YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Szabo

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132
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2017-06-04
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2017-06-04
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  1. “My smartest teachers, mentors, peers these days are all on Twitter and blogs and they're mostly auto didacts. Like they might have a, they're self-taught, right? Fancy word, but they might have degrees and whatever, but the reality is they're curious people. And the internet is the myth of the library of Alexandria writ large. Like you can find anything and everything. You can become an expert in anything. You can talk to anybody. So I used to feel guilty about spending so much time on the internet, but now I don't as long as I'm reading interesting things from the people that I think are really smart wants the downside.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “No, I mean, I would just really encourage people to go read Nick's blog. He is a true polymath. He's written about stuff. As he mentioned, ranging from hourglasses and clocks, the Industrial Revolution, to blockchains to law and policy and privacy and rights and singularity and freedoms. And I just learned something every time I go to his blogs. I'm probably not finished about half the pieces on there. And they're always highly inspirational and educational.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yeah, I think three or four of my top 20 books of all time are all Ridley's rational optimist Genome Red Queen Origins of Virtue.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I think this is a general phenomenon where society has not yet figured out how to deal with social media. I think like in my kids generation, they'll be seeing all kinds of crazy things on Twitter and nobody will care. Nobody will lose a job over it. Nobody will get worked up over it because everyone who's saying everything crazy all the time. But right now when we're transitioning from a world of our thoughts being private to our thoughts being public, people are still getting outrage. But to me, the people who get outrage are sort of the most anachronistic, least intelligent members of society. And I'm happy to leave them behind. The more easily outraged you are, the less I want to have to do with you. Be gone. So if you think words can hurt you, you're going to live in a world of misery and pain your entire life.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “No, that's right. I do the exact same thing, which is I would say every. Every couple of months, my tweet stream gets a little edgier as I've sort of pushed out the people who can't deal with what I'm saying. And I've muted them or blocked them or just they've unfollowed me or what have you. And I didn't used to block, but now I've had to. Because there's always somebody who will strawman whatever you're saying, get outraged and try and start a fire and assemble a mob around it to like burn you at the stake And unfortunately, a lot of the best people on Twitter have left because of that issue, right? Like PMarka probably being the most famous, but you can put out 100 tweets a day and you say one thing wrong in one of them and they're trying to burn you at the stake.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “The inputs from the environment, according to my conditioning. And I'm trying to be as unconditioned as possible. By the way, that's why my Twitter avatar is like a sketch of a human face because it's trying to remind me to be unconditioned. You don't want to be overconditioned and you don't want to be overly strong with your identity.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Human consistency bias is a powerful thing. So just when someone asks you, are you a libertarian, just say, I'm not anything? If they say religious, you know, like you don't say anything like Krishna Murdy is one of my favorite philosophers when he met the Pope. The Pope said to him, like, I'm Pope, blah, blah, blah, from this lineage and so on. Who are you? And Krishna Mordesis said, I'm nobody. But he was being serious, I don't even know what I am. I'm just this thing that's here right now in this environment reacting to”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “That's how they make a living. So if you attack someone's identity, you shut down all conversation with them. That's why political conversations don't work. So conversely, if you want to be rational and open-minded, you should not have an identity. And the less of an identity, you can absorb, can adopt the better.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I try to keep a very low level of mental surface activity. For anything other than whatever I'm directly dealing with in the moment. And one of the ways I'm trying to do that is by stripping away layers of identity. So I don't want to overly identify as Indian or American or libertarian or Democrat or any of those kinds of things because one, that sort of keeps me from actually engaging in thinking as I need to. It's all preconceived beliefs. It makes me more defensive because once you have, the reason you can't talk about politics to anybody is because it attacks their identity at a core level. Every tweet I put out, I now know that even if I attack a general class of activity, all the people who are engaged in that activity will respond. So like I put out a tweet about how you want to value investing and venture investing are both long-term investing and trading is just a get rich quick scheme which doesn't work. And so of course all the people who got really angry about that, I just clicked through their bio and sure enough they're traders. Like that's what they do. They trade all the time for Wall Street.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So, the people who are both holding the simulation hypothesis in their head and the singularity being around the corner in their head are sort of”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “There's also a probabilistic argument against general intelligence, which is the universe is so vast and so large that if the same people who make the general intelligence argument also make the we're living in a simulation argument, well, they kind of both can't be true because if we're living in a simulation, then that means that at some point we already invented a general intelligence. Like when you get the technological capability to invent a simulation of this complexity probabilistically and you believe general intelligence are possible through the mechanism described in the singularity, then we probably already hit that along the way. So that means that whatever that general AI is already exists and we're just living inside its sim. So why do we have to worry about it suddenly emerging here then killing us all?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “There's a physical limits of how far transistors can go. Then there's a question of our transistors even the right medium, like maybe to exhibit our kind, our variation of specialized intelligence, it needs to be on wetware, like it needs to be on tissue. And we have not yet gotten the growing brain tissue and then programming it. That's a long ways off. And then you have to deal with the fact that our brains evolve or our intelligence evolves in reaction to our environment. And even genetic algorithms evolve in reaction to fitness functions. So not only would you have to create a computer that could run on our tissue to exhibit our kind of intelligence, but then you would also have to put it in our kind of environment and its rid of learning would be limited by what inputs our environment can provide. And if you're going to go do all that work, then just have a baby. It takes nine months and we already know how to do it and save yourself a lot of time.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “You laid out a lot of arguments against it. I mean, another one is just what is this general intelligence thing? Like humans are highly adaptive to specialized machines and every other animal that's around today, including the cockroach, is just as evolved as we are. It's just different fitness functions. And so it has a different concept of intelligence that it needs to survive. And machine intelligence that we've developed so far is extremely specialized. So there probably is no such thing as general intelligence. Instead, what we have is machines that are brilliant at calculation, but terrible at other things. And now they're getting brilliant at face recognition, but that doesn't mean they're going to be really great at me solving my next debate with my wife.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I can do this. A lot of the ICOs are scams, and Pascal scams are these big scams where like you can't calculate the probabilities because you're dealing with affinities. And the most recent of the Pascal scams that's making the rounds is the singularity movement.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “That out amongst a distributed network of computers, and you could pay people in coin on the network for doing that. So these kinds of applications are coming up. And for each one of these, you look at like, is it novel? Is it useful? What's the competition? Is the code secure? Are the developers scammers? Are there backdoors? What's the supply and demand? So it's still completely wild west, which is both the opportunity and the terror of it. I mean, I think the average person who's investing in coins on most of them is probably going to lose their shirts over a long enough period of time because the scammers are really sophisticated. But I think the really smart people who know what they're doing and maybe get a little bit lucky are going to make generational fortunes.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Trying to create a network of distributed computers that will do storage for you. So instead of uploading your file to Dropbox or Amazon, you can upload massive files into these distributed storage networks that will take your data, encrypt it, split it across thousands of machines, and then they'll test to make sure your file is still available in the network if you ever need it back. And then you'll pay people in the coin. And so people who you don't know, grandmothers in India, might be holding a piece of your file and waiting to serve it back to you when you need it as a backup or just for storage or serving. And you'll be paying them fully anonymously and from far away and the whole transaction is handled to the network. There's another one called Blockstack, which is building an infrastructure for the decentralized internet, including domain names, name serving done in a distributive fashion. Today, all the names servers are controlled by ICANN and Verisign and so on. But what if you could split?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I think you can look at a framework of you can say, first of all, is this doing something novel and useful? Is this useful? Is privacy useful? Is computation useful? Is exchanging money useful? Then you can say, is this the right technology solution? Because there's probably 20 other blockchains competing for it. Then is it being adopted? Is there a network effect? Do people have in their wallets? Does the infrastructure exist or are they using it? And then supply and demand. And that gets gamed a lot. Sometimes the developers of these coins are pumping out more coins in the background. You don't know where they reserve the right. You can read the source code to figure it out. So that's why investing in some of these extreme so-called altcoins or app coins is very scary. But there are other applications coming up that are really interesting. So there's like one coming out called Filecoin, where I'm a small investor, so a disclaimer. But there are others, the Storage A and others like that also, that are basically”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, essentially, and I don't want to community is very acidic and they fight the Zcash community, so they get into battles with each other. But there are different approaches. One approach is I'm doing a transaction and there are five other people doing a transaction. We all pool our transactions together. And then, so it's someone who's trying to analyze the blockchain will just see that five transactions were done and these were five participants, but you've lost, they can't tell what went to whom. And something like Zcash takes it a step further and just the entire ledger is opaque. Like it's all cryptographically protected. You can't tell who exchanged what. And there are these crazy complicated proofs that go into proving who still has what money. And in theory, Zcash is very private. It's sort of the extreme edge of privacy, but it's computationally extremely expensive and it's brand new cryptography, which hasn't.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, so minimal. Basically, if you buy on an exchange, they'll know what account that the money was sent to or the coins were sent to. And then every time the coins move, someone can analyze the blockchain because they have a copy too. They can say it went from account X to account Y, account, Y to account Z. And they might lose track you somewhere along the way, but I even heard someone say that law enforcement is starting to refer to Bitcoin as prosecution futures because sometime in the future they will be able to unwind that transaction, figure out who was doing what.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Actually, before we get into that, I think the privacy issue is really interesting one because physical privacy is being utterly destroyed. And I don't think people realize the extent to which is going away because cameras are essentially ubiquitous and face wreck and everyone can track everything except privacy is possible in one realm where it wasn't possible before. It was just digital privacy. And that's encryption. That's the story of blockchains and blockchain computers. Blockchain computers can enable digital privacy to a level that you just couldn't get otherwise. So one of the sets of things we didn't talk about is things like Zcash and Monero and other blockchains that are all about privacy. I don't know if you want to touch on that at all.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Well, the extreme example of this, the one that a lot of people in our social circle are constantly peddling is the singularity example. It's a very seductive one. Even Elon Musk, who's otherwise absolutely brilliant, seems to be taken in by it. And I give him credit for worrying about it and thinking it through and so on. But it's just another one of these Pascal scams, it seems like.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “It's a probability thing. Where is it on the probability spectrum? If it's one out of 10,000, you should probably worry about it or at least take basic precautions if it has never happened yet but could happen and would wipe out all of humanity or like once a generation then it's sort of in the sphere where you just can't think about it or you'll just go insane.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I think that would be highly entertaining. Oh, yes. I want a front row seat on that one. Oh, yes, it would be entertaining. But it's used Taleb's language. Some black swan is likely to happen, but any particular black swan is very unlikely to happen. And so people are just trying to scare you with a particular black swan. And because it can end your world even infinitesimal probability has to be taken seriously and you can waste your entire life worrying about these things, whether it's suitcase nukes or another financial crisis or the world exploding or imploding or cooling off or whatever.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And Pascal originally basically said you have to believe in God because just in case, because if you're wrong, you're screwed for eternity.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, I think the accidental limit from text messaging days turned out to be a huge bonus for Twitter. Moving on a little bit. There are these other little phrases you coin that help me crystallize my own thoughts. So there's a class of things that people seem to worry a lot about these days. Statements under what I thought was a brilliant little moniker Pascal scams. And where does that come from?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Twitter's taught me that. I mean, you have got 160 characters. Everything you say 140 most of the time. Everything you say will be taken out of context and used to attack you. So you really just have to boil it down. You have to hone it. And I tweet mainly because it helps me clarify my own thinking.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Right. Yeah, because then you're actually arguing on the real merits, not on the anecdote you picked or a piece of it that you picked to attack.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Yeah, this is classic Socrates, right? He would always just keep digging and arguing the point. And you could never pin him down on his beliefs because he was always exploring the thought space.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Yeah, so I mean, this is not how we are socially taught to think. Socially, we are taught you have to have a point of view, you have to have an answer, you have to pick a side, pick your tribe, fit in, and then defend it and be consistent. But the reality is really complicated. And so if you're really smart and you're operating on the edge of any field or trying to figure out anything new, you probably need to have quantum thought. You probably have to hold both states in your head and constantly weighing probabilities. And if you're not shifting back and forth, then either you're not doing something cutting edge or you're not being intellectually honest with yourself about it.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Change, I change my mind. What do you do? So I've gotten okay with this concept of contradicting myself. Walt Whitmanell said, like, I contradict myself very well then. I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes, right? So I've gotten used to that. But then I encountered a concept in your writing, Nick, that I liked, which is called quantum thought. I don't know if you even remember this. Do you even remember what I'm talking about?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Scholars of the day just completely forget, as shown by the whole surveillance debate. I mean, it shouldn't even be a debate. The right to privacy is very clear. And even if it's not explicitly spelled out, our phones are private and our computers are private and our conversations are private. The ways of thinking, the process of thought itself is kind of interesting, right? After a while, you get introspective enough and you're like, how am I doing on my thinking itself? And one of the things that we run into online a lot is people jump on any little contradiction, right? If I say something on Twitter and if I say something different a year ago or maybe out of context and a different conversation, people jump on me and say, well, that's not what you said and so on. So it's like a big gotcha, right? So I think we have this false consistency that we all try and throw up when the reality is we're always changing our minds. And I forget who said it when somebody said when the facts”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Yeah, so basically, just because the right is not explicitly listed there doesn't mean you don't have it. In fact, all the unenumerated rights you have by default, and it's only the ones that are actually restricted are the ones that are restricted. That's something that I think our government and constitution.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “He's probably a menace on the road. And he probably takes Uber now, hopefully. But what's the point of being a good driver today, right? Especially if you have some other scope in your life where you can add unique value. Yeah, in fact, so reading your blog, there are all these other little gems that I've found that”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “It's like every time I hit a web page with an article, I pay 10 cents to read that webpage, or every time I listen to a song, I pay a penny to listen to that song.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Yeah, and so I think there's a larger point where Nick doesn't pigeonhole himself in his interests or his identity. And so that allows him to be more free and explore a wider range of intellectual topics. And so that's why I really enjoy reading the blog. And so that gives me sort of the next set of questions which are all around just random things on your blogs that I've read or things that I've heard you talk about, which may not necessarily relate to Bitcoin or blockchains. Now, you were the first to really convincingly argue, and this goes way back about why microtransactions on the internet were much less likely than people thought. Because when I was growing up on the internet in the late 90s, everyone thought microtransactions were just around the corner.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, then you gotta pull those through a garbage dump. Or your kids playing with a computer and wipes out your wallet file. And there's no way to get it back. So I think the custody has to be solved. And as Nick mentioned earlier, there are hardware wallets that are out there that are starting to get pretty good. They're getting good enough now that the sophisticated people can use them. But eventually they'll have to get so good that the average person can just use them without having to think too much. One of the interesting things here is that Nick's blog is called Unenumerated. And I'm going to let him explain what that means.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “To actually answer your question as to what infrastructure needs to exist to make this space happen, security is a big issue. I think your average person today, if they buy coin, they don't know how to deal with what's called custody, which is just how do you hold on to it in a way that if you don't go overboard in security, you get hacked. And if you go overboard in security, you're going to forget your password or lose the private idea. You're going to be bulldozed.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, you have a system here that allows anonymous trolls to engage in complex financial transactions so they can scream at each other and call each other names while still doing business.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Is why some of these companies are going to Singapore actually And actually, the worrying trend that I'm seeing is a lot of the more interesting development teams and companies are all locating overseas.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “20 Western Unions. And they're warming up to it. The forward-looking ones are warming up to it, but we're talking about going from one bank in the country to like 10 banks in the country, you know, or five. So it's still not a large set. And these are small banks generally.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Yeah, I mean, first, I would plug them into the existing banking system in a much better way, the existing banks should accept that if there's a legitimate player here, they're only working with currencies that aren't scams. Maybe they have some bonded collapse.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yeah, the way I participate in cryptocurrency investing these days, because I don't want to have to worry about how do you procure it, how do you secure it, or even what to buy is I invest in hedge funds in the space. And I've actually joined one loosely as a venture partner. And the biggest problem they have is getting bank accounts because the regulators just dig in too much. If you're sending money in and out of Bitcoin or Ethereum exchanges, it's just something they haven't seen and they don't want to deal with it because banks don't have a sister to charge you more for new weird stuff. So just plugging into the existing banking infrastructure is hard. And that's probably where if countries do crackdowns, it'll probably happen in that area.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Going back to the money definition, the debate is Bitcoin really a store of value or is it a medium of exchange? And so, Nick, I know you don't want to get into the middle of the politics of it, but just from a pure computer science perspective, like if you were designing, you know, if you're redesigning a Bitcoin today and you wanted to incorporate some of these learnings, where would you fall in on? Would you go for larger blocks? Would you go for a second layer?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “That's a lot of work. Whereas you could probably run all of Visa's computational power on a single iPad today. Centralized systems are much more efficient, but they're much less secure. That's kind of the trade-off.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “That's where the bad blood comes in. There's a huge debate right now in the Bitcoin world where they're fighting over. And the basic question is, do you increase the size of the ledger? It's the block size debate. Do you increase the size of the blocks to hold more transactions so then you can bring down the cost of each transaction so I can go and buy coffee and Bitcoin? Or do you leave Bitcoin alone and treat it more as like a Swiss bank where you only move around money rarely in large quantities? And the smaller transactions are done on another layer on top where you create another software layer on top. They call it like Lightning Network is an example of that layer, which can be used for very small, very fast transactions, micropayments or not even micro, but even like paying $5 for, you know, at Starbucks because Bitcoin, literally every time you do a transaction, there are thousands to tens of thousands of computers all over the world that are recording that replicating that and storing that for all the time.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “This is open source code, so I can take Bitcoin. I can create a copy tomorrow and I can change it so that all the benefits go to Neval. And that's a fork of Bitcoin that I'll call Navalcoin. Now, in reality, people hopefully do more interesting forks. So there's a fork of Bitcoin called Litecoin, which uses different mining algorithm, a different way to authenticate the miners. There's another fork called Zcash, which uses different privacy routines to basically allow for private transactions so other people can't look in the ledger and know who spoke to who can.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Exactly. Or will the value switch from Bitcoin to Ethereum? Will Bitcoin fork into two competing coins because people are arguing over whether the block size should be increased or not? There's so much craziness.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “More than double just in the last quarter. So there's a lot of hot money flowing in. Will it flow back out possibly? Are we in a bubbly environment? Probably. Will this bubble pop? Nobody knows. Will it pop across the board or will it pop selectively?”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Bitcoin, Ethereum are kind of the best known ones, then there's sort of a second tier contender list of Zcash, Monero, Litecoin, et cetera, some new ones coming up like Tezos, these seem more legit, but you have to know your stuff and do your homework. It's not something where I would recommend you just run out and buy. And then there's a long tale of coins where there's a diamond in the rough here or there, but there's a lot of junk too. But what's attracting people is just how much money you can make in this space. Bitcoin has basically doubled in value every year since its founding. And you do that for eight, ten years, and you end up with a very, very steep curve. Something like Ethereum, if you bought it when it was sold in the original pre-sale today and just a few years later, you'd be seeing it hundreds and hundreds of times your money and you'd be fully liquid. But this is not unrecognized. The space has increased in value so much. The market cap of all the cryptocurrencies is”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “It used to be easier to spot. The louder they talked, the scammier they were. Now I think the scammers have gotten really sophisticated. Some of these scammers are like version five of their scam. So they'll be selling some coin and they'll be talking about how it enables some functionality when reality the code doesn't or they have some backdoor where they're selling you a scarce coin but they can print a lot of them. So in that sense you know there's a couple of coins that are sort of in the top set that are regarded as top flight that are legit.”

    2017-06-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #244: The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency -- Nick Szabo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT