WBD174 Audio Transcription

Jimmy Song Killing the Hopes and Dreams of Shitcoin Bagholders

Interview date: Friday 23rd November 2019

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin consultant. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Jimmy Song; Bitcoin educator, developer and author. Following his recent article “On Altcoin Valuation”, we discuss why altcoins are a poor investment, the misuse of blockchain and why shitcoins rely on marketing to grow.

“As this bear market has shown, you’re going to get rekt much harder on an altcoin because, one, it doesn’t have the liquidity that Bitcoin has and, two, it doesn’t have the value prop or usage.”

— Jimmy Song

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack:  Morning Jimmy.

Jimmy Song: Morning!

Peter McCormack: Or howdy? I should have my hat!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, I know. You bought it from me and everything.

Peter McCormack: It's actually still in my car. My daughter keeps wearing it.

Jimmy Song: Where does she live again?

Peter McCormack: I'm not telling you, you're going to come steal it back! I was like, "You got to be careful with that. that's a $1,500 hat!" It's a Stetson right?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it is.

Peter McCormack: Should have brought it, fuck I didn't even think, what a moron! Anyway, hello! Good to see you again.

Jimmy Song: Good to see you again.

Peter McCormack: Is this third time?

Jimmy Song: I think so, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Right, so we're going to kill the hopes and dreams of shitcoin investors.

Jimmy Song: Well, let's see if we can. That would be delightful for me.

Peter McCormack: Are we going to be objective or are we, everything's a scam?

Jimmy Song: Well I'm going to tell you what I think about everything with respect to altcoins and give you some of the history and all that stuff.

Peter McCormack: So you wrote a medium piece, what was the trigger?

Jimmy Song: "On Altcoin Valuation" is the title, and the reason was... I'd been thinking about what makes certain coins succeed where they don't because some of them are clearly technically superior in other things, but they don't do as well. So what's the actual reasoning behind it? And the more I investigated, the more I realized, short story, it's the marketing. That's the big thing.

Peter McCormack: Okay, interesting. The marketing, I didn't think you were going to say that so...

Jimmy Song: It's totally the marketing and I traced the history of various alt coins and why certain ones succeed when they do.

Peter McCormack: Right, because I'm a marketing man so I understand that, but ultimately I don't mind the marketing as long as it's something of value and creating value. So this is a Bitcoin show, the reason I'm doing this show with you now is because if alt coins are a poor investment compared to Bitcoin, I want the people listening to this to reconsider, because look, I get all the pressure of like, "don't do any shit coins" and blah blah blah, which is fine, but at the same time there are people who listen to this show who invest in alt coins/shit coins so if this helps educate people as to why that's a really risky investment compared to a less so risky Bitcoin investment, I think this is a healthy thing to do.

But let's be objective rather than "everything's a scam" because I think it's more useful to do that. An interesting first question I have for you is, do you believe alt coins have a right to exist?

Jimmy Song: They have a right to exist. Now whether they provide value is another question entirely and this is the thing about marketing that really gets me, is that you can market something that's completely useless and people might buy it, but depending on what utility that you say it has, if it doesn't, then eventually people with find out. But that said, there's stuff like Amway that's still going on and stuff like that, so it takes some time for the market to adjust and for people to understand why something's a scam or not really providing the value that it reports to do.

Peter McCormack: Right, so I just did a show about OneCoin, the ultimate crypto scam. There's a guy called Jamie Bartlett who did a BBC podcast documentary series called "The Missing Cryptoqueen". He was trying to find Ruja Ignatova who was the creator and OneCoin completely passed me by. I'd observed it and I remember hearing about that, "that's a Ponzi scam," and just competently forgot about it.

We had a conversation, me and Jamie, about why it did so well, and I said I think it's because it missed... it was so far a scam, it missed everyone by and what I decided to do, I tried to categorize things in that, there's Bitcoin, then there's genuine attempts to build something with the blockchain and what I mean by that is, I don't think the creators whether they're misguided or not, set out to scam people, I think they believed they are creating something where the blockchain is useful.

I would even put Ethereum into that bucket in that, whether or not they've changed, I think the initial vision was to create something of value. I don't think it was let's create Ethereum then just go scam people out of billions. I don't think they thought it would happen. I then put in the blockchain scams where it's just a scam, "100% we're going to create a scam, we're going to exit scam", and then there's the big Ponzies like OneCoin and what was it...?

Jimmy Song: Bitconnect.

Peter McCormack: Bitconnect, hey-hey-hey! Yeah, so I tried to grade them. I got some shitty feedback on that because it's like "everything but Bitcoin's a scam", but I think that was a fair way to categorize it.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, well it's interesting how you categorized them because there are the outright Ponzi schemes where you literally have to put in money and you hope to recoup enough people that you can get paid back out of it in very much a pyramid scheme kind of structure. There are ones that are more very opportunistic, creating and ICO during the 2017 bubble, and raising $100 000 to a couple billion dollars and just doing whatever with it, to people whose intentions may have been maybe a little more naive, but they thought that they were actually providing value and then finding out later that they didn't.

I don't know if the difference of intent really make a difference. Like the Ponzi schemers, they're doing it knowing fully well that this can't possibly go on, or I don't know maybe they're super dumb and they think it can. I mean, it's possible that their intentions are pure and they're just really stupid.

It's also possible that you have people that are sincere about a particular coin, but whether they know it or not, ultimately they're scamming and that's the big thing, they can't deliver on the promises that they make which is it's going to be utilized for this particular use case and if they aren't being utilized for that particular use case or if it doesn't have the utility value that they report, then it's a scam. You made a false promise and you didn't meet up to it, that's it.

Peter McCormack: Well to be as objective as possible, just out of fairness, plenty of people raise money to create businesses and don't deliver on their promises and businesses fail. I guess where I'm going is, whilst I only have Bitcoin, only invest in Bitcoin, that's the only interest right now, massive disclaimer there, I don't believe that it is 100% certain will be the only blockchain forever that will achieve something. I'm saying it might happen. So what I'm trying to get at, is I think for me I think it's an important separation of direct intention to scam and then misguided and misleading people. It's just different for me.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, for me, I get that. Usually the difference between those two whether not intend to do it or not, is just a matter of ignorance. That people that are less technical, they think "oh, well we can make blockchain do this because Don Tapscott and his book said so."

It's like "yeah, you don't really understand what's going on" and I've written multiple articles about this, about how really blockchain is like this buzz word that people use to say we can solve whatever really complex problem, just throw blockchain at it and then people actually believe them and then try to start companies and end up scamming a lot of people whether they know it or not. In a sense, it's like whether or not they were ignorant of that fact before or after, you're still scamming people.

Peter McCormack: Okay. I think I saw you in a presentation saying "sprinkling magical blockchain dust"?

Jimmy Song: Yeah that was back at Consensus 2018 and that was the panel with Joe Lubin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, have you got that fucking bet done yet?!

Jimmy Song: Well, he's still being shifty about it. He wanted to change the terms after we had more or less agreed to it. We did that earlier this year with Consensus, it was like the most watched CoinDesk live video over the whole two days and he wanted to change the terms a few months ago. I'm like "no, why would I change the terms?" He wanted to make it Dai focused and if you're holding some Dai collateral that counts as use even if you're not actually transacting and it's like...

Peter McCormack: Come on Joe, stop being a pussy, make the fucking bet! You've been promising for ages, for fuck sake!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, he's just kind of like a squirly guy and given the price of Ethereum, it's just not going to happen, I don't think.

Peter McCormack: By the way, before we get into it, did you know about the OneCoin scam?

Jimmy Song: I heard about it a while ago. I didn't really pay that much attention to it other than it was a scam.

Peter McCormack: Do you know how much money when into it?

Jimmy Song: No, how much?

Peter McCormack: So, it's a range. It's at least $4 billion up to $15 billion.

Jimmy Song: Are you serious?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's why it's fucking mad! So that show's done so well because the amount of people that listen to it are like, "Whoa, I didn't know! I didn't realize it was that big!" Yeah, up to $15 billion!

Jimmy Song: Okay, so that's the valuation of what it was or like actual cash that went it?

Peter McCormack: Actual cash that went in.

Jimmy Song: Oh wow, that is insanity!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, absolutely mad, just mind blowing the amount. It's worth listening to if you ever get time, Jamie Bartlett. All right anyway, so the alt coins! So deduce from what you've said that basically everything else is a scam. Some may not have started out intended as a scam, but as soon as they realized or the fact that they didn't have the right technical people explain it to them, it became scamming.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, most things. I mean there's a few I think I respect at least technically, and I guess I would put them on the border and I wouldn't necessarily call them scams, but I would say-

Peter McCormack: Can you tell me which ones? Can you name names the ones that you...

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so put that in my "On Altcoin Valuation" article. I think they have some technical innovation there that's worth while, whether to not they're all ethical or something, I don't know. But Zcash, Monero, Decred, I think all have pretty strong cryptographers, pretty strong programmers.

I've met a lot of those guys and they're smart, I know that for a fact, but one of the things I point out in the article is that despite their technologies, almost all of them, they do way better than some of these other things that are way above them, stuff like TRON or Cardano, which most of these things don't even have a product! But the marketing that went into something like TRON or Cardano, was insane versus something like Monero or Decred or something like that.

Peter McCormack: Monero was the one I always felt like... when I interviewed Fluffy a while back, I said to him, "there's multicoiners, Bitcoin maximalists, and then Bitcoin maximalists, but Monero's okay!" For a long while, I think that's died a little bit and a lot of people now have lost interest in Monero for various reasons, but it did have that mysterious creator. It didn't really have the marketing, it did seem to be trying to do something different and when I spoke to Szabo, I'm like "well if Szabo says it's okay, then maybe..."

Jimmy Song: Well I don't know if it's okay. I mean essentially Monero is a clone of ByteCoin and in that sense it's like well, you didn't really add that much new. Since then they've added stuff like bulletproofs and did confidential transactions using ring signatures and stuff like that which... I studied their code base, so I know it's good stuff, but even then, you had this possible inflation bug that they had, that they had to go and fix and I haven't looked at the code which examined their blockchain to see if that inflation bug actually created any new Monero.

But stuff like that is just sort of inherent when you're hiding amounts and this is kind of the problem with all of these alt coins that are trying to hide amounts, is that you run into the possibility that there may be an inflation bug and if I had the exploit for an inflation bug, I would not tell anybody and I would just continue to create as much as and trickle it through, and this is my argument for why...

Peter McCormack: I don't think you would.

Jimmy Song: I mean, that's what you...

Peter McCormack: That's what a bad person would do! I don't think you...

Jimmy Song: Yeah, that's what somebody that wanted to make as much money as possible would do. I mean, there's rules of...

Peter McCormack: Responsible disclosure. I know that if you found out Bitcoin, you would disclose it.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, but that's the idea right? Is that there's a lot of stuff like that which... the orders of magnitude are more complicated as a result of trying to add new features and this is inherent in the whole thing. But yeah, those are the four I would say are reasonable. I still don't understand why people give Litecoin so much respect because if you look at the history and what they actually did... and this is something that I point out in the article.

Back in 2011 when Litecoin started, it was basically like a clone of something called Fair Bricks which was also created by Charlie Lee. Fair Bricks was actually a clone on Tena bricks and Tena bricks was something that was launched maybe 10 days after Namecoin which was the very first alt coin. The big thing about Tena bricks was it used the different proof of work hashing algorithm, which is script and which is what Litecoin uses.

But the big thing was the creator premined a bunch of coins for himself and so Charlie went in and said "okay I'm going to make a fair version of this, no premine." If that reminds you of ZClassic or something, that's exactly what it was and he created Fair Bricks, it didn't go anywhere. One of the things I point out in the article is well, why didn't it go anywhere?

It's because he didn't have very good marketing around Fair Bricks. In fact, he pretty much took Fair Bricks, rebranded it Litecoin and launched it again and that did much better because he had a really good slogan, silver to Bitcoin's gold, and he had a nice logo, he had a community around it and he let everyone know. There were at least a dozen coins that launched around that time and Litecoin is pretty much... even Namecoin doesn't really exist anymore, nobody develops on it or anything and Litecoin's pretty much the only one that survived and in large part, it's due to Charlie doing all of the marketing that he's done.

Litecoin fan boys, please don't come after me, this is exactly what Charlie has said, he's admitted to pretty much everybody. He's given presentations saying why did Litecoin succeed? "Well it's because of good marketing, I had a really good slogan, a catchy name, nice base58 address that starts with a capital L" and everything else. That's what he said and he even goes and talks about Fair Bricks and stuff like that.

So the fact that Litecoin has as much respect as it does, given that really there wasn't any innovation there, it was all taken from other sources and a similar thing with Monero, it's very similar to ByteCoin and Zcash. Yeah they came up with some new stuff and that in and of itself, but most Zcash is held in just... it's a clone of Bitcoin. It's the shielded transactions which take up a very small branch of it and that to me, tells me that a lot of the... First of all there isn't enough technical understanding of what the heck's going on and second, that it really is all marketing and marketing material substitute for real knowledge at the technical underpinnings.

Peter McCormack: But has Bitcoin benefited from marketing? I mean, arguably it has. At some times Roger Ver did some stuff early on and word of mouth is a form of marketing, but it's a different kind of marketing, it's an authentic marketing.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it's not sensualized marketing and the main piece of marketing in almost everything nowadays, every alt coin is the whitepaper. That's your main piece or marketing and some of the whitepapers you read... Oh my god, they have zero technical detail and they promise you the moon. At the same time, they tell you have no investor production what so ever.

But that's essentially what whitepapers do and it's like... I've read some of these, I've been paid to read some of these and they don't make any sense what so ever and if you're technical at all, you can poke like 800 holes in them in the span of 10 minutes.

The sad reality is that's what people use instead of looking at the underlying code or often times they don't even have the code. It's, "oh we're going to launch this token." Ethereum was like this, they promise something and they said "okay, you know what? We're going to make this chain-complete, smart contract language platform..."

Peter McCormack: World computer.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, world computer, coder's law, proof of stake eventually, all that stuff and they kept none of the promises and they were originally planing to launch at the end of 2014, they didn't. I think maybe there was some test net available mid 2015, but it didn't really get going until 2016. A lot of this stuff is really just marketing and that's the thing that... I don't think I fully realize... So I don't know if you know, but I have a little bit of a history with Vitalik. Do you know about this?

Peter McCormack: No, tell me.

Jimmy Song: Okay, all right so I got into Bitcoin coding back in 2013. So I was working on a project called the Color Coins back then.

Peter McCormack: Is that like Mastercoin?

Jimmy Song: Kind of, so Color Coins was this idea that basally you can have assets riding on top of the Bitcoin chain and as long as you had rules, you can keep track of those. Right now, something like Liquid does that a lot better, and does it on a side chain so you don't have to bloat the Bitcoin blockchain, but it was a really interesting idea. You can have other assets besides Bitcoin being tracked on the Bitcoin ledger and it gets all of the security properties and so on.

So I was working on this and one of the... what you were talking about Mastercoin, Counterparty, Ethereum, they were all after the same mantle. The reason Mastercoin started was because of this of this guy, JR Willett, who was frustrated with the progress of Color Coins and he decided to go and raise money to basically create Color Coins and they called that Mastercoin. That was a complete disaster.

They had these feature bounties and stuff like that and they raised something like 5,000 Bitcoin which at the time, I think it was somewhere between $50 and $100 per Bitcoin, so it wasn't a small amount, and they started having bounties for certain types of features saying "okay, give us a block explorer according to this spec and we'll give you the bounty and stuff." That was a complete disaster. At one point, there were four different explorers and they gave different balances on the same address.

So it was like, this is why you don't do development that way. You need to care about the actual end result instead of just getting paid what ever bounty you can. That happened, Counterparty was a little different. It was kind of a reaction, but Ethereum also came as a result of that. But anyway, when I was part of the Color Coins project and stuff, one of the things we did was we asked somebody to write a whitepaper about Color Coins because you want some sort of spec and you want people to read why it's valuable and so on.

So we asked this kid that we knew out of Canada and he's like "okay, I'll write it" and he wrote the whitepaper, except it wasn't anything like what we had written, like we had actual code, so like what the heck? He said, "Well, I think it should be this way," but that's not what we agreed to, blah blah blah. Eventually he's like, "Well don't worry about it, I'm not really interested in this project, I'm thinking about launching my own" and of course that guy was Vitalik Buterin and the coin was Ethereum and he launched it in early 2014 with that concept.

Peter McCormack: So Ethereum is your fault. You fucking caused it, Jimmy!

Jimmy Song: No, no he knew... Well it's Mastercoin's, but I didn't get into it until after the Mastercoin launch and everything else and I didn't start coding in it until, I think it was October 2013 or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Do you have a relationship with Vitalik now?

Jimmy Song: I say hi to him whenever I see him. It's not been that many times, he doesn't tend to go the the same conferences as I do.

Peter McCormack: I've never met him.

Jimmy Song: I've met him two or three times. We're cordial, but I still don't think he is right. The thing about Ethereum, when I heard about it, and I was in the weeds when this was all launching, I read the whitepaper and everything and it was just like, this is going to be super complicated and this is going to be really hard to secure! Back then I wrote some articles that like nobody read them back them because-

Peter McCormack: Are they still available?

Jimmy Song: I have them somewhere, maybe I'll republish them!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, dig them out.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, but one of the things I wrote was, "okay, this thing is just way too complicated" and it's taken Bitcoin... at that time, it was about five years old, so I was like, "it's taken Bitcoin five years to just get the security up to where it is and it's in order magnitude less complicated. How the heck is this thing that's way more complicated, going to get any security what so ever" and he was talking about an 8 month development timeline for something this complicated.

I was like, there's no way he is going to hit end of 2014, if anything, maybe 2015, probably 2016 and I think my timeline was roughly correct there. But that was my argument and that's why... I had to opportunity to get 2,000 Ethereum per Bitcoin. That would have been an excellent investment in many ways, but at the time I was like, "there is no way this can work. It's way too complicated and it's not going to have any security." The thing that I was mistaken with though, is that I thought the technical stuff mattered and the fact of the matter is, it didn't!

Peter McCormack: It was the marketing.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it's the marketing and one of the things I point out in that article is that Counterparty, which was one of the Color Coins competitors or what ever... During 2014, they came out and said "well, you know what? We've implemented all of the properties of the solidity language.

You can write any smart contract in Counterparty that you could Ethereum and we have it available now, not many months from now. We have it available now" and it was true. You could do everything technically that you wanted to do Ethereum on Counterparty as of 2014. What was the difference? Ethereum had a lot more marketing dollars and they were able to just pump the heck out of it because they raised 30,000 Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I tell you what was quite powerful in there I think as well, was there Ethereum alliance or association...

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it was the Ethereum Foundation and then later they did Ethereum Enterprise.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so many companies joined that! It just looked to an outsider, it's like "wow that looks powerful!"

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and part of that was because, believe it or not, they started running out of money and they went out and got more VC funding. Once you get VC funding, you can get stuff like that, endorsements from companies that don't know what the hell's going on or are sold on the whitepaper or something like that.

Peter McCormack: Do you think... An exploration into blockchains has been useful to prove certain things like... Has it been helpful for Bitcoin that all these other projects have happened or some projects have happened that proved that Bitcoin is the only real use case and has anything come out of any other projects that have helped Bitcoin?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, there's definitely been helpful tries of different things and things like that and we find out, "okay you make things too complicated, nobody really uses the Turing completeness of Ethereum, you can write the ERC-20 tokens, the ERC-721 without any Turing completeness", it doesn't require any loops or anything like that. But that's one of their big things about Ethereum, "oh, we have Turing complete smart contracts."

Well, it's not really useful, nobody's using it, but that's their marketing spin on it and to this day, I've talked to people and I'm like, "why do you like Ethereum?" "Oh, they have smart contracts." You know Bitcoin had smart contracts and has from the beginning?" And they're like, "Bitcoin has smart contracts? What?" The marketing has penetrated so deeply that the have no idea and especially in places like Asia where the marketing is all it is and that's the only thing that they evaluate.

Peter McCormack: Then we can get to the root of why this conversation's important because most people aren't Jimmy Song, they don't code blockchains, they don't understand security, most of them... and this is what a lot of the fucking morons get angry at me about when I'm trying to save them, is that most people, they want to press a button on Coinbase or Kraken that says buy Bitcoin and then want to put it somewhere and the number go up.

There will be a lot of people who will get into the economics and the tech, but the majority of people just don't have time. Therefore, I'm compassionate to people who, when they first hear about cryptocurrencies, end up investing because I did the same and I didn't do it out of anything other than I thought, "oh wow, a bunch of new companies going to be built on this new kind of database design and that sounds really cool."

Then over time I realized that most people aren't. So this is why we need to do this show. You mentioned earlier and said most people don't understand what's going on underneath, so what is going on underneath?

Jimmy Song: At a high level, to speak to the people that you're talking about, really the big difference is centralized versus decentralized and all of these alt coins are centralized and people talk about decentralization as if it's something you can magically conjure up. It's actually extremely rare and to my knowledge, Bitcoin is the only that's achieved it, in any sort of digital realm.

Peter McCormack: BitTorrent, could you argue BitTorrent's done good job of it?

Jimmy Song: Being a decentralized protocol or something like that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean they struggled to shut down Pirate Bay, people still use torrents.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and so the way torrents work is you can do... It gets kind of similar in the sense that you can go and get all of the source code from one or the other or whatever. That's not the technical decentralization I'm talking about. The thing that I'm talking about is that the Ethereum Foundation controls Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin can say "okay I want this feature" and it'll get done, but that's not very different than US dollars or the Euro or British pound or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Okay, not technical decentralization, you're talking about centralized management controlled decision making.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, or single point of failure where they can choke it. Like Ripple, they recently said that there's $400 million that may have been drug deals or something like that.

Now, if the US government wanted to, if there was a DA that was ambitious enough, they can go and say, "okay Ripple you're going to give us all your records or we're going to start regulating, otherwise we're going to prosecute you" or something like that and they could go into here and make it so that "okay well, that guy's a drug dealer, freeze his Ripple account and take all of the money and give it to us." That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Peter McCormack: What about commit access and access to the Github repository. As I'm aware, is it like five people?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so that's for the Bitcoin core software...

Peter McCormack: And there are other software implementation etc, but Bitcoin core is the primary one. Is there a fair slight argument there, that that is something that needs looking at?

Jimmy Song: So the thing is that the maintainers merge in the code, the actual work is done by everybody else. So I've contributed before and basically what you do is you put in something called the pull request and you get reviewers to review it and that's not an easy process by the way, getting your code reviewed, it's not like working at some enterprise software company or something like that where nobody really looks at it.

They really look at it and they comment on every line of code that where you might have made a mistake or whatever and if it's consensus critical, you get 9 or 10 people doing that and you can imagine, it's a lot of scrutiny over this stuff. Remember, whatever code that gets produced, the software that ends up, you don't have to run it. Whatever additions that they put in, you don't have to do anything. Bitcoin doesn't force you do that.

Peter McCormack: So even if the FBI did a coordinated take down, arrested the group of people with commit access and stuck them in a room and said "basically close this down or you're not getting out of jail", that doesn't matter because even if they close it down, someone can just spin up a new Bitcoin protocol.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, or a new Github repository and if they seize Github, they can go host Github on their own website or whatever. Many people have forks of Bitcoin, like Luke has one called Knots.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've got that.

Jimmy Song: I think Jonah Snell used to have an address index version which he doesn't keep up anymore, but there's a lot of different... Some people are using BCoin and I think the LND guys use like BTCD and Libbitcoin is used I think, there's a lot.

Peter McCormack: So it's different. Okay so as far as I see it then in my simple world, is that if you want to build a service with a database, SQL's great, it works great yeah okay, but if you want to build a database which can't be switched off because it's decentralized, the blockchain is the database you use. That's what it is designed for, for a decentralized database.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it's very expensive and slow database whose main feature is that it's decentralized and you would not use it for anything that's already centralized. It depends on what people need.

Peter McCormack: Uber on the blockchain.

Jimmy Song: Most of that stuff doesn't make any sense what so ever and I've written many articles on that particular score as well, but back to alt coins and their value prop, they're trying to be decentralized and centralized at the same time and they're kind of forced into centralization in many ways because otherwise, it wouldn't do anything and especially the marketing and that is largely centralized. You look at something like Ethereum or whatever or Tron or Cardano or whatever, you have to have a foundation that's doing all of the marketing otherwise nobody would buy it and that's the sad reality.

Peter McCormack: Justin's Tron, Justin Son's face on the lift at Consensus, it's fucking bullshit. So they got to keep pumping it and keep pushing it. The problem they have is they're not decentralized and nobody's using them.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and those are the main problems and I do sympathize with your listeners that are just wanting to click buy on the Bitcoin logo and then watch the number go up and they're like 'well, these other numbers are going up, maybe they're just as good stores of value." I kind of blame this on fiat, is that there really aren't very good places to store value. You got maybe stock, you got maybe real estate, maybe gold, although gold's heavily manipulated so it's very hard do that with.

But because those have all high friction and they're not very easy to get access to and they require a lot of research, if you every try to buy a stock or real estate, there's a lot of research that you have to do and a lot of time that takes you to do it. Really what people are looking for is a good store of value where they can just click a button and say, "okay I'm going to get the same returns as everybody else that's owning Bitcoin, instead of that corner house over there is worth less than the one that's in the middle of the street because there's less traffic around it" or whatever.

Or this stock is worth more because they were in acquisition talks or whatever. Bitcoin is way more fair than any of these other stores of value and that's what they're really seeking. The thing that they don't realize is that once you go into alt coin land, you're going back to all of that friction and the thing is, they're not doing the necessary research that's required of stocks or whatever.

I made an analogy a while ago about how investing in random alt coins without reading the code underneath is like diversifying into Pink Sheet stocks without knowing what the heck they do and that's essentially what people have fallen for, is they're diversifying into Pink Sheet stocks and that's kind of a sad reality.

Peter McCormack: It's time preference right?

Jimmy Song: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because look Jimmy, I'd never heard of the term "store of value" before Bitcoin. I hadn't heard of a lot of fucking terms to be honest, you can do like a dictionary on them, but I knew there's gold as an investment that people tended to hold for a long time, but I'd never gone through the process. I was talking to Tuur and Bitstein about this yesterday, saying I never really considered the concept of money, what it actually really meant until I was 39 years old. I'm 41 now, two years ago, I started questioning it. Before it was like, I get paid, it goes in my bank account, I spend it.

I didn't even know inflation was a kind of like hidden tax on my money. Just never thought about it. I was like "oh that's part of the economy and we're meant to have inflation, it's good right?" So all these things are new concepts. I think a lot of people don't realize what a store of value is because they got the time preference problem. They want a quick return, they want to make some money quick and buy a new car, have a holiday or some bullshit. But I think they do and so that's why they're investing and then what happens, someone like Mr. Hodl will say, "well they get wrecked and then they go to Bitcoin."

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and that's been the process. There's a temptation to get better returns than you're getting on Bitcoin and that's what usually tempts people into alt coins or whatever, but as this bear market has shown, you're going to get wrecked much harder on an alt coin, because one, it doesn't have the liquidity that Bitcoin has and two, it doesn't have the value proper usage and it's a much worse store of value.

You're going to have sketchy things happen like an inflation bug in Zcash or whatever. I think Zooko is now asking for a bigger dev subsidy because the Zcash price is so down or whatever, that should be called a dev tax by the way, but that sort of thing is at the center of all of these alt coins.

Peter McCormack: It's the wrong incentive model.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, well they essentially have governance and the hilarity of this is people have been talking about Bitcoin governance and I say there is no governance because it's decentralized, it's not supposed to have it. The whole idea of governance is government right? Some central place where decisions can be made and that's fine if you're centralized. If you are decentralized, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Peter McCormack: I had Zooko on a long time ago, like episode 50 or something. I think my first question to him was... or definitely early on was, is Zcoin a company? It kind of is, it's the Electric Coin Company. Yeah, there's no other way of looking at it. It's a company and the fact that it's a company, is the reason I think they went on Coinbase without shielded addresses, which is then like, what's the fucking point of this?

Okay, so one thing you can help me with, let's spend a little bit of time on this because I don't understand Dai technically. I listened to Laura Shin's double show and I was like okay, kind of interesting and I met Rune actually when I was in Boston, and he seems like a smart guy. He's interesting and I'm not totally against the idea of stable coins in that, we have volatility with Bitcoin and I don't really want to spend it, but if there's an easy way of buying and transferring a stable coin from one country to another, and it was better than PayPal or something else, I'm not opposed to that.

If it's a way of trading in and out of Bitcoin, again, I'm not opposed to stable coins. But Dai, the Ethereum guys like Ryan Adams, that fucking idiot and what's the other one? They keep coming at me and like, "oh there's this guy in Argentina and he put his peso into Dai and now he's saved his money because of the inflation" and it's a very fair story. In the short term, if you can do that, cool. If you can put your local Argentinian peso into Dai and then you can release it over time and you're protecting your value, I find that hard to argue with as a process for an individual. But...

Jimmy Song: So here's the big thing about all of that, is Dai is what you would call a synthetic peg to the dollar. So something like Tether is supposedly backed, I don't know the details or whatever, but they have some bank account somewhere and that's definitely centralized, but you put in a dollar, you get a dollar and that's the whole idea.

The thing with Dai and I think Basis tried to do something like this, but they gave all their money back to the investors because they couldn't figure out a regulatory way to do it. But something like Dai, I think Steem dollars did something similar, this is not a new concept at all. I think BitShares before that tried to do it and I think Dan Larimer for whatever reason is big into this stuff.

Peter McCormack: Well the chances are high because he's created like 73,000 blockchains!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so the idea is you have a reserve, so it works almost exactly like a central bank. So the way central banks work, if you're the central bank of Indonesia or something, what you want to do as a central bank is keep your currency pretty stable with respect to the dollar. If it gets too high, if the dollar costs too little, then you're not going to be able to export and all of the investment that's coming into your country will basically go kaput.

If it's too low then you're inducing inflation in your economy and you're not going to be able to import anything. So it's very important for every central bank to keep it within a certain range and how they do that, is they have a reserve of US dollars or treasurers or whatever and whenever their currency gets too high, they print more of their own currency and whenever it gets too low, they sell some of the dollars for their own to pump up their currency.

That's essentially how most of these synthetic pegs work and with MakerDao, they have a bunch of their coins on exchanges and they trade against it, so it gets too high they sell, if it gets too low, they buy. That's it. Now the problem with a central bank doing something like that it is that eventually, there's a crazy enough event where you don't have a reserve anymore and you break the peg. George Soros famously did this with the British pound I think in the '80s or something like that and essentially he broke the Bank of England and made a ton of money doing it.

When people can trade against your desire to keep it in a peg, that can be some serious bad news, especially if your currency is liquid. Now, Dai's not that liquid, but if it gets more popular, I fully expect something like that to happen. Something that's fully backed, I think is a lot better and like the Argentinian guy story that you talked about, I mean he could have just done the same thing, just buying peso for the dollar and would have been protected in exactly the same way.

Peter McCormack: Well, didn't they have a block on buying dollars?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, but you can still buy on the black market and so on.

Peter McCormack: But maybe it's at a premium. Again, I'm trying to be objective here. I'm trying to be objective and say if I'm there, let's get away from the Bitcoin Maximism versus everything else is shit argument. If I'm sat in Argentina, I'm like my money is losing value and someone goes you can do... I'd buy the story. What I don't know is the risk. What is the risk that he wakes up and his Dai is worth fuck all? And how does that happen?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so again, if it's like a central bank, it's gradually then suddenly. These events happen quite often, where a central bank just runs out of reserve and then it's hyper-inflation almost immediately and it gets kind of crazy like that.

Peter McCormack: How does Dai run out of reserve?

Jimmy Song: Well there's only a fixed amount to do that and they have a reserve of, I think it's Ethereum or whatever, but they can always print more of the Dai I think, so whichever side is not under their control, that's the one that runs out, then they're doomed.

Peter McCormack: And you think the risk is like if Ethereum dropped under $100, that becomes a significant risk?

Jimmy Song: Well, I think it becomes significant in the sense that a lot of the people that have taken out loans. Right now, the vast majority of people that are using Dai are using it because they don't want to get out of their Ethereum position, but they need to pay their bills in dollars.

So what they do, is they have something like 1.5 to 1 loan to value or something like that, so they'll put in some amount of Ethereum into a smart contract, so just to make the numbers round, they have to put in something like $150 worth of Ethereum to get $100 dollars in a loan and then they can pay their rent or whatever.

If it drops below a certain amount, well that Ethereum that's locked up, if it goes below the 1.5 ratio or whatever and usually they'll lock up more than that, so like $200 worth of Ethereum, it goes below $150, they get liquidated unless they put more into it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so a market crash is super risky.

Jimmy Song: Hugely! But they're all basically gambling. There might be good reasons to do so. The argument I've heard is if you're an Ethereum miner, then this a good way to hedge the risk of complete collapse or something like that, but it just gives you a little bit of a run way until it falls too much, then you're going to capitulate and you're going to get completely wrecked. It's like being leveraged on BitMEX or something like that.

Peter McCormack: So I got the heat of the Eth boys the other day because I was just like, "Dai isn't for the common man. It's just too complicated, people aren't going to do anything they don't understand" and the comeback was, "well people don't understand how fiat money works." I'm like "yeah, but despite it being shit, you kind of understand in your head how it works. You've got a certain trust in the system in that you get paid and you knew you can go into a shop and spend it."

You grow up with it and you're born understanding that it just exists. So even though we as Bitcoiners don't trust fiat, because it's bullshit, we still trust the processed works of getting paid and using our card most of the time. The problem with Dai, is that I fundamentally don't understand it, it's like a whole new system and I don't thing other people will understand it. I said that it just seems like a ETH toy, a toy for guys and girls who got rich on ETH. Then somebody said "well no, because that's now, but it's going to become multi-collateral, so you'll be able to raise Dai with your house."

I was like "okay, I understand the point. Who checks that I own the house? What happens if I don't pay off my loan? Who's going to come and take my house from me?" They said "oh well, there'll be centralized services built on top to do this." So I was like, "oh, so like a bank?"

Jimmy Song: Yeah, this is the problem with any sort of smart contract that tries to take in collateral from the real world is that you need some enforcement mechanism and you need to obey the laws of the jurisdiction and there's no way to guarantee that. I can say I own the house, how are you going to check it? Who's going to check it?

Is the house on the Dai, MakerDao blockchain or whatever actually represented and if somebody steals that token somehow, who's going to go to the jurisdiction and say "I own this house, evict this guy." This is what's called the oracle problem and it's not solvable. It's a metaphysical problem! You have some token on the blockchain that represents something in the real world, you can't forcefully make them linked.

Peter McCormack: And these are over collateralized loans, whereas the bank don't force over collateralization of your loans from your house. Well, not in the UK generally. If I wanted to go and borrow against my house, I don't have to over collateralize. So to me it seems like they've built a more complicated version of something that already exists and works.

Jimmy Song: Right now Dai is used basically by people that don't want to sell their Ethereum and they want to make it multi collateral and the next targets are probably like Bitcoin and other alt coins or whatever. They basically say "okay, well you can get a loan in dollars through Dai or whatever and basically pay off whatever, but as long as it stays like this, then you get all of the upside of that coin while being able to pay off your debt or whatever bill you have." You're essentially, basically entering into a debt contract and I don't recommend that.

Peter McCormack: I am not putting my Bitcoin on Dai!

Jimmy Song: No, and that's just asking for trouble and you have one black swan event and everyone gets just completely wiped.

Peter McCormack: Why do you think it is that these boys... I keep saying boys because it's mainly blokes I talk to, but why is it you think that the Ethers haven't given up on Ethereum, why they're so amendment it's going to be a success and it's this amazing thing? Because everyone I speak to, like you talk to Udi, it's like "this is dumb." Eric Wall, followed his... did you follow his thing where he tried to sync a full node for Ethereum?

Jimmy Song: I think so.

Peter McCormack: It took him ages and he just said that it's a nightmare. Somebody also told me this, and tell me if this is true or not, I know other people lose their shit if it's not, but somebody said there's only probably 10 full Ethereum nodes.

Jimmy Song: Well that we know of maybe. Vast majority of people are using the same thing that Consensus does.

Peter McCormack: Infura.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, everyone uses basically Infura.

Peter McCormack: They just bought Infura didn't they?

Jimmy Song: I know they're losing a crap ton of money, just from AWS bills or whatever.

Peter McCormack: I'm pretty sure Consensus bought Infura. But if everyone's running it through Infura and you turn off the Infura plug, it's dead!

Jimmy Song: Then nothing works, yeah! Or if you can go and corrupt Infura to say whatever you want it to say and say "I have a million ETH in this in account", when it really has like 0, yeah you can probably spend the hell out of it and get all these assets or whatever. This is why I call Ethereum completely centralized. You compromise Infura or the Ethereum Foundation or Vitalik or eight different things and you can probably abuse the hell out of it and there's so many ways it could get regulated.

It's crazy to me that people think that this is something great, but as far as why a lot of people are still so enthusiastic about it, I read a story of this woman that has been doing Amway for like 40 years. She hasn't made any money the whole time and she still kind of forced to believe in it and I kind of see it like it's Stockholm syndrome or something like that.

 Your identify is in Ethereum, well if you spent the last three years building on it and you've realized... Cognitively it's very different to come to that point and this is why a lot of people can't quit smoking or drinking or whatever. It's a part of your identity, "well, I must be getting something out of this or the future of this is much better than I think in order to..." It's self deception really.

Peter McCormack: Well this was covered in that OneCoin podcast that I covered with Jamie. So even at the point where it was so clear it was a scam, like so obviously clear, people were defending it and it was for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they were part of groups where they were told "no, ignore those people because they're liars and they're jealous and they're just haters."

They already invested so they got money in so they're financially invested, but essentially he also spoke to this person who's like a psychologist and it's like these things become cult like and you cannot separate yourself from them. Like you said, it's like smokers, it's like an addiction, but you're clear. It's as clear as pie to you, Ethereum is a dumb idea, it's a poor investment, it can't scale, it can't work and it isn't decentralized.

Jimmy Song: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: There's no doubt, there's nothing...

Jimmy Song: There's no doubt, and the reason why they've been successful is largely marketing which... Great they've done a very good job in that regard, but technically I don't think it has much merit and as far as their value prop, most of it is just people playing with stuff that doesn't matter or it has no utility outside the people that already hold Ethereum.

So it's crazy to me, but this phenomenon of being loyal to it despite all evidence, is very clear in BCH and BSV and pretty much every alt coin, you have defenders that are invested in it and it's very hard to convince someone that their baby is ugly. It's basically what we're trying to convince people of. But even in the stock market and stuff like that, the whole Theranos thing.

Tim Draper was defending that woman forever and going back to stuff like 2X, there are still people that are defending the fact that they thought 2X was a good idea even though it's very clear it wasn't and it's crazy to me how much people hold onto those beliefs as an outsider. But then again, we're all human, there's a part of us that wants to believe, but this is where your ability to separate your ego from objective fact and truth is a very important skill or part of life.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it. I remember when I was done with alt coins. I defended them and defended my right to do interviews and all that stuff and I got to the end and it was such a weight off my shoulders when I dumped everything, and the only thing that's happened since then is my Bitcoin's gone up because I'm not selling any and I add to it. I actually don't even check the price that much often. I don't know if you're a regular price checker?

Jimmy Song: I do.

Peter McCormack: I see it when it's on Twitter, but I don't really check it anymore, I'm tending to just look a bit longer. But all right so we can conclude alt coins are a risky... it's a stupid investment, most likely a scam. If they're not a direct scam, the people have realized it's not going to work and they're scamming you by continuing on this nonsense and if anyone gets angry with me, I'll just say talk to Jimmy. Jimmy told me to say it, because I don't fucking know!

Jimmy Song: I've written lots of articles on this. The thing is, people get so offended when you tell them "okay, you might be in a scam or whatever" and it's kind of like if you're giving somebody feedback about anything. If you tell them they're not doing something right, it takes a mature person to take that feedback and say "thank you, like I understand that."

Peter McCormack: You know what we never get? We never get somebody, we never ever... I've talked about this a few times, have somebody come around and go "do you know what? This idea is bullshit, we were wrong. Sorry, we're going to stop the blockchain, it's bollocks, we're sorry. I know you lost some money." Nobody's ever done that.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and they can't because the liability and lawsuits that would come almost immediately would be insane. Basis sort of did that. They tried to do the algorithmic peg or whatever and they realized, "let's just give everybody back their money and let's call it a day" and good on them for doing that. That takes a lot of integrity and maturity to do, but for the vast majority of people, they've more or less sold their souls for that, and you can't get it back and this is the one thing they can cling to.

I sold all of this and my credibility and all my money all this other stuff for this coin, if it doesn't succeed then I'm worthless or something like that. Honestly, I think this is how people like Calvin Ayre and Roger Ver are thinking, they have to make it succeed and they think they're the drivers to make it that way and this is what drives a lot of the people in Ethereum too, but...

Peter McCormack: The amount of ego wrapped up in that.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, that's the thing. Sometimes that can be good because if you're at a startup and you can pivot and try different things and make it work and I imagine that's a large reason why so many of them come out of some of these things and actually end up succeeding. But these are kind of hopeless projects and it's that woman that's been doing Amway for 40 years still gung ho about it, despite not having made money and having sunk lots and lots of money into Amway, that's kind of the situation we're in. I don't know, I'm hoping these people wake up, but I honestly don't know if they have that in them.

Peter McCormack: Well, I know the response. I know what will happen when this will go out. It won't really convince that many people. One or two might go, but you'll reinforce beliefs and if some people are on the edge, it might drive them to research a bit more. Also I think Jimmy, there are some people out there who probably know, but they still think the value will go up because it can do and they'll make some money and then they'll get out, like "oh once it gets back to there, I'll get out."

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and that's sort of like the loss eversion and that's a part of human psychology. You want to at least not lose money so then you can go dump on it afterwards and I can fully admit, I had the same thing. Whenever I make an investment, there's definitely loss aversion and at least according to Tone, this is what causes a lot of the technical patterns that show up in charts and so on. But there is a loss aversion.

The thing is, what if you're wrong? What if it never comes back? Then you might get deeper in this whole. Is it really worth losing your soul? In a sense, you're kind of going to be more and more twisted the longer you hold on and this is something I realized about a lot of these alt coins and lot of investments in general, is that you end up defending any investment that you make, not because of the facts, but because you own it.

It's kind of like, again, somebody calling your baby ugly. If it wasn't your baby then you might be more objective about it, but there's a desire to defend that which you have just because you have it and that's a really sad situation. Actually, how did you quit smoking? What made you decide to quit smoking?

Peter McCormack: I wouldn't say I fully quit. I still relapse because I really like smoking. I love a cigarette! But the reason I know I've got to, is I'm getting older and I'm more conscious of my mortality. I'll tell you actually one of the biggest things, I really fucking hate the fact something owns me. I own my life, I can do what the fuck I want, when I want, where ever I want, but nicotine owns me.

When I'm full on smoking, say I've got my Juul, and it runs out of battery, I start to lose my shit and I'm like "where can I charge this", or if I haven't got any pods and that means that owns me. Everything else I can control. I could do with losing some weight and I've done it before, if I want to. It doesn't control me, food doesn't control me. With nicotine, it's like I fucking need that.

Jimmy Song: That's it right there, because alt coins own these people!

Peter McCormack: Yeah they do!

Jimmy Song: And they don't realize it. They're like "wait, all my opinions, all the defending that I'm doing, all the tweets that I make, all of this..." I'm sure somebody's going to say "Jimmy, same thing's happening for you with Bitcoin." Yeah, I don't know, that's hard for me to judge because I do own Bitcoin. But what I can say I that I've owned other alt coins in the past. I don't own them anymore and that's qualitatively different than how I look at Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well hopefully it will help some people stop using blockchains for their bullshit project. Just have a SQL database and you'll be fine! All right, well listen look, before we finish up, how's the book done?

Jimmy Song: "The Little Bitcoin Book" is doing very well. We have it translated to Spanish, Portuguese will be coming out pretty soon. We're working on Mandarin, Dutch, I think French, possibly German, Russian, Arabic, Turkish. We're working on a lot of them.

Peter McCormack: The feedback's been amazing!

Jimmy Song: We can't wait until the bull market because then I'm sure we'd sell even more, but we've sold in the 5,000 range in the first couple of months so that's very encouraging to me and it tells you that there's a hunger for this kind of material that's very accessible.

Peter McCormack: And what about your book, because before that, you did a book?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, "Programming Bitcoin", it's doing well. I get a check for it every month so that's always nice. But yeah, I know that a lot of people in the Chaincode labs residency, it was a prerequisite before they went in, so very happy about that. There's a lot of people that have told me that they learned a lot about Bitcoin or now understand things a lot more fully so that's very gratifying because that's why I wrote the book and all this other stuff, is to educate and get people in a position where they learn Bitcoin more because Bitcoin isn't Ethereum, we don't trust 10 people to make all of the decisions.

The more decentralized the knowledge is, the more people understand what's going on underneath, and not to say that everyone has to know the subtleties of Consensus rules and C++ or whatever, but being able to at least comprehend a little better and leveling up yourself, that's very important to me because that's what keeps Bitcoin decentralized and there'll be a scenario that you outlined earlier where all these programmers get arrested, well we can continue that, because we have a bunch of other people that understand that the knowledge is out there.

Peter McCormack: All right, and what's coming up next? I know you'll always have something. Can you tell me anything? Any secrets?

Jimmy Song: Well, so I'm working on a new class. So I've taught the "Programming blockchain" class for a while now. Working on a new class programming wallet so it will be on top of that and hopefully, that'll become like a follow-up to the book "Programming Bitcoin", as a way to understand sort of wallets and all the things that you need to know technically in order to program one. I'm going to be in a bunch of different places over the next few months. I'm going to be at techfin.asia, it's in Seoul in Korea, early December. Then a week after that, I'm going to be LaBITconf.

Peter McCormack: I will see you there, I'm there!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, it's going to be in Uruguay.

Peter McCormack: I've not been. Have you been?

Jimmy Song: I haven't. I've been to South America once and that was last year. Yeah, I can't wait for the event, that's going to be amazing.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think I'm going to go via Argentina because I want to see Buenos Aires and someone's invited me to El Salvador which slightly scares the shit out of me, but I can't fucking wait.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and South American people are just so friendly and they're very warm. Well I don't know, maybe I'm making a stereotype or whatever, but at least when I went to São Paulo last year, I had a really good time so I wanted to make this one. In February, I'm going to be at a Advancing Bitcoin, that's in London.

Peter McCormack: I'm MC'ing that!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, you're going to MC that, so that'll be fun and I'm going to be at Tone's conference, that's Unconfiscatabale in Las Vegas.

Peter McCormack: I meant to be at that, but it clashes with my daughter's birthday so I might be able to come to the first day.

Jimmy Song: Why don't you just bring your daughter, man?

Peter McCormack: To Vegas for her birthday? I mean she would love that, but she's got school, man. I don't think her demonic mother would love that anyway!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so those are the next four trips that I have.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to see a bunch of you then.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, I'm going to try to write more books and stuff and I'm still trying to figure out what book to write. I think maybe something saying blockchain fraud or something like that.

Peter McCormack: I think you need to do a kids' book.

Jimmy Song: A kids' book?

Peter McCormack: You've got like hundreds of children, you could write a book for them about Bitcoin and how it works.

Jimmy Song: Bitcoin Money actually does a pretty good job.

Peter McCormack: Is that Bitcoin Rabbi's book?

Jimmy Song: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's great.

Jimmy Song: I like that one and my kids like it too.

Peter McCormack: Do you ever see that picture I've got? I've got this fucking brilliant picture where I'm reading that and my daughter's next to me reading Mastering Bitcoin.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, well you should make it my book. But yeah, I like Mastering Bitcoin too.

Peter McCormack: All right, well wicked. Lots coming up, excellent. I'm going to see a bunch of you and means we're going to eat some good food!

Jimmy Song: Yeah, we're going to go do lunch after this, right? We're going to go to Coopers or something?

Peter McCormack: You tell me, I don't know, it's your town!

Jimmy Song: Plenty of good barbecue over here. I think Parker said he wanted to go too, so we'll see.

Peter McCormack: Well okay listen, tell people how they can find you, buy your shit, and follow you.

Jimmy Song: All right, so I am on Twitter, Medium and Github as Jimmy Song and you can go and follow me there and I talk about lots of stuff. I also have a two day seminar, "Programming Blockchain", you can go check that on programmingbitcoin.com. It has links to my books as well, including "Programming Bitcoin" and "The Little Bitcoin Book."

You can buy the Spanish version on Amazon right now. So you're going to want to search that if you have Spanish relatives or something. I really need to work on how to market that, by the way. I'd like your advice on that.

Peter McCormack: I got you, let's talk about it.

Jimmy Song: I talked about my blog, I've talked about that. I have a show on YouTube, "Offchain With Jimmy Song" that you can subscribe to as well.

Peter McCormack: I have that as a podcast.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, so I usually just talk for 40 minutes, but I don't know, maybe people find it interesting! That's about it I think.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, thanks for coming on and Joe Lubin, if you're listening, stop being a pussy, pay your bet! People been waiting way too long for this, to take your fucking bet! Great to see you man, let's go and eat.

Jimmy Song: All right!