YouSaid · the spoken record

Nic Carter

lines on the record: 158
first: 2021-04-01
most recent: 2021-04-01
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

“You know, first of all, I think the layered scaling model is definitely correct. I mean, that's absolutely the way these things have to work, given the constraints of blockchains.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I haven't checked lately, but I think it's reached kind of morbidity. It doesn't really have much traction. The blocks aren't full. So the whole value proposition was, you know, we will get all this merchant adoption if we increase the block size. That just didn't materialize. In my view, they'd have a flawed vision of how adoption works and what blockchain should optimize for. Maybe you got a Bitcoin Cash supporter on the show that give you a different answer. But yeah, full disclosure, you know, I have my sympathies, and I think the small blockers won, that's skirmish for sure.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frequency of trade. Oh, no, no. I mean, they do like a fair number of transactions, but there's no way to know that that is genuine or just contrived. So, you know, ultimately the true measure, I think, in my mind is just where the market prices these protocols relative to Bitcoin, because that's like a prediction market. If Bitcoin cash was being priced at 50% of Bitcoin, you could say the market has given it a 50% chance of unseeding Bitcoin, right? But both Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, which was a hard fork from Bitcoin Cash itself, are well, I believe at this point, well below 1% of the value of Bitcoin.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they popular? I mean, if you look at the metrics, they're not. They don't trade. I think each trade below 1% of the value.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not very intuitive, so I don't like that way. Another way is that a hard fork is backwards incompatible, whereas soft fork is, in theory, backwards compatible. So in August 2017, basically the large blockers had had enough and they said, we're going to hard fork Bitcoin, we're going to create a clone, an alternative version of Bitcoin, which has a shared history as Bitcoin itself, but you completely fork it and you create a new future. But, you know, everybody that had a balance on Bitcoin at the time also had a balance on the alternative coin Bitcoin Cash. And so that was really...”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a few ways to define them, and it gets controversial as well. One way to define it is a hard fork an expansion of protocol rules and a soft fork is a shrinking of protocol rules.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a wave of competing Bitcoin implementations starting in 2015 with Bitcoin XT. Actually, Gavin Anderson, who was the guy that Satoshi handed the reins to when Satoshi left. Gavin supported this large block proposal. And so that didn't achieve consensus. And then there was Bitcoin Unlimited. And then later on, there was a genuine hard fork where the small blockers couldn't, or the large blockers couldn't push through their proposals on Bitcoin itself, so they just created a competing version 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've seen what it's like to operate those nodes and it's not pretty. So there are totally genuine computer science physical limits because it's a broadcast network. Everyone has to be aware of every transaction. And that model, which gives you the trustlessness, the nice guarantees where everyone's an equal peer on the network, everyone has audited the full history of the transactions. That model falls apart under stress. So the small block or vision is that ultimately you would scale in a layered approach with the base layer transactions being settlement style transactions and payments happening at the other layers basically.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't even think the big blog approach would allow you to be visa, frankly, because there's effectively one node in the Visa network, right? So you don't really need to maintain this peer-to-peer architecture at all. And the amount of data you'd have to push through the network to reach Visa scale is a really preposterous amount. I mean, and we have now evidence for what happens when you try and scale up as a blockchain and do 10 million transactions a day, which is still not visa scale, right?”
