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Max Hillebrand

lines on the record: 67
first: 2024-05-01
most recent: 2024-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, exactly. It's so simple. Just don't steal from each other, and we're going to be filthy rich. It's a very, very simple game plan. And Bitcoin is a great way of actually manifesting that. So yeah, thanks, Preston. I really enjoyed this conversation. You can find me online, Maxille Brandt, and WasabiBollet.io. Get it from the right source and verify your PGP keys.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so having a system like Bitcoin that every 10 minutes has enshrined in it, that you shall not steal is extremely powerful. And it changes the people who are interacting with such a system. And I think that's probably what makes me the most bullish about Bitcoin, is how the imbued ethics changes the people that engage with it. And number go up means more and more people will be attracted to this glowing gemstone and it will morph them and make sure that they grow and flourish, which I think is going to be very fascinating to see how an economy based on an ethical sound money would look like. It's going to be wild.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later, at the classical Cantion effect, it also means that we mess up our production stages and we produce way more than we would need. We malinvest in sectors that should not be invested in. And simultaneously, we overconsume by a bunch of crap that we don't really need. And both of these things together just lead to a strategic destruction of the production stages and the growth of civilization. It's extremely, extremely harmful. And it's harmful because fundamentally it is based on theft.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I really like what you ended with here, it's incredible about the work that people are doing in the space. It's absolutely unbelievable. And maybe to round it off, let's mention the force book that I recommended at the panel in Bedford, which is the ethics of money production by York de Holtzmann. And I think this might explain why Bitcoin is so weirdly positive and productive. Because he argues that there is a clear ethic embodied in the technology that is money. And we can have a money that imbues a positive ethic, that is sound, where property rights are respected. That is sovereign-based money neutral-based money, gold and Bitcoin would fall under these categories. Or we have a monetary technology that can be controlled by ODIS, where the money supply can be inflated and where there are just numerous consequences that break out of this, not just a direct transfer of wealth and capital to those people who print the money and the way from the people who receive the newly created money.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can send you money without ever knowing what your address is with the Swabi Sabi coinjoin protocol. It's absolutely insane. It's so anonymous that even the person who pays you doesn't know where you end up getting the money instantly. Wabi Sabi is such a scalable and flexible and secure protocol that I'm very bullish on that.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Salaries at the same time in the same coin join. And nobody knows that you just paid these 10 different people. And one of your employees cannot spy on the other employee with previous ways of making batch payments in Bitcoin alone, not inside a CoinJoin was very clear to fingerprint that one guy is paying these 10 people and they all know about it. With a CoinJoin, that's no longer possible. And we can even, you know, we have ways that Preston, I can send you money, but you, Preston, the receiver, you never have to tell me your address.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something, right? But with Wabi Sabi eCash, the value of the token is fully encrypted. So if you have 5,000 Satoshis or 40,000 Bitcoin, the coordinator cannot tell the difference. And this means that we can finally have an extremely maximally flexible way to write a CoinJoin client. And there can be different modes for this, right? There can be some that focus on radical privacy. get great levels of privacy where other people might just want to have a small level of decent privacy and not spend too much on the entire fare. They can use it probably even cheaper than doing it by themselves without a coin join. All of this is now possible. And for example, payments in CoinJoin as well. So if you're a merchant or like someone who, let's say, pays his staff 50 transactions every month, you can do a batch transaction paying a bunch of these”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, we could use blank signatures to improve the privacy of all of this. And everyone forgot about it again until we started picking it up and actually implementing this. And then since then, with Wasabi 2.0, having a basically introduced a new eCache system, a new blind signature scheme, or more specifically a key verification anonymous credential scheme. And the cool innovation here is that even the value of the token is now encrypted. Whereas in the past with things like cashu or fede, the value of the token is known to the mint And if you have a token worth one Bitcoin, you don't get any privacy from the other users who have worth 10 Bitcoin.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without sacrificing their privacy. So block filters has been introduced for Wasabi in 2018. And since then, we've had numerous improvements on making it much faster, much more performant. And we're still working on making it better all these years later. So it's a very elegant solution that works really well. And finally, CoinJoin, another, the crowning feature. With Wasabi 1.0, we had our first attempt of having a CoinJoin coordination system that's anonymous, where even the coordinator cannot spy on you. And we use Tromian blind signatures, right? The ancient eCash tech from 1983 that everyone forgot about.