When Satoshi Disappeared
Speakers: Pete Rizzo
Date: April 28, 2021
Transcript By: Stephan Livera
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRkiSbHyGvQ
podcast: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/271/
Stephan Livera:
Pete, welcome to the show.
Pete Rizzo:
Hey. Well, thanks for having me glad to be here and excited to chat.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, man. So I’ve had a chance to read your article about what happened when Satoshi disappeared, and I think it’s a good one to get into. But also just for listeners who don’t know you, can you just take a minute and just tell them a bit about yourself and your involvement in the Bitcoin world?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah, I’ve been here for eight-plus years now. Editor of Bitcoin magazine Editor at large at the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange best known for being sort of the original founding editor over at CoinDesk growing that business up over time. But yeah, I’ve been spending a lot of my time of late diving pretty deep into the Bitcoin archives. Just trying to get to the bottom of some of the things and the mythology that we’ve heard about over the years. Right. I think over time, I’ve definitely become a more of a Bitcoin believer as most people have. I think I’ve shed the objectivity and sort of having that sightline of look Bitcoin as an invention. It’s going to be one of the things that really stands the test of time.
Pete Rizzo:
And once I kind of locked in on that, I really became shifting my work over to sort of digging into okay, like who were the people and events that shaped the technology and what do we actually know about them? And as I kept digging I just found that we know less and less, right. There’s a lot of kind of pivotal events in the technology’s development that really have just been understudied under contextualized and have just resulted in sort of like sort of these weird memes that aren’t actually super true if you, if you look at what happened and that’s one of the crazy things about Bitcoin, right? I mean, it’s an entirely digital money. It’s an entirely digital creation and full record of its existence lives on the internet, right. So It’s basically open and public for anyone willing to take a dive in there. So yeah, that’s been my recent focus and I was excited to publish today, obviously the 10th anniversary of, I think, Satoshi kind of handing over the keys to the project it was a milestone that felt like it needed to be marked. I was happy to do it.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And it’s like this whole idea of having Bitcoin historians because certainly there are memes and things. And maybe occasionally someone might point to an old forum post or some old email and say, Oh, look, see, this is Satoshi meant this because he said this on the Bitcoin talk forum. Yeah. Whatever day and whatever year. And obviously there are certain well-known resources in the community. Like the Nakamoto Institute run by my friends Bitstein and Pierre Rochard and.
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah, very good resource.
Stephan Livera:
And it’s like, there are now there’s more of an effort if you will on actually cataloging some of this. And I think a really good example, as well as Jonathan Bier’s book, the block size war, really great book. And you’re also doing a lot of work around this also because it’s kind of going back and digging through the archives. So what was that like for you and how did you start that process?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah, I think a lot of it is just stripping away sort of the idea that the past is sort of like this blank time that just has no immediacy. So I think for me with this one I had written at the end of last year with Aaron van Wirdum, we did a sort of deep dive into the first Bitcoin war, which was after Satoshi had left how the developers actually enacted the first soft fork for bitcoin. It was called P2SH essentially it’s a code format that enabled multisig and a lot of the, a lot of different things that we have today. And I sort of went into the politics and dynamics of how that played out, I think, as a result of that. And you mentioned Jonathan Bier’s book about block size wars.
Pete Rizzo:
I think that one’s interesting because I think and considering that time period which I’ve done a lot as well as it just became kind of more obvious to me that really everything kind of starts back at the beginning and we really didn’t have, and don’t currently have a great picture of like what Satoshi’s tenure as software developer was like. So I think there was a lot of again, tendency to kind of colour the present with our perception of the past, which actually doesn’t really meet what actually occurred. So I think for me, the more that I sort of dove into things and tried to contextualize like my own understanding of what had happened to Bitcoin, the more that I said, okay, I just have to go back to the beginning.
Pete Rizzo:
What did the people who were there experience? Like what were their interactions with Satoshi like, cause I think it’s really easy to just separate people into ideologies in Bitcoin. And kind of make us versus them camps. I think this is really happened a lot along, along the block size war stuff, even, even today. Well, a lot of the things are sort of, Oh, these people were bad because they thought a certain thing, but I really wanted to go back and just free myself from any like preconceptions. What do I actually think as someone who’s just reading these things and experiencing them in real time. And I think, I guess what I would hope for people who read this piece, if you check it out is that you get kind of a feeling of what it was like to be there at the time.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. I didn’t want Bitcoin to feel like this like quaint dark thing in the past. Yeah, I think when we think about the early days of Bitcoin, we think it’s like this black box where Satoshi was just like in front of a computer by himself. Actually there was like many people doing a lot of things. The article gets into some of like the sillier moments where they’re launching the first exchanges and they’re debating what Bitcoin should be worth. and I, really wanted to paint the idea that these were all like communal decisions that even though we think of Satoshi as being sort of the benevolent leader of the project, which I think he was to some degree, it was still very communal right. People, there was great activity around Bitcoin even it gets into the certainly one of the first public efforts to promote Bitcoin and how that was a user led decision, how Satoshi really wasn’t super in favor of that.
Pete Rizzo:
And then it sort of causes the whole, you know then nascent ecosystem to be overrun, like the exchanges go down and it goes down from like 10 cents to 5 cents. And people think this is just a great tragedy where, you know there’s speculation that the bankers are trying to subvert the network and all of these things. But I guess I really want to add a lot of that context. Cause I think, again, it’s really easy to just like think that this is a time period that has no substance when really these people were living like full and active lives and like their concerns and dramas were just very important to them. So I think I wanted to get a lot of that out and I really wanted to kind of reckon with, okay, well, how did Satoshi actually lead the Bitcoin project?
Pete Rizzo:
Because how can you really know anything else if you don’t know that because that’s sort of the foundational aspect for everyone’s perception in Bitcoin thereafter, right? Like there was a group of developers that worked with Satoshi directly for better, for worse. Like one of my theses is I think most developers want to feel like they are doing what Satoshi would have wanted. I think even today, you sort of mentioned right. People on Twitter, they’re constantly evoking Satoshi. We have this weird sort of father figure relationship with Satoshi. We want Satoshi to think that we’re doing well for us. Right. so I think that I really wanted to get to the bottom of that and in the end. Just kind of develop my own picture of Satoshi as a character that wasn’t just some guy who invented something, which he was and there’s certainly Satoshi, the inventor. I think this sort of story takes a look at Satoshi the project manager and the flaws and sort of missteps and things that he did that are a little bit more less black and white than some of the things presented on Twitter.
Stephan Livera:
And so when Bitcoin first started, it’s all early and I guess it’s like many things it’s like, there’s a honeymoon period. And then maybe there’s some conflict that comes up. Right. So what were some of the first few conflicts that came up in the whole Bitcoin world?
Pete Rizzo:
I think it’s really interesting. Yeah. As you mentioned, there’s a honeymoon period, like for the first, like really half of 2010 2009 is kind of this great blank period, right. Where there’s really like nothing. Right. You can go through the logs and there’s just weeks the past without any transactions. And presumably people are claiming coins of their mind, but there’s not really a great record on that. There’s just like kind of nothing happening. Right. and it really isn’t. So the forums that Satoshi creates at the end of 2009 and that sort of gets people together. And I think that’s kind of an interesting point when you think about it, it’s that Satoshi invented something, but he needed to keep moving the project forward in order for it to advance. And to get to the point where it says like, Satoshi created Bitcoin, but that didn’t actually birth Bitcoin.
Pete Rizzo:
You know, he, even though he had solved it to get people to care about it and buy and buy into it. So he has to kind of do all this other stuff. I think it isn’t until like mid 2010 where, what happens I think is that there’s actually a big code. So in the middle of 2010, what happens is that the project’s getting big enough that actually serious talented coders begin to be interested and they’re downloading the code and they’re actually really going over it and looking for the kind of things that advanced coders would look for, which is, can I hack this thing? Can I steal the money? And is there something bad that I can do to this new decentralized money project that’s now worth, I think then it was like half a million or something like that.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. So people start downloading it and people are reporting bugs to Satoshi, or some period in July. And then what happens in August is that someone actually exploits one of those bugs. So somebody actually creates his own client, right? So they make this kind of their own version of Bitcoin and they code it such that there’s a value overflow. So essentially they pre program the digits of the transaction, so they said the input was negative, a hundred million coins or something of that. And it basically tricks the protocol into thinking that 184 billion Bitcoins that didn’t exist got printed. Right. So I think this is a pretty pivotal event for Satoshi. He actually, from what I can tell, gets pretty freaked out by this and really kind of goes through a period where he’s making a lot of very rash kind of like quick decisions for Bitcoin.
Pete Rizzo:
And it really exercising his authority in ways that I think if anyone did that now, they would be very suspect. But back then it was still possible for him to do that. And there’s a number of instances, right? So he changes how the software behaves. He changes the rules for transactions, and most notably, he just kind of like sticks this random block size limit in to the code. And actually it doesn’t even in the release notes for that software actually even announced that he did it. It’s something that they discover later that he had done. And again, this kind of gets into, like, you can tell certain traits from someone’s behavior, right? So his posts become more frequent. They become less detailed. They’re kind of like overlooking things. There’s one message that he gives where he’s like, please upgrade now ASAP.
Pete Rizzo:
And people are commenting on the code and they’re like, Hey, are you going to publish anything for us to look at? Or are we just gonna download this code. So yeah, there is a period where they start kind of questioning, okay. Like, well, what’s going on here? And I think some of the developers, especially the ones who had more open-source expertise, I think Jeff Garzik in particular kind of stands out as this is who I couldn’t imagine would have been very impressed with Satoshi. You kind of entered the project to the point where Satoshi is very whimsical. He’s like kind of doing all these things not being very open, not displaying the characteristics that maybe he would have wanted. And that leads to a period sort of towards the end of 2010, where there is more direct conflict with Satoshi. Some of that is passive and some of that’s more active.
Pete Rizzo:
So there is at the end of 2010 sort of a debate over Satoshi basically tries to limit the types of transactions that that users can make. Right. So when Satoshi wrote the code, he includes hundreds of transactions that include like all sorts of different things that he envisioned like multisig would have been a great example, right? Something where you can use multiple keys to move coins. So he would he would have said, basically, I don’t want anybody doing anything advanced like that. You can only send these types of transactions. And in that case, the users and Michael Marquart best known as Theymos leads, a somewhat minor revolt against Satoshi where he’s like we don’t want this code, we’re going to do something else.
Pete Rizzo:
But yeah, I think it’s from what I can tell, it’s like, it was a lot more acrimonious with Satoshi than I would’ve expected. And I think there were some interesting reasons for that. One, most people were actually much more technical back then in the project, right? So I think the average, like technical difference between like Satoshi’s expertise and the average user just wouldn’t have been that large. So they were more apt to view him as someone who like wasn’t helping them directly and like just could have been like making their lives easier, but just wasn’t for whatever reason. So like one contingent that’s kind of amusing is the miners because they’re the ones who are really, Satoshi doesn’t actually develop equines mining code, like in any substantial way. So he’s not actually making easier for you as a user, to mine and generate more Bitcoin.
Pete Rizzo:
The users are doing all that. So they’re actually leading kind of the optimization there, which is interesting, interesting to think about. There’s a whole kind of section of the code that would have been largely kind of developed by the community. And their attitude to him is like really dismissive because he’s just not really doing anything to help them. He’s not like merging the things that they’ve added that they like so that they begin to be a bit more antagonistic. And then really towards the end, I think that partly just bleeds out to the rest of the community. They become very frustrated with this guy. And again, like, this is part of the issue with like centralized schemes and things, right? Like they become a lot more demanding of Satoshi for whatever reason and because he’s there and he’s capable of being demanded to, they stomp and kick their feet.
Pete Rizzo:
And they’re saying all these things on these threads where, you know they’re just basically like kind of impetuous children. And I think the relationship really devolves by the end. And I think one of my big conclusions is after doing this research is I don’t think Satoshi could’ve continued. I don’t think there’s like a scenario where Satoshi kept being the leader of the Bitcoin project at the end of 2010. It felt like there was a natural sort of conclusion where Satoshi had done everything that he could, he had used his authority to keep Bitcoin secure. And in mortgaging that authority, the users sort of became distrustful and moved beyond his authority and influence and basically asserted control. And I think it was sort of a gradual move to a break that I think most people would say now is like probably pretty inevitable, but it was, it was still interesting because I had always thought Satoshi kind of just laid down the sword and had walked away. And now I think that there was no way he could’ve stayed around.
Stephan Livera:
It’s really interesting insight. And I think it’s also worth pointing out that in the open source community and there’s this ethos of you should be able to contribute and everyone should be able to contribute. And it’s not about having one kind of King or leader or God or whatever. It’s just like we can all contribute and we’re all equal. And I think there’s an interesting point you made in the article where at an earlier stage, it was seen like the code was you can view it, but it was all the contributions had to go through Satoshi.
Pete Rizzo:
That was just a product of the way the code base was structured. Right. You actually need to update the repository and push the code to the users. And that was something that it seems like, it was more kind of open. Satoshi would give the keys to things. This is where it gets kind of confusing. Like we don’t really know who had keys to what, at which times. So the most kind of famous example of this that I think the article gets into where it’s kind of gray is the Bitcoin.org website. So Satoshi was at the beginning, like he’s the inventor of the code, he’s the lead developer, he’s the maintainer of the website, he’s the admin of the only forum. So he has like, sort of all this consolidated power and he does do a job of kind of offering people and getting people into the community.
Pete Rizzo:
There’s one kind of small note here of this developer named David Parrish, who just basically tells Sirius Marti Malmi that she just like is interested in coding and they make him a maintainer, they client that project, which is kind of crazy, right. That would have just told you that the barrier entry there was pretty low. But yeah, I think that yeah, it, it is interesting because with the website in particularly like, we don’t really know who had access to it, but at some point in 2010, it becomes clear that one of the advantages on the website is now that Bitcoin is great for cheap, fast payments and that it’s competitive with credit cards. Right. So what do we make of a development like that? Right. Do we think that did Satoshi approved that, did he know that?
Pete Rizzo:
I mean, obviously he was around when that change was made. We don’t know if he did it directly or if somebody else did it, or if he was aware of it. I think we’re assuming that he was aware of it based on some of the things that he had said thereafter. So again, it’s hard to draw conclusions on some of Satoshi’s actions and decisions because he wasn’t the most expressive and explanatory about what he was doing. And again there’s sort of this collaborative nature of the project, it makes it tough to tell. And again, and this is, I would say if this is something that concerns you, like, if you really are curious to know what Satoshi would have wanted, I think as in some ways we all are, and in some ways we try not to be it’s hard to really figure out what he would have wanted in that case and what he was okay with.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. Was he okay with people just kind of being a little bit more if this gets people to adopt Bitcoin, then that’s fine. Even though it’s not really true, is that what he thought? We don’t really know. Right. Like to what extent he believed these things or did or didn’t and yeah, I think that’s part of the enduring complications of Satoshi and that really kind of foreshadows the later battles amongst developers and the different factions in the community is that I don’t think Satoshi was always clear on what he wanted. I don’t think everyone within the project always thought that we should do what Satoshi wanted. And I think going back to what I was saying earlier about like how to view the later stages of the project I almost like sort of view the block size Wars and the things that followed as they’re part of this inherent riddle, which is that Satoshi is a single or maybe he’s a single man or group who invents decentralized money. And there’s just like sort of an inherent contradiction in that where the project needs to move beyond him to succeed on its very definition. And I think I sort of view the early years of Bitcoin as that’s the central conflict is that is Bitcoin moving beyond the contradiction at its birth where it’s it’s one guy who invented the centralized money where it’s, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s a contradiction into itself.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Interesting idea there. And another one that I think is worth exploring is when maybe people are first learning about Bitcoin, they might hear someone quote, unquote, selling Bitcoin, the idea of Bitcoin to them and saying, Oh, look, it’s never been hacked. There’s no bugs. And it’s like not really, like there was this value overflow incident. There was the 2013 fork, there was the 2018 CVE with inflation bug. They have been found in Bitcoin, there have been bugs exploited in Bitcoin. And maybe that is uncomfortable for people, isn’t it?
Pete Rizzo:
I think so. In some ways I’m not uncomfortable by it. I want to understand what happened in Bitcoin. And I like having that increases my confidence was like understanding what Bitcoin has persevered through. And I don’t think that Bitcoin has to be quote unquote, like perfect in that way. Every time I think to me, I understand that Bitcoin is an invention. I understand the invention as being a money that is outside of government influence and control that is operated as an open source platform. And I think that I’m, I’m not trying to constantly evaluate Bitcoin against a bunch of altcoins. So I don’t have to take that perspective. And I think we should want to understand what happened with Bitcoin and how it progressed, because I think the danger is when we hold perceptions, that aren’t true and we come to believe sort of like myths about the project.
Pete Rizzo:
So I’ll give you an example of something I’ve really been kind of chewing on. I think a lot of people maybe before this article came out or just the common thinking is that, you know when Gavin Andresen took over the project after Satoshi, that he somehow cheated that outcome or that he kind of like overstepped his authority by like sort of seizing power or that Satoshi, like just maybe made a mistake and gave Bitcoin to the wrong guy. And I think there’s something inherently weird about that viewpoint, because if you believe that you actually would have to believe that the users weren’t in control of the project at that point, or that they, that the users were capable of being duped or that they somehow got hoodwinked in this transition. And I think the fact is that the users were in control when Satoshi was around and the users were in control when Gavin was around. And there were just was a reason that transition took place and that it was the users who decided. And that if you don’t think that the users decided that then you actually probably think that Bitcoin operated much differently than, than it does now. So I think that was another interesting realization for me was that some of these myths that propagate, they say a lot about us, like more than maybe the times. Right?
Stephan Livera:
Right. And maybe in order to talk about Bitcoin, sometimes people have this sort of, they want to talk about it in a way that comforts them more to say, Oh, it’s never been hacked. Or it’s always, it was this way. It was this way from the start and its this way forever. And it’s like, well, there are some changes that are allowed in Bitcoin. Obviously some changes that are non-starters that are never going to happen. But things can change if enough users go with it.
Pete Rizzo:
I think that’s the other fascinating thing is I think a lot of the early or some of the earlier developers in Bitcoin actually didn’t understand Bitcoin and don’t as we do it today. And that to me is really interesting. So like Gavin, Andresen, who’s a really strong component of this piece. The person who succeeded Satoshi, I think that Gavin has a lot of, displays a lot of thinking about Bitcoin that is very antithetical to how we think about it today. And the article goes into that where towards the end, one of the central mysteries, I think is that what really did Gavin and Satoshi have in common? They’re just such opposite figures. Satoshi is this mysterious guy who doesn’t give any personal information about themselves. Gavin is this guy who like he tells you where he lives where he lives, what his wife does, you see his picture online.
Pete Rizzo:
You know, even his first email to Satoshi is like, Hey, how are you doing? Like, where’d you go to school? Like, how can I help you with Bitcoin? He’s just this like open sort of guy. And then Satoshi is the polar opposite. And yeah, I think it’s one of the enduring mysteries of like, okay, like what they see in each other as collaborators, because obviously they they worked very tightly together for some time. And by the end it’s clear that Gavin’s thinking on Bitcoin is like he makes some comment that didn’t end up in the piece, but he’s like, Oh, the perfect monetary policy for Bitcoin would be if it was like governed by a board of economists, but 21 million Bitcoins is fine too, or something like that.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. So he’ll sort of like say these sort of things now where you’re like, okay, like this, this person didn’t understand Bitcoin as we do today, but he was still at for some period, like the leader of the project. And to me, that’s really fascinating because I think it says a lot about, I dunno, just like that Bitcoin was an invention. It wasn’t able to be understood by everyone so early at all times. And yeah, I think those people made mistakes, but we should be able to evaluate them somewhat honestly. Right. And maybe maybe we’ll learn something important, I guess, about how human beings come to terms with invention. Right. That sometimes it takes time and conflict.
Stephan Livera:
For sure. And I think it’s also fair to say that there were implications that maybe they couldn’t have seen in those days. Right. Like obviously the block size war being a good example where it was seeing like, Oh, it should be cheap and free forever or cheap and accessible and fast forever.
Pete Rizzo:
I would actually say like, what’s amazing is like, there’s a quote in there that I stuck in from like his, for one of his first interviews in 2011. And like Gavin actually projects the entirety of the conflict. He says the quote is basically at some point when we scale up the project, people are going to have to start trusting central servers and the people who run Bitcoin on their home computers, aren’t going to like that. I mean, this is in 2011. Right. So he’s already sort of like, I think there’s like an interesting phenomenon in Bitcoin where if you actually look at the text, It’s sort of like, at some point, everybody kind of predicts their own downfall. Gavin. It’s like he, like, he knew that he saw that coming. Right. And it’s almost like you pick that exact line out and it’s like, that’s the future there and he predicts the future and he predicts the exact issue, but he’s incapable of actually avoiding that future outcome. And that’s the interesting thing about history, right? Sometimes we’ll learn things like that.
Stephan Livera:
And it makes you wonder what things do we think now in April, 2021 as the quote unquote Bitcoin community, or if you will just kind of people who are interested in Bitcoin, what do we think now that’s actually wrong.?And we’re only going to find that out in five or 10 years time?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. That’s what I think like that’s what keeps me coming back to this period in Bitcoin is that I think we should all be in a process of learning about Bitcoin and understanding Bitcoin myself, I’ve been here since 2013, I’ve seen the narrative around Bitcoin change pretty substantially from originally it was kind of a a lot about payments, then it became building applications and on top of the blockchain and now we’re sort of in this great macro everybody’s a macro economist who understands about the imports and exports of all these countries globally. Right. So I think that I dunno if I’m a little bit jaded to the fact that we’ve figured out Bitcoin at this point, it’s only because I’ve seen other people think the same thing.
Pete Rizzo:
And look, we may find when we look back that this is a period of Bitcoin’s history, where we held assumptions that later to be untrue, that we were naive about things that we were overly optimistic about things. And in the end that might make this period of Bitcoin no different than any other, but each period of Bitcoin does contribute in moving it forward. Right. And I think that, I don’t know, over the years, it’s been hard for me to make strong statements about what I think will happen with Bitcoin, because I just think that I don’t know. Maybe it’s just, I lack a lot of certainty as a person. I sometimes think, people think that, but I don’t know.
Stephan Livera:
Okay. Here’s the thing. Could we say that okay. Now in 2021 — 12 years in that there are some things that we do know better that we know like there are certain things that we know is not going to go that way. Right. Like we know we’re not gonna do on chain scaling. We know we’re not going to do we know that privacy is going to have a cost right now. Like if you want to be private on chain, it’s going to cost you more. We know that.
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. We do learn over time. I mean, I think that I would categorize the current bullish attitude towards the bitcoin right now as basically being the idea that Bitcoin is mainstreaming as an investment asset, that it is a digital gold that past descriptions of Bitcoin were perhaps inaccurate. And that we’re now kind of I guess I would say the Bitcoin-TINA line of thinking is that we’re at the start of a Supercycle, the Supercycle is Bitcoin crossing the chasm into a new class of investors who previously weren’t involved before. And that this is going to catapult Bitcoin through some sort of mega up cycle that will get you hundreds of likes and retweets. If you agree with this line of thinking, so I’m in, look, I think that’s a possible, it’s a plausible scenario.
Pete Rizzo:
What I would say as an alternative hypothesis is that to me, if Bitcoin drops 80% at the end of this year and marginally outperforms past periods where we’ve had downturns, I am not, my opinion on Bitcoin is not affected by that. I will still believe in Bitcoin. So what’s the harm, right? I guess is how I look at it. And I look at I think there are a lot of people with really sky high expectations for where Bitcoin is right now. And look, if we get there, then that’s great. I have no problem with that. To be fair. I have no problem if Bitcoin goes up forever from here. That doesn’t bother me, but I’m also okay if it doesn’t. And I think I worry sometimes about people setting the expectations for new people who are coming in the space.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. Because I think that I don’t know if you’re coming into Bitcoin now thinking you’re going to be part of this great up forever Supercycle, are you really going to be a Bitcoiner who has the habits that we want for Bitcoiners, right. Are you going to be a skeptical person who evaluates claims who really kind of asks themselves if they’re doing the right thing for Bitcoin, are you going to be a militant participant of the network who is going to be a sovereign user in the way that we want, right. Are we teaching those values and kind of moving them along? I think that would be my hope is that we’re able to do some of that. And I think, I dunno, I’ve always appreciated like skepticism as a tool to get there, because I think particularly remember the periods of Bitcoin where the people who have the mainstream views today were you mentioned Bitstein and Pierre Rochard, and I work Pierre here over Kraken, then we’ll talk about it. And I’ll say Pierre was a very marginalized figure. Like in his time, Pierre was not well understood. He was not mainstream. He was correct. And the history will sort of bear him out as being one of the early Bitcoin economists who was foundational, but there was a large period of time where he wasn’t someone who was viewed as a mainstream Bitcoiner, and I think there’s likely people who are like that right now, there are probably fringe voices who might have the right idea about that.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. That’s an interesting idea to contemplate and it might be someone who says, Oh, maybe we need to be treating Bitcoin privacy more importantly. And maybe that voice becomes more prominent, right? Like that’s one example or maybe things will change as the value rises. And I think this calls back to the point you were making in your article as well, because as you kind of go through and catalogue, what’s going on, you sort of say, Hey, now the price is this, or now a Bitcoin is worth millions of dollars as in, as the total market. Right. Not the price. And I think it’s as the value rises, that’s when we start to see new conflicts come because now the stakes are higher. Right?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. I think that’s true. I think it’s interesting where Satoshi, I got the sense in researching this article and again, this is something that I wouldn’t have expected either that towards the end, I think he felt like he was running out of time. There was a sense where I got from the value of overflow exploit where he knew that in order to kind of protect Bitcoin against the kind of attacks that it was then facing from a more experienced kind of group that he had to take certain actions. I think that sort of what accounts for his quick activity, how he, why he becomes short, why he doesn’t really kind of explain himself. I think he’s like kind of keen not to play his cards and to let people in to see what he’s doing. And I think one of the things in analyzing his last post is he sort of, kind of turns off some of the features that he turns on in the wake of the value overflow exploit, where it’s like almost today, it would be kind of weird, right?
Pete Rizzo:
So he’s even like they basically, like if you download a new version of the software, you had a hard-coded block. So everybody had to agree on this certain block, just kind of like weird concepts that we wouldn’t have right now. And you wonder is that even like a rational free market, like way to decide something, but he kind of turns that off before he leaves. And he does actually remove his name from the code, which is actually something I didn’t know that he had done. Right. He actually turns the code over to Bitcoin developers. I got the sense that he was running out of time and that he just knew that his authority and influence that he kind of had to overplay it for some period in order to shore Bitcoin up and that at that point he was fine to walk away.
Pete Rizzo:
That’s how I felt. That’s my reading of it. I think I’ve tried to lay out what I can as being, I think these are the important things that happened around Satoshi’s time. I mean, some of these are going to be my assertions. Hopefully I wrote the article in such a way where if you really want to dig into these citations and kind of come to your own conclusion I’ve left a paper trail, right. So you can really kind of go down the side roads and ultimately I think after writing it, I felt like I’ve left people a roadmap from like, this is Bitcoin in 2009 to end of 2010. Here’s what I think the important streets are. But if you want to I certainly encourage that exploration and courage, more people to kind of dig into that time.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. That’s excellent. And so, as you rightly pointed out, most of this stuff is totally public, right? It’s forum, it’s Satoshi’s emails and posts on the mailing list. It’s a code that was I believe back then it was on SourceForge before it went onto GitHub right. And and then some of it is actually private, right. Because it’s email correspondence. So can you tell us a little bit about that email correspondence between Satoshi and other early contributors, like Gavin or Mike Hearn or whoever else?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah, definitely. So Mike Hearn has done a lot to he’s actually published his full correspondence with Satoshi, which is rare, like not a lot of early Satoshi contributors have done that. So what I actually did in researching this is you can go into the SourceForge logs and you’ll see that Satoshi actually does thank a lot of developers, because as I said again, it was very egalitarian in the beginning. Everybody was kind of working on code, they’re working on their own patches as to what would happen is people would just send Satoshi pieces of code and he would merge them in. And you can look through source versions, thanks anywhere between like 10 to 15 people for submitting. I was actually able to reach out to five of those people and kind of talk with them and get some of their accounts of the process.
Pete Rizzo:
And they were pretty keen to position Satoshi as just a down to earth guy. Like they were using this new project, they saw his email, they emailed him, he was nice about it and updated their code. And that was their interaction with him. They didn’t think he was mysterious or weird or anything. And I think the article also tries to get at how quickly Satoshi got mythologized and really that started with the users disassociating from him. But that early on, the users had a very strong connection with him. They felt like he was one of them and that they were embarking on this project. That was the way they were equal participants. Right? Like, I don’t think anyone really early on, at least in the beginning of 2010, it does change over time. Nobody really thought anything of Satoshi.
Pete Rizzo:
They didn’t think that he wasn’t named Satoshi Nakamoto. They didn’t think that he wasn’t a Japanese man who happened to be running this project. They just saw him as a very kind of open, accessible figure. And that’s really contrast. And I think what’s really amazing is how quickly that changes. If you think by middle summer 2010, people just thought he was a regular guy that they could talk to. And then by the end of 2010, he’s sort of this mythical figure that they’re drawing pictures of him as a woman. And they’re like talking about like what he does in his free time and like how his sleep schedules changed. and then by April, 2011, really when the peace kind of concludes at the main mainstream press is coming in and they’re calling him this mysterious shadowy figure it’s just amazing, like how quickly perceptions about him changed.
Pete Rizzo:
So drastically. I think that was one of the things I wanted to get across to your point about the nature of the private correspondence that was used. So Gavin Andresen has a trove of emails. He was one of the most frequent correspondents of Satoshi. Gavin has not made his entire email archive public. He was able to send me some things which I’ve quoted in the piece they’re marked with asterisks. I did not receive those full emails. I received copy text from Gavin of this is what this said. So I’m taking him at his word that those are real correspondences. I also received something else at the same effect from a user named Ribuck who was pretty active the forums back in the day, he was actually the guy who named the smallest of unit Bitcoins, Satoshis. He was the one who came up with that proposal.
Pete Rizzo:
And he thinks that was the first thing that was ever named after Satoshi. And that happened after he left. That’s an interesting part of it, right? I think as we go as history kind of develops, I would hope that more of these early people feel comfortable turning over their emails. A few people have told me that they’ll be more comfortable going through their archives for me going forward, which I certainly appreciate, there are other people who won’t do that under any circumstances. They don’t feel like it’s appropriate to hand over private emails. Look, I think that this stuff benefits from additional scrutiny in the case of the email that I got from Ribuck, which I thought was really interesting he attests that Satoshi — he offered to pay Satoshi for making a fix to the code. And Satoshi said no, thank you. I have plenty of Bitcoins which is interesting because I don’t think that there’s another citation or thing that I could find where Satoshi admits that he had Bitcoins at all, let alone enough to turn down a reward for them. So you can learn things from these small pieces of evidence, right?
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. That’s an interesting one because that’s another commonly cited thing where they say, Oh, Satoshi never spent his coins. And, well, I guess we don’t know. Right. So, I mean, he’s rumored to have whatever, how half a million coins or 600,000 coins that never moved. But for all we know he had, that’s like the main coins that he mined in the early days. And then maybe he’s got another amount of coins that later were spent and we never know, or, or it’s like some people have this kind of altruistic vision of Satoshi who literally just created this thing and literally never spent a sat.
Pete Rizzo:
Well, I think that’s, what’s interesting, right? So today Satoshi is just whatever we want him to be because he’s not here, so we’re free to manipulate and alter the course of his dialogue to our own ends. And that’s why I think the Satoshi mystery. I don’t really care who Satoshi is I care about his lingering authority and influence over the project, which is so palpable. Right? Even the idea that Bitcoin is sort of this macro hedge asset, this, this kind of, I would say that this is the cycles narrative du jour. I mean, there’s this people who spend most of their time on Twitter, trying to act as if like Satoshi somehow justifies them thinking these things. Right? And that goes back to where we were saying at the beginning where we want Satoshi to think what we’re doing for Bitcoin is right after all these years, I don’t know how to square that.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. I think that people who did bad things against Bitcoin wanted to do what was right for Satoshi. And I think that people who did good things for Bitcoin also wanted to do the right thing for Satoshi. And then I would also say that there’s a group of people who like were actually like had a lot of foresight and didn’t care what Satoshi thought at all. So one of the more interesting minor characters in this piece I thought was Michael Marquart, theymos, who operates the Bitcointalk forums now where he was one of the first guys who you think about it at the time, it’s actually kind of impressive that he was just this 20 year old college kid and he just openly just says, I don’t Satoshi, I don’t think is how this should be run.
Pete Rizzo:
I want to be able to run whatever transaction site by why you can’t tell me what to do. That is how we would think about Bitcoin today. But again, he was a minority person then, right. That view was a bit of a minority view. And I think it’s interesting to me, like if you think of Bitcoin as this sort of saga or play of ideas, that there are some ideas that grow and they become more powerful over time through a competition of ideas. Right. So today back then, when theymos did that, there was a lot of hate towards him for speaking out against Satoshi or going against the grain or trying to people thought he was trying to cause a war today. I think we would think what he did was sensible that it was the proper expression of what Bitcoin was.
Pete Rizzo:
And to me that’s really interesting because that would suggest that Satoshi could have been somebody who was on the receiving end of what we think of Bitcoin today and would have been wrong by today’s standards and his actions. So I don’t know. I think that’s the interesting thing about history is we can use it as a framework to look at our own perceptions and how they’ve changed over time. And I think with this piece, you get a lot of those instances where Satoshi doesn’t really give us a hundred percent answers. He can’t, that’s one of the reasons we continue to fight over what he thinks and we can move past him. But I’m not sure we are.
Stephan Livera:
Well, it’s funny because you’ll see people every now and then they’ll write a post or they’ll tweet something and say something like, dear Satoshi, I hope you’re doing well, blah, blah, blah. Like, they’re kind of calling back to that idea.
Pete Rizzo:
Oh, like the coin, but like the Coinbase people like sent him as their IPO thing. I was like, all right. I thought that was like, I thought they were like there and they tweeted out about it, how they sent Satoshi that their IPO filing and they, or they put him as like a notice or something. And I was just like, oh God. Yeah. I really wonder what Satoshi would have thought of that. But I don’t know. It gets to the point, right? Like it’s Satoshi is this figure who like, we just, we want his approval. He’s just like this a strange father figure to us in a lot of ways,
Stephan Livera:
But what if he, like, okay, maybe Satoshi is dead. Right. But what if he just kind of made it more, like, I just wanted to make this technology and then step away, you know? And it’s not like this big, not imbuing, this big grand moral arc to it. And like other people just kind of project a story or certain characteristics because they want maybe it sells better or it just, it jives easily because it’s a story and it kind of has that there’s like a conflict arc to it.
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. I think what’s interesting when I look back through Satoshi’s writings a lot late lately, and then one of the things that really kind of gets me is that Satoshi talks a lot about timing. I think that’s something that’s not really thought of enough, right. When you give, when you give Satoshi an idea, or when he’s asked for a direct answer of things, he often differs to a timing. So he doesn’t actually say yes or no. So one of the interesting things is there’s a part of the piece where Jeff Garzik, another developer who’s kind of kind of viewed somewhat negatively now sort of asks him if he, you should, if they should increase the block size, which was again, the random piece of code that he had just stuffed in there pretty recently. And he says, yeah, if we get closer to needing it.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. Satoshi again, I think this is like, again, trying to pin him down. I think he’s someone who’s a little bit more apt to say like, okay, maybe all these ideas are good at a certain time, but the timing is the important part that also struck me in the email that Gavin had sent me about. Yeah. I think I mentioned the topic where they were talking about white listing, the transaction types, and this was where theymos was kind of arguing about where Satoshi also, doesn’t say no, he says that Oh, okay. Like maybe at some point with this, isn’t like a pie in the sky idea. We can do this. So he doesn’t actually say yes or no. He talks about when. And I think that’s actually kind of interesting if you think about it through that lens, that actually might say a little bit about Satoshi’s idea of maybe all of these things could have happened, but just the question I wanted, but even now I’m navel gazing and I’m just like, I’m choosing how to view Satoshi like on my own for my own purposes.
Stephan Livera:
And also, speaking of timing, I think another relevant question around timing is the whole WikiLeaks and going to the government aspect. So let’s get into that. So what was Satoshi’s view around the use of Bitcoin for funding of WikiLeaks at that time? Yeah,
Pete Rizzo:
I sort of get into the end of the article. It really accelerates in terms of, I was trying to show just how fast the conversation was accelerating. So we have this kind of like period at the beginning of 2010 where it’s pretty idyllic things move slow. And then by the end of 2010, there’s really just like a series of canonical debates that are just, I don’t even know how I think we’re still trying to answer them today. So one of them would be, there was a question about bitcents. So it’s like, how should you measure like the smallest units of Bitcoin? Like, should they be displayed like dollars? And there’s a bitDNS, which is this idea that you can build applications on Bitcoin. So it’s like, Satoshi, should we fork? Should we do all these things?
Pete Rizzo:
And then the WikiLeaks argument comes along, which I think is also pretty symbolic right at its root it’s about how political the Bitcoin project should be. Should it be defined by being anti-state anti-authority I would argue, we don’t actually know what Satoshi thought about that. And I think one of the reasons I included the earlier passage in this piece about Slashdot. So this would have been when the early developers like promoted Bitcoin through Slashdot, which was a famous internet aggregator at the time. And that drove a ton of traffic and that sort of crashed and then caused negative aspects of Bitcoin. I don’t really know. Satoshi only gives one comments on WikiLeaks, which is that Oh, this kicked the hornet’s nest and now they’re coming from us. So just establishing the actual order of events. So what happened was in November Amir Taaki, who’s actually a pretty famous Bitcoin developer for some more radical reasons later on, he proposes that Bitcoin should help Wikileaks. Why Wiki-leaks is like losing access to the banking system. Okay. That makes sense. So now you have another effort where it’s like grassroots users are trying to promote Bitcoin for something PC world picks up this article. Satoshi says, ah, we can’t do this. This is crazy. It turns out that WikiLeaks had already decided not to do it. so Satoshi was actually just reacting to old FUD. It wasn’t even reacting to new FUD.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah.
Pete Rizzo:
And like, we don’t know. I actually don’t know if Satoshi object to the use of WikiLeaks using Bitcoin, which I don’t know why you would have, but I think he was, I think he saw it. And this is one of my theses is about looking at history think is like everybody in the president is trying to avoid the mistakes of the past. And I think such as she probably would have seen the WikiLeaks thing as causing a similar issue to the Slashdot thing earlier. Right. Because what happens is when the users went and popularized Bitcoin, when they actually went online and kicked up all this noise about it, that is what caused the attacks against Bitcoin that compromised the monetary policy. So I think Satoshi would have seen something way, like WikiLeaks and his statement, this kicked the hornet’s nest. Now they’re coming to us.
Pete Rizzo:
I think that he saw that as potentially being one of those scenarios where, okay, this is going to be just like that thing, but even worse. And he was ultimately wrong about that. I think if you look at it that way, but we don’t know. Right. he only kind of made one comment and then he ceased responding and WikiLeaks never accepted Bitcoin anyway, so hard to draw conclusions, but yeah, certainly I think a more of a minor event, than people give it credit for today. I think sushi is kind of viewed as someone who saw WikiLeaks coming and then like ran for the hills and that wasn’t around anymore.
Stephan Livera:
But now what about the CIA part? Right? The Gavin going to present at the CIA. So I think that’s the point where most people say, yeah, that was the like bug out point.
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. Another event that’s really shrouded in mystery. Which is funny because you can actually go and like Gavin’s slides from the event are totally public. There’s actually, he appears on like a YouTube show after the event where he like, talks about it with this guy named Bruce Wagner who had a famous YouTube show at the time. Well, I guess famous like a thousand people probably would’ve watched it 2011, which was a big deal where he talks about it, the CIA event. It was interesting to see Gavin’s emails to Satoshi about this, where even Gavin was pretty about face about it. He was like, Oh, it’s a US intelligence. It’s an agency that does funding for startups around US intelligence. I’m gonna go talk to them. But then this is where Gavin gets kind of interesting is that I think Gavin, yeah, it’s a lot about presentation, right.
Pete Rizzo:
So he writes a forum posts and he’s like, Gavin will visit the CIA. That’s the name of the post and his first again like this is the famous last words thing. He’s like, I don’t want this to post to cause controversy. And it’s like, okay, well, you probably shouldn’t have done what you just did. You just did then. Right. Like there would’ve been a better way to approach that. So, yeah. I don’t know. I mean, that’s another event where it seems like there’s more information about that then people will commonly spread. Like I think there’s been some major people on Twitter who sort of think that at that meeting, Gavin was somehow corrupted and this like was a government infiltration of Bitcoin. I think you could see that Gavin’s ideas about Bitcoin were actually already becoming increasingly weird and different from the community.
Pete Rizzo:
Like prior to that and I would also say that his decision to attend the event was seen very positively. And I would argue that it was seen very positively because Satoshi was seen as such a mysterious kind of muted figure who was like, kind of running away from authority. He didn’t want WikiLeaks to happen. He became, he disappeared. He wasn’t around. And then here comes this guy who he’s not afraid he’s going to go to the CIA and just tell them about Bitcoin even if they stick them in a Gulag somewhere. Right. So I think that they saw Gavin as someone who was willing to stand up for them. And then again is where I would go back to, I think the users decided that Gavin was in charge and again, how could they not have, if you believe that Bitcoin is governed by the users, then how could Gavin have ever ruled otherwise?
Pete Rizzo:
Right. So I think part of the inherent appeal of Gavin was that he was willing to do that. And I think that users felt like he was willing to do that on behalf of them. And I think they felt an affinity for him that they didn’t feel for Satoshi at that time for whatever reason. And I think this is where people are emotive. They choose to feel about things a certain way. And now we feel differently, but back then most developers were really kind of behind Gavin on this. This was widely seen as kind of like a display of leadership. And that thinking about a free market, the free market had elected Gavin as a leader and supporting him on this initiative. Even though now we view this today as totally crazy events. And I think I write in there, it’s almost a perversion of the ideals of Bitcoin to think that any lead developer of the Bitcoin project, would in any way liaise with the government. But it happened right?
Stephan Livera:
And so that was 2010 and I think it changes over time that a lot of the developers, their perception of Gavin went down with because they thought, okay, he’s making the wrong decisions on the part of the, on behalf of the project is kind of overly centralizing it. He’s trying to scale it the wrong way. These were some of the concerns, I guess. And this is also even, maybe foreshadowed in your other article about P2SH right?
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. Gavin makes a lot of mistakes. I think that in my private conversations with Gavin, I think that he remains like a very interesting relic of that time. I think he, I think he had a lot of preconceptions about Bitcoin. That again are interesting. And It’s difficult to think that somebody in his position could have held those things. One of the things that still is remarkable to me is that Gavin, I think never thought Bitcoin could be worth that much but is it irrational, right? Like I think that the rational scientific person who came to Bitcoin in 2011, 2012 and had saw Bitcoin go to a thousand dollars, I don’t think that, like there was this idea that Bitcoin would be so valuable that it would be like the most valuable commodity ever created on planet earth. Like I don’t think many people had that assumption, certain people did, but I think that was a fringe part of the community thought I last talked to Gavin on Bitcoin pizza day and he was remarking about how the government money printing in the wake of COVID was very bad.
Pete Rizzo:
And I said to him, I was like, well, this is again, this is one of the reasons the developers of the Bitcoin project, like went the way that they did. Right. Which isn’t the way that you want it. And I think he’s still sort of struggles with some of those things, but I think he remembers a Bitcoin that was colored by a lot of different conversation. Right. The idea that users self sovereignty is a goal is something that like, I think would have eluded him. I’ve encouraged him to read the Bitcoin standard over the years, but I don’t think he has, but I think he would find the ideas in the Bitcoin standard to be very like things that he had never heard before. Really, because again, they weren’t very mainstream at the time.
Pete Rizzo:
I think like what Saifedean with the Bitcoin Standard, which again I will vouch for is probably the only important book about Bitcoin ever written is that he put together a lot of ideas that I think prior to him, vocalizing them were not widely publicized. And really, I think like if you look at the block size conflict as well, It’s a failure of people understanding the economics point. And how could you, how could you have understood there’d only been one Bitcoin cycle and we barely even know if there’s Bitcoin cycles now though, that I would argue that overwhelmingly seems the case now that we’re entering a third one, but how would you have known like a in the, in 2015, 2016, like people just didn’t know that Bitcoin wasn’t failing. How would you, how could you have possibly known that? And of course, again, you go and say, Oh, well, Pierre Rochard knew that. And it’s like, yeah, well he was the one guy
Stephan Livera:
Minority. Yeah. Like, I mean, there’s a few people who are coming from an Austrian perspective, like Michael Goldstein, Pierre and Daniel Krawisz before before he went all B-cash…
Pete Rizzo:
Yeah. But they all lived within like a four block radius of each other.
Stephan Livera:
There was a few of us out here trying to talk about it from that point of view, but not many let’s say until Saifedean sort of helped popularize that way of thinking at least inside the Bitcoin community if you will.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. Well, I guess my point was basically that and talking about Gavin is that I don’t know. I think we can learn from his experience of the project. And I think yeah, if you view these two pieces that I’ve written now in the, Oh for Bitcoin history, it’s like, I’m trying to develop some of these characters and people over a span of time. And in the P2SH article, Gavin does assert more authority. He becomes more of an authoritative leader. And I think one of the things that’s kind of interesting is looking at this article and reading the last days of Satoshi, like, would you not agree that Satoshi was someone who uses authority? He seems to have been very open about that and very interested in, and unapologetic in the way he used his authority. And, you know could you argue that was the wrong thing to do, but again, if you’re taking over for someone don’t you want to do what they behave as they would have.
Pete Rizzo:
Right. I think one of the interesting lines that I pulled out of your if you go back like Wladimir van der Laan, who succeeded Gavin, I mean, he was one of the first ones who actually vocalize the idea of like, Hey, like no developers should have authority over any of this stuff. So again, this is where it becomes, okay. Are people important to Bitcoin? I think there are a lot of people who want to pretend that people are not important to Bitcoin, but everywhere I look within Bitcoin, I see the effects of people who had the will and foresight to think differently. And I think that time proved them correct. And we should celebrate those people. So in the case of Wlad van der Laan, I think that in the line, in this piece, it’s like, I think that’s the first instance where I’ve ever seen a developer question, the idea of whether whether Bitcoin development had to become decentralized in order for Bitcoin to be decentralized. And I questioned whether Satoshi, like really actually understood that I actually don’t know that Satoshi understood the inherent riddle and the problem that his authority caused because he wielded his authority. So then how could he possibly have had a perception of it? Because he doesn’t seem to have any proclivity to do that. Right. So in that way, I think it’s interesting to be a Bitcoin as an incomplete project, right. That Satoshi couldn’t have completed because Bitcoin eventually had to move beyond him in order to be completed.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. That’s a really good way to put it. So Pete, do you have any ideas or anything you’re working on for your next article? Or what areas would you like to see that you think there’s more work that needs to be done?
Pete Rizzo:
That’s a great question. Yeah. I think well I think I’m done with the back years. I think I’ve got everything to 2012. So people read last days of Satoshi and then you read the first Bitcoin war piece back to back, like gets you up to 2012. I think that again, I like to think that this work is building to something. I like to think that part of the reason that I’ve done a lot of this work in trying to understand these developers and these people is that I’ve wanted to honestly understand like where they came from and like how their ideas progressed over time. And like try to really with a strong degree of certainty show that evolution because again, I don’t like viewing people as bad. I don’t think that Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andresen and Roger Ver and these people who have become the great villains in Bitcoin’s history were necessarily bad people.
Pete Rizzo:
I think that we can learn a lot from understanding how their journeys in Bitcoin progressed. And I do think that there are also great heroes on the other side of that tale, whether it’s Luke Dashjr’s or the Wladimir van der Laan, or the famous who do not get the credit that they deserve for having like very unique ideas within Bitcoin and then through the force of will have their own humanity propagating them. And then through the wisdom of the market, those ideas being validated over time. To me, I think it’s important that we view that way because I do think that, I mean, look at the conversation around taproot right now, it’s a great example, right? For people who are still following that, I think this is an argument that taproot is still a conversation that’s highly influenced by certain individuals, the Bitcoin development proces is to the extent that it’s a meritocracy is still very influenced by individuals.
Pete Rizzo:
That doesn’t make that a bad thing. It just makes it something where I think we want to understand this process, right? Like Bitcoin, it does have a governance process. Decisions are made decisions have to be made by people who have to believe certain things. So if you trace these things back I don’t know. To me, it seems like as much as we want to make Bitcoin, this amorphous code that is so big, it can’t possibly ever be changed. That it does move to the directions of people. I don’t know how you square that. And maybe that’s one of the riddles that I’m trying to solve and maybe I don’t ever get closer to understanding that that’s what, that’s what keeps me thinking.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Maybe we don’t. I don’t know. I think there’s some things that will stay true about Bitcoin and we sort of understand those and it’s not everyone possible that someone tries to compromise. There are people trying to compromise Bitcoin, right? And so then it’s like, there’s battles. There can be internal battles or people reviewing code and making sure to try to make sure that there’s no malicious code or something being put in.
Pete Rizzo:
What makes me worried is the stuff that we’ve become very confident about that I think that could easily be taken away from us. Like I’m definitely more of a clubhouse bear. So if people want to check me out, but I think that look, I mean, we’re all hugging the number, go up Teddy bear, like little kids these days. And if I’m the parent I don’t know, it’s not going to take me too far to really kind of hit us in the gut there. So I don’t know. I think that I like to view my exploration of Bitcoin history as an exercise in adversarial thinking. Right. I think like as Bitcoiners, like we should learn and know by now to be adversarial, I was shaped by people who are adversarial towards me. Right. I was originally a gatekeeper of information in my days as a journalist in this space.
Pete Rizzo:
My ideas were attacked and my work was attacked. And ultimately through that process, I began to understand Bitcoin better than I did. Right. that made me question things and deepen my understanding. Right. I think that I view Bitcoin toxicity as a gift in that way. Right. I think it has been a tool that we’ve used, but I mean, certainly I’m not sure everybody can say that. But I don’t know. That’s why I try to pass that along. Those are the things that stay with me questions about, okay, well, are you really doing the best you can for Bitcoin? Are you being an adversarial thinker? Are you really kind of doing your best to kind of further this stuff? And I look at this history of, okay, well, the more we can understand the past, the more we can understand how these things happen.
Pete Rizzo:
And it does seem that certain people over time within Bitcoin have tried to abuse it and they’ve had, they’ve tried to move in different ways. And I would even say like as a result of this article with the last days of Satoshi, I think that if somebody today is coming up with an argument and they’re saying like, Oh, well, it really matters like who Satoshi was like, if somebody was in to BSV or BCH, this article was like, Oh, well the users at that time, like it already moved past Satoshi. So it doesn’t care. I don’t have to care about Satoshi because the users had already moved beyond him. And that gives me a higher degree of confidence in the Bitcoin that I have today. Right. Even in his own time, Satoshi was someone who we moved fast. We didn’t need him anymore. And maybe that is the story of his disappearance, that it wasn’t this that he laid down his arms altruistically. It wasn’t that he vanished afraid of WikiLeaks. It wasn’t that he was spooked by the CIA. It was that we didn’t need him. We picked somebody else. And that ultimately Bitcoin is a product of us.
Stephan Livera:
Very fascinating. Pete, I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. Listeners, make sure you follow Pete online. I’ll put the links in the show notes for the article. Pete, where can people find you online?
Pete Rizzo:
Twitter @Pete_Rizzo_ going by all caps Rizzo these days, too many Peters out there got to really narrow it down also publishing on Bitcoin magazine. So you can check me out there and leading the open-source grants program over at Kraken. So if you’re a developer really doing great work in the space you want to apply for funding or kind of pitch us on your project. We’re definitely have open applications. You could go to Kraken.com/features/grants. So we’re taking applications there and yeah, we’d love to chat with anybody who is doing really interesting stuff in the Bitcoin space.
Stephan Livera:
Fantastic. Thank you, Pete.
Pete Rizzo:
Thank you.