WBD259 Audio Transcription

Does Bitcoin Have Gatekeepers? With Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Interview date: Friday 11th September

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos. 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 Bitcoin Speaker, Author & Educator; Andreas M. Antonopoulos. We discuss toxicity in the Bitcoin community, the steps to better Bitcoin privacy and what an xPub is.

“If this system only works if everybody adopts it at the highest level of financial sovereignty and highest level of technical skill and highest level of ideological purity… it’s not going to work.”

— Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Andreas, good to see you again, man, how are you?

Andreas Antonopoulos: I'm doing great.  Thank you so much for having me on the show again, I'm really excited.

Peter McCormack: Well, this was actually your idea, this one, dealing with xPub-gate.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, I think I did, I invited myself; how rude!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's absolutely fine.  So, Xpub was a really interesting thing, because I do sometimes trigger some of the more technical people, or some of the more hardcore Bitcoin people, when I kind of petulantly refuse to learn certain things, or I just ask certain questions.  And specifically with xPub, actually in that scenario I didn't; I just saw a conversation, "Oh, what's an xPub?"  And, this seemed to kick off a massive shit‑storm, because there was this expectation that I should know this; that people believe, because I have a Bitcoin podcast, I should know this.  And, I don't know, I was a bit taken back.  What did you make of it all?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Well, I thought it was both silly, on its face, and also very, very counterproductive for the broader cause, which is to help more people understand, learn and adopt this technology.  So, silly on its face because, honestly, I'm quite tired of all of the litmus tests and surety tests and internal circular firing squad nonsense that happens in the Bitcoin communities.  People gatekeep this community and if you're not technical enough according to some arbitrary standard, if you're not maximalist enough, if you're not meat-eating enough, if you're not woke enough, then you're not a real bitcoiner, and so this is the whole "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

And, not only is that silly, because this is a neutral technology that shouldn't require some kind of purity test in order to be entered into the halls; it's almost like a hazing ritual and I find that not only silly, but I think it is counterproductive to the extreme.  I'd even go as far as calling it toxic.  It creates a toxic climate in which people who are unsure of details, people who do not necessarily fit a certain profile or idea of what a Bitcoin person, or a cryptocurrency person, or a blockchain person should be, find that it's a hostile environment in which if they speak up, they get ridiculed or they get told they're not a real bitcoiner.  It's a very unwelcoming environment and, you know, who elected these gatekeepers?  I sure as hell didn't.  I very much dislike that attitude.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  The toxicity thing's interesting because the term itself has become, certainly amongst some people, a badge of honour and there's a certain in‑crowd where you have to be toxic to be part of that, and I kind of think I know where it comes from.  A certain inflexion point might be when you take a look at what happened with SegWit2x; that scenario, there were a lot of people very concerned with the potential hijacking of Bitcoin.  And, if you agree with them, which I do and I'm glad what happened happened, is that the conservative protection of the Bitcoin protocol now has seem to radicalised, and I'll probably get criticised for using that point, but has radicalised people to the point where they now seem to harass people on other issues which are not related to Bitcoin.

So for example, if you show any form of statism, that you believe in the state, that becomes a point where you might get harassed; whereas, I think not everybody who's going to come into Bitcoin is going to be an anarcho-capitalist.  Some people just believe in the state; they just want a better state.  But, this certain kind of group think around that you must be anarcho-capitalist, there must be full destruction state, you must fully adopt this to become a bitcoiner, I think is counterproductive to the expansion of Bitcoin; while, at the same time, I do support and agree with the conservative protection of the protocol.  But, I separate the two.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes, and there's multiple levels to the protection of the protocol.  So, consensus exists with multiple levels: there's protocol consensus, and that has to do with technical measures taken to not deviate from the protocol, so that's things like refusing to run the software client that implements bigger blocks, or even going one step further, implementing a user-activated soft fork client to basically embargo minors who don't activate SegWit.  Those are technical measures.

And then there's social consensus, which is creating a set of principles that the community broadly agrees on, and then vigorously defending these through narrative, through speech, through the exchange of ideas; and I think that's valid too, as long as you keep it focussed on the principles of consensus.  I think having certain expectations, that people who say they believe in Bitcoin can actually articulate or enumerate which principles make what they believe in actually Bitcoin and not something else, I think that's fair.  You should be able to say, well if you don't believe that there should always be a 21 million coin limit, then you don't really believe in Bitcoin, because that's a defining principle.

And the problem is, there's no clear line.  So, you can keep expanding the set of principles that you have to defend, and at some point you cross over into the realm of the absurd where you bundle a whole bunch of political, ideological opinions that you strongly identify, that form a world view, and you associate all of those in an exclusionary manner with what is Bitcoin, and then gatekeep anybody who's not in total agreement across all of those points.  At that point, it becomes counterproductive and the question is, where do you draw the line?  Which principles are indeed sacrosanct, and which principles are simply a litmus test that you can use to continuously elevate the degree of purity that you expect from new adherents or people joining. 

There's a big danger to that and in fact, we can see that historically in a whole bunch of social movements.  There's the revolution, then there's the counterrevolution and the purge.  So, you know, first you have the French Revolution and then you have people like Robespierre trying to continuously elevate the level of purity of adherence to the revolutionary principles, which means that more and more people get their heads chopped off because they weren't sufficiently pure, because they are traitors to the original principles of the revolution.  We saw that in the French Revolution; we saw that in the Russian Revolution; we even saw that in the American Revolution. 

So, this is a feature of social movements and it's a very dangerous feature, because it represents the beginning of the downfall of those social movements.  They go from social movements that have principles, to social movements that became a dictatorship of principles, of a narrowing and narrowing and narrowing cadre.  And course, the people within that circle of purism have to be absolute hypocrites, because the tests get so hard that eventually no one can pass them unless they're lying, right?  So, you end up with the only people who can really claim purity being the greatest hypocrites of all, because they're lying so hard so as to be able to check all the boxes, and they're constantly looking for traitors in the midst.  It's a toxic, cultural phenomenon. 

I hope we don't go there in Bitcoin and certainly gatekeeping, how much technical knowledge an end-user, commentator, educator, podcaster should have certainly seems to me past that line.  That's not defending the principle of Bitcoin; that's now gatekeeping so as to separate the purist from the non-purist.  That's tribalism, straight-up tribalism, and it's toxic.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it takes me to the point where I start thinking about, you know, my friends know what I do for a living; if I go down to the pub and they're like, "So, what's the deal with this Bitcoin thing, people?"

