YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Odell

lines on the record: 69
first: 2021-09-22
most recent: 2021-09-22
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

“Get overwhelmed. People shouldn't get overwhelmed. Hold your own keys, use your own note, be humble enough to realize that you don't know everything with Bitcoin and it's a constant learning process, constantly seek to improve. Be humble enough to realize that Bitcoin isn't perfect and that we can do things to improve the experience for everybody. Help your fellow Bitcoiners, help your fellow man, and most access.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My Bitcoin journey in the beginning was heavily, heavily nymphed. It was random strangers on the internet that had names they made up. And we were in IRC, we were on Bitcoin talk, we were on Reddit, no filter. Basically everyone learning together. And for a lot of the years, Bitcoin Twitter also evolved in kind of that way. And I think one of the cool things about Bitcoin is not the influencers. There are a lot of people that have very good writing, that give us great content that we can consume and think about things. But to me, the most powerful thing is the community. And it's basically you have all these peers that are, we're all on the same level learning together and bouncing ideas off of each other, even though sometimes it can be very aggressive. To me, that”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know. First of all, I hate the term influencers. I think people with platforms are trying to influence people. I think the goal in Bitcoin should be And my goal has always been to help them find their independence. You know, Andreas, he was very early on for me, like very big. I always like Zabo. Andreas Zabo. Snowden was a big one for me. He's not Bitcoin. He's recently come around to Bitcoin. How about you?”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, snow crash is kind of like a dystopian free market kind of thing. It doesn't have Bitcoin in it, which makes it unrealistic. That was like my biggest complaint about. But now it's like if I read new sci fi, like if you don't have Bitcoin in it, you're the least forward thinking author there is. What's going on there?”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outside of Coinbase. That's scary. Maybe we trust the US government. I'm not going to make a comment on that. But what if it's another government? What if it's an authoritarian that decides that he wants to use that information in the wrong kind of way? So we're very vulnerable on the individual level. But I think the network is, I mean, it keeps just beating my expectations. It's really robust.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin land for the last three or four years, most people in the industry have been cheering on these kind of KYC regulations. We want regulatory clarity. We want these large exchanges to exist, and we're fine with giving up that privacy. And that's very short-sighted. We need to realize the risk at play here and how it makes us all vulnerable as a whole and at least start pushing back, at least with education, that there is a risk there. We had, you know, I'm getting a little bit long-winded. We had Coinbase in 2015, 2016. They fought the US government. The U.S. government wanted the information on every single user. Instead, they gave information on 20,000 Americans, every withdrawal address, every deposit address, full Bitcoin buys and sells. And if you use all that information with a change surveillance company, any transaction they made.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In every single transaction they make because there's change in surveillance companies that make a profit doing the forward-looking stuff after you withdraw. So when those databases leak or if a government, it might not be, you know, Americans tend to be very American centric. If a major government in Europe, let's say, decides that they want to crack down on Bitcoiners, they have all these databases available. They can crack down on individual Bitcoiners. They can criminalize private Bitcoin usage if they want to. Is it going to be hard to enforce? Yes. Are they going to have to go individual by individual? Yes. But they can make our lives really difficult if they wanted to make our lives really difficult. So I think that is my biggest concern. I think it starts with education. If you look at gun rights in America, gun rights in America, the gun lobby has been super successful about trying to push back on any kind of lists that are of gun owners.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those numbers yet because seed security is still kind of a little bit primitive. But the privacy risk, if we have the overwhelming majority of people who are coming into KYC exchanges and on-ramps, they are getting their full identity, all that information is being taken by the exchange. And an important thing when we talk about KYC is they say it's, you know, governments say that they're putting this in place to stop crime. The criminals are all using fake KYC data. They're fine. They're doing whatever they want to do with impunity. It's the law-abiding citizens that are getting burned by this. It's not actually stopping crime. But if you have all these people coming in through KYC and then they're not using privacy best practices, there's basically, you know, maybe I'm being a little bit hyperbolic. There's databases of Bitcoiners. There's databases of Bitcoiners and how much Bitcoin they own.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to cease, and you can spend or save at will without anybody's permission. That's the value prop. Otherwise, we could just use traditional finance methods. So ultimately, what we're looking at here is you want to preserve censorship resistance. You want to preserve the ability for people to spend and save at will without permission. And on a network level, we're extremely robust. But at an individual level, we're still very vulnerable. The major vulnerability there is there's two major vulnerabilities. It's holding your own keys, which I think we've gotten a lot better about, you know, the tools have gotten way easier to use. I think five years ago, if you told people that whatever, like probably like 15, 100 million people holding their own keys would be completely unimaginable. Who could secure their keys? How could that many people secure their keys? I don't know for where.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With bourbon. So I'm not going to talk about the dark pub things. No, I think the biggest risks, like I said earlier, I think that Bitcoin is extremely censorship resistant at the protocol level. And that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day, the censorship resistance is the value prop of Bitcoin”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Risks. So, first of all, I like to say that there's certain things I talk about publicly on air. There's certain things I talk about on my NIMS online. And then there's certain things that only get discussed at 2 a.m. in a dark public.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have like three stakeholders in Bitcoin. We have the people using their own nodes and holding their own keys. And there's some overlap, right? And then you have the miners. And then you have the exchanges. And they all kind of keep each other in check. And so for the same reason, we don't just want like a couple nodes on AWS is the same reason we don't want minor centralization, right? So as it distributes, the network becomes more robust.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or three ASICs compared to the big regulated miner that has 100,000 ASICs in a warehouse. And when we hit that point and we're getting closer and closer to that point, that is extremely bullish. That is something that I've been hoping for for a very long time now.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of scale. Because the major issue was the ASICs would obsolete. The ASICs would obsolete super quickly. So you'd have a major hardware investment. You were in a rush. You needed to know exactly what you were doing. Now we're already seeing with the S9s, they've been profitable for like four or five years now. So I think as we start to see these life cycles kind of plateau, you know, you don't have these like exponential increases in ASIC power or ASIC efficiency. It really comes down to efficiency. It becomes more practical for someone to install a water heater that they want there for 10 years and not worry about the ASIC.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Large regulated institutions in the majority of hash holding a large amount of coin. So right now the market is not fully pricing in that phenomenon. What we've seen go down. And when people start to realize, like, we basically crossed the Rubicon is kind of how I feel about it. But ultimately, what I want to see is I want to see more homeliners. I want to see buildings, supplementing their heat. with ASICs in their water heaters. I think there's actually in the adoption phase of ASICs, there was an economies of scale. Bitmain produced the ASICs. They had cheap power. They had them first. They can mine with them really quickly. And all their labor costs were lower because they were doing mass scale mining. So there was massive economies.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was like a little bit concerned at that point, and you can go back. I don't delete any of my tweets. You can go back. There's threads on threads and threads about Jihan and Bitmain. So we dodged that bullet. And I think that was like the major bullet. And then to a lesser extent, this recent migration out of China, this distribution hash kind of really to me was extremely bullish fundamental. And a lot of people conflate that with, you know, the hashes moving to the United States. If all the hash was moving to the United States, it wouldn't be bullish. The beauty is that it's really distributing globally and it's also distributing between smaller miners. And that's one of the cool things that Marty's doing is that they're doing these off-grid sites that's not like a major warehouse like Marathon or Riot where there are major regulated company and they're holding all this hash and this large holding coin that you talked about earlier.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we dodged a bullet. I think he didn't have the balls in November 2017, December 2017. He never flipped his hash. He was only mining a certain portion. Of his hash was actually mining on Bcash. He kept the majority on Bitcoin. If he had just flipped all of his hash to Bcash, we might have had to switch proof of work. We might have had to like switch our algo and brick all existing ASICs. And fortunately, he was just too scared to kill his golden goose, which is the incentive, right? That's the incentive that kept him at”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that are bricks, if Bitcoin fails, is a massive incentive by miners. It aligns incentives with miners and the rest of stakeholders on the network. So I think, but the one issue with ASIC is that it seems, I mean, this is the first time it's ever happened. There's like a, it's only been really theorized, but we're watching it play out. There's adoptions phase, right? And during that adoption phase, we were pretty vulnerable. You know, we had one or two companies were producing the ASICs. They were also the major miners. They were also mainly located in China. They were all buddies with each other. They'd have like eight-person meetings or they're like controlled like 60% of the ash rate, 70% of the hash rate. We were very vulnerable, especially in 2017 with Bitmain. And Jihan Wu of Bitmain knew that, right? That's why he was trying to flex on BCASH and really.