What a great interview! Bob is one of my favorite Bitcoiners and an excellent educator. I always learn so much about mining from him. Please invite him back!
Such an amazing interview. I definitely didn’t know that not everyone will be able to be completely sovereign. Whoa. Makes sense when Bob broke it down and I’m happy he’s talking about it. You never stop learning when it comes to Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation and as always, have learned so much. Thank you and I can’t wait for the next time you both sit down together to chit chat more! 🙌
Fee based mining has a small centralizing force. As a small pool if you're unlucky on that day of the month when fees spike 10x your profitability will be damaged a lot. So big miners and big pools have an advantage here.
What an awesome conversation. Honestly, based on the title I didn’t know if I would enjoy it, figured I would at least learn a bit more about mining, but I was pleasantly surprised at the direction the convo took. Definitely look forward to having Bob on again!
Great episode. When he mentions ramifications of fees getting out of control, ordinals, ETF's, etc...First thing to pop in my head is that BlackRock has already thought about this, hence why they have the FORK verbiage in their filing.
Important information we all need to be aware of. Block space is the commodity of real scarcity here. Mining pools set the block templates (aka, they are the gate keepers). Self custody and base chain settlements are going to be EXPENSIVE going forward. I'm glad we get a clear perspective from the systems guy! Thank you Bob! LFG Ocean! Here come the T.I.D.E.S.!!! We can do this if we are armed with the necessary information. Also, I love you Danny
Sorry i had to rush through that. Could you explain why self custody and base chain settlements are going to get expensive soon? Don't think that truly clicked for me.
@@flowwesterly6136 There is a lot to it but basically the network has a capacity of roughly 200M transactions per year. Little can be done to change that without an increase in block size or decrease in block time. There are 8B people in the world so even a 2% adoption means that there would be only about 1 base layer per person per year.
Bob and I have a similar experience. Except when I was exposed to computers in 1986, I thought computers were useless and I became a farmer. Live, Learn, Buy Bitcoin
The Replace By Fee will start pushing the Fees up that make small miner (sub S9) in a mining pool more profitable. Fees at .7+ or higher with a BTC value of above 100K will make mining pools profitable as well as pushing up processing power demand where small mining rigs can become profitable or at least off-set their own expenses.
I love all your guests interviews. Sure learn from each 1. I get excited for the future of Bitcoin, being apart of this revolution in my lifetime, 51 yr man. I just always get concerned, worried about the congress elected politicians that some will go all out to kill the Bitcoin, cryto technology.
I agree that is one of the bigger threats to BTC in the short to medium term but in the long run- it seems like BTC will overwhelm any entity that tries to control it. If the US knocks the price of BTC down other countries are more incentivized to scoop up cheap BTC. It’s gonna be interesting no matter what!
A very deep analysis of the blocks and future implications that I haven’t heard talked about before. So will it get to expensive in the future to move bitcoin off the base layer from my cold storage hardware device because fees will get so high?
I believe only honest people in bitcoin concede this. Lightning better scale and be stable. But on there it won't be "sovereign" you'll rely on custodians.
Maybe Peter and I can dig in a bit deeper in the future but the short version is that you'll probably want to interact with the base layer in something around 1M sat intervals or greater.
@@alyssacrypto We have to be honest. This is Bitcoin's design. I think it is brilliant but yes, we need strong layer 2s for Bitcoin to reach its potential.
Self-Sovereign desire can be fulfilled by the On-Chain transactions but in any case the need for Self-Sovereign needs to be a personal realisation choice for specific stores of value but for everyday use I don't believe Self-Sovereign will be necessary.
But even "stores of value" a middle class person could store 50 thousand dollars in 10 years on chain and not be able to move it 4 years later because half would be lost. Bitcoin is supposed to not steal from you (fees is like taxes...). This is concerning.
do i get this right? miners are an instance of fee-dependant decission-makers and arbiters and therefore a single point of "intrusion"? what if gouvernments decide to create "public miners"? and exclude transations based on ... whatever ... ?
Yes, you are thinking along the right line. However, it is preventable - what we need is a path where there are thousands of block template creators (currently there are about 15) - this will be solved soon technically. The question will be if mining companies take up the initiative to become template creators. If they do, we are good. If not, then there is a massive centralization risk.
If people thought I was dodging I apologize. Self-sovereignty will be available to all but only at a price. The system cannot accommodate everyone on the base layer.
We're starting to have the same problem as we have with the infrastructure for cars. We continue building cars and cities for the old legacy infrastructure even though the best way would be to walk everywhere and use airtaxis and high speed rail for longer journeys. Since Bitcoin fails to scale we are experiencing again building on top of the old failed infrastructure instead of building from scratch. Early days....
Money is devaluing to infinity. Data storage demand is growing to infinity. Bitcoin for decentralised money. Filecoin for decentralised data storage. Both hugely important for humanity. And both very much certain to succeed in their respective areas.
Nobody on the podcast even questions that mempool being backlogged and blocks full as being bad. Lol It's like everyone rushing to get on the bus and there is only one bus and the bus ticket is super expensive.
one can REALLY be sovereign with lightning... One holds ones own keys, one choses the channel partners and peers to connect to... one decides the terms of operations and conditions for others to connect to one...
People get the "Total" number of bitcoins wrong in the fact that the mining of bitcoins will never reach 21 million but the mining of Satoshis will continue to infinity because Sats will eventually become as valuable as what Bitcoins are today. That is the beauty of the brilliance of Bitcoin.
There is technically a point where there is no longer a subsidy in the block reward. At this point no new Bitcoin will be issued. It is a number just short of 21M. But, yes, mining will keep on keepin' on and will be driven by only fees.
How can you say Satoshi got everything right when the platform doesn’t have the ability to process billions of transactions, while also maintaining the main tenent of self sovereignty? It seems if replacing the current fiat system was the goal, then the idea of billions of transactions should have been assumed from the beginning? Why are ernest explorations and approaches trying to improve on this outside of bitcoin considered “shit-coins”? Couldn’t even bitcoin benefit and evolve from the learnings of these other “shit-coin” experiments ? I find it very hard to find open honest discussions in this crypto space not colored by tribalism/religion.
Laser eye maxis secretly have been waiting for institutions to pump their bags so they can borrow against their bitcoins for lambo, compounds and clout. They don't care about the mission lol Nor about everyone being on bitcoin. Literally their favourite slogan is "you get bitcoin at the price you deserve". The deserve word use is telling.
You are entitled to your opinion. In my opinion he got it right. The best structure is one that is in layers. All layers are available to everyone but the price of transacting at lower layers is more expensive. An architecture that tries to do everything on the base layer will require bloated nodes and centralized ledgers meaning no sovereignty at all.