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So our team will probably make it possible. So that's quite encouraging. With block filters, we have a great way to find out how much money you have on the blockchain without actually running a full node. Because the larger the blocks, et cetera, the more difficult it is to run a full node. And we want people who don't have that much compute power to still use Bitcoin.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just really bullish for Bitcoin privacy. Like, I really think we have fundamentally solved that problem. And that's super encouraging. There's still a lot of work to do, but on all three major categories, we're doing quite well. So we have great network level privacy, basically hiding your IP address with Tor. Tor is working quite well, sometimes under denial of service attack, but there's lots of improvements, a complete new re-implementation of the Tor code in Rust, which makes it much more modern and modular and faster. So this will be huge. This will finally bring a usable Tor client to mobile phones. One of the last bottlenecks to get Wasabi on mobile right now is Tor. Wasabi is probably the most sophisticated user of the Tor network, and it simply doesn't run on the phone. It will probably blow up and burn.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But fediment breaks people's minds with establishing a federated money warehouse of base money with a federated digital money warehouse receipt. Absolutely mind bonkers. Like the idea that multi-signature even exists in Bitcoin seems like a glitch in the matrix. And combining that with a federated eCash system is just incredible. These are all things that are here right now and will continue to be worked on.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can certainly engineer our way out of the problem to some extent, but not infinitely. So I'm rather bullish on money warehouses in Bitcoin, custodians. Not because I necessarily like them to be around, but more, it's a very useful service when there's a high demarage cost of the money. And a lot of people will use it. So we better build solutions that work well and that provide efficiency and scalability and privacy and security and autonomy to the user. And I think we can do that. So I'm quite happy with the recent development of eCash as Money Warehouse receipts with Cashwood and Feddi. Like Cashu, extremely simple and beautiful and way more fast than Lightning.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much easier to move a paper that says this is worth 100 kilos of gold, much easier to move that than to do it physically. And especially that paper could be digital. These are all solutions to decrease the demarage cost of money. And we will need to use all of them with Bitcoin. And that's mainly because it's very difficult to fundamentally improve the protocol so that naturally decreases its demarage cost. Like, sure, we could increase the block size, but not by that much, because a certain size, it definitely breaks. Sure, we can have to lightning network, etc., but there's still opening and closing transactions to be happening on chain, et cetera.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is a cost of moving base money. The higher this cost is, the worst it is to make payments, to settle payments in this money. And for example, where costs of using gold was very high, alternative monies cropped up to settle this, like, for example, silver, much, much easier to move small amounts of silver rather than small amounts of gold. Or we have banks popping up, basically money warehouses, who take custody over the base money and hand out paper receipts, basically money substitutes, money warehouse receipts. And those can be transacted cheaper.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, since forever, there has been a cost of using money. Economists would say this is a demo rush. So this means, for example, if you have a gold coin and you want to protect it, you need to buy a safe metal box, et cetera. You need to hire a guy with a gun, stand in front of the safe and such, keep it secure. And if you want to move it, you need to move the gold and the box and the guy with the gun from place A to place B. So that's quite expensive. That's the cost of moving base money. And similar is the case with Bitcoin when you need a computer to register your private keys with. Maybe you want to have a hardware wallet, et cetera, need electricity and such to power the whole thing, internet and so on. But then, of course, also you need to pay your blockchain block space costs. So the fee rate to miners has to be considered as well. And as we can see, this can go quite high.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Software is much more conservative. For example, in the last, especially with SegWit, for example, Bitcoin Core did not have any activation logic for this new soft fork. It simply had the call to verify these new transactions, but no way to enforce the activation of it. And then instead, an alternative client and an alternative full node implementation popped up that had the activation mechanism built in, which then finally triggered miners to upgrade and produce blocks that are valid. So this is always very tricky and we can have activation periods that are very short, like three months or activation periods that are really long, like three or five years. All of this has been proposed in between. And yeah, there is simply no consensus on how to change the consensus of Bitcoin. And maybe that's a good thing.