Lop. We're talking and they're talking about the early days of of the bitcoin message board and the and the the faucets turning on and all the bitcoin coming out of the faucets. People just thrown around thousands of bitcoin at a time. Um, there was really

no market for them. So is that where you were in those early stages or where'd you come in at UM? Well, I had a couple of exposures to bitcoin. Um, a lot of my work was pre bitcoin. So back I created a company called Zero Knowledge Systems, which was a cipher punk research lab, and we employed we had two eight employees, including a large at that time. Now, you said cipher punk, so a lot of listeners may not understand what that is. So what what was the cipher punk? Um?

So the cipher punks was kind of ad hoc group that create was created right around the time that the FBI rated a bunch of hackers in something called Operations Send Devil where Sun Devil where they essentially rated a bunch of teenage hackers, and they barged in and treated them like essentially isis earists, And a whole bunch of teenagers found themselves being essentially jackbooted by secret service FBI held without their rights. You know, a bunch of very

innocent teenagers who were exploring computer networks. This is in the mid to late nineties, late eighties, and that's what led to the creation of e f F, which is Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was created by John Gilmour John Perry Barlow and created Lotus one, two three. John Gilmore was employee number five at Sun Microsystems and John Perry Barlow was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Okay, wow

what what what a group? And they kind of collectively were like, we need to write a declaration of independence for the Internet and we need to fight for civil rights, which was before the Internet was even really a thing, because I think that it existed, but WWW went live, this is even pre that. Well WW actually was ninety three when Timber is really published, when the first like NCS mosaic started kind of coming a lot. The HTTP

protocol had been proposed, but there were no browsers. It was all tax based um and so I at the time was running one of the largest Internet providers in Canada. But previously I had been part of the computer security community, so a lot of my friends got arrested in that, and I had before I turned eighteen, transitioned into doing penetration testing for companies. So it's kind of smart enough

to realize hacking was not a lifetime career. I wanted to stay in and so I really cared about civil liberties. I saw what was happening to my friends and so in I ended up building the largest Internet provider in Canada for dial Up, sold it, and at that time Phil Zermanrin was being prosecuted for exporting p GP right because they considered the p g P, which is basically the encryption the encryption. They considered that munitions like weapons

because at the time only the military had encryption. Um well, it was actually the math was known, but they created something called the wasson Ear Agreement which creates created this kind of control and treated math as an exportable munition, like exporting nuclear technology. So you could be prosecuted in the United States if you exported strong encryption. That's where later my partner in block Stream out of back created the t shirts with encryption algorithms and sold them so

people could wear munitions on plants. That's right. Um now, so we had a thesis. After I sold my I s P, I created a company which was, if we can make encryption tools as easy as Netscape made browsing the web, maybe we can build privacy and the base layer of the Internet. We had kind of three maintenance. One was an anonymous I P browsing, So we invented something called the Freedom Network, which was a precursor to tour that the Naval Research Laboratory later came out with.

So we ran it. We had it running. Then we tried to develop and roll out electronic cash, anonymous electronic cash, and heading up that development was dr Adam Back, who I hired to build our cash. And then on top of that, we wanted to have private identity, the idea that you could prove your over a team without ever revealing your name. And so we said, if we build these three kind of pillars, the Internet can actually develop with privacy as the base layer, without surveillance capitalism. And

unfortunately we got way ahead of our skis. We grew too fast. The dot com collapse forced us to fire all our researchers, pivot the company. We ended up making it financially successful, but in terms of the social and civic goal us that we had to kind of promote privacy in the world, I think we actually failed miserably.

It seems like it's an uphill battle. Well, starting from the eighties when you did, or into the nineties, I would imagine it's the uphill battle because even today, in today's day and age, which has gotten crazy with the dystopian future that we're living in. Um, even today, a lot of people still don't understand why they even need privacy.

And I'm guessing back in the eighties and nineties was probably even a much harder sell to try to explain to people why they needed privacy beyond the beyond the hacker community. Yeah. So it was so funny because all of our market data and all the market research we tried to do everything gave us these we really bad signaling in the sense that we would put a hundred people in a room and say how much do you care about your privacy? And it would score off the charts.

People were afraid to put credit card like, no one was shopping online because we're afraid to put credit cards off at this phase, this was I started. I started the e commerce business in two thousand one at the bottom of the dot com crash, and so right, I remember, even in two thousand one, people were very afraid to put their credit in. You remember, we had flus, we had cyber cash. We had all these companies trying to

build alternative digital currencies. They were all centralized. But this was the error when we tried to buy digit cash out of bankruptcy. So we actually have the cipher punk ideals and we're like, if we roll out anonymous show like show me in totally, like David chomb private he cash, it can actually form the commerce engione for the Internet before credit cards were the north. So what you're talking about there is is something I want to dig into

a little bit. UM talking about different versions of early versions of cryptocurrency, digital cash, pre bitcoin, etcetera. Um, you're listening to the Mark Moas show. I'm sitting down with Austin Hill. We're talking from Miami at the bitcoino conference. UM talking about the early days of bitcoin. Um and so he he was there in the beginnings. We're gonna

talk about that. I want to talk about. Yeah, I mean a lot of people, a lot of people use this fake this analogy that you know, Bitcoin is MySpace and this Facebook will come along. So so such an old argument. But uh, but Bitcoin was not one of the first versions. Of a matter of fact, there was earlier versions. You worked on so I want to talk about that. UM. I want to get into UM, we'll

talk more about this this privacy piece. UM. I want to talk about kind of the the advancements of bitcoin and kind of where we're at today with some of this new technology development. People think it's like old technology. So we've got a lot to dig into. Again, you listen to the Markma Show. We're broadcasting from Miami with the Bitcoin twit conference. I'll be right back with Austin Hill. Don't go away, all right, welcome back. You are listening

to the Mark Ma Show. We're talking about the decentralized revolution that bitcoin is creating right now, and we're broadcasting from Miami from South Beach, Miami for the Bitcoin twenty two conference. Supposed to be about forty thousand people showing up. It's amazing and I'm sitting down UM with Austin Hill right now talking about the early days of bitcoin. I mean, we have forty thousand people here, and for sure there's no way well maybe you could have predicted there could

have been forty thousand people here at this point. Even I was before the break, I was talking how I started e commerce? Is this in two thousand one? And I there was no Shopify, there was no like WordPress like. It wasn't easy. And um, I went to these brands and I said, hey, I built this website. I want to sell your products on my website. And they laughed at me. No one would ever buy anything online. They

told me. That was in two thousand one. And so we're talking here a decade earlier that you were working on this stuff. So, um, the bitcoin is my space and the Facebook will come out kind of analogy. But bitcoin was not the first version of this. So you were talking about did you cash and chom what he was working on stuff? So give us some of that background of versions that you were working on our scene

that kind of led into this bitcoin. Yeah. I mean not only we, but there was a community that actually emerged out of the cipher punk mailing list called Koda punks, and they created the hind Now was the mailing list like a physical male like snail Manili was email at that time? Okay, total mail mailing list and use net use groups if you remember back in the day, there was like those were essentially like the message boards and NTPA. So there were why wasn't on them at the time?

So I don't know. I didn't. I didn't really get on the Internet until probably is probably by the time I got on the Internet, they were still there. They may not have been used as much, but so you had used it, which was like a broadcast peer to peer kind of medium, not peer to peer so much as broadcast medium for newsgroups, which was essentially message boards

back in the day. And you had mailing list and so there was cipher punks, and then offshoot of that was Koda punks, and that's where the adage of cipher punk's right code. Because the manifesto that Tim May wrote, who was one of the co founders of the cipher punk movement, was we believe that the tools of cryptography are where we'll find our freedom. There's this new world we can build in cyberspace where we exist beyond the

reach of government, beyond the reach of authoritarian companies. You know, is that is that what it's always been like the you know, the Pilgrims left for America to get away from the here any of the government. Like people moved west in the United States, they moved to the West coast to kind of start this new frontier. People going to the sea and now people going to the internet, and like we're always trying to get away kind of

keep our sovereignty or autonomy from the state. Certainly, a lot of the underpinnings in the cipher punk movement was changing the balance of power exactly, the balance of power. That's a key piece. That's where bitcoin does. It wasn't so much that we don't need this or that this

is entirely bad. It was just if all the power is concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, then you have this imbalance of power where you will always become victim to mass Yeah, you know, mass thought, mass programming, um, you know, waves

of popular opinion. And your rights as a self sovereign individual, whether it's property rights, freedom of speech, the rights to express yourself should not be dependent on the whim of the it's a it's a it's a difference of being a customer who's valued and given value back, or a surf or a subject who's just treated, or a or an asset which spot and sold. You know. Sure, so, so it's either like hey, the think of it, like going to Disney World, I pay one flat fee and

