Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin are joined by Peter Ryan of Ryan Research to discuss the vile truth at the heart of Bitcoin.

This podcast was recorded on August 23rd, 2025.

Where to find the podcast:

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

Peter’s piece

Subscribe to get each episode delivered to your inbox:

We also have a Discord Server you can join here.

Where to find Crypto Critics’ Corner:

English Transcript:

Welcome back everyone. I am Cass Piany and I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you today? I'm doing okay. How are you, Cass? I'm doing great. We're joined by a very special guest today. Um, Peter Ryan, who we've we've known for a very long time, um, and who has his own consultancy firm and a Substack, Ryan Research. You can look it up. Um, that covers history, economics, tech, uh, everything you can possibly imagine. But uh we have yet to have you join us on the show, Peter. So, first of all, welcome. And second of all, how are you? Great. Uh we have been uh colleagues uh I dare say uh friends uh for a number of years, especially kind of the heyday of the late 2010s of uh crypto journalism and and and content. Uh and yeah, I it's great to be on the show. you guys are a huge influential uh assemblage duo in the space and so uh I would have loved to come on earlier but as I was telling you um in the pre-show uh it felt somewhat like stolen valor uh to like be on the same plane as you guys. So I'm happy that I can equate a slight niche uh to you guys at this point and uh I feel uh humbled to be with you. Well, it's that's a little bit Sorry, Cass, but Peter, that's a little bit of a funny thing to say considering your history in in the industry was leading research for CoinDesk and Cass in my history in the industry before we started this podcast was tweeting at people angrily. It's not by the title, it's by the content. Um, so actually, I'm just trying to flatter you. That's it. Actually, the best meme about Cryptocritics Corner is by Peter in which he shows a guy saying, "Ah, Cryptocritics Corner, it's about cryptocriticism." And then over his head it's like, "No, it's about it's about best friends." Um, but yeah, that that's all besides the point. Um, Peter, we've been talking to you for a really long time and I think most people are probably unaware of the first thing we're going to be talking about. So what the reason we crossed paths originally was because we were covering we were all talking the main thing we were all talking about back in 2017 the end of 2017 was something called the block size wars and I think we've maybe gone over this a little bit on the podcast but really we've never gone into a deep dive about it and uh your recently published work which is fantastic um uh money by by all means am I getting am I getting that right? Um, so your recent piece goes over the block size war. Um, and yeah, I would I like I maybe just ex can you describe what the block size war is and what it meant to the history of Bitcoin. Sure. So, Money by Val means I have an a bridge version in compact magazine and the extended version is on my Substack um to get all the juicy details uh and extra sources. But what the block size war was, it it forms a essential piece of the essay I wrote and it is so important because it intersects many of the core myths of Bitcoin and how those myths became debunked in the process of going through that block size war. And so the way I would frame it is that in many ways it should never have been a war. uh as far as I see it and I think there's there's definitely a faction um that sees it that way is that Bitcoin was always meant to go down one side of that war which was increasing the block size in the blockchain there's blocks blocks contain transaction requests the more transaction requests you can fit inside a block um the more fees miners can generate the more efficient and productive each block is for the blockchain and so this is the natural way that the blockchain would scale and get into actually competing with Visa and other major payment processors. So, this seemed to be what everyone will say, you know, this is the way Satoshi envisioned it. This is the way a lot of early devel developers always talked about it on bitcoin.talk forum and other communication platforms. Uh and it was only into like 2013 2014 that it emerged that there was a deviation and that once we get into the sort of 2016 2017 land that's when there's a true break in the community and there is freezing the block size faction who ultimately won the block size war and then there is the uh not even you know exponentially increase the block size but like moderately increase the block size to proportionally keep up with demand uh in a very sort of sequenced events every few years. Um and so that occurs in about 2017. And this chapter going through that kind of year 2017 through 2018 forms kind of the the backbone of this critical period where all these decentralized open-source software ideas they get tested. All these free market ideas, they get tested and we end up seeing in in both ways these sort of market failures start to emerge and it starts to actually get into core questions of like what is money and like how should money be used in society and how do certain myths of Bitcoin get that wrong? So, well, can we can we sorry, Bennett, if you want to jump in, you feel free. Sorry, I don't want to I don't want to take over here, but I just my I see where you're going here and you're I you're purposely being big, which is good, but I do want to I do want to drag you into the what what Peter is talking about is there's Bitcoin, what what's now known as Bitcoin and there's what's now known as Bitcoin Cash. And they're different they're different um they're not just different monetary policies, they are completely different currencies now. And that was that is the split that you're talking about. And this was a split between different factions, but also just completely different interests within like what makes the Bitcoin blockchain, which is like I know that all of this is we've talked to enough people that um I think most people understand how a blockchain works. Now, I think it it might be annoying to go over that exactly, but I do think you're talking about some very specific interests here, and they're opposing in different interests, right? So, we're talking about miners, and like their role is to hash a number um using computing power uh to get the next bitcoin out of a chain of bitcoins. Um, and there are reward like I Bennett, do you want to do you want to help me out here because there's so many different factions basically. So, Peter, can you maybe talk a little bit about how Bitcoiners self- selected into like small blockers and big blockers and what the different interests Cass are Cass is talking about looked like on the different sides of that? Yes. So the the important thing to remember too is that Bitcoin Cash became eventually the banner which the big blocker faction rallied around. Uh and you know like I made it known in my essay if anyone checks a few Google searches like it's no surprise I was partial to the Bitcoin Cash big block side. I don't make any bones about that. I think like I check myself in that bias by kind of criticizing them as well and the sort of general concept and sector of crypto. Uh but I would say that the easy way to like slice this is that like I said there was an original road map for Bitcoin's upgrades to be and a lot of people you know were actually like I would say like the dominant position in the community was this sort of Satoshi inspired uh way of upgrading the block size. Now, I would demarcate that opinion by looking at like the uh New York agreement in the spring of 2017, and I know people can like make uh points about this, but like near 80% plus of the mining hash power at the time uh was on the side of this moderate um uh big block upgrade within Bitcoin BTC. So Bitcoin Cash wasn't even like a figment of anyone's imagination at this point. So the miners were dominantly for upgrading the block size. Now within that New York agreement, there was also the nominal signing of like a petition in support of that which many of the original Bitcoin businesses and you can say what anyone wants to say about they're oligarchs, they're not oligarchs. You know, a lot of these were startups at the end of the day, but a lot of the business community supported the big block side. So, in the only ways we have to kind of actually measure this consensus, this rough democracy, we had 80% plus of the minor hash power, which was very quantitative. And then we had more a little bit less quantitative, but nonetheless, like a bunch of the businesses signing on to the agreement. Uh, and then so that's like kind of the original conception. A lot of these people too, a lot of the vocal people were, I would say, these libertarian Bitcoin idealists. Roger Ver is sort of an obvious one that comes to mind. These were a lot of people that go to Porkfest in New Hampshire that liked Ron Paul, that were into Austrian economics. And so I would say there was actually more of this idealist strand inside that big block community. uh while it was dominated and led but I well I would say like the minor community and a lot of those miners were based in China at that time in the market share of Bitcoin. Now we get to the small block faction and a lot of the small block faction was more led by Bitcoin core developers and their sort of uh interlocators um uh like nominally like exchanges like Bitfinex which probably will come up a lot later. uh they were in support of that that small block Bitcoin core kind of led faction. And what I will say and I document this in the essay in terms of quantitatively measuring these sides, the big issue to demonstrate how popular and grassroots the small block uh side was in terms of their argument was the user activated soft fork um kind of campaign. And so we have all the non-mining nodes out there that would raise a flag on them and would indicate if they support this small block shibilith if you will that would say I I vote for the user activated software. We don't have to get into the roots of that. We just have to know like this is their way of declaring how many of them are. And so they could never get above like 20% of just the non-mining nodes. So by their own terms they could not demonstrate they were an actual uh significant let alone plurality but not even a majority. So this is how I would say you would want to start thinking of these two sides um and that there was the developer there were sort of corporate interlocators to the small block side and there was some deceptive practices there. Not to say that the big block side was perfect in everything they did, but generally that's the vibe of each side. So, can you can you talk about what the reason is that there was this? Because we we understand you're you've explained that there was this split and that there was at least some ideological value to this split, but like why would 80% of miners be pro big block and then 20% not? And why why would um you know why do we have Bitfinex and Tether and other or or more importantly actually more importantly um at least for what we're talking about right now um more importantly the the core devs being into the small block stuff as opposed to the big block stuff and and I'm yeah I'm wondering because because I do think that most people at least like most people I know who are familiar with early Bitcoin history it sure does feel like it's very libertarian leaning and the concept is this should be money. Like I do think that it it sounds to me and and Bennett, if you think I'm if I if you think I'm wrong here, but it sounds to me in a lot of you know Bitcoin uh Bitcoin talk forum posts and stuff when Satoshi was active that like this is meant to be utilized transactionally. It's not supposed to necessarily be something you just hold on to. though I'm not sure that's necessarily even thought of as a real use case back in those days.

Sorry, I like I trying to like I'm wondering I'm wondering where the split is, why there's this ideological split between these two very important parties and whether or not there's truth to either side. Like I don't know what Satoshi's plan was. Does anyone Well, one person claims to know Satoshi's vision. Sorry. Anyways, perhaps the best way to come at this is uh were there certain groups that most benefited from different plans and what groups were those? Yeah, that's that's a good way of putting it. I mean, I think I've written in this essay and there's a previous essay I wrote um talking about the Bitcoin miner fee crisis which is eventually going to hit. Uh but in terms of the economics because of a thing called the happening because we have this bifurcated fee structure in Bitcoin miners where there is an inbuilt default subsidy the algorithm gives the miners as a way to encourage them and then there's the market supply and demand variable fee that they must uh subjectively choose to charge their customers uh transaction requesters. And what's supposed to happen every happening that subsidy goes down and eventually there's an inflection point where those variable fees are going to be all there is and those variable fees have to pay the miners the sufficient amount of revenue to justify everything. So I think from just that design principle and then like I document plenty of Bitcoin talk forum posts by Satoshi uh emails that he's written uh I bring up Mike Kern a lot as a character that spoke a lot with Satoshi uh and use his sort of you know you have to sort of um default to his conception of a little bit but I think there's enough evidence of Satoshi's own words and what early developers around and close Satoshi is that like there there was this general idea that Bitcoin was always meant to be a medium of exchange and that it was a payment processor. I mean it was this thing where it was going to compete compete with Visa to pay for $2 transactions for coffee. So this idea that there's a store of value and there's a medium of exchange that are totally divorced. I mean that wasn't really true and those were always sort of interwoven together in the early days. So I would say even though there is a very toxic Satoshi's vision narrative out there that really like ruins the branding and optics around that conception of Bitcoin like the I mean like the the backbone evidence of those early days is like very suggestive that it was supposed to be this way. Now once we get into like 2014 to 2016 to 2017 especially like there are contemporary reasons and ration why certain parties pick a side. Um and so I would just say quickly the reason miners want a big block is because of that structure where they need to eventually get variable fees sufficiently up to a point where they can um have a competitive and sustainable business model. So to do that, you either charge really high prices for your uh transaction request services that you provide because there's a low quantity of them or you can keep the prices of the fees low and just have a ton of quantity of those transaction requests. The only way to have a ton of quantity of the transaction requests is if you expand the block size. So it is it is very natural for the miners to go down that path. Now, when we go over to like Bitcoin core developers and other people around them, why they would maybe not want that and want something that's more the opposite is that when you freeze the block size, so there's all this like latent transaction demand that would have otherwise gone inside the blocks that like is can't go anywhere or it needs to go somewhere. So that's where we have this invention of layer 2s and layer twos are grafted onto the layer 1 bitcoin blockchain as this alternative payment rail to cover all those like $2 coffee transactions and things like that. And that's where we have businesses like a blockstream that offer layer 2 products. And so it's kind of bewildering that Blockstream and sort of the things around that and again there there's toxic ways people talk about Blockstream and their role in the community. But again just I would hope people start from first principles and just look at what they are. They offer a layer 2 product. They have a natural conflict of interest where they want to freeze the blocks on the Bitcoin layer 1 blockchain. So all that latent transaction demand goes to their layer 2 product and Blockstream funded and supported many of the Bitcoin core developers and there was a natural um assemblage of fellow interested parties like for instance uh Bitfinex was an exchange that did not go for the New York agreement in support of big blocks. they were very um unsupportive and it only became like known later down the road after denials and I actually cite in my essay instances where both you two are like talking with Samson Mau and Adam back and you're inquiring on them on certain things about you know did you invest in this company or that and it wasn't until like 2021 that they completely reversed course and admitted like things like they actually were an investor in Blockstream in the early days they weren't just like a customer of Blockstream, they were like a seed investor. And so when you're supporting Bitcoin core developers and you're a seed investor in like the dominant layer 2 alternative to layer 1 blockchain uh transaction demand, like this is a really big conflict of interest. And I'm not even saying that that could be wrong in of itself. One of the problems is is that that conflict of interest or that alternative value proposition was not properly disclosed and not properly argued from that standpoint. I think that's an a fair summary though when I hear it the first points I come back to are um is there latent transaction demand right fees on Bitcoin right now are under one sat a bite right or one set per vite and uh if this was meant to benefit things like liquid why does no one use liquid yeah so that's a good question so this is where my essay works on two planes it's one using the internal logic of bitcoin and you know sort of the free market Austrian economic premises that go into that. Uh and I use that as a way to like argue these things break down. But then there's a second plane of just looking at it when you're not already inside the logic of Bitcoiners and you're looking at it from like just anyone approaching economics from a neutral level. And so I would say um one you could say the reason that there's no demand today for liquid in the ways that we would think about is because a lot of these dominant narratives took over and a lot of the infrastructure businesses and again like like at the end of the day like marketing that would be used to communicate how you use Bitcoin uh was set aside to make way for the store of value narrative for speculative trading narratives for like you just throw it in an ETF and like invest in that narrative. So a lot of the ways in which we maybe would have seen that and again there were periods where we saw surges in uh transaction demand that obviously the big block side would always say when you do that and you're not increasing the block size you're just going to see the surging of fees and like so that has been historical episodes where we do see that and always because the fees rise proportional to the transaction demand uh it it basically kills the transaction demand and people stop using it. So I would say from the internal Bitcoin logic um it probably could have had an alternative history where that demand was properly placed inside the layer 1 and the narratives that could support it would be there. But I would say from the outsider logic you could say that crypto there's a fundamental problem with crypto is that that's not how people use money. Uh that's not the institutional environment that money can operate in. uh where people like people use their bank accounts to move bank deposits back and forth to pay their bills, to pay each other. Uh, and there's there's a huge institutional level of trust, of regulation, of risk offsetting that goes into that that like libertarian oriented people like can't fathom. And like how people would prefer their banks and even in some cases um, uh, more like you could even say like people would maybe even seriously trust a central bank digital currency. I might raise eyebrows with that more if given the chance than like one of these Caribbean island started uh cryptocurrencies and that's because of a lot of implicit status logic that normal people just consider without thinking about it. I it's it's so funny. Like I'm I'm not I don't want to drive us too off off track here because I think there's more history to to delve into about this, but it's so funny because as you're describing this to me, I'm thinking of I'm thinking of the discussion that Bitcoin has in general now. And that discussion is like new ETF and like and oh this much money is being utilized to push money into a Bitcoin reserve or like whatever whatever the idea is that their value. Right. Right. Right. Right. Exact. No. Right. Exactly. which is so wild when you do reflect on what Satoshi excuse me Satoshi's vision um what it what it was which is absolutely there was the '08 banking there was the great financial crisis and he saw that happening he saw the failures that banks had not not just actual bank failures but clearly saw like a systemic issue um and was like oh this needs to be fixed and now the propositional value of Bitcoin is like, well, just hold the Bitcoin for as long as possible and then it's just keeps going up in value. And then people will be like, I don't even understand why would you have an ETF? Shouldn't people just buy Bitcoin? And I'm like, well, yes, but now I actually understand why someone would just buy a Bitcoin ETF because like you don't need to have the Bitcoin in your wallet anymore. You don't need cold storage wallets for your Bitcoin. In fact, I could really easily argue that an ETF is better for like an old person to have than actually having Bitcoin because you can just get [ __ ] shot for your Bitcoin. Like that ETF is easier to insure and deal with than the Bitcoin in a a cold a cold storage wallet or whatever. And I I I just find it it's it's crazy because it is so different from whatever the initial concept was behind this stuff. I like I just had to express that because this was like flowing through my brain as you were discussing this, Peter. Yeah. And and I would just like um add to your statement there in thinking about these core value propositions that everyone talks about with Bitcoin and it's store of value which is the dominant one now. It's medium exchange which is less so but people talk about in terms of like layer twos like Zap or all this other stuff. And then there's number three, which is like less talked about now, but um is censorship resistance. And when you actually like think through history, and this is the and I kind of came to this like in the 2010s, but like especially now at my kind of final conclusions, the real out of the park stellar use case that Bitcoin gave to the market was censorship resistance. And it was only by providing that as the headline that medium exchange medium exchange was a means to censorship resistance and that store of value then becomes a tertiary property where it's like we yeah we want store of value like in the sense that it's stable so you can transact it as a medium and avoid getting it censored. But this is like and this has always been the benefit of like like something as simple as cash, right? Like if we want to just break it down like that is when cash being valuable back in the day is like you can't stop me from accumulating cash. You just can't do it. Like you can if I put it in a bank, you can take away my bank deposit. But me just having cash and using it on hand, you cannot stop that. And that is the beauty of it. And I think um yeah, like clearly that got hijacked. I wait till I fire Jerome Powell and see what your cash is good for. Yeah, and that's we have to get into the deep. We don't need to get into conspiracies. But um but yeah, I mean you're exactly right and this is where um today when we talk about ETFs, when we talk about Bitcoin treasuries, like when I think of Bitcoin, the only reason it like halfway makes sense is because of the censorship resistance. And when you divorce it from that completely by having some other third party and like a wackadoo like uh a Michael Sailor managing that for you um who I think I think it was uh you know your very own protos that documented like he's there's like allegations that he's like doing some uh cockami stuff with customer funds or his fiduciary responsibility but we don't have to get into that. But um the point is like why would you even invest in this thing in the first place if you don't even have the inherent access to it directly so you can uh have the censorship resistance immunity. So that's where it doesn't make sense other than the only thing people value about this is that it's a casino token and it's going up in value. People are gambling. It's the same principle where you see people talk about uh sports gambling addictions with all these new apps. Um it's it's the same social mechanism going on with that inside of crypto and it's even you could say the larger equity markets because of apps like Robin Hood. Uh people are just gravitated to this because they're addicted to gambling and a lot of them are chumps and getting suckered by whales. Uh they don't understand it. They're not actually investing in for the properties that we all thought Bitcoin was valuable for in the early days. uh and it creates this really toxic and and frankly stupid uh way of looking at an investment. In your essay, you talk about how this black size war and this split revealed certain like truths of the Bitcoiner community to be myths in actuality. Can you talk a little bit about what those myths are and how they were revealed by the process of this split? Sure. So I think I think the big the big one is I I'll I'll locate it on like two points. Uh there's the software layer and then there's kind of the the buyers and seller market layer. So number one, we always have this meme of Bitcoin's like digital gold. It's 21 million capped. It will only ever be 21 million. Uh there's this finite supply. No one can ever change this supply which makes it so good. And there will be people that talk about this in various degrees of uh religious paranoia. And so you can get the sort of like cold turkey talking about it on a Bloomberg, but you can also go to the more esoteric Bitcoin podcast where it's like a seance where they're talking about this. So you have this you you have this like different degrees of talking about it but it's all towards the same message. No one can touch the supply of Bitcoin tokens out there but that is an unexamined proposition. And so once you start asking critical questions you say well like how why you know what's going on there? And when I started to ask some of these questions, it just became obvious that it's like, okay, well, Bitcoin is not like a commodity that's you dig out of the ground. It's a software. And software is made by humans. It's also upgraded by humans. So there's a continuum of human interaction on this thing. So like who are these humans? And so then you get into like we've talked about Bitcoin Core, but as a but as more of a general conception of that, there's only a few elite developers that um have a role in actually shaping the code of Bitcoin. And the code of Bitcoin is essentially part and parcel to its definition of monetary policy, which keeps that supply limited. So when you think about it, it's like 90% of Bitcoin's code was generated by like over 40 people. So when you like that that's a very different statement than you'll hear on all those other shows that talk about uh the religiosity of this supply cap. And so when you start conceptualizing that you say okay 40 people and then there's actually like one to five depending on the year uh elite maintainers of the Bitcoin code that have the exclusive privilege to reject and upload uh new code additions into it. So that creates another layer of of privilege and by privilege you also have increased risk of capture by you know more uh you know nuance factors of that are passive and things like that but also of direct capture by the state or like very uh bad oligarchic interests things like that. And so once you start to think of the developer elites in that sense, you can see it's actually like very simple for them to either passively or actively be influenced in a way that they could change the code whenever they want. And once they change the code, that means they can also change the supply. And there has been instances where one they've changed the supply and people don't really talk about it. Now, it's not in a huge way that like causes a lot of concern, but I'm more concerned not in, you know, like the most perfect way to bolster my side that they change it to like 40 million. I'm talking about the claim that's made by all those Bitcoiners is that no one can, that there's not a single person on Earth that can do that. And my question is, well, is it technically possible? Not only is it technically possible, it's been done before. And then secondly, can that can code changes be enacted and pervade the entire market and go unnoticed by market participants? I the question that is also yes. Yes, that's true. That is true. But I but I also want to I is it still true? I don't know if it No, I don't know if it's still nodes are running like knots now, right? There was like inside Bitcoin core over op return and stuff like that. like there are two pretty major node implementations running now on the network. No, I I I think what I'm what I'm more suggesting is two things. that he's right that this has happened in the past, but but more so I was going to point out that I think as you've suggested Bennett, you're like Peter's not alone here, but as you've suggested as well that like this needs to change at some point in the in not our lifetime, but if Bitcoin continues to be a thing in whatever it is 140 years or whatever, um how are you going to pay miners? And you just eventually the answer sadly whether or not these you know Austrian econ uh economists or whatever they want to call themselves cyhodine you know whatever um like if these guys want to suggest that it could just go on without increasing supply forever they got to figure out some other implementation that they can keep people in invested and incentivized to stay in the ecosystem because if you don't increase supply it doesn't work and and like I That's just I that's kind of like how economics works. I don't know I don't know how you secure the system if you don't do that at some point. Yeah. And just just to add like and I and I don't mean to like ingrandise anyone's one statement or their position in Bitcoin, but a character that's a developer like Peter Todd has literally advocated for the concept of increasing the uh the the supply cap to do more subsidy rewards uh to make sure that minor fee crisis doesn't happen. So if that gets implemented, that's another question. How influential is Todd? Another question. But the point is that this is a conversation point inside that developer community. And so that's where you look at that. You look at the fact that while there are competing things uh like knots now, there's like a whole funny like recreation of like Bitcoin core conspiracy in uh for for people today. Um I I think the point is like it's it's a question of like market dominance. How do like kind of natural monopolies form? How do competitors within the open source software community and the wider sort of way we engage with open source software, which is like we'd love to think it's like all of the cool people that can download this open source software and run it themselves, but like the reality is that doesn't really matter as so much as the limited access ramps of exchanges and the buyers and sellers on top of that that actually determine who is in the dominant position. So that's where you could we could say not is like an interesting example of uh people realizing a incumbent developer group is distorting the project in a way they don't like. So they create this competitor but they're just create recreating the failed thinking of like a Bitcoin Cash or some of these other projects which have tried to do that and have ultimately wound up on the dust bin of history. Um, and like it's an even I would say it's an even more of an uphill battle today because back then there was still like a grassroots like level playing field to some degree. Now like you're competing with like the government is essentially uh you know part of the Bitcoin um elite cadre now. And I don't think the government is really going to let like anyone, let alone the government, but like anyone that's like doing an ETF of Bitcoin and and getting really involved in it. Like there's just way too much institutional support around this. And it's an institutional support that's that's frankly either like like bad people that don't care about the values and like how it works. They just want to make money. and stupid people like there are boomers that have a lot of money and access to capital that are just like throwing 2% at this or trying it out because that's what they see on CNBC and they're just dumb. They just don't know what this is. They don't care about the mechanics of it, why people invented in the first place, why people advocated for it. And so you just have all these lemmings that are going to keep pushing this dominant incumbent uh Bitcoin version ahead and no matter what competitors like Knots or in the past like Bitcoin Cash has tried to do, they can't really fight that uphill battle. Uh so it sounds like what we're kind of getting at is Bitcoin ends up being what people agree Bitcoin is. And with that as the context, you want to talk a little bit about the fight for the BTC ticker towards the end of 2017 and kind of some of the games the different parties were playing to be the real Bitcoin in that era. Yeah. So, so I would say I mentioned earlier that Bitcoin Cash was not even a figment of anyone's imagination in the spring of 2017 when the New York agreement was signed. Um, and I would say from that New York agreement through the summer into November where it was scheduled to go uh live, but ultimately um it was cancelled due to alleged lack of consensus of the community which was never which I make a point in my essay. It was never measured. It was never stated in the cancellation letter that was given out uh that what the numbers were like what percentage of the community said what. So like there was never an argument of what is the actual quantitative measurement of support for this or that version. Uh but besides the point, the mimemetic sphere of it, the the pressure campaign, the uh narrow uh concentrated channels that led to that result influenced the cancellation of an block size upgrade on the Bitcoin BTC blockchain itself. And I would say that was the dominant side of Bick blockers all through this period. and Bitcoin Cash, which was created like August 1st of uh 2017, it was not I mean again, we'll never know some of the closed door conversations that were had, but as far as what's we can read that's publicly available, it was a minority group of the big blockers that set that up. And it from my reading, it is likely when I look at um some of the documentation around it, it is likely some form of Chinese miners that that led it. I don't know who, but that that's my sort of I don't know who. Yeah. I'm I'm just saying like we're just going by what evidence I can pinpoint what I can pinpoint when you read some of the letters of launching Bitcoin Cash uh or especially the flipping letter which we can get into later. Um like what I what I look at there is it is clearly not American English that was used to write that. And when I think about that I think okay well uh you know it makes sense that maybe it's like UK English used in Hong Kong. And so that's like how that's one of these connections I make of like how you might think about that. But point being, it was a splinter of a minority of big blockers that started Bitcoin Cash in August 1st, 2017. By the time November hits and the big block version on BTC is canled now, basically there's no other alternative uh to doing this. So, the flipping letter, which I mentioned, is released early November, right along the time that um the upgrade gets canceled on BTC. And this letter is just a call to action to say, "Hey, we're going to get all of our collective mining hash power. We're going to take it off Bitcoin BTC and we're going to put it on Bitcoin Cash, BCH. And when we do that, that's going to be a huge signal to the market that this is the chain that's going to survive. And by doing that, one, we're going to harm the actual operation of BTC in terms of processing transactions. And in a very kind of like long-term roll out, um ultimately, um the BTC chain would like freeze. It would it would become non-functional if enough hash power left. Um, so by doing that on an operational level with minor hash power, that would then be a signal to the market on exchanges, hey, get in on Bitcoin Cash because this is the one the miners are choosing. this is the only one that's going to survive in the long term and they could use their exorbitant holdings of different cryptos and whatever dollar value or Jan value they have and drop that on the exchanges to initialize that that fire cell of BTC and increased buying pressure of BCH. And so this was like the critical moment where a lot of people kind of then or at least on a on a short-term like uh very loose connective tissue way I think went in on the Bitcoin Cash flipping narrative. And so that's where we see once we start getting into November 8th, November 9th, especially November 10th, they actually do it. They flip the hash power. So, Bitcoin Cash's blockchain hash power flips BTC's and um you it it is it's quite an impressive feat to like do that big switch and get enough people to uh to do that. Now, they could never actually make the same dent on the exchanges. And so ultimately to your question, the ticker, if they were able to flip the prices, they would be able to say we have the most hash power, we are the higher priced, and like we and like you know, whatever other metric you want to say, we have the most use, we have the most transactions, we have the most this. Um, eventually that would then lead the community to have to award the BTC ticker in some sense and kind of like the singular name of the Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. And this is something that exchanges like in their own ways of dealing with the fall of 2017 leading up to this, they had back and forths of how would they deal with this? Like there's two bitcoins operating now. And uh a number of them indicated that based on how Bitcoin

definitions work, the chain with the most amount of hash power for a given amount of time that makes it like undeniable would have to be declared the BTC, the Bitcoin, the original Bitcoin, all that stuff. Um and so there there was a agreed upon idea that that would be the way to win the ticker. Um the hash power certainly went that way. The exchange volume, interesting enough, also the the exchange volume for BCH actually did slightly flip BTC at one point, but the prices could never like there there was this like real resistance to the prices changing. And so I get into a lot more of the technicalities of that later, but that's essentially what happened. And that was the rationale for why people were fighting over this ticker. And and ultimately, if you can win that ticker, um, which again, this is this is like a larger question outside of Bitcoin logic. This is like the ideas of natural monopolies. This is the idea of how do market failures happen? Human nature, you know? Yeah. Human nature. And like what do you do about fraudulent advertising? What do you do about uh this or that? uh deceptive behavior which if like we were operating in a regular business environment that most other companies have to operate in. Maybe some of the tactics and communications would have been different especially in terms of companies that had influential power from a software level to a minor level to an exchange level to a money printer level having severe conflicts of interest they did not disclose. It's it's really it's fun to go back over this because this is literally when I Bennett I don't I I think you and I literally got involved at the exact same time in all of this like a month and a half apart is our first tweets on crypto or something like that right so I think we both got involved in this in the exact same time and what I found myself I I was basically I started as a troll um and I was just trolling Bitfinex and Tether employees basically like that was my main operation. Um, and then very shortly there after I did Elon Carlo or did Elon Carlo come? No, I started with G I started as a Gian Carlo clone and then I became Elon Carlo and then uh and then I started actually writing articles. But but I did I did have a a shift here. And I think what I started noticing in November, December of 2017, I guess December of 2017, is that suddenly there were a bunch of people involved with Bitcoin Cash who were following me and, you know, talking to me about this stuff even though I was involved in something I thought was completely unrelated, which is to say Tether, Bitfinex, like those were the main things that I was following thanks to a an account called Bitfinex who I don't I don't know how active he is anymore, but you know was was very important in all of this. Um I think just even for calling out Tether as shady like that enough was incredibly important. Um and but the stuff that he was discussing about what Tether was doing and Bitfinex was do what they were doing together and this false claim of not being involved with each other. They lied about everything, right? They lied about anyone they were involved with and they lied about Blockstream being involved. They lied about other people being involved with them. And I think that is when I started getting all of these people who were very worried about the block size war in my mentions. And that's when I became even really aware of the blocks. Like I knew about it, but I got invested in it when a bunch of people were like, "Hey, Tether's involved in this. Bitfinex is involved in this." I don't know how much truth there is to that to this day. Probably some truth. Um I I mean I think I do think Bitfinex and Tether had a vested interest in this for sure. Um, so I like I do appreciate that to this day, but it it like just talking about this I immediately go back to 2017 and 2018 where this is this is what was happening. Tether at the time for anyone in who doesn't understand where we're coming from here. Tether at the time was worth less than a billion dollars. It's worth almost a hundred what like $200 billion now. Less than a hundred million at the end of 2017, right? This was like this was January 2017 10 million tether supply right by the end of the year that summer and was like close to 100 million by the end of that year I think but nothing compared to now which is just wild to think about because I like all of it is so I don't know why we lost our minds. It's extraordinary. It's just extraordinary. And I I like I I have nothing to say like nothing to say about it about I think you've made good points, Peter, but I just am like, oh my god, it's so crazy to be driven right back to that point where everything could be different today. Everything. And but this does talk about, right, this talks about like Tether, you know, it's crazy. Tether is like the most important aspect of any cryp any chain that it's on. Like the use case for Ethereum or Salana or whatever is based on how or Tron for that matter like it's it's all based on like how many tether transactions happen on the blockchain now which is like it started out as a Bitcoin like a little offshoot of Bitcoin like a memo a memo pad on blockchain on on Bitcoin blockchain like it it has morphed into something completely [ __ ] different now and is a serious driving point and to your point can like make or break a blockchain, right? So, Peter, perhaps you can talk about why these big blockers were following Cass and interested in Tether and Bitfinex. Sure. So, so the problem for me in 2017 was, as I laid out, there was all this market evidence that the support and dominant position was for the big block side. And then so you can look at that from the New York agreement. You can look at it from the very low support for the small blockers measured by the user activated software uh softwarework um listening node count uh under 20%. It's like anyone can look that up and ju just like there there were so many ways you could say like it doesn't make sense. This has to be the way from a from a measuring of the support level to the way that this is designed to work uh in the long term. It this is the only way it can be. So when it ultimately like the big block side lost its first like the major battle in November 2017 and subsequently like the the sort of the year the year of like like we're going to get them with Bitcoin Cash of like 2018 through 2019 um which ultimately was disappointing like that sort of like last uh gasp of of trying to win it out. Um, like I I couldn't really quite understand like how like everything believing in free markets, everything would tell you this is the way it should have worked out, but it's like it doesn't add up. How did this happen? And that's where I was able to finally like kind of put the puzzle pieces of Tether together. And once you do that, you realize that, oh, so the markets were manipulated. So that's where we start with that first point that I made where there's the software level level of elite developers that have risk of being captured by oligarchs or the government and could pervert the blockchain. Now what everyone says and I had a lot of criticism from um the peanut gallery on my article about this Peter Ryan says that you know the 21 million cap can be changed at every time with a click of a keyboard. That's not true. you know, there's all this like blah blah blah decentralized consensus and it's like the I realized that and this is where like that's like the first section of my essay and then I go into examining that rebuttal. I preempted that. So that preeemption rebuttal is that then the community only has the recourse of the market and the market is defined by the few exchanges available that buyers and sellers can interact to trade these coins and determine what has the highest price, what has the biggest market cap, so forth and so forth. So that is the only veto the community really has if the software developers go off the rails. And so once you start looking at that you say one there's not a lot of exchanges like when we say the market we always think this like amorphous cloud that's you can never quantify and like there's always a competitor that can come in to like check the the privilege and monopoly power of someone else. There's always buyers and sellers coming through and it's like one there's a very limited amount of buyers and sellers to begin with and it's like way way dominated by whales in the system that could talk to each other coordinate all this type of stuff. Then the actual operators of the exchanges like at any given time like especially in this 27 2017 window you know there's like a dozen exchanges that actually make or break Bitcoin. And what everyone said also in 2017 and and like Nathaniel Paer said this um like Bitfinex is the biggest exchange in the world. This is the exchange that like makes or breaks Bitcoin and I document like quotes like that from him and others. So like Bitfinex was a very dominant player and there was also like just a few handful of these exchanges uh that mattered. So it's like that to be clear to this day, right? like this is I don't want you're you're making it sound like this is only back in the day, but I just want to I want to be clear way more than Bitfinex does now. No, that's but that's what I'm saying. I'm saying there are like three exchanges that matter to this day, right? Like just like in 2017, 2018, 2019. There's three that matter now. There's three that matter then. The names might be different, but it doesn't really matter. Like the, you know, like you control those three exchanges. you control the inflows and outflows at or whatever like you you are pushing the most out of Binance or Coinbase or whoever, right? Like the OK EX or whatever the hell is in the lead at the this time, right? Like you you are a market force and you are changing minds. And I think it it like it's it was true then and it's true now. Yeah. And like the choices that individual exchanges make that make them distinct from other exchanges are also distortive outside distortion effects on the general community. So for instance, Bitfinex was one of the few exchanges that like offered a lot of margin lending. It also offered the only shorting of the two big block small block chains leading up to the fall of when this big event was supposed to happen in November 2017. And so like these are ways in which sure you know ABC exchange um that might not have shorting that might not have this or that feature. But if Bitfinex is doing it, that creates a communication through the community that says, well, if this is happening on Bitfinex, then like it's, you know, that probably shapes my opinion of how I trade on ABC exchange. So, and we should add, we should also add for those who weren't around at this time, Bitfinex was the largest exchange and it was also one of the only one with anything resembling like fiat banking rails. There was an even smaller number who had that and the rest were left to rely on this other firm called Tether. Yeah. So, so this is where I start to get into like how Tether's influence, how exchange influence like shaped the results of the block size war. And so again, like I don't need everyone to agree with me. I might have a very unique conclusion on how I view that. But the way that I look at it is that one from the Bitcoin Cashers, what's very evident is that they first suffered from a like silo problem where the majority of I think their trading volume in the flipping attack that they did was occurring not uniformly across the exchanges of the world. What ended up happening was because they were largely led by Chinese miners and thus a lot of their holdings and volume would be from Chinese miners, the Chinese miners had a disproportionate utilization of South Korean exchanges, Bitum. So what ends up happening is during the flipping, all of that volume goes towards one South Korean exchange and in the middle of them using that exchange, the exchange has a massive server crash and it shuts down. And so their trading pressure, their trading attack just for no for no other reason than a technical glitch. that's all we can say from what's publicly available. Um it's it stopped them in their tracks. There was no way that they could keep up that pressure uh because they simply just couldn't trade and then there was all of this panic around oh shoot I've I've lost my money. What's going to happen and like you know getting to the exit door and things like that. So that was an initial problem. I don't think the Bitcoin cashers um with their flipping plans really act like it was actually like a glaring problem with them that they couldn't think through like hey if we just like throw tons of like unprecedented volume at this one South Korean exchange is that going to create a problem versus like uniformly distributing it. Um and so they never no one considered that and so they crash the servers. It stops them in their tracks. That leaves the main conduit of the market where the Bitcoin buying and selling pressure uh that was pushing up Bitcoin Cash and pushing down BTC was occurring which means you have the other exchange is still live and dominated by Bitfinex. And so then the unique thing about Bitfinex as we said um they had a very natural conflict of interest because they were a seed investor in Blockstream that offered a layer 2 that would be incentivized to freeze the blocks and they own Tether. Yeah. And so that was the other thing and then it comes then it comes out they own Tether as well and Tether being um the synthetic dollar uh trading instrument that was going on in all the crypto exchanges and that would come out later. It just proven they were unbacked. they would have a onetoone peg with the dollar that they alleged had uh perfect redemption whenever you wanted for 100% of the value of what it would alleged to be worth. It turns out that wasn't the case. They were fractionally reserving. Um and even more egregious is that they weren't exactly just accepting uh money in my opinion and then sort of like spending it out and then you know doing it that way where they get the money and then they drain it and that's the fraction. But instead they were getting some money but they were printing and that's how they were creating the fractional reserve quotient. And so when you look at it from this perspective, you have all the conflicted interest parties in this nexus and they have this documented uh unbed uh money printer that's doing synthetic dollars that is really directed at Bitfinex specifically and it's two other conduit exchanges we don't have to get into. Um um but what you basically have happen is that these unbacked printed dollar instruments were used on the very preferential interested exchanges for Bitcoin, BTC and the small blocks. And so I think you can look at it from an acute way and I document like how tether supply and trading volume how it actually operates in the specific window of the flipping in those few days of November and it kind of seems like there is this like mad dash to print tethers to create like combative selling and buying pressure to stop the flipping but I realize like that that's a harder pill to swallow for people uh and might show more skepticism, but I would say even if you don't want to look at that as like a very reactionary use of the unprint uh of the unbacked printed tethers, there is still the obtuse argument of looking at it where at the end of the day, they started in January 2017 at like 10 million supply and then by like February 2018, um you know, they're at like 200 million maybe, something like that. And when you look at it that way, you see this, it's just like crazy growth. And when you just see that whether it was like a reactionary short-term combative burst that they did to stop this flipping or it was in actuality more of a passive way in which they they didn't excuse them of anything. It just they were able to print these unbacked reserve tethers that would bolster their side in a very steady and long-term way that would whether Bitcoin Cash emerged or not, it was always going to prop up their chosen Bitcoin small block BTC and and any other challenger like Ethereum or this even though Tethers would naturally spill over into inflating the wider uh crypto market. And so that's where I think you you could argue from both perspective, the acute or the obtuse way, but the the more the easier argument is the obtuse way. And that still doesn't excuse anybody. So I I think that gets to this point point of the market basically had a failure there. there were these manipulators that were fraudulent that were lying about who they were partnered with, who they were investor in, lying about their reserves, uh, and and basically using this counterfeit mechanism to distort the market where, you know, a dozen people decided who won the block size. It wasn't like the myriad of millions of Bitcoin buyers and sellers. And I think that is the real window into revealing how everything then cascades from that. The dominoes fall on all these myths of Bitcoin start to fall. I I I I do I will say I find it very fascinating that I I I don't know how this has never come to to my own brain, but I do understand a a kind of conspiratorial idea of like, well, the people involved in Tether of course are going to want not cryptocurrency to be super easy as a you know, like they don't want this to be like because the more they're able to establish themselves. And they were still omni back then. They needed low fees, you know. Yeah, that's true. You know, you know what's Yeah. You know what's just funny? While I was writing these essays this summer, um what was hilarious is like it started to dawn on me, too. It's like, well, what is tech like what what are stable coins? They're medium exchanges. So like one it's like they're like whether they are investing in like a layer 2 that has more of an inherent utilization of crypto tokens and decentralized principles like they themselves are um centralized third parties that operate medium exchanges and then it was like June I was like blown away there was a story that was released like Tether is actually pioneering their own native blockchain for tethers and then it's like holy crap like they don't even need crypto anymore. They don't need to run native blockchains. They're working on USDT zero and stable. Yeah. So, you know, probably there's like ways in which they haven't revealed yet like exactly how they work and they might still like operate on top of crypto rails, but it just goes to show like wow like from just a use case perspective, they literally are medium exchanges that compete with layer 1 blockchain transactions and two they are actually like doing away with the necessity to exist within a layer 1 decentralized blockchain paradigm. And so like there's a day in which you you could you could hypothesize. I'm not saying like this is what's going to happen. I'm just saying it's easy to see a scenario where these um stable coin native blockchains exist as layer ones and it just becomes this obsolete of like why do you need like decentralized non-stable coin crypto especially like you know hey the government is all supportive of stable coins and it's this perfect um crude you know right-winger argument that somehow like makes sense in people's minds. that well yes the government totally supports this thing and is in bed with them but also it's like the exact opposite of a central bank digital currency but in reality it's like it's essentially that yeah can I jump in with an alternate explanation for Bitfinex and Tether during this era because like September 15th 2017 is when they open their account at Noble Bank and Freriedman does their attestation showing that in that account they have all the dollars they're supposed to to back Tether we don't definitively know they're unbacked until like March of 2018 based on the New York Attorney General report. So during this period there's at least some evidence they have at least most of the assets they're supposed to the split between Bitcoiners and Bitcoin Cash is in some extent and it doesn't cleanly map onto this but a split between like holders and transactors and holders tend to have more of the currency than transactors do right businesses have to pay out their payroll and things like that and so they're not keeping as much on hand. You have this split occurring across the various exchanges. You have the Bitcoin people who received their Bitcoin Cash selling their Bitcoin Cash, but the Bitcoin Cash people don't necessarily have as much Bitcoin they can sell. And even among the Bitcoin Cash people, there were a variety of people who were willing to hold on to their Bitcoin cash, but were not fully willing to part with their Bitcoin, at least until they had a better understanding of how the next few weeks, months, or years were going to shake out. And like that to me provides a lot of the same like price dynamics we ended up seeing on the exchanges. Explains why Bitcoin Cash's volume went up but its price never seem to compete with Bitcoin and doesn't involve at all a money printer or unback dollar derivatives. Yeah. So, I mean that's that's plaus like I'll say that happened like that like that's a part of the reality of what happened and I would say like I made this criticism of minors before as well that like again because like miners are an argument how minor are defined what they're proposed to do in the community like they're a very central part of how Satoshi built cryptocurrency miners to be clear were not yeah yeah so so the point is like and that's where like I overly focused on Bitcoin in this essay rather than talk everything about crypto because like if anyone is into crypto like it starts with Bitcoin and really like the only way that I think makes Bitcoin unique is the way in which this incentive structure and and technological constraints that are placed on miners like that is the true innovation that makes Bitcoin worthwhile. Again, I'm not saying that as a neutral third party. I'm saying that like within the Bitcoin logic paradigm. So what ends up happening is that like you said like there's a lot of BCH supporters that like are too scared to part with BTC because they want to hedge if something goes wrong. And so even though I think there was a lot of miners that did the hash rate switching which is like not that hard in reality. I mean it's hard to get the community consensus on that but it's to flip the switch. It's not crazy. Um, so they did that and I think what ended up happening was because the South Korean exchange goes down with a server crash and because they see the activity on other exchanges where they can't move the price. I think basically after a few days they just they literally get scared and they they don't have the tenacity to keep this going be and it would be in their long-term incentive to push and hold out to do this but they could not fight a war of attrition if they sell all their BTC and they hold this BCH and they can't move the prices uh because then they would they would be screwed and ultimately miners are caught in the incentives of not so much the abstract notion of everything internal to Bitcoin, but they got to pay short-term bills, electricity, rent, so forth, so forth. And they got to convert from Bitcoin or other cryptos into whatever home fiat they need to pay those bills. That that's how miners operate. And once you realize that, you realize miners which are held in this lofty position. And if you read the white paper, you read all the Bitcoin talk form stuff, this is undeniable. But miners are supposed to play this very dominant role. They are actually super subordinate and passive to other players that can exert influence and dominance in the industry. And so basically what you said, Bennett, is very true that they were skittish. They did not want to part and they didn't want to use the full extent of their muscle to push things over the line. And I would say that that's that's a contributing factor. But I but I still say the ways in which when you look at all these things together and again I'll I'll revert to just the obtuse version of over the year like you you still don't have the dominance of BTC um and those people without Tether printing that money and even though there's attestations and snapshots in time where we do see that there is backing some backing of of Tether's reserves like I don't have to tell you guys snapshots are not indicative of the daytoday reserve holdings of these types of stable coins and that's where I point to like a academic paper like Griffin Shams and Bennett we've talked about it you may have some doubts about Griffin Shams paper but as far as their argument goes I think it makes sense that what ultimately Tether does is that like in the front of the month they do all their printing they send that out that raises the crypto prices raises all boats boats and then once those inflated prices are there at the end of the month they start to sell, get some actual fiat back and fill that gap of reserves they created for themselves. And they just keep doing this process over and over again. And in the long-term trajectory of this, they they keep increasing prices at a rate where they can proportionally backfill um gaps in that reserve. And at any one point in time when they want to show a snapshot, there's a mechanism where they can do that. Yeah. Yeah. And the the Griffin and Shams paper is interesting in this discussion because one of the biggest reasons I'm skeptical of its con conclusion is because if you take out the two most important months in terms of the flow, the two largest most aberant months in terms of flows, the relationship goes from like uh large enough to obviously be able to backfill the reserves to a much smaller relationship that makes it a lot less clear they'd be able to backfill the reserves. And like the two months in question are December 2017 and January 2018, which is funny in this context that those would be the two most aberrant uh months because those are pretty close on the calendar to the period we are talking about. Um but like that broadly for the audience that's one of my critiques of the Griffin and Shams paper is that eliminating the two most extreme values really weakens the relationship they discuss. just to to to really dig into basic stuff in case anyone watching doesn't understand this. The idea with accounting in general is that you should be able to account for the money throughout every day and every hour. Like you should be able to know how you got the money, where the money went, who had the money before, and who you gave it to. Like these are basic accounting principles. And once you start to deviate from those accounting principles, like we're just going to show you how much money we have in a bank account once a month, there start to be problems with that, right? Because now you're you're literally finding out by the accountant, we're going to check the account on March 1st or whatever, and as long as you have the right amount of money in that bank account on that day, I guess everything is fine. Well, you can do a lot of things to make sure there's enough money in that bank account to make it look like everything is fine. If you're told when that is going to be checked and you have some reasonable amount of heads up, you can get a loan. You can do like there's any number of things you can do to to change these numbers. And what we're talking about here is that um yeah, there there's issues with this study, but like if you can't follow basic accounting principles, there's just a general problem, especially if your main goal is to be a stable coin, right? If your main goal is to be like, I can prove how many assets I have, where they're located, how how much is in my possession specifically, and how much I can give out to customers. And you can only do that once a month. Well, there's a big [ __ ] problem. So, like these are these are issues that play a role in all of this because it means that the money is probably being utilized for other things at other times and you have no idea what for. Well, I'll say this as well. I don't think Griffin and Shams in their original writing of the paper were saying so much as like we definitively prove that um the tethers were unbacked in the fashion that we write. Uh what they were they were more so laying out was the hypothesis like if they were doing it based on the data we can grab like this is how it would go down. And so I think that where the Griffin Shams paper comes in as most um useful is understanding the concept of how a stable coin like this would undergo, you know, this uh pump priming the pump of the crypto coins of how they would do that, how they would print, how they would backfill reserves. And so you start to understand that. And so where you get into more definitive evidence, this is where like we get to 2018 to 2019 of these actual legal cases where like um Tether's lawyers admitting like like yes in an affidavit like we had unbacked reserves. So again that becomes a question of when in the timeline did that occur? How long did it occur? How are those funds distributed? There's the, you know, someone could even I'll use the devil's argument of um, you know, yeah, but like maybe uh, Tether didn't have it in their bank account, but they were utilizing Bitfinex's bank account and like technically, okay, that wasn't their reserves, but like they had access to money that they could move around. Um, but you could, you know, there's ways that you could then rebuttal that. Yeah. But the point of the matter is like we have the concept through Griffin and Shams of explaining how this could work. we have more so the legal cases and the settlement with the New York AG that that really like you know no one can say otherwise like even though it was a settlement and all this type of stuff you know that's kind of an opensh case like they at that time through the 2017 2018 they had periods of time of having unback reserves u this is from what the New York Jay found this is also from what their lawyer said one of the things also that's very interesting that as just a community partic participant that I was and going through the process of just conversations and comms and all this type of thing uh and research. Uh one of the things that seemed like concerning but like no one no one kind of made it into a bigger issue than it was people started questioning the redemption window of Tether. So if you had Tether tokens there's the implicit understanding I should be able to go to Tether and just like cash out one to one. But then it became an issue when I believe it was that that uh community manager Zayn Tacket that was the like the mouthpiece that was actually kind of doing them a disservice. People were communicating played a role who played a role in FTX. I just want to say this this lad was involved in FTX when FTX went down as well. Yeah. One mouthpiece that Juan Carlo wishes would stop talking in whale poolool chats. Yeah. I think everyone wishes he would stop talking. So there you go. But the point that I'm trying to say here is that for the first time this mouthpiece of Tether was like indicating like well you know not everybody can redeem their tethers. It was like, wait, what? Like that that was a I remember that being a reverberating vibe through like that era of some crypto participants like thinking like how can you be onetoone and then like have a click of like whitelisted people you redeem for but if I'm just hey maybe I'm not just an individual like schmuck. Maybe like I'm an institutional investor that has 2% of my my [ __ ] in Bitcoin and I'm using stable coins to trade that. Hey, I got a decent amount of holdings. Maybe I wasn't like, you know, at the latest Bitcoin conference, but I got enough money and I'm using this this stuff. I deserve to go to Tether and get this redeemed. That's what's on the tin of Tether. I should be able to redeem this one to one. But when that starts to happen, you said, "Oh, no, no, no. We we can't redeem you." That is a huge red flag that indicates well if they're not redeeming anybody but their whitelisted clients that means they likely can't sufficiently provide the withdrawals for the reserves they claim to have. So you have that, you have the not so much as like you say Bennett, it's not so much they are saying this is the definitive evidence, but more so using Griffin shamp say this is a way of explaining a concept of how this stuff could work and then you go to the New York AG and others to show like okay like really open and shut case there was unback stuff going on. you know, it's it's pretty I think when you combine all those things together, it's a pretty clear case that there was some version of this that was going on. And again, if we look at from an obtuse way, so the passive way that they did that, regardless of whatever competitor came to them, big blocks or even Vitalic with Ethereum or any other coin, they had the passive incumbent privilege using this money printer that was directed mostly at their coin to keep them in incumbency. So, so I we're already like 130 into this and I know we could probably go for like two or three more hours um without an issue and I mean that not hyperbolically. Um but I do I I So a question for you right here is you know earlier we were talking about free market and we were talking about like the the you didn't use this term but like the bastardization of the free market that that this is not a free market, right? You're talking about all these these actors who have their own agendas and are pushing the market in the way that they see fit. Whether it is the big blockers using using one exchange in South Korea and hoping that it'll suffice to push their agenda or it's small blockers using Tether and Bitfinex to push their agenda and hoping that that that will suffice, right? Like you you might have any number of people using any number of agendas. Isn't that kind of like, isn't that the free market? Like, isn't the argument here that that is in fact what the free market looks like is a bunch of wild west scumbags shooting each other in the chest until one of them wins

in a in a way. Like, yeah, like that's what the market is. And it really takes us going back to our foundations of like what are our first principles of how we we come to understand these things and we come to advocate for these things. And so that's why, you know, I made a big hubaloo like when like everything kind of clicked for me like I literally had kind of a identity crisis of being part of this industry, of being a promoter of this industry in whatever whatever way I was doing it. Even though like I was maybe on the boat of being crypt uh critical of obvious scams and things like that, you know, I was still in foundation supportive of this uh idea. But once all these things clicked and I started understanding again these first principles and like how does the market keep failing and what is money and how does money interact with the state because ultimately it's all about the state. Bitcoin is a shadow of fiat currency. Like everything about it is informed by how we look at how the state uses money. So like I I basically wrote a little article where I said I'm leaving crypto and I had you know research clients and other sort of business clients uh that were crypto companies. I just had to like, you know, cut ties. I sold all my crypto for me. I just couldn't stomach everything that I knew then about it just advocating for this thing and profiting off it. That's just how my ethical stance started to arise. Next, I then get into like I need to really deal with my libertarian priors and read a bunch. And so I like I did a master's program. I had the um again sort of the time and space and capacity to just go and say like I'm going to do a master's program. I ended up going to Ireland to do it. I had really good professors there. They exposed me to a lot wider scope of readings that were not misuses or you know Rothbart or any of these types. Uh but but it what I valued the most was it wasn't something where I was picking a perspective and then okay well that's my oppositional thing. I was really trying to read from the ground up. It's like well like how did we like get to the origination of central banks? How did we get to the origination of the stock market? How do we get to the origination of of money as a fiat currency? here. What are these ideas where how do we prove the case that money was a commodity in the first place and not something inherently linked to the state? And so these were all things that I was really trying to go all the way back to the source and read my way through up to the present. And that's where I've now come to the conclusion um that how we think about money is is in a much different way than the nominal Bitcoiner narrative and that in actuality like the state is really the only way that money can exist and the state's passive allowance of like a private currency is not so much like that means the private currency is thus more productive or efficient than the state. It's like the state is allowing it and thus the state allows it. You know, it's in fact it's like a shadow fiat currency. So this is where you can go to guys like old 19th century economists like George Knap who talks about chartism and this is like a a proto version of MMT, modern monetary theory and and modern monetary just like that's just one lane of thinking about money in this way. But this is where I cite a lot of economists that can like get at this. And uh one of the economists I like is David McWills who's an Irish economist. Um I highly advise people to uh check out his book money. He came out with it last year. He has a great chapter about crypto and bitcoin and he has a lot of great uh phrases where he's explaining this thing of like ultimately like private versus state money has always been the battle that's being waged for like hundreds of years to some degree and the issuance and control of money is like the the biggest weapon in the state's ar armory and why would the state give that up? So it's either the state um using that whether it's an authoritarian or more of like my ideal version. The only way to deal with this and actually get some of the ideals if you disconnect the means from the ends the ideals of Bitcoin is a more democratic utilization of the finance uh system uh of money. And it is only possible now my final conclusion to get those ideals we all thought about in like 2013 in Bitcoin through actually making the state more democratic of going directly through the state and using those institutions and tools to actually create that type of system. Otherwise, you only have like uh the oligarchic captured state as I explained that will use the state as a security force to bolster its control of money at the exploitation of the populace. One of uh yeah, and this is a bit of a nonsequittor, but I want to get to this before we start wrapping this up. One of the things that you talked about that was really interesting is the sense in which like stable coins and tether specifically is like a private money pegged to a public money that has received in some sense a bit of a blessing from uh the government from the United States and stuff like that. And there was one quote from your uh longer version of the article that I wanted to pull out here for the audience. Um, the dirty little secret of the US government stable coin strategy is that it vacuums up global dollar flows that would otherwise stay outside of the domestic borders of the US because they would never pass regulatory scrutiny. To whatever degree a poor third worlder uses stable coins, as self-proclaimed humanitarian stable coin advocates suggest, to get the benefit of the stability of a dollar financial infrastructure, they can only do so because stable coins don't provide the same level of regulatory scrutiny the traditional dollar financial infrastructure does. This humanitarian argument is an admission of the regulatory evasion. Um, so I wanted to kind of bring that up uh because I thought it was one of the important points and one that like uh Cass and I have talked about a couple times on here. Like I think we talked about this a little bit when Boaz was on here in that like these stable coins the they do provide a valuable service to people who otherwise might not be able to access dollars. But then you have to open up the question like what regulatory structures were preventing those people from accessing dollars and uh why did those structures exist in the first place? Um, and so I thought it was interesting how you walked through how like this infrastructure exists as kind of a way to repatriate and almost kind of this isn't quite the right language, but kind of like uh fence in or still get some of the advantage of the untouchable global dollar floats. uh do you have any thoughts you want to add to like the this shadow dollar infrastructure? So this is where Bitcoin and wider crypto has evolved to. So we've we walk through this history, the original prototypical version of Bitcoin, the scaling war versions of Bitcoin battling it out, the kind of in between Bitcoin getting through some bare market uh territory like the rise of FTX and like kind of like 2021 through 2023 and that kind of boom happening and now the recent boom uh which is very like government related. And so like the final crescendo of Bitcoin and crypto is that it is like a tool of the US government. Uh and so that operates on two levels. The first is exactly what you described from my essay is that there are all these dollar and dollar like instrument flows going on around the world that cannot access the traditional US financial system. because of obvious like you know they would not pass the mustard of screw like if they could they would so like it's it's self-evident and because it is too arduent a fight to go in and face off against Elizabeth Warren or something to deregulate the existing traditional financial sector. Um why go through the fight when you can just make this parallel system and say oh no no no we're going to keep all the regulations all but we have this parallel system where we don't have anything or we have very limited uh things that we're also not going to even enforce or like look into. Um and then in aggregate that full system is net deregulated. So like it's actually quite an ingenious way to get financial deregulation and pull the wool over one's eyes. So then once you have that deregulation, you can use as your marketing tool, which I can picture a very specific individual that always talks up the humanitarianness of um of stable coins and things like that. But it's like it like it is an admission that like okay so why can't someone in a South American country that's you know facing hyperinflation and uh and that already like utilizes uh dollars for remittances per chance because of their family networks in the US or they want to save in dollars and and there's already like a shadow dollar system in a lot of these countries. Um while that person might be the case like why does that person not have access to the existing US financial system and however like best case scenario we can paint this type of individual the the argument still allows for because that individual cannot access that it admits that it's like it's because that person like can't offer the levels of identification or other I'll be I'll be even more basic about this. Like you need to abide by US rules, laws, and regulations to have those dollars in your hand, right? Like if you're a US citizen, you meet the you meet it. You like you're good. But if you're if you're an Iranian citizen, you definitely don't. And it's not because maybe you want to. I'm not I'm not suggesting your intentions, but like your government, your state doesn't want anything to do with this and the ability for the US to be like, "Hey, [ __ ] you. You can't do that." Ch like right. Like I if you if you just decide velocity is the only important thing, it just it this argument drives me [ __ ] crazy. I don't think it was Iran's choice to cut Iran off from Swift. I don't think that's No, but but but but I but the dollar even right like the idea that they would not use the real or whatever like I don't know what they use but like the fact that they wouldn't use that instead is like of course in a a world where there is no sanctions or like it's all so insane to me because a huge part of the dollar like the importance of the dollar mechanism is your ability to stop people who you don't want to use it from using it. And if you go like, well, never mind. The most important thing is literally the velocity of money. It's just how many transactions are happening all the time with the money that we have. You have defeated a large benefit of what it means or or detriment to what it means to be a part of your currency. So like if if you're a sanctioned country, it's a huge detriment to you that you cannot access US dollars anymore. It is a huge detriment to North Korea that they cannot access US dollars. They have to invent new ways to counterfeit money to have access to US dollars. But it's but it's not even like those are very like unique like you know adversaries of the US state interest um type of examples. But like there's a lot of individuals uh nexuses of of money that are just kind of like in a gray area where it's like they're not like an an active adversary. They're just like they could be as simple as there's some guy in London that's like just moving like dark money around and it's sort of it's it's neither here or there but he just he simply can't get access to the US system and has to like have all these rats holes for the money. Now the US is going and saying how do I get how like I I I know there's all this rat hole money out there that's in US dollars or US dollar like instruments or that that can like be exchanged for whatever other fiat into US dollar. Um I I want that ratness money. So they are creating like a stable coin infrastructure to basically absorb all of that. And it's like why are they doing this? They're doing this because as we run out the clock on how our debt is paid, how our debt is financed, and how the rest of the world is growing. It's my opinion, I believe in the multipolarity thesis. The rest of the world is growing while the west and the traditional incumbents are declining. And this adversarial competition um is creating uh decoupling across many different layers of the international world. And so namely the most important thing is that the US has relied a lot on foreigners to fund its deficit and its debt. And so as you can see uniquely with China because China's the the biggest adversary, China has said look we're done. They are constantly decreasing the amount of US debt they hold. And so that is naturally going to start happening with a lot of other countries as they say, you know, rightly or wrongly you just have to understand like they are adversarial with the US. Why are they going to fund their adversary? So that's happening. There's no way around that. So the US has to come up with a way. How do they fill that gap? Because they're not going to be able to fund their deficit. So stable coins have become this very interesting conduit to offset the declines of state actors like China decreasing that amount of money going towards the US uh treasury market and instead getting one as we talked about all of this darkpool money that's out there that can now be flowed into stable coins and those stable coins then and now with the Genius Act mandated they have to buy uh US Treasury bills 90 days or less. So this is becoming a huge part of how the US thinks about its debt. I trace it all the way back to we can look at guys like uh you know Mr. Nick Carter uh of Castle Island talking about this like in 2019 2020 the sort of initial conceptions and then we can see this the Bitcoin policy institute this is all from within the Bitcoin like insider uh discussion uh you could even say Safety Moose was like critical in using the way that he conceived of Bitcoin as a settlement layer instrument for central banks exclusively as a way of folding this into the absorption of like a US state interest. And so that's where we fast forward and the first real indication the state is thinking this way is that Paul Ryan comes out like about over a year ago in a Wall Street Journal oped. He says all this. He says, "Stable coins are supplying new demand for US treasuries as we see China and other countries declining in their appetite to buy our treasuries." So this is like GOP stalwart. Paul Ryan, no relation, um, saying the quiet part out loud, hey, stable coins are a great way to do this. Let's keep this going. And then all of a sudden, what would, and this this was one of the most like interesting inflection points for me, is that not not saying Donald Trump is is like good for doing this, but I'm saying his position always was that crypto is bad for the US dollar. And that was his position from 2015 to like 2024. And so he he was saying this constantly even though within the first term you could say like his underlings were doing things to aid and abed uh the crypto markets. But then like in 2024 like he starts this like complete 180 pivot where he's all in on the crypto. Maybe you could say that's just him doing uh very trivial uh you know lobby like the crypto people lobbyed him. They gave him money. He said fine I don't care. I don't have real authentic positions. I'll now take this position because who cares. But the reality is, I think, not so much him, but the collection of people around him basically won this argument that Paul Ryan made that stable coins are needed to fix this problem of people not of us not being able to fund uh the US debt. And so now you see this huge ground swell of Republican argumentation for this. And so now we have the Treasury Secretary Scott Descent. All this guy can say now is that stable coins are going to bail out the US debt. We're thinking stable coins as a total uh supply are going to go to like three trillion by 2028. I believe that's a citation he's using from like a City Bank report that made that claim. Uh I looked at all like kind of different researchers, financial institutions. I made my own bottom up top down analysis. I think on like a like if the government keeps supporting this as it's doing like three trillion to five trillion by 2030 like that's not crazy and when you think about that that is like it it's not that we have to replace 37 billion of US uh trillion I mean of US debt overnight with stable coin supply. What we have to do is the delta that we lose each month we have to turn that over into stable coin demand. So that's a much more doable strategy. And when you think about that trajectory from now to like trillions in stable coin value that that is doable based on the run rate that all these guys are talking about. So one the dark pools and pushing that in to treasury demand is the reason the US is so supportive of this. Um, and but I would say number two, and this is where I get into my more speculative territory of of forecasting is that I think there is a real parallel to what we saw in the scaling war and where I argue the printing of unbacked tether tokens was a was a real thing that actively or passively helped the parties involved with that. and that that mechanism can still be used in the current more government infused system that's being done and now you have a system where as I described one it's a shadow central bank that can shadow money print and then number two and three number two it can shadow monetize the US debt which it's doing and then number three it can shadow quantitative ease and so this is where like the third leg of the stool comes in where if they can push that shadow uh printed money into the equity markets. Well, now you just create a really perverse incentive for all the corporate incumbents to back this strategy because hey, we might be facing a situation where PE values in the US are so high that everyone's saying there has to be a correction. Everyone's saying the AI bubble is going to correct. Everyone's saying a lot of these tech stocks are overvalued. All this stuff is pointing to the degree to which let alone the tra the trade wars and how that has a depressive effect on the market. There are so many indicators that the US has to go through a correction and why would these corporate incumbents want to deal with that when they can get in bed with what the government's doing taking advantage of the shadow money printing and get access to that to shadow quantities to fuel and prop up the market. And that's what we can see what's Tether doing today. They're investing in everything under the sun from AI to biotech. They're an investor in Rumble. What does a video YouTube clone app that actually doesn't work really good? What does it have to do with the stable coin? No one really president's son. It's the president's son is the link there. But but this is it goes into this thing where it's it's this uh nexus of interested parties coming together um that are creating these these very strong ties short-term incentives, short-term gains over long-term reality, right? Like ignore long-term reality. Focus on short-term gains. Focus on short-term whatever. And hopefully you can scrap, scrge, and figure your way out of it. And I like I do I think that this is a conceit of capitalism. I like this is not a just a crypto thing. This is not just a like this is a conceit where it's like yeah well that's always going to be the case is that you are going to put short-term goals and gains over the long-term whatever you might imagine cuz you don't know what long-term actually means. None of us do. And short term like you have a pretty confident concept of what that will look like, right? And if you can gain that in any way that you can get away with, it doesn't matter ultimately. And I think like this is a perfect symptom of everything wrong with the stock market, cryptocurrency, like every every coin like this is this is the Tether is this, but like it's so far beyond Tether. It's it is the Bitcoin forks. It is the it's it's the fact that Micro Strategy does what it does. Like all of this is a symptom of something far broader and sicker in this system. Um and I think like I think we're already there, Peter. Yeah, we I we have kind of crossed the Rubicon on entering this like shadow central bank system whether we like it or not. And we have to deal with this fact that like and maybe it's not like to and I I mentioned this because the market share of tether and stable coins has gone down over the years. Uh it doesn't necessarily have to be just Tether because Trump has world liberty uh financial now and there's other stable coins out there. And we can even look at it kind of like as a quasi like stable coin reserve system like the Federal Reserve system. There's 12 banks in theory. Um, and it's like there could just be like a collection of 12 stable coins that all operate in unison and they all have the same uh modus operande to, you know, print synthetic dollars uh that go towards uh paying for the US debt that go towards uh keeping up corporate incumbents in the equity markets and the bond markets. Um, and this is all, you know, doable because no one has the wherewithal to kind of look under the surface a little bit deeper and they're just fine with considering all these things that, oh, this is innovation, this is, you know, high-tech, this is and and that's the problem where all of our financial press is like either talking about this as innovation and it never goes farther than that and they humor it that way or they're skeptical people and Nasim Taleb is a smart guy and and or I won't get to that. But let's just assume he's a smart guy. You know, he's a big crypto uh crit critic of crypto and um all he can say about it is like, hey, I I don't really look into it. It's like gambling. You know, you can make money. I don't care. But it's like this is a guy with brain power and he has not delved into these layers that we've gone to where we're reaching the core of earth of like of Bitcoin uh nuances. Uh and so this shadow bank um central bank system is just like here now and no one's really inspecting it deeper and that's where like guys like uh who I mentioned in my paper uh Marco Dela Elba um he's actually the one that coined the term shadow central bank. He doesn't connect so many dots that I do. I believe his first paper coining it was in 2019. Um and so he's he just basically brings up the fact like okay there's like all these properties emerging which stable coins have uh that are like very emulative of a central bank and this creates a problem for central banks and in transmitting their policy because then it could not work. But then we fast forward to actually this year the bank of international settlements came out with a working paper that was actually very uh impactful and it ended up in their annual uh BIS report where they talked about the way in which um they don't call it a shadow central bank but they say hey we just like measured and it turns out um the inflows of stable coins impacts uh treasury yields and so there's a direct relationship here and there's a huge problem that as stable coins They're going to suppress the ways central banks can actually communicate their monetary policy. And so they can do whatever they want. Jerome Powell can do whatever they want, but ultimately if stable coins get big enough, whatever they're doing and the flows that they have is actually going to be more influential on shaping our monetary policy. So this is so this is where it's like we're now you know 2019 when um Shadow Central Bank is first coined to fast forward to this year when the BIS is basically saying it out loud and they've actually taken a very like sharper disagreement with the American way of looking at this. Uh they're definitely looking at more of the central bank digital currency approach for the European context and they're very critical of stable coins. Uh but they're saying it out loud. And so we're in the position in America where, you know, this thing is, you know, slightly less equal to equal or, you know, depending on how things roll out, going to be more powerful to Jerome Powell's uh Federal Reserve. And you know, does anybody want to talk about that? I think I'm the one that's kind of vocalizing that, aside from the more academic people that are measuring this in a very um you know, minutiae way. Um so yeah so that's where we're at and that's like as you say Cass kind of an interesting feature of the the history of capitalism where we've now arrived at this point and is it so much a feature of crypto it as much as a feature of the natural evolution of allowing unchecked oligarchic privilege uh to conglomerate in this new implementation of a shadow central

So like the reason we would want additional demand for treasuries is to like avoid having to raise rates or inflate and then raise rates to continue paying them. But like if this is like just a shadow deregulation, wouldn't it make more sense to do like change the bank regulations? Cuz if you can get say 25% of stable coin demand into banks, isn't that going to have like a larger net effect on your economy and downstream like your ability to manage your debt than like allowing this backdoor deregulation? Not to be glib, but if they could, they would. So that's where it's just like, yeah, like makes sense. Um, try to get that through Elizabeth Warren or, you know, just like not even her as an avatar, but just like trying to you're able to you're able to push back against the the real deregulation a lot easier than well we have no control over that Bennett right yeah and even though like people are saying like whatever way in which the government today is overstepping what the letter of the law says or the constitution says and you could say well if they can do that they can do anything like there's still ways in which they have to contend with the institutional hurdles that are in place so like it's not even like an individual politician ician like it could be just like a random judge out there that like stops you know a deportation order. It could be um you know an institution of civil servants that like just do not process and do not operate as per the top of the government says they should. So these are problems that however you know uh looney tunes an elected government official at the top of the pyramid could do like there's still all this inertia from other elected politicians to institutions to lower level civil servants that it's just like why would we go through the slog of that when we can just do this on the side and it's like we're already there like I said the BIS paper came out and it's already suppressing yields with its inflows. It's already having effect. They're already warning about all these ways in which it could also destabilize the entire financial system because if there's a bankr run on these stable coins, they don't have the reserves, things go haywire. Um I could I mean I could talk about too like there's like just as a theoretical like there's a bug that freezes all transactions on one of these blockchains. You know, Tether's making its own native blockchain. If that like has a bug in it and all that stops, like what happens to the value of Tether or other stable coins and then how does that diminishment of value on stable coins affect all the ways in which stable coins are now infused into the wider uh private financial sector? A lot of like Bitcoin and other things like that are being used as collateral for loans. And so stable coins get diminished naturally uh there's going to be a wider fireell across crypto and bitcoin's going to diminish. And so if bitcoin diminishes on the on that collateral for loans guess what you're going to get margin calls. And when that starts, it's cascading. And to be clear, like this has happened before, right? We we've seen the devaluation, the deping of Tether and other cryptocurren like stable coins. And we have seen there like there is a cascading effect to this type of thing. We haven't necessarily seen it in treasuries, but the idea that we could I like that does not I'm not surprised by that at all. That doesn't that doesn't even make me blink. I think that is very real. just just add to one bullet point of that something that was an epiphany for me of like doing the some of the deep just research of of doing this in real time in the 2010s uh is that like everyone's saying during the hyperinflation period of Venezuela that like crypto became such of a big thing for them uh and when I started to like really look into that it's like the narrative is that all these Venezuelans are like oh Bitcoin's great everything Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin I'm using Bitcoin but in reality All they were doing was using Bitcoin as a middle layer to get out of Venezuelan fiat currency into US dollar fiat currency. That's right. So, none of them were actually, funny enough, they weren't holding it as a store of value. A lot of a lot of crypto a lot of crypto um 501c3s and otherwise were talking about helping Venezuelans and I noticed that stopped and it's exactly because of what you're talking about where they they weren't using crypto to hold value. They were using crypto to acquire dollars and that is a big big difference actually. And this is this is where when you look at the actual correlations and and way this you know goes back and forth with the equity markets with uh risk episodes how gold operates as a counter hedge asset you actually find like if everything about Bitcoin is true it should just be parallel to how gold operates and it doesn't do that it's acts as if it's the frothiest of the froth of a tech stock in the S&P 500. That is how people see it outside the religious zealatry of Bitcoiners. People see it as a frothy tech stock or as something in the third world they can use to get in and out of fiat currencies. And so there there is no um diamond hands. There is no huddle culture when it comes to the much wider circle of people that are interacting with stable coins, Bitcoin and crypto crypto in general. And so this epiphany that I saw in the Venezuela case study made me see where you could forecast in the future as crypto becomes collateral for loans. It's like and if stable coins have a bank run like no one is going to have any loyalty to Bitcoin. Like if stable coins go down and all of crypto is going down no one's going to ride that roller coaster. They everyone is going to rush for the door to get completely out of crypto. And so that is a very huge risk that we're just sleepwalking into because of all these types of myths and all these narratives that are out there.

I that I for me that that uh sums it up quite well. Um uh Bennett, do you have any other questions or anything you want to throw it at at Peter? Uh I do not. I just want to remind people they can find Peter Ryan at Ryan Research, both his Substack and his consulting services if you need them. And thank you very much for joining us, Ryan. Peter, thank you. Ryan, yeah. Uh, and I just want to, as I did in in the pre-show, um, thank you guys for having me on. Uh you guys, as I said in my essay, have been a stalwart um duo in criticizing Bitcoin, but that almost like trivializes it where it's like you are doing real journalism of chasing down leads, of factchecking, of really um doing the Lord's work in providing something that just should be like inherently there, which is unfortunately not really the case uh broadly. So, I think people should really commend you guys for what you've done over the years. Uh, the platform that you provided for people and for being like an essential reference is like the more I've gotten into like the study of history and how historians work. Uh, I'll just keep uh buttering you guys up. they will go back to uh crypto crypto critics's corner and all of that and it will be an essential reference text and primary source for understanding the history of the emergence of this industry. L literally exactly what I would love to hear as someone who's done this for [ __ ] free for way too way too long to be like, "Yeah, yeah, exactly. I want people to talk about this in 10 years and reference. I don't know if you monetize that, but it's going to happen." Uh, Peter, I did not expect this to go for two hours. So, I just want to thank you for joining us. I like that. Yeah, this has been a very very long and fruitful discussion and I appreciate it. So, thank you. Yeah. Oh, and and last Easter egg. Um, part of the title of my essay is Money by Vile Means, is a direct quote from uh William Shakespeare's uh Julius Caesar, which is it's from a scene. It has a very apt metaphor that is utilized that I explain in the essay. But as the Easter egg, when we were all uh meeting each other for the first time online and and discussing all of our skepticism and journalism around uh crypto, uh somehow we landed on our little group chat being called Vile Gang. I think it was cuz Adam Back or someone called one of us. the way we were behaving was vile and then got adopted as the moniker. Yeah. So, it's it was amazing how I was like, you know, uh history's funny that way or life's funny that way when I could land on this turn of like William Shakespeare. Yeah. That it it connects all the dots together. So, uh it's a it's a fun little Easter egg there. I I really I love this. I love this discussion. Thank you, Peter. This has been fantastic. All right. Thanks, guys.

Crypto Critics' Corner

Episode 173 – The Vile Truth of Bitcoin (feat. Peter Ryan)

The Vile Truth of Bitcoin (Feat. Peter Ryan) – Crypto Critics' Corner

Where to find the podcast:

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

Where to find Crypto Critics’ Corner:

English Transcript:

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Episode 173 – The Vile Truth of Bitcoin (feat. Peter Ryan)

The Vile Truth of Bitcoin (Feat. Peter Ryan) – Crypto Critics' Corner

Where to find the podcast:

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

Where to find Crypto Critics’ Corner:

English Transcript:

Share this:

Leave a comment Cancel reply