WBD255 Audio Transcription

BTC Vs ETH Episode Review with Udi Wertheimer

Interview date: Monday 24th August 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Bitcoin developer Udi Wertheimer. 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.

We discuss the Bitcoin Maximalist mindset, flaws with the Ethereum protocol and the supplygate saga.

“I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don’t know what it’s good for but fine; other people like it. Good for them.”

— Udi Wertheimer

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Udi, how are you doing man?

Udi Wertheimer: Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: Always a pleasure, I'd always have you on the show. Okay, I needed someone to talk to about this Bitcoin v ETH review show thing I did, because it's very difficult to get impartial opinions. Everyone's opinion was pretty much... I would say 80% of people was through the lens they see things, right?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So as a good example, if you think ETH is a scam, then you think what Samson did was pretty much correct to call it out as a scam and not have any tolerance for discussing the technicals, whereas if you don't, you may have thought that Samson's approach was wrong and it becomes a very difficult thing, because I just want to kind of navigate it. How did you find it?

Udi Wertheimer: So I did listen to it. I thought that it was an interesting debate, because I don't remember Samson and Vitalik ever being in that kind of setting together. So it was interesting to see them like one against the other, but I don't know, a lot of times it felt like they're talking past each other.

I think as you mentioned, everyone sees those things through their own lens and then just really hard to figure out what the actual points and disagreements are, because we're hardly even speaking in the same terms. So it's really difficult to see who's who in that debate.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and there's things that I don't get, and the reason I did it or the reason I care a little bit more now is, I did my 250th show, as you know, and had people submit a bit of content, and I think it was Shinobi who said that Lightning Bitcoin, liquid Bitcoin, base-chain Bitcoin, wrapped Bitcoin, they're all Bitcoin. His view is they're all Bitcoin, as much that might trigger people and I was thinking about it, "Okay, that's right.

Well, therefore if someone's got a wrapped Bitcoin, they need to be at least aware of, as subjectively as possible, about any risks they're taking and using it." So it kind of felt like I wanted to understand a bit more about it, but I was kind of thinking who could I review the show with? Who do I think would be at least some way impartial, and I think some Ethereum people will say, "No, Udi isn't..."

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I'm the last person that they think will be impartial.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's fine, but I don't see you as like a maximalist wanting to just attack Ethereum for the sake of it. I think you're pretty fair in the way you look at things.

Udi Wertheimer: I try to be. I think I try to see both of these from the lens of the supporters, as opposed to from the view of the opponents. So it's very easy to find straw man arguments against both, but once you try to understand what Ethereum supporters actually think or actually find valuable in Ethereum, then the criticism becomes more valuable, I think.

Peter McCormack: Yeah and I think somebody said to me, you know those Nigerian scams that you get that come through an email, like the bank account? "I've got $74 million, blah, blah, blah." Somebody said if you think of Ethereum as like that, then you have to tell people. I'm nervous really calling it a scam as such, although I certainly think there are things about it which aren't great.

But I think, how do you actually call a blockchain a scam? I think I struggle with that, but there was a lot I struggled with. Some things I didn't really get there. So I just thought I've been through it, I've got like a whole list of all the things we pretty much talked about, and I just kind of wanted to work through it with you, because you're like my blockchain oracle.

Udi Wertheimer: I hope you won't regret that, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: Actually I came out once on Twitter and I said, "I just repeat the people I trust." They said, "Well, who do you trust?" I was like, "Well, mainly Udi," and they went, "Okay, fair enough." All right, so I think a good starting point is almost the philosophical side of things, which I felt on Vitalik's side, there was some weakness and he almost gave some ground there in that I personally still don't know what Ethereum is.

Some people say ETH is money, I think Joey from Augur came out yesterday when he was talking about Augur2 or something, and he said, "ETH is money as well." But other people are like, "No, ETH is not money." I was like, "Well, if it isn't, what is it?"

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, that's a good question. Even if ETH is money, which I don't know, but even if it is, then that still doesn't answer what Ethereum is, because Ethereum and Ether are not the same thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Udi Wertheimer: So this is something I struggle with too, I don't know what Ethereum is for. The early explanation of it being a world computer, I don't know, like what is a world computer? So people say that it's a computer that no one can stop. Okay fine, but your phone in your pocket is a computer that no one can stop. It's yours, no one can stop it and you can use it to do whatever you want with it. So I don't think that's it, and it's faster and it's cheaper and so on, so that's probably not what it is. I don't know, it's really hard to explain exactly what it is. I find that even for Ethereum people, it's kind of hard to explain what it is.

I guess the word that they would use or the term that they would use is that Ethereum is a state machine, but then what's that? It's a term in computer science that's not very interesting. I can go into that, but it's like I don't think that's very interesting to hear. So yeah, I don't know what it is. It seems to be a way for people to do experiments, I think one of the best things about Ethereum is that it has some standards that really caught on so. The best example is probably ERC-20 for tokens.

Technically I don't think it's the best way to issue a token technically and to use one, it's expensive, it's inefficient and so on, but it has one very good thing going on for it, which is all exchanges supported, all wallets supported etc. So if you're going to issue a token for some reason, you're probably going to choose Ethereum. You don't care about the technicalities of it, you just want to make sure that people can use it and buy it, so you're going to use what's supported, and that's ERC-20.

So in my opinion, that's the best thing going on for Ethereum, it has standards that's going on, it has interoperability with a lot of products and services, so that's pretty important and even though technically it's just not very good, like there are a lot of contenders unrelated to Bitcoin, there are a lot of contenders later that showed up with better standards for tokens, but they're just too late probably.

Peter McCormack: Well I'll tell you my take. So I think ETH is money in that cigarettes in a prison can be money, in that any object that you want to trade with somebody in a certain scenario that can become some kind of currency, it could be money. But then if you say ETH is money, I understand it's probably something that's quite difficult for someone like Vitalik to say, because if you're also saying that Bitcoin is money, then ETH doesn't seem like great money.

It just doesn't seem like very good money, whereas in prison like cigarettes are good money in certain scenarios, because they hold a lot of value and so I think it is a unit of exchange. Then I see Ethereum, the protocol itself, is just some kind of like almost like a virtual world, like this little world where you can go and you can create kind of financial, almost like games or products, that you can play with. But I wonder how much value those games and things would have if there wasn't the existence of a lot of people having made money on ETH itself, perhaps there would be something playing around with stablecoins, but it seems to me just to be like this wild west messy kind of financial virtual world. 

Somebody said to me, they're like, "Well, why don't you go create a MetaMask account and play with it?" I was like, "But for what?" Because I still don't see what use I personally have for it. I can understand if you're somebody who likes to make money, if you made money on ICOs, you don't give a shit, you're just like, "I don't care. I just want to make money," and then you can go into this DeFi world and you can make money, then fair enough. I get it, because it's like a game. But I don't see it as like some serious contender for replacing certain financials centralized systems at the moment.

Udi Wertheimer: The narrative around that has changed very heavily in the last month, so not even years. If you asked people a month ago or two months ago what Ethereum apps were about, they would tell you, "Oh, you can take loans and you can use stablecoins and you can bank the unbanked and so on." There's very large goals around that, and now it's mostly those Ponzi games, and mostly their creators agree as well that they're Ponzi's. The claim is that because it's not a secret, because it's an open fact that they're a Ponzi then it's fine. I'm okay with that, but it's a game of musical chairs and I don't find it particularly interesting.

It can be individually interesting, sure, if you think that you know more than the other guy and that you can get more money out than the other guy, then great, but that's a short-term game. I think that's pretty obvious to everyone involved it's a short-term thing. One of the funny things are that if you talk to people about what Ethereum is today as opposed to a month ago, then you'll get completely different answers, because now this is the big thing, the DeFi Ponzi games, while a month ago DeFi was a way to get loans, which is, I don't know, more traditional I guess.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I can see some value in that. I can see some value in a decentralized system for taking out a loan, and perhaps I wouldn't do it, but I could see somebody saying, "Well, I've got some Bitcoin, I'll wrap that Bitcoin and I can take out a dollar loan, this is collateralized," whatever it is, say up to 50%, "And I can instantly get access to some dollars and then I can liquidate those on the exchange and I haven't sold my Bitcoin." I can see that scenario, I wouldn't use it myself and that's got some validity.

Udi Wertheimer: There's other options to get a Bitcoin based or Ethereum denominated loan, whatever. There are other options to do it. Not clear why you need Ethereum for that and I suspect that the people working on these projects realize that, like there are other perhaps more competitive options.

So instead they went the Ponzi route in the last few weeks or months, which I'm not trying to judge here. This is what people do in the crypto space since forever and they seem to struck gold in a way, because this is something that everyone was looking for. So I'm not judging here, I'm just saying it's very, very different than what people were raving about just months ago.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I don't mind being wrong. I'm not this huge maxi that's like, "Let's shit on Ethereum now." I've said stupid things in the past, but tell me, prove it to me, I don't mind. If I had to for a certain reason, I would use a stablecoin on Ethereum, if I had to move some money around in a certain way, I've got no problem doing that.

Udi Wertheimer: I'll use them for sure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it doesn't bother me, and I know there's a sort of risk that comes with that. But I wonder what is it I'm missing? When these debates get really heated and people are going away on Twitter blah, blah, blah, like what is it that I am missing that these Ethereum people are seeing? Do they have this kind of naive vision of the future, or am I missing something? Do you question that?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, so there are a few types of people. So there's the quintessential crypto person who bought something early, got rich, and now they think it's god. That happens in Bitcoin too, it happens in Ethereum, it happens in a lot of much sillier shitcoins as well, and you see a lot of that. Probably the first thing you have to kind of wade through is those people, and there are a ton of them. Then I think that some people just have a very different vision, a very, very different vision than Bitcoiners.

Ethereum people don't really care in my opinion about most of the things that many Bitcoiners care about, they're very different. I dare to say that I see there's a lot of more socialist tendencies in the Ethereum community compared to Bitcoin. But probably people are going to get mad because I said that, but of course that's a generalization, but I think that it's true in many cases.

Peter McCormack: So I agree with that, but I'm wondering what does that actually mean for Ethereum? Is it because they care less about hard money, individualism, like these libertarian ideals? They're quite happily living this, I guess what we would say, and I'm broadly generalizing here, but quite happily living with a state, with a government. Whereas a lot of, say the most hardcore Bitcoiners are very critical, a lot of them want to see the downfall of the state, individual liberty, they want hard money to back that up.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it goes down to that level?

Udi Wertheimer: I think it does. You see a lot of focus in the Ethereum community on public goods and how to fund them, how to sort of tax people to be able to fund them, and they're very interested in that. In Bitcoin it's really the other way around. Like at Bitcoin, a lot of people are just saying, "Just leave it alone, just don't touch it, don't change anything ever." That's easier, because we don't want to make any governance decisions because that always ends badly.

So it's better to just not do anything. Also with regards to just having hard money, I think a lot of Bitcoiners today are interested in having hard money and a lot of Ethereum people are just not. They just don't care about that. I had this thread when the entire supply-gate thing started, and I think that the supply-gate issue is very interesting. It brings a lot of issues to light in a very clear way, but I think one of the things it brings to mind, is that Ethereum people just don't care about that. When you buy Apple stock, you don't really sit there and count how many Apple shares there are. It's an important data point, but that's not why you're buying the Apple shares.

I would say that's probably how Ethereum people think about buying Ether. They see Ethereum as something that has potential. They care about the supply, but it's not the top thing that they care about. Bitcoiners, and again not all of them, but some Bitcoiners, they only care about the supply. This is the thing that they want to make sure that there's a very strict supply and very strict inflation and that they can predict it and whatever. Both ideas have merit. I can see why some people want that and why some people don't, and that's fine.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it became a bit of a gotcha?

Udi Wertheimer: Well, maybe. But I think that the supply-gate thing was good in that it brought to light just the differences. There are a lot of good explanations for why Ethereum doesn't do very well in calculating the supply. I mean it does pretty well, I think Vitalik said in the debate that the round of error is very small, like the margin of error is very small, which I think is fair. But still, it brings to light the fact that a lot of Ethereum people just didn't ever think about this. The idea didn't even cross their minds, which just shows how the two communities are very different. But I have to say, they have a lot of good reasons for that.

So in my opinion, the best reason is Ethereum is just not about Ether. So Ether is an asset that's supposed to make Ethereum work. It's there in order for Ethereum to function, and Ether is flawed, and it was always described as a flawed non-perfect thing. It's just there to allow their blockchain platform to work, as opposed to Bitcoin, which is a digital asset first, that's what it is. It has very strict monetary properties, and it has a blockchain which is flawed, it's not perfect. It has many problems with it, and we wish it didn't have to exist, but it does.

So just right there you have a very massive difference between the two. So Bitcoin is focused on the asset, Ethereum is focused on other things, and things like Ethereum nodes, they have to keep track of a ton of things. They have to keep track of the supply of a ton of tokens, they have to keep track of the state of many apps, they're keeping track of a lot of things! So looking at specifically the supply of Ether is kind of way too specific, why is that the thing that we're looking at and saying that's difficult? There's so many things that Ethereum is keeping track of, why are we giving them a hard time specifically about the supply of Ethers?

Peter McCormack: Well I didn't care myself, but for different reasons. I didn't care, because I know they don't care. I don't care, because I don't hold it or own it, and even if I did, it wouldn't be for like a hodling reason. The reason I own Bitcoin is because I think it's a solid financial asset, which I trust, I can hold value in it, for the number of reasons that Bitcoin is doing. Therefore, the supply is really important, and it's really important we are flexible around that.

But I didn't care, because there isn't that mentality about hard money with ETH. I don't think people are thinking, "Oh, I'm going to buy ETH and hold this for 20, 30 years and this is a savings technology for me." I don't think people think like that.

Udi Wertheimer: I think the most don't.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so therefore I was like... It was almost like we were comparing a tank and a car and we're annoyed that the car doesn't have this hard shell around it, when it's not trying to be a tank. It's just trying to be something else. I could still stand there and say, "Look, what it's trying to be doesn't make sense, I don't understand it and it seems a bit crazy," but at the same time I can also say, "Well, I can understand why that focus on the supply isn't such a big deal, because it isn't trying to be the same thing."

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I agree with that. It's really just trying to be something else, so the focus on the supply is a bit of a gotcha.

Peter McCormack: What is it trying to be?

Udi Wertheimer: But it doesn't like the difference, which I think that a lot of people didn't understand. On the Ethereum side too, like you could see when this discussion continued how some people just say, "You know what? I just never thought about that, and that's an interesting point to think about." If you ask Vitalik about it, if you really get into it, he has some very good explanations and points on why this isn't necessary for Ethereum, and I actually agree with them.

The problem is it's really hard to communicate those ideas and I think that even a lot of people on the Ethereum side are having a difficult time to communicate that, because it's pretty complex. When you're using Bitcoin, really what you care about is how many Bitcoin exists and how many of them you have, and the ones that you have you want to make sure that they're legit and when someone sends you Bitcoins, you want to make sure that they're legit Bitcoins and you didn't just make them up. With Ethereum, you want a lot of other things. That's one of the things you want, but you probably want a ton of other things. You want to know that the stablecoins that you're getting are valid for the same reasons, you want to know that the apps that you're using didn't change.

There are so many things you want to know, and I would say that Bitcoin, a good mental model for it is that you could say, "Okay, we have a group of people who decided on a bunch of rules. There are only ever going to be 21 million coins, and to send them you need to have a private key and whatever." Just a bunch of rules, and it's not a very complicated set of rules and you could say, "Well, if we had the time, we could verify everything manually, just with a pen and paper, just everyone would sit down at the end of every day, run through all the transactions for the day and just calculate it and make sure that we're all on the same page."

You could probably do that, it's possible, it's doable, it's just a bit complicated, but you could do it. It would take a lot of time, but you could do it. With Ethereum, there's so many things going on and there are so many things going on that you specifically don't care about. If you're not using USDC, then you don't care about that at all, so why would you spend time verifying that? So Ethereum kind of has a very different mindset in that, and you could say, "Okay, so the Bitcoin full nodes, their job is just to automate that process of verifying.

They're not doing anything magical, they're there to make it easier on you. Instead of you doing it manually, they're automating it so that it's faster and simpler for you." On Ethereum, it's something else. The nodes, the blockchain, those things, there are magic that allows for decentralized whatever, they have those magical powers, they're much more important in that way. So the way that people like Vitalik believe that they solve that risk of maybe not knowing the exact supply or whatever, is because why do you want to know that in Bitcoin?

In Bitcoin you can say, "Well, maybe the software that I use is buggy. Maybe there's a problem and the software will think that there are more Bitcoins than there are. But because it's so easy to see, then I'll immediately find the problem and everyone will talk about it and we'll fix it immediately." In Ethereum, because it's so obscure, maybe there's already a bug, maybe we don't even know because it's so hard to find out.

So what Vitalik and other people would say is, "Well look, we have multiple Ethereum implementations built from scratch, multiple Ethereum nodes built from scratch, that if they have bugs, then you would expect that they have completely different bugs" and so far people who run them can see that they all consolidate on the same state, so if that's the case then there's no bug right now that manifested at least. So for Ethereum people, they're saying, "This is so complex that mere humans are not going to be able to look into the current state and see if something's wrong.

So instead we have this more risk averse system where we have multiple implementations to try to find if there's a bug in one of them and then if there is, then we know something's wrong and then we stop and then we try to find what the problem is." So that's a very different approach. It's riskier, because you don't have direct visibility into what's going on just because it's too much, but on the other hand, it's the only way to do it and because Bitcoin is simple, we can do it kind of manually.

But Ethereum is not simple, and there's no way you could do it manually. You need to have an automated way to do it, so I think that the way they chose is reasonable. I don't find it interesting, I don't want to do it, but I think that their solution makes sense.

Peter McCormack: So I wonder sometimes if Vitalik's bitten off more than he can chew, and I kind of asked him about that. Do you know when he started work on Ethereum?

Udi Wertheimer: Probably around 2014. I think it launched in '15.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, see back when he probably was working it, like Bitcoin obviously had its first real kind of big period of interest in 2013, but it wasn't like a global asset. It didn't have institutional investors like it does now. It was like a very different world, and I just wonder if he was kind of almost like nerding around, wanting to do stuff with Bitcoin, like, "I can't do that."

I finally read the Ethereum white paper, I've never read it before, and not in detail, because it's long and there's way too much stuff I couldn't understand. But like things stood out to me like the lack of Turing-completeness, and whilst I'm not a coder or a techie, I understand the difference that offers and I've read about the oracle problem and blah, blah, blah. So I was just kind of like thinking, I wonder if it's just a case of he was thinking, "Well, I want to do some things I can't do on Bitcoin, so I'll build this other thing," not really expecting or thinking it to become this $40 billion, $50 billion protocol, not really thinking Bitcoin could...

I don't know, but I'm wondering if he just kind of like had this idea, and it's just got way bigger than he expected, a lot of problems that he didn't probably foresee coming, and now rather than saying, "Huh, you know what, this kind of doesn't make sense." It's kind of like how do we... Like a good techie, he wants to solve the next problem. He wants to, "How do I fix this? Why there's sharding?" Or it's this, or it's that, it's the other. I wonder if just kind of like that scenario is playing out, because it's very difficult to turn around and go, "Yeah, do you know what lads? Got this wrong. Pack up."

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, it's probably something like that, but to be fair, that's how most things are built, right? You start small, you have no idea what you're doing, and then sometimes you're lucky and it explodes. Vitalik worked on things that are similar to Ethereum before Ethereum. So he was involved in MasterCoin, which was on top of Bitcoin, he was involved with other like coloured coins things, which were like kind of ERC-20. So he spent a lot of time working on things like that, on Bitcoin, and I truly believe him that he just found that it's not satisfactory and that something better needs to be done if that's to become a reality.

To be fair, he did build something that became a reality for all tokens almost, that's what they use, so he definitely set out to build this and succeeded. Now is it great? No, but it works to an extent and I think this is also another gotcha that people like to say that, "Yeah, so Ethereum is broken, which is why they're trying to rebuild it basically with Ethereum 2.0." But it is true that they always said that there's a lot of work to be done. Like when Ethereum first came out, they always said, "Look this isn't what it's going to look like, this isn't the final form," and in a way there's a lot of marketing in saying that too.

I mean they always said it, they always said they're going need sharding, that was true from day one. They also always said they want to move to proof of stake, that was true from day one. It's not like new things, they just didn't have any idea how they're going to do it, and the way they would do it changed drastically over the years. It still didn't happen, so who knows, maybe it changes again? But you have to be somewhat fair, this didn't come out of nowhere. They always said that the current way it works is not going to work forever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I struggle with this idea that Vitalik sat there and thought, "Oh, I'm going to build this big blockchain system to make myself a billionaire and scam people." I just don't buy that argument. I buy that he's a techie and he wanted to build something, like he had an interest in it. Yes, of course he's got rich of it and even the change in narrative, in some ways it hasn't bothered me hugely in the idea that something pivots. I don't have an issue with somebody pivoting an idea fundamentally. The shame is it just pivots from bullshit to bullshit, like ICO scams to DeFi scams and blah, blah, blah.

But I don't fundamentally have an issue with the idea of something pivoting, that's a technology thing that happens. That's happened for plenty of companies and ideas. One of the things I do though have an issue with, is like one of the things I was thinking about is that there's some kind of hypocrisy sometimes when people are throwing mud across and they were like, "Oh, Ethereum's just used for scams," but really it's not like the system is a scam. It's what people build on top of it, which is a scam.

But also, Bitcoin is used for scams as well, and what I realized is like people are able to use the asset Bitcoin for scams, right? They create scams and they request the asset, but you can go a little bit deeper with your scam with Ethereum. You can actually build the scam into Ethereum itself and as far as I can see, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, you can't really build scams into the Bitcoin protocol?

Udi Wertheimer: No, because it's so simple, it can't do anything but transfer money, so no. Yeah, that's a good observation. Some people would say it's just semantics, but I think that the way that it really influences things is that the Ethereum community is kind of conditioned to champion things that are built on top of Ethereum and they tend to a lot of times just champion scams, because the thing with scams, it sometimes takes a while before you realize that they're scams.

So I'm not saying those are bad people, but they see something, it seems cool, it wasn't tried before, and they definitely champion and market that, and eventually they realize that maybe it wasn't a good idea. So I think it just leaves a sour taste, I would say. I do understand people say Ethereum is for experimenting, and I think that's fine. Obviously you're going to experiment, and a lot of those experiments will turn out to be scams. But if people know that, if people are going knowingly into these new Ponzi schemes knowing that that's what they are, then I don't see any problem with that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I throw in the other thing I had into that, which I mentioned during the interview with Vitalik, is like I struggle with it with the concept of immutability as well, with a system that is... And also he said like, "Oh, some people think Bitcoin is 80% done and Ethereum is 40% done, maybe 60%," and I struggle with that. I'll tell you why I struggle with that, because it's like, what is done? What is complete? I often don't think of Bitcoin as... Like people say "If Bitcoin succeeds." I kind of think it has already. I'm in that place now, I trust it, I hold money in it, I use it, we have derivatives and we have institutional investment. 

Yes, you can keep building on, you can keep improving it, but I've got to the point where I'm like, "It is successful." Even if it dies now at some point, it's been a success. It's done a lot of successful things. Now yes, it's got other things that people want to do with it, take it further, it'd be great to have like on-chain privacy and all those other things, but it's still a success. But I don't see Ethereum the same. I still see it as a project, an experiment, a beta, and as such I think it should come with responsible warnings like, "You could lose all your money in this, if you're buying this."

A bit like you know the warnings that came with Lightning? Be reckless but you could lose it, don't put more than $50 to $100 in this. I kind of feel like Ethereum needs to come with that, because I think... What was I reading again about today? Another DeFI thing that's got another potential millions locked in it. I also found out about Curve, this guy has got 71% worth of voting power. Again, it's like every day I keep reading about things and I'm like, "Well, this is risky. It's risky to have money in this."

Yes, it's risky in Bitcoin, but it's a different risk profile. I don't feel like I have a risk from Bitcoin developers. I don't think there's a risk that Matt Corallo is going to do something that's going to lose me my money. I implicitly trust the procedures they put in place, but someone could create a smart control and it's buggy or it can get hacked, and in a way you can suddenly lose a lot of money and therefore I think with Ethereum, I find it a little bit disingenuous to not be telling people that, "This is risky, you shouldn't be locking up a lot of money in this."

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I agree, it is very risky. A lot of those things are very risky. The current point is probably that you could say that Ethereum itself is stable. I think that's arguable as well, but you can say that Ethereum itself is stable, but the apps that people build and deploy daily, definitely some of them are not stable at all. Some of them are outright scams and some of them are just broken in a way that we didn't find out yet. So if you're going to use those specific apps, then you'd better trust, I don't know, the person who built them, maybe review the code yourself. I don't know how you're going to approach that.

But yeah, there's risk in that. But when someone builds a Bitcoin exchange, then it's not built on Bitcoin, as we said before. It uses Bitcoin, it's not built on top of it. But it's still maybe a scam, maybe it breaks, maybe coins get stolen, a lot of things can happen. So it's kind of just the Bitcoin apps are not built on Bitcoin, they're built somewhere else. So we just don't look at it the same, but those problems can exist there too. There's a lot of semantics there, there's a lot of...

Like it really depends on how you define things and the other thing is that because Ethereum is so experimental, that a lot of the new apps there are extremely experimental, as opposed to things with Bitcoin that are relatively traditional. You're going to have new exchanges, maybe new derivative products, but they're relatively traditional and stable, and that's probably because of the risk profile of the people using it too, they're more conservative with this stuff.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I guess it depends on certain things, like for example if I owed you some money, we went to a conference and you owe me $200, and you said, "Pay me in USDC," or something and I'd feel fairly confident buying that, send it to you, and it'll get to you, I'd be not so worried about that. It is when I hear about these projects, like it's one developer guy who's coded up this yield farm to farm carrots or peas or something, I don't know. By the way, which I don't actually understand what the hell's going on there.

Like somebody's told me like it's to do with liquidity, but that's by the by, that I'm like, "Who is this guy? What's he doing? Who's checking what he's doing?" I just find that a little bit insane, especially that thing that happened with the Yams. There was just that massive drop in price and I was like, "This is just fucking bananas!" But it doesn't seem like internal. Well, that's why I say it's like a game, because it feels like internally everyone's like, "Well, this is how it is. Did you get out your Yams? Blah, blah, blah."

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, well because people who actually looked into it before they jumped into it, they actually took some time to read and analyze what it is, they're not surprised, because this was obvious it's going to happen. I suspect that some people just went on exchange, saw the price charges bought Yam, and got wrecked, and this is where the money comes from. How do those yield farmers make money? They need retail to buy the actual coin, and to disregard what the coin actually is. These coins do crazy things, like there's the rebase.

The rebase means that the coin tries to stay packaged to let's say a dollar or whatever, some amount, and to do that, if you hold the coin and it went below a dollar, then you just get more or alternatively if the price is too high, the supply just increases. So I mean fine, but then if you don't know that, if you don't understand that, then you're going to get completely wrecked, because you're not going to understand the charts. The charts are going to look like they're going crazy when in fact it's just the supply chain, and that's kind of where the money is.

They built these very complicated, intricate schemes that are very hard to understand, and they're targeted at the fact that some people will just look at the chart and buy the coin, and that's where the money comes from to the people who actually look into it. It's a bit disgusting, because it's really planned to confuse retail and to be a Ponzi, and what they're saying is, "Look, it's openly a Ponzi, so details are there. If you want to you can look into it, if you're not going to look into it, then it's not our fault" which is fine and it's fair, but it's not going to keep up.

That's one thing I'm pretty sure of, that it's a short term thing. People are going to run out of money to dump into this. People have to lose money, it's a zero-sum game, and it happens so quickly. So they're going to run out.

Peter McCormack: Well it is like a casino, that's why I say it's a game. I guess the people who learn the game the best, learn the rules the best, they're the ones who are going to profit. But I kept thinking, I saw this chart of all these different like DeFi tokens and how much they've gone up and I was like, "Okay, if people are making money here, somebody has to be losing money, like they have to be losing money somewhere. Where is that happening?" But I kind of refuse to spend too much time looking at it, because I don't want to get involved in this. I can tell without spending much time on it, it's nonsense.

Let me ask you about another thing. I want to ask you about centralization, because clearly Ethereum is more centralized than Bitcoin. But again, not being somebody who codes these things, where other people are like, "Well, you might as well just have a database, you might as well just have a spreadsheet" and I feel like, okay, Bitcoin tends to be the kind of moral benchmark for everything, Bitcoin, blockchain and money, and I get that and I'm cool with that. But at the same time, if we were trying to be fair and just trying to say, "Okay, ETH isn't a scam, Ethereum isn't a scam, let's just objectively try and give it a bit of time to consider."

There's clearly a difference between having some centralized database than having say something that's distributed on a number of inferior servers, or am I completely wrong here? Is it essentially pointless?

Udi Wertheimer: I don't think it's pointless, I don't think it's automatically pointless. So you can find or you can think of use cases where it might make sense. Ponzi's were actually some of the best ones, because very early on there were those Ponzi games on Ethereum where everyone knew it's a Ponzi. So it was a very simple scheme, you put money in and if you'd less want to put money in before a thing happened, then you were screwed and everyone else gets more money. It was very, very simple. It's very difficult to do it in any other way, because then someone will try to stop it.

In Ethereum you can deploy it anonymously, no one will know who you are, and it will be relatively difficult to stop it. Not impossible probably, but relatively difficult. So it's good for those kind of things. When you look at something like the most popular use case for Ethereum right now, which is USDT, Tether, Tether is really just a spreadsheet. It could be a spreadsheet on Google Docs, because Tether controls anyway what's going on. Tether can take coins from anyone at any point. You can put it in your ledger or treasure in a safe, and they could take it out of there whenever they want to.

They can also create new ones whenever they want to. So they really don't need any decentralized thing, and you trust them 100%. So the only reason people use Ethereum for that, is again, because interoperability reasons and because wallet supported and exchanges supported, that's a good reason I guess.

Peter McCormack: So there's like an ecosystem reason?

Udi Wertheimer: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Because we have an ecosystem based on blockchains with wallets and exchanges, it makes more sense. Like, for example, if it was just a spreadsheet, like a centralized database, how would a wallet integrate with that? How would an exchange integrate with that? I don't see how they could. Could they do that?

Udi Wertheimer: So I mean technically it's possible.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.

Udi Wertheimer: But the tools for that don't exist, so that's why people choose Ethereum. But technically it's possible and would have been cheaper, it would have been easier. I make a lot of Tron jokes all the time, about how Tron is superior to Ethereum, and it's a joke. But Tron is a fork of Ethereum, it does have its own version of ERC-20, which is technically compatible. It's the same API, it's the same everything, the same tools that people use like MetaMask and Ethereum wallets, and the same tools that exchanges use to integrate can be used with Tron.

So for that reason, when Tether issued USDT on Tron, and again, Tron is a joke, but when Tether issued USDT on Tron, it was very easy for many exchanges to support that instantly, because they already have everything that they need and I think around 25% or 20% of USDT volume is actually on Tron, just because it's fast and it's cheap. Now Tron is a centralized database, that's what it is. It's a centralized database with the API's that Ethereum uses. So people can use it with the tools they already have and I think that I don't know if Tron is going to be the one, but I think that someone is going to be building something like that.

You have a centralized database and just supports all of the tools that people already use for Ethereum, just so that you can integrate easily. So that's going to happen with something like USDT, in my opinion, for sure, because USDT is fully trusted, it's just wasted on Ethereum. It's expensive to use it and it's slow, so I think it will move away, at least for people who are just sending it around. When you use USDT inside Ethereum apps, that's something else, but if you're just moving it around exchanges and so on, there's no reason for it to be on Ethereum.

Peter McCormack: Can you clear up the node bit for me, or what your take on the node was in the following discussions, because there seem to be disagreement on the full archival node versus whatever the node was the Vitalik uses. How many full archival nodes are there? How important are they? That I couldn't get my head around. Also, where is that directionally heading?

I'm always interested directionally, but it feels like the Ethereum blockchain is getting bigger and bigger, it's scary. Did I read somewhere like it's over a terabyte now, and if it becomes more popular it's going to become bigger and bigger? That feels like a bit of an unmanageable beast long term.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I'm not tracking it. I would imagine it's much bigger than one terabyte, but I don't even know. Yeah, it's definitely growing more. In Bitcoin you have constant efforts to try to make things grow at a slower pace, and in Ethereum it's the other way around, and it also depends on how you're going to count. Like the Ethereum 2.0 things, is that going to be considered part of that? Because they plan for that to grow much larger. So I don't know. The role of nodes is arguable as well.

Again, in Bitcoin, the reason you run a node is very specific; you want to know that your coins are real and you want to know that you're not getting coins that are fake. That's generally why people run nodes, and then there are levels to how extreme you want to be, because some people buy node hardware and that hardware ships with the current state of the chain, so they don't have to sync everything from day one and they start from a certain point, they trust the supplier to verify it correctly up to that point, and then they continue from there on their own.

Other people will want to sync the entire thing from day zero, from the genesis block, that's fine too. The point that Ethereum people will make is that it's a wasted effort. Why would you go back and verify everything? You can just ask five friends what the current state is today and start from there. Do you not trust your friends to give you the current state? How likely is it that so many people are going to lie to you about what the current state is? That's what they say, and there's point in that. The thing with Bitcoin is that it's relatively simple to verify everything from the genesis block.

So there's not a lot of reason not to do that. Maybe it will take you a day or two, but you're just putting a box on your desk anyway, just let it do its thing and then in a day to two it's ready, so why not remove that doubt? But with Ethereum it's really hard to do that, because there's so much... It's just really hard to do that. So they have plenty of reasons why not to. I don't know who's right, I don't know, this is different. I think that those kind of fights that go on for years, it's kind of silly to watch them at this point, because it's just people talking past each other.

Peter McCormack: Well, no-one's changing their mind.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, the Bitcoiners will say, "Well, it's not a full node, it's this node, it's that node," and it repeats itself for years. I don't know, what's the point? They don't care. It's like are we trying to convince other people that way, or are we trying to say, "Oh, we have cooler nodes?" What are we doing exactly, because that doesn't sound very convincing. The difference is interesting. So you explore the difference.

You say, "Well, Bitcoiners care about the supply and they care about that, and they want to make it easy." That's great. "Ethereum people don't care about that that much, they care about other things." Awesome. Now people can choose what interests them more. I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don't know what it's good for, but fine, other people like it, good for them. Those debates that are so weird like, "No, you're lying about what a full node is." Come on man, it's just a technical detail, it's not that important.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, sometimes I wonder why they care so much. It's like how much time are you going to spend in your life arguing about the typical differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, when you actually don't want to own it? So if you're trying to protect people, then why aren't you out there protecting people then? Why don't you go out there and do that fundamentally?

Is it just some kind of point scoring system? Again, I don't know, because I question how much responsibility of myself into knowing the differences and communicating the differences via the show. I have that with Ethereum more than anything else, because it's the other one, apart from fucking Ripple, it's the one I get asked the most by friends. Actually recently Cardano keeps coming up, ah, Jesus! I just wonder how much responsibility, what is it we should be... Or are you just like, "Look, these people who are in Ethereum, they know what they're doing, they know what they're playing with, they don't care?" 

Should we just leave them be, or is it that actually there's only a few that care and we should be encouraging the leadership to be at least being clear to other people? Because I think the Bitcoin community, we were very good with Lightning to say, "This is risky right now, this can get locked up you, can lose it, be careful. Be reckless, but be careful at the same time. Don't put more than a few dollars on there to play with." Perhaps, because we talked about this earlier, perhaps would it be better to encourage that kind of behaviour instead?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, so for Ethereum it's not really possible, because all of those experiments have to be huge, if it's not a lot of money it's just not an interesting experiment. So they can't really be very careful about that. With Lightning, Lightning is a payment system, it's mainly used for smaller payments, so it makes sense. For Ethereum it's not really possible. I think that in general I would say just live and let live. For me, I would troll Ethereum people all the time.

For me it was useful, because I was interested in Ethereum and that way people would approach me with information that otherwise would be very hard for me to just obtain that amount of information, because people say, "Well, Udi talks about Ethereum a lot," they would just continuously reach out to me with very good data and good information that I'm very happy to have, so that was useful for me. But I don't see that as something that helps protect people.

I don't see myself protector of the people, and I don't think that people should think of themselves as that, because people know what they're doing and if they don't, they'll learn. It's very hard to convince someone to not use Ethereum, and I don't know why you would do that. I don't think that it's fair to say that it's a scam, like on the base level of it as a scam, I don't think it's fair to say that.

Peter McCormack: Mr. Hodl would disagree. He would say it is.

Udi Wertheimer: Probably.

Peter McCormack: And the reason he would be giving is that it's a base scam, because it's pretending to be something it can't, and it's lying about its ability to be that. Again, I was trying to say, "Okay, objectively, what's it lying about trying to be and what can it do?" Again, it's an ability to transfer value. Well, it can do that. It might break in the future for whatever reason, scalability issue, but right now you can move value around in it, which he will say it's a scam, because it doesn't need a blockchain. Okay, I understand that argument, but we're talking about database design. 

There's nothing in the law that says you can't use this database design. Sometimes .NET might be preferable to PHP, but they use a different one. That's just a database design, so I'm trying to say like objectively why is it a scam? An actual reason it's a scam, and I've never been able to get to the root of it, I can find a bunch of shady behaviour and a bunch of kind confusing messages and kind of perhaps leading people on to believe a little bit of gaslighting, but an actual scam, I've really struggled to nail onto it.

Udi Wertheimer: I think that a problem that Ethereum faces and Bitcoin doesn't, is that Ethereum has known founders who are still around, and Bitcoin doesn't. So anything that those people say, and that's Vitalik but it's also a bunch of other people, anything that those people say is going to be analyzed and people will try to find what's the scammy angle there, whereas with Bitcoin all the known figures that exist, they can say whatever they want and the worst case you can say, "Well, they're not representative. They're just saying something."

So Ethereum, it's kind of in a sticky spot in that regard, and sometimes Vitalik is tweeting a lot, he's tweeting all day long, and sometimes he's saying things that are not correct. People who use Twitter a lot, sometimes they say bullshit, and you can kind of grab one of those things and say, "Well, Ethereum is a scam, because Vitalik said this thing once," which I don't know, it also feels a bit like a gotcha. Also you have ConsenSys, which is Joe Lubin's company, he's also an Ethereum co-founder and he's doing a lot of... He would call that evangelizing Ethereum.

Other people would call it shilling Ethereum, but whatever, and some of that is complete crap, like the notion that Ethereum has more Bitcoin usage than Bitcoin itself. They have those stupid charts where they say that this WBTC thing has more Bitcoin locked than Lightning, which means that Ethereum is the second layer of Bitcoin and it's just crap, because once you get into it, it doesn't make any sense at all. For example, because Lightning is being careful explicitly, and it's used for small payments, while the Ethereum stuff is just used for huge Ponzi schemes.

So obviously the Ethereum stuff will have more money in it, but still people use more money in Bitcoin on Coinbase than they do on Ethereum, so it's useless. Anyways, so there's a lot of that kind of unfair or incorrect advertising for Ethereum sometimes, and I think people do that with Bitcoin too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Udi Wertheimer: But the difference is with Bitcoin it's just people, just random people, and with Ethereum some of them, they are founders, so their statements seem more official in a way. So I think that's kind of a thing that the Ethereum will forever probably have to deal with.

Peter McCormack: I do also find sometimes maybe from the Bitcoin side is that, and I'm again I'm generalizing, but let's just say we for the sake of the argument, we Bitcoiners will attack every single possible angle we can, and then some of them they don't hold up. Like for example the pivots from world computer, it just feel like it's a waste of time or even, and this will piss some people off, but the pre-mine, right? I don't like the pre-mine, I don't like it at all.

But if you keep arguing about it, it's not going to change it. People aren't going to undo that part of it. It's happened, it's done now. I think it's just another thing that becomes pointless arguing about or even like with the DAO hack, again, yes, code is blah, blah, blah, blah, the rollback has happened, they're not going to re-roll it back. They're not going to undo the rollback. So some of those things I'm like, "What's the point in having those? Why not just focus right now? Focus right now on technically what is Ethereum? What is it trying to be? Can it do that? And therefore, is putting any money into Ethereum risky, and then therefore, how risky?"

I think you can very quickly come to some conclusions about if you invest in the right time in the market, like with Bitcoin, you might make some money if there's more people buying than selling, because the market goes up, and that's your risk. The serious question is, should you put money in there any other reason than being a short-term trader? Is there a long-term investment there? That's when you can get to the base of the technicals. I'm comfortable holding money in Bitcoin long-term, I'm comfortable to say, "I'm not going to move anything for 10 years." I've got a feeling it's going to continue to be secure, the developers will continue to build a very trusted safe system, I believe there will be a growing interest in it, I believe in 10 years it will be more valuable than it is today.

I believe it will exist, I don't see there's technical issues that it's going to face for it to exist. In 10 years perhaps there'll be a lot of usage, perhaps there will be increased costs in using the base chain, but hopefully my values increase at the same scale. Something like Ethereum, I'm like, "Is it an honest good reason to hold that for 10 years? And if not, what are the reasons?" No, because there's an issue with proof of stake, or that technically ETH 2.0 doesn't scale. I think if you focus on that, you give people who potentially are putting money into them, a lot better information about whether they should or they shouldn't. Does that make sense?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, it does make sense. Look at Ether as an investment and whether the investment makes sense or not, and this is what people are looking for. They're not looking for debates on small technical details. So yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense I think for Ethereum.

I'm notoriously long-term bearish on Ethereum, but I think that the people who are bullish on it, they're probably making the bet that currently something like Ethereum 2.0 would be so great that just everything in the tech world will migrate to it and be built on that and obviously if that happens, then Ether is probably a good investment. I think that's insane, I think that the idea that this could happen is batshit crazy.

Peter McCormack: Why though? If we had to get to the root of the arguments around this, and a couple of caveats, give me your shortest most least technical version of why you think the long-term prognosis for Ethereum is poor?

Udi Wertheimer: So I think if you look at what people actually build on things like Ethereum, it's always those short-term things. It's always a quick ICO thing to get rich quickly, a quick Ponzi scheme, a quick DeFi yielding field farming, whatever. It's almost always those very short-term things, which is just not how the rest of the world works. So when you want to build a social network, that's not what you want to build. 

When you want to build a phone, when you want to build anything, I mean that's not what you're looking for and Ethereum, it's just more difficult to use, more expensive, more whatever. Even after Ethereum 2.0 comes out, it's still going to be order of magnitudes more difficult than traditional web technologies or whatever. So why would you choose it? The only reason to choose it is if you want to pump something for a very short-term benefit, which is a great reason.

I'm not judging people who do that, that's a good reason. You want to make money fast, everyone wants that. But it's not what the entire world is going to be based upon, and I think people who think that are insane. It just doesn't provide any benefit, and real businesses who have real issues, they're not just going to add another issue on top just to make Ethereum people happy. Ethereum is an issue, it's a challenge, you need to hire a lot of developers who understand it, of which there aren't many. Why would you even get into it?

Peter McCormack: Sorry to interrupt you. So you're saying the problem here is that it's too difficult for developers, there's no real incentive for developers to build their applications, their long-term applications on it, as opposed to there being fundamental technical issues with itself with Ethereum that means it will itself collapse?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Or is it both?

Udi Wertheimer: So I don't know, I can't judge if Ethereum 2.0 is going to collapse or not, because we don't know what Ethereum 2.0 is yet and so until it exists and launches, who knows? I don't know, maybe it works incredibly well. But even if it does, I don't see why people would use it. I can see some reason, like if they want to build a short-term Ponzi, then they might use it and that's something, but I don't see the entire finance world transitioning to Ethereum. I think that's insane. I think thinking that is like...

The only people who think that are people who never tried any financial product in their lives usually. So I don't see that happening. But yeah, Ponzi schemes could be, sure. So maybe there's value in that. Maybe you could say, "Well, I think Ethereum could be the place where all Ponzi schemes go to, and I think there's value in there. Maybe I buy Ether, because I think that's going to be a growing sector, just Ponzi schemes." Maybe. If that's your thesis, that might be fine.

Peter McCormack: Have you got any of your own blind spots with this? Are there any areas where you question yourself and you're like, "Come on Udi, maybe it's good for this. Maybe I missed..." Do you ever question that?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, look, you can't ignore the fact that usage right now is growing. It is. So I used to say, "Well, why would anyone even use those apps when there are other apps that exist?" And clearly people are using them, they're paying high fees for them, so clearly they want to and I think that now there's a reason for that and I think that the reason that I might have missed is interesting, which is that with Ethereum you can very quickly...

Again it's kind of the Ponzi dynamics that are driving the current boom, but you couldn't really do that with traditional exchanges as easily. In 2018 there was a lot of, especially in China, in Asia, there was this liquidity mining boom going on with a lot of exchanges did things very similar to what people are doing in DeFi now, which they would basically pay people to create liquidity, and that liquidity would in turn make those look more popular. Because they would go up on CoinMarketCap, for example, because they would have more volume, because they were paying people for volume and basically that's what's going on in DeFi now.

So people are being paid to provide liquidity, to make the numbers look bigger, the numbers look bigger so more people buy the underlying coin, the price of the coin goes up. So now they can pay more money for people who mine liquidity. Now it's very obvious how this ends. It has to end and eventually retail can't buy any more of those coins, because they ran out of money. There's no way around that, and when that happens the whole thing crumbles down and then there's a question, "Well, did you manage to use the time to build a brand around your curve finance, or whatever that you manage to you create some awareness?

Are people are in your community now, are they're going to stick even after the Ponzi element collapses?" That's possible, and you saw that with the Asian liquidity mining exchanges as well. Some of them disappeared immediately as they collapsed, some of them stuck around because just people realize they have interesting features or whatever. But when you want to build a liquidity mining exchange, it's going to take a while, you're going to have to get compliance in order and whatever. Even if it's in Asia, it's not easy, and with Ethereum you take the code, you fork it, you publish it, and you don't necessarily have to show your face, which is a big plus when you're doing a Ponzi.

Peter McCormack: Can't get away from the Ponzi. I do feel like a philosophy would kind of help. Again, I bring it up and I talked to Vitalik about it, and I kind of felt like he agreed. I felt like that was a weak spot of his during it, and I could see him kind of like question it during it and I wonder if it's impossible for them to have a philosophy, because if you wrote the philosophy now, it's kind of like, move fast break things, we just want to build a test environment for testing things out. I think in that philosophy you have to say, "Look, this is risky, you can lose your money."

So no one's really going to want to hang their hat on that, therefore the only other option is to go more conservative, but then it's not a conservative platform. So it needs a philosophy, but I don't even know how it can come up with one.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I don't know either. I think in the recent DeFi boom, he's being fairly cautious, I think. He repeatedly tells people that, A, it's risky, B, it's just musical chairs. So if you don't understand the rules of the game, you probably shouldn't play it, because you're the fish. But he's not being extremely loud about it. It's not like he is running all over the place saying, "People no, stay away." He's just mentioning it, which it's probably fair.

Peter McCormack: Well, cool... Look, I know people are going to listen to this and I think if they're like a hardcore Bitcoiner, they're going to be a little bit like, "You're not tough enough on Ethereum, it's bullshit, it's a scam, blah, blah, blah." Then if they're like an ETH head, they're going to be like, "You don't understand it." They're going to be triggered, blah, blah, blah. "It's not just Ponzi, blah, blah, blah." It's that unwinnable... It's very easy to win when you pick a side, right? It's like if you don't care about the U.S. election, you're like, "Trump's a moron." If you slag Trump off, they're like, "Oh, you're left-wing, you're a Biden supporter."

No, you're not, I don't like either of them. But I feel like sometimes it's easier just to pick a side and just go, "Fuck you," to the other side. But I struggle with that, because I try and find the nuance, and I feel like you've confirmed things for me, and I feel happy with my observations. I still have no interest in Ethereum. I would never invest in it, but I also stand by the fact that if I had to use it for certain things, then maybe I would. But it I would be very specific about what those cases are. Like I said, if you said, "Pete, send me $1,000 of USDC, or Tether over", like I don't care about, I'd happily do that. But yeah, cool man. Listen, appreciate your time dude!

Udi Wertheimer: For sure.

Peter McCormack: How do you think this plays out?

Udi Wertheimer: Last thing I want to say is that Ethereum isn't a scam, just to troll everyone listening.

Peter McCormack: Well, that will trigger people. But again, I come back to that point, it's like people can be scammers and ideas can be scams. I don't see how a blockchain itself is a scam, I think it's the usage of it. A scam is like a human action, a scam is like subjectively is what humans have decided is a scam, but a blockchain isn't subjective. So I've always felt that's not a useful thing to say.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, it doesn't further any debate, that's for sure.

Peter McCormack: All right, cool man. What are you working on anyway dude? Anything interesting?

Udi Wertheimer: Well, everyone should come to Reckless VR, that's for sure. We have VR meetups every weekend. The only way to go to a conference these days is to put a VR headset on.

Peter McCormack: Have you got to log in through Facebook?

Udi Wertheimer: Only if you get a Facebook headset. There are a lot of other manufacturers, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, do you know what? I haven't been able to come back on, because I took my VR up to my brothers, because I wanted to show him the Walk the Plank. I don't know if you saw me push him off it?

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, I did.

Peter McCormack: But I left the charger there, so I haven't had my charger for nearly two months. So I've got no charger and as soon as I get it back, I'll be back in. But congratulations on what you've done there, you've really built something pretty cool, right? It's looking like a good audience.

Udi Wertheimer: Yeah, it's a lot of fun and I was surprised that people are geeky enough and nerdy enough like me, to both be into Bitcoin and VR, that's quite the niche, but there is someone.

Peter McCormack: Well, keep crushing that man. I'll share that in the show notes to make sure people go. Look, appreciate your time man. People don't know I'm always picking your brain in the background, like confirming my thoughts. I appreciate your time and everything you've helped me with man, and all the best. I'm sure I'll see you soon dude.

Udi Wertheimer: For sure! Thanks for having me.