I can choose to pay that fee. Now there's cheaper amusement parks that go to if I want to pay less. But they treat me as a customer, They value me, they want my business versus the state that could just take whatever they want without asking. So it's it's it's it's changing the balance of power shifts them to kind of take that more of a relationship. I mean, we ran this famous ad when we thought we were flying too high, too close to the sun, we had raised

too much Frenchshire capital. But we ran this national and campaign that had children with barcodes on their forehead that says I am not a piece of your inventory on the Internet. I am in control. My data belongs to me. You will not buy me and sell me. And embedded in the bar codes we actually had a hidden cryptographic message which got a lot of attention. Um, it was great conceptual, great ad agency, total waste of money because

it was just too early. Then, well, you know, we expected all these privacy signaling that we got when everyone's so. I famously made this quote at a conference that was kind of repurposed by a bunch of cryptography people. You got a hundred people in a room and you asked them if they care about their privacy, will say yes. Take the same hundred people two weeks later, stick them in a different room and asked them if they wanted years free McDonald's in exchange for a DNA sample, and

will say yes. Because it's so ephemeral that people make bad decisions about their privacy every day, because the consequences of making a bad decision are so postponed, and it requires such a level of technical, nuanced understanding consequences that people It's like people who say I care about the Rman, but I'm gonna buy an SUV because they offer convenience. Well, so the key word that you said there is nuance, and today people are not able. The majority of people

aren't able to and I just did it myself. The majority of people aren't able to pick up on that nuance and that is what changes everything. So to your point, when you say do you care about privacy, They're like, oh, I have nothing to hide, I guess right. Then you're like, okay, give me your phone, let me let me go through your phone. They're like no, So if you kind of put in that, like you know, like let me let me browse through your history and see what you got,

and then they wouldn't want that. And then you know they kind of have to see that that that example there um and then and then even nuance back to the SUV in the climate, Like, I love the environment more than anybody. I surf, I'm in the water every day. I'm in the mountain snowboarding all winter long. I wanted to be preserved and clean for my kids. But I drive a truck. But I've done the research, and I have feelings about certain things. But there is nuance, and

I understand the consequences. I understand the cost, I understand the actual and that effect. I've actually I'm very very comfortable saying, Okay, you know where I live. I moved to Latin America from Canada, and I'm like, okay, I support green grids, I support smart grids. I support all these things. But they don't exist. Yeah, you know it sounds good if they don't exist. So um, so then you're working on you're working on this, Uh, you worked

on previous versions of bitcoin. And I then went into venture capital, where I invested in a bunch of startups above and beyond just crypto and security. Um that was in Canada created like a Canadian version of y combinator UM, which is a very famous startup accelerator in San Francisco. And uh, right around two thousand eleven, a bunch of friends started messaging me saying, Austin, you've gotta pay attention

to bitcoin. And at the time, I had been retired and I was trying to become a professional poker player, very arrogantly playing way above my skill level and having to humble myself UM, and I basically messaged them back and they were like, Austin, this de cash thing is finally real. And I wrote them back saying, basically, go after yourself. I was like, I just spent eight million dollars and ten years trying to do this. I'm glad someone figured it out, but I'm not ready to look

at it. So so let's let's talk about that. I want to UM because to the point that we're making it, Bitcoin wasn't the MySpace. Bitcoin was many iterations later, and they solved a problem that couldn't be solved. I think that was kind of a key piece that differentiated it. So I want to I I want to talk about that. You're listening to the Mark Moa show. I'm broadcasting from

South Beach, Miami for the Bitcoin two conference. Um here sitting down with Austin Hill, early early early bitcoin, cipherpunk. We're talking about some of the early days and and we're gonna talk about more and we get back about how bitcoin wasn't the first version, what really changed from the earlier versions, and then we'll bring it all the way back to the forward to here. Forties people in Miami. You listen to the Mark mo Show, sitting down with Austin Hill. Got a lot more to go over. Do

not go away, I'll be right back. All right, Welcome back. You are listening to the Markma Show. And we're talking about bitcoin. We're talking about the decentralized revolution. We're talking about why forty people are in South Beach, Miami right now for the bitcoino conference. I'm sitting down with Austin Hill. He's an early early, early bitcoin adopter, programmer, investor, and

we were talking about the early day. So before the break, Um, you were talking about different versions of digital cash whatever it's called cryptocurrency. I don't know what it was called at that time, but but that led up to bitcoin. But Bitcoin solved a problem that the double spin problem. I guess that it was at the big differentiation double spend had been solved before was show me an e cash,

but it depended on a central life server. Oh okay, And so there were versions of the diggi cash mint and we all played around with diggi cash um David Chom and diggi cash went bankrupt and it was actually patents that prevented anyone else from innovating. So patents held by r s A and patents held by digi cash ended up blocking most of the cipher punks who wanted to build things open source and free because they were worried about patent in frging and getting sued. So the

cipher punks were incredibly frustrated. There were various forms of algorithms that were beginning to develop elliptic curve, uh, you know, other mechanisms. There were some startups that actually tried to do this. Brame Cohen, who invented bit torrent, tried with mojo Nation. Incredible idea. It was a way to pay for content and build peer to peer networking, and it was built with the eye to replace Napster and ended

up becoming bit torrent. But They actually had a previous startup that had payments, content creators, e commerce, everything called mojo Nation. There were other attempts to do this um. Adam Back had invented hashcash, which was a way of developing digital scarcity in the form postage stamps for spam abuse. That's when we hired him to come work for us and run our ecash lap um. So there were a bunch of was that was a decade before bitcoin um. We collaborated a lot with Nick Sabo. We worked with

all these people. They were our friends, they were our community, and we were all trying to figure out how do

we build the perfect version of the cash um. A lot of the cipher punk's missed or miscategorized Bitcoin early because it was so far different from the vision that we had, which was totally blinded privacy enabled the cash by moving to a totally decentralized and solving the problem of double spend in a totally different orthogonal way, which was we'll give everyone a copy of the ledger and we'll solve the Byzantine general's problem, which for listeners, was

a very famous problem in computer science, which very kind of dumb down, which is if you assume that all your communication lines are untrustworthy and you want to coordinate with multiple parties around the world. How do you end up building trust when you can't trust what you send them.

This was known as the busy team in General's problem, which was based off this kind of idea of if a bunch of lieutenants are trying to attack a city and you want to coordinate them all to attack at the same time, but you can't trust your communication method, how do you actually coordinate? And it was a famous problem in computer science that Satoshi famously solved in a

very kind of weird way. He said, what if we assume everything is public, accept some discordination, but every ten minutes we force everyone to get on the same page. And part of what prevented that from being working was something called inflation control around digital scarcity, so we had hashcash. One of the things that Adam Back had not invented

was a way to deal with inflation control. So essentially, people with the most amount of money to spend on CPUs could essentially inflate the economy and outperform everyone else. Sotoshi invented something called the difficulty adjustment, which forced everyone to come back to an even keel. So Bitcoin every two weeks says we're going to monitor the health of the network and we're going to reset programmatically in an openly,

in fair way. Yeah, for the for the listeners, the difficulty adjustment is one of the very many things that are just genius in bitcoin. And so what happens is like with gold, for example, um gold has very low stock to flow ratio, meaning that inflation, right the amount of new gold produced is very low compared to the stock of existing gold. But if gold, let's say right now, it's an let's say went to ten dollars an ounce, a lot of people would go mind gold, and more

gold would come out of the ground. But with bitcoin, if more people go mind bitcoin, it doesn't bring any more bitcoin out. They just have to split the bitcoin amongst all those new players, and new players can come on or like what happened last year with China where they knocked off six of the mining power than the

difficulty adjustment adjusted and then everything got back to normal. Well, and that's what makes bitcoin so perfectly at least under every examination by true economists, even true gold bugs who approach it honestly can say This is the best form of sound money, the best form of non sovereign money that's ever existed, because even when you start getting into like new technology, singularity tech, there are new singularity tech stuff I see every day in my venture capital investment.

Liquid plasma drilling, autonomous drone drilling that can go down and it will be able to extract gold at prices and a cost basis that no one's ever even imagined,

like a thousand x cheaper than to ad. And so when people are able to extract gold at a thousand x cheaper than today, we have no idea actually how much gold is actually in the planet, And if they start releasing we end up with the de Beers diamond situation, where a few cartels can totally control the gold market and you end up with a very centralized, essentially you know, central bank approach to even gold. Same with asteroid mining.

So whatever ends up being that trigger, whether it's price increase, evolving technologies, space exploration, gold is totally unpredictable, but bitcoin just totally transparent. We know about that. Yeah, So let's uh, let's let's fast forward a little bit, because we don't have all the time in the world as as as as fun as it would be to kind of go back all the way through the all the way through that. Um So, you work on the early versions, um a

decade before bitcoin came around. Bitcoin to your point, Stosian Akamoto solve this general's problem. Um I want to kind of move forward to kind of wear we're at today. I know you're working on a bunch of new technology that's kind of still kind of in that space before we do. Um So. I was just interviewed recently two weeks ago, I think at the Unconfiscatable conference over there as well. Um I was interviewed for a documentary they're

doing about who is Satoshi Nakamoto? And uh, what's your answer? Um So? I have three very firm beliefs on this good um A, whoever he, she, or they are, they have earned deserve and we should all respect their pseudonymity because we have absolutely no idea of the personal risks, consequences, and or long term effects that penetrating that pseudonymity by

speculation and setocia hunting may provide good good answer. Yeah, how Fingy's wife was dealing with kidnapped requests, uh, threats to her children and bomb threats for our house as how Finny was dying where for the listeners heal. Finny was one of the known early developers on on bit quin and many people suspected he was so she secretly right, which is why he was getting the bomb threats. How was a friend of ours. We worked with him at

p GP. He was an known cipher punk. He was the first person to publicly received He ended up developing a LS so he was in a wheelchair, trying to take care of his family and enjoying his last days, and he had to deal with people threatening to kidnap his kids unless he paid a bitcoin ransom. So just based off that second issue early people who were in

the community. There's a problem that David Schoon posted called the dining cryptographer's problem, which is if enough people know part of a secret, they can collaborate to hurt the secret holder. So we early cipher punks all made a pledge to each other that we would never do anything, we would not compare and speculate to invade Totoshi's privacy. It's good, I I mean, and and you're you're working on technology to preserve privacy, so of course why would

you want to go and work against that privacy. You're listening to the markma Show. We're talking about bitcoin. We're talking about the early, early, early days of bitcoin, and who is Toian Docomoda. I'm joined by Austin Hill. We are in Miami for the Bitcoino conference. There's forty thousand people here coming to talk about bitcoin fixing the money, fixing the world. We're talking about the early days with

Austin Hill. When we come back, we'll finish talking about Tocian Komodo, and then I want to jump forward and talk about some of the new technologies that are being built on bitcoin. Be right back, all right, welcome back. You are listening to the Mark Moa Show. We're talking about the the intersection of politics, finance and technology, which of course is bitcoin. We're talking about the decentralized revolution

and how it is changing the world. We're talking from Miami Beach where the Bitcoin conference is here with forty thou people, and I am sitting down with one of the early adopters of bitcoin, Austin Hill. We were talking about before the break um, the early days, even a decade before bitcoin was invented, in how they were working on it. What it's solved. But Austin, before the break, you were just kind of finishing up a couple of

points on situation Alcamotive. One, we should, um, we should probably just preserve his privacy whoever it was, not trying to hunt him down because it causes harm to other people. And I think you had some more points that you want to make their. Yeah, I mean the second was, um, those of us who were in the early community kind of felt an allegiance or an ideal commitment to if we really wanted to, maybe we could break this person's privacy.

But why were we always in this right like, for for privacy and for self sovereignty and for the economic freedom that comes with non sovereign money. So what are we doing trying to compare notes to invade anyone's It may be someone in the room, It maybe one of our friends. It maybe there are a bunch of cipher punks who died and maybe someone who passed away and most likely was but there there are there are suspect lists that are longer and more well known than's ever

been discussed. But we agreed amongst ourselves let's not compare, Let's not contrast, Let's not add to this idea of setoc hunting. And the last one is the most actually important one. UM in the idea of decentralization open source. Every open source project has faced the idea of how do you develop a leaderless hydra head And that's a big piece. Uh. Lenox had Linus tor Volt. It had a bunch of lieutenants, including people like Rusty Russell, who

built Lightning for Blockstream. Incredible developer. He spent twenty years on the front line of trying to defend Linus and uh you know some of his very unique personality and strongly held opinions on how to build Lennox. But as long as there is a central head, every single one of these systems are weaker because there is someone you can advocate against, there's someone who can influence of community. And so if you think about it in the terms

of religion, you can be agnosted or whatever. Just historically, UM a religion where people can adopt the name of the figurehead of the religion Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, uh you know, Taoists, Joseph Smith for Mormons, whatever, when people can interpret them after they're dead and say I speak for this person, and you have a leader, leader based organization that has

higher archies of organization. People love hierarchies of organization because they love to be told what to do, and any single structure like that makes it very very easy to find an attack surface where you can weaken the underlying organ By Bitcoin remaining flat and saying we are leader lists, it comes at a cost. There is no spokesperson for bitcoin. There are people who stand up and say I speak

for Bitcoin, who are horrible for bitcoin and actually promoting coins. Yeah, but that cost is worth it because with no leader, there is no central point of attack, and every other coin who has tried to replace Bitcoin is weaker less than and we'll never achieve its goals because it is centralized. It has a leader, and it has a group that more often than not has stolen from consumers to fund their marketing budget to promote their centralized structure. Yeah, that's

a great point. With bitcoin, we call it your reference religion. It's like the Immaculate conception. It was just created. We don't know who created it. We don't need to know um, and it's better that we don't ever find out. Because to your point, I agree with you. We don't want a leader. We can see you know ethereum with atalic butterin in order Charles Hoskinson and how that works, and

we definitely don't want somebody like that. And and even the attack vectors, like you said, the attack service, you know, someone to squeeze the top if if need to be whatever. So all the things I agree with you on that. Moving forward, let's say we run out of time here. UM. So a lot of times we think that bitcoin is old tech, UM, and you know, now there's all this new tech and they have all this smart stuff built

into the into the base layer chain, UM. And maybe they just they have this misunderstanding how technology works and how it works in layers and how it scales. So talk to us about some of the stuff that's happening today, UM, bitcoin. You know, from being with blockstream and lightning labs and stuff, obviously a lot of stuff being built on lightning labs. UM. Are we at a point now building technology that you maybe didn't think we'd get to and are you encouraged

by that or what do you think? I am stated that today I'm an endless optimist when it comes to technology. UM. I always see you know, class half four versus glass half empty, right, Um, but I am still surprised at how much work has been done by the community and actually how fertile a ground that people are now planting season. I was just in El Salvador. I was blown away

by the excitement the changes that are occurring there. Um awesome. Yeah, so hard for people in traditionally North America because I think we live such a privileged life and we're so

used to frankly, this kind of like terminal uniqueness. And I refer to terminal uniques as as terminal disease, because we somehow believe we're so unique in the world, and but we were, in fact so privileged when you actually look at the countries who are actually suffering from being unbanked, suffering from no credit, suffering from you know, the only credit market existing to be gangs and like overnight lenders

and like loan charts. Um, you know, the average loan size in some of these countries is five and you pay a week interest and that is the only loan you'll ever get because banks refused to even open an account. And so here we're like, you can be an eighteen year old student who just has a name, and you get two thousand dollars in credit or two to college exactly, like we live such a privileged life that we're actually sheltered.

I think from how powerful the changes in bitcoin are occurring, and so bitcoin, I think through better engineering, has actually built a platform that will and is going to change the world, and people don't see it because good engineering takes time. The best analogy I give to this is if you're waiting every day in line trying to get to New York City from New Jersey and you're just you're tired of traffic, and someone comes to you and says,

don't wait in traffic anymore. This weekend. We designed a three layer bridge and we built it last week. Come drive on layer two. I, as a driver, would be a little suspicious if they built that in a week. Is that really something I really want to trust my car weight on? Right? Like? Maybe I really want to wait until their safety test civic engineering, safety engineering, stress metal tests. Like there's a reason why some of these

infrastructure projects take time. I'm not going to hop on a plane that says we have the cheapest tickets to Hawaii while they strapped like fold out chairs to the wing right, like, and so many of the ship coins and the alt coins have taken that approach, move fast and break things. We don't care about safety. We're all about innovation, and we're willing to do it at the

cost of people's money. And that's one of the biggest risks that Bitcoin has actually have to suffer, is because it deals with the reputational damage of all these other experimenters who are taking risk that Bitcoin chose not to take. Like, there is a reason we do not give power users who buy electricity from a nuclear power station control and decision making on how the nuclear power station is made. There are nuclear engineers who actually build nuclear power station

who deserved to actually design the safety protocols. You as a customer should have no right or no say in how that nuclear I don't know anything about. Yeah, but we didn't take that approach with so many of these ship cooins. So people create these dows, they create these weird crypto they use all these things to invite usually people to lose their money. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

That's a good point. Also you think about like, um, you know, back to kind of these leader uh not leaderless, but having leaders platforms, so like metallic buter and goes back and changes the monetary issuance of ethereum. And imagine, if you know, they change the t c P i P protocol with trillions of websites built on that, applications built, and then they just change the protocol and doesn't work, or gravity change and all these buildings came falling down.

It's a great point and that's one of the benefits a bitcoin that nobody can control that. Um. You're listening to the markma Show. I'm sitting down with Austin Hill talking about the history of bitcoin, and it's important to talk about it today because we're here in Miami with forty people for the Bitcoin call o friends, and that's what I got for you today. Thanks so much for listening.