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, whenever we change the Bitcoin rule set, the consensus rules, we need to somewhat agree on when do we change to that new set of rules. Because if President starts verifying it differently at block 100, but I only start my verification at block 150, then there is some discrepancy. And maybe Preston is going to be happy with a block that follows a new rule. But according to me, that would be violating. So we would fork off and split. And further on, it's important that the miners are also up to date. Because if miners do not produce blocks valid according to your software rules, then your blockchain is simply stale. It doesn't move forward. And therefore, we need miners to be active in collaborating with this as well. So in the early days of Bitcoin, this was all just done by Satoshi in a silent software update, not really much rigor there. But since then, the industry is quite mature and the deployment of”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, any change to Bitcoin is quite critical and very difficult to pull off. We still don't really know, for example, which activation mechanism we should use in the future. The last two softworks have been quite painful in terms of activation. Explain that there.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The question still remains what are you going to settle your future trades in? So after the fork, are you going to give an address for fork number one or fork number two? And this is here where in the future your economic node will make decisions. Another thing Eric Vosko talks about is all about the economic node. An economic node is a full node that is used to verify a receiving transaction in an exchange. And that verification of the full node is the depending trigger for releasing the goods and services to the other party. That is what is actually ensuring the integrity of Bitcoin. And this goes on after the fork as well. And you either run a node on one or the other.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another group saying, guys, it's not that easy. Like, we wish it were that easy, but the reality is it's not. If we have a hard fork that leads to disastrous consequences, and most likely, a vast majority of users remaining under the default status quo, because that's all network effects and inertia. And yeah, the same will make it really difficult. I don't know if we could, for example, remove inscriptions and such with all the hard fork. Potentially we can. We can do a lot of things with soft forks. Peter Todd wrote a great article in 2016 about evil softworks. Like we can inflate the money supply with soft fork, et cetera. There's a lot of things that we can do. And the question is, will any of these things actually gather enough momentum and such? And that's very difficult to predict.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The extent of it happening right now has not been the case before. And we see, for example, with ocean, right? They are to some extent ringing the alarm bells and saying that we should do something about this, but also realizing that it's really difficult to do anything about this. Like sure, you can construct block templates without any data on chain, and that's certainly doable. It means you're going to leave a lot of fees on the table that your competition might take, who might not have the same idea of excluding these. really tough there And also the whole SegWit New York agreement block size war drama was not so much about the block size. It was more about how do we change the protocol itself with one group claiming that it's easy. We can just do a hard fork and break the rules and do whatever we want.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really good question. And of course, it's always difficult to say beforehand. It's probably going to be a connection of numerous events, right? It usually doesn't come out of the blue. But potentially it is ordinals and inscriptions, et cetera. This might already be the catalyst because as we see right now, blocks are full with data With non monetary transactions. And this is quite a change to how Bitcoin was originally designed for and used. It has always been possible to put arbitrary data on the chain, but.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Notified that there were still some issues with Taproot not fully fixing a critical bug that makes assigning coin joints on a hardware wallet impossible or susceptible to theft, let's say. And this was finally fixed in Taproot. So this is great. This enabled finally to have a secure signing environment for CoinJoin transactions, but it did require changes to the protocol. And if we would not have had that, then features like this would simply not be possible. We definitely need to keep working on this protocol.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it definitely is. Changing Bitcoin is quite difficult. I do am pretty confident that we will have numerous changes coming in the future. Again, otherwise Bitcoin dies. So we definitely have to get our act together. But it is always going to be difficult no matter how you put it. And I guess the larger the network grows, the more difficult it will be. And that has benefits and downsides. So it's definitely going to be tricky. But, you know, like, for example, if we would not have had SegWid, we would not have had coin joins or the Lightning Network if we would not have had Taproot, we would have could not have a hope for an actually private version of the Lightning Network. And with all Taproot, you could, for example, not sign join transactions on your hardware wallet. This was a change that is only possible because of Taproot. Funnily, one of the times where I was available was rather active with changing the Bitcoin consensus rules was in the taproot proposal, the Trezor developers.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of people with hundreds of inputs, hundreds of outputs. Then we can all aggregate and have one signature, which is quite cheap. There has recently been some new progress and further discussions on how we could potentially do this. There's numerous proposals with different degrees of complexity and efficiency improvements, but at least that conversation is going. So yeah, that's interesting.