Andreas Antonopoulos: Don't you mean the xPub?!

Peter McCormack: Well, xPub now we're in lockdown so we can't go to them!  But, you know, if I'm sat down and they're like, "Pete, what's this Bitcoin thing?" and I can say, "Well, it is a form of digital gold; it is censorship-resistant money; you can send it, nobody can stop you; it's trustless; and because of the 21 million fixed limit, it hopefully can be a good hedge against inflation", I can pretty much try and convince them.  But, if I start saying, "Well, it's the best money we've ever had; it is ultimately a chance to bring down the state and remove the government, but with that you're probably going to have to start arming yourselves just to protect yourselves, and then potentially you might end up living in a citadel"; that kind of Bitcoin dystopian future is a very tricky one to try and sell to people, and ultimately I think it's quite off-putting. 

Because like I said, there are plenty of people that have a valid dislike for the state, and I understand that.  At the same time, I'm still not entirely in that scenario where I believe that a stateless solution would ultimately be a better scenario.  I sometimes think, would it actually be a breakdown of certain aspects of civilised society?  Yes we have liberty, but does it end up becoming a more dangerous society?  And, I see valid arguments on both sides.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Do you have to go full Atlas Shrugged in order to adopt Bitcoin?  I think ultimately, that's the question.  And certainly a lot of people think you do.  I've never thought that's the case; in fact, I think there's a way to present the appeal of Bitcoin as a form of hard money, as a form of independent technocratic money, in a way that appeals to left libertarians and perhaps even leftists, not autocratic communists, but people who are opposed to kleptocratic, monopolistic, broken-down capitalism.  And you're like, "Listen, the banks are wrecking everything; here's how you take away power without going to autocratic communism, by maintaining principles of free market and transparency.  This also works as anti-monopolistic, anti-corruption money".  I think there's a very good argument to be made there, and I think it's a shame that that's beyond the pale for some people, which then makes it difficult to make that argument.

But again, that's just my personal opinion, nobody has to follow that or agree with me on that.  I just wish we'd noticed that the crossfire from the circular firing squad is not only turning people against us, but also it is, ironically in many ways, many of the things that these same people claim to be abhorrent.  This is cancel culture; this is political correctness; this is ideological purity; this is not respecting the marketplace of ideas.  This is an attempt to reduce the range of expression, to counter arguments, not with better arguments, but with silencing of the people who are making those arguments; and, this is snowflake behaviour.  Ironically, this is trying to turn Bitcoin into a safe space where you can't have a conversation about …  And it's also saying that Bitcoin needs defending, because the market can't decide on its own.

Peter McCormack: I'm with you.  I think one of the tricky things, and it is something I wrestle with, I think some of the conflict comes from obviously, there's a certain portion of bitcoiners who don't particularly like my show and they prefer other shows, and there's some other amazing shows out there that do probably a significantly better job than I do on the technical discussions.  And, my use case and use of Bitcoin is very simple, Andreas. 

From when I first got in, I very quickly moved to a hardware wallet, and I backed up my private key, and that was it.  I would buy Bitcoin, send it to my hardware wallet and then occasionally, I would send Bitcoin out from my hardware wallet, and that's all I ever did.  And I used to see all these conversations about coin selection and CoinJoin and things and I used to think, that's just not for me, it's just too complicated, I'm not going to bother with that.  And I think some of the conflict comes because the show, I didn't expect the show to do well, but because there's a good portion of people listening to it, there's this expectation that I have this responsibility to be a, let's say, "good bitcoiner", to be somebody who understands issues of privacy, who does run Taurus, etc.

Andreas Antonopoulos: But, the basic concept behind the marketplace of ideas is, if you think you can be a better bitcoiner than Peter and teach this better to newbies, go make your own fucking show!  If it's that easy, and it's not as both of us know because we actually have to do it, this criticism comes, for the most part, from people who sit on the sidelines and don't actually do any of the work.  Their perfect imaginary show is always better than the actual show you produce.  Their perfect imaginary book is always better than the book I actually published and I got the same criticism many, many times.  So, the best answer to all of this is to ignore them. 

But, I'd like to go back to this idea that your technical understanding and skillset in Bitcoin has to be above a certain bar for you to be considered a real bitcoiner, or a true bitcoiner.  And, I really like this concept that was introduced by my co-host on the Let's Talk Bitcoin show, Stephanie Murphy, and she talked about the staircase of financial sovereignty.  The bottom level is where you are someone who's never considered any of these topics, right, so you are basically a fiat wage slave.  Step 1 is being interested in cryptocurrency.  Step 2 is acquiring some.  Now, how are you going to acquire it?  Most likely through a centralised KYC exchange, and you're going to put it in a custodial wallet.  And that is unacceptably non-bitcoiner. 

Well, no.  In the staircase of self-sovereignty, that's step 2 of the staircase, and you're already two steps above, and you've left behind the fiat wage slave mentality.  You understand the idea; you find that idea appealing; and you have taken action to move towards that idea.  That action isn't perfect and it's not complete, but at that point you shouldn't be told, "You're doing it wrong".  You should be told, "You're doing it right, congratulations; now, let me show you the next three steps.  Get comfortable where you are and I've got more to show you, and you can take the next step when you're ready"; you should encourage that.

Peter McCormack:  Sorry, Andreas, let me just throw something in there.  So, I actually wrote down my steps here, it's funny you should say that.  I think what I was wrestling with is that I always want to keep my position as somebody who is almost like a newbie, who empathises with the experience, and also want to challenge ideas that I don't think people think through enough.  So, for example, everything that came out with regards to a node; I understand how important nodes are, I really do; and I think everyone should, and I do, use a node now. 

But at the time previously, I said most people aren't going to, and I stood by that despite the criticism, because I actually stand by that as an issue and I think it's more important to defend the idea that the vast majority of people won't be bothered with that, than join the train and say, "No, everyone should".  Because, if I'm right and the vast majority of people won't, then at least we can deal with that as an issue, we can say, "Okay, what does that mean; what does that mean for the network; what does that mean for Bitcoin itself?"  I kind of keep myself in that place.

Andreas Antonopoulos: If this system only works if everybody adopts it at the highest level of financial sovereignty and highest level of technical skill and highest level of ideological purity, if that's what it takes for this system to work on a global scale, it's not going to work because most people won't.  Most people won't protect their privacy; most people won't go beyond the very first steps.  Can people take some steps up this; and can we live with a system where a small minority go all the way to the top of the staircase and they become the backbone that keeps this system open and free and usable and sovereign and robust for everybody else, assuming the majority won't?  They won't run a node; maybe they'll never leave a custodial exchange.  If they do, they won't run privacy software, they won't use CoinJoins. 

There are all kinds of things, especially at first, unless these things become automatic, invisible, default, you know, where it's actually harder not to do it the right way, then most people won't.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Well, I've gone one step further, so I'm one further step up the staircase.  So, I do have my Bitcoin now in a multisig, geographically distributed set of keys, and I know I'm doxing my own process there, but I'm actually quite comfortable with that.  It would be very difficult for somebody knowing this to actually come and steal my Bitcoin now, rather than knowing I have a hardware wallet.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Right.  That's a principle of: security by obscurity is not security.  So, you should be able to reveal your security plan and it should be equally robust as if you didn't because if your plan is the security best practice, then people can simply assume that that's your plan, and it should still be secure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well that's the point I'm at now and I'm kind of happy with this one.   Prior to doing my interview with Johnny Levin from Chainalysis, I actually watched one of your presentations on the importance of privacy and I was like, okay, I get it, I fully understand why this is important.  Also, going back and reading some of David Chaum's writings with regard to privacy, again I get it; why it's so important for society.  Every time I've looked at how I achieve perfect privacy with Bitcoin, I'm just like, I don't think I can do that.  I possibly can, but the amount of effort that's going to require, I don't see the trade-off for me.  Now, that would trigger some people; they'd say, "You should, you have a responsibility".  But actually, I want privacy to be something that's provided for me, it's kind of abstracted away, it just happens.

Andreas Antonopoulos: That's a pragmatic approach.  We cannot expect privacy in Bitcoin to work unless and until it's implemented so deeply in the protocol that you don't have to think; and in fact, the option of doing things without privacy is the hard option.  Just like today, we're using SSL in our browser right now, not because we wanted to, not because we chose, but because it would probably take us 30 minutes of tinkering with configuration to turn it off and then, this particular website probably wouldn't work anyway.

Peter McCormack: Very true.  Okay, so what is though, from your perspective, everything you know and everything you've written about, what do you think my next step is on the ladder?  Where do you think, "Do you know what, Pete, this is something you should look at"?

Andreas Antonopoulos: That depends.  So first of all, I think the bar on a personal level can keep rising, if you want, or you can reach a point of stasis where you are comfortable with the outcome and for the use case that you are using this for, it's good enough.  You may have already reached a point where there's no real benefit to moving further up for you individually, although there might be a broader network benefit; but in a system that is decentralised, that is driven by individualised incentives, we have to accept the fact that the moment it becomes no longer incrementally useful for the individual, that individual will stop progressing along that path; do you see what I'm saying, Peter?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do.

Andreas Antonopoulos: You're not going to do it for the good of the network if you're not incentivised to do it for the good of Peter, and this system is kind of designed to make sure that you do things because they're good for Peter; that's one of the essential aspects of this, is to align the individual incentive so that you do these things.  And, there may be a point at which it is no longer significantly better for you to do this and in fact, it might be just complex enough to take the next step that it's not worth doing.

The question is, can we continually raise the bar across the whole system, protocol level, design, user interface, so that the level at which it becomes both beneficial and easy for you to do is higher over time, so we can progress more people up the staircase?  I think we can, and I think that should be the conversation.  If you're not going further up the staircase, that's not your fault, and system design shouldn't be, "Well you're not motivated enough, you're not virtuous enough, you're not responsible enough, you're not praying hard enough to get the benefits of this system"; no.  The system should keep making it easier and easier for more people to just stumble their way up that staircase, otherwise it's not good system design.

Peter McCormack: We should probably say here, and something I reiterate, this to me isn't a criticism of people who have been working and building on Bitcoin.  I think people have done amazing work.  Sometimes people will say, "Oh, it's a bit disrespectful", or, "You should learn to code", or, "What are you contributing?  You could become a contributor".  No, I definitely can't; I don't have that skillset and I'm not going to develop that skillset, because my skillset is in content creation.  But, when I say these things, it's no disrespect to the work people are doing; I'm just saying this is the level I'm happy at and I accept my own personal trade-offs.

Andreas Antonopoulos: And, you're already more motivated than the average person.  So, we can't solve this problem by making you individually more motivated to do this.  We have to look at the system design to lower the level of difficulty for everyone so that, even lesser levels of motivation push people to adopt greater levels of privacy, greater levels of involvement in the system.  This is not something you solve by browbeating each individual in turn, until you get mass adoptions from mass browbeating.  And, claiming that of course the collapse of the broader economy and currency, when all other economies become Sudan, then everybody will need to do these things, so you'd better start early, cupcake, is not a plan.  I don't want to have to see mass adoption in the context of Mad Max society.

What we need to be thinking about is, how do we make each transition, each step, easier and easier and easier?  Part of that is teaching people the necessary terminology and the concepts in as simple a way as possible, so that they can be immediately grasped.  And part of that is making the system hide more and more of that complexity behind default settings that are by default secure, by default private, that don't require any effort.  That's the nature of technology development and innovation and trying to rush it along, you can't make people change faster than they're comfortable, and you can't rush along the development of technology.

So, simply saying, "You haven't progressed enough because you're not intellectually pure enough to see where we're going", what that reveals in my mind is a lack of confidence in the value of the technology without extreme ideological commitment.  And I think Bitcoin is a technology that can be adopted and can progress and can grow without requiring extreme ideological commitments; and if it does, we're doing it wrong.

Peter McCormack: One thing I would just add in there, that I would be interested to get your perspective on, because I always thought this; I always thought UX needs to be better, it needs to be simpler, and I listened to a really good interview that I think Marty Bent did with Janine, and one of the things Janine said that did actually make me question my thinking about this, she said, "If you make UX too easy, you might make people a little bit careless with certain issues.  We are self-sovereign here, we are responsible for our private keys, we are responsible for our money; a stupid mistake can lead to you being compromised or losing your Bitcoin and in making it too easy, you could potentially lead people to making those mistakes".  I did feel that was a fair point.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes.  That's true in the case where the abstraction is not a good metaphor for what's actually happening, so the intuitive action leads to unintuitive results.  That's bad design, it's bad abstraction.  This goes back to a fundamental engineering concept called "fail-safe" and people haven't usually heard that term and they haven't really thought about what that means.  It has a very specific meaning; it's part of a number of terms.  So, fail-safe is the one you've heard; you've probably never heard, "fail-open", "fail-close" and "fail-unsafe", which are kind of the cousins of that one.

Fail-safe means a system where, when it fails, the outcome is safe.  So, that would describe a nuclear reactor that if it overheats, shuts down on its own.  The failure mode itself triggers the safe outcome, for example, because the motor fails; well, if the motor fails, then the lead rods simply drop through gravity.  They have no choice but to drop through gravity.  They are held up when the motor's working; if the motor fails, they just descend through gravity and so the reactor shuts down.  Fail to safe.

You have things like fail-open.  You see that, you're from the UK, you know this, fire doors in the UK.  That's something I notice immediately.  Systems in the UK are designed to fail-open in the case of a fire.  So, if a fire happens, the doors swing open because an electrical circuit gets cut and then, mechanical springs push the doors open and they have no choice but to push open.  They have to be physically held in the closed position, or they fail-open so that people can get out.

So, with security design, these concepts are really important.  Our systems should be fail-safe.  If the security mechanism you have in place fails, that should result in your money becoming safe.  And, we can describe that in Bitcoin.  One example would be, if you don't take an action by a specific time-lock, then the only address that the Bitcoin can be sent to is a whitelisted address that you've specified in advance; that's an example of a fail-safe system.

So, our abstractions, our designs, our technology engineering should use these concepts because you can't assume that things will go well, or that people will exercise caution, or that knowledge and skills will be complete and adequate for a failure condition.  And, we don't generally design computer systems like that.  That's something we see more in product design and in system engineering in the real world.  But, we can design software like that and in fact, cryptography is one of the domains where we can more easily design systems like that.  So, that's a challenge for designers; that's not a challenge for the audience to rise to the level of my magical thinking; it's the challenge for designers to bring their designs down to within the grasp of the average person who isn't willing to change radically.

And, there will be always be a number of people who, through a necessity or ideology, are going to go the extra mile, are going to study harder, go on a steeper learning curve and achieve greater things.  But, you can't build adoption on that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because I have this feeling the majority of people I know want Bitcoin for a couple of purposes: they just want to speculate because they believe that Bitcoin will continue to grow, more people will adopt it and they want to see the upside; and then, a similar reason is I have a lot of friends who are nervous about the economy and they're nervous about inflation, because they keep getting told.

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, it's a hedge?

Peter McCormack: So, it's a hedge.  I don't have many friends who are talking to me about saying, "I really need to have private transactions and I really don't want the government looking at what I'm doing".  If you offered it to them, they would obviously want it; but, these are the same people who've been told time and time again what Facebook is doing with their data, and still have accounts with them; they still have accounts with them.  And, I think there is sadly, a large majority of people who just don't care about these things that we, maybe, in Bitcoin care about.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Well, that's a luxury; that's an absolute luxury.  And of course, if your government is not actively snatching people with vans and disappearing them in the night, as is currently happening in Belarus, or a whole host of totalitarian countries; but, your adoption model, your mainstream adoption model for Bitcoin can't be, everywhere becomes Venezuela therefore everyone needs to take these things seriously, first of all because we hope that that's not the case, and second because that really limits the success scenarios for this technology.  You're saying, only if all of these conditions play out precisely do you end up in that scenario of the, you know, Atlas Shrugged type of bitcoinisation, we all live in Venezuela; no, that's not the model to mainstream adoption.

The model to mainstream adoption is much more mixed, it's much more nuanced, it involves a whole bunch of people who just have Coinbase accounts and are using it just as a speculative hedge against inflation; a whole bunch of bankers trying to chase yield and not giving a shit about any of our ideology; a whole bunch of people in totalitarian countries who have found that permissionless is the only system that works so therefore they have to use it; and everything in between.  

And, that mishmash of incentives and skill levels gets us to adoption, while we continuously improve the design, the engineering, the user interface to make the number of people who can easily transition into a system like this bigger.  That's always been my opinion and that means, honestly, being humble about what you can and what you can't teach, what you can and what you can't learn, and not thinking that one skillset beats all other skillsets.  If everybody needs to learn how to code; great, that's a dead end.  If the only contribution you can make is by coding; that's a dead end too.

So, instead of thinking about creating narrower and narrower conditions which lead to dead ends, what we should be thinking is exactly the opposite: how can we make this as broadly appealing as possible?  That doesn't mean throwing away the principles, because that's pointless, right?  And, that's the other side of this, which is the people who want mainstream adoption by complete compromise and capitulation.  Yeah, we'll get mainstream adoption as long as we apply KYC AML at the protocol level and give all of the keys to a central bank, yeah, you've got mainstream adoption, but not for Bitcoin, for George Orwell coin; and, nobody really needed that.  Although in fact, Facebook is building one and so you're not going to be able to compete with them; they have better marketing.

You need to say, "What are the core principles that we have to defend, and what are the non-core principles that we have to engineer away the necessity of applying them, right?"

Peter McCormack: So, next step on the staircase, because like I say, I'm very comfortable that my long-term Bitcoin cold storage is wrapped up in a multisig, keys are geographically distributed, it's pretty locked down.  For me personally to move any coins is very hard; it takes a lot of effort and a lot of planning; I'm very comfortable with that.  But, the next stage I'm kind of feeling that I need to get to, and that I want, is that I want to start transacting a bit more with Bitcoin.  I want to accept it a bit more for what I do in some of the work I do, and what I am worried about is that I am leaving this trail behind on the blockchain that people can track everything I've done.  I'm not fully aware what my addresses mean, like what is that telling people?  That is definitely the next step I'd like to take and I don't feel I can do that without learning a bit more.  Does that feel like that natural next step?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, I think so.  So, being able to apply privacy-enabling technologies of different types in order to be able to transact more often, without creating Venmo, without creating a public and obvious trail of everything you're doing, and that's not easy, it's not at all.  Part of this of course is also defining your threat model.  So, people look at this privacy and security as if it's a binary.  If I can't defend against a targeted black bag operation by the NSA funded at $1 billion, there's no point in doing any of it.  Because, obviously I can't, right?  If "They", the mythical They, the scariest They you can imagine, put their quantum computers of $1 billion and they're in Operation Fuck Peter in the most incredible way possible, through the use of blockchain analytics, there's nothing you can do about that.  You don't have the means, the budget, the technical expertise, the operational ability to do that.

But, that doesn't mean you give up.  And in order to take the next steps in privacy, you have to accept that doing a little is better than doing nothing, even if it's not doing enough; does that make sense?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, let's start modelling.  It's the same thing with wearing masks during a pandemic.  Does it stop?  No.  But, we're playing probabilities here across thousands of instances of risk all in a row, right?  So, if I increase the probability of success, decrease the probability of failure, at each step of the way over a thousand steps, the end result is measurable, the difference is measurable.  Even if I only took a tiny, tiny step, it compounds.  Risk compounds, and that means that you can take measures to have an impact without being 100%.  And, you don't give up just because you can't do 100%.

So, how do you go to the next level?  Well, first of all, one thing I recommend is having different tiers of crypto.  You have your cold storage, you have your warm storage and you have your hot wallet; and, treating those as completely distinct, trying not to move too much between them.  And, your cold storage takes you months to get to, plane tickets, whatever else.  Your warm storage; to me, warm storage is what I use to run basic operations for my companies, so that's payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, buying equipment, paying contractors, etc.  That's a single key hardware wallet.  So, I use a hardware wallet, it's a multicurrency hardware wallet, and I use that to pay my employees and stuff like that.

There's only so much privacy I can do on that, because it involves a lot of touch points with a lot of people with varying privacy profiles.  And, the privacy I'm trying to achieve is to make it difficult for a medium well-funded, medium well-motivated adversary, as we'd call them in information security, to be able to casually reveal what my payroll is, or who my employees and contractors are.  And, I'm relatively confident that I've achieved that.  If you have $5,000 to spend with a private investigator who is a specialist in blockchain analytics, and you have a bit of information about my operation, you still won't be able to get that much out of it.  If you have $500,000 to spend and access to FBI resources, or the resources of internet service providers, sure; it's going to be trivial, it's going to be transparent, you're going to break through.  If you can buy a Chainalysis account with unlimited access, you're going to break through this. 

So, I've calibrated it for that level, because what I'm protecting is not state level secrets; it's the privacy of myself and my employees.  And again, what am I comparing this to?  Better than banking.  That's the goal, right?  It doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be better than banking.  And in fact, banking is a lot easier to track, surveil and breach the privacy.

And then I have a hot wallet, and my hot wallet is like cash.  And this is something where I'll interact with complete strangers and some of those strangers will have bad intentions.  So, let's say I'm donating Bitcoin to someone at a meet-up; I don't know who they are.  Or, maybe someone comes up to me and says, "Can you sell me $10 of Bitcoin at a meet-up; I just want to play around with it?"  Sure, I'll do that.  I'm going to use a vanity address for that.  Everybody knows it's me; I don't care.

So, I've calibrated my privacy for three different tiers; I've calibrated my security level for three different tiers; my hot wallet is going to be on a smart phone, it has a PIN, that's about it, not very much security there.  And, because of that, I won't put more than $400 or $500 on there, no more than I would ever carry in a physical wallet in my back pocket.  In my company account, yeah, by necessity I'm going to have a few thousand dollars because I need to run a business and payroll is more than that.  And, everything else is in cold storage.

And so, creating tiers for security, tiers for privacy, tiers for risk, and then being clear about who you're protection against and accepting that it's never going to be 100%, but it's worth making the effort anyway; does that make sense?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So that's making me think, okay, so what are my risks here, Andreas?  If I'm running my long-term cold storage, but I also have a warm storage, which is my invoicing and payments, if I wanted to move say an excess of funds in my warm wallet, because I've had a couple of good months, and I want to put that into cold storage, what are my risks of moving Bitcoin between the two?  As somebody who's not knowledgeable about coins and how people trade on the blockchain, am I suddenly exposing my cold storage to somebody?  What's going on there; what do I not understand?

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, yes you are, in a way.  So, one of the things you have to carefully consider there, and this is probably the first step on the privacy staircase, and that is address reuse.  So, most of the information we leak in Bitcoin is through address reuse.  The way companies get around the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin, where you don't have names of people but you have Bitcoin addresses, is to try to correlate Bitcoin addresses by seeing when they occurred together in a transaction, and then try to de-anonymise Bitcoin addresses by seeing when they touch a system that collects identity information.

So, if you originate Bitcoin from an exchange that has your ID, if you send Bitcoin to a merchant that is going to send you a T-shirt to your name and address, those types of activities will de-anonymise those specific addresses.  When those addresses touch other addresses, by being associated in a transaction, then you have correlated them.  And by correlating them, someone can draw inferences.  These are not certainties; these are probabilities.  That's how these analytics companies work.

So they can say, for example, okay, we know that on Coinbase, this withdrawal happened from Peter's account; Coinbase gave us that information.  Or any of the other exchanges, they all do it.  Now, we then see that later on, Peter sent Bitcoin from this address to another address and also, from these three other Bitcoin addresses that we previously didn't know belonged to Peter, but they were all signed for in the same transaction.  We can reasonably assume that all three of those addresses belong to Peter.  If one of the inputs belongs to Peter and this transaction doesn't look like a CoinJoin, we can assume that all of the inputs belong to Peter, therefore we can now track where all of these other inputs came from and assume that they were also belonging to Peter, or paying Peter.

Now, if you use that to pay your cold storage, the address that lands in cold storage can now be linked to Peter; and if then you spend out of cold storage and bunch together a bunch of addresses, and one of them has been linked to you, then all of the other addresses that are spent on that transaction are linked to you, etc.  So, in information security, and specifically in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency blockchain security, let's say, we call that "taint", which makes every 13-year old in the room chuckle because it means something very different among adults.

So, taint, you can think of it in epidemiological terms.  When addresses touch, they spread the infection of loss of privacy between them, right, and you have to think of contact tracing, right, so we're contact tracing addresses.  And, that's why it's very difficult to make hard lines between these things.  One way to do that is to use mixers, so that's why mixers are popular.  So, before moving, say, from your warm wallet to your cold wallet, you would want to go through a mixer in order to break the correlation between those input addresses and the output addresses.

If someone sees a CoinJoin transaction that has 100 inputs and 100 outputs, they know it's a CoinJoin transaction at the moment, but that also means that they can't assume that the input addresses all belong to the same person; in fact, they know they don't.  And, they can't figure out which outputs belong to who.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm already in this position thinking, well everything I've done for the last three years is probably all tainted.  Everything I've done almost certainly can be tracked back to all my purchases on, originally Coinbase and Kraken and anywhere else.  I haven't done any of this, so what am I meant to do?  Do I accept it; do I need to do something with all my current Bitcoin; or do I just accept that lot's tainted and then in future, have a whole separate procedure for future Bitcoin?  This is where I'm just like, oh God, this is such a lot of work!

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah.  This is why Bitcoin itself is not a coin that delivers great privacy, because it requires a lot of work in order to achieve not even great privacy, but just some privacy.  And, this is why buying Bitcoin, or earning it through trackable sources, is bad for your privacy.  It's much better to earn Bitcoin in a kind of peer-to-peer economy.  So, if someone pays you for something, the analytics companies are not going to see that it was you who got paid, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, it depends which address you send it to!

Andreas Antonopoulos: Well, if you don't reuse addresses, right.  So, if you use a fresh address; if you can stop things from getting tainted when you earn them, when Bitcoin comes into your possession, that's a great help.

Peter McCormack: So, my donation address on my website has been the same address for however long I've had it; a couple of years.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Right, so address reuse is the number one thing you have to solve.  And, the way you solve that is by putting up a payment processing system.  My favourite is BTCPay, which is an open, free software, and what that will do is it will just generate a new address for every single person who wishes to make a donation.  And so, that way, it's much harder to track, right?

Peter McCormack: Right.  So, is this where xPubs come in?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes, this is where xPubs come in.  So, xPubs are simply a way to generate a whole sequence of addresses, Bitcoin addresses, and the magic behind them, the thing that makes them interesting, is that all of these addresses can be generated without having any of the private keys.  You only have the xPub, which is a master public key, or an extensible public key.  It might be at the root of your address tree, or it might be at a branch further up, a subaccount, a single currency subaccount, or something like that.  But from that, you can generate a whole sequence, billions of addresses, and you can do that with simple software that you can put on a website that can just hand a new address to everybody who comes along. 

And, all of those addresses belong to this seed which means that if that seed is a mnemonic phrase that you have in a hardware wallet, when you load up your hardware wallet, it's going to see all of those payments as coming in on different addresses; but, it will be able to track all of those addresses and see that you've been paid.  It has the whole tree and it has both sides of the whole tree, the private keys and the public keys; whereas, on your website, you've given it just the public side so it can generate addresses, but it doesn't have any of the private keys so you are not at risk of having your money stolen.  And, that's one of the magical things about xPubs; it makes it really good for reducing address reuse by generating a unique address for every interaction; and also reducing the security risk by having no way of spending that money.

Now, xPubs do come with one risk, which is privacy risk.  If the xPub leaks, they can see every address that can be generated from that xPub.  It basically gives people a read-only, watch-only wallet that mirrors every transaction you've ever done on that wallet.  And so, that's not good.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so how do I get my xPub?  Say I'm using a ledger, does the ledger provide it to me?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes.  So, every hardware wallet can securely export just the xPub of a subaccount, and that's a feature that you will find in all of the interfaces, no matter which software wallet you use to access your ledger; they will all have a way of exporting an xPub.  And you can tell it, you know how on your ledger, you have account 0, account 1, account 2, you may have a number of subaccounts?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, each one of those will have its own xPub, and that xPub will be just for that subaccount.  You're not exporting, you shouldn't export, the master xPub that gives all of the subaccounts; you should basically take one branch, one subaccount and export that.  So for example, on my warm wallet, I will use one subaccount for my shop, my website; I will use one subaccount for donations that are gifts towards me; and, I will use one subaccount for invoices that my clients pay me.  And on my hardware wallet, that looks like account 0, account 1, account 2, and I can name those "shop, donations, invoices".

Now, I can then take the shop xPub and put it in my ecommerce store and it can generate addresses that deposit into that account; I can take the donations xPub and put it on the page where I'm soliciting donations and that will generate addresses for people to donate; and, I can take an invoices xPub and put it on an invoice page where I can send my clients when I want them to pay an invoice.  That way, nice and clean, separate.

Peter McCormack: And you can't link one xPub from one subaccount to another subaccount?  So, say an xPub did get compromised, you could just close that one and nobody would be able to link everything?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Find the others, correct.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so that does feel like the next thing I should do; that does feel like that's a sensible next step.  So, for example, the donations page on my website, I should create the branch, find the xPub, export the xPub, and I should do that; that definitely feels like the next step; there is a benefit to me doing that?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes.  I will put one caution out here now, because a lot of people will fall into this trap.  Your hardware wallet is the secure mechanism by which to export an xPub, which is derived from your mnemonic phrase, your seed.  Some people will be told, "Go to this website and type in your mnemonic phrase and it will give you your xPub".  This should automatically make the hairs on the back of your neck rise up and go, "Wait, wait, wait.  I'm typing my seed onto a keyboard?"  Nope, I'm never doing that. 

My seed only gets entered into a hardware wallet, it never gets typed onto a computer, I never put it onto a keyboard; my fingers are physically unable, as I'm about to start typing the first word, my brain goes, "What are you doing?  I detect imminent typing of words from your mnemonic phrase; stop doing that!"  That's what you should feel.  Lots of people have lost money this way.  It's a common scam.  It's actually a scam that's used for cloud mining and things like that.  People will say, "Take your seed, go here, type it in, give us the first xPub and we'll be able to send you your winnings from our incredible investment scheme", and of course they're sending you to a phishing site that will take your entire seed.

So, as long as you remember the xPub comes from your hardware wallet, because that's the only secure way to do it, never type your mnemonic phrase anywhere except into a hardware wallet directly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that one I am experienced enough to know not to put my seed anywhere.  So, that does feel like something I should do and I will try, but also I think of the newbie, think of the beginners, think of the no-coiners; I also do think it just feels very complicated.  And, maybe that's the trade-off for having privacy, maybe I have to accept that, but I do feel like, urgh!

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, here's how we design this away.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's what I want to know.

Andreas Antonopoulos: The way you design this away is by having an ecommerce or a web payment system that you go into and it says, "Are you ready to receive payments?" and it says, "Okay, connect your hardware wallet so you can select which account to send your payments to", and you connect your hardware wallet and it says, "Do you want to select the first subaccount, the second account or the third subaccount?"  You say, "The first one", and it says, "Okay, please confirm on your hardware wallet that you wish to export this first subaccount", and you do; done.

Your hardware wallet will never just give the private keys.  There is no function on the hardware wallet to export the private keys; there's no function to extract the seed, on purpose; you cannot do that.  So, if a website asks you, "Plug in your wallet and do you authorise exporting the public keys from this wallet?", that's a safe operation.  So, you don't need to know how to export the xPub, what the xPub is, where to put it in.  You go to the ecommerce page when you're setting up your shop, it says, "You already have a hardware wallet that's set up?  Great.  Let's send funds directly to it.  Do you confirm that you want to send it to this hardware wallet?  Do you want to use one of the subaccounts?  Yes/No?"  Boom, boom, click, click done.

We can abstract that detail away, and abstract it in such a way that it is safe.  It's not teaching you any bad habits, right; you're not likely to do it wrong and there are some parameters around that.  Obviously, you don't just go into a random website, plug in your hardware wallet and give it access to the exported keys.  But, that's something that people are accustomed to.  If you want to connect your hardware wallet to Ethereum MetaMask, or you want to connect it to the MyCrypto desktop application or the Wasabi Wallet, or etc, you're going to go through exactly that process.  That's where it pops up a little page and says, "Do you agree to an export?  Yes.  Type in your passphrase if you have it?  Yes.  Confirm on the screen?  Yes", and then you do it.  So, you don't really need to know what an xPub is, or every see one, in order to do this, as long as the thing you're using to accept donations is nicely integrated with the hardware wallet's infrastructure.

Now, that happened a year ago.  So a year ago, a common standard for integrating with hardware wallets, called HWI (the Hardware Wallet Interface) was created and it works, and was integrated into BTCPay recently, so you can do that.

Peter McCormack: So, that's my next step then.  I'm going to try that, you know, I'm going to give that a go.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, but importantly, a year and a half ago, you couldn't do that without going into the weeds.  Now you can do it without going into the weeds and five years from now, it's going to be even easier.  So, it's not just about your skill level increasing, it's also about the difficulty of doing this going down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, I think with this one, it's definitely worth me trying.  Look, I want it abstracted away.  I mean, even now I'm like, my triggering language that triggers people is like, "Yeah, this is too complicated".  And I know people will come back saying, "No it isn't, you just haven't tried".  And then somebody will say, "Look, I did it".  But, I still feel like it's niche, it's a niche thing.  But, I'm going to try it, I'm going to give it a go, I'm going to have a play with it.

Andreas Antonopoulos: It is a niche thing.  And again, you're asking people to understand a whole bunch of different technologies that perhaps they have no need to use in the rest of their life.  And, if you're in it, in the weeds, all of these things appear straightforward, trivial, easy, etc.  It took me months to understand what the hell an xPub was or how it worked.  It took me months to understand how a hardware wallet works; and I have a Master's degree in Computer Science.  And that doesn't mean I may be the stupidest person on the planet to have a Master's degree in Computer Science; I'm not disputing that; sure.  The reason it took me months to figure these things out was because I'm stupid.  Great, granted, maximalists you win.  That's not the point. 

The point is, there are plenty of people out there who should be able to use Bitcoin who have none of the inclination, background knowledge, life experience, technical expertise, broad domain knowledge, and neither should they in order to be able to do these things.

Peter McCormack: Well then, we're in agreement.  All right, listen, that's what I'm going to do next, that's going to be my next project over the next couple of weeks.  I'm going to have a play with that, I'm going to get that set up, I'm going to try BTCPay server.

Andreas Antonopoulos: I'm surprised you did multisig first?

Peter McCormack: Well, I did it with Casa though, so it was very simple.  I've used two multisig products; so I've used Caravan for a bet and there's absolutely no way I could have done that without somebody walking me through it, and I still didn't understand it.  But, I used Casa and Casa is just super easy.  It's all abstracted away; it's a breeze and I absolutely love it.  So, that was an easy thing, but that's because someone created a UI for me to do it.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Right, exactly.

Peter McCormack: Whereas, the UI with Caravan, it's a bit more complicated.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, and I've been doing multisig since 2014 and at first, it was a nightmare to do.  And not just a nightmare, but not only were there no UIs; almost everything involves manually constructing transactions on the command line and copying HEX back and forth.  And you look at that and you can draw one of two conclusions: one is you're not skilled enough, you should try harder, learn harder, study harder; or, it's not easy enough yet.  And I would draw the second conclusion.  At that point, it wasn't easy enough.

But the thing is, we've seen this in technology before.  I remember sending my first email, 1989, Unix command line, right; and if you told me my mum will send an email exactly 20 years later to the day by simply swiping her finger across the screen of a iPad, that's what it took.  And, we are on the same track and it's going to take a while, but the goal isn't to teach everybody Unix command line skills or demand that.  The goal is to hide enough of the complexity that more people can do it.

Peter McCormack: All right.  Well, listen, I'm definitely going to try it now, I'm going to have a play with that anyway, I'm not going to wait for that part to be abstracted away.  But before we close out, it's always a pleasure talking to you, Andreas, but how are you?  What's going on with you, because we're all locked down?

Andreas Antonopoulos: You know, I'm doing great.  Honestly, the hardest part of this has been that I am an extrovert and I really, really need socialisation, so that's emotionally difficult to be shut in and not to be able to go out and see people and do my extroverted dance, my little social butterfly thing; that's hard.  But in other ways, this has removed a lot of distractions from my life, being quite productive, got a lot of work done, made enormous strides in my professional work and managed to keep up a very good kind of fitness and eating regime.

So, you know how they say, "The pandemic 15 pound gain"?  So, I've lost 15 pounds and gained muscle, so I'm actually feeling good about myself.  I'm coming out, well I'm not coming out; I'm in it but I'm in it stronger than I was when I got in it, stronger, leaner, healthier, more energetic.  And so, you know, I'm pretty happy, but I'm also very, very fortunate to have had very easy conditions for weathering this quarantine.  So, it's great.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I went the wrong way first.  I was drinking loads and eating nonsense, but I just stopped drinking 32 days ago.  I was like, "I'm not going to do this anymore, I'm not going to drink while I'm on a lockdown".  I said I was going to do a month and I did a month and I was like, "Okay, I think I'm going to try until my birthday, which is end of October".  But, I might just carry on with it.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Congratulations!  Yeah, I saw the little accountability screenshot you did.  Good on you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I think some people think I'm an alcoholic.  I'm definitely not an alcoholic; I just like a drink!  And, I didn't drink a lot before the lockdown, like it's a social thing.  I just thought I'd give it a go.  But that app is great, because you just don't want to reset it, you don't want to reset it back to zero.  So, it does keep you accountable, but yeah, it's been a strange lockdown.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, the fasting apps work like that.

Peter McCormack: Oh, do they?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, because you turn it on and it says, "Your fast has started", and then you're like at 15 hours and 38 minutes and you're like, "Yeah, I can do 22 more minutes.  Fuck that, I'm going to get to 16".  And then you're like, "I can do 18".  Yeah, that's a good one too; all of these.  Gamifying discipline, I think, is a brilliant way to actually have technology work for us instead of sabotaging our happiness.

Peter McCormack: I agree.  Well, listen, I've learnt a lot today.  I've certainly learnt about xPubs, so I'm going to go and try this and I'll let you know how I get on.  But, thanks for reaching out to me and thanks for doing this; I always enjoy talking to you, it's been a few times now, and I love having you on the show and I also love following your Patreon and keep up … oh, before we close out, how's the book?

Andreas Antonopoulos: So, last week, last Wednesday in fact; no, last Tuesday, so it's exactly a week ago, I delivered the first half of the book to the publisher, the draft of the first five chapters.  So, 165/170 pages done, draft.  It's going to go through several rounds of editing.  And, of course, that was the easy half of the book, the less technical half.  The heavier stuff is in the second half, but we're actually making good progress.  So, I'm working with Olaoluwa Osuntokun, CTO of Lightning Labs, and Renee Picard, who is one of the best educators about the Lightning networking space, and we're making some progress, just very, very slow and steady, getting writing done every day.

A book is impossible to do if you look at it as a whole, and possible to do if you look at it as, I'm going to get one paragraph done today and then one paragraph on top of that, and not worry about the whole book; just worry about, can I get a paragraph written today?

Peter McCormack: Is it shifting your thinking on Lightning at all, in writing the book; is it making you think about it deeper and making you realise anything?

Andreas Antonopoulos: Oh, absolutely.  I mean, it's an incredible learning experience.  Every book I've written so far has taught me the technology that I'm writing about to a level of depth that I couldn't possibly learn, because I have to, right?  So, I go into it and I've got a pretty good understanding of it, but I don't yet grasp the nuances, the ones that make all the difference.  And then in order to explain it, I learn all of these nuances.  Having fantastic co-authors, I mean they're both far more technical than I am, and that helps. 

So, yeah, and as I'm writing it, I'm also coding examples and running Lightning nodes in order to experiment with all of these things, and that's teaching me a lot about how it works.  And I'm also running a shop that accepts Lightning payments for things like ebooks and stuff like that.  Just having to keep that running and not crash and make it so that people can pay me, so they have channels and all of these little nuances of not just, in theory how does the Lightning Network work; in practice, for a real shop that's actually trying to do real sales, how does it work?

It's given me an appreciation for all the work that's gone into it, and I'm very, very bullish on this technology.  I think it's gradually reaching a maturity level where I can say, "You can do it, absolutely.  You can use one of the easier-to-use wallets and become part of the Lightning Network".

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  Well, I look forward to that.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Is that your next step on the staircase; are you ready to get a Lightning wallet?

Peter McCormack: Well, I have a Lightning wallet.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Great!

Peter McCormack: Well, I say I have a Lightning wallet; I historically have used BlueWallet, which I think is custodial Lightning if I remember.  But controversially, I didn't have a huge issue with custodial Lightning wallets, because I didn't tend to keep much in that wallet.

Andreas Antonopoulos: It's a stepping stone?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is a stepping stone.  But I don't have a huge use case for Lightning itself right now because my use of Bitcoin is very much big ticket spend, or invoices for work, and for me it's this long-term savings technology.  I don't have that use case yet, but I know it's coming.

Andreas Antonopoulos: I sell an open source book on my shop for $2 which you can download for free if you want, but I've priced it at $2.  And the whole purpose of that book being on the shop, it's the SmartCustody book, is because it only makes sense to pay with Lightning payments for that.  And if you have Lightning and you want to try it out, a $2 purchase kind of shows the value of that system.  Maybe I should put something even lower priced, like 10 cents!

Peter McCormack: I don't know what you'd do for 10 cents, but perhaps, maybe.  You could do it by chapters, sell chapters.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Well, for 10 cents, it will be a photo of me as Commander Worf, Lieutenant Commander Worf of Star Trek.  Someone did a fanart of me in Worf's uniform, you know, with the Klingon bandolier and all of that, so I think that's worth 10 cents; don't you?

Peter McCormack: I think that's fair.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Nobody else does …

Peter McCormack: Well, I think we'll definitely have to do a Lightning show when the book's ready anyway, I want to get in the weeds with you on that.  But as ever, Andreas, I always learn a lot when I talk to you and a lot of people won't know, but when we see each other at conferences, there's a couple of times you've kind of mentored me through some of the stresses that this space can give you, so I do appreciate your friendship as well as coming on the show all these times.  And hopefully, these lockdowns will end and we'll actually get to see each other again soon.  So, fingers crossed and thanks again.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Thank you.  Very kind of you to say, I'm really looking forward to that, and let's do some more shows.  And don't let the bastards get you down!  You do you and if they think they can do better, let them try.

Peter McCormack: Bring it on. All right, man. Well, listen, take care and we'll catch up soon enough, I'm sure.