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. I mean, preposterously larger in terms of data throughput than Bitcoin offers up, or at least it used to 144 megabytes of space per day and your average transactions 350 bytes. So, you know, you could add a push to four or five hundred thousand transactions a day, which is not many. So if you wanted to get to Visa scale, you'd have to increase blocks obnoxiously large. The small blockers claimed that this would overwhelm the ability of any regular person to ingest that data and stay current at the state of the ledger to rebroadcast or replay all those transactions to ensure that the protocol rules were valid. So basically the small blocker contention is that you eliminate the trustlessness of the system by pushing a ton of data through the system because only one or two”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it really comes down to the way you think about the system. So a lot of people wanted Bitcoin to be visa scale. So to have blocks sufficiently large that you could accommodate a visa level scale of transactions.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That had been brought up in that status quo from 2009 to kind of 2015, they noticed the blacks started to fill up and they're like, okay, well, let's just remove this arbitrary limit, right? What could possibly be the harm? Then a whole other faction said, no, you need to cap the data throughput of the system because if you increase it, it's going to be highly exclusionary and ultimately regular folks are not going to be able to run a full node.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we can get into, and people have spent thousands of hours pouring over Satoshi's writings to find which side Satoshi was on. And you can find any textual exegesis. You can find evidence for either side, right? But yeah, I mean, effectively when Bitcoin was launched, there was a block size because if you made a block over a certain size with the first edition of the code, it would have crashed nodes. But then yeah, in 2010, Satoshi added the one megabyte limit in a covert way with no comments or anything. And that stuck, basically. And then Bitcoin blocks filled up, and people that had been socialized into this vision of Bitcoin as an effectively free transactional network like why pay transaction fee if you're not at congestion, if the block isn't full, the miner will mine your transaction for free, right?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When someone does a fake phone call saying that you're holding someone hostage at your house and the SWAT team goes, it's pretty scary. Internet warfare tactic. Yeah. But the block size warfare, I would say effectively ended, although we're definitely going to have more civil wars in Bitcoin for sure. But basically the core argument was Technical one on its surface, but a very deep political one at its core of the technical question is how many megabytes should be in each successive block? So Satoshi basically installed a limit of one megabyte per block.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can get a little violent, I guess. I think one of the Bitcoin Core developers or one of the participants in the war got swatted at one point.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin at this point, we have our own civil wars, if you're wondering about how politically intense it gets.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That should have been one of the sides on these dice. Should have been quant I don't think it is. I forgot to put it on this edition.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's not like people sometimes represent it as a really challenging puzzle. The individual puzzle is very simple. You can do it with pen and paper if you wanted, you know, like Sha256. It's just that you're searching through the big mathematical space to find the needle in the haystack. You're just doing lots of iterations of a simple puzzle.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All challenging. I mean, you need so 6.25 Bitcoins and a Bitcoin's worth $55,000 or so. So it's probably going to cost you about that amount to produce it because it's a free market competition and miners have very thin margins. So it's like if I auction off a dollar you would pay up to $99 to buy that dollar for me. It's exactly what happens with miners. They're, you know, basically competing for the right to obtain new units of money so logically speaking they would pay up to the value of that money in order to earn it.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so they have to incur a real physical cost to produce a block, right? So right now you get 6.25 Bitcoins in a block at a minimum and then maybe some fees as well.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Valid way that the inflation rate was adhered to and that there's no covert inflation, that if you're spending 50 units of Bitcoin, you had that Bitcoin to spend in the first place. So it's sort of delicately poised between node operators who engage in this validity checking kind of anti-counterfeiting checking. And then also the miners, which are an industrial entity and they basically produce block space and assemble transactions in a block.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 350, something like that, it's doable on a regular consumer laptop, and that is going to be really key later on in the discussion. But so, you know, that's really the ultimate trust models. First of all, we trust that the miners that assemble transactions into blocks are the archivists. You know, they inscribe those transactions onto the ledger and they have an economic incentive to sort of behave correctly because they're getting paid in no units of Bitcoin. That's part of it. But then really you are also, you're not fully trusting them. You're actually, if you want to run a node, you replay every single transaction in the history of Bitcoin from the beginning to the current day and you arrive at the present state that way. So you don't really have to trust too many people or entities. You can validate the correctness that all the rules have been followed, that all the Bitcoins that were created were done so in the”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So with some variants. And then the miners aren't the sole entities that control the system to really participate if you're a merchant and you're accepting Bitcoin. You really want to run your own full node and check the whole history of transactions. It's sort of something like, I want to say five to six hundred million transactions that have ever occurred on Bitcoin.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The adjacent metal and create gold atoms would be expensive. And the same with dollars. We trust that it's hard to counterfeit a dollar. So we trust the physical analog world to help maintain the state of that ledger with digital money, like the money in your bank account, your checking account, we basically trust our institutions or banking institutions to keep a faithful record and then ultimately we trust the central bank to administer that system. So there's kind of a handful of nodes. In Bitcoin, we trust that the economic incentives of the system are carefully poised, basically. So trust that the free market mining competition will lead to the miners assembling transactions into blocks in a faithful and correct way and that we are going to converge on a global state of the ledger continuously, which updates every 10 minutes or”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics is Eledger, right? Same with gold, right? You can't just produce new units of gold. So we trust that gold atoms are hard to create, although not impossible, right? You could fire a bunch of protons and whatever”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fair. I mean, and the block size wars are really fascinating discussion of how governance debates intersect with technical features. So I guess we can, yeah, so basically at the highest possible level, Bitcoin is a globally shared. It's really a replicated ledger that any participant that wants to be an equal peer on that ledger, they want to maintain that ledger and they want to stay up to date with the global state of the ledger. And really any monetary system is just a ledger with physical cash. We benefit from the physical instantiation of the money.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's definitely people that are influential in Bitcoin. There's core developers that people listen to because it's, I would say, meritocracy largely. And there are sort of self-appointed high priests of the protocol. I write a lot about Bitcoin. People listen to me, but it's a completely free market of ideas, right? I don't have any authority within Bitcoin whatsoever. I'm just a scribbler, you know?”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is people that own financial assets made a lot of money and people that didn't. So you see that cantalon insider cantalon outsider effect. And it's the same with a cryptocurrency. In many other alternative cryptocurrencies that do have these corporate entities or these leaders and CEOs, they're able to make specific decisions regarding the protocol and the currency of the asset, the benefit themselves, their cronies, etc. And that's not a good feature to have. I mean, it does grant you the ability to orchestrate decisions in a faster and more efficient way. But long term, what you're trying to optimize for, if you're creating a money, is monetary credibility and soundness. So you don't really want it changing all that often. And you don't want to have the appearance of, you know, these elites that are engaging in rent-seeking or anything like that.”
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 real counterintuitive point because most Bitcoiners, including myself, would say, no, the lack of leadership is a great quality to have. Because if you have a charismatic leader and a foundation or corporation that controls it, maybe they can control the features of the protocol and maybe they can expropriate holders of the coin or build in an endowment that pays them off and gives them privileged access to the units of the coin, for instance. So, you know, we call people that have privileged access to the money spigot cantileon insiders, which is theirs as economists that pointed out that I think Richard Canteon, that as money enters the economy, it has an uneven flow, right? And so you see this in the last decade or so before that too, the consequence of money printing in this country.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Coinbase leadership, they're not as big trolls as Elon is. But I mean, it's a risk for sure from their perspective because, let's say Satoshi returned, doesn't seem likely. And let's say they decided to spend all their coins, which also seems very unlikely. That's rumored to be or estimates have it at $1 to $1.2 million Bitcoin, which is like $50, $60 billion worth. So some people consider that to be a risk.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in the risk factor sections of the prospectuses, it's really just the lawyers doing a total brain dump to cover absolutely everything they can think of.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people don't like the uncertainty, especially folks on Wall Street, they really want to know. And if you read the Coinbase S1, their disclosure pre-IPO, that's a risk factor that Satoshi could come back. So the risk management crowd wants to know because they want to know if maybe Satoshi had undesirable political opinions or something that would forever taint the project.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know. It's probably not me because I was like seventeen when Satoshi mounted Bitcoin 16. So unlikely. And also I'm not really a programmer. There's a lot of theories, but honestly, it's one of the greatest mysteries of all time because even Bitcoiners that have been around since day one, really, you know, people that were around before Bitcoin came out, they were on the mailing list, they were active in the cypherpunk community. You ask them and they sincerely will not know, and they may not even have a good guess as to who Satoshi is.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting to see that flow. So that's one of the core values for sure is the censorship resistance. Then you have the fact that it's a cryptographic-based system and you can hold value in your brain by memorizing 12 words, for instance, that gives it seizure resistance, which is, again, a political concept. If you wanted to desert your jurisdiction with your wealth intact in your brain, you know that cryptographic future of the system, the fact that it's built on public key cryptography, and that you can encode a Bitcoin private key in 12 words, that gives it this political salience that you're now empowered relative to a deskbot, basically.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin itself is very simple, I would say. Like, ultimately, it doesn't pretend to do very much. It really just settles transactions, but people do superimpose their own views on it for sure. And Bitcoin's qualities give rise to these perceptions of it having censorship resistance or giving you transactional freedom or a measure of transactional privacy. So because anyone can operate a node and join the consensus process and because mining is a competitive free market process, that means that It's likely that you can't be censored by the miners. So that means you have transactional freedom. So you have these computer science technical features of the system that cause it to have these political qualities, which is it's very hard or impossible to censor a specific individual.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we've had people that have had a lot of influence in Bitcoin in the past and they've tried to make changes to the protocol not as dramatic as that. But Bitcoiners have generally resisted those individuals, institutions. And Bitcoiners have a good track record of sort of staying true to those core values.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's sort of one of the first things. And I think ultimately that comes back to basically a strong respect for property rights. Because if we were to have unanticipated inflation, let's say, you know, really charismatic leader somehow commandeered Bitcoin and convinced everyone that we should have 30 million units and not 21 million. Would basically be dilutive on everybody that held Bitcoin and had opted into the 21 million set of coins, an additional $9 million on anticipated would have a dilutive effect on everyone else. And that would be a covert way of effectively stealing their purchasing power through inflation.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is kind of a first for the monetary system. I mean, gold kind of has that property, right? Because the supply of gold above ground only really increases at one to 2% a year. So it's sort of inhuman, which is a good feature, right? You don't want to give humans that much control over it. Bitcoin is a much more fastidious approach to that. It really is super concrete about what the supply schedule is. And the fact crucially that it can't change. So we can't have a bailout of debtors. A lot of people, let's say a lot of people had debts denominated in Bitcoin and we needed loose accommodative monetary policy to bail them out. That's not possible. We couldn't have a jubilee denominated in Bitcoin because the social contract that we've all bought into and committed to is that it's non-discretionary.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Units, and none of those numbers really matter. Like, it could have been 25 million units and it could have been more aggressive slope or a more gradual slope. But what matters is that this schedule is proposed even before the code was public. The schedule was proposed. And then we all collectively agreed to stick to it”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like divisions, right? But so, you know, keep in mind that this is just one man's opinion. I don't speak for Bitcoin. So I would say the key number one value that's embedded in Bitcoin is the notion of non-discretionary monetary policy. So algorithmic monetary policy as opposed to human-based monetary policy. Satoshi was very clear about that. Bitcoin is an alternative to modern central banking where you have constant tweaking, constant intervention, which Satoshi felt leads to credit bubbles and so on. So Bitcoin proposes a completely non-discretionary monetary policy sort of decays over time. 50% of the coins were issued in the first four years and then the next 25%, the next four years, then 12.5% the next four years until you get to 21 million.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So it's not just any protocol for moving value around. It's not just any currency. It's got specific rules and values that are embedded in it. And this is an important point. It's the Bitcoin is the encoding of certain values, which are often misunderstood or not acknowledged necessarily. And so it's sort of impregnated with values. And what they are specifically is a topic of debate and there have been civil wars fought over the values inherent in Bitcoin. You know, one of them was, should Bitcoin be this cheap, scalable, the base layer low fee payment system with an emphasis on PDP payments? Or should it be more of this gold-like digital commodity that would eventually settle infrequently and mainly between institutions, right? So that's fundamentally a complicated”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if we have time to do all 11 because there's one with my funds logo on it. But it's just basically a tongue-in-cheek joke that the critiques of Bitcoin are so formalic at this point that you can just put them on dice. It's silly”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the other thing I brought here basically dice, 12-sided. Don't have any Bitcoin on them, so they just have a bunch of different critiques of Bitcoin on each side.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gave to Poke Hall through the little hole, and that renders it spendable. So, you know, that's protection against you spending it and then representing that it's still loaded”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. You still need to plug it into your laptop to actually verify that there's coins on there. So you still need the internet.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's useful for GIFs, but yeah, I mean Know if it would Be a suitable foundation for a physical Bitcoin economy. In theory, these would be like cash like instruments that you could use to transact.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's analog Bitcoin. We're rendering it analog, which I was like, because Bitcoin is this immaterial thing. And so it's nice to have physical totems.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open dime. The point is if you wanted to settle a Bitcoin transaction instantly, the kind of same way that Cash transaction is instant final settlement, right? You would do it with a device like this. So if I was buying a house from you, you might prefer to do it with a physical bearer instrument as opposed to waiting for confirmation on the Bitcoin blockchain. So, the moment I hand that over to you goes in your possession, you're the owner, there's no way for me to have retained the private key. Like, I could have created a Bitcoin paper wallet and given that to you, but you have no assurance that I didn't copy down the key elsewhere. So this solves that problem, basically.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This isn't a bribe. This is just a proof of concept So, this is basically a Bitcoin bearer instrument. So I put $100 of Bitcoin on here. And to spend it, you have to basically physically destroy part of the device. You have to poke a hole and poke off one of the little transistors on this. So it can only be spent once. And you can't extract the private key from this device. So the private key was generated on device always stays on the device. So what it means without breaking off a small part. So this basically is a way to physically instantiate Bitcoin. It's kind of the gold.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they are sometimes distinguished practically. Like you can transact with Bitcoin outside of the Bitcoin protocol, for instance. You can transact with Bitcoin on Ethereum or I have Bitcoin on a open dime here. This would be a Bitcoin transaction. It wouldn't settle on the Bitcoin network.”
2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source