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for example, one thing that's not really broken, but one interesting new proposal that is coming is cross input signature aggregation, which has been around for some time and basically means that when you have one transaction that spends numerous inputs and creates a couple outputs, right now every input has to provide its own signature. So that means that there's more data that we have to put on the blockchain. And we can, however, use some cryptographic magic and aggregate multiple signatures into one. So when you have a transaction with 100 inputs and 100 outputs, for example, you would not have 100 signatures, but only one signature. And this is, of course, much smaller. And this gives a nice financial incentive to team up with other people to spend your transactions together, which is a coin join, right? A collaborative Bitcoin transaction, where instead of everyone making a transaction with one input, two outputs, we all come together, make one single transaction with hundreds.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, these are all still research. And the problem with Bitcoin mining is you need to be damn efficient because if you're not, you're someone else is eating your lunch and that's expensive. So anything that adds latency and complexity and is just undesirable, which makes it very difficult to perform here and compete.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. This is one of the many problems that arises with a design like Stratum V2. And the solution is that there's a handshake between the miner and the pool to agree upon the log template and say that, yes, if you mine this template, we will give you a part of the payout. But it shows another fundamental problem, that the pool has custodianship over the money, basically. It's a bank and that comes with all types of nasty legacy regulations and such are annoying. So this is another interesting thing that Ocean and some other miners are doing to have a very short payout time of the delivery of the Bitcoin and also over lightning. So this is very good when miners can actually get paid instantly for each candidate block that they perform, then that would be great. There are certain other proposals for having a more peer-to-peer decentralized mining pool, a braid pool for example comes to mind.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's quite a critical bug actually. And with Stratum V2 specifically, it is possible to construct pool templates for as an individual miner, even if you just have one little USB miner or one ASIC, you can connect that to your own node, basically, and verify all of those transactions that will be included in the next block. That is great that we by now have these technologies. And for example, Ocean, as well as brains and other mining pools are working actively on deploying this hopefully soon, which is great.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of more people constructing a block template itself. So basically constructing the next block, which someone is trying to get anchored to the chain. That task should be as distributed as possible. Right now, only the pool operators do this, right? Only a handful of computers, basically, define what goes into the next Bitcoin block.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Network, etc. And that is a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin that still has not been fixed and is very difficult, if not impossible, to fix. So we will probably always see very large pools dominating the market, which is exactly what we're currently seeing, because unfortunately the cryptoeconomic design of Bitcoin leads to such an outcome. And Eric Waskul is a genius for pointing this out so succinctly in his book.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe to then go back to one of the books I recommended, which we haven't yet talked about crypto economics by Eric Voskuel. It's the best book about Bitcoin so far and second to none, long distance. It's absolutely phenomenal. It's phenomena, by the way, because he introduces the axiom of resistance as a third axiom required to understand freedom technology, security technologies that are applied. Resistance has to be assumed. If people do not resist duress, then any higher level security protocol cannot help him. So this book talks about one of the most critical flaws in Bitcoin's design, and that is pooling pressure. The fact that you get a lot of financial benefit as a miner when you are larger compared to smaller. And the larger you are, the more you will gain. And that is, well, for numerous reasons, for the cost of verifying a block and how long that takes, as well as the cost of relaying a block across the”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, so this is one problem. And we cannot RBF it replaced by fiat because in order to do that, the replacing transaction needs to pay absolutely more fee rate than the previous one. But the previous one is a gigantic coin join with hundreds of inputs and hundreds of outputs. These are quite large and you need to pay a lot for this amount of block space. And this makes replacing transactions extremely, extremely difficult. Unfortunately, right now, we don't really see an option of bumping the fee rate of an existing CoinJoin or even replacing them securely on a consistent basis. That sucks.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a CoinJoin will have numerous chains of children. So people are paying for a fee bump, but none of them are being recognized by the miners.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Long list, I mean, what would be your number one thing? So one thing that provides a lot of headaches for me and wasabi right now is demandpool. Like we have a couple CoinJoin transactions that were coordinated back when the fee rates were quite low. So these transactions are paying like seven sats per vbyte, which at the time was a reasonable rate to choose. But then since then, the Mempool has going up only and fee rates have been quite substantial all the way to thousands of stats per rebyte and now at around 200-ish. But yeah, those old coin joints will never be, will take forever.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think this whole ossification topic is not the thing that we can turn on and turn off, it's more of a naturally emergent phenomena. The fact that people just don't upgrade their softwares and don't want to and have good reasons why they don't. This is something especially tricky with Bitcoin, wherein we have software that defines money. So here, since it's just a fact of reality and you can find good or bad, but it is. Nevertheless, Bitcoin dies if we don't keep fixing it because it's pretty broken right now. I mean, it barely works. And we really need to ensure that it can continue to work and continue to scale. That's very much not a given. There's insane computer engineering challenges ahead of us and just ignoring them and not working on them will just lead Bitcoin to break. It's certainly an option, but I don't think it will happen because while people are actively working on it and that's a good thing and we should have more of it.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there have been numerous proposals on improving both the lightning network as well as coming up with a couple new protocols, Arc as one example, or state chains. All of these would be a lot better if we have something like Covenants. And the design space goes a lot larger, which is great for developers and engineers because we can play around and build cool stuff. But it's also very difficult to see the unforeseen consequences. That is what makes it scary. And further, we need to change the Bitcoin consensus rules for that. And that's no easy feat that has always been, or not in the beginning, but nowadays it's especially a mess. And everyone's kind of scared of doing it. Just because it's very difficult, it's not easy to change to a Bitcoin rule set by design. And that's a good thing. It has its pros and cons.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, covenants are quite interesting proposal and quite a useful one, though it does come with some uncertainty and some potential risks. So the concept is basically to define, so right now, if you have an address and a coin locked up in this address, the rule is that you can only spend it if the witness is valid, meaning if there's a signature that checks out. But there's no spending condition on where should that money go. You cannot say that this coin can only be spent to this other address. That's currently not possible with Bitcoin, but with covenants, it would be. So you can put some money in, for example, cold storage and then say that this out of this address, the money can only move into my mobile device or hot wallet, for example. And it cannot go to any other third-party address. And this is quite interesting, not just for the end user to actually play around with this himself, but more for protocol designers to come up with interesting second layer solutions.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trivial to verify your signature when you have the public key and the message, but to brute force the private key if all you have is the public key is impossible. Or to fake a signature is simply impossible. And that's great. And we can use technologies like these and Bitcoin is in this class of technology. It's extremely cheap to use Bitcoin, all things considered, and to opt out of a hyperinflationary fiat standard and opt into a much more sound and reasonable protocol. Extremely cheap. The opportunity cost to say no to the fiat shenanigans has never been lower, while simultaneously trying to stop Bitcoin and the technology surrounding it is extremely, extremely expensive. I mean, sure, it is actively being tried, but it comes at a humongous cost, which deters numerous attackers. And that's great.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, yeah, also the fact that we can make no transactions fully anonymously. There are no outside party can observe the source, the destination, the amounts of payments that are flowing. And that again makes it very difficult to target individuals and to see that, ah, this guy has a certain amount of money worth to knock on his house and rob him, et cetera. This becomes a lot more expensive. So fundamentally, these are all crypto-anarchist solutions. The crypto anarchist frame of this is that we want to increase the cost of attack while we decrease the cost of defense. It should be extremely cheap to use these defensive technologies and it should be enormously expensive, near impossible, hopefully like practically impossible to overcome these defenses and private public key cryptography definitely does this. It's trivial to generate a private key and from there a public key or a signature.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin's mission is to make theft impossible. And that's on numerous levels. First and foremost, of course, it makes inflation impossible. You cannot print any more Bitcoin than my note defines. Full stop. And you cannot force me to change the software that's running on my code, on my computer. And that means inflation is impossible. But likewise, my full node checks every signature of every transaction that has ever been made, ensuring that the owner based on the protocol, you know, the script that was defined in the address of a coin with a certain amount of Bitcoin, I check that this coin can only be spent if someone provides a valid signature, a valid witness. So nobody can steal any individuals specific coins. And of course, unless you leak your private keys, which is up to you to keep secure and private and not post publicly. Again, Bitcoin fails with all privacy, specifically the privacy of your private keys, of course.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say so because we have now this call that we're having every website traffic, HTTPS and DS stands for secure encrypted. Sure, we had legal and narrative debates back then, but nowadays everyone uses encryption because not using encryption is simply not secure. It's ludicrous to go on the open internet without relying on strong cryptography for confidentiality and for security and access rights, et cetera. That's why we use private public key cryptography everywhere. And I think the same extends to financial transactions. It's ludicrous to make payments out in the open where anyone can see it. It's in fact extremely dangerous to yourself and the people whom you're paying. And I think we have a responsibility to ensure that other people don't get wrecked when there's sensitive information is leaked to the public.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we can draw a lot from history and go back to the early cipher in cryptography boards where PGP was attempted to be outlawed, marked as ammunition, and you cannot export it outside of the United States. Of course, ridiculous because it's just cold. And so what they did is print out the code on a book in a text format that is easily readable by any computer. And then you can ship it from US to Berlin, which is what happened. And clearly showing that a mandate on not publishing source code that uses cryptography or in fact anything is just outrageous because humans speak and there's nothing that you can do about it. I'm sure you could set up a paper law, but in reality, there's no way to tame the human spirit in this way.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control over his keys and his coins. You're always in full control, and therefore it is not the banking service. It is just a way to make Bitcoin transactions by yourself. And that means the legal tricks that would have to be played to outlaw such a thing are quite substantial because it obviously violates any resemblance of free speech and human dignity, which is enshrined in most constitutions.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, I think the confrontation has already started decades ago. The fight against financial privacy and personal autonomy has been relentless throughout the decades of a fiat regime. And, you know, especially since the 2000s, it has definitely increased. And whereas in the past, banking service providers could legally provide a great degree of financial privacy. Switzerland was for long the last remaining bastion here. But even there nowadays, it is near impossible for banking service providers to provide you services with a certain degree of dignity and privacy. And that's a big shame. But thankfully, we have Bitcoin. We actually have base money in cyberspace. We don't need banks necessarily to transact. We can do it just by ourselves, peer to peer. And that is extremely, extremely powerful. And the cool thing is that the solutions to Bitcoin's privacy problem, specifically CoinJoin, works fully self-custodial. So the end user never hands over.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have and where you're getting it and where you're sending it and how long you're storing it. And I think that's a very important part in the Bitcoin technology stack.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's a scalability nightmare because how are you going to keep up with everyone making transactions for everything that's just impossible? So throughout the years of Bitcoin, both of these fundamental flaws have been addressed or are being addressed and there has been substantial project for both of them. I mean, look at the Lightning Network, for example, a genius technology, and it works at scale right now, even when fees are quite high. I make a bunch of lightning payments every day. They work quite cheaply. So that's excellent. And I think on the privacy side, for Sami Wol, it really has established a holistic solution. And the genius with it is we didn't need to change anything about Bitcoin, right? We didn't really need to add any fancy new cryptography and such. Secwit was kind of needed, but since then, we can really address the privacy problem. I think quite holistically, the Wasabi wallet today is a way to use Bitcoin very privately, where no third party can find out how much money you”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Email was this doesn't scale because it is not private. Every full node needs to verify every trans view action of every other user ever, like since the beginning of the history. That's insane. That's absolutely insane. That's a privacy nightmare. Because you don't want to tell other people about the financial transactions that you.”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rather than actually writing the lines of code. And so I started contributing to free and open source projects, mainly because, well, they need a lot of help. Like, seriously, this stuff is barely working. We all need to ensure that the tools that we use ourselves are working securely. And much more than just development needs to be done. So I started out with just doing explanation videos and tutorials and guides and writing documentations, etc. And with this, you get to learn a lot more about the projects and find out ways on how they can be improved. So I opened a bunch of feature requests and bug reports and things like this and got more and more involved in the project management side of things. But yeah, throughout these years, I think Wasabi Wallet was clearly the project that caught most of my attention because it aims to fix one of the two fatal problems of Bitcoin, and that is privacy. The very first comment about Bitcoin, the very first...”
2024-05-01 · We Study Billionaires · BTC180: The Current Challenges Bitcoin Faces w/ Max Hillebrand (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT