Mr. ₿usiness

Awesome episode!

I am a TNG maxi, personally.

Sorry Guy, I love you but you're way off on this one. Musk is the antithesis of Carnegie, the prime example of how scamming the fiat system can make you the world's richest man. His first company, Zip2, was basically a black box scam, with Musk.pretending that a giant box was a supercomputer that provided his company's product. In reality, the code was largely a mess and the company was dumped off on Compaq for $305 million, which made Musk a millionaire. (Kevin O'Leary did something similar by buying The Learning Company and running it into the ground before dumping it on Mattel.) His second company was X.com, an online bank. This merged with Peter Thiel's company Confinity, which had a payment processing product called Paypal. Musk got kicked out of the company after trying to take it over and force the unprofitable X business as the focus. After that, the company changed its name to Paypal and dropped the online banking stuff entirely. Musk had nothing to do with either Paypal the product or Paypal the company as he was never an employee when it had that name, but he still walked away with some nice bags when Paypal went public. His third company was again not his company, but this time one he successfully stole from the guys who created it. Martin Eberhardt and Marc Tarpenning had the idea for making an electric sports car using their knowledge gained from selling portable battery-powered devices. Up to that point, electric vehicles had always used NiMH batteries, but Eberhardt and Tatpenning were convinced they could do it with lithium-ion batteries. They founded the company, they came up with the concept, they built the prototype, and they were the ones who worked out the deal with Lotus to get the cars manufactured. Musk's input was to make arbitrary demands for the vehicle that ended up delaying production and increasing the cost of the vehicle, like carbon fiber construction. The only reason Tesla is not bankrupt today is thanks to EV subsidies. Meanwhi…

Great episode! I respect Antoine, but unfortunately the majority of opinions he expressed are the same things we've already heard from Core devs, many of which don't make logical sense. The idea that an increased use of OP_RETURN for spam purposes won't happen because spammers are already using the witness data is absurd. They are two different things. It is equally as absurd as saying that they will stop using witness data and use OP_RETURN instead, which we know is not the case for things like ordinals because they CAN'T. It is the same as saying "the filters don't work, we need to remove the filters because they encourage spammers to go directly to miners." Also, the idea that no core devs want spam on bitcoin is factually untrue. Lopp has specifically stated that he is "a fan of new technology," ie shitcoinery on bitcoin. He is not concerned for the monetary use case of bitcoin but rather sees the timechain as a developer playground. Lastly, I am deeply, deeply troubled by the apparent defeatist mentality of Core developers that fighting spam is a losing battle. In a tweet from March 8th, Lopp posted this: "OP_RETURN debate is novel due to how factions are split. 1) Ruthlessly rational technical folks who understand the dynamics of the network and don't want to play unending subjective games. 2) Ideological folks upset by how others use the network who want to play those games." Ignoring the arguably inaccurate representation of both sides in that comment, I find it stunning that someone who supposedly gives "insights on security" (per his Twitter bio) thinks that attacks on a network are "unending subjective games" that can simply be opted out of if the developers so choose. Oh how easy information security would be if that were actually the reality, Jameson. Unfortunately in the real world, things like spam and DDoS attacks are very real threats that require constant vigilance to be mitigated. The Core attitude of "we can't stop it, so we might as well gi…

Max, you cunt! Only 2/3 through it but damn this is a good one! Great guests, love the conversations. I will definitely be checking out all the links!

I appreciate this conversation, but I wonder if Steve has any awareness of just how delusional he sounds. He consistently arbitrarily chooses which facts to acknowledge and which to ignore. His main arguments against facts that are inconvenient to his arguments are "you don't understand anything" and "so-and-so said this so you're wrong." What really blows my mind is the cognitive dissonance on display by people who adhere to strict literal interpretations of what bitcoin should be based on the white paper and early forum posts while also advocating for wildly unpopular, consensus-breaking hard forks. Very convenient how Adam Back's word is gospel, but only when he happens to utter something that seemingly agrees with the big blocker arguments. The majority of what Steve has said seems to be intentionally misrepresentative of reality.

The reason why nobody runs their own email server anymore is because it's literally impossible to do so if you want to have any hope of your email actually reaching the intended recipient.