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the funny thing about mining, proof of work in general, is that it's one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole network. It is what allows you to validate all these transactions, secure the chain that the nodes are validating, but the miners are securing the chain. And it allows you to do without a trusted third party in a permissionless way, combined with the difficulty adjustment, this idea of distributed proof of work with the automatic difficulty adjustment is absolutely mind-blowing. That's a rabbit hole in itself. And the funny thing is like there's a large portion of this industry that believes that's a problem with Bitcoin that needs to be solved. And then they even go further. There's some people that believe in proof of work but think that ASICs are an issue and that you should be able to mine on your computer. Just a regular computer. ASICs are a feature, not a bug, right? The fact that we have these purpose-built machines that are super expensive.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time requesting for me to come on. I was like, okay. I was like, let's do it. And we had a great time. We found out that we lived very close to each other. And we became Bitcoin buddies. And I think like a month or two months later, the idea for rabbit hole recap was born. And then the rest is history. Then I was automatically chatted with him once a week about Bitcoin. And at that point, we were doing it all in person. I would go over to his apartment and we would just rip it in his like little studio apartment. We used to say like live from the studio, but it wasn't like our podcast studio. It was like his bedroom. And yeah, now he's a brother.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met Marty because I was episode 23 of Tales from the Crypt before Rabbit Hole Recap existed. He saw me on Bitcoin Twitter and I was very privacy focused and I had a no podcast rule and he seduced the hell out of me. And on his like fourth”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the thing that people are missing about El Salvador. You know, there's a lot of complaints on Bitcoin, Twitter about the fact that it's a legal tender law that they're forcing all businesses in El Salvador to accept Bitcoin. But the big chicken and the egg with a circular Bitcoin economy is the merchant doesn't want to hold all Bitcoin because they can't pay their suppliers in Bitcoin. Yeah. But in El Salvador In El Salvador, all their local suppliers are forced to accept it. They have no choice. So you take away basically the last real good reason to need to have some kind of US dollar exposure because you're able to just directly pay your suppliers in the Bitcoin you receive.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then on the sender side, if you're sending from something like strike or even Chiva wallet, right? Chiba wallet supposedly USD to Bitcoin easy conversion in the government wallet, then you can just send a USD payment that instantly gets converted into Lightning, gets sent to them, and then instantly gets converted back to US dollars for minimal fee very fast, way more private than another, like a normal fiat transaction. And like I said, that's the stopgap, basically. It's the bridge. It's the bridge to a fully Bitcoin world. It's the training wheels”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We already see that today. So, Burger King, I'm pretty sure he's using OpenNode. Pretty sure Starbucks is using OpenNode in El Salvador. So OpenNode has like a little slider, right? You can choose how you want to receive it. If you want to receive 100% automatically switch back into US dollars or you want a portion in Bitcoin, the majority of them are probably just automatically converting into US dollars, right?”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but your invoice gives me your fixed node public key It gives me your IP address if you're not running through Tor. That's why everyone should be running through Tor. Fortunately, all these node packages just default through Tor. I would be able to tell your public channel capacity how much Bitcoin you have in your channels just from the invoice, right? I could tell your public channel capacity. And if I was a sophisticated actor, I could probably figure out your private channel capacity too through something called probing, where I basically send, I keep sending bogus payments through your node to see where your channels are and how you're connected to things. So the receiver side, we still have a lot of work to do. The sender side we're way closer and it already gives you major privacy improvement over using on-chain.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That transaction, if it was trying to pay Burger King, what you're going to like give them your credit card information over Twitter and then it's shared by however many companies in the chain are getting all that information, your billing address, your full name, your full credit card information, maybe all that history gets sold to marketers and stuff like that. It's already a massive improvement. And then the second thing you mentioned there is they were sending to Burger King So with Lightning, the privacy guarantees are way better on the sender side. So if I was sending to you a payment on Lightning, it wouldn't be easy for you to tell if I sent you the payment or if someone else sent you”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I was talking about in terms of privacy people tend to have a one track mind with privacy. Right. And that's why you have die-hard people who will say I will never use Bitcoin. I will only use Monero, right? But the reality of the situation is Bitcoin as it is right now is a massive step up improvement. Over our legacy finance system from a privacy perspective.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example, right? Like how many lightning payments are strike? I love strike. I love Jack Mauler's, but it's a bridge. It's almost a stopgap until we're in like a full Bitcoin world. And until then, if you're using strike, obviously you're sacrificing your privacy to that company and they're going to store all that information and hopefully secure it properly.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That ideologically minded Bitcoiners are running their own node on Tor and they're providing liquidity for the network between other ideologically minded Bitcoiners because one of the concerns is that the major liquidity providers when you're talking about lightning at a high level, there's all these gotchas with privacy. And that's the thing. It's like we want to remove as many gotchas as possible because people aren't going to be thinking about gotchas. That's where they shoot themselves in the foot. One of the gotchas is basically when you're visualizing lightning, you're like hopping between nodes to get to like me and you don't have to be directly connected. We can hop between a couple nodes to get there, right? We can't have all those nodes be KYC regulated companies. They can't be bit refill, strike, bitfinex. We need to have individuals that no one knows where they live that are running Tor nodes that are providing liquidity. And PlebNet has been doing massive work there, which is really good to see. And I mean, I just mentioned strike. Strike is a perfect example.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mobile is the future. If you check any kind of analytics on any kind of website, the majority of people that are hitting your website are doing it from their phone. Most people don't have computers. Most people aren't going to be running a server at their home 24-7. I mean, we're talking about privacy in your everyday life, right? Why are you using the Google Cloud? Because it's less convenient because no one wants to, because very few people will do that. So the main pain point is for those types of users, we've seen massive gains there. We've seen wallets like moonwalled with two Us. We've seen wallets like Phoenix wallet. We've seen wallets like Breeze Wallet that operate in a less custodial fashion. There's still some trust elements, but it's not custodial technically. There's been massive development there in a short period of time. And I think that improves. But I also think there's an element here that, and we've seen really good progress there by ideological Bitcoiners. There's a group called PlebNet, and there's another one called Rings of Fire, where basically the idea is”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you could use it more privately, but ultimately for an El Salvador use Lightning Network privately, what they really need is very user-friendly mobile wallets. Most people don't have computers. Most people aren't going to have the beauty of Bitcoin is that anyone can run a node and that it's low cost and it's accessible. And we need to keep it that way so that anyone who wants their own node can use their own node. That is absolutely important. But we also have to come to the realization that the overwhelming majority of people are just going to be using mobile wallets.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think a lot of the pain points have kind of been hidden from view because we have these easy to use custodial wallets. What I want to see is, and so then if you're seeking better privacy, you can use your own node. You can keep it in your office, you know, keep it on 24-7. You can hopefully be funding it with, you could hopefully be funding it with CoinJoin outputs.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was using a custodial wallet. And maybe the merchant was using a custodial wallet. So if you're in that situation, you're basically kind of privacy-wise. You're like in a better version of the current Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, because at least it's interoperable. You're trusting the app with your privacy. Whoever's running the app with your privacy. And what have we seen throughout history? If you trust a third party, they're going to be a security hole. They might get compelled to add KYC. You know, maybe we're in like kind of a honeymoon period. Usually Bitcoin custodians have to add KYC. They all end up bending the knee eventually at some point.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blue wallet. Yeah. Right. A lot of people are using Blue Wallet or Wallet of Satoshi. We see the screenshots, you know, the BitCorner makes his El Salvador pilgrimage and he goes, oh, I just bought coffee with Lightning Network and I paid no fees. I paid very little fees, right?”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, when I came out of the BCAS war, the popular opinion is a lot of people thought that meant no forks could ever work on Bitcoin. What it meant to me was if there was ever actually a need, if there was ever actually something that Bitcoin absolutely needed to survive, that Bitcoiners actually needed to use their better money, then the market will will it and it won't be catastrophic. BCAS wasn't catastrophic to us. It was a horrible idea. It was led by inept people and there was no market fit for it. So it failed. But if there's a market fit for something and there's an over, it's hard to measure, but if there's an overwhelming demand for something, then ultimately it will users will decide how they want to proceed by their own choice. That's the beauty of Bitcoin. By your own choice. No one's forcing your hand.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are other, no one uses liquid, but liquid is interesting. There's also this other concept called state chains that I find really interesting that has a completely different trust model but is more private. And there's probably all these different things that there's wizards out there that I can't even conceive of that if they see a market need, they will bring it to market and we can permissionlessly use it. Ultimately to me, the bullish thing”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think what's going to happen is there'll be some messy periods in lightning development. Some users will get burned. We haven't really seen any kind of massive funds loss, which I think is like the number one thing. I mean, they kept saying reckless, reckless. And basically what I did is my learning strategy is I just, you know, I just dive into things. So I was like reckless on lightning. And I really didn't lose much Bitcoin. Like I lost some, but I didn't really lose much. And it was because of fees and stuff. It wasn't because, you know, it was because I was experimenting and we were in a high fee environment at the same time. But I never actually had like catastrophic fund loss. So I think the main pain point is probably privacy on Lightning. It seems like if you don't care about privacy, it works really well today, as is. So I think as we use it, it'll push it. And I want to reiterate, though, that lightning can fail. I don't think it's going to fail, but it could fail. And I would still be bullish on Bitcoin.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think lightning has beaten in all my expectations. I went from a lightning bear to a lightning massive lightning bowl to like a cautious lightning bowl. And now I'm like inching back up again. I think lightning has a lot of pain points, specifically on the privacy side. There's a lot of privacy benefits that it could gain us, but they're not really in focus right now. And I think that ultimately we basically are just, we're doing it live. Like people said to me, like, are we ready for El Salvador? Like, no, we were never going to be ready until it happened because we basically need the market pressure to spur the development. If we don't have, if the use case isn't existing, then no one's going to gear towards the use case.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day, Bitcoin's designed in a way that what's the worst that could happen if they have a lot of coin, they can dump it on us, they can lower the market price. For how long? Not that long, a short period of time. And then afterwards they can have fun staying poor.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solve those pain points because if you can solve those pain points, your wallet will be used more. I kind of come at it from this, we've never really had a proper free market before. The Bitcoin development, especially on the app side, is a true free market. You can permissionlessly innovate on the side of Bitcoin, integrating with Bitcoin. And we will see massive improvement happen basically as people hit these pain points that we don't even know the pain points exist yet. People don't realize if you're living on $30 a week and you need to spend that $30 in that week, like how does that work? And how do you do that without the merchant knowing how much you're making? That is going to get solved as people hit that pain point. And as far as the institutions go, it doesn't matter. They will learn their lesson. Hopefully, you know, some of them will stop custodying with regulated custodians. I think it's actually bad form for their shareholders. They're exposing their shareholders, allowing someone else to hold their keys. So I think they have a fiduciary responsibility to at least use like some kind of collaborative custody option. But at the end of the day,”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have had a very Western driven base of Bitcoiners, basically, who have mostly looked at it as an investment, especially over the last five, six years. You have this buy and hold strategy where you don't spend. Part of that is driven by the tax laws, right? Like when you spend is when you have to pay taxes. So the government has kind of forced the hand of law-abiding Bitcoiners who they don't want to do that. So they just buy and hold and then they're making their money in fee out anyway, so they spend their fiat. El Salvador is a very interesting test case because we have people living paycheck to paycheck. They don't have much savings. And they're going to be spending Bitcoin on the regular because all of these different merchants except Bitcoin, they have to accept Bitcoin down there. And as they do that, they're going to be hitting pain points. Pain points that we haven't experienced because we haven't had this real spending culture. And as we hit those pain points, there'll be a market driven approach to based.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Bitcoin, we don't have that issue. The second thing is, you know, I think it was kind of genius of how the supply distribution happened in the beginning where it was very quick. It was not too quick, but it was quick enough that a large portion of coins are held by ideologically minded, ideologically driven Bitcoiners that believe in sovereignty that are individuals, not corporations. Even when you see micro strategy holding 100,000 Bitcoin, There's anonymous whales out there that none of us know who their name is who control that much, right? The third thing is I think you mentioned El Salvador, right? And El Salvador is like a perfect example bridge of my last point.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a couple things going for us. First of all, Bitcoin is for enemies, right? We had Sega2X, it proved that. This is not a proof of stake system. If you have more coins, it does not give you more power over the network. Very grateful for that, right? And I think the proof of stake systems, they're going to learn that lesson the hard way. Like imagine if the majority of your validators are, it's an ETF or something, or exchanges, regulated exchanges and an ETF product. Like that is a horrible situation to be in. And they will force changes through.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or we can get ahead of it and not have such a dark period where individual Bitcoiners are getting. The way I view it is very, very censorship resistant at the state level, at the protocol level. It's extremely robust. It's really hard to attack the protocol. A lot of our worst case scenarios are kind of behind us now, but it's super vulnerable still at the individual Bitcoiner level, especially if you're targeted. If you have like an authoritarian or a specific malicious individual that decides to target you, corners are very vulnerable right now. As we get burned, as people get burned, we will learn and we will improve everything around Bitcoin, including in transactional privacy.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Released on the app level. And with stuff like lighting, lightning still has a ton of holes, but on the app levels and with lightning and better wallets and whatnot, we've improved tremendously over the last two years. I think what happens is we have basically as people get burned the need for transactional privacy on Bitcoin, easier transactional privacy. Like if you know what you're doing, you can use Bitcoin relatively private today, but easier transactional privacy will be something that basically the market will demand. And whether it's projects on the side of Bitcoin, wallets, app on the app level that bring most of it or whether that's certain protocol improvements that help enable the app level to do better, ultimately we will get it. It goes back to what I was saying earlier is that, you know, there could be a messy period in between when we're getting burned and learning our lesson that we need to improve quickly.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Risk. If we're trying to pay a minor in a stable coin peg to fiat, then someone's got to be holding the fiat in a bank account somewhere, right? And you have this middleman and that middleman can get pressed, right? We had Nick Zabel, you know, trusted third parties are security holes. So you need to have a native token. And that native token needs to be at least stable, but it should be accruing in value. This is the issue that I get into on both sides because a lot of people like to frame people into two camps, right? You have like value investment camp and then you have the transactional cash camp. Privacy first and number go up is doesn't matter to them. Really, you need both. You need a native token that accrues purchasing power and you need to be able to spend it at will without permission. And whether we have better privacy tools today, which I honestly, I think it's been improving way quicker than I expected.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's basically like a short versus long-term kind of thing, a high time preference versus low time preference type of thinking. I think that short term, some of these other projects, specifically Monero, I mean, that's the elephant in the room. Specifically Monero can be useful for transactional privacy today in way easier fashion than it is to use Bitcoin privacy tools. But I think ultimately that means nothing. It's short term. And I think short term, if Bitcoiners absolutely need privacy, they can swap spending cash into Monero and spend it. But that doesn't mean that Monero is going to overtake Bitcoin. I think long term, what we see is, first of all, a key aspect of these protocols and key aspect of Bitcoin specifically is that we have a native token to pay miners. And this token has to be native because if it's not a native token, then you have third party.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, what the alt corners don't realize is whether you like it or not, it's not our choice whether or not Bitcoin takes over the world. I think Bitcoin is going to be the reserve money of the world. So Bitcoin is the reserve money of the world regardless. Our focus should be improving Bitcoin, improving the tools on Bitcoin, improving the education around Bitcoin, rather than trying to build completely separate systems. I think ultimately Bitcoin will be the best privacy coin. if you want to use that terminology. It's a terminology that gets thrown around a lot.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people fall victim to their biases and they go really deep and they don't see the bigger picture. And ultimately, you know, Bitcoin is a freedom technology. It's freedom money. And if you compare Bitcoin to Venmo or a PayPal or a credit card, we're already off to a good start in comparison to the complete lack of privacy that those offer. Now, if you use Bitcoin in a default way, you can expose a lot of financial information about yourself, which is why I'm so vocal about it. And I think ultimately it's really important for us to make privacy easier so that when people feel the need for privacy, when they get burned or when they realize that they want to improve their privacy, they need to have convenient, easy tools that are not too expensive for them to use to try and be more private. So they don't have to, you know, read a whole textbook on it. But ultimately, I think specifically.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have enough Bitcoin. I will never have enough Bitcoin, and I need to have more. And you start to come to the conclusion is like, how will I lose my Bitcoin? Key aspect of the whole sovereignty question and being a sovereign individual and holding your own wealth and being your own man is that you don't have all these prying eyes on every little thing you do in your life. So I think there's like a direct financial incentive there for Bitcoiners specifically.”
2021-09-22 · We Study Billionaires · BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT