Crypto Critics' Corner

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Episode 120 – How to attack Bitcoin (feat. Micah Warren)

How to attack Bitcoin (Feat. Micah Warren) – Crypto Critics' Corner

Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey are joined by Dr. Micah Warren, a professor of mathematics, to discuss the game theory of Bitcoin and what it means for the security of Bitcoin. This episode was recorded on June 8th, 2023.

Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin are joined by Dr. Micah Warren, a professor of mathematics, to discuss the game theory of Bitcoin and what it means for the security of Bitcoin.

This episode was recorded on June 8th, 2023.

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00:00:05:02 - 00:00:13:02
Bennett Tomlin
Welcome back, everyone. I'm Bennett Tomlin, and I'm joined, as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Cas Piancey. Cas, how are you doing?

00:00:13:07 - 00:00:18:09
Cas Piancey
I'm doing fine. We have a little background noise, but other than that, I'm good. How about you, Bennett? How are you?

00:00:18:12 - 00:00:32:16
Bennett Tomlin
Well, I'm doing pretty well. Today, we're joined by a very special guest, Dr. Michael Warren, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon and the author of the recent textbook Bitcoin: A Game Theoretic Analysis. How are you doing today, Micah?

00:00:32:23 - 00:00:33:06
Micah Warren
All right.

00:00:33:09 - 00:00:44:27
Bennett Tomlin
We brought you on here today to talk a little bit about what makes Bitcoin secure and what makes Bitcoin not secure. So let's start with the first half of that. What helps keep Bitcoin secure?

00:00:44:29 - 00:01:19:03
Micah Warren
Well, I guess if you're going to answer that question, you have to ask what is attacking Bitcoin? It used to be that I think people thought the biggest threat vector was people doing double spends and this was like in the early days when, you know, you could mine a few blocks on your laptop. It was very possible that you could go, you know, sell somebody some some bike parts on Craigslist and then go home and then line up all your laptops and maybe try to do a double spend or something, and you'll get the get the $50 back somehow.

00:01:19:05 - 00:01:38:18
Micah Warren
But those days are long over. And now it's very hard to do a double spend. So I think the major thing that Bitcoin has to worry about is miners colluding or, you know, somehow acquiring lots of hashrate and is taking over the whole network and then basically owning the network.

00:01:38:18 - 00:02:01:16
Bennett Tomlin
So less perhaps about like directly trying to profit from a double spend and more about trying to either like take on a censorious position in the network or gain some other type of advantageous position in the network. In that vein, what do you think is the least appreciated weakness by most Bitcoin advocates? Like, what do you think is most commonly missed when they're thinking through like Bitcoin security and how it works?

00:02:01:16 - 00:02:23:13
Micah Warren
So I think they believe that it's impossible, that it's impossible to 51% attack the network because it just it's impossible because 51% is too much. But the thing about 51% is it's less than 100%. So, you know, the the entire of the hash rate where all the hash rate is 100%. 51% is any you know, is a subset of that.

00:02:23:13 - 00:02:57:19
Micah Warren
Like all you need is those miners to agree. And most people believe this will not happen. But over time, I think these security considerations are going to change and it will be more advantageous for miners who are, you know, really just fighting over over scraps to start to make collusive agreements to kind of like form sort of soft trusts and start to work towards more of a collusive, monopolistic type of security.

00:02:57:21 - 00:03:12:19
Bennett Tomlin
And when you say the incentives are going to change, what we're mostly talking about is like the fact is the halvenings rate is that every four years the amount of new bitcoins available to the miners goes down. And because of that, the incentives start to change around that right?

00:03:12:20 - 00:03:38:10
Micah Warren
This is one of the most obvious ones. But there's also going to be other other factors, like the fact that it's not a new thing and the miners are like kind of like early adopters that are trying to boost the technology. Like if you go out 20 years from now, Bitcoin, if it's around, will just be another thing like email and you won't have people like, you know, basing their lives like around with a personality or, you know, that they're excited about email or something.

00:03:38:10 - 00:04:07:08
Micah Warren
And if it's just another way to make money and if your business comes or goes, it's, I think, less of it. I still think we're kind of in the early stages where people are trying to get us to get to the point where it's got mass adoption and it's and it's credible and it's viable. And if it if it ever crosses that point where, you know, like you're trying to make this case to the public that it does work, then the miners can kind of look at each other and start going after each other's profits and things like that.

00:04:07:11 - 00:04:28:20
Cas Piancey
Haven't the miners already done a meeting like in the past where they, like, had to discuss how. I don't remember if it was a mining pool or if it was miners themselves where they had to like discuss that they were controlling too much of the hash rate and like to tamp it down. I thought that happened already and there was imagining.

00:04:28:20 - 00:04:53:08
Micah Warren
That it was one event. I don't know if the same when there was a mining pool back in like 2014 G hash where they they had claimed over 55% of the blocks or something like that. And then everybody kind of freaked out and left the pool. But this is a pool, so it's not the same thing. And of course, that was 2014, I think, which is like Bitcoin was five years old and like it was still very much a small hobbyist thing.

00:04:53:11 - 00:05:12:01
Micah Warren
And so people would would look at that negatively. Back then, it wasn't you didn't have Michael Saylor holding like billions of dollars of his public company's stock in this thing. So I think the set of incentives are a little bit different back then. So and I don't so so I guess I'm saying I don't think they would necessarily run away.

00:05:12:04 - 00:05:35:21
Micah Warren
They would see this as this horrible nightmare as they did when it was understood, you know, ten years ago that Bitcoin was kind of an experiment. I think once people no longer think of it as an experiment and think of it as a functioning thing, they're less they're more likely to kind of go after the little, you know, bits of profit here and there that they can in a way they might not have done ten years ago.

00:05:35:23 - 00:05:49:14
Bennett Tomlin
One thing that I think you've actually changed my mind on more recently relates to like the market fragility hypothesis and like conceptual failures of Bitcoin. Can you talk a little bit about what those mean in this context?

00:05:49:20 - 00:06:11:04
Micah Warren
Yeah, So probably the main security assumption that most people make is that miners will never collude to attack the network because that would be the end of Bitcoin like. And it's definitely like it was true ten years ago. If, if all the miners would have said, okay, we are just taking over the network monopolizing it, it would have been a matter of months before.

00:06:11:04 - 00:06:34:19
Micah Warren
It was just it was history. Like nobody would have put up with that. But over the last ten years, where we've had all these people stepping up and selling, this is like a long term store of value. It's a hedge against inflation. It's this useful way to, you know, cut out the credit current companies fees using like it's a useful way to send money overseas.

00:06:34:19 - 00:07:00:23
Micah Warren
It's a it's a way to to you know, the dissidents you know fighting dictators in foreign countries can like, you know, collect money. You can move it around. And, you know, all this these great properties, a lot of these properties don't 100% require a non monopoly miner. Right. It's like if if there were four companies that were caught, there were sort of like kind of like colluding to to mine.

00:07:00:23 - 00:07:17:14
Micah Warren
It kind of, you know, had some sort of trust arrangement where they were keeping the hash rates low or something. You know, you could still you could still send money to to somebody in some other country. You could still, you know, do all these things. You could still store your value and watch the number go up and then sell everything.

00:07:17:16 - 00:07:44:05
Micah Warren
So I don't think it's the same situation where if if someone started if some corporation decided to move in and took sort of a heavier and heavier portion of the hash rate started selfish mining, started forming some agreements with other mining corporations, I don't think everyone would run for the exits. So that's that's what I call the market fragility hypothesis, and it's what people used to believe, But I don't think it's true.

00:07:44:07 - 00:07:54:21
Cas Piancey
What's the incentive that these miners would have to collude at that at that point? Like, what are they doing that is making this a profitable venture for them?

00:07:54:28 - 00:08:28:14
Micah Warren
Well, so in theory, mining is a very competitive industry, right? It's supposedly like somewhat like a perfectly competitive iron. And all the hash you know, the hash is basically fungible and you're just, you know, everybody's fighting for these the, you know, the small margins. So if you're spending, you know, say globally, if they do spend to try to get Bitcoin by miners is $10 billion in a year, they might be getting like $11 billion in return.

00:08:28:14 - 00:08:51:17
Micah Warren
And so these are sort of it might be much less. They're getting some very small profit margins. But if you can collude, if 51% of you decide to do this, you can spend $5.3 billion and you can get that same $11 billion in revenue. So your your your profit margin is just like jumped by an order of magnitude or two.

00:08:51:20 - 00:09:18:04
Micah Warren
So and it it goes beyond that. Like once you have a monopoly, like once you are, you get to say you can actually do other things like differential pricing. You can make you can insist that if someone's going to sit $1,000,000,000 transaction, they include a $200 dollar fee or something like that. And you can kind of make your own rules where you couldn't do that in the way it's it's a it's much more favorable to the to the transactors in the current landscape.

00:09:18:10 - 00:09:34:04
Cas Piancey
So if if they're able to do this and collude to compromise that in these ways, that make it much more profitable for them, what's to keep people using it at that point? Like, why would people want to stick around on on the Bitcoin blockchain?

00:09:34:07 - 00:10:03:05
Micah Warren
So this is something which I mean, you think about why do people use Twitter? Why do people use Facebook? Why do people use Google? Why do people use a lot of things? Why do people use GrubHub? I recently heard this term that Cory Doctorow came out with called enshittification, and it's this process that's happens to almost everything on the Internet where it starts out as kind of a useful thing.

00:10:03:08 - 00:10:18:02
Micah Warren
You know, it's useful like, like Facebook, you know, you know, 15 years ago is kind of nice. It's kept up with your friends, kept up, you know, met up occasionally with people in other states that you realize were like one town over that kind of thing. And like, it was kind of cool. I like Facebook 15 years ago.

00:10:18:04 - 00:10:44:04
Micah Warren
Then a decade later, it's like I'm arguing with some guy I went to high school with about gun control or something and watching my family members go down like QAnon rabbit holes and it's become like a really shitty place. And you look at what happens to lots of network Internet phenomenon. Like like Uber was actually kind of convenient and cheaper.

00:10:44:04 - 00:11:05:10
Micah Warren
Like ten years ago it was I mean, recently it's actually not like I recently have used cabs and found that like actually much more cheaper and convenient than Uber's. There's a lot of things where the whole model of a lot of the the Internet business over the last ten, 15 years is to like capture some sort of network effect, make sure that everybody's using the network.

00:11:05:10 - 00:11:14:10
Micah Warren
They don't really have any viable alternatives which feel that role and then just let it kind of deteriorate to the point where they're capturing all the surplus.

00:11:14:12 - 00:11:37:28
Cas Piancey
So don't you think, though, and you know, maybe you'll tell me I'm absolutely wrong here, but like, don't you think that the sticking ness of these networks is maybe not as sticky as Uber and Lyft, like Uber and Lyft, were able to, in a sense, monopolize the taxicab customer base and taxicabs kind of disintegrated. That industry industry disintegrated.

00:11:37:28 - 00:11:58:05
Cas Piancey
And now people don't even think about using cabs as an alternative anymore. I I'm like, I'm curious what would keep people on the Bitcoin network? Why would they be sticky? Why would they want to stay on the Bitcoin network if it felt like it was compromised? If there was clear like collusion between miners or or something along those lines?

00:11:58:07 - 00:12:15:00
Micah Warren
Well, this is the you know, there can be only one like, you know, that's what that's what the the Michael Saylor’s are trying to create is this there is one store of value. It is Bitcoin. You're either off it or you're on it. And if you're you know, you're not leaving it, you're short it. It's like we all have to agree that this is a store of value.

00:12:15:00 - 00:12:32:21
Micah Warren
And if we all agree to that, to that, then you know, where do we go? If if someone decides to defect, they just sell it and then go home. Or we can just agree that it's still working, like the number is still going up. The number, you know, all these things are still happening. Like it's it's a slow process.

00:12:32:23 - 00:12:54:25
Micah Warren
We're like like, you know, you're sort of rationing this over time. You're like, okay, this is slightly I mean, you know, it's like, you know, Facebook or whatever. At some point you eventually dump it. But but like a lot of people, it takes them five or ten years or Twitter. You use it. You keep using Twitter, even though like it's run by someone who's like actively enshittifying like speedrunning, this whole thing.

00:12:54:28 - 00:13:12:17
Micah Warren
But you know that like at some point it might not be there, but you're still using it because you get more engagement. You know, I tried using Mastodon, it kind of kind of Crip back over to Twitter a little bit because like, like I just there's just not the same level of engagement. And so it's a network. People use it.

00:13:12:20 - 00:13:28:24
Micah Warren
There's that inertia is going to last for a while. It might last five years, it might last ten years. So this could be the same thing with Bitcoin. You go in and if you got ten years of like decent profits before the whole thing collapses, you don't care. That's pretty good. That's better. That's better than eking out these tiny, these tiny profits.

00:13:28:24 - 00:13:31:27
Micah Warren
You're fighting very competitively with all the other miners.

00:13:32:03 - 00:14:00:25
Bennett Tomlin
And like Cas, I think it's possible that like when you and I think about Bitcoin, the first thing we think about and the thing we most relate to with Bitcoin is its value is this censorship resistant medium of value transfer. You can send transactions that no one else can stop. A lot of the Bitcoin ethos at this point is oriented around like number, go up, store of value, all of these things that may be tangentially related to censorship resistance but are somewhat distinct.

00:14:00:27 - 00:14:33:16
Bennett Tomlin
And so you wonder if some of those people might be willing to tolerate some loss of censorship resistance. And this really kind of came into focus for me. Micah and I recently did a panel together with the publisher of his textbook to talk about some of these types of things. And one of the other panelists mentioned that they'd heard from a staff member of a politician who was asking, what would it take to get miners to agreed to like the most simple of censorious requests, like, let's say you never again do a transaction to any of the OFAC addresses.

00:14:33:16 - 00:14:52:03
Bennett Tomlin
Let's start with that. And like the idea I think is that this type of takeover, this type of conceptual failure would happen kind of slowly and in the smallest reasonable step each time, Oh no, we're just no longer going to let you transact with OFAC addresses. But anyone else in the world you can still send your bitcoin to.

00:14:52:06 - 00:15:16:06
Bennett Tomlin
Okay, now it's OFAC addresses, plus this list of addresses that are known to be related to child sexual abuse material. Right. And eventually you keep pushing that until, well, if we only have this many miners, does it really matter if we start like cranking up the block size and making it unfeasible for like a home user to verify the blockchain and gradually, eventually you get to the point where portions of the community have stripped off along the way.

00:15:16:10 - 00:15:23:08
Bennett Tomlin
But there was never like a single schism event. And so there was never like a true, viable alternative until Bitcoin is captured.

00:15:23:11 - 00:15:58:22
Cas Piancey
So I've heard ten years, five years. So some sort of metric where there's like a sustainable amount of time that they're still volume, they're still users, there's still trading going on on Bitcoin. But I'm just curious, like we already have a lot of competitor chains in, in essence, right? Like I think Monero has taken over when, when Ben and I think about like, oh, censorship resistant, like privacy money that isn't nation state built Like I think most people think about Monero more who are like super into that stuff.

00:15:58:24 - 00:16:21:17
Cas Piancey
I think there's other chains that are more used for transact ability. Probably one I would hate to admit is like I think people use Tron because it's cheap and fast. Like I, I think there's, there's actual movement in Solana and stuff like that. So I think they're like they are already capturing some of these these people who were previously using Bitcoin.

00:16:21:24 - 00:16:28:02
Cas Piancey
Are we already seeing this happen then in real time, like without without nation states or miners needing to do anything at all?

00:16:28:07 - 00:17:01:20
Micah Warren
Well, I guess a good question is like what what preceded it? You know, you have this huge market cap, you know, half a billion, half a trillion dollars supposedly in Bitcoin. How many of these how did this comes from these people that that would leave it immediately go to Monero and how how much of this is you know these people that just want never go up and they don't really care if this is a significant portion that you know, shedding a few of these people over to Monero over time or the people that just need to a quick means a transaction overseas that's not going to have a significant impact.

00:17:01:20 - 00:17:09:04
Micah Warren
And it might not be something that like a possible minor collision group would I would be afraid of.

00:17:09:07 - 00:17:33:18
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and what's interesting to me is there's even kind of an argument that at a certain point, if number go up, if the value of your investment is your primary driving thing, censorship, resistance could actually work against that, right? If you're coin token investment starts getting the reputation as being the funding mechanism of choice for all these societally undesirable things, the value of your investment is likely to suffer.

00:17:33:25 - 00:17:49:01
Bennett Tomlin
And so there's kind of these points of divergence where potentially these competing interests of these different people who all considered themselves bitcoiners threatened, kind of like we're sticking strictly to one threatens the interests of this other group.

00:17:49:02 - 00:18:07:18
Micah Warren
Yeah. I mean, if there's a strong collusion that could actually kill two birds with one stone and that they could actually drop the hash rate significantly and that could be you don't have to worry about these, you know, billions of dollars spent on electricity. If you have three or four corporations who are controlling the hash rate, that's now no longer concern.

00:18:07:18 - 00:18:22:21
Micah Warren
These corporations are also protecting us from the really bad people at the same time. And then the rest of the you know, the rest of everybody could just put their money in their head, watch the never go about which might be appealing to enough people that you don't have to worry about this whole thing collapsing.

00:18:22:21 - 00:18:41:28
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. And so I just having thought more about those types of conceptual failures over the last several weeks as we're working through some of that, I have found it an increasingly kind of compelling and interesting vision of Bitcoin failure as opposed to just the more direct, Hey, look, this miner could make more money by double spending this one transaction.

00:18:42:00 - 00:18:57:26
Bennett Tomlin
One other thing you recently wrote was a treatise, an essay, a piece where you decided to respond to some arguments about whether or not Bitcoin ends wars. So what do you think? Does Bitcoin end war?

00:18:57:28 - 00:19:14:15
Micah Warren
Yeah, pretty skeptical about that. I don't know. I don't exactly know the mechanism by which it would. So it's hard it's hard to formulate a good response to that.

00:19:14:17 - 00:19:26:07
Bennett Tomlin
But that is the thing that has been argued by certain bitcoiners is that as hyper bitcoin ization occurs, it eliminates or severely reduces the amount of hot wars that would occur in the world.

00:19:26:10 - 00:19:26:19
Micah Warren
Right.

00:19:26:19 - 00:19:28:20
Bennett Tomlin
And that's a popular argument.

00:19:28:27 - 00:19:47:07
Micah Warren
This is I think there's been a real argument there like, like Alex Gladstein to me, this argument, just the the ability to print money and spend it means that you're always going to be spending it on things like the military. And this could be this could be bad. It's wrong. I guess that's that's there's a reasonable argument there.

00:19:47:09 - 00:20:13:22
Micah Warren
I don't know that. I mean, that's an argument for why fiat and war go together. But it doesn't mean that like removing or adding Bitcoin to the situation will completely remove the ability of the government to somehow incentivize people to create weapons that they can use to attack their adversaries with. I think there's other ways besides lending which which governments can or borrowing by the governments can use to create weapons.

00:20:13:24 - 00:20:25:19
Bennett Tomlin
And there are some versions of the argument where Bitcoin almost becomes like the battleground for these nation states will fight. What do you think of those arguments?

00:20:25:21 - 00:20:45:13
Micah Warren
Well, so you would never like you would never want to go into a a battle where you know that you are going to lose. It's like I'd be to play, you know, the game where you pull out what's it called, Big wallet or something or big bag where you you open up your wallet and it's got has a big has a lot of money.

00:20:45:13 - 00:21:01:24
Micah Warren
The wallet gets to keep everybody's wallet. I don't know if any was actually played this game but you know people have challenged me to it like know like if you're somebody if somebody works for your party, they're like, hey, let's open up our wallets and rivers. The most money gets to keep everybody else's money. Like, why would you do that?

00:21:01:24 - 00:21:17:15
Micah Warren
Why would you agree to that game? You know, take, you know, the $50 in your wallet so you can get home rather than. Yeah. So there's no reason that anyone would ever put themselves in a position where they would be vulnerable to somebody who's going to outspend them in some sort of an auction situation like this just doesn't.

00:21:17:15 - 00:21:24:21
Micah Warren
It's complete nonsense. No one with no one would go for this. And so they would just opt out of this whole game entirely. I think that's the show.

00:21:24:21 - 00:21:45:06
Cas Piancey
If you like. One of the one of the Tether executives has suggested that the like the first country that decides to just start buying up Bitcoin, like whether like with whatever their currency is, like just print your currency and keep buying bitcoin, maybe it was Samson Mow and just like that, that that would be the way the country that wins.

00:21:45:09 - 00:22:11:07
Cas Piancey
And I was just like, this is so this is so absurd absurd. And it also just flies in the face of the suggestion that it can end all wars or anything like that. It's like, Oh, well, on one hand they're suggesting you just print money and just keep buying Bitcoin. And then on the other they're suggesting that it's going to end all wars and it's going to stop spending and it's going to like it sounds like, no, it's going to keep spending going just in one only one direction.

00:22:11:07 - 00:22:28:05
Micah Warren
Yeah, people are kind of having their own competition for the most bullish hypothesis. And so scenarios in which like nation states are FOMOing into the Bitcoin is kind of like the top level of that. So I think that's that's the goal there.

00:22:28:07 - 00:22:39:06
Cas Piancey
I mean, we're seeing it on, on some small level at least, right? We're seeing it with El Salvador. And I just looked it up. I hadn't checked on this in a while, but Central African Republic,

00:22:39:06 - 00:22:40:10
Bennett Tomlin
They abandoned it.

00:22:40:12 - 00:22:46:18
Cas Piancey
Yeah, they gave they gave it up, which I'm. But I'm curious why they decided to give up on that.

00:22:46:22 - 00:23:07:04
Micah Warren
Well, they were very I mean, these are very low countries on the international totem pole. So they have a little bit more, I guess, less to lose. So if they get they put in a little bit of their wealth and everything goes up, it looks good for them. But thought it's asymmetric risk that if you just have a little bit to put in, it's not you know, it's not a completely horrible, stupid news.

00:23:07:06 - 00:23:27:16
Micah Warren
Central African Republic. They had their part of this, you know, French system. I forget how it works, but it's kind of it's not great for them. And it seems like they were pressured. I don't know. I'm hearing this for probably the the Bitcoin is but like they were pressured through economic means to like rethink their movement towards bitcoin.

00:23:27:23 - 00:23:42:25
Bennett Tomlin
Interesting which well I mean that's what we saw with El Salvador as well. Like there was the attempt by kind of the IMF and everyone else to use their access to loans and funding to convince them this experiment with Bitcoin was not worthwhile.

00:23:43:02 - 00:24:07:15
Micah Warren
It is something Bitcoin doesn't fix. This is something which I realized I came into this, you know, I first heard about it in 2011 and I was kind of hopeful about it. I thought maybe, you know, there is some way that people organizing around a selling point somehow we could, you know, maybe come up with systems that would they would kind of claw back some of the power from from corporations.

00:24:07:18 - 00:24:32:19
Micah Warren
And, you know, it kind of wrestled with this for a while. I realize, like, it's really hard to usurp, you know, power like like you can't like if you don't have the power to do it, you you can't do it. So they could always just use other economic incentives to to beat you. And so it's a really narrow roundabout, long path by which this could actually lead to something and, you know, something, I guess sustainable.

00:24:32:19 - 00:24:47:25
Micah Warren
And that actually accomplishes what people wanted it to do, which which is kind of like takes over the power back. And I think if it ever gets to there, it's still right for someone to come in and take over the whole thing.

00:24:47:26 - 00:25:10:16
Cas Piancey
We have Rob Green on a long time ago who did some marketing for cryptocurrency companies back in the day and he said he also I won't forget it just because he was the first person I heard say something like this, but it was like that He he was kind of on board with some of the messaging of cryptocurrencies in general.

00:25:10:19 - 00:25:48:21
Cas Piancey
And then the more he thought about it and the more he considered the enemies that like the people that Bitcoin was supposed to be going up against, which aren't just it's it's not just nation states, right? Like, like you said, it's corporations. It's banks. It's like it's the entire financial system. And when you think about the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of resources available to all of that and all of the people employed by that industry and like, yeah, just what you're up against, it's unless you have a really good plan, it's pretty much insurmountable, right?

00:25:48:21 - 00:25:56:11
Micah Warren
Yes, I remember. That was a good one. The last 10 minutes. I think he went on a very, very nice rant which explained this very good. I remember that correctly.

00:25:56:12 - 00:26:26:06
Bennett Tomlin
It's a point you make, I think, in Limbaugh as well. When you compare the security spend on Bitcoin to various like to the amounts currently spent on defense and things like that. And I think you raised a similar point in our panel when someone talked about like Bitcoin's role in the energy industry. And again, you're looking at an industry where like the total spend is so many orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin, you can just kind of embroiling Bitcoin in those types of things makes your protocols subservient to those interests.

00:26:26:06 - 00:26:28:11
Bennett Tomlin
It doesn't necessarily strengthen your protocol.

00:26:28:17 - 00:26:51:13
Micah Warren
Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's just like it can be picked up by some multitrillion dollar corporation. It's just sort of some wing of it and it's, you know, part of it of their interest. Like they they can they can drop the whole mining wing if it's not profitable or they can sell it off, bundle it to sell it to the Saudis or whatever, like, you know, you can just it's nothing compared to hundreds of trillions of dollars in other energy projects.

00:26:51:15 - 00:27:18:21
Bennett Tomlin
One thing that sometimes kind of surprises me and I'm trying to talk about these things like some of these potential risks to Bitcoin, which I find interesting, mostly academically. Theoretically, I don't own any Bitcoin. It doesn't in much of a meaningful sense to me, matter if Bitcoin gets attacked or not. But I just find these questions interesting. But when I talk to Bitcoiners about some of these issues, and especially when I start to get close to certain touch points, they tend to recoil.

00:27:18:23 - 00:27:48:24
Bennett Tomlin
Like if I were to whenever I bring up that, I think it is likely at some point there will be a version of Bitcoin with more than 21 million coins. And I think that there's a good chance that that one retains the ticker and a lot of the mass. There's a tendency to kind of ignore it and not just ignore it, but kind of deny the things that would lead to that state, like deny the need for growing transaction fees for that type of demand for black space, for the types of things that are kind of inherent in their protocol.

00:27:48:27 - 00:27:52:17
Bennett Tomlin
What do you think kind of leads to that tendency in the Bitcoin community?

00:27:52:23 - 00:28:16:23
Micah Warren
Well, I think there's a belief that we just need to get past like the next stage, the next level. We need to push through this that we're always just like one cycle away from this, like mass adoption is one cycle away from whatever the price target is that we need to like have everybody believe that this is real and, and make all the skeptics cry and we're just almost there.

00:28:16:23 - 00:28:41:18
Micah Warren
And we just need to ignore this stuff because once we can push through, once we, we, we get to that level, then we can solve all these problems and sort of thinking about this problem before we get there is just going to stop us from getting there. We're never going to make it if we're running around with Bitcoin $30,000, worried about like the security budget in ten years, you know, that's that's not going to help us.

00:28:41:18 - 00:28:58:09
Micah Warren
It's not going to it's not going to it's not going to serve the mission. So, I mean, that's what I think makes people not think about it, is it? It's you know, there's a there's a positive probability that this is actually bad for for the long term security of Bitcoin. So and there aren't really good answers.

00:28:58:12 - 00:29:32:04
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely true. But like for me specifically, watching some of the mainstream Bitcoiners reactions to audios recently was really fascinating to me because you saw a bunch of individuals who had advocated for turning on SegWit, who had advocated for turning on Taproot, who suddenly saw these parts of their protocol used and in a sense driving demand and raising transaction fees and showing like more demand for block space than there had been since like 2017, I think.

00:29:32:06 - 00:29:54:13
Bennett Tomlin
And yet they they were horrified that that was a thing that was occurring and in a sense that supports the aims of their protocols, that's aligned with all these things they claimed to be in support of. But once it actually started happening, they were against it. Do you think there's like do you think there's a mistaken belief that a lot of bitcoiners hold that leads to that?

00:29:54:15 - 00:30:14:18
Micah Warren
So I don't know exactly, but I mean, Taproot was kind of funny. I didn't hear anybody opposing Taproot. I don't know, like everyone was like, Yeah, yeah, it's great. I mean, I didn't look into it too much, but I mean, it's the way people are describing it. It's like, Oh, you know, you could do more smart contract things like, okay, is that really what we want?

00:30:14:18 - 00:30:35:08
Micah Warren
Okay, but everybody loves it. Oh, but, you know, as far as this like, audible thing, I think a lot of people think it's okay. It's Bitcoin, you know, it's supposed to operate as this this fee market. It's a fee market. You know, there's supposed to be a competitive market to get, you know, get your transactions on the tree or the chain.

00:30:35:08 - 00:31:05:17
Micah Warren
And over time, we need the fees. So this is kind of good. But there's always this tension between fees and the other alternatives. And this this is an interesting point because if we want the fees to go up to replace, they're going to go up by orders of magnitude to replace the lost fees from the block subsidy. Then you're going to have to get into the situation where people might start to leave if they're using it for all these other reasons, like, you know, cross-border payments or something.

00:31:05:17 - 00:31:28:06
Micah Warren
If you could just easily do this with Tron, you might as well just do this with Tron, right? If you're going to it was going to cost you $200 to send this or $2,000 like they say it's going to happen in 10-20 years in the future, of course, you're going to you're going to use Solana or Tron or Cardano or Tether or whatever or or U.S. Cbdc see, like why not?

00:31:28:07 - 00:31:38:27
Micah Warren
If you're not if you're if you want them to think that you're buying, you know, a snowboard off Amazon and you don't care that anybody knows that, like you might as well do that in a CBDC

00:31:39:15 - 00:32:06:22
Bennett Tomlin
And like what's really kind of interesting to me about this here's I think this connects right back to kind of what we were discussing with conceptual failures before in ways Bitcoin can kind of be taken over in that like the need to replace the new issuance with these transaction fees is directly related to some of the hard money aspects that the store of value fans of Bitcoin propagate and is like a central portion of their thesis for why bitcoin will succeed.

00:32:06:24 - 00:32:32:02
Bennett Tomlin
But like as we're talking about here, the closer we get to that point, the larger and larger portion of the population you price out of trustless and censorship resistant transactions using that protocol. Like if you're going to insist and transaction fees need to rise to this point to ensure security, you are basically admitting in that that many people will never be able to use the protocol for censorship resistance.

00:32:32:04 - 00:32:56:03
Bennett Tomlin
And so I think when it gets down to is kind of the tension there is Bitcoin has been promoted as a way to bank the unbanked and provide everyone worldwide with this new way to send value in this censorship resistant way. But the current design decisions of the protocol, including some that are seen as sacred, sacrosanct, fundamentally make that more challenging to achieve.

00:32:56:05 - 00:33:07:01
Bennett Tomlin
And like I think that at least in part could contribute to an eventual kind of conceptual schism where Bitcoin would be vulnerable to the kind of like take over you were discussing, right?

00:33:07:08 - 00:33:29:18
Micah Warren
I mean, if you have to ask what happens if the fees go up, like, let's just say that, you know, ten years from now people are paying on average $250 a fee or, you know, say times 1,000 or 2,000 a block. So, you know, you're getting this $200,000 in fees for a block or something like that.

00:33:29:21 - 00:33:49:10
Micah Warren
This means that there has not been a viable alternative for most people. Like like nothing like there's no reason people would kind of continually over time, continue to pay these high fees for something that really was like really the top dog. It really was the only one. Everything else was garbage.

00:33:49:11 - 00:33:54:15
Cas Piancey
Isn't isn't this the classic container ships argument from Nic Carter?

00:33:54:22 - 00:33:55:21
Bennett Tomlin
It's related to it.

00:33:55:24 - 00:33:56:16
Cas Piancey
Yeah.

00:33:56:19 - 00:33:57:14
Micah Warren
Yeah. And so, I mean.

00:33:57:20 - 00:33:58:09
Bennett Tomlin
But.

00:33:58:11 - 00:34:17:01
Micah Warren
Yeah, it could be that like this is is the major thing that I mean you need to get your lightning channel set up in this in the chain So you're willing to pay $500 to set up your lightning Channel so you can service everybody that is this will there's a real built in network effect there that that you know, could lead to this situation.

00:34:17:01 - 00:34:37:21
Micah Warren
And at this point, if this is the main containership that all you have to do is buy the container, ship, shipping company or whatever and now you out everybody, which is I guess precisely the argument I'm trying to make is like if everybody's shipping their stuff to one ship and you buy the ship, they hope they don't have any other options.

00:34:37:21 - 00:34:46:04
Micah Warren
They've already they've already, you know, abandoned all their other little that they used to carry stuff with. So you're just they're just stuck with whatever shipping company owns the ship.

00:34:46:04 - 00:35:22:19
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and just I think Bitcoiners love to portray Bitcoin as antifragile, which means something that when it's stressed, it becomes stronger. But I think in many kind of respects, like we're talking about some of the feedback loops inherent, you're fighting against that. Like if you assume the security budget needs to stay roughly the same or increase and you need fees to go to this certain level, then you're going to like as you're trying to get to that point, continually be pushing regular transactions on the network to look for alternatives and to consider alternatives like it fights its own, like path to that point, right?

00:35:22:21 - 00:35:34:22
Micah Warren
Yeah, I don't I mean, there are points where it is kind of antifragile where you, you know, kind of at a local level, like you think about a a a ball which is in a valley at the top of the mountain like, you know.

00:35:34:24 - 00:35:35:19
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, exactly.

00:35:35:19 - 00:35:41:28
Micah Warren
You go back and for a little bit it's going to roll down to that little valley. But if you push it too far, the whole thing is going to it's going to the ball is going to roll its way down to the sea.

00:35:42:05 - 00:35:43:06
Bennett Tomlin
It’s a metastable state.

00:35:43:06 - 00:36:05:03
Cas Piancey
Isn't the argument against this like the classic argument against any of this, that it's been around for a long time now and this hasn't happened, that nobody is trying to do this seemingly what could be like a pretty profitable move like nobody is doing it. It clearly is able to protect itself against that.

00:36:05:03 - 00:36:25:21
Micah Warren
And this is sort of a paradox because once you say like, which everybody believes this, that we've got to this point, I still think people believe we're not quite there. Like it's still the next cycle before we get to that point where it's actually, you know, set in stone and no, nobody can mess with it. So a little bit paradoxical in that if once we believe this, then somewhat that's what makes it vulnerable.

00:36:25:24 - 00:36:49:12
Micah Warren
Some of. So yeah I still have a lot of people still think that we're we have another order of magnitude or two to grow before the bullish statements will not be as strong. But of course then they say once we get to $1,000,000, then that's what everybody knows. It's secure, which which is of course, you know, there isn't a point at which we don't secure.

00:36:49:14 - 00:36:53:15
Micah Warren
I think it's best to just kind of you're not using it to store value.

00:36:53:22 - 00:37:00:29
Cas Piancey
Why? Why do you think why do you think it hasn't been attacked in any meaningful way? And up until this point?

00:37:01:00 - 00:37:32:23
Micah Warren
Well, I think a lot of the miners are they're they're they're bullish. And so they they are part of the ecosystem. And actually, one thing about miners and this probably could persist for a while, this is this kind of actually stabilizes it is that going into a competitive industry is actually like a horrible idea. Like if you're an entrepreneur, a businessman, like if you have a great family pizza recipe, you don't want to be like, I'm going to go start a piece of by the Slice restaurant in Brooklyn.

00:37:32:24 - 00:37:52:26
Micah Warren
Like, this is like big. It's just not a bright idea. Like you would you just start somewhere else, build up? You know, there's actually a a great I watched this great talk recently by Peter Thiel, who's maybe not your favorite, you know, everybody in the audience, favorite person. But he says all the quiet parts loud. It's great. It's called competition.

00:37:52:26 - 00:38:14:10
Micah Warren
It is for losers. It's a great talk. He gives it to, I think, a Stanford CS group. And he just explains the way to make money is to go find it. Industry where you can wipe out the competition and then and then suck up all the profits. The last thing you want to do, if you're a smart businessperson, is to go into an extremely competitive industry because there's no way you're going to make a lot of profits.

00:38:14:10 - 00:38:36:16
Micah Warren
And if you screw up just a little bit, you're going to end up losing a ton of money. So this might be somewhere where where Bitcoin is actually being helped because there are people that are that are running into the mining industry. They're actually there because they're somewhat supportive of Bitcoin. They're not just trying to make a quick buck because you can't really make a quick buck in it.

00:38:36:23 - 00:38:58:07
Micah Warren
And historically, from everything I've heard, Bitcoin miners usually lose money in Bitcoin terms. They've made a lot of profits over the years because they've been on the other the good end of a bull market, but they've actually lost money like if they had to instead of investing in Bitcoin equipment, they would be buying Bitcoin. They would have been a much more successful business.

00:38:58:09 - 00:39:23:22
Micah Warren
So there is a lot of pro-Bitcoin ideology and I think they are not really willing to go and do these things. They're not to cannibalizing each other yet. I think there's a point in the future where they could start to look at each other and say, okay, if we don't collude and start selfish mining or something, then you know, these are so the group over here is going to do it and then we're going to our profits are going to go to zero, really have to sell all our equipment and go bankrupt.

00:39:23:22 - 00:39:56:13
Micah Warren
And I don't think we're there yet. But this could happen if we don't get another huge bull run. I mean, like we've we've still had, you know, cycle to cycle. It's gone up by multiple. If we go a cycle where it doesn't go up by multiple, like if we don't reach 60,000 in 2025, things could get kind of testy with because they don't they kept us reliant on sitting around waiting for the bull market to make sure that they're all they're all rich.

00:39:56:15 - 00:40:15:08
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and I mean, we saw that already kind of a little bit, I think with Core Scientific right? They over levered against their machines going into the like during the last bull run didn't sell when it was like peaking and we're still holding too much when the market crashed and like ended up in bankruptcy because of it is I think, the broad strokes of their bankruptcy.

00:40:15:08 - 00:40:33:20
Bennett Tomlin
I haven't covered it much specifically to go read coverage before you take that is like a detailed series of events. But broadly, I think we've seen miners like throughout the history of Bitcoin mining end up in that kind of position because it's capital intensive to get started. You have ongoing costs, your returns are delayed at least until you can get set up in the machines running.

00:40:33:26 - 00:40:52:02
Bennett Tomlin
And like you mentioned, because like the market for bitcoin, mining is global and is global, you're competing with whoever has the lowest possible energy costs. And so if you don't have the lowest possible energy, you better hope that Bitcoin increases in dollar terms.

00:40:52:04 - 00:41:15:17
Micah Warren
Yeah, this could happen. I mean, this is something where an entirely this could happen to the entire mining industry at some point if there is a kind of nasty, you know, trip down during a bear market, this could be really nasty, especially with the hash market with a hash rates going up. Like I looked at it yesterday, it was like 370 million tera hashes per second or something.

00:41:15:18 - 00:41:31:07
Micah Warren
This is like the this is really big like, you know, relative to the to the price we're about a year away from having. So like the price I mean the, the profit margins are going to be really tiny coming out.

00:41:31:09 - 00:41:48:04
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Especially around the halvening but I think a lot of the recent increase in hash rate is probably due to Bitmain filling some of the back orders they've had for their most recent machine because they had long backorders during the bull market and are finally filling some of those out. So like, so we're seeing the efficiency of miners go up.

00:41:48:04 - 00:41:59:03
Bennett Tomlin
So like in terms of hashes per dollar have gone up. Yes. Micah, would you like to explain what selfish mining is and how it changes the commonly accepted 51% number that bitcoiners keep in their head?

00:41:59:03 - 00:42:10:16
Micah Warren
Sure. Yes, I left you. So it's selfish mining. It's something which, you know, is there's a paper that came out 2013. Someone described this If a miners.

00:42:10:16 - 00:42:12:13
Bennett Tomlin
It was Emin Gün Sirer.

00:42:12:16 - 00:42:12:18
Micah Warren
Yes.

00:42:12:18 - 00:42:14:17
Bennett Tomlin
Emin Gün Sirer of Avalanche right?

00:42:14:18 - 00:42:15:10
Micah Warren
Yes. Yes,

00:42:15:13 - 00:42:16:17
Bennett Tomlin
He wasn’t of Avalanche then.

00:42:16:17 - 00:42:38:17
Micah Warren
Right. If a miner is to keep a certain blocks secret or mined blocks keep them secret and then publish them at the right time, there's a process where, you know, they can by posting these are the right times. They can actually destroy more blocks of their competitors proportionally than they are losing of their own by risking them by them secret.

00:42:38:18 - 00:43:00:10
Micah Warren
And so, you know, it's the math is like a Markov chain. And you can you can figure this out. It's kind of a polynomial divided by polynomial. But but you look at this function and it shows you that once you get to one third of the hash rate, you you by increasing your hash rate a little bit and doing the surface mining, you get more proportionally of the blocks in return.

00:43:00:17 - 00:43:25:21
Micah Warren
So this kind of abuses the difficulty adjustment a little bit. So this means that once someone starts selfish mining at 33%, they can start to bring in other miners and it's always going to be a profitable investment to take hash away from the other mining pools over to the selfish mining pool because because you're getting more, you know, it's just arbitrage opportunity, more bang for your buck by moving over the selfish mining pool.

00:43:25:24 - 00:43:51:18
Micah Warren
And so this creates a situation where things could snowball, where, you know, one day it's 33%, next day it's 34, 35, 46, and pretty soon you have a 51% attack and then you're just monopoly mining. So this is one of those things where it's interesting when you consider this market fragility hypothesis and say, okay, what if a corporation just decided to start doing this like tomorrow?

00:43:51:20 - 00:44:13:05
Micah Warren
What everybody what everybody just kind of is at the moment, they would they would like right away it go, you know, buy US treasuries or like what would we have to get to like 40% of the mining before before they did that or what if they got 45% and were controlling most of the mining? And what if you just actually had like full control of the mining?

00:44:13:05 - 00:44:34:04
Micah Warren
But they promised to like, stay true to Bitcoin's core principles that they were going to censor anybody because that's, you know, and this was all good because now they can they can kind of ease down the the the hash rate. And we don't have to worry about the environmental fist fight anymore. There's a lot of on ramps for this for this centralization.

00:44:34:06 - 00:44:54:15
Micah Warren
And I think selfish mining is one of the easiest ones because you just start at this at this level and, you know, you can see it happening at first, but it can it can slow it can snowball it. If nobody freaks out and leaves like everybody says is going to happen, you can try it. I mean, you could just start selfish mining and then nobody you know, the prices go down well, we just keep doing it.

00:44:54:18 - 00:44:57:27
Micah Warren
This can work its way up to a full centralization attack.

00:44:57:27 - 00:45:23:23
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and I think what you pointed out there is like your only real other option in an attack like that is to leave and go somewhere else, to change the consensus algorithm and convince most of the Bitcoin community that now this coin is the new Bitcoin and we all agree on that. So it's true, but that's like and like that layer zero, you know, that social consensus is fundamentally what drives a lot of this.

00:45:23:25 - 00:45:42:10
Bennett Tomlin
And like I think what you pointed out, where at what point do you decide we need to leave and and like change this because it's a pressing concern is kind of what makes this challenging because perhaps some folks, as soon as they see someone get to like 30%, are going to be like, this is a serious issue. We need to take steps.

00:45:42:16 - 00:46:17:02
Bennett Tomlin
But if they can't convince enough of that mass, if enough stays in like the primary one, it can kind of trundle along to that point and like, yeah, And so largely, I think that's what it kind of comes down to with a lot of these types of attacks and why like the Bitcoin culture's interaction with these ends up fascinating to me because there is a portion of Bitcoin culture that treats the protocol itself as some like sacred thing with so many features that are never to be changed, that to even talk about changing them is like committing some type of heresy against Bitcoin.

00:46:17:05 - 00:46:40:22
Bennett Tomlin
And there are some of these situations we're talking about where you end up in like this selfish mining attack where you need to decide which part is most sacred. Is it like staying in this historically longest chain that has followed this algorithm that everyone knew, described and handed out to everyone? Or is it changing that and preserving some other more vague aspect of Bitcoin that's important to you?

00:46:40:22 - 00:47:06:26
Bennett Tomlin
It's censorship, resistance. The distribution of it's mining or whatever. And what's especially interesting to me is there have been many attempts throughout Bitcoin's history to like there was at one point, I think even Luke Dash Jr suggested adopting like Monero's Isaac resistance, where they hop between different algorithms at some randomly determined pace and that that would help decentralize Bitcoin mining and prevent it from like centralizing into ASICs.

00:47:06:28 - 00:47:27:00
Bennett Tomlin
There have been other people who've suggested like switching Bitcoin to like wholly different consensus algorithms that use like there was one that wanted to use like lasers, reading disks or something that got some brief support. But like none of these have ever been able to get like anything approaching what I would call serious consideration in the Bitcoin community.

00:47:27:05 - 00:47:38:00
Bennett Tomlin
And I think that kind of highlights how insidious this type of attack or how effective this type of attack could be, because it's really hard to build that type of consensus in the Bitcoin community.

00:47:38:00 - 00:48:03:24
Micah Warren
And I guess obviously any, you know, affect to counter this might go to a new algorithm. How long is going to take for that new algorithm to be, you know, swamped by the same forces or completely new ones? Right. I mean, and I guess I'm just thinking a little bit more cynically, how do we know that like Luke Dash Jr has it like, does it have, like already talked to some people who have built this thing and it's ready to go?

00:48:03:26 - 00:48:18:06
Micah Warren
I mean, we can trust him and maybe he's not allowed to do that. But what if, you know, we don't we're not supposed to trust him. Maybe he's already has some of these machines ready to go, and next thing you know, he's going to have he's going to do selfish mining on these on these laser disks or whatever.

00:48:18:13 - 00:48:19:03
Micah Warren
You know.

00:48:19:05 - 00:48:39:20
Bennett Tomlin
I don't think he related to that weird optical like spinning disk consensus algorithm, but I'm pretty sure he did it at one point when to adopt like the Monero for a while had one with a switch between like a random set of algorithms at random times in the hopes that it would never be worthwhile for someone to accumulate like enough of the different ASICs to cover that.

00:48:39:23 - 00:48:50:26
Bennett Tomlin
But like Monero was also far smaller than Bitcoin and the rewards are far smaller, and so the incentives end up a little bit different, like there's less people willing to develop custom chips for a smaller market.

00:48:50:28 - 00:49:14:12
Micah Warren
I haven't looked at that algorithm, but in general, when you combine things, you get a nonlinear relationship between like input and output or like input in like how many blocks you get. And the non-linear is really bad for centralization. The nice thing about, like Nakamoto consensus is if you're if you're contributing 15% of the hash rate, you expect to get 15% of the the block rewards.

00:49:14:12 - 00:49:19:19
Micah Warren
But if it's not linear like that, there's all sorts of incentives for centralization.

00:49:19:21 - 00:49:39:06
Bennett Tomlin
That was back in like 20, like middle of 2018 that I remember. Monero having a bunch of issues surrounding these ASICs and trying a bunch of different things for a while. They were just like regularly hard forking to new algorithms with like a month's notice or something like that. But then I thought they change it to something else where it switch between several but doesn't particularly matter.

00:49:39:06 - 00:49:58:16
Bennett Tomlin
The important point here is like it's hard to get consensus for that kind of thing and like it's hard to get consensus to change the Bitcoin supply cap. They tried to get consensus to change the Bitcoin block size. They got many of the most important, like companies and people in the Bitcoin ecosystem together at consensus and had them all sign a piece of paper.

00:49:58:20 - 00:50:12:08
Bennett Tomlin
And still that ended up not being enough consensus for Bitcoin to actually change those things. And so like I think that like escape to that layer zero social escape ends up really challenging in a culture like bitcoins.

00:50:12:11 - 00:50:33:11
Micah Warren
Yeah and they are blocks is worth is interesting in that I think people have tried to glean a lot of like you know universal wisdoms from this and like you know maybe maybe it's true you can't change it. Maybe smaller blocks are better. Maybe the miners are always the bad guys or will always lose and the nodes always win.

00:50:33:14 - 00:50:58:22
Micah Warren
But this is one of the things it sort of built into the whole mythology of Bitcoin. Now that the nodes are always going to have the final say and I don't really know precisely. I tried to like figure out what exactly precisely that means and how that would make sense. But it's it's kind of part of the understanding now is that the nodes would be able to soft walk away anything that they didn't like.

00:50:58:29 - 00:51:20:10
Micah Warren
And I don't actually believe this. This is something which I think requires a lot more of an argument than what about 2017? So if if this happened to in the future happened 20 years in the future and the miners said, no, listen, we're going with this hard fork, these are, you know 20, you know, the night having or whatever will be the last.

00:51:20:10 - 00:51:45:22
Micah Warren
Is that what happens after that? That's a hard fork. You know, get on board. It's not clear that that the same you know, it's we're we're relitigating the block war again it's like the block size where it's like whatever's going on in the world in 2041 or whatever, it's completely different situation, completely different dynamics. And if if Bitcoin is the thing which people are using every day and they need to rely on it, then they don't want to challenge.

00:51:45:22 - 00:52:10:14
Micah Warren
Miners who have, you know, will at this point be working with all these major financial corporations to to, you know, set up lightning channels for, you know, Wells Fargo and all that kind of stuff. They're all going to go with the miners, right? They're not going to like let their nodes fight and cause the soft, which is going to destroy the world's financial system when everything's on bitcoin.

00:52:10:16 - 00:52:19:16
Micah Warren
So I think these dynamics could become completely flipped once we get to this magical place where Bitcoin is like, you know, indispensable and adopted by everybody.

00:52:19:18 - 00:52:49:01
Bennett Tomlin
I, I think there's lots of assumptions that were made around 2017 which over the coming decades, people will find were not true. Thank you very much for joining us today, Micah. Anyone who wants can check out his recent textbook on Bitcoin, a game theory theoretic analysis which has more detailed information about different attacks. Bitcoin security, how to think about it, how to model it, and like really how to understand these different things.

00:52:49:01 - 00:52:50:06
Micah Warren
And I should.

00:52:50:09 - 00:52:51:11
Bennett Tomlin
Thank you very much for joining.

00:52:51:11 - 00:52:52:07
Micah Warren
Us. It's a little bit.

00:52:52:07 - 00:52:56:28
Bennett Tomlin
Mathy Yeah, it's a math textbook. It's a graduate level math textbook.

00:52:57:00 - 00:52:57:07
Micah Warren
To be.

00:52:57:08 - 00:53:05:28
Bennett Tomlin
Clear. So if you're interested in a graduate level math textbook about the game theory of Bitcoin, it's the best. Yeah, it dominates that category.

00:53:06:01 - 00:53:08:27
Micah Warren
Yes, yes, yes, I competition is for losers.

00:53:08:29 - 00:53:10:10
Bennett Tomlin
Well, thank you very.

00:53:10:10 - 00:53:11:05
Micah Warren
Much for having me.
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