Is Bitcoin Going According to Plan? Gold, Saylor, Satoshi | Dan Held

What happens when rebel money becomes institutional money? In this episode, David sits down with Bitcoin OG Dan Held to ask whether Bitcoin is actually going according to plan. They unpack Bitcoin’s cypherpunk origins, the rise of ETFs and corporate treasuries, Michael Saylor’s influence, Bitcoin’s missed scaling opportunities, privacy tradeoffs, quantum risk, the Satoshi mystery, and why Dan thinks Bitcoin can still flip gold. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Is Bitcoin Going According to Plan? 2:39 Bitcoin’s Culture Changed, But Did the Code? 9:06 From Magic Internet Money to Digital Gold 15:08 Michael Saylor, Strategy and Concentration Risk 20:08 Is Bitcoin Becoming Too US-Coded? 24:12 Did Bitcoin Miss Its Scaling Moment? 29:42 Privacy, Cash and Bitcoin’s Tradeoffs 32:15 Satoshi’s Design Choices 37:50 BIPs, Quantum Risk and Bitcoin Upgrades 41:35 How Urgent Is Quantum? 44:14 The Satoshi Mystery 47:38 Bitcoin’s Next Phase of Adoption 49:23 Will Bitcoin Flip Gold? 53:11 Being Early Looks Crazy --- RESOURCES Dan Held https://x.com/danheld --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Bankless Nation, I'm here with Dan Held. Dan is probably one of the most OG Bitcoiners that we've had on the show in the past. Dan, welcome back to Bankless.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I just kind of want to have a pretty broad zoomed out discussion. Dan, you and I have been both in crypto Twitter, you're in Bitcoin Twitter, I'm in Ethereum Twitter, whatever, for, it feels like a decade now. It kind of is approaching a decade, at least for me. I think you got into Bitcoin before I came into crypto.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I mean, crypto is kind of like dog years, right? Like every year that passes is like seven years. So we've been in this space for effectively about 100 years.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Right. It's certainly how it feels. And so I kind of just want to ask you, like, if we go back and put ourselves in the shoes of our younger selves, like the 2018, the 2020 era, is Bitcoin going according to plan? It's kind of the broad premise I want to investigate in this episode. So I'll ask that question to you.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, the reason why I said yes to this is I think it's a pretty fun one, both from my perspective as a Bitcoin maxi who's been in this space for 15 years. And also I'd be curious to get your side of this. But I think, let me kind of zoom back all the way to the beginning, because I got in in 2011, started purchasing in 2012, but I created my Mt. Ox account in December 2011. Back then Bitcoin is a very rebellious, anti-government sort of mechanism, right? You had people who were into Silk Road, peer-to-peer file sharing, so torrenting, those sort of, you know, online gambling. The origins of Bitcoin came from a pretty, I would say rugged place. It wasn't, this wasn't clean, nice, institutionalized,

• 1:40Speaker 01

  anything like that. So Bitcoin's core ethos, I used to joke, is, you know, 3D printed guns, drugs, and Bitcoin. That's what it originally was. You know, it came from the cypherpunk/extropian communities, which were very libertarian leaning. What's interesting about that is, you know, both, that was the cultural values around the Bitcoin code itself, right? So you've got the code of Bitcoin, which represents what Bitcoin is. I mean, it's essentially just the code that runs, right? Across every Bitcoin node, and that's what we all agree upon is the Bitcoin network. That is what Bitcoin is. Then there's the community and culture around it. So that's the old culture. Today, the culture is much more institutionalized. You have Bitcoin and ETFs. You've got top investment banks. You've got, you know, Fed

• 2:23Speaker 01

  chairmans. You have presidents talking about Bitcoin. You have them referencing it in a positive and negative manner. You know, Bitcoin has largely been institutionalized. And so I think there's a lot of hand wringing around the idea that Bitcoin has been captured, that the original Bitcoin cultural ethos has changed. I do think that's true. So, you know, I'm not going to deny that Bitcoin's cultural ethos has changed a bit. I think a lot of people view it as just another asset in their portfolio, rather than truly understanding it. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. People buy a lot of assets that don't really understand them. People buy gold or the S&P 500. You know, with the S&P 500, I often joke, can you tell me one of the quarterly earnings of any company,

• 3:03Speaker 01

  the S&P 500? Most people can't. But that's fine. You know, so Bitcoin, in terms of the obfuscation of understanding how it works culturally, of course, I wish everyone understood how it works and would keep all their Bitcoin on a treasure or ledger. But that's just not how mainstream adoption works. Now, when it comes to Bitcoin's core code, because that's ultimately representative of what Bitcoin is, you know, did we see institutions have any sort of capture of how Bitcoin's core code functions, or do they push any changes that were implemented? And we don't see any of those. So from Bitcoin's code perspective, it didn't bend the knee. The institutions bent the knee to bring Bitcoin into it. So

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I don't think Bitcoin has compromised on its core code values, but the community certainly has changed. And as an OG, I don't mind that. I think this is how institutionalized and mainstream adoption works. I'm a weird libertarian guy who studied finance during the 2008 financial crisis, got radicalized from that, grew up in Texas, I own seven guns. I'm not a normal person. This is not normal person behavior. I'm a weird libertarian, you know, formerly gold bug, got into Bitcoin. So I don't expect everyone to have my same cultural values. So, you know, Bitcoin's culture has certainly changed, but that doesn't mean that Bitcoin itself has changed at all. And certainly, we would have seen that in the code.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think the purpose or the point of the question, like, is Bitcoin going according to plan, is not really to answer like yes or no, but it's more to like, understand the nature of the question itself, I think. And a little bit, what I was thinking about hearing you talk just now is like, the measuring stick of what success is, is really important. And, you know, that we could just like, talk naively, it's like, oh, it's the price of Bitcoin. Like, that's the measure of success. And to some, to some degree, that's true. And I kind of enjoy that the fact that that's true. But I also, I was, I was thinking about Burning Man as an example, where if you talk to people who go to, who went to Burning Man in like, the 90s and the 2000, like, the early 2000s, they look at Burning Man today and

• 5:12Speaker 00

  be like, like, we've lost the plot. What are we doing here? These influencers are everywhere. And like, we have starlings, like, the ethos and spirit of Burning Man is gone. It's failed. But then you look at Burning Man, it's like, there's 80,000 people there, and it's, it's growing in energy, and it's shifted. And, and this is all, always what revolutions do. I think like, revolutions moderate as they grow up. And so I don't, I don't want to like, say that like, oh, the fact that like, we are all looking at Michael Saylor and the Bitcoin ETFs, and we've like, lost the plot of not your keys, not your Bitcoin. I don't think that's a fair measuring stick. But I also don't want to lose sight of that

• 5:56Speaker 00

  either. And I have a hard time doing both. I don't know if you have, if you have any reflections on that.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, I think this is, I think what you're referencing is what are the KPIs that we would have initially set up to determine? And KPIs, for those who don't understand what that means, it's a tech term to stand for key performance indicators. What KPIs would we have set up to represent the success of the Bitcoin network? Now, having done this both at Kraken, Uber, and since leaving Kraken, I've had 15 fractional CMO clients. So like, I do this OKR KPI process more times than almost probably anyone my age. Setting proper KPIs is really difficult, right? It's not just measuring every single metric we could, right? Because it could be hardware wallet ownership, it could be a private key management,

• 6:43Speaker 01

  like how many people are self-custoding their assets. Usually what we try to do when we create KPIs is we try to distill them down to the really core key metrics that represent success. That's why it's called E-Performance Indicator. It's not a measurement of all metrics. I would say first and foremost, a nice compression of all of those metrics together is Bitcoin's price, because the price represents the aggregate belief that it is a new digital gold or sound money. So the price is a one-way hash function of all of the collective belief in it, and that's what the price represents. So that, I think, is the number one KPI, because price also loops into everything else. It's adoption,

• 7:24Speaker 01

  it's liquidity, it's resilience, it's narrative, it's all these things combined. So price, first and foremost, would be probably the top KPI. From there, you know, obviously self-custody is a hugely important issue. So self-custody would be, how many people manage their own private key? Whether that be, you have a dedicated hardware wallet, which would be ideal, or they're set up, which, there's a pretty low percentage. And it's not too unsurprising. I mean, I've managed my own private key for 15 years, and honestly, it's, it's pretty stressful. You know, I don't have a multi-sig setup. I do single key, because, you know, certainly not the two out of three has its own issues, but I don't, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. You know, private key management, I would say, liquidity is

• 8:07Speaker 01

  also a function of price. Now, how deep is the market? Like, the price could be high, but there's no liquidity. And, you know, if you look across those KPIs, you know, even with private key management, like self-custody, we've seen that improve, but as a percentage of total hodlers, it's still lower than what I'd want. You know, from there, it gets a little fuzzier, right? Like, if you measure changes to Bitcoin's core code, you know, that would be a function of, it's really subjective. Like, you don't want to be like, oh, we should change it all the time, but certainly it needs to improve. So that's a really fuzzy one. I'm not sure how we actually measure that. But yeah, that's kind of my initial foray into how would we measure success?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  He probably prices the simplest answer just because it reflects everything else combined.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Markets don't move one asset at a time. One day it's Bitcoin, the next Nvidia, then gold, and then the S and P. But most traders are still managing their portfolio across different platforms, different accounts, and different pools of capital. Bitget just changed that. Their new Stocks 2.0 product lets you trade tokenized equities directly with USDT, all inside the same app you already use for crypto. This is not just another tokenized stock product. Stocks 2.0 is designed around deeper liquidity, faster execution, and the lowest fees in the market at just 0.04% and one-to-one economic exposure to the underlying stock. Dividends, stock splits, and other corporate actions are reflected automatically, helping your position stay aligned with the asset you actually want exposure to. One platform, one account, multiple markets, crypto equities, commodities, and more,

• 9:32Speaker 00

  all accessible with USDT. Bitget, trade smarter. Start trading today through the link in the show notes. This is not investment advice.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato. He runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years. And this year, we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether, and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes. They're short. They're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search the DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts,

• 10:21Speaker 02

  YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes. There's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people who come into crypto on the earlier side of things, like the pre 2020, 2021, you have to have come in it for like the ideology. Like it's, it's, you're not just there for the money. Like you were crazy to be there before 2020. And that's because you were like ideologically motivated, like, or like some emotional motivation to like be in the crypto space, either in Bitcoin or Ethereum. And I think a lot of it was like, you cited your radicalization because of 2008. And so I think a lot of early Bitcoiners and like people, like for me, believing in Ethereum, it's like, I, I want to change culture. Like I want to change the world. And now we have this like financial tool to do that.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  And like what, what more powerful of a tool to change culture and change, change the world than with money and finance? And I think that's kind of like the, a potential measuring stick. And I want an old article that I really liked from Nick Carter, where he wrote about how Bitcoin is a peaceful revolution. Right? Like you're just demonetizing the nation state's ability to engage in warfare. Or like, that was like one angle. Or another angle is like, ah, it's just like a check on power of, of central governments, like inflating their currencies. I don't know if we've been impactful on those fronts. And I know it's early, like Bitcoin is 15, 16 years old. So it's early to say that like, yo, we're like Bitcoin is going to defund violence.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  But still, I don't know if, I don't know if there's any hints of success on those like big macroscopic ideas that we once had as an industry.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Look, we memes, when I first got into Bitcoin, it was largely associated with drugs and money laundering. Right? This is early, early days. I mean, I even went on a date in San Francisco and she said, are you a drug dealer? When she asked what I did. So like Bitcoin's improved somewhat from there.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Now it's largely perceived as a speculative asset. I would say, which is still a pretty negative connotation rather than a positive one. And it's like freedom money. You know, culture wise, like we memed Bitcoin, which is a fucking random ass magic internet money, largely perceived as dirty and filthy and bullshit. We aimed that into what was a tiny, obscure community. I mean, in San Francisco, you know, I went to the Bitcoin meetups there in early 2013. It was just Brian and Fred from Coinbase, Charlie Lee, Jed McHale, Jesse Powell, Jared Kena, who hosted at 20 Mission. I mean, there was a dozen of us in a cooler full of PBRs.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Like from that into the president is talking about it and there's a bill in Congress about it. And Goldman, JP Morgan are all like, yeah, this is legitimate. And same with the Fed. I mean, I think we memed it into an existence where people believe it's digital gold. For me, since that was my original thesis, I think we largely succeeded. You know, does the everyday person see it that way? You know, I think market, last time I checked the surveys around market penetration in terms of what percentage of the US owns Bitcoin, I think it's under 10%. But I might be making numbers up, but I'm pretty sure it's like five to 10%. That's not bad. I mean, we convinced, what is the population of the US? Like 400 million?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  You know, we convinced 40 million people to buy Bitcoin. That's just the US numbers. Globally, it might be bigger. From obscurity of this crazy magic internet money into being semi-relevant, I consider that if, from a marketing standpoint, that's a huge success. 15 years, people don't wake up and wonder, should I shake my core foundations of understanding what money is? Like that's, you wake up and you wonder if you should buy Chick-fil-A or Burger King. You don't want to wake up and be like, let me question the nature of reality, both by God, family and purpose in life. You don't want to go down that rabbit hole, you know? So the fact that 40 million people in the US alone, let's say the 10% number is true.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  40 million people woke up and decided to go down the rabbit hole of questioning the nature of the reality. So core to them, like what is money? I think that's success. But yeah, you know, it's still a battle to be won. I think this is a, you know, I realized a long time ago that this is going to be a generational thing. I don't think the boomers, most boomers, I think are kind of too far gone. They're too set in their ways. And so as the famous quote goes, "Science progresses at the death of every scientist." You know, I think like Bitcoin adoption will.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Oh, my, I understand that quote slightly differently. The quote that I have in my head is, "Science progresses one grave at a time."

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Same, same, I think.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Same, same, yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Basically.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  We need the old people to die so the new people can take over. But that's not a revolution. That's just time passing.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Well, I guess every invention before though, had the same, same effect. You know, after going through this myself with Bitcoin, and then, you know, six years ago, I invested in SpaceX, which had a lot of similar, I would say like very like, a lot of intense feelings in a negative manner towards the concept. After going through this experience myself, I really have this empathy for every single inventor or artist before us. Like, can you imagine? Most people were never recognized for their contributions, whether it be science or art, until after they died. Imagine living a whole life like this. At least we were validated that we were right. But imagine living a whole life and everyone is just ridiculing you all the time. Like it's like Bitcoin and ETH being at super low prices your entire life.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  You know, at least we had moments where like, we definitely had our victory laps, where everyone who was a critic was coming back and saying, hey, you guys were right. So, yeah. And again, like I said, I have deep sympathy for every inventor or critical thinker or contrarian thinker before us.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do you think about Michael Saylor's influence or just role in, in Bitcoin? Like I think it's pretty easy to say, like, obviously he's been good for it. If our measuring stick is price, because he bought $60 billion, he just piled $60 billion into Bitcoin. So how is that not good? But there's also, there's definitely a double edged sword. And we can talk about that. What do you think just overall about like Michael Saylor and his relationship to Bitcoin?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. First and foremost, I think he's played a really good critical role in advocating for Bitcoin. I've had a lot of time. I just know what they met is, his place in Miami. We've gone out to dinner quite a few times. You know, there's some funny things as well where, you know, his proof of, his whole energy memes, you know, he's mentioned before that like, oh, you know, a lot of what I learned about Bitcoin is from Dan. So I've seen some weird after effects of like, I think his, his take on energy is a little too.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Cosmic.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  A little bit esoteric. Let's put it that way. And so, you know, whereas I feel like mine was a bit esoteric, but more for an easy concept for people to digest. But I didn't go a little, I didn't go crazy with the energy meme. I think he's taken some narratives and I think gotten a little too esoteric with them. So overall, I think he's in that positive. At the same time, you know, he is advocating, ultimately he represents micro strategy. And so at the end of the day, he's sort of not recommending, but advocating for micro strategy. And as, you know, I never got involved in any of the Dats. I got offered to be CEO of three of them. Actually, no, I think it's four of them. You know, I could have participated in them, like buying it early.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  I didn't do that either. You call me old fashioned, but if you want to buy Bitcoin, just buy Bitcoin. And I think a lot of people had this whole concept around like, oh, well, what if we get like a leverage play on Bitcoin and whatnot? You know, I don't think that, I think Stretch and MicroStrategy, I don't think were represented in the, you know, most accurate way possible. I don't think there was malicious intent behind it, but you know, so TLDR, I'm kind of waxing poetically here, TLDR, I think is a net positive for Bitcoin. However, I would not have recommended Bitcoiners buy MicroStrategy or Stretch or any of those products.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. My concern is about the role of Dats and the success of Dats is just like the centralization of the supply. Like if you, if you tell me like, okay, what if Strategy owned half a percent of Bitcoin? I'd be like, that's great. 1% of Bitcoin, that's great. 2% of Bitcoin, I'm like, wow, that's a lot of Bitcoin. It's not 4% of Bitcoin, dude. And at some point, like we, just like as a thought experiment, like what if Strategy owned 50% half of the Bitcoin supply? I'd be like, that's too much. That's bad. That's a bad thing. And I bet you price can't really move too much if one entity owns 50%.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Now, we're, we're at 4%, so very far off, but still, like, it starts to be a little worrisome that there's just this like one dude, like the, the whole like Metcalfe's Law interpretation of like networks depends on the Bitcoin supply being diffuse. And so I do kind of worry at like, at what point is there just like too much attention? Not like, there's no risk to Bitcoin because Bitcoin Code doesn't care about MicroStrategy. So like, whatever. But just like the attention and the branding can be like captured a little bit. And that kind of worries me. What do you think about that?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think you're wrong that there could be a narrative that would impact price around concentration risk being like, oh, this, people just inherently believe more concentration means wealth inequality, censorship, centralization. So you're not wrong narrative wise, as you mentioned before, though, the Bitcoin Code doesn't really care, right? Bitcoin's proof of work function isn't a proof of stake function. Thinking of proof of stake protocol, that'd be very worrisome. And a proof of work, work protocol is a little less worrisome. Granted, with someone with that much capital, they could also buy a lot of miners. But you know, proof of work basically functions, you, you have all this CapEx, you buy these machines and the only thing these machines can do is print money, which is Bitcoin.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  So if you buy too many of them and then people perceive the network as being centralized, you would, and then you act in a bad manner, like doing 51% of tax, you would essentially destroy the machines that print the money and you've already spent upfront capital. Proof of work is provably burning capital to purchase machines up, upfront. And so anyways, even if they had a concentration of the miners, they would have to be willing to burn the money and be willing to destroy their, all of their invested capital if they wanted to manipulate the network in their favor.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't really, I don't really think it's a, it's a technical thing though. It's more of like a, it's a, it's back to just like, it's a, it's a sociological thing. And it's kind of similar in the sense that, you know, the United States has really planted their flag on Bitcoin and cryptos. Like Bitcoin is, we have a strategic asset reserve, strategic Bitcoin reserve. And like Donald Trump wants to make crypto the capital of, of the, of the world, crypto capital of the world. And I see like, well, China doesn't give a fuck about Bitcoin. What's China buying? But gold. And so there's like a branding, it's like, it's not as credibly neutral. It's not as like permissionless and balanced and harmonious across the globe as it once was. And so it's kind of the same thing with the United States planting the flag, like Bitcoin

• 21:52Speaker 00

  is just US coded, which works for me, I'm in the US. Bitcoin's also kind of Michael Saylor coded. And that's kind of like, that's part where I go back, that wasn't the plan. That was not the plan. What do you think about that?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, first, I'm actually quite surprised that China and other, like Russia and China didn't try to buy as much Bitcoin as they could.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  I mean, Russia right now is dealing with the consequences of that with the Ukraine war, they've had a lot of their assets frozen. So the fact that they didn't perceive Bitcoin as kind of a safe store of value is quite bizarre, especially with how fluid they could pay their partners with it. You know, I'm not exactly sure why adoption didn't occur there. Granted, you know, Bitcoin is suit anonymous, so we don't know exactly how much the Russian government could own and they could make a very concentrated effort to keep it semi private-ish and just, you know, have it in a bunch of different wallets and distribute it in a way where we wouldn't know true ownership. But yeah, I mean, I, for me, Bitcoin is an incredibly neutral asset. There is a potential negative narrative being associated with both the United States and

• 22:56Speaker 01

  a certain party. I think the party is more troublesome than the United States being associated with it. The United States has the largest gold reserves in the world, so much so that it's larger than I believe, I believe it's larger than every other gold reserve combined, but it's huge. So the US has the largest gold reserves out there. Just because the US believes in gold doesn't make gold any less valuable. And also the US is perceived as still the world reserve asset. The dollar is perceived as the world reserve asset. So them adopting Bitcoin, I think is a positive. I think it being Republican, you know, I'm libertarian, so I dislike both parties equally. But I think that could be a negative narrative here in two years or Trump would come, yeah, about two years from now.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Few years, yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  You know, that, that could come back to where, especially since Trump, and I find this very distasteful, where he, you know, leaned into largely pump and dump schemes like Trump pouring and all sorts of stuff. Where I'm like, you know, man, all you had to do is just be a little classy about it. You could have set up.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  That's asking too much.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Partnerships, a venture firm, you get a preferred terms, you get all sorts of different deals. You could have made your billions in a nice ethical, clean way. And instead it's just really grimy with how he did it. So I think that's going to really come back and bite us. There's probably going to be some investigations after it comes up, after he leaves office. So yeah, TLDR, we can't really control how Bitcoin gets adopted, like who, who adopts it, where, who buys it. So I, I think the US association is okay. Trump, not so much. When it comes down to concentration and to answer your first question, concentration and the narratives around that, I think 4% is fine. I mean, it's pretty hard to accumulate a 4% position.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  It's taken them years, years of constant buying. So I'm not too worried about that, even if it gets to 10%. I still think 10% in most people's minds would sound low. You know, 40%, I agree with you. At those numbers, it just sounds bad. So theoretically, yes, I agree. You know, practically, someone's been trying to do this. I don't know when he began, was it five, five, six years ago?

• 25:07Speaker 00

  It was right around COVID. It's right around COVID. Yeah, so five years. Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  So he's sticking up a long time to get to 4%.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Doesn't seem like he's going to be buying a lot of Bitcoin in the short term either. That's on pause.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  With the, the trading below par, not par, they're not really a par in that, on Stretch, but trading below the $100 sort of target price, I don't think is a good omen.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to ask about scaling in Bitcoin. Lightning Network, I don't know what's up with that, but I don't see it anywhere on my feeds at all. Has like Bitcoin kind of just like become indifferent to scaling?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's, this one, I'd like to go back to the, the block size wars. Basically, for those who aren't familiar, there's Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, Civil War, Bitcoin Broken Half, essentially in terms of cultural community values. The small blockers, which was myself and basically what Bitcoin is today, we believe that you can't scale Bitcoin completely on the layer one, so you have to scale it in layers. So you have to build these other layers that eventually net settle on the Bitcoin base layer, for, for those who don't know what we're talking about here. For the L2s, basically the community made a promise that we would push all this economic activity to L2s and that we would foster a healthy L2 to L1 relationship.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I do think Bitcoin, the Bitcoin community has failed in that regard. We could have implemented things like OPCAT or other very basic scripting functions in the Bitcoin base layer that would enable trustless L2s. Most of Bitcoin L2s have different security assumptions that basically make the process of, of, of using your Bitcoin on an L2 less secure than Bitcoin's L1 and we could have made it almost equivalently secure. So I do think that that is a promise that was made back then in the block size wars that we have not fulfilled. And so. I would say that's a big miss because we could have had a, and I think the, the rise of different

• 27:03Speaker 01

  other smart contract platforms like Ethereum, Solana and others represent that missed opportunity. I think that the lack thereof of really, you know, capable L2s that are anchored really well into Bitcoin's L1. I think because we haven't made those changes happen in the community, I do think, like I said, those, those protocols represent that missed opportunity.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Interesting, interesting. How do you think, what, what could have, what could have that looked like? If like, say if some of the things that you talked about, like OP Cat and some of the other technical things actually worked out, what would Bitcoin look like?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. It's all hypothetical, right? Can't replay what would have happened, but you know, if you have trustless bridging, which means you can take your Bitcoin from an L1 and bring it to an L2 and you don't have to trust the bridge. That changes a lot of things. I feel like that security would change a lot of user behavior around when they operate with this L2, if they trust, you wouldn't have to trust it as much. There's of course zero day exploits and other functions with an L2 that you need to be aware of, you know, protocol risk. You know, I was saying this five years ago, you know, just because it's DeFi doesn't reduce its risk. A lot of people are marketing DeFi as, yeah, I've reduced my counterparty risk to zero. Like, yeah, you did, but you also-

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Your counterparty risk, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which isn't a bad or good thing. It just, you just need to be aware of it, right? So I think that, you know, with, with Bitcoin L2s, I think it would have captured a lot of that DeFi demand. Bitcoin's L1, basically that the community is like, well, look, we're not going to do all the fancy cool stuff that Ethereum and Solana can do on the L1. And so, you know, we didn't have really robust L2s. And so I think that, you know, we would have seen Bitcoin's market share in terms of like market Bitcoin dominance metric. I think we would have seen that higher. I think we would have seen Bitcoin absorb a lot of those positive narratives that Ethereum and Solana got around DeFi, smart contracts, you know, that could have floated to Bitcoin, which, which what I think would have

• 28:59Speaker 01

  been value accretive to the store of value narrative, like a use, a more useful store of value or a, you know, digital gold that's more, you know, more productive, you know, those narratives I think would have amplified the digital gold. It wouldn't have been distracting from it. So yeah, I think that it was definitely a missed opportunity and, and that's where I think the market capitalizations are both Solana and Ethereum represent that missed opportunity. Granted, those protocols are still a very small percentage of Bitcoin's market cap. So how much of an opportunity did we miss? I'm not sure, but I do think DeFi is the future. Like seeing Ethereum DeFi summer was interesting. Like as a Bitcoin maxi, I still appreciate it and, and spent a lot of time exploring why Ethereum DeFi summer

• 29:44Speaker 01

  occurred. And because A, users want it, B, there's a lot of very basic primitive financial types of financial transactions that people want, lending, borrowing, you know, staking, lending, you know, different types of, you just smart, other smart contracts or options, derivatives. These are all productive things. You know, there's, there's a whole host of like, do we need millions of tokens? I don't think so. I don't think that's exactly useful, but taking an asset like digital gold and being able to borrow against it in a trustless manner, there's a massive amount of demand for that. And being able to lend it out in a way that's semi-trustless, you know, I think is useful.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  What about privacy? I, I can't actually remember if Bitcoin had like a commitment to privacy in its culture. I don't think it did, but nonetheless, privacy has always been interesting to Bitcoiners. What, what is kind of like the idea, the relationship that Bitcoin and Bitcoiners believe about privacy with regards to the Bitcoin protocol?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question because the early community, the word cash actually means that. So when the Bitcoin white paper was written, Satoshi wrote it for the Cypherpunks, which were on the Bitcoin, the Cryptographer mailing list. The Cypherpunks don't use the word cash to mean everyday transactions. That's a huge misconception.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Interesting. I've never realized that. That's, that's crazy.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause you know, like you had like e-cash, hashcash, like what, why are they using this word cash?

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  It means a couple of different things. It means a one-way function. That means once I make a payment, it can't be reversed. So it's irreversible. That's what a cash transaction is like. If I pay you cash for your plant in the background, you can't ask for that back unless you want to give it back.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  So it means it's, it's irreversible and usually means that it's private.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Between the two parties, yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a big component that the Cypherpunks really cared about. Now Bitcoin is pseudonymous. We don't know which Bitcoin address, who owns which address, but if we ever de-anonymize, if you've owned an address, then we can trace through the blockchain and probably figure out some of your ownership, but it is still difficult. It's not easy and you can do coin joins, you can do all sorts of other obfuscation. You know, Lightning, which is a Bitcoin L2, you know, that channel activity is largely anonymous. But for the Cypherpunks and Satoshi, that was actually a critical component with the idea that Bitcoin would be semi, semi-private or fully private. That's what the word cash means. Not cash in your pocket, not, not pay for everyday stuff. Now Satoshi, of course, does reference merchants

• 32:16Speaker 01

  and paying for things, but the word cash does not represent that because he's writing this to the Cypherpunks.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  The privacy issue though, very early on, you know, Satoshi in his writing, both on the forums, the peer-to-peer foundation forums rather than Bitcoin Talk forums, but also there, you know, he mentions that privacy is a good thing. They want to explore any more privacy. He talks about CK.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  You know, Satoshi also had a lot of mistakes that he made with Bitcoin. People forget that too. And there's a, there's actually a few things that I would consider Satoshi actually missed on significantly. One would be the units, why 21 million versus 21 billion? I think he was quite bearish. So he said-

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Why 21? I actually never figured out why 21.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Supposedly that's like a computer science thing. The 21 just makes it easier from like, sort of like floating point number or something like that will be on my, my plebeian marketing understanding of tech.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  So 21 is like, I guess a more elegant way to do it, but 21 million versus 21 billion versus 21 trillion. I think he wanted to break the dollar parity sooner and he, this is an experiment. He didn't know if it was going to work.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  I think he was a little too bearish and that unit bias problem I do think is an issue.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. I, that's, that's novel to me.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Right? Like so-

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Bitcoin is just too expensive.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone thinks Bitcoin is too expensive. So I think Satoshi did make a mistake on that where he put the decimal.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  You think Bitcoin should be like $65?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you probably would have got a more adoption, but maybe it wouldn't have. We don't know. We can't replay time.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And then he also had a very aggressive issuance schedule, you know, like to produce that many Bitcoin in the beginning. It was very aggressive. It could have been a much flatter trajectory. So-

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you and I have talked about this extensively, but yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It's-

• 34:02Speaker 00

  I mean, outside of the security budget, I'll, I'll talk about the security budget in a second, but just like, yeah, it's just like having like so many coins be mined so early. Like imagine how you could have just stretched the security budget like four times, 10 times further.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. Yeah. We'll, we'll touch on that if we want to go with that a little bit later, but there's a, there's a very clear trade-off between auditability and transparency. So if it's private, we can't audit it as easily, which we just saw on Zcash literally a month ago. That's not the first time it's happened in Zcash. It's also not the first time it happened in Bitcoin. It happened in Bitcoin in 2010. However, it was before Bitcoin was worth a penny. It was immediately fixed and you know, Bitcoin is a very-

• 34:48Speaker 00

  It was rough.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Bitcoin is rough code in 2010. It wasn't like a, a real protocol, like not, not tested, not really. It was very basic. Again, it was before Bitcoin was worth a penny. I think a lot of like Zcash people will bring that up, but it's a false equivalency.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ethereum people bring it up when Bitcoiners fought Ethereum about the DAO hack and they're like, well, you guys did it too.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But yeah, I mean, one was a consensus change. One wasn't like-

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  The Ethereum DAO hack was like saying, oh, this theft is bad. Bitcoin was like, this broke consensus that was 21 billion.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Sure. I take that point. I take that point.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I would say privacy is, of course, is something I strive for. Like I think that's a great value to have, but you cannot have perfect privacy on an L1 and auditability. And Bitcoin's core value prop is around the 21 million hard cap being a credible monetary policy. That's why we could, that's why it makes for a good sound money, not its rate of inflation or deflation, but the fact that we can trust that 21 million won't be changed or has a high credible, credible chance that it won't be changed.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So privacy is like an application layer thing, not a, not a protocol thing.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Totally. And you know, we look at the market cap as Zcash, these other coins, and they're tiny. So like, how much do users truly value privacy? I think it's quite low. Even though I wish from a libertarian perspective that people would care-

• 36:07Speaker 00

  More people valued it?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  They don't, you know, and so I also wrote about this in 2020. It's called Bitcoin Privacy. Is it the article I wrote on my blog? Let's say we had perfect privacy on Zcash or Bitcoin and we didn't have any auditability flaws. Okay. So I spend it on various activities and I buy a house.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  My house is, has a title and that title is in my name and you know, the IRS and various other entities, anyone in public can walk by my house and see how big my house is and or small or whatever it is. The IRS can ask me where I got that money from because they can see that I bought a house. And so the idea that you can live in this perfect level of privacy, if we just had a perfect private money, I think is a little bit, a little bit ridiculous. Like I think you can't have perfect privacy. If you buy any big items, you know, it's kind of impossible.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. If you buy any big items, you're kind of like filling in some numbers on a Sudoku puzzle for other people to kind of like figure out. Yeah. Yeah. And like, yeah. And, and also, yeah, I think what, what we're saying and what I, what I understand is like, we enjoy privacy. We enjoy technically strong privacy, but there's a limit as to how safe it is to put it deep into the protocol and we can get privacy elsewhere. I, I take that point.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  In a perfect world, if with no trade offs, absolutely. It's, it's, you know, and that's where I find the Z cash folks just so dishonest, where they act like as a, we could just stab it with our finger. We could have privacy on Bitcoin's L1. Obviously we thought about that. This isn't like, oh yeah, we're just being, you know, curmudgeons and we're like, no, we don't want privacy because we, we're all institutional now. No, it's not that at all. It's, it's basically, there's a huge trade off and we're like, the trade off doesn't make sense for us, but you guys go on and do that. Cool. I mean, and then Z cash had that, you know, the flaw in it with the inflation bug and we were kind of largely validated by our concerns.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Not, not an inflation bug, an inflation bug inside of the privacy pool. And so not, not a actual unit inflation bug, kind of an inflation bug, but not, not, yeah. Ultimately, the, the number of Z cash remains the same.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Appreciate, appreciate.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  But yeah, nuance, nuances is hard with privacy and that's kind of the point, actually.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless R S feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it. If you signed up for Bankless Premium, and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  I want to talk about BIPs. What is, what are, what's the current BIPs being talked about? And BIPs, BIPs are Bitcoin Improvement Protocol. So this is like for Ethereum people, this is EIPs, the, the Bitcoin improvements. What's being discussed in the modern day and age around Bitcoin?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you know, Bitcoin, the BIP is basically in a Bitcoin improvement to the protocol that's proposed. You know, there's a couple floating around, I think BIP 360 is around quantum, like improving Bitcoin to be quantum, post quantum cryptography, basically solving some of the, you know, with, with quantum, the current issue with Bitcoin is that, you know, when you sign a transaction with your private key, that a private key can get exposed. And if it gets exposed, it can steal your Bitcoin. And so we have to upgrade Bitcoin signatures to post quantum secure signatures.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And we have to pick which signature is the best one. And there's a bunch of trade offs with each one.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Bunch of trade offs from potential zero day exploits to large byte sizes. Overall, I think post quantum is going to be a little much larger in bytes, AKA data size. So that'll make Bitcoin transactions more expensive. Certainly opens up another conversation around Bitcoin block size though.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm kind of okay with that. Actually, I think I was having this debate with Ryan where Ryan was like, oh yeah, Bitcoiners like are going to need to increase the block size. I'm like, I don't know if they do. I think they can just pay the fees. Do you have an opinion on that?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Well, block space currently isn't super busy, so you could probably need to do the fees. But you know, in a theoretical world where like a lot of people are trying to do it at once, block size increase may be necessary, but that's a, that's a whole can of worms. But anyways, any, any post quantum secure, any post quantum encryption that we select will likely be larger in bytes. There is some improvements that are like magnitude shifts. And I think that's some of the criticism that some folks have is that, you know, we shouldn't make these changes until we, you know, basically have much more data dense transaction types, or not data dense, but just, and more efficient. So it's BIP 360. There's a couple other proposals as well. There's also kind of a retarded

• 41:05Speaker 01

  one called BIP 110, which I don't know if you've seen those voices. I don't even know if you even see those people on crypto Twitter, because the Twitter, the nature of Twitter has changed a lot. Like,

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very bubbly these days.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that and like, I feel like we were all part of the same conversation before and now, now kind of gets a bit more convoluted. So yeah, I would say BIP 110, basically a bunch of these moronic plebs believe that, you know, we should censor Bitcoin because

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Okay. I was wondering if this was still relevant. Yeah. Okay. So this is, this is the arbitrary data. Do we allow arbitrary data in Bitcoin or not?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  These idiots don't understand how computer science, AKA information theory works. You know, these are, these are very uneducated.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Aren't some of these idiots core devs though?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  No, one. There's one core dev.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  It's a super religious guy?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's, believes that the Catholic Church has perverted Catholicism. He believes in eating cats. He

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Also believes all sorts of crazy shit.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Okay. So we don't take him seriously anymore?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  No, no, he's a lunatic. And so you got a lunatic and a bunch of uneducated plebs that are behind him.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  And they're like, signal for 110, you know, so they're kind of shouting right now about that. And literally every miner and every business is like, what the fuck are you doing?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  They like, stop, stop being weird.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, stop being weird. And so he might actually fork off, which would be great.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  Great, great, great. Let them. I hope they do. I hope they do.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Please. Exactly. So BIP 110 is a joke. 360 is like being considered slash talked about a little bit, but there's nothing that I would see in the immediate short term that's, that's kind of like.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  For sure. What's, what about the, like, the level of urgency around the quantum BIP, BIP 360, or just like how fast things are progressing? Cause there is like a level of urgency around quantum, right?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say this is the biggest unresolved question and I would say most pressing issue in Bitcoin. Pressing doesn't mean it's an immediate concern, but pressing as in we need to have, I'd say some forward momentum.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. We, we, the foot needs to be on the gas.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, you know, Nick Carter, obviously has been, been kind of ringing that bell a bit. I do believe that we should be making actions now or progressing towards a solution. I don't think this threat's imminent, even in some of the most aggressive timelines for, uh, you know, quantum, you know, quantum, yeah. Or what do they call it? The Q events or something like that? Q data. Yeah. I think it's still five years away, probably at a, at a minimum, but even then it still might take us quite a while to agree upon how we upgrade and in the process of migration. You know, if every single Bitcoin address wanted to, you know, move over to a post quantum secure encryption standard, it would take significant amount of time. So yeah, this needs to be figured out. I'd say soon.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  In the next couple of years, it'd be great if we had consensus over the next direction. And then we have actions happen in like year three. I think that would be like an acceptable or, or good timeline in my, my book.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  I think the big concern was that it wasn't being taken seriously as an issue broadly by Bitcoiners. Is that still true? Or do you think everyone has kind of realized like that we have to, we have to take this head off?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  I think that's where like, I respect Nick, but I think he definitely kind of exaggerated the level of apathy. It was largely talked about in most circles I'm a part of. I think the only disagreement was the level of concern. Like how, how soon does this need to be resolved? I think is the bigger question. And Nick was kind of raising the alarm, which I applaud him for his efforts. I also think he was a bit too critical of various efforts that were going on. I don't think people were just like, oh, this isn't a problem. I think it was more of like, it's going to be a problem, but it's going to be a little while from now. I think game theoretically that given how advanced AI is getting, that the AI coming up with solutions to make quantum computing more effective will likely lead to its adoption

• 45:00Speaker 01

  sooner than later. So I do think that five year timeline, while previously was considered extremely aggressive, I think is a safe one. I think even with AI breakthroughs on, you know, building quantum computers, I still think five years would be pretty, pretty aggressive in terms of, of when we think Q day might occur.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Dan, did you watch the Finding Satoshi documentary?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  I did.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Good.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Do you like, agree with the conclusion?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  You know, I'm kind of a Hal Maxi, like a Hal Fiddy Maxi.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  To me embodies.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Which I think you can be and also still agree with the conclusion. So the documentary, we had them on the podcast for listeners who didn't watch, kind, in my opinion, kind of does the best job that I think will ever be done about investigating Satoshi and comes to a conclusion that it's both Hal Fiddy and Len Sassman. To me, the addition of Len Sassman was the curve ball. Sassman was the curve ball. But like, I, I, my opinion is that I don't think we're ever going to have a more definitive answer than this. Maybe, maybe that's what I'll ask you to like qualify or disagree about.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's interesting is that I had a question posed to me once, given more and more time, will it become more or less likely that we find Satoshi? Which I thought was super interesting. And I, I think it's more likely we would have found him sooner. And I think the more time that progresses, there's, it's less likely that we find him. Even though our ability to like analyze his text and look at all the data we have becomes better with AI, there, there is data decay that is occurring. Emails, written communication, logs that are slowly being deprecated and or erased, that would have been, helped us definitively find who Satoshi is. So I would say like the lens, the Len Sassen and Hal Finney connection, I thought that was

• 46:44Speaker 01

  an elegant, good narrative. I don't have any strong opinions for or against the argument. It's certainly a lot better than the New York Times one about, oh, man, that was so bad.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Adam Back?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was just so, so bad. Adam Back is definitely not Satoshi. So, yeah, I would say like Hal Finney, it definitely feels like Hal Finney wrote the code. It, Hal Finney fits the bill perfectly for who Satoshi is. You know, the idea that Len, Len, Len Sassen wrote the white paper. I mean, the idea that like Hal Finney couldn't write a white paper, though, that seems a little weak. The idea, the idea that he had to bring in Len Sassen for that. Yeah, maybe, but white papers aren't exactly rocket science.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you think identifying Satoshi, does that do anything? Or is this just a fun game?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want it. I don't think we should know who Satoshi is. It's a fun game, but it would be negative if we definitively found who Satoshi was because, one, it creates, you know, this, this, this basically deity now becomes a cold, hard, real person.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Right. It pops the illusion.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Satoshi's whole purpose of creating the pseudonym was to be, you know, a pseudonym, is to be, you know, someone who wasn't, there, there wasn't a physical representation associated himself with this. It was more of a, I am an individual, I've done my contribution and now I'm gone. Versus, you should look up to me, you should, you should ask me what to do next. He didn't want to be that. And so I think it wouldn't be good if we identified who he was. It is still a fun game. I still try to attempt to identify who Satoshi is, but I don't think it'd be good for the protocol to know who he is, but I don't think it'd be ultimately that much detrimental. Satoshi has likely passed away. And if that's true, then he doesn't really have any say over future direction of the protocol.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Four-year cycles, we seem to be doing them. But I kind of want to look at what happens in the next four years, like 2028, but then even into like well into the 2030s, like the, the medium-term future of Bitcoin. We got, we got Bitcoin treasuries, corporate treasuries, we got Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, some huge wins, some huge dubs for Bitcoin. What kind of wins does Bitcoin, do we want Bitcoin to get in like its next phase of growth?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, both further, I would say, market penetration of how many people own Bitcoin? Like, that's a really important KPI for me. Like, how many people across the globe as a percentage of the population own it? Whether it's a hundred dollars, $10 or a million dollars, doesn't really matter, because then-

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Does it matter how? Like, if I said ETF, does that matter?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  I would prefer to them do self custody, but it doesn't really matter. They can do not self custody and they still, by buying Bitcoin, they have bought into this new financial system, this new belief in Bitcoin. And by believing in Bitcoin, it does make it more real. And it's all a shared aggregate illusion. That's what all money is, both gold, the dollar and Bitcoin. And so the more people that buy into the concept of it, the more it has, the more it's longer it'll stick around, the bigger it'll become. It's a network effect. It's like a social network, but for money. So the more people that buy into it, the better. It's like a social network where you can plug directly into it, or you can use an app to go access it. Either way, you, you're buying into this new system, which further disenfranchises you from the existing system and ultimately brings about Bitcoin success, a global reserve

• 50:04Speaker 01

  asset, or like a new global money. So I do think buying it even in ETF is good. It's certainly not negative. It's good, but it's not as good as self-custody.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Do you think Bitcoin flips gold?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Over a long enough time period, yes.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Like a lifetime or like a couple of decades?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know, depends on the growth rate, right? Like 15 years, we went from zero to 1.5 trillion. I do think what was nice about gold's recent movement is it showed that large market cap assets can still have huge volatility. So there was an argument to be made that like Bitcoin would never have such large movements ever again, because like large market cap assets don't move that much. SpaceX, Bitcoin, Apple, I think very much proved that wrong in gold. So, yeah, I do think Bitcoin will eventually flip in gold. I think that's probably at least 10 to 15 years away. You know, it requires more people to believe, at a fundamental level, with, with the market cap represents, is do people

• 51:03Speaker 01

  believe more in gold or more in Bitcoin? And like I said before, this goes back to a generational divide over, you know, world boomers adopt this, as they die off, millennials and Gen Xers bought into Bitcoin a lot more. We start to set policy for different sorts of institutions, both banks and the Fed, et cetera, Treasury. So through these, I'd say gradual lifetime sort of generational adoption cycles, that's when we should see gold flipping, Bitcoin flipping gold. I mean, gold is a pretty, pretty boring asset. How many Gen Xers, Gen Z and millennials buy gold? I mean, it's considered the kind of a boomer thing. So

• 51:45Speaker 01

  as boomers, which are basically the only gold bugs left, as they die off, I do see gold's value or gold's perception of being a, you know, store value assets slowly fade away, especially as well with SpaceX. SpaceX, as Starship program improves and the tonnage that goes to space improves, there will be extremely credible opportunities to mine asteroids and return that gold back to Earth in a way that is economically doable. All gold on Earth is from asteroids. So, you know, the, once we see that become more tangible and people start to price in that future expectation of, of asteroid mining becoming real, then gold really has a crisis of faith where its supply becomes largely irrelevant. That will

• 52:28Speaker 01

  happen in our lifetime. So that's where I think 10 to 15 years is when we see the flipping of gold, because that future expectation of 30 years from now starts to get priced into today. I don't think a lot of people really grok how big Starship will be in terms of, basically what, what he's doing, what Elon's doing is he's mass producing spacecraft at such a huge scale that space travel will be as reliable and as cheap as airplane travel. I mean, the consequences of that are so enormous. And when it comes to gold, it's a, a very detrimental consequence, because with gold mining, you know, on asteroids, you know, one asteroid, I forget, it has like four quadrillion dollars worth of precious

• 53:09Speaker 01

  metals, you know, just harnessing one of those asteroids would essentially, and all you have to do is, is land a, you know, a small, small craft that has additional thrust and it can slowly push that asteroid towards Earth.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  And we make it crash into Earth?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  No, you just push it to Earth's orbit and make it-

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Yeah. Cause you can't make it crash into Earth, because then it's kind of a, it's a free for all.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  But I can't, I can't imagine what will happen is when you like land either, you can either land mining craft on the spaceship, or sorry, mining craft on the asteroid, or you can push it into an orbit and then, and then work on it. But once that happens in any sort of tangible manner, I bet gold drops 25% to today. You know, like that's, that's going to be a death sentence for gold. Anyways, I've been talking a little bit too long.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  I, I remember when the Winkleville went to Dave Portnoy's house and they were trying to shill him on Bitcoin. This was in, this was during COVID, I think, right after COVID? And like, they were pitching this, like at the gold asteroid mining to Dave Portnoy, and they were doing a terrible job. And David Portnoy was so turned off. But that was like six years ago, because it was like so absurd and sci-fi and crazy. But that was like six years ago. And for some reason, I'm listening to you now and like, this is, now we have AI, SpaceX is capturing rockets with, with chopsticks. It doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, I saw the first Starship launch in person. I bought SpaceX before they built the Starship program. So that was my original faith, my, my risk was that they wouldn't be able to execute on that. They did. It's pretty cool. I mean, I recommend that everyone go see it, because it's, you know, a lot of the things that I grew up watching sci-fi wise are coming true. And that's one of them, space travel. So, yeah, I mean, look, you, if Elon's right about this, which he's pretty damn right, like this, they did it.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Most of the time, yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Starship has been built, they caught it with little chopsticks. You know, it's pretty wild. So, you know, you're right, though, sometimes being early is the same as being wrong. And if you're really, really early, you look like a lunatic.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan, this has been great. Thanks for coming on the show and talking to me. I appreciate your, your perspective on stuff.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, been too long, David. Glad you could have me out.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Cheers. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, Bitcoin is risky, but that's what we're here for. You could lose what you put in, but this is frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you were with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.