YouSaid · the spoken record
Nic Carter
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- 158
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- 2021-04-01
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- 2021-04-01
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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
“Yeah, it's a very optimistic view, and people accuse us of being pessimists and saying that we are rooting for the collapse of civilization. Completely false. Bitcoiners are wildly optimistic because they believe that you can monetize a completely new system from scratch and compete with the strongest superpower in the military and the dollar and everything that goes with that. That's the craziest, most ludicrously optimistic proposition imaginable. So, I think Bitcoin is the most optimistic people out there.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may be true, but I find the sublime in things like Bitcoin. I find it incredibly inspiring to work on it. I believe it's a hundred year plus project. And, you know, it stirs those aesthetic emotions in you, as I'm sure your work does.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We make our own meaning for sure. I find a huge amount of meaning in what I do. I find it beautiful. I feel very lucky and blessed to be in the line of work that I'm in, you know, to have your hobby and your passion and your job just be a completely integrated thing. So that's where I find”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. You have to put yourself in a position to be lucky. And most people don't. So you just have to get as many shots on goal as possible. And of course luck plays an undeniable role in any career path for sure. But you do have to make yourself available to it. And you have to take a ton of chances. But yeah, that's the problem with advice It's just so hard to replicate it. So, I find it illegitimate most of the time.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a card pack or whatever. And I wasn't afraid to, you know, really put myself out there and float my thoughts online and see how people reacted to them, even if I said stuff that was completely erroneous or wrong all the time. The rewards to writing and just publishing content are immense, as you know, obviously. It's the most high leverage activity I think most young people have available to them. And I was very lucky and I benefited from a lot of favorable coincidences. A lot of people that took a chance on me. And if I had more time, I would sit here and name them.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might say, you know, I was wearing a green tie on the day of my job interview. And so you should go out and wear green ties. And so they might just get the causality completely wrong, right? I mean, I'm not going to claim that I'm super successful at it, but see that's the problem is that I don't think my journey is replicable necessarily. So, you know, who am I to give advice? Although the one thing I will say is that Thing I did right was to become completely obsessed with a domain I found really interesting and held promise. Like if I had been really interested in like Magic the Gathering, I wouldn't have been able to do much with that aside from build a killer.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, the problem with advice is that in a world where so much of success is defined by luck and serendipity is that the advice givers often don't know why they've been successful. And so”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I have issues when I watch ostensibly sci-fi or fantasy films that are not consistent about the rules for the universe that they've laid out or where it's impossible to comprehend. Like Christopher Nolan's latest film. You needed like a spreadsheet.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really liked the three body problem, but that's a really hackneyed recommendation. But it really made me think. And I like the hard sci-fi, you know, the commitment to science and science fiction. So I thought I was very clever.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm going to need 18 months But most of the good Bitcoin content is just online, on medium, on Twitter. So it's a decentralized consensus kind of thing.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Antinopoulos' books, Mastering Bitcoin are good. Then there's like simpler intuition building books that aren't hardcore on the economics or the protocol design. So you have inventing Bitcoin by Jan Pritzger, which is good. You have Bitcoin Clarity by Kjarbickers. As you can tell, I have like a my bookshelf is like mostly Bitcoin books.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a more recent book called Laird Money, which I liked by Nick Batia, which goes into more depth about what I was talking about earlier in the conversation, the layered approach to scaling. And that's a really critical thing to understand. Then technical books about Bitcoin. I like grocking Bitcoin, which is very computer science heavy one. There's a good textbook called Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Arvind Naranian. I think he's a Princeton computer science professor, which is really good at building intuition.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a good description of sort of the Austrian perspective and then how it relates to Bitcoin. There isn't that much about Bitcoin in there, but I think the point is once you've understood safety's view of monetary policy, Bitcoin makes a ton of sense and you don't actually need to argue for it that much. So the Bitcoin standard is a good introduction to sort of the orthodox thought in Bitcoin.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The canonical economic work relating to Bitcoin, a lot of people don't like it. I think it's fine, would be the Bitcoin standard.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all too. I mean, your average book is terrible for sure, but not on Bitcoin specifically, but just in general. It depends whether you like the computer science, the economics, or the history. But my recommendations would be, you know, obviously the Bitcoin white paper, and Satoshi's complementary writings, that's very important, is to try and understand the intentions behind the system and also to understand the system without having your view colored by some third party's description of it. Most descriptions of Bitcoin are really bad. So just go to the originals, go to the Hal Finneys posts, Satoshi's post on Bitcoin talk. There's a huge amount of lucidity there. And actually, most of our questions about Bitcoin today that we have a decade later were really answered in those earliest days. People just don't know it.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had to be kind of crazy to adopt Bitcoin in the first sort of five years of its life. So there was adverse selection element there. I don't know if that's an uncharitable way to put it. But some of Bitcoin's earliest evangelists are not the evangelists. I would have chosen. But they're the ones that we got so.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, they are the most interesting thing. You know, I mean, Bitcoin itself doesn't really change that much. It's kind of this cold, you know, protocol that just sort of ticks along. But the characters are just fascinating. I mean, and there's so many unbelievable characters in the Bitcoin story. Unbelievable.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By Jonathan Beer, who runs probably the best research desk in the industry. So there's huge amounts of history that has transpired that hasn't been chronicled. And some of the accounts are indifferent. They're often written by outsiders, journalists that maybe don't fully engage with the Bitcoin system.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I tallied up the words that I wrote in the last couple years on Bitcoin. It's like over 100,000 words a year. So that's two novels there. But yeah, I think I do. I think there's so much underexplored space in Bitcoin. I mean, a systematic interpretation of Satoshi's writings, for instance. And a lot of people don't want anyone to do that because they don't want it to have these religious overtones where you're engaging in interpretation, you know, but that's something that should be done. There's a lot of Bitcoin histories that haven't been written. Was a great Bitcoin history recently published. This is one of my recommendations on the block size war.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's my duty 100%. Everyone that has created a lot of Bitcoin content probably should condense it into a book to give it an enduring status”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very easy. It's much easier today to make the Bitcoin journey because the quality of content is so much better than it was when I started. I mean, when I learned about Bitcoin, there was the Bitcoin wiki and the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and the subreddit, and that was kind of it. And you had to just pick up everything, the economic theory hadn't really been worked out very much. So you had to pick everything up from scratch. The good news is that there's a huge abundance of content. And that's actually one of Bitcoin's greatest strengths, is that people are totally inspired to write about it. And it's almost a rite of passage at this point if you're a Bitcoin thinker to have your book. I don't have a book yet. I would love to recommend my book. I haven't written one.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a little skeptical in speech as well when someone will describe someone as articulate. I'm always immediately skeptical of the value of what that person is saying. Because if you articulate, you can make bad ideas sound very acceptable and great.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so for sure, and we deal with complex topics all the time in crypto, and that's always a huge red flag for me. I mean, if you can't explain something simply, do you understand it? So if you're talking about something complex, if you can't find simple ways to discuss it, my presumption is that you're actually obfuscating the truth. And this is what Orwell railed against with political language. You know, he really hated political language because he felt that its authors were using deliberate obfuscation. And, you know, he hated euphemisms. And I hate euphemisms too. You know, I much prefer, you know, forthrightness and clarity of thought. But most people, when they write, don't really endeavor to be particularly clear. They might be writing to show off their startup or to demonstrate to people how cool they are or how well read they are. They're displaying. It's like a peacock style display.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, that's one of the most powerful Kogodo Urgo Sam, one of the most powerful phrases ever written. And that sent a zillion philosophy undergraduates down a rabbit hole of skepticism that some of them didn't make it out of, you know, and they're convinced that the brain and the vat theory is true and there's no way to know what our tangible experience is. But yeah, so that's the beauty of writing. The thing that interferes with that is our pride, our desire to, you know, impress people and look good to them and show off our vocab and stuff. And that's the point of that piece is that I went on this journey where I eventually realized that I don't know if I'm any better of a writer for having realized it, but I think that is a necessary condition.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's unbelievable. And that's like a superpower. And if you could do that to 100,000 people at once, how powerful is that, right?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was basically the point of the blog post is that being an impressive writer is different from being an effective writer. So I think the answer to your question is humility, basically. I think if you let pride and vanity seep into your writing, then you risk creating a very noisy signal, creating very inefficient channel for communicating literal neural arrangements from your brain to someone else's brain. And that's what I think about when I write is like, wow, I have the power to at scale change the literal physical composition of people's brains, right? to rewire them if I make an idea that's so persuasive that's so sticky if I coin a phrase that is so pithy Then I can alter their brain. That's crazy. I mean, you're letting someone reach into your head and mess with it a little bit.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pitched from a political perspective, there's a lot of critics as well as defenders that operate in bad faith, I would say. But that's the nature of the beast. It's because we're proposing a very disruptive thing. And there are people that would be disrupted by it.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I take your side on that. I think a patient and careful approach is the way to go. Now do all critics deserve good faith engagement, right? No, I would say a lot of critics of Bitcoin operate in extreme bad faith. And the reason why is because we're not just talking about technical questions. In fact, most of this conversation has not been technical. It's been political. Because Bitcoin is an intensely political idea. And so a lot of people are predisposed to totally hate it and to wish death on Bitcoiners. I mean, there was a professor at GW this I saw earlier this week that was amusing about getting all the Bitcoiners on a boat and sinking it. It's like, in what other context would upstanding professor muse about mass murder? But in the context of Bitcoin, it's sort of okay within his peers because you're talking about something that most people don't like. You know, it's a concept that's alien to them, that doesn't jive with the way they see the world. And so because it's so...”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that justify immense toxicity on social media? Probably not. But it's a leaderless protocol. So the whole point is that it's money for enemies. And do you know some of the Bitcoin maximalists came for me too when I made suggestions that they didn't like? But I'm happy to use it, the protocol, because I know that that transaction will be final regardless of how odious my counterparty is or how politically disfavored their opinions are.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's a pretty dismissive thing to say that I can reduce you to a. An algorithm of, you know, with 11. Permutations. But You know, the thing to remember, I guess, is that some of the best funded companies in the Bitcoin space, the most powerful miners, billionaires, have tried to change and co-opt and alter Bitcoin to shape it to their liking. And without these incredibly hardcore sort of high priests of the Bitcoin protocol, it would have been hopelessly malleated in all number of ways. And so there is a reason why someone would be incredibly protective of Bitcoin.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I retired from Twitter. I hit 100,000 followers, and then I retired. So I'm free now. I don't have to tweet anymore. It's great. But I totally can see the point. I wish that Bitcoiners were gentler in their approach. Not all Bitcoiners are like that, of course. There's fifty to one hundred million of them worldwide, and a few tens of thousands on Twitter. So I'm not going to claim that they're necessarily representative. The toxicity, though, is kind of a learned habit because Bitcoin has had so many episodes where strong willed institutions, billionaires, the dice were pretty toxic, you could say, right? I'm basically mocking critics of Bitcoin.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I mean, Bitcoin is sort of what you make of it. So you can define your own path as you advocate for Bitcoin or don't, for that matter. So my chosen approach is the approach you see here, which I try to minimize the amount of sort of harshness or mockery. I've been known to be mean on Twitter too.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% yes. You know, I'm super, super bullish on that idea, basically creating open protocols, open namespaces, ways to organize without the dependence on a single node effectively in Silicon Valley, you know, the Twitter node or the Facebook node. I think it's a matter of urgency that we create digital gathering spaces where you have strong property rights. You have a claim on your identity, you have a claim on your data. And open architectures are a way to do that. I don't know if it'll be a blockchain, but certainly I think the general concept introduced by blockchains is a good template for how to organize these systems.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is some details about the investors. It's backed by some pretty big name investors. So I probably wouldn't use the word scam to describe it, but it's got Ponzi-like dynamics. Like everything in crypto. So there's very questionable. And then also is it using people's likeness without their permission, which is, I think, a legal question. Open questions around it. But is our public blockchains and that sort of architecture? Is that going to be useful for decentralized or alternative forms of social media?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Circulate freely on a peer-to-peer basis and plugged into exchanges and things like that. Clearly has protocol market fit, right? People are using it for a May the valuations contract of NFTs in the aggregate definitely possible, probably likely. But I think the notion of Creating enduring collectibles or artworks that have accompanying signatures, basically autographed art on the blockchain, that has totally been validated. I think that won't go away.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is for the sort of virtues of the actual technical phenomenon, NFTs are actually not a new idea at all. So you've had NFTs, I didn't call them NFTs, but in 2016 built on Bitcoin, for instance. So it's been around for a while. What it is, is a serial code, basically a string of data that is inserted onto a public blockchain and then circulates as a unique token. And then the question is, okay, well, what does that data refer to? What's the external reference? And that has to be defined. There has to be some entity which says, oh yeah, this unique string refers to like this piece of art or digital content or trading card or whatever. So NFT, the concept itself is like an incredibly broad idea. It's just, well, what if we took barcodes and put them on chain so that they could be traded and so they could serve?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you see virtually every asset class is awash with cash right now. People are investing their lives depend on it, investing, trading, whatever. Whether it's options, volumes on Robin Hood, you know, like kind of retail brokerages, things like that, whether it's stocks, whether it's crypto, and then other collectibles, baseball cards, their valuations have been skyrocketing. And so I think NFTs are part of that. It's a new asset class. It's basically an opportunity to invest in sort of art or collectibles in-game items, things like that. I think that explains a large degree of the enthusiasm and the excitement is that it's a novel asset class that people can trade and write as these inflationary tailwinds pick up.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's in CPI or not, that basically lots of dollars are being injected into the economy, we have all seen stocks massively appreciate even as GDP contracted. And so a lot of people sort of got cotton on to this notion that, wow, is the Fed lowers interest rates and Congress spends a huge amount of stimulus dollars into the economy, financial assets going to go up, so I better have exposure to all that stuff.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the current enthusiasm for NFTs and the financial metrics you see the growth there in that sector is partially a function of where we are in the actual credit cycle. So oftentimes when inflationary events occur, you have correspondent speculative manias that occur at the same time because people intuitively feel that the fiat currency that they hold is being debased. And so they frantically look around for other places to put it. So stocks, property, commodities, and then other asset classes, NFTs or an asset class. And this is a case with any inflation you look at in history, you saw these correspondent speculative manias basically, speculative episodes. So a lot of us feel that inflation is occurring.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's really the challenge with operating in the crypto space, talking about it. Overlaid on top of everything that's interesting politically or culturally about it is the financial incentive. Know it's not all fun in games because there are literally billions over a trillion dollars at stake now. So if you buy Dogecoin because some influencer on TikTok said so. You've now made a financial decision, right? So I'm not going to scold any Dogecoin buyers or any cryptoasset buyer for that matter, but be aware that they are like billions of dollars of really elite hedge funds that are trying to front run all of your decisions and evaluate social sentiment, things like that. So it's a water full of sharks, basically.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's merge mind with Litecoin, I think. If there was an inflation bug on Dogecoin, it's unclear who would sort of be able to remediate that. So it's not technologically very sound. So I wouldn't recommend that anyone stores wealth in it, you know?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the crypto landscape is very broad today. So whatever cultural element you seek to find within crypto, you will find it was a bit different in 2013 because Bitcoin was kind of the only game in town. There were a couple altcoins. And so Dogecoin made a lot of sense as a counterpart to Bitcoin as a less serious counterpart. Today, crypto is just this gigantic cultural and economic trend. It's very multifaceted. Dogecoin is one of the many, you know, ways that people have to engage with it. I think a lot of people that buy Dogecoin based on Elon's implied guidance are going to lose money because fundamentally there's nothing enduring about Dogecoin. It's an ancient fork of Bitcoin. It's unmaintained. It's probably at risk, actually, from a protocol perspective.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, who am I to question the meme, right? I can't dissect internet culture and panandically sit here and tell you it's an invalid meme. If people believe in it, then it's real.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were like way too serious about all this stuff. And I was like, okay, I'll just be a part of the Dogecoin community. And they did all these funny publicity stunts. Like they paid to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. You know, like great stuff. Like they put the Dogecoin logo on top of a NASCAR car. And I just, that tickled me so much because it's like this made up internet coin, this was back when crypto was pretty novel and still like kind of funny and stuff. And that was really entertaining. Fast forward seven, eight years. Dogecoin is way less entertaining now, frankly, because it's the leadership left, the community spirit evaporated. The meme didn't persist. I mean, Doge itself is not really contemporary meme, right? I mean, it's an old meme.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. I mean, so I wasn't like a figurehead in Dogecoin or anything, but that was totally my introduction to crypto was mining Dogecoin in my dorm room and then tipping people online in Dogecoin, which I just thought was the funniest thing. So I guess I was really easy to entertain back in 2013. But it was very playful at the time there was a culture around Dogecoin. And people liked it because it was in opposition to the Bitcoin culture, which was really serious and involved lots of Austrian economics and Rothbard and Hayek and stuff like that. So that was my introduction to cryptocurrency was because I thought the Bitcoin people were pretty lame.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I honestly don't know, and I would love to truly know Elon's genuine thoughts on Bitcoin because he's kind of sending us mixed messages, honestly, with his embrace of Dogecoin, which is sort of playful, not exactly sure what point he's trying to make there.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Converge either way. That's totally happening. And yes, I mean, I don't think Bitcoin is going to power every financial transaction. I think it'll coexist alongside sovereign currencies. I think it's a great reserve asset. It's a very powerful asset to build a financial system on top of because it's highly, highly auditable. It's something that you can take physical delivery of very cheaply. And those are great qualities. If you're a depositor in a bank, they can prove to you how much Bitcoin they have. They can't really easily prove, you know, in the old system how much gold they held on deposit. And you can easily conduct a run on the bank. You can hold them accountable because you can withdraw it because making a Bitcoin transaction is pretty easy at the end of the day. Unlike fiat currency, it's like kind of, you can't really withdraw all your dollars from the bank. I mean, you sort of can, but you're not going to want to take delivery of pounds of cash or anything like that. So it's a good modern asset upon which to build a financial system, basically.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's precisely what I expect. And banks and visa are already using Bitcoin. So Visa has embraced Bitcoin in a really big way, actually. And it's always funny to the people saying Bitcoin has to change in a certain way so it can compete with Visa. No. Visa adopted Bitcoin, right? PayPal adopted Bitcoin. Square adopted Bitcoin. Obviously they're not tearing out all of their existing infrastructure, but they're totally engaging with this thing. Banks have now begun, they got the green light to provide custody for Bitcoin, for their depositors. That's the first step. Eventually, it'll happen one of two ways, either Bitcoin native financial institutions will become banks. That's already happening. There's Bitcoin exchanges that have gotten banking licenses or banks themselves will start to engage with Bitcoin as a reserve asset.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that I expect hyperinflation, but yeah, I mean, look, Bitcoin is worth about one tenth, slightly under one tenth the value of all the gold in the world. Gold is worth $10 trillion, $11 trillion in the aggregate. Do I think Bitcoin can be more culturally and economically salient than gold in two decades time? 100%. Bitcoin was unknown twelve years ago, and today 100 million people worldwide own Bitcoin. So just extrapolate that. What is the level of penetration you think we'll get? $500 million, a billion, you know, you can easily tune these adoption curves however you like. I don't think it's done, you know, monetizing and being adopted globally.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't rule anything out with Bitcoin. So, I mean, I'm not wanting to put price targets on it, but one way it could reach a million dollars is Bitcoin's value stays unchanged in real terms. And dollar crashes. A dollar depreciates against it.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source