YouSaid · the spoken record

Jimmy Song

lines on the record: 89
first: 2021-01-20
most recent: 2021-01-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I have a weekly newsletter that's sort of the technical developments in Bitcoin that are happening. It's called Bitcoin Tech Talk. And it's at jimmy song.substack.com. The other thing I have is the podcast, like you said, Bitcoin fixes this. I'm on Twitter at Jimisong, GitHub at Jimmysong, LinkedIn Jimmy in slash Jimmysong. So medium at Jimmysong. I don't publish too much there anymore because I'm fighting this weekly newsletter. But there's a lot of old articles that might be helpful if you want to understand what happened during SegW.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Motivates you way better. And that's how I want to write every other book for the rest of my life is with other people and depending on other people. And part of what you described about, thank God for Bitcoin, is that, you know, we get to the point we don't use flowery language and stuff. It's because it has eight authors and we read every page like out loud. This was one of the things that we did. And if it sounded super silly or conceited or something like that, people would say so. So we would change up the language so that it's accessible to somebody with like a ninth grade reading level and they can understand the arguments we're making. It's not necessarily because we're more virtuous. It's because we just had a lot more eyes look at it and you can create something beautiful that way. And that's something that I learned from startups. And that's what I brought, I can hopefully bring to books. And that's what I love about it.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me like 16 months, it was quite the slog, mostly because writing is a lonely endeavor It's something that you just, especially like when you're facing that blank page, it's sort of like an existential dilemma. It's like, do I really exist unless I write something down? But then, you know, you find every excuse imaginable to actually not write words on the page. This is why the other two books that I've written Little Bitcoin book and thank God for Bitcoin, I did it as a group because there's something about writing with other people and having them depend on you.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's meant to be a way for you to really understand everything from a nuts and bolts level. It starts with math, with finite fields and elliptic curves, things that you don't necessarily learn in high school or college. But they're not that hard to learn. So I teach those. A lot of programming exercises. And then it goes through signatures and public key cryptography. you know, the Bitcoin protocol and what the anatomy of a transaction, lockheaders and the actual networking aspect. And by the end of it, you should be able to connect to the Bitcoin network with your programming and receive transactions and block editors and so on. That's what the book is for.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so programming Bitcoin that's published by O'Reilly. All of you tech geeks that know about O'Reilly, they make a lot of books on different technical topics and stuff. I was privileged to be able to write that book for them. And it came out of frustration from my early days in Bitcoin where there wasn't that much documentation and nobody taught me anything and I couldn't find any of the details for anything. Just as a programmer, this is the resource that I wish that I had. And it came as a result of me teaching a lot of different people how to program Bitcoin stuff. And through doing that, I understood where people were getting stuck and so on. It's a very interactive. So it has a lot of programming exercises for you to do to make sure that you understand what the heck is going on. So if you don't understand that you're not going to be able to complete the exercise, so you might want to read that part again.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level, if it becomes sort of a moral imperative, which we argue that it is in this book, then there's way more reason to do it. And it's not just sort of a selfish endeavor, so you can go buy a Lambo. It's much more about doing something that's good for the world, that's good for civilization, and make civilization better. And that's the argument that we make. It's on Amazon, and you can get that print or Kindle edition, and we'll have the audiobook out soon. Very exciting stuff.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank God for Bitcoin is a book that I wrote seven other people. It's kind of a child of COVID and it started kind of as a book club slash Bible study. And we started a couple of books, Ethics of Money Production by Guido von Hallsman and Honest Money by Gary North. are books from sort of an Austrian perspective, but talking about the morality of money. And that's what this book is about. The thing we didn't like about either of those books was that it didn't mention Bitcoin and we wanted to write one that did mention Bitcoin and that made the moral argument for it. And it comes from a Christian perspective, all of us that wrote the book are Christian. But the thing that we wanted to make sure that we got out there is that moral argument because generally people, you know, I mean, you can make the investment case and people will want to do it out of self-interest, but a moral case is one that causes people to think on another.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can set it up themselves. So that's one. The other one would be sort of the mentality of dollar cost averaging, which a lot of exchanges, different apps have put in. This makes investing a lot easier. And from a practical standpoint, I think that will sort of accelerate adoption and get people thinking much more about it. And so those are the two. I know people want to hear some space mining project or some Mars thing. But for me, it's just making Bitcoin good for what it is, which is the store of value, and that means security is important. And that means getting money into the system that you want is important. Both of those things have improved significantly.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just on during that transaction, but in other transactions as well. So I think his project is great. But as far as other ones that I'm excited about, these might sound pretty mundane, but I think they're significant from a consumer standpoint. One is Spectre Multisig wallet. It's essentially multisig security that is pretty accessible. Use multiple hardware wallets and so on. I know so many Bitcoin holders that have a single point of failure and they get nervous as hell about it. And not having a single point of failure is actually very freeing because now even if something goes wrong with one thing, you have backups. You have ways to get around that. That's always been there. It's just that the user experience has been kind of terrible. So now you have a user experience that's actually doable and it's not that hard.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you receive Bitcoin and you don't have to convert it in between. So the customer gets to choose the worst money to spend, but the merchant receives the better money. It's sort of like subverting Gresham's law for both parties in a way that works out for both of them. Now he's planning to do the same for remittances, which I think is absolutely awesome. Because if you're on the other end of remittances, you want the currency that's going to store value because generally you're in a country that doesn't have very good stores of value and you have legal tender laws that make it make you have to spend your local currency, but no one actually wants to hold it. So if you're receiving Bitcoin, that's great because now you're, you don't have to worry about kind of your currency inflating away. And that helps you save.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really like Jack's project. I always thought the strike was revolutionary for the fact that it can convert fiat to Bitcoin within that transaction of customer to merchant, right? And it's almost like every other merchant that's quote unquote taken Bitcoin, it's gone the other way. Like somebody will pay in Bitcoin and then the merchant will convert that to fiat. And it's essentially people selling their Bitcoin for goods. And for that reason, most of these companies soon saw their Bitcoin sales dry up very quickly after maybe a little bit of an initial burst and then they'll stop taking it because the engineering cost of keeping that on their website would be very high. What Jack's thing does, that's absolutely brilliant is that for people that want to receive or have no other choice, this is perfect because you can your customer just needs to.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's going towards projects like this that absolutely do not deserve it, that have no value prop. It's just sort of like gambling vehicles. And I'm thinking now that maybe like altcoins are a symptom of sort of the fiat disease. It's one of the ways in which it manifests itself is that people will just sort of gamble and spray and pray or whatever. Like that, that's sort of the style that people tend towards when they don't know what to do. So that seems to be the case.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, sort of psychologically, you know how if people win at a casino, they don't really feel like they deserved it on the inside. So they'll just sort of spend it very freely on stuff that they would never spend their own money on. I think it's kind of like that with a lot of people that have received money from some sort of government subsidy or whatever. They're spending it on stuff that very frivolously on things that they never otherwise would spend on”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can go back to exactly where that money comes from, but they have influx of new cash coming in from retail or VCs or whoever that want them to keep creating these like Goldberg machines that aren't really doing anything. They're essentially like the one need that I do think that they are filling is a need to gamble. A lot of people, and we can talk about exactly why that is in this sort of economy, but there's a lot of people that want to gamble on stuff. And this looks like it's a decent gamble. They might not understand it, but they're fine buying lots of different lottery tickets and seeing how many of them pay off. That's the only actual human need that seems to be fulfilled. Nothing actually in the market that people want.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say that that's a very accurate description. Essentially, when you have new grads that want to play with new technology or whatever, they kind of get lost and when they come back with whatever project you gave them and they come back with this thing, it barely works. It's not performant. You're just like, okay, go do it again and use the tech stack that I told you. And they learned that way. With something like Ethereum, Uniswap, all that, they don't have that feedback loop because they get a new injection of money by printing their own money, right? Like they'll create a new token for some reason. And then they sell it to investors or whatever. So they get this new influx of cash. So they can play this game forever or for as long as that money lasts. And the unfortunate reality is that there's a lot of that money and it's not going away.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ecosystem. So even price based contracts or something like that on Bitcoin, right? You still need somebody to say that Bitcoin exchange for this many dollars on this day on this exchange. That's data that needs to come in from the outside. So I have a hard time unless it's like purely digital and it's like, okay, blocks will be found within or difficulty will be this and the next difficulty adjustment or something that's within the Bitcoin ecosystem that you can sort of measure without trusting a third party to report data from outside the blockchain. It's in principle impossible because it requires some trust on somebody.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between 50 degrees. You need an oracle. You need somebody to add that data to the smart contract. There are many ways to do that, but all of them are essentially centralized on that oracle. Because the Oracle needs to report truthfully and you have no guarantees that they will. And I mean, you can try to say, okay, well, we'll then use 10 Oracles and the majority will listen to the majority. Well, there's no guarantees that there are, first of all, 10 different entities. And second of all, that they won't collude with each other. You have no idea. You get into these weird situations with all of this where you still have to trust a third party. And when you're asking for something decentralized, what you're asking for is no trusted third party. That is essentially what you're asking. And from a metaphysical standpoint, it's not even at the layer of engineering. You can't get away from that. If it has anything to do with the real world in any way, shape or form, it cannot even in principle be a decentralized thing because of the external data that you need. Now, within”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the difficult thing, and this is what you always end up at when you talk about smart contracts, is something called the Oracle problem. And the Oracle problem is that almost anything interesting requires some information from the real world, right? Like whether or not a house changed hands or that it legally something happened in the real world, the score of a baseball game or something, whatever it is.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you just put up the collateral and you get the loan, and you can, I don't know, maybe go buy more of Ethereum or more of whatever. And that's how most people use it is some way to leverage it. And as a result, you have this platform for doing some playing financial games that Wall Street has been playing for many years on Ethereum. And of course, most of these games are zero-sum. Really, you're just sort of taking sucker's money if you're good at it or you're the sucker.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which I think is a misnomer because anything but decentralized because you have the Uniswap token issuers and the Uniswap contract writers, right? And they have backdoors and all this other stuff. Who knows? But basically it's a platform for some sort of lending or whatever and you have different assets on there. For some reason they're named after lots of different foods. But essentially you have different ways in which you can collateralize your Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. You have to wrap it in an Ethereum contract. And of course, that Bitcoin is held by Bitco, but it's wrapped. So you have some guarantees, but it's like the worst thing to call it decentralized because it's centralized at like six different points. And it's not decentralized at all. It's more like anonymous finance or something like that or pseudonymous finance.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking custody of their own stuff or having that much responsibility. We're used to outsourcing it to trusted third parties, which in a sense I can kind of understand it makes it more difficult for certain types of attacks, but it makes you way more vulnerable to another type of attack, which is that the government can take it away. That's horrible.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. It is impossible because it's a bearer instrument. And somebody told me that the last 50 years of U.S. policy has been getting rid of barrier instruments and Bitcoin's kind of bringing them back. Yeah, the reason why they've been taking it away is because then they can have their hands in the middle of it and they can be the intermediary that can control you sort of financially. With Bitcoin, you get that back. With Ethereum, you don't have that at all because you had this intermediary central party that can do whatever the heck they want. But with Bitcoin, you lose your keys. It's losing the 400 ounce gold bar that you had in your safe or buried in your backyard and forgot where it is. You're not going to get it back. And, you know, it's both sort of a thrilling prospect because you're your own bank, but it's also a scary prospect because you're your own bank because people are not used to.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only one that pumps it at this point. But that proved that Vitalik controls the entire Ethereum ledger. He said all of these spends to that contract, we're going to just roll them back. We're going to pretend they didn't happen. I mean, this is nothing different than a government bailout of an industry. And that's essentially what Ethereum did. There's no reason to think that he wouldn't do it again if it was sufficiently harmful to Ethereum to not do so.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, essentially it was Vitalic. And I still remember to this day what Vitalik said like the week before he made that decision or not Vitalik, but other people in the Ethereum community were saying before the decision. There was a guy that was literally on YouTube saying, you know, I would understand if Vitalik decided that code is law and that he would let this go. I would also understand if he decided to roll it back, which tells me there was no principle here. It was just let's just follow our dear leader into whatever he wants to do. And of course, a week later, he decided, okay, we're going to roll all those transactions back. And that caused what was at that time known as the Ethereum Ethereum Classic split. The Ethereum Classic Node operators were basically saying, you know what, we think code is law and we're going to keep going with it. Barry Silbert bought into that soon afterwards. And he's, I think, pretty much.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is sort of built in so that the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum developers will have all the power perpetually forever. And this was, I think, one of the early things that happened to Ethereum was the quote-unquote DAO hack. It wasn't so much a hack as it was more like good smart contract warring. But essentially what had happened was you had this thing called the DAO, which was supposed to be a decentralized autonomous organization where you can the crowd would decide where the fund would invest. So it was sort of like a crowdfunded VC fund or something like that. And that was the idea behind it. But of course, like the contracts were written wrong and somebody figured out how to drain it of all its money. And basically they did. And then they decided, oh, you know what? Like, I think at the time, one sixth of all Ethereum was in the Dow contract. So they decided, okay, it's getting drained of all this.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you don't have a vote whatsoever. The thing about Ethereum is that they hard fork every six months or whenever they need to because essentially backwards incompatible.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alec seems to have done with everything Ethereum related. And this is why Solidity is such a mess and has so many security flaws. And it's very difficult to analyze and you don't know what's going on. And you're not sure how long it'll run. It's just a giant map.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vitalic to me is sort of like that, and I've seen this, I've managed college kids that came out and work for me in different capacities or whatever. And the typical sort of mentality of somebody that comes out of college as a, you know, maybe they study software engineering in college is they just want to use like something cool and do something new or whatever. And Vitalik's almost fits that profile to a T, right? His mentality is if it's not built here, I want to make my own because I think I can make it better. He kind of has that. And the result is usually that something that's a complete mess. And this is in stark contrast to Satoshi's choices. Almost all of Satoshi's choices in creating the Bitcoin protocol take some standard that already existed instead of trying to roll your own crypto, which is, which unfortunately is what Vital.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's just good engineering. That's what you would call something. You make it hard for the user to do the wrong. Ethereum, they had this brilliant idea. We're going to ditch base 58 and we're going to use hexadecimal and all our addresses are going to start with zero x. They took out the checksum. So what happens? Lots of people put the wrong address in and they just burn their Ethereum. So they obviously recognize their mistake. But there are all sorts of things like that throughout the entire thing.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I look at Ethereum and I see all these flaws, right? Initially, like Ethereum addresses, simple example, but Bitcoin addresses, you know, they're base 58, at least until Bec 32, if you're using native Segwit, then that's something else. But Bitcoin addresses are base 58. And the last five or six characters are what you call the checksum. It makes sure that if you wrote it down wrong or you pasted something wrong in that address, any wallet can easily detect it and say, you know what, this is, you pasted it wrong or maybe you did something wrong. Can you check again and make sure you get the right address? And that's just good practice, right? In case you write, if you didn't have just the checksum and you wrote the wrong thing, then it'll go somewhere else and you'll lose those coins and the person won't receive them.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I'm just a coder, right? And I've been quoting for like since I was nine, but professionally for like 23 years or something like that. And I got to say, I've looked at his code. And the thing is, like he started as sort of like a 19-year-old, like getting into Bitcoin. And then, you know, he did Ethereum and all that. And everyone kind of like has this incentive to make him out to. Prodigy genius, or whatever. The thing is, what I see is like a kid that doesn't really know how to code well as a programmer, right?”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. And he wanted Turing completeness. He thought that was a weakness of the Bitcoin smart contract language script. But Satoshi specifically made it not Turing complete because you could DDoS all nodes with an infinite loop. And as soon as you have Turing completeness, you just have, you know, you just put an infinite loop out there. And this is why Ethereum has such complicated mechanics, like the idea of gas. It's so that you can't have Infinite loops. Like every time you run through a loop, you use up some gas. And if you run out of gas, you know, too bad. And this is why if your transaction doesn't go through on Ethereum, you lose your fees anyway. This one of the subtle gotchas. The thing is, like, Vitalik has sort of like this reputation as some sort of prodigy or whatever.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not going to do it. It's like, okay. He's like, I think I'm going to go make my own coin anyway. So that coin, of course, ended up being Ethereum. And that he launched maybe like three months later with yellow paper and a white paper. And he did the crowdfund raising in early 2014 and so on. Now, at the time, this was my assessment of Ethereum. Just given sort of the ambitions that he had for it. First, he wanted terrain complete scripting language.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Short story before we get into all of that. So 2013, I was working on something called color coins on Bitcoin. And this is what you might call like proto Ethereum ICO stuff. And it was on the Bitcoin protocol. You could create coins that are quote unquote colored. So you can trade them as assets that are other than Bitcoin, something like that. So that was where that was sort of my first experience doing open source development on Bitcoin related projects. And one of the people that we had actually writing the white paper for color coins was Vitaly Peter. And he actually wrote the white paper. It wasn't what we had written. So there was a little bit of back and forth. And he said, you know what? I'm not going to change the white paper to say what you wanted it to say. It's like, but that's what it is technically. And he's like, eh.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than there actually is. There's actually very little progress in a lot of areas. It's just a lot of people that need to justify their salary. So they make it sound like they are.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's kind of like it ends up being something that they can use to sound smart and the unfortunate reality is that I don't know, quantum computing to me has jumped the shark like maybe 10 years ago. It was something that was exciting that we didn't know that much about it. But then you learn more about like the engineering challenges related to that and you go, okay, there's no way this is going to happen like anytime soon. And even if it did, there are mitigations anyway. So people place just way too much importance on stuff that, you know, the press sort of like tells you about. I mean, we're all kind of overconsuming media. So there's a tendency to get manipulated by the media in ways that we don't really recognize. And this is one of them from a science perspective, there's the illusion of making more progress.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the thing about any sort of, I just want to go on a rant here for just a little bit. This is one of my pet peeves about like all these corporate R&D departments is that almost always you have somebody in charge of that R&D department that needs to justify why that lab exists and why their job is important. So they love press releases and they will deceive the hell out of any reporter and make their achievements sound like it's way more than it is. And it's not just Google, right? It's every company that's ever done anything blockchain related. It's like, oh, we did this, this, and this, and it's so incredible and it's going to change everything. Yeah, they're just justifying their jobs.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And go tell me what the Google paper actually said, because what they did was actually not that impressive. I mean, essentially, they. Define quantum supremacy as the ability to come up with a random number. Oh, gee, quantum computer, anything quantum related always spits out random stuff. So of course it's going to be better at it than like a conventional computer, which is deterministic. Acting like that's some incredible breakthrough is just really disingenuous. More marketing than anything.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shows prematurely, then you're not going to be able to observe the thing that you need to observe. There's so many little things like that from an engineering standpoint that I mean obviously it's captured the imagination of VC. So of course they're going to write articles about it or whatever. But from an engineering standpoint, it is extremely difficult. And I don't think people really appreciate how difficult it is. When I hear people talk about it as if it's inevitable, it's like it is anything but kind of like cold fusion, right? Like people thought it was inevitable in the 80s because there were all these popular articles about it. You know, I still remember back to the future too, right? It's like there's a little Mr. Fusion. It's like cold. It's just going to happen. Talk to any physicist and they're like, there's no way. It's not going to happen in my lifetime. That's how it is.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even setting up a qubit is incredibly difficult. It's literally atoms at like nanodegrees above absolute zero and you have to keep them in this weird quantum state for a significant amount of time and you have to error correct for the fact that these atoms have like half-lives and things like that. And then you have to keep it in You have to keep it in some sort of like a quantum state.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the thing is, very few people actually know the details of quantum computing. And they have like these popular misconceptions that somehow quantum computing can do exponential calculations in like linear time or something like that. That's not the case at all. And if you know anything about quantum computing, you recognize that the engineering challenges are so difficult that you need three or four breakthroughs that are the equivalent of essentially doing cold fusion before you're anywhere near like being able to do something like that. And we still don't have cold fusion. So like there you go.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it'll always sort of exist in the popular mind in a way. But the longer it doesn't happen, the more people are able to dismiss it. It's one of those things that will sort of always be kind of a question in their mind. I mean, I hear questions about like quantum computing, right? It's like one of my pet peeves. Well, let's go there.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, really incredible. Socially, I don't think anyone would accept it. And they would clearly see this as an attack and just cut it off. Like you could try. I mean, you could have a nation state do 100 block reorg. There's no way in hell anyone is going to accept that because they're going to say, okay, these 100 blocks appeared out of nowhere. I'm just going to disconnect it. That's it. Now with other chains, this is a little different. The game theory is a little different. There's a reason why if you're trying to deposit Bitcoin SV into Bitfinex that they don't accept anything until 50 blocks have gone. Because there's a lot of ways in which the exchange can get screwed. So that's just sort of the game theory of it all.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I guess you can do multiple exchanges at the same time or something. If you're particular committed to it, but that's $700,000 just in energy cost. There's also capital costs of all the mining equipment. And there's, of course, sort of like social coordination to make sure that you have some argument so people don't just disconnect your chain. And I mean, there are just so many aspects to it that an attack like that is, at least in my mind, like not realistic. Really impressive.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin, it's usually three, you know, maybe if they're a particularly strict exchange, they might require five or six. But I mean, even three blocks is a lot of hashing power. And that's a lot of energy you have to expend. In order to do that, and like for this quote unquote sovereign nation state, that's three blocks of mining reward at least. So that's what 6.25 times three, 18.75. I mean, you're looking at close to a million dollars. I mean, not quite, but I think it's like 700,000 dollars or something like that. So that's a lot of money just to do that.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That means that at that point, we don't really know what's going to happen. It really hasn't happened. But one of the things that you can do as a node operator, remember, you're master of your own node. If you're a node operator and you're running your own full node, one of the things you can say is, you know what, reject the four. I'm going to go with the three. And you can say disconnect block. It's a simple command. You type it in. And it says, well, I'm going to go with the one that was there before instead of this four blockchain that just suddenly came online in the last five minutes, in which case it might not succeed. So there are so many ways in which this thing can go wrong for this sovereign nation state. And one of the things that I remember that Andreas and Antonopoulos said, like, okay, so they produce all this equipment. They run this thing and they do it for one double spend. And he starts still clapping.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the way that nodes work is basically if I'm a node and I see one chain with one block and another chain with two blocks, then I have to take the two or that's how the logic in the code works. But here's a weird social aspect of it. Say you have three blocks and then suddenly something with four blocks comes along. You're supposed to take the four. But pretty much everyone is going to be alerted that you had a three block reorg, which is going to ring alarm bells everywhere, including exchanges They're going to be like, okay, we accepted this deposit. Now we're going to have to do something, and every exchange has, or at least any good exchange should have some protocol for what they do if you have a four-block reorg or something like that. Especially if you take three confirmations, because it might be an attack against you.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like it's all probabilistic. You don't actually know that you have 55% of the network. Now, you might, but it's still probabilistic. The other chain might find it faster than you just because You don't know. And essentially, you have to be longer before you can broadcast that. There's a lot of tricky things there.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So essentially, what a 51% attack is it allows you to do what's called a double spend. It lets you spend 100 Bitcoins twice, once to the exchange and once to yourself. So you get to have your cake and eat it too, essentially. You can eat it by converting it to $3.5 million. There's a lot of risks in that scenario, right? First of all, the exchange might sue you, right? Like if you try to do that, well, they know where they sent the money through the fiat system. So they're going to go and find out from the bank and see if they can recover the bank that way or slap a lawsuit on the bank. And I know of no exchange that gives you like a suitcase full of cash. So that's not going to happen. And second, you don't know that you're able to get more blocks than the other parts.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're able to withdraw three and a half million dollars. And then using the hash power you have on hand, you create two blocks before the rest of the network finds one. And instead of the 100 Bitcoins going to the exchange, you send the 100 Bitcoins back to yourself, in which case that transaction is no longer valid. And you have 100 Bitcoins and three and a half million dollars. That would be a way to attack it.”
2021-01-20 · We Study Billionaires · BTC009: Bitcoin Engineering w/ Core Developer Jimmy Song (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT