Episode 109 – Satire in Cryptocurrency (feat. Laurence and Josh Cincinnati)

Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin are joined by Laurence and Josh Cincinatti to discuss the value of satire in cryptocurrency, ordinals, Justin Sun, and more.

This episode was recorded on January 30th, 2022.

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English Transcript:

00:00:05:01 - 00:00:12:12
Cas Piancey
Welcome back, everyone. I am Cas Piancey. I'm joined, as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you today?

00:00:12:14 - 00:00:13:18
Bennett Tomlin
I'm doing well. How are.

00:00:13:18 - 00:00:22:23
Cas Piancey
You? I'm exhausted. I've been talking all day. We're joined by two of our favorite Twitter friends, Laurence, who's @functi0nZer0 on Twitter. How are you?

00:00:22:24 - 00:00:30:22
Laurence
I'm good. It is a 10:15 in the evening here. It's freezing outside. I'm half a bottle of cider deep and I have many things to share.

00:00:30:23 - 00:00:51:22
Cas Piancey
And then second time guest of the show, Mr. Josh Cincinnati, who is currently founder of Radiant Commons, a contributor to Penumbra Zone and highly recommend reading his work at BitBanter, which is absurd and obscene. Josh, how are you today?

00:00:52:05 - 00:00:55:21
Josh Cincinatti
Thank you. Those I feel superlative after those

00:00:55:21 - 00:00:56:08
Josh Cincinatti
superlatives.

00:00:57:14 - 00:01:08:24
Josh Cincinatti
Declarations. I know I'm good. I, I don't feel quite as comfy I think, as Laurence feels that he looks he looks like he's in the super cozy zone.

00:01:08:27 - 00:01:12:08
Laurence
I that's the, it's the mild effects of alcohol.

00:01:12:19 - 00:01:13:00
Josh Cincinatti
Um.

00:01:14:00 - 00:01:25:15
Laurence
Know you will get exponentially worse as the, as the conflict goes on. I do I do have to wonder, Josh, when you are going to join us in 2023 by finally converting to a proper substack and getting some real eyes on your material.

00:01:27:01 - 00:01:27:16
Josh Cincinatti
But then.

00:01:27:16 - 00:01:40:11
Josh Cincinatti
But then I can't say that I built my stupid static site generator myself, you know, and and I'm, you know, as a sovereign individual, I should be able to do that and hosted on Cloudflare. So.

00:01:41:20 - 00:01:43:02
Laurence
You know, what are your.

00:01:43:02 - 00:01:46:15
Laurence
Feelings about hosting Monkey JPEGs on your a new set of content.

00:01:47:07 - 00:01:47:17
Josh Cincinatti
Not.

00:01:48:03 - 00:01:49:18
Josh Cincinatti
Only on the Bitcoin blockchain.

00:01:49:18 - 00:01:52:22
Cas Piancey
Anywhere. That's right. That's right.

00:01:52:22 - 00:02:00:14
Bennett Tomlin
But you wouldn't ever trick and lie to the code, would you?

00:02:00:14 - 00:02:01:10
Josh Cincinatti
I would.

00:02:01:13 - 00:02:19:12
Cas Piancey
Hold on. I'm going to jump in here. I'm going to jump in here. I don't think anyone will know what the fuck we're talking about. Luke Dash Jr, who is a Bitcoin core developer and has had a got innumerable run ins with the public. I guess I should just say everyone about everything.

00:02:20:23 - 00:02:22:24
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Reality and Society broadly.

00:02:22:24 - 00:02:24:05
Josh Cincinatti
That's right. That's right.

00:02:25:16 - 00:02:36:12
Cas Piancey
He recently stated that putting jpegs on the Bitcoin blockchain is immoral. I believe was his statement. So I'd love to. Yeah. Why don't we just start their thoughts?

00:02:36:12 - 00:02:58:04
Laurence
Gentlemen, I. I posted something about this earlier today. You know, it's the classic midwit meme, which is Mike truly in my top two memes that format. And it's put whatever you want on the blockchain as long as you pay for it. Same on the other side. In the middle is Adam Back. We should start spam filtering it all off and like getting rid of nonsense.

00:02:59:13 - 00:03:24:04
Laurence
I think so long as you don't pass any kind of widely accepted moral boundaries, such as placing extreme pornography of various types on it, or like using it as a as a platform for a, I want to say leaking, but I think in most cases leaking is based on doxing type information. If it's if it's JPEGs, if it's, you know, various financial like if it's various infrastructure, fine.

00:03:24:04 - 00:03:29:12
Laurence
What are you complaining about? This is the this is your accidental use case that taproot enabled.

00:03:30:13 - 00:03:52:09
Bennett Tomlin
Well, I mean, historically, Luke Dash has not been the biggest fan of accidental or intentional use cases for Bitcoin. So our audience has some context here. Back when Satoshi Dice was a thing and people were gambling using Bitcoin, Luke Dash also found that to be morally objectionable and so he developed a special spam transaction filter for Bitcoin Core.

00:03:52:10 - 00:04:19:27
Bennett Tomlin
In most of the places you could download Bitcoin core, it was off by default, but Luke Dash Junior was also a Gentoo maintainer. And so if you download it from their repositories, it was on by default, meaning your node would try to ignore these spam transactions that were people trying to interact with SatoshiDice. So I'm not surprised to see him finding people doing the modern variation of colored coins objectionable.

00:04:20:08 - 00:04:20:23
Josh Cincinatti
Well, what a.

00:04:20:23 - 00:04:46:08
Laurence
Morally equivocating King said. Like the equivalence discussion of like compliance discussion that we had on the theory after the tornado cash incidents, really, because there's nothing new under the sun right. I did find it deeply funny that this was a discussion that was being held for great content by a certain subset of the worst people on the Internet.

00:04:46:08 - 00:04:50:05
Laurence
Only to turn around and go to this is not new.

00:04:50:12 - 00:05:12:29
Bennett Tomlin
And I think part of it is some of these Bitcoin maxis committed to like a position during the NFT boom on Ethereum that like NFTs themselves were bad or vapid or something like that. And so their existence and bitcoin in them potentially contributing to the security budget for Bitcoin now puts them in this uncomfortable, uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance.

00:05:13:19 - 00:05:14:10
Josh Cincinatti
It does feel.

00:05:14:10 - 00:05:42:13
Laurence
A little bit no true Scotsman but for for non to witness data in a block. I mean I have a position that approaches something like NFT cynicism, even though I have a whole bunch of them, I don't think I would find myself rabidly objecting to their very existence, especially since it is effectively an accident of history. I'd be like, okay, that's cool.

00:05:42:13 - 00:05:58:25
Laurence
This is a thing that's happened. We might as well accept it. I spent some time today looking at the Ordinal library just to see if I could put up a you wouldn't validate a transaction containing the hex data for a monkey JPEG on there just to make a point.

00:05:58:25 - 00:05:59:04
Josh Cincinatti
We'll get.

00:05:59:04 - 00:06:07:22
Laurence
Around to it. But I haven't had a wallet with any bitcoin in it for about two and a half three years now. So like, I mean, that's a step that I need to take first, which.

00:06:07:22 - 00:06:41:17
Josh Cincinatti
Does speak for me that this sort of speaks to the central point, right? Like of of the fact that there's finally a use that's driving the fee market and like no one was and I say this as someone who's like a who actually still loves Bitcoin to this day, right. That that I appreciate Bitcoin for what it is but maybe like in order to if you if you want more of your preferred style of usage of Bitcoin to exist on Bitcoin, maybe, maybe get people to use it that way and pay for it, right?

00:06:41:26 - 00:06:54:24
Josh Cincinatti
Rather than like have someone not, not have bitcoin in their wallets for three years suddenly, you know, dashing out to go make it exchange so that they can post and ironic NFT on it.

00:06:54:25 - 00:06:55:24
Josh Cincinatti
You know like.

00:06:56:07 - 00:06:59:20
Josh Cincinatti
Like maybe well maybe we should figure out what this is or.

00:07:02:26 - 00:07:09:10
Bennett Tomlin
Laurence may be slightly more prone to ironic posts than other people.

00:07:09:21 - 00:07:10:15
Josh Cincinatti
In the community.

00:07:10:18 - 00:07:13:05
Bennett Tomlin
Maybe, though.

00:07:13:05 - 00:07:15:14
Josh Cincinatti
At this.

00:07:15:17 - 00:07:34:22
Cas Piancey
This is kind of all of this is kind of at the center of what we're supposed to be discussing today. I think, with a strong focus on satire in general. What you guys are talking about right now instantly made me think of Bennett. You're you're starting FuckCoin. Or was it FuckCoin Cash? What was it?

00:07:35:15 - 00:07:47:28
Bennett Tomlin
It was it was one of those two. And that's the most Bitcoin transactions I've ever done. Was making a parody coin using OP_RETURN instead of Segwit.

00:07:47:28 - 00:07:48:25
Josh Cincinatti
I was about to say this.

00:07:48:29 - 00:07:52:15
Laurence
This is how everyone eventually comes to Valhalla. Right? You know.

00:07:52:15 - 00:07:53:17
Josh Cincinatti
Like, oh.

00:07:53:26 - 00:08:14:29
Laurence
Fairly recently I was like, you know, I know about the existence of OP_RETURN, but I don't really like know how you can like stuff it with things to make things, in fact, you know, provably unspendable I was like, what if I made a shit coin? And I'm glad to see that it is not me, but people from across the divide that are like, you know, I'm going to piss around on Satoshi's vision.

00:08:15:12 - 00:08:16:17
Josh Cincinatti
You know that?

00:08:17:06 - 00:08:41:08
Bennett Tomlin
Well, I was I was specifically trying to satirize tether in their promises. And so I created a website for this coin FuckCoin cash, I think it was and it was the website had a variant of the tether white paper with a few key words changed and then versions of some of their other posts and stuff like that meant to kind of point out some of the inconsistencies between them.

00:08:41:13 - 00:09:02:05
Bennett Tomlin
And then I went on Omni and actually issued a token in like sent it to a bunch of the top tether addresses and then like changed the issuer for the token from the address I was controlling to Tether's issuing address. So then tether controlled the token, which that was just a funny little detail. And yeah, and that's the most Bitcoin transactions I've ever done.

00:09:02:05 - 00:09:06:13
Bennett Tomlin
It was all to like pull off this unnecessarily elaborate piece of satire.

00:09:06:20 - 00:09:17:13
Laurence
And I'm disappointed and frustrating to to tell you that this probably makes you more of an expert in using the Bitcoin interface. And 95% of people on Twitter hit me on Twitter.

00:09:17:13 - 00:09:19:22
Cas Piancey
I mean, in the world I think in the world, right.

00:09:19:28 - 00:09:22:22
Laurence
Like the minute that you pull up and clear immediately.

00:09:23:05 - 00:09:24:28
Josh Cincinatti
A couple of levels.

00:09:25:12 - 00:09:25:25
Laurence
Right.

00:09:26:04 - 00:09:46:21
Josh Cincinatti
I mean, I kind of had a similar experience in 2017 with Ponzi dot Co when all of that was like primarily on the Ethereum blockchain. And I'm pretty sure like back then I think I was probably like a top 5% solidity developer purely based off of the experience of, of deploying that contract, you know.

00:09:46:24 - 00:09:48:21
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, yeah.

00:09:48:21 - 00:09:51:11
Josh Cincinatti
But you know, obviously now not so much. What's that.

00:09:51:12 - 00:10:19:18
Laurence
Yeah, I think my, like my launch into solidity dev was it's this known fact about me that the data I started learning solidity was coincidentally the day that DevOps 199 break for the parity multisig and I will leave that to float into the ether for people to discuss coincidence. That's like yeah my, my first like active like contribution was it was was fixing a contract that blatantly called itself a Ponzi.

00:10:20:16 - 00:10:45:01
Laurence
It turned out to be a, an integer overflow error back at the time when safe math wasn't a thing because like mine was that, no, we can do this right. And well, here I am now sitting in a shed doing that. You don't kids just don't do that. If you decide to do something for the bit. I would advise against like looking at yourself in the mirror and taking a few deep breaths.

00:10:45:01 - 00:11:14:09
Cas Piancey
I mean, so I think this actually gets to the the kind of the point of the discussion at hand, because I think that Bennett and I both started like mostly being satire. Maybe it was only me, but I certainly started being entirely a satire account. And I guess from what I'm hearing from both of you as well, is that like a lot of the useful ways that you got interested in cryptocurrency was through satire.

00:11:14:09 - 00:11:30:07
Cas Piancey
So it's funny because it's almost like the skeptics and the critics were like, Oh man, satire is really necessary for getting for driving. Our message home. And then the people who want the adoption are also like satire is super necessary for for getting the adoption and driving our point home.

00:11:30:08 - 00:11:54:10
Laurence
Yeah I think that tracks I, I mean my, my first like kind of reading about stuff was I was working for a bank at the time when Ethereum launched and I was just kind of curious about like this thing that wasn't Bitcoin. I admit that I had seen like the, the deal for the IPO. I didn't pay any attention to it because to be blunt, I was doing my job.

00:11:54:10 - 00:12:07:21
Laurence
I printed out a bunch of stuff and I went to a bar that was near where I was living in Singapore and I just read the whole thing. I was like, Oh, this is actually really cool. It's pretty close to the topic of my PhD. So I was like, Oh, okay, okay. Well, I couldn't have done this like if I tried it.

00:12:07:21 - 00:12:31:29
Laurence
Just a complete accident of history. And to be fair, being serious about it for a while I learned like the ins and outs and then as you say, right, like I truly believe that nothing powered someone to learn something more than spite or humor. You cannot convince me other than this. Like I have sat down and I've done like 60 hour coding sprints, learning stacks that I do not know just to, like, make these nuts joke on a block.

00:12:31:29 - 00:12:33:24
Laurence
And I know I'm not the only one.

00:12:35:06 - 00:12:35:19
Josh Cincinatti
Oh, yeah.

00:12:35:24 - 00:13:04:22
Laurence
Like, I mean, Josh's daughter said, I mean, I've seen your, PonziCo white paper. I've read it with some admiration at the time. You truly did. Oh, thank you. Beat the competition to I mean, we've also talked about it in some way of which we will talk about later in terms of satire. But yeah, it does seem to be that the bit drives a lot of I think there's a certain type of person right as you go your ideologically driven sort who are like, okay, this is I'm no destroy all banks type.

00:13:04:22 - 00:13:20:18
Laurence
I'm like, okay, this is cool. This could, you know, things can be done safer, etc., etc. And then you do have people who are like, It would be funny if this worked. Oh, what it actually does like in certain circumstances, it works the way you want. And I've also put like a legendary joke out of it.

00:13:20:18 - 00:13:40:20
Josh Cincinatti
And sometimes it's like the joke in and of itself. I mean, it's like one thing because, you know, you go on Twitter and then you can like I've got to remember, if I did this during the PonziCo era, it's like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if you just made an explicit solidity contract that was Ponzi echo? And then you can frame that in terms of a joke and post it, but it doesn't really have as much power.

00:13:41:01 - 00:14:01:19
Josh Cincinatti
It doesn't really like actually it doesn't have the same kind of, I think, delivery or impact as someone who goes to the length of relearning how to do Latex to write a 12 page white paper and then like builds a solidity contract that functions like the white paper claims it would.

00:14:01:21 - 00:14:02:22
Josh Cincinatti
Write don't news.

00:14:02:22 - 00:14:12:22
Laurence
Is currently rolling around in his grave going the fuck you mean relearning?

00:14:12:22 - 00:14:39:26
Josh Cincinatti
It's absurd. I'm sorry I failed you by forgetting, but I. I do. But I think there's something. There is something. And maybe it is like. Maybe Laurence and I are just particularly wired and Bennett, you know, given that you went to this to the length of making you look like you carefully focused on Yeah. An Omni which is, you know, now it is fun for Relic too, but, but there's like, it's like a fact that you went to that length.

00:14:39:26 - 00:15:01:18
Josh Cincinatti
Like there's something there's something I think that drives folks like us, like that, that intrinsic motivation to, like, make the joke land in a way that actually has a great deal more power than simply just. And writing about it is great too. But like, there's that extra step when you actually build it that just it sort of tickles.

00:15:01:18 - 00:15:02:23
Josh Cincinatti
It tickles me for sure.

00:15:02:28 - 00:15:27:00
Laurence
My kind of like pedagogy for this game from before I started tinkering around with programing on blockchains and even before I like started a job in industry I taught at university. Fee is kind of like intermediate computer science topics and I found a human did a really good job of that. So for example, one of the topics that I would teach is the lambda calculus.

00:15:27:00 - 00:15:52:11
Laurence
So abstraction over variables from like application of terms. And one of the great points that I would be able to make is the lambda doesn't mean anything. It's literally just a matter variable that indicates like abstraction of verbs. So you can replace it with, Oh, I don't know. In my case, I'm not saying I did this something phallic and then commits to the bit over the case, something like a huge bunch of computations on my board or something which may exist but I will never get on Twitter.

00:15:54:04 - 00:16:15:26
Laurence
But again, that kind of like people have learned something and they've laughed, you know, like and to be fair, the more complex it is great. I found that humor is a great tool to interesting to get really complex ideas such as things from, I don't know, categories, theory. The thing where like, you know, where mathematicians go to die, you know, okay, that's how that clicks and hmm.

00:16:16:09 - 00:16:33:29
Laurence
If some of this stupid posts that like I make or some of the, like the little projects that I do work in that same kind of like delivery mechanism, so much the better. That's great. Maybe someone will learn how, like, operating actually works. Maybe someone will understand why. Suppose liquid transactions are the only thing on the bitcoin network and so on and so forth.

00:16:34:14 - 00:16:56:21
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah. And to add to that, just very briefly, I think in our industry it's particularly instructive and helpful because it contrasts so heavily with the people that fashion themselves as like, you know, prophets of the new financial order. Right, you know, you got people out there getting hair extensions to demonstrate how.

00:16:56:26 - 00:16:58:23
Josh Cincinatti
Like my favorite.

00:16:58:23 - 00:17:00:10
Laurence
Conspiracy theory of canato.

00:17:00:13 - 00:17:11:21
Josh Cincinatti
I just I look, there's ample proof there's ample proof to suggest that, you know, some founders out there just might might feel like the next is coming.

00:17:11:25 - 00:17:13:09
Josh Cincinatti
No, no, no, no, no.

00:17:13:17 - 00:17:17:24
Laurence
No bulls. Josh. Oh, name Moshe got hair extensions before he launched. That tells.

00:17:20:18 - 00:17:20:24
Josh Cincinatti
And.

00:17:20:24 - 00:17:35:00
Laurence
Like Samson, it has bumped the price. There is ample evidence. To be fair, I will share this with you later. A two year gap where there is no photos of him and he comes out with far more hair growth that he could have gotten in that time. It is a wonderful.

00:17:35:00 - 00:17:41:11
Josh Cincinatti
Theory and they're not saying that if you pull the hair extensions out, Aptos will crash. We're not saying that.

00:17:42:04 - 00:17:42:09
Laurence
I.

00:17:42:11 - 00:18:03:01
Josh Cincinatti
Might happen, you know, incidentally. But like, you know, it's not up to us to figure that out. Oh, my. But but all of which say and I can't take you can't take credit. There's someone in a group chat that. Yeah. Kanata on Twitter who came up with this theory. It's hilarious. But but there is but I think in our industry there are these people that style themselves.

00:18:03:01 - 00:18:32:10
Josh Cincinatti
That way they say we can fix everything that's wrong with the world we are, you know, the next coming of Satoshi slash, Jesus, slash, whatever. And and they take themselves far too seriously. And I think it's like, you know, frankly, like we owe it to society at large to bring them down a peg and to frankly, like, you know, to also add that kind of levity to an industry that that, you know, money is serious business.

00:18:32:10 - 00:18:53:17
Josh Cincinatti
But but the people that make these kinds of grandiose claims and that got very lucky in a lot of their wealth and timing that, you know, in their minds then turns them into a transcendent figure is like something that I think should be heavily critiqued and and and, you know, just keep keep people honest. Right.

00:18:54:04 - 00:19:12:14
Laurence
I think this feeds back to like the critics that I respect are the ones that are funny and don't take themselves seriously. I could name at least half a dozen off the top of my head that are just it's just it's a serious it's a it's a crusade. Right. You know, like what we need to do is we need to go to Jerusalem and burn it down.

00:19:13:24 - 00:19:25:11
Laurence
I do I do find myself far more willing to both break bread and talk and agree on several points with people who are just like, it's a bit shit, isn't it?

00:19:25:11 - 00:19:54:11
Cas Piancey
It just both. Both things that I instantly am thinking of right now is one that Laurence It was you who said, you know, it's about committing to the bit. And I think, for instance, Cas coin, I just I constantly talk about Cas coin. I constantly talk about it relentlessly. And and then on top of that, Bennett went out and bought Cas Coin Foundation dot org and we decided, Oh yeah, we can utilize this to link to our stuff.

00:19:54:11 - 00:20:16:26
Cas Piancey
And like it is about committing to the bit and it is about turning that into something while goofy. Hopefully like still people want to look into your stuff more and while it's not like it's not about taking us seriously all the time, but it is about being willing to like accept that some of our points might be fair, even if they're funny.

00:20:17:14 - 00:20:37:10
Laurence
Yeah, well, I will accept from areas that Cas What you've done is you've allowed Bennett to take one of the fundamental lessons of crypto traders to heart, which is to turn your friends into exit liquidity.

00:20:37:10 - 00:20:40:02
Bennett Tomlin
So, so.

00:20:40:14 - 00:20:41:25
Josh Cincinatti
But I was too much. Sorry.

00:20:42:23 - 00:20:51:25
Bennett Tomlin
So for you too is is instruction is showing people some version of the truth the light or something, the goal of the satire? Yeah.

00:20:52:18 - 00:21:15:26
Josh Cincinatti
I would say that's part of it. I think. I think so much about humor and satire is sort of exposing things that, you know, are true in a surprising context that you hadn't thought about before. Right. And then it's that reveal that makes it like the reveal of the, you know, of whatever you're writing or building that people then get exposed to.

00:21:15:26 - 00:21:32:29
Josh Cincinatti
Then seeing that, that like, oh yeah, I guess that is like I never thought about it that way, but that is like that is funny that it's true, right? I made some joke about ponzi co like, like just thinking about the Ponzi a white paper. And I had a graph of like, this is the graph of every, every company that has ever existed or will exist.

00:21:32:29 - 00:21:36:25
Josh Cincinatti
And it showed like value up and then down. And I said, yeah, the.

00:21:36:26 - 00:21:37:12
Josh Cincinatti
Your.

00:21:37:24 - 00:21:40:08
Josh Cincinatti
PonziCo is that we can compress all of this.

00:21:41:19 - 00:21:42:00
Josh Cincinatti
To it.

00:21:42:16 - 00:22:00:15
Josh Cincinatti
Much more rapidly. That's the power of technology. Right. And, you know, there's like a sort of truth there to what people were, you know, flinging at the time and cryptocurrency and and sort of like a broader idea of like what constitutes value in financial markets to maybe.

00:22:01:00 - 00:22:02:29
Laurence
You were Twitter's first acceleration test.

00:22:03:20 - 00:22:05:18
Josh Cincinatti
Yes, yes. Yeah.

00:22:06:05 - 00:22:10:26
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah. Crypto acceleration is. That's right. Terrible breed.

00:22:11:08 - 00:22:13:20
Josh Cincinatti
Of it's.

00:22:14:20 - 00:22:50:14
Laurence
Yeah. It's it's curious. I though I certainly have a vision that is fairly program. So in certain contexts I, I've never felt like going for Ted Kaczynski and writing a manifesto mainly because I haven't gone to a good cabin. But I do think what I always find is that I walk both worlds in the actually like no, I'm quite pro crypto and I can also be like know a lot of this is trash and I think that's a value to me at least where I am and like I have no reach.

00:22:50:14 - 00:23:10:27
Laurence
I'm just a dude who's screaming into the void on Twitter that like, much like anyone else, I am the guy who in my friend group people will ask about Is this trash, is this good? Can you explain this? And a role that I have felt since I learned to touch type at five years old and all of a sudden that made me like my machine's busted.

00:23:10:27 - 00:23:37:05
Laurence
I think it's 1993. This happened. And I suspect as the future goes on is that I'm currently at law school attempting to to get involved in like the actual conversation of how this looks in the United Kingdom. I figure that the US can burn in this respect. It's not my problem. Humor me. Play a role there in being able to kind of, you know, get an analogy across or what have you.

00:23:38:14 - 00:23:58:09
Laurence
I think when it comes to to money in particular, there is such a a garden is about this like guilds a Lindy right look at what happened to Josh Browder when he tried to bring an eye box into a courtroom. Right. Immediately got his legs broken and thrown in jail.

00:23:58:13 - 00:23:59:07
Josh Cincinatti
Fucking for.

00:23:59:11 - 00:24:25:06
Laurence
The same thing. Appeals like applying to to banks and financial infrastructure. Right. There's it's I don't think any jury in the world is going to convict me of saying that there is a vast intertwining between political structures and banking. And I'm not saying there's a better way. Some of the stuff that's in crypto is a better way. Some of it is absolutely atrocious and everyone involved should be shot.

00:24:25:06 - 00:24:47:18
Laurence
There's a discussion to be had about what those form up your parts are. And but again, the thing is, as soon as you you start saying, I have to couch every conversation where I meet someone new and they say, What do you do? And I don't want to give the answer. If I'm an exotic derivatives engineer, I find myself apologizing where I go.

00:24:47:18 - 00:24:59:23
Laurence
This might be contentious, but I'm a crypto dev or on the crypto advocate. So like if they're like computer science background, I might like go into a bit more detail on some of the stuff I worked on.

00:25:00:26 - 00:25:14:03
Cas Piancey
And even even as a like even as a just a journalist, I'm like, yeah, I'm a journalist who follows cryptocurrency and fintech and I, I watch the lights just turn off and they're.

00:25:14:03 - 00:25:19:18
Laurence
Like, I'm the other.

00:25:19:18 - 00:25:27:24
Cas Piancey
But you're giving, you're giving too much credit. You're giving too much for the part of the. I would have no fucking clue what I'm talking about.

00:25:27:24 - 00:25:57:24
Laurence
I do find that again, money is money is inherently political. Money is inherently about power. And I do have some some takes that would probably lean towards the radical in terms of like the the seizing of such power in like, say, the subversion of like financial surveillance. That doesn't mean that I can't catch all in-jokes when I want to talk about points.

00:25:57:26 - 00:26:06:05
Laurence
And I realize that like, this is far more nuanced that will get across than like my lazy ass 9 a.m. posting on Twitter.

00:26:06:05 - 00:26:06:16
Josh Cincinatti
But I want to.

00:26:06:16 - 00:26:30:20
Laurence
Say like that's the goal. I'll try and give a talk. Like the last talk that I gave the crypto conference was about the various hacks that had happened in the year before, and I hadn't Ernest Hemingway quote as the title, you know, never sent to know for Whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the if I can continue doing that and and being informative and possibly offending a bunch of people on the way, I consider that well spent.

00:26:30:26 - 00:26:37:05
Laurence
My wife will disagree and my child will disagree, but I don't know. It's all about the cloud.

00:26:37:15 - 00:26:39:02
Josh Cincinatti
We are.

00:26:41:26 - 00:26:43:10
Josh Cincinatti
Definitely going to keep that clip.

00:26:44:27 - 00:26:46:04
Cas Piancey
Clip to childhood.

00:26:47:03 - 00:26:48:03
Josh Cincinatti
I was showing that.

00:26:48:12 - 00:26:48:29
Laurence
Child that.

00:26:49:02 - 00:26:55:12
Josh Cincinatti
Oh, there you go, run, run. The gamut of. Yeah, yeah.

00:26:56:21 - 00:27:18:06
Josh Cincinatti
But there is like I like that. Yeah. I will say I agree with Laurence there too. Like in large part because I am, you know, there's so much shit in this industry, but I'm I'm in it because and you know, you know this from the last, though, the last podcast that we all did together. But, you know, I'm in it for private, you know, private finance and private money.

00:27:18:28 - 00:27:49:26
Josh Cincinatti
And I'm terrified of the world that might exist if we don't figure that technology out and make it accessible to regular people. Right. And I think that the more like the more that like shitty people do shitty things in our industry, it really takes away the value of the real honest to God, improvements that are happening that could help, you know, people in society more broadly.

00:27:49:26 - 00:27:51:03
Josh Cincinatti
Right. Well.

00:27:51:13 - 00:28:17:03
Cas Piancey
I can I can I push you on this? I actually would love to get your further opinion on this, because I was talking about this earlier today. I think there's a I don't know if it's a theory or something, but there's this idea that bad money pushes good money out of systems. This idea that like, oh, eventually all the good all the good will we can if we just ferment the good and get rid of all this bad muck that's that's in here.

00:28:17:03 - 00:28:44:08
Cas Piancey
I mean, as you guys have said, 95% of it is fucking viruses and bacteria just molesting your your fermenting process. So but let's pretend you got rid of all of that. Like, if we look at a legacy system, a legacy traditional finance system and banking, like a lot of the bad stuff is all still there. All of the bad actors are still there.

00:28:44:15 - 00:28:55:07
Cas Piancey
All of the bad shit that was happening a century ago is pretty much still happening. Like, isn't it a little too optimistic to suggest that these bad actors are going to ever exit?

00:28:55:13 - 00:29:14:23
Laurence
I think yeah. I think that is too optimistic. And speaking as someone with personal experience who has worked in a bank with such a financial system in the back, you know, I worked on the risk management side. We found that like I'm speaking from complete personal experience, from like a recollection of a GitHub that has been three or four years since I've looked at it.

00:29:15:01 - 00:29:39:13
Laurence
All right. A lot of I want to call it bad or outdated code still existed. And to be blunt, it was nothing more than social pressure that prevented people from interfacing with it because it was like, well, you know, you use this, things are going to go wrong. And this is that this was helped by the fact and this is often counter to my own point that it was a gated system.

00:29:39:13 - 00:29:58:01
Laurence
We knew who the participants were mostly because we had get blame and a phrase that was effectively a swearword whenever someone brought it up in a conversation in a sprint because it knew that things were about to get thrown, I think even in the context of that, you know, there's significant pressure to go like, okay, this library's buggered.

00:29:58:04 - 00:30:14:27
Laurence
And then to be fair, this is the case for anything like existing Python stuff, stuff that you can pull from NPM or what have you. It's like, okay, it just doesn't work anymore. It's a bit rotted or it's just out of like common practice. I think it is naive to say that's in an open system. You would be able to eliminate that completely.

00:30:15:29 - 00:30:41:20
Laurence
I have personal experience of trying like my own swing at making setting precedent for that kind of bluntly the fuck around and find out thing. I will not reference the particular case, but I have spent significant time and effort trying to like dissuade efforts in this case. You come along and sure you can. You can put you can put societal pressure on it.

00:30:41:20 - 00:31:01:02
Laurence
But again, this is the joy and the curse of an open system. And then it was allowed to create a fucking that had a purpose. I mean, it was it was purely satirical in nature. He'll say that until he prints millions. And, and so.

00:31:01:04 - 00:31:01:16
Josh Cincinatti
Like the.

00:31:01:16 - 00:31:23:15
Laurence
Great work that I've done that really taught me about things like the Ethereum virtual machine and some of like the more esoteric parts of other chains has been done for the bit. Should I have been allowed to do it? Categorically not. And I grateful that I was given the chance to. Yes, I probably come from a different standpoint in that like, oh, this was educational and I never like showed stuff to people.

00:31:23:15 - 00:31:48:27
Laurence
I was like, Does it work? You know, can I tinker about I don't see a way short of the Eye of Sauron exact kind of thing that I think is anathema to my own views on like the connection between politics and money that you can dissuade this thing with in any meaningful kind of like force. I think the way you do it is through social pressure.

00:31:49:11 - 00:32:01:06
Laurence
And with that said, there are always going to be the desperate, the gambling, the punting, who are like, Yeah, you know what, fine, I'll do it. This time will be different. And Christ, do.

00:32:01:06 - 00:32:22:03
Cas Piancey
You think social pressure is even effective anymore? Like I. I guess I see Ben and I, our last episode we're talking about Don Juan and how, like, the fact he hasn't been arrested is enough for people to be like, you got to support this guy. Like, you have to, you know, and it's like, how broken is this? Like, how completely fucking broken is this that?

00:32:22:03 - 00:32:25:07
Cas Piancey
That is the the low bar, right? Like that's the bar.

00:32:25:08 - 00:33:01:01
Laurence
I think social pressure works within very small groups and but I say very small groups. I'm talking on the Order of the Dunbar number when when the number came out, when, when the pitch deck came out from Su Zhu and Kyle Davies about the absolutely cost platform for trading debts and like such such magical nonsense, I ran a poll and I said, if you were given the opportunity to participate in a seed round for an amount that you were comfortable with, provided that you were going to be publicly identified as being on the cap table, would you do it?

00:33:01:14 - 00:33:21:01
Laurence
And the answers were yes. Happily, yes, reluctantly, no, reluctantly, no, happily. And it was about 20 people that were like 20% of people out of about 500 that were like, absolutely, sign me up. And one of the responses that I got that I found quite telling was, I'm a businessman, not a priest. You're not a businessman. You're you're pressing buttons on the computer.

00:33:21:28 - 00:33:47:02
Laurence
Your wallet has floki. And as well, don't I? But I find that telling I floki doesn't it doesn't do it for you lads. All right. Okay. I do think that there is this kind of implicit. Well, you know, it's a market alpha led. I don't want to call it arbitrage that they'd be like, well, if I don't do it, someone else will.

00:33:47:06 - 00:34:01:06
Laurence
Therefore, you know, even though I know it's a terrible idea, I mean, we could see this with with lunar as well, going back to dark one that, you know, the great thing about algorithmic stablecoins is that a true algorithmic stablecoin has never been tried.

00:34:01:06 - 00:34:05:04
Bennett Tomlin
I think I've used that line before.

00:34:05:04 - 00:34:06:04
Josh Cincinatti
I have no idea if.

00:34:06:04 - 00:34:08:14
Laurence
That's a goal for you or something else.

00:34:08:14 - 00:34:09:05
Josh Cincinatti
I apologize.

00:34:09:09 - 00:34:30:13
Bennett Tomlin
But like, no, no, no, it's very true because like, so sorry to interrupt, but I think there is this phenomenon with algorithmic stablecoins and other unsustainable schemes that whenever they fail there is a bit of the. No, that one wasn't real though. Everyone knew that one was real because all the people who did it, all of us smart people, knew it was broken and those people deserved it.

00:34:31:20 - 00:34:40:15
Bennett Tomlin
And it doesn't matter which group of people and how important they were, how central to the industry were invested in the stupid thing because it wasn't real and everyone knew it.

00:34:41:00 - 00:34:41:02
Josh Cincinatti
Was.

00:34:41:04 - 00:34:57:04
Laurence
Not true. And your age has never been tried. Is an undercurrent between basis, cash and Luna. Every dollar I will I will take my knocks for not being vocal about this at the time, simply because I and at one point I did buy some wrapped Luna I did.

00:34:58:08 - 00:34:58:26
Cas Piancey
Wrapped.

00:34:58:27 - 00:35:04:09
Laurence
Simply because I was like, Well, okay, fine, you know, I might as well my number go up.

00:35:05:03 - 00:35:07:06
Cas Piancey
You even went the right route. You like you?

00:35:07:15 - 00:35:08:20
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah. Yeah, I was going.

00:35:08:20 - 00:35:10:10
Laurence
To break Luna. Fuck off.

00:35:12:14 - 00:35:13:05
Josh Cincinatti
The.

00:35:14:28 - 00:35:41:19
Laurence
Mapping back to the ultimate point. I don't know if so, like, if social deterrence is really going to do anything for it. I think there are subsets that you can get. Like I like I can identify a group on Twitter that, you know, can think in a certain way. I can't speak for a shopkeeper in Hyderabad. I cannot speak for the single father in in Bangkok.

00:35:41:19 - 00:36:04:28
Laurence
I cannot speak for the waitress in the Midwest in terms of, you know, this is what you should do and not doing this is a like a good thing. And this is when I say that and I put moral weight to it, I'm no better than that in a clearinghouse that decides what fund should and shouldn't be, shouldn't be permitted.

00:36:05:02 - 00:36:31:12
Josh Cincinatti
And I think that's that's also it's that like sort of sense of just wild permission looseness that that affords all of those people the opportunity to participate in these systems. Right. But also gives them, you know, the possibility of being hoodwinked by them or, you know, hoodwinked by the scammers in the in these systems. That's like the real double edged sword.

00:36:31:14 - 00:36:46:13
Josh Cincinatti
Ultimately, you know, I think that maybe my my views have changed somewhat because when I first got into this space, I was like, you know, hell yeah, code is law down with everything, the bitcoin standard, yadda, yadda, yadda. Right. Like I was just really starry eyed and.

00:36:46:28 - 00:36:47:24
Laurence
All right, look.

00:36:48:15 - 00:37:21:20
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, only three kids for me, not eight. So I'm like three eight, seven Luke at best. So they by pure progeny standards. Anyway, I but no all at it like I definitely there is something alluring about that because you know, I think especially as someone who like got into, you know, started my career in the midst of the great financial collapse, like graduated from grad school in 2009.

00:37:21:20 - 00:37:52:09
Josh Cincinatti
Like, well, like, you know, I just felt like so, you know, so betrayed by the system and yadda yadda yadda. Right. But I've seen like, you know, you sort of see what happens in a world with like complete and utter lawlessness, right? And you see what that permissionless ness can bring in a very negative way. And it's it does it does give you like pause over what sort of like, you know, I don't I don't really want a system with pure anarchy.

00:37:52:09 - 00:38:13:22
Josh Cincinatti
Ultimately. Right. But I, I can admit also that this tech that a lot of the technology, the fact that like, you know, Bitcoin is this permissionless system where you can audit the supply, but you can do that in a more generic way for other financial instruments and other derivatives in a way that you'd never be able to do in the, you know, old financial system.

00:38:13:22 - 00:39:01:17
Josh Cincinatti
Right. And or you can even have hybrid models where where maybe you do have some degree of trust with some centralized entity. But there's, you know, a degree of like more visibility and auditability into what they're doing that you can't really get anywhere else or in any other system. The sheer irony, of course, is that like so much of the shitty collapses in our industry are from people that maybe claim that on the surface, but ultimately operate in a centralized, fraudulent manner where none of that could have been ascertained, you know, and that part really like, like saddens me because I do think that there is this ultimate, like, you know, a halo effect of

00:39:01:17 - 00:39:14:15
Josh Cincinatti
negativity, you know, negative halo effect for those the stuff that those folks engaged in and how it then takes away from some of the actually interesting and powerful aspects of a lot of this technology.

00:39:14:18 - 00:39:45:17
Cas Piancey
I'm like, I'm I'm curious where you guys would draw out like, like, okay, like a great instance of something. I sit here, someone one I satirize relentlessly is Justin Sun just for all of his shit coins and the like. Absurd. Is this again one of these people who I've spoken about, like I assume most people when we were speaking about if you were speaking about SBF before the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, everyone was like, He is so fucking rich, he's so fucking rich.

00:39:45:17 - 00:40:02:19
Cas Piancey
He has so much money. He could have he could backstop the whole entire industry for sure. And I think a lot of people are suggesting the same things about Justin Sun. But then I look at like what he's done and I go, okay, like I make fun of Tron constantly, but like.

00:40:03:12 - 00:40:05:28
Laurence
You, you are morally obliged to make fun of Justin.

00:40:06:25 - 00:40:30:08
Cas Piancey
But then my question becomes like, so a lot of people like I assume at least maybe I'm wrong, you guys feel free to jump in and tell me I'm wrong. But I assume a lot of people legitimately transact with Tron and utilize the blockchain this man invented like, is this a bad representation of the industry or is it a good representation of the industry?

00:40:30:09 - 00:40:31:24
Laurence
I'm going to put consent label.

00:40:31:26 - 00:40:34:01
Bennett Tomlin
To put an asterisk next to invented.

00:40:35:07 - 00:40:35:20
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah.

00:40:36:11 - 00:40:42:21
Bennett Tomlin
You took an implementation of Ethereum and changed a couple of constants and then plagiarized a white paper.

00:40:42:27 - 00:40:43:23
Laurence
Including but.

00:40:43:23 - 00:41:10:16
Cas Piancey
Again again like is that something that's uncommon in cryptocurrency even, right? Like we're talking about open source code, we're talking about something that like everyone's like, go ahead, take it if you want to. So he did. And then he threw his stupid fucking face on it. And now it's, you know, Tron. So I like it. But is that's part of the thing like this is why I'm a this is why I'm asking like, is this a good or bad representation or is it just that like this is what's to be expected?

00:41:10:16 - 00:41:17:09
Laurence
I would like to congratulate you for activating my trap card because I have to say about Justin Sun.

00:41:17:09 - 00:41:17:16
Josh Cincinatti
Because.

00:41:17:16 - 00:41:43:11
Laurence
I fucking hate him. I'm the reason that Justin Sun will never see the Pearly Gates is because of one original sin, and that is. And to be fair, there are many more after that. The prime one is when he created the fork that is now ultimately Tron. He changed the decimals and things to six as a default rather than 18, which means that immediately when he poured things over, it fucks things up.

00:41:43:11 - 00:42:16:22
Laurence
And as you think things through, this is a self-reports for having written some stuff for Tron. And it says a lot that shortly before I came back to start law school here, I spent about three weeks in New York. I walked through Times Square at about 11 p.m., and Josh can confirmed this because I was I was in a group chat with other people telling me that I was just egging me on, making bad decisions, drinking, just buying stuff off the street, walking to Times Square, look up and see Justin Sun with BUIDL on Tron.

00:42:17:07 - 00:42:24:14
Laurence
And I threw my beer in the bin and I went home in a huff because fuck that, man. The great thing about Justin, Justin's.

00:42:25:23 - 00:42:26:16
Josh Cincinatti
The world's.

00:42:26:16 - 00:42:57:09
Laurence
Greatest ego. An egomaniac is a pathological need to be in the story. We all have read articles about getting the pump on the coin. We have all seen how every time there is a collapse or any kind of difficulty, he will come in and he will bond. It is one of my favorite bits to do that. As soon as something happens to be like in before Justin Sun comes in and I stress that it is it is one of the reasons I get out in the bed in the morning when something is done congested.

00:42:57:09 - 00:43:26:23
Laurence
And so the funny thing, and I think the thing that was a bit telling back in the day was when Tron was new, they did a $100,000 prize pool effort for applications on Tron. This was 2018, so I was fairly new to Solidity development. We were still on version 4.2 something. And to be blunt, most of the stuff that we had, I don't even think Maker was around yet.

00:43:27:27 - 00:43:53:11
Laurence
I know this because there's a period of time where I spent a lot of time looking at Maker Tdps It was just Ponzi contracts and bunch of us literally just took code ported over converting from 18 to 6 decimal points, gave it to him untrammeled and went Hello, we'd like some of the prize pot please. And to the best of my knowledge, I think people that I know got something like 80% of that pot and just pumped garbage.

00:43:53:11 - 00:44:21:13
Laurence
It's Tron and called a glorious success. That is my story. That has been the echo of Tron throughout, right? Hmm. Tara failed us. We're going to double the yield. This time will work. This is again the true like true algorithmic stablecoins have never been done properly. He will attempt to backstop this instead of buying the billion dollars of Bitcoin that lunar labs that Terra Labs did, he had out of his own pocket.

00:44:21:13 - 00:44:40:26
Laurence
So, you know, he's got it available to him. The thing is, because everything was like up until recently, I may be wrong on this because I don't want to spend more time thinking about this man than I have to. Minting is now open that. Well, the reason that this was never at risk was because the minting was was so low that it was like, well, he can obviously bankrupt himself.

00:44:40:26 - 00:45:02:10
Laurence
So it's going to be a blazing success. Like, I mean, it's an opportunity cost for him and I'm going to stop. But I think coming back to the original point here, I think there might have been a point about three or four years ago where just inside could have backstopped a large part of Defi. That is certainly not true anymore.

00:45:03:05 - 00:45:23:05
Laurence
Hmm. Whether you like it or not, a large part of defi runs on stablecoins such as tether and circle. He cannot backstop that himself through his liquid wealth. He couldn't do it even through his illiquid, low, illiquid wealth. Does that make has this fed into the ego? Perhaps. Perhaps not. And the chances anyone ever sends, make, get. Fuck you, Justin.

00:45:23:05 - 00:45:49:16
Laurence
So this is really a passionate thing for me. Is he indicative of a wider trend in terms of like chances are you want to get away with things? I believe so. For a certain type of sociopath and to be fair like that, despite everything that I've said, I still have a grudging respect for him as the the grifter that chanced it.

00:45:50:02 - 00:45:55:06
Laurence
I couldn't do that because I have morals.

00:45:55:06 - 00:45:56:03
Cas Piancey
Does that deserve.

00:45:56:03 - 00:45:59:20
Josh Cincinatti
Respect? Well, okay. I've begrudging respect.

00:46:00:16 - 00:46:08:22
Laurence
In the same way that someone that's climbed the Burj Khalifa can do it. I'd be like, I recognize you are utterly insane for this and you will probably be killed ultimately doing the.

00:46:09:00 - 00:46:09:10
Josh Cincinatti
Best I.

00:46:09:14 - 00:46:32:19
Laurence
Can do. But I wouldn't do it. And good on you. So yeah. Leaping back I think this comes down to again. You asked again. The other question you asked was do I know anyone else that's actually interacting on Tron? The cynical and to be blunt, I think white Western answer would be I don't know. I don't know anyone.

00:46:33:07 - 00:46:59:00
Laurence
I think this comes down again to the Dunbar number. I believe that there are people and I believe that they're not that they're not doing it, ironically. But I also believe that they will never interact with my side of Twitter. They are the Chinese. Me too will use Weibo. I even whether or not they've bought into the Usdc yield stuff, whether or not they actually know anything about just like, okay, it's it's a cheap blockchain.

00:46:59:00 - 00:47:18:00
Laurence
They can transact with it. They can do dog coin shit. I believe there is some primitive defi. I don't think there's like maker on it. For example, no one that has any respect ports their app over to the Tron chain. Heidi, I have nothing good to say about Justin except for his hair. I want to know. Josh, please.

00:47:18:00 - 00:47:20:16
Laurence
I've talked for way too long.

00:47:20:16 - 00:47:26:17
Josh Cincinatti
I mean, I don't know that I can follow that.

00:47:26:17 - 00:47:32:27
Bennett Tomlin
At some point. We probably should get to the question of what is West Ham West.

00:47:32:27 - 00:47:33:10
Josh Cincinatti
Thank you.

00:47:33:20 - 00:47:34:04
Laurence
West Ham.

00:47:37:09 - 00:47:41:25
Josh Cincinatti
No questions.

00:47:41:25 - 00:47:47:29
Laurence
Josh, do you what do you want to give you a go a lot. West Ham is a guy.

00:47:47:29 - 00:47:51:02
Josh Cincinatti
It's really more like it's more a concept than.

00:47:51:20 - 00:47:51:23
Josh Cincinatti
A.

00:47:52:06 - 00:47:58:24
Josh Cincinatti
State of mind more than anything else. Okay. Now, for real, though, do you really want to know.

00:47:58:25 - 00:47:59:02
Josh Cincinatti
What.

00:47:59:03 - 00:48:00:25
Laurence
I'm happy for you to tell people?

00:48:01:05 - 00:48:45:10
Josh Cincinatti
Sure, sure. So. So. And I actually I was a late comer to West Ham, but it is a group chat that Laurence started when another Twitter Twitter friend got drunk and started taking pictures of West Ham Stadium. West Ham is a football club that I am vaguely aware of, but my association is obviously very different at this point and as a result of that experience, like I think, Laurence, you created this group chat of just like when I put random people in random people that I know from crypto Twitter into this giant pot, whatever the max number, it's like, you know, 74 people, 75, 75 on Twitter, Twitter, DMS, which is, by the way, the

00:48:45:10 - 00:48:54:20
Josh Cincinatti
most abominable group chat interface known to man. It is so broken, even pre pre. Mr. Tweet was very broken.

00:48:54:28 - 00:48:59:23
Laurence
I'm glad that whoever designed the Twitter group chat, things got fired. That's all. That's all I'm.

00:48:59:23 - 00:49:00:00
Josh Cincinatti
Saying.

00:49:01:19 - 00:49:03:19
Laurence
I think they should have been shot on the way out as well.

00:49:03:27 - 00:49:38:14
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, I sometimes like I sometimes want to make a reference in that group chat and I have to scroll up to like 12 hours prior and it literally takes me 10 minutes. It's the most painful experience. But in any event, that group chat actually became like probably my favorite corner of of crypto Twitter because it's just, it's a bunch of very random have like geographically diverse some and on some, you know, fully doxing individuals just like shooting shooting the shit about what's happening, you know, in, in crypto Twitter.

00:49:38:18 - 00:50:06:03
Josh Cincinatti
And it resulted in me like, like, you know, we've talking about earlier committing to the bit. It resulted in me creating an entirely fake website forked from the Berkshire Hathaway website, West Ham Capital, to try and convince people during the FTC's collapse that West Ham Capital was was able to backstop losses, which was quite fun.

00:50:06:27 - 00:50:07:29
Cas Piancey
I do want to state that.

00:50:08:10 - 00:50:10:27
Josh Cincinatti
But I was really careful.

00:50:11:17 - 00:50:29:00
Cas Piancey
Bringing this full circle as well. Back to Luke Dash and his issues with the code on the West Ham Capital site. During the legal disclaimer, you importantly state code isn't law. So you were ahead of your time?

00:50:29:25 - 00:50:43:00
Laurence
Yes. True trailblazers in the fields of everything, including finance. The fact that we are banned from the London stadium en masse.

00:50:43:00 - 00:50:46:12
Cas Piancey
The is that that's not true. Right? Is that true? That's not true.

00:50:46:27 - 00:51:13:05
Laurence
You find out the the very funny thing is that I am not a West Ham fan. I am not a Premier League fan of football. I, I grew up in South Africa like my sports are rugby and cricket and sports that are very boring to watch for people that do not know what they are, especially cricket. Am I now several months on from the creation of West Ham have a West Ham Black?

00:51:13:10 - 00:51:36:24
Laurence
I have a West Ham. I have a West Ham shirt. I'm going to give my next academic talk in a West Ham jersey. And it does feel like and my wife, my my adoring medic wife, who has nothing to do with any of this shit, is questioning things, to be fair. I mean, I.

00:51:37:13 - 00:51:39:05
Bennett Tomlin
Like why she's married.

00:51:39:05 - 00:51:39:24
Josh Cincinatti
To you.

00:51:39:24 - 00:51:42:19
Bennett Tomlin
I was interested in West Ham's.

00:51:42:23 - 00:51:43:19
Josh Cincinatti
You're not in the top.

00:51:43:19 - 00:52:01:18
Laurence
Five, Bennet. And the original thing was, what happened? It was. It was basically a sociological experiment. What happens if I throw 75 people that I don't really know, but kind of like I've seen around into a group and see how well they gel. And I started getting a little bit brutal with the like with the kicking and adding other people.

00:52:01:19 - 00:52:26:00
Laurence
And I thought like at a certain skill set that were programmers, they were lawyers, they were marketers or just they had some salient insights. And yeah, I know it's resulted in a couple of jobs for relationships. It's, it's very and it is mostly now just a as soon as oh, it's also a ruthless place in terms of copyright for material.

00:52:26:00 - 00:52:28:10
Josh Cincinatti
It is actually IP anarchy in there.

00:52:28:11 - 00:52:59:28
Laurence
It is if you if you've made the mistake of posting on the chat first and you don't post it on the timeline that it's it's it's intertek like it is something that's I think this is the case regardless of your community. Right. I think people in crypto Twitter occasionally and Twitter writ large, they say what I missing in the community and this is again for for the critical among you I apologize when people join crypto I think a thing that they want to learn mostly is who do I speak to.

00:52:59:28 - 00:53:17:24
Laurence
This is like this isn't even crypto this is anything online, right. You know I'm playing Monster Hunter, I'm playing I'm playing Genshin Impact who are my tribe. And to be fair, given the predatory nature of a lot of crypto, a lot of that can boils down to who are the people that I can dump on? Turn your friends into action.

00:53:17:24 - 00:53:43:21
Laurence
Liquidity has been adequately cast. The the creation of like the group chat that will do that like has truly like become a bit of a second family and one that I actually like spending time with. I realize that the odds are very low that my actual family are ever going to to watch this, which means I've completely and clear.

00:53:43:21 - 00:53:43:29
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah.

00:53:45:09 - 00:53:46:10
Laurence
That's all right. My first.

00:53:46:24 - 00:53:49:13
Bennett Tomlin
Questions. I'm going to make more questions.

00:53:51:00 - 00:54:22:09
Laurence
But it's fine. But yeah, I think an attempt at creating a community for people. I didn't have one turned into something lovely and I don't think that actually has anything to do with crypto. I think that speaks more to a common interest can actually result in something really nice. It also happens to be a ruthless place for misinformation where stuff is boiled up and I realize I am in fact anyone West Ham will be watching as I realize I have effectively blown the lid off of things.

00:54:22:09 - 00:54:24:13
Laurence
I've alluded to it before and cope.

00:54:26:16 - 00:55:02:13
Bennett Tomlin
Well and the the misinformation which is satire in a sense, because what I am is doing and that's why I brought it up, is because I've seen the various jokes across Twitter that kind of center around that. I do think you're absolutely right, though, that like a lot of people are looking to try to find a community. And like I remember when I first came on crypto Twitter, I like followed the common people who would be referenced in like follow Fridays or on like online lists of these are the crypto people you need to follow.

00:55:02:19 - 00:55:07:20
Bennett Tomlin
And it took me like a year and a half to reset my following list to something with intelligent people in it.

00:55:08:11 - 00:55:09:17
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah. Yeah.

00:55:10:00 - 00:55:12:01
Laurence
And if you're following Josh now, you've still fucked up.

00:55:12:14 - 00:55:12:29
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah.

00:55:13:23 - 00:55:18:27
Josh Cincinatti
Don't know what dark corner led you to us, but we're sorry and.

00:55:18:29 - 00:55:21:15
Cas Piancey
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

00:55:21:26 - 00:55:41:29
Laurence
I mean, I, I treat a lot of like my side of Twitter is just kind of Elisabeth like it's a bit of a pit at this point. And I do like to imagine, like what I tell myself when I'm struggling to sleep at night because of guilt of the stupid shit I see. Is that it. It is a bit of a a sampling of across the board.

00:55:42:18 - 00:56:04:24
Laurence
I follow some of the most intelligent people I know that are genuinely doing things that are truly a treat. And I follow some coin have dog kind of people as well. Not that that it's helpful to kind of check what the Overton Window looks like of of crypto writ large. I mean even on the critical side, right. I said I am, I am.

00:56:05:07 - 00:56:25:10
Laurence
I would consider myself friends with the two of you. Of you. There are certain people that I will not interface with, but I think it's it's folly, especially on the Internet, given that I am to effectively borrow a term from GCR long on human misery.

00:56:26:15 - 00:56:28:29
Josh Cincinatti
Got to do with.

00:56:29:15 - 00:56:49:21
Laurence
Increasing things like humans becoming increasingly digitally online. Like, perpetually like okay, like this is online. I might as well correct things and monitor things and like this is where things are going to happen in future. So I might as well keep an eye on how things look there. Be it for like people that I would get along with or people that I am probably going to bump into in Parliament in five years.

00:56:49:21 - 00:56:57:27
Laurence
Shouting at a select committee for evidence. I can't wait for the day that this clip appears in front of me saying why I should be.

00:56:58:22 - 00:56:59:01
Josh Cincinatti
Giving.

00:56:59:01 - 00:57:06:28
Laurence
Evidence on legislation. So whoever is Prime Minister, then seven from now. Nice to meet you.

00:57:06:28 - 00:57:13:15
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, yeah. And for me, I just sort of maybe rename internally. Anyway, West Ham is exhibit A.

00:57:15:26 - 00:57:17:21
Laurence
At a ceremony like West Ham.

00:57:17:26 - 00:57:20:23
Josh Cincinatti
So anyway. And I would stand just.

00:57:20:23 - 00:57:24:00
Cas Piancey
Call it wire. Just call it wire fraud, guys. Just call it wire free. You did.

00:57:24:05 - 00:57:24:12
Josh Cincinatti
That.

00:57:25:26 - 00:57:27:00
Laurence
And we did call it wire fraud.

00:57:27:01 - 00:57:28:20
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, well, we.

00:57:28:20 - 00:57:29:10
Laurence
Got that too.

00:57:29:15 - 00:57:34:28
Bennett Tomlin
I, I'm in one group chat where as soon as I saw that news drop, the first thing I did was name it.

00:57:35:00 - 00:57:36:04
Josh Cincinatti
To their.

00:57:36:09 - 00:57:37:23
Bennett Tomlin
Wirefraud.

00:57:38:13 - 00:57:39:14
Josh Cincinatti
I have a screenshot where.

00:57:39:15 - 00:57:40:22
Laurence
About 11 chats.

00:57:42:28 - 00:57:43:01
Josh Cincinatti
And.

00:57:43:02 - 00:57:47:11
Laurence
It was like a five minute window.

00:57:47:11 - 00:57:48:01
Josh Cincinatti
I realized I.

00:57:48:03 - 00:58:16:08
Laurence
Was one of the I think what we did was we spoke a bit about kind of like the, the reputational pull of certain people such as Justin Sun. And because one thing that you did want to talk to and we can either leave this be or get to is kind of our takes on certain centralized like the focal points of certain centralized services and kind of how they get an easy time and things.

00:58:16:08 - 00:58:31:08
Laurence
I am thinking like I think given back previous conversations, people like Su Zhu and Kyle Davies and their attempted Phoenix play for GTX I mean Gone.

00:58:31:09 - 00:58:33:16
Bennett Tomlin
Was that Phoenix an intentional reference?

00:58:33:29 - 00:58:34:22
Laurence
Yeah, a little bit.

00:58:35:10 - 00:58:35:21
Josh Cincinatti
Okay.

00:58:36:22 - 00:58:43:00
Bennett Tomlin
To Gox Rising. Okay. I just had a second. There was like.

00:58:44:13 - 00:59:20:00
Laurence
Well, he knows things and he drinks. And so I don't know if we want to go anywhere with this, but I think like this last year, I mean, when was the the funny thing is that in the last, I think day or two, there was news that turns out like the the stuff deep egg is really what kind of caused it was causa belli for myriad collapses including what ultimately took out 3 hours capital it took out Luna down the road as you seen, it's taken out Genesis, etc. And it turns out that was ultimately those wallets were three.

00:59:20:00 - 00:59:26:07
Laurence
AC So what they did was, you know, like kind of a Rube Goldberg suicide and.

00:59:28:16 - 00:59:29:06
Josh Cincinatti
The.

00:59:31:09 - 01:00:10:24
Laurence
And I think it enrages me kind of after like the the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a man who I have spoken to my constitutional law seminar leaders about because they have asked me questions too, because they've twigged to what I do that these two have had the gall to to attempt to come back. And like, I mean, this is kind of an open question where like I think but I guess I think in terms of like the the chasing down, like the dastardly deeds and like in terms of like what people are currently doing, you guys will probably be better suited to me, but I think Josh and I will have more thoughts on where

01:00:10:24 - 01:00:23:04
Laurence
we think they fit in the ecosystem and like whether they should be beaten to death after the initial Joshua lead on with anything from that.

01:00:24:14 - 01:00:30:17
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, I mean, just depending on which country they find themselves in, they might well be beaten to death as a punishment.

01:00:30:17 - 01:00:30:26
Josh Cincinatti
For what.

01:00:31:06 - 01:00:31:24
Laurence
I lost in.

01:00:32:11 - 01:00:32:29
Josh Cincinatti
All of them.

01:00:33:16 - 01:01:03:25
Josh Cincinatti
It's I mean, I yeah, I find it, I mean, it's sort of interesting, right? Because on some level, like you, I think on a personal level, it's important for people to have, you know, a degree of grace and forgiveness for people that have wrong them in life. You know, like I think it's an important part of, of growing as an individual and being able to strive to, you know, to to understand that people are human, right?

01:01:04:15 - 01:01:08:21
Josh Cincinatti
What they're doing is on a much larger scale and.

01:01:09:00 - 01:01:11:26
Josh Cincinatti
Unforgivable by every human.

01:01:12:00 - 01:01:14:02
Laurence
To liquidate nine figures is divine.

01:01:14:15 - 01:01:19:14
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

01:01:19:14 - 01:01:42:07
Josh Cincinatti
And the fact that they're also trying to, like, rebrand themselves as somehow like lifestyle gurus, like going full on, like navel rubbing, rubbing cat without like any of the wealth, which is really just that is so I mean, it's insulting in so many ways.

01:01:42:29 - 01:01:45:13
Josh Cincinatti
I like the.

01:01:45:17 - 01:01:49:24
Laurence
Fact that you've likened these two to the most midwit character on.

01:01:53:22 - 01:01:54:21
Josh Cincinatti
I and.

01:01:55:04 - 01:01:57:00
Laurence
I don't give a shit if he sees this.

01:01:57:00 - 01:01:58:21
Josh Cincinatti
I Yeah.

01:01:59:07 - 01:02:04:26
Cas Piancey
He's definitely not watching crypto critics going around.

01:02:04:26 - 01:02:05:06
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah.

01:02:06:01 - 01:02:21:14
Cas Piancey
I, I agree with you. I think it would be I mean, I do want to say that they I think they were always doing that lifestyle shit. I mean, wasn't Susie known for, like, his stupid fucking quotes that he would constantly do all the time? And being Mr. Fucking.

01:02:22:23 - 01:02:43:01
Laurence
Susie as his thing was kind of pretentious. Accelerationism dressed up as the supercycle. Yeah. I don't want to call that lifestyle so much as effectively and retroactively a genuine heart placed belief in a apparently forever. Um, a kind of market bubble.

01:02:44:12 - 01:02:51:08
Bennett Tomlin
One of the things you, you said there was you think they have it easier in a sense. Can you speak to what you think is easier for them?

01:02:51:12 - 01:03:11:28
Laurence
I have at this point now dealt with a couple of cases where people have that this comes back to like my belief in like code is law. And that code is law is not a thing. But people that have like attacked protocols and like and fled the scene effectively like will widely split things between, oh, they did nothing wrong.

01:03:11:28 - 01:03:27:06
Laurence
They were incredibly based. And people who are same, who have worked in production systems for any kind of software engineering project. No, I can't believe I'm saying that software engineers are on the side of God, but apparently so. That's where I've landed.

01:03:28:05 - 01:03:32:04
Bennett Tomlin
What are you going to do, arrest me?

01:03:32:04 - 01:03:59:16
Laurence
The I think it has come down to like that old adage, you owe the bank 500 million. It's your problem. You have the bank 500 million. It's the bank's problem. And I think a large chunk of this is down to the fact that so much money was lost and so much damage was done, that it almost behooves us all to give them a redemption arc, to show them that this is not how it was like.

01:03:59:16 - 01:04:06:21
Laurence
I mean, it was truly a slap at Kansas, shaking his head. And I genuinely want to hear what's coming out of this. Well.

01:04:07:25 - 01:04:28:05
Cas Piancey
I'm just I'm just thinking about like, oh, it's almost this idea of like, well, we just need to prove that there is value here, though. Like it feels almost desperate to be like, you know, you get these horrible, horrible guys. They can be here, they can be you're in the club. It's okay. Just because you're so much like it's not their fault public.

01:04:28:05 - 01:04:29:12
Cas Piancey
It's not their fault. And it's like.

01:04:30:29 - 01:05:00:24
Laurence
Fucking Andrew Tate had a crypto twitter alt, I, I would be I would judge no one for a pogrom that killed anyone that knew what an EVM stood for. It's I think when it comes down to I think what you know, we talked about this idea of like kind of dissuading people. And I think I referenced this poll that I did where a bunch of people were very happy to get involved in GTX.

01:05:01:07 - 01:05:14:27
Laurence
I think a lot of that is pure greed. I, I do think, you know, the meme of, oh, I'm in it for the tech. Like it's a meme for a reason. There are people are just like, no, I am literally just here for the money and I can't blame.

01:05:14:27 - 01:05:15:04
Josh Cincinatti
Them.

01:05:16:25 - 01:05:47:02
Laurence
When it comes to. And I said my ire is not reserved for those two balance. Right? I mean, it extends a wide blast radius to machine, to bank commentary to Alison, to too many others, who, to be blunt, after three drinks, I can't remember. And I do think that there is a large amount of hope in the well, if this time it goes right, then that's like a a validation of the tech stack.

01:05:47:21 - 01:06:12:23
Laurence
I wrote a thread fairly after like very shortly after the collapse where I said, this is not a crypto problem. It's, it's the it's a collapse of an opaque shadow bank. And this got a lot of heat. My, my, my take was, despite the fact that crypto has its myriad problems in terms of confusion, in terms of regulation in the United States and worldwide, and the fact that effectively they could do what they wanted in an untrammeled setting.

01:06:13:08 - 01:06:36:05
Laurence
This would have happened were they allowed to trade soda or painkillers. It's down to the people that are responsible. I realize that this is a take that a lot of people disagree with, but it's one that I at the time believed when I posted it. When it comes down to them like, Oh, I want my redemption arc to be like, okay, what?

01:06:36:05 - 01:06:59:27
Laurence
To do the same thing again. Like it's fairly telling that like in three out of capitals case it was I ran a hedge fund, now I want to do a debt exchanging thing. Those two entrepreneurialism geniuses they checked for product market fit for selling debt on claims before they decided to launch a fucking exchange. Doing exactly the same thing with an order of magnitude difference.

01:07:00:12 - 01:07:05:03
Laurence
Absolutely no notes.

01:07:05:03 - 01:07:11:20
Bennett Tomlin
Moral notes, maybe societal notes.

01:07:11:20 - 01:07:37:27
Laurence
Fan and I don't think I do think I think like a proper skeptic like there is no redemption for this industry. Well, listen to me talk and go. A lot of this sounds like hope. I like to imagine that there are more people like me that are go. Okay, look, these people should be tarred and feathered, exiled from things.

01:07:37:27 - 01:08:02:15
Laurence
They can come back if they want, but they will never have the power that they did. A couple of sensible discussions with regulators. I do find there's a narrative of never interact with authorities for know, because all we want to do whatever we want. I think that's folly. I think that's a way to find that you end up with stuff like tornado cash happening over and over again.

01:08:02:15 - 01:08:23:26
Laurence
I may turn around in ten years and go, Yeah. It turns out qualifying as a lawyer and speaking to the government was a huge fucking mistake. But I've got to try the degree to which I can help. There is perhaps up in the air, right? When you have cases like the people from 3 hours capital, when you have like the FDA, not all of whom are in prison.

01:08:25:06 - 01:08:53:17
Cas Piancey
But these aren't even new cases. This is like a thing that has happened. Like I think my shining example would be Sifu and or if you want to call him Michael Patryn by his real name, I mean, this this guy, how did he have any redemption art like he was involved in QuadrigaCX. It sure as fuck seems like he stole people's money and now he like he stole people's money again, I guess.

01:08:53:17 - 01:08:56:06
Cas Piancey
And that was cool. Like, everybody's just cool with that.

01:08:57:12 - 01:09:29:07
Laurence
I, I won't comment on any of the wonderland slash time stuff mainly because it's not in my mind right now. I remember like one of it's weird what forms in your mind is a memory. I remember like in my kind of dog days of living in Singapore, I sunburned very easily. So whenever I go to the pool as a memorable event and I remember in my like reading my phone about Gerald Cotten and the QuadrigaCX collapse, and I remember seeing his name, Michael Patryn, and I was like, okay, that was interesting.

01:09:29:07 - 01:09:46:10
Laurence
I turned to my wife, who is also burning in the sun, and I said, He's not fucking dead by chance. My wife went, That's nice, honey, I don't give a shit. And that was the end of that. And then when it turned out the great reveal, and I believe it was from ZachXBT that revealed who he was in know kind of day.

01:09:46:10 - 01:10:11:15
Laurence
Oh, wow. Okay. That's that's that's a throwback from several years back. And I think the take from all four of us have a fairly limited us kind of perspective on what it's like, what's accepted and what's like like vilified here. Because like we, we're creatures of Twitter and it seemed like a fair chunk of people went, yeah, that's base.

01:10:11:15 - 01:10:28:27
Laurence
That means he knows how to run a like a large, like large amount of money. I'm like, okay, well, not well. And again, to my own sin and one that I've been slowly starting to fix, I didn't say anything because I knew nothing about Wonderland time at the time, except he was an Olympus Folk and B because I didn't want the grief.

01:10:29:05 - 01:10:50:26
Laurence
I've never been someone that's worried about annoying people and going global. You shouldn't say X about why, but I was like, Well, I don't want to say something wrong. He has gone fairly quiet. He launched C5 Vision. I have no idea what the statute of that is. I do have a slightly way. Take that. I mean, he didn't serve any time, did he?

01:10:50:26 - 01:10:51:20
Laurence
Or did he?

01:10:51:28 - 01:10:58:24
Bennett Tomlin
He did. For the identity theft cases back when he was before Dani, before he was Michael Perrin. Yes.

01:10:59:16 - 01:11:12:09
Laurence
And as part of me is it thinks and this is the lawyer in me, he served his time for the crime of which he was convicted. Therefore there but for the grace of God. We know we've served our time.

01:11:12:18 - 01:11:13:13
Josh Cincinatti
Does that? Yeah.

01:11:14:00 - 01:11:33:16
Laurence
Anchor around with finance? Absolutely not. So I was fairly conflicted myself. I was like, I don't want to to intervene with this and that that's on me. Not that at the time I had any breach or really like no one would have cared. I wasn't a Wonderland person. So like, it's like, oh, it's someone else coping and seething on Twitter.

01:11:33:20 - 01:12:04:02
Cas Piancey
I guess I'm not suggesting that people need to be condemned or like shunned out of the entire system, like society or something. But I think the fact that these people can come back and there are supporters right there. As soon as Zach revealed that CFU was Michael Patron, like there, there was like a significant portion of the of the industry was like, hey, that's awesome.

01:12:04:10 - 01:12:12:29
Cas Piancey
And I just like it's hard for me to fathom why like why is that awesome? What is cool about that? Why would you want this guy involved?

01:12:13:24 - 01:12:41:21
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah. And that's no that's a and I don't I mean, again, I can't speak to the that is Laurence was alluding to like we all have a very kind of narrow perspectives based off of around corners of Twitter and, you know, whatever other community experiences we have in cryptocurrency at large. But there is this like there is this this sentiment around almost evaluating it like a Keynesian beauty contest, right?

01:12:41:28 - 01:13:04:11
Josh Cincinatti
Like, oh, well, this goes back. I know that there will be a bunch of dumb people that buy into his antics. Therefore, I will buy into his antics because of all the other, you know, second, third, fourth order thinking like other people thinking like me. So of course this is going to pump and all of that. Right? And so I think that there is this like strange echo effect.

01:13:04:11 - 01:13:27:04
Josh Cincinatti
I mean, from said should be vilified for all of this and maybe you would be in other systems are instead granted if not forgiveness certainly like some degree of enablement from this broader community that just are not community but certainly like a broad collection of people that have various incentives to say, yeah, let's let them cook.

01:13:27:24 - 01:13:28:23
Josh Cincinatti
Right. Like.

01:13:29:07 - 01:13:36:18
Josh Cincinatti
You know, sure, I know, I know that kitchen is going to blow up. But until it does me some great food coming out of there.

01:13:37:15 - 01:13:37:22
Josh Cincinatti
I want.

01:13:37:22 - 01:13:38:20
Josh Cincinatti
To fight. Right?

01:13:38:25 - 01:13:42:19
Bennett Tomlin
Oh, food is what's being cooked in your cousin's kitchen. In this.

01:13:42:19 - 01:13:44:24
Josh Cincinatti
Analogy.

01:13:44:24 - 01:13:45:03
Bennett Tomlin
It is.

01:13:45:22 - 01:13:48:24
Josh Cincinatti
Not. It's not really.

01:13:49:09 - 01:14:20:19
Laurence
I think this comes down to like one of my beliefs about this whole weird mess that this podcast is about how Josh and I work in is. And I'm going to effectively quote from a government article I wrote last year, which is the crypto is one of the examples. There's like best growing of a tabula rasa and it's like by that I mean that like anyone who comes to it with like intent to engage as a blank slate, so like their own philosophy, politics and world view gets projected.

01:14:21:18 - 01:14:44:21
Laurence
And I think there's like a lot to be said that thought, this notion of like, I don't even want to call it live and let live right? A lot of it is like, Oh, well, you know, I would certainly hate it if I goofed and then I was condemned. It's how I imagine the thinking goes or perhaps more charitably, it would be like, Well, I deserve a second chance and I shouldn't be cast out into the wolves for the things I did.

01:14:45:08 - 01:15:10:15
Laurence
And I don't think that's a moral for me to make. I mean. Well, I make it quite, quite vehemently on Twitter often. But again, I think this comes down to this idea like, you know, how do you socially kind of push people away from something where they're like, I'm going to make ten bucks on this? Um, I have no answer.

01:15:10:15 - 01:15:16:03
Cas Piancey
I mean, time and time again, they don't write like they try to turn someone.

01:15:16:03 - 01:15:16:20
Josh Cincinatti
People did.

01:15:16:20 - 01:15:17:06
Laurence
Not you.

01:15:17:10 - 01:15:21:11
Cas Piancey
A16z? Yeah. A16z does. It's like it's.

01:15:22:13 - 01:15:32:20
Laurence
Crypto. It's like your experiment by Harvard. The Harvard University to translate a16z experiment has concluded. Thank you for your time.

01:15:32:20 - 01:15:34:13
Josh Cincinatti
And I think.

01:15:35:00 - 01:15:50:14
Cas Piancey
I guess I guess the only the only thing I'm trying to say, like I don't even think so when we're talking about second chances, I'm like, I'm all, I'm all for it. That's cool. I'm totally cool with for instance, if someone did their time like you, we are talking about with view. So you do your time for your crime.

01:15:50:27 - 01:16:10:18
Cas Piancey
Like the idea that you can't ever be involved in crypto at all. Well, that's silly. Like, of course you can. Of course you can jump into this industry and buy coins and support people if you want to. But like the idea that he would be welcomed back as a founder, I guess is the issue and like and supported in that role.

01:16:10:18 - 01:16:17:00
Cas Piancey
I have trouble it's it's not that I guess I have a trouble in the judgment of that is what I'm trying to express.

01:16:17:05 - 01:16:18:29
Laurence
Because this time will be different.

01:16:19:29 - 01:16:23:17
Cas Piancey
Right.

01:16:23:17 - 01:16:31:18
Bennett Tomlin
It always is. One day when they were like one signature on the multisig away from sending see through like $40 million.

01:16:31:18 - 01:16:32:06
Laurence
Hey, hey.

01:16:32:17 - 01:16:40:14
Josh Cincinatti
I'm true. True redemption arcs have not been tried.

01:16:40:14 - 01:16:40:21
Josh Cincinatti
But.

01:16:41:20 - 01:16:50:05
Bennett Tomlin
Like, a true redemption arc for most of these people would probably look like finding quiet ways to contribute or educate people and the things they did wrong. And now.

01:16:50:20 - 01:16:53:09
Josh Cincinatti
You know, fine, let's go back.

01:16:53:13 - 01:16:58:09
Bennett Tomlin
I'm going to spin the roulette wheel one more time and this time it's coming up red. I'm sure.

01:16:58:22 - 01:16:58:28
Josh Cincinatti
The.

01:16:58:28 - 01:17:14:23
Laurence
Last person who tried that out was Karl DAVIES when he posted a picture, a painting of himself with gracious and humbled. I will be sharing my knowledge to the degree that it does good and then immediately starts his next grift. Right.

01:17:14:27 - 01:17:15:22
Josh Cincinatti
I mean that I think.

01:17:15:22 - 01:17:22:18
Laurence
The correct answer to then the exemptions is that's please face the wall now.

01:17:22:18 - 01:17:28:28
Josh Cincinatti
I mean but it wasn't us like making fun of his painting ability that made him do that right. Like it's not on us, right.

01:17:28:29 - 01:17:34:22
Laurence
Oh I mean I got comfortable that it wasn't. But I wouldn't I would really feel guilty if it was.

01:17:35:11 - 01:17:35:22
Bennett Tomlin
Literally.

01:17:35:22 - 01:17:38:27
Josh Cincinatti
Driven around and.

01:17:38:28 - 01:17:44:13
Bennett Tomlin
It exists in a pattern of behavior it's not like GTA X is a one off.

01:17:45:07 - 01:17:45:24
Josh Cincinatti
You know.

01:17:46:07 - 01:17:52:12
Bennett Tomlin
So like he was such a great member of an upstanding member of the community. And then you made fun of him.

01:17:52:21 - 01:17:55:27
Laurence
Yeah, it is Joker moment and decided that was it. Yeah. Okay.

01:17:57:00 - 01:17:58:24
Bennett Tomlin
He got rejected from art school.

01:17:59:06 - 01:18:03:06
Josh Cincinatti
And this was rejected.

01:18:03:06 - 01:18:04:13
Laurence
From art school moment.

01:18:04:26 - 01:18:09:05
Cas Piancey
Hey, bring it full circle. You wanted to talk about which races we hate, right?

01:18:09:05 - 01:18:11:14
Josh Cincinatti
Laurence Oh, no, no, no.

01:18:12:16 - 01:18:20:08
Laurence
I said that I wasn't sure whether anyone would be willing to accept my. We should cage the English like dogs of you.

01:18:20:08 - 01:18:23:14
Bennett Tomlin
I don't think the English have a lot of defenders. I think you'll be okay.

01:18:23:29 - 01:18:24:27
Josh Cincinatti
All right. Well.

01:18:25:09 - 01:18:31:18
Laurence
That's right. I don't think I have much more quite in this, given that I have a Cambridge act that.

01:18:32:03 - 01:18:51:19
Cas Piancey
You know, I think that there are like our number three, number two or number three country that of listeners. So this will be great for us to. So yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Everybody really get getting our German listeners happy, getting our our English listeners happy. Everyone is going to be blessed today. Okay.

01:18:51:29 - 01:18:54:16
Bennett Tomlin
Well, definitely getting demonetized.

01:18:55:05 - 01:18:59:17
Cas Piancey
Oh, definitely. Yeah. What money? It's all gone.

01:18:59:17 - 01:19:08:16
Laurence
It's a really good thing that you've created Fuck Coin because that is an absolute manna.

01:19:08:16 - 01:19:14:27
Josh Cincinatti
Fuck you fucking think about it, but it goes wrong.

01:19:14:27 - 01:19:19:08
Laurence
You can take pictures of famous moments on the Crypto Critic's Corner podcast and.

01:19:20:25 - 01:19:21:11
Josh Cincinatti
Whenever.

01:19:21:29 - 01:19:23:19
Cas Piancey
We're going to NFT at all, baby.

01:19:25:01 - 01:19:32:03
Bennett Tomlin
They're got you know, just because I want to see Adam back and Luke Dash's reaction to you and I meeting or.

01:19:33:08 - 01:19:34:29
Cas Piancey
We're going to break Bitcoin.

01:19:35:17 - 01:19:36:16
Josh Cincinatti
It is always.

01:19:36:16 - 01:19:39:01
Laurence
Morally correct to lie and cheat the code.

01:19:39:12 - 01:19:41:17
Josh Cincinatti
On Bitcoin.

01:19:41:17 - 01:19:43:25
Bennett Tomlin
That's that's akin to breaking the law.

01:19:45:22 - 01:19:45:26
Josh Cincinatti
That.

01:19:46:01 - 01:20:00:26
Laurence
I mean I have takes on my code did take on like the Ethereum virtual man is effectively that intent matters and that's I mean like I have demonstrated history in that sense I do feel.

01:20:00:26 - 01:20:01:20
Bennett Tomlin
Like the parody.

01:20:02:01 - 01:20:36:05
Laurence
Yeah, correct. And my previous arc is DevOps 199. But I do feel that like when your take there is an X was not designed for why again you would never validated transaction that contained hex data for a monkey jpeg. That's completely a moral judgment and it's one that I could probably do an entire show as a solo, if not the host on my takes on Bitcoin maximalism, but I won't because again, I don't want you to be demonetized, but suffice it to say.

01:20:36:05 - 01:20:38:13
Cas Piancey
That yes you do. I know you do.

01:20:39:24 - 01:20:43:22
Laurence
It because I know that that means that I have someone to advertise with whenever I.

01:20:43:22 - 01:20:44:29
Josh Cincinatti
Want.

01:20:44:29 - 01:20:53:19
Laurence
I do find that I think like there is I posted this in a tweet earlier where I think and this is going to be the bit that gets clipped out and.

01:20:54:11 - 01:20:58:06
Bennett Tomlin
This is the bit. This is the bit. Yeah.

01:20:58:06 - 01:21:02:00
Josh Cincinatti
Not engaging with the English. This is the one that's going to be okay.

01:21:02:11 - 01:21:02:26
Josh Cincinatti
Well I mean.

01:21:02:26 - 01:21:27:29
Laurence
This is the before you your red meat for your crypto critics where I was saying on Twitter that I don't think it's either moral or practical for people to shill or advocate for Bitcoin in particular as a solution for store value or transactions in the medium to long term future. Given current concerns over network security or the people that are currently working as core devs and its acolytes, I will write this up at some point.

01:21:27:29 - 01:21:29:07
Cas Piancey
Nobody is going to clip that.

01:21:29:07 - 01:21:31:22
Josh Cincinatti
Laurence Well, yeah, no, no.

01:21:31:25 - 01:21:42:04
Bennett Tomlin
Listen, listen, I think I'm top ten in like Bitcoin people who care about the long term security budget. So I think you're safe.

01:21:42:23 - 01:21:45:04
Laurence
Right? Okay. Fair enough. Keep it for yourself. I don't give a shit.

01:21:45:21 - 01:21:46:05
Josh Cincinatti
You go.

01:21:48:27 - 01:21:50:00
Bennett Tomlin
Cast anything.

01:21:50:00 - 01:21:50:08
Josh Cincinatti
Else.

01:21:51:17 - 01:21:57:02
Cas Piancey
I mean, what the fuck, man? No, I. It's we're we're toast with this idea. I have no idea.

01:21:57:11 - 01:22:03:20
Laurence
You are upstairs. Have a cold bath and think about what he's just allowed to.

01:22:03:20 - 01:22:04:03
Bennett Tomlin
He don't.

01:22:04:03 - 01:22:04:18
Cas Piancey
Want to hear about.

01:22:04:18 - 01:22:07:17
Bennett Tomlin
This coin reserves, so he deserves it. Oh, I ran away.

01:22:07:17 - 01:22:12:14
Cas Piancey
You're the one who fucking gave us up fed. I don't know what to say about you trying to blame on me. Get the fuck.

01:22:12:14 - 01:22:19:03
Laurence
Out of here. Looking forward to your Spider-Man pointing at each other. I mean, when the two of you.

01:22:19:03 - 01:22:19:27
Josh Cincinatti
How so.

01:22:19:27 - 01:22:24:24
Cas Piancey
Gascoigne? I'm just so cas coin holders don't blame either of us. Yeah, that's.

01:22:26:02 - 01:22:27:27
Bennett Tomlin
How. Because I heard you got subpoenaed.

01:22:28:10 - 01:22:28:17
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah.

01:22:29:03 - 01:22:34:08
Cas Piancey
Yeah, yeah. I'm well. Yeah, I'm already working with the DOJ crypto.

01:22:34:08 - 01:22:37:06
Bennett Tomlin
Twitter cuts in this episode that most people are not so.

01:22:37:06 - 01:22:42:04
Cas Piancey
Stupid. No, not at all. Not at all. Thank you. All right.

01:22:42:05 - 01:22:48:18
Laurence
I'm much time, both of you. It has been a genuine pleasure to spend the hours of 10 to 11 getting steadily more drunk in my schedule.

01:22:48:18 - 01:22:49:02
Josh Cincinatti
Why am I have.

01:22:49:20 - 01:22:55:25
Laurence
To leave some stairs? Thank you for this. It is. It has been a joy and a privilege.

01:22:57:00 - 01:23:01:03
Bennett Tomlin
It's it's been great to chat with both of you.

01:23:01:14 - 01:23:02:23
Josh Cincinatti
Because you just don't not.

01:23:02:24 - 01:23:05:22
Laurence
Eric coughing child right now. He doesn't care he's just happy to.

01:23:05:23 - 01:23:13:03
Josh Cincinatti
Yeah I'm my while my heavily pregnant wife deals with two sick children this been a lovely.

01:23:14:10 - 01:23:14:14
Josh Cincinatti
Watch.

01:23:14:19 - 01:23:15:21
Josh Cincinatti
I'm going to pay for later.

01:23:15:22 - 01:23:22:19
Cas Piancey
Oh, I feel like we are going we're all going to hell for this podcast, basically. So there you go, Luke.

01:23:22:20 - 01:23:24:04
Josh Cincinatti
That's the real moral judgment.

01:23:24:25 - 01:23:28:21
Josh Cincinatti
And the day. Oh.

01:23:29:18 - 01:23:31:23
Bennett Tomlin
Okay, I'm going to stop you before.

01:23:32:01 - 01:23:36:07
Cas Piancey
Yeah, we're good. We're done. That was awesome, guys.

One response to “Episode 109 – Satire in Cryptocurrency (feat. Laurence and Josh Cincinnati)”

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April 3, 2023 at 7:13 pm

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Episode 109 – Satire in Cryptocurrency (feat. Laurence and Josh Cincinnati)

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