WBD340 Audio Transcription

The Last Days of Satoshi with Pete Rizzo

Interview date: Monday 26th April

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Pete Rizzo. 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 episode, I talk to Pete Rizzo, the Editor at Kraken & Bitcoin Magazine. We discuss Satoshi's final days, his contribution to Bitcoin, the project's transition to decentralisation, and why his disappearance was inevitable.

“Satoshi kind of left an unfinished product, because in order for it to be finished, it had to solve the riddle of him.”

— Pete Rizzo

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Rizzo, how're you doing, man?

Pete Rizzo: Good, is this the show? Have we entered the show mode?

Peter McCormack: This is the show; we've entered show mode.

Pete Rizzo: Excellent.

Peter McCormack: All right, this is first using Zencastr video so if something goes wrong then you're my guinea pig.  You do need a haircut.

Pete Rizzo: Okay, you can just replace me with a "photo not found".

Peter McCormack: Anyway, man, listen, look you haven't been on the show since what 2019?  We did it in the Coindesk office.

Pete Rizzo: It's been a while.

Peter McCormack: New York City.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, that was Consensus 2019, the depths of the bear.

Peter McCormack: The depths of the bear, but we hung out in Vegas was it 2020 February before the shit locked down?

Pete Rizzo: Unconfiscatable, I remember that was just as COVID leaps the ocean into Italy, people were starting to realise that this was going to go global.

Peter McCormack: There it did.

Pete Rizzo: A watershed moment.

Peter McCormack: Good to see you, dude.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, good to see you, man, appreciate it.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look you've been doing some good, interesting work on the side, some interesting writing work.

Pete Rizzo: Thanks, man.

Peter McCormack: When you told me, you were doing this obviously I was like, "Please come on my show, can we talk through it?"  Basically, I just want to hear the story.  Before we get into the details of this because we're -- I mean people will know from the show title that it's the Last Days of Satoshi we're covering but like what's the deal here?  How come you've been doing this work; why you have you been doing these deep research pieces; are you making a book; are you going to make a film; tell me what you're doing?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, interesting.  I guess I'll just in start with the article that I'm releasing called The Last Days of Satoshi.  It basically marks the tenth anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto's disappearance from the Bitcoin project, so a special time, I think.  This is the ten years the Bitcoin has survived without a clear leader; something that I always just found interesting.  I don't know; I guess to your question of what I've been doing, people may know me right now, I'm Editor at Bitcoin Magazine and of course Editor at Large at Kraken.  Before that my time, in the media, at CoinDesk.

I feel like I've always been trying to understand Bitcoin and been in the process of understanding Bitcoin and I've never stopped that, right.  I've been in the industry for eight-plus years and I feel like I'm always in the process of wanting to understand Bitcoin better.  I think my transition, people might know me as a journalist and now I'm sort of branding myself as a historian, is more about my time preference for things changed.  I kind of got done with the sort of media saturation of just being in a loop of a news cycle and realised just after many years of doing that that there were just fundamental things that I didn't understand about what had happened with Bitcoin and I think what really clicked for me is that Bitcoin is an invention.

Bitcoin is an innovation, if they are going to be talking about this in a thousand years, like, "What happened with Bitcoin; who made it?"  Then we still live in a time period right now where Bitcoin can be understood, where it's capable of being understood and known.  We can get answers to some of these questions, so I think that was a switch for me, when I realised that after the 2017 bubble when I think we had seen the second Bitcoin cycle where I really understood that Bitcoin was going to be a cyclical economy, I really started to understand this wasn't theoretical, this was happening, it was interacting with the real world; it was only going to continue. 

Really that just changed the direction of my work and really, I started to go back to the beginning, and I was like, "Okay, well I've been here, I've seen things.  What don't I know, and I have to go find those answers, because I don't know who else is going to do that at this point, right?  I was like I know most of these things, but I don't know all of it, right?"

For me, I think, I just started diving into researching again, for the fun of it though, right.  I think with media you can get, "I've got to put out the next article, I've got to put out the next thing, this guy's hot, this project's hot, I've got to talk about the Coinbase IPO", the whatever, the, "Michael Saylor said this or that".  It was really just stripping out all of that and it was just like, "Okay, what do I want to know about Bitcoin?" 

For me, one of the biggest most interesting is like this inherent contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin where you have a single person invented the decentralised money; that's what it appears like, right.  Satoshi was the lead developer, he was the maintainer of the website, he was the admin of the forum.

Peter McCormack: Definitely one person?

Pete Rizzo: The article doesn't get into that.  We know that he was -- there was an online profile that people interacted with and that they assumed was Satoshi and corresponded as if he was Satoshi.  The article I definitely think takes the standpoint of, "Okay, we know that there is this legacy of Satoshi posts", right.  Again, asterisk we can never know that this is Satoshi, we can never know this is one person, but let's dig into that.  What actually was his time like as leader of the Bitcoin project?  Like people interacted with him, they had real experiences with him, he was the leader of this thing.

Really, I think, for me it was just we have grown beyond that, we don't need maybe that type of leadership anymore, but we had it and for me it was about going back to the beginning and really taking a look and saying, "Okay, how does Satoshi run the Bitcoin project?  What do we know?  Are we still confused about him?"  The article really traces everything from the launch of the whitepaper right up to the end of his disappearance of just being, this is a full one article, total picture of what Satoshi's time in Bitcoin was like.

Peter McCormack: Before we go into the detail of it, did anything really stand out for you when you were researching it?  Anything that you find out that really surprised you, you thought, "Jesus, I didn't know this.  I didn't expect to find this out?"

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, 100%, I think that for me the biggest one was that I'm less convinced that Satoshi could have ever stayed.  We have this mental image in our mind that Satoshi chose to leave or was somehow like a benevolent decision on this part.  Looking back through the archives and really digging and spending a lot of time with what happened in 2010 and 2009, I really just think that in many ways the community outgrew him, they no longer needed Satoshi. 

If you look and follow the forums, by the end, by late 2010, you have a few things that happened and one of the notable things is that people become outright hostile to Satoshi.  They become more comfortable dissociating from him, you have people on these IRC chats, they're talking about, "I see a woman", is he Yakuza guy.  There were drawing pictures of him, they're talking about if he was a woman, they would claim him as their girlfriend, they're like fighting over this kind of stuff.

So, they just have this mental break where even though Satoshi is like in his own time where he was an actual person like manging this project, he became so sort of mythological that people just became very abstract.  The article starts with people sort of discussing all their theories about who he is and how mysterious he is and in reality, he is still the person pushing updates to the code. 

So, I think that really, one, they really disassociate from him towards the end, and I think two, there's kind of this wave of FUD that happens at the end of 2010.  You have the first -- people are coming to the Bitcoin project and Bitcoin is successful now, it's almost a $1, it's like a $1 million project and they're casting doubt on it.  They're like, "Oh you have this leader, and he could just change anything".

I call this part of the article it's like the "birth of FUD".  It's really like this is the first FUD; there was no FUD before.  If you are a Bitcoin user, you are used to FUD, people making stuff up to challenge your insight and your understanding of Bitcoin.  That literally never happened before and their response was, they were just like, "Okay, well if Satoshi does something bad, we're going to fork".  In everybody like your average pleb user to Gavin Andresen who by that point was Satoshi's right hand, essentially.  It was like, "Look, if Satoshi goes rogue, we are going to fork".  I think in actualising this message, really what you see I think is that I don't really see how Satoshi could have stayed.

I think the community just outgrew him, they outgrew a need for him and in many ways there was just too much going on.  How could Satoshi solve all these existential questions that people were having?  People were auditing the code for the first time, they were like, "Can we have multiple block chains?  Can we have multiple cryptocurrencies?  Dear Satoshi, oh my God, Satoshi what shall we do?  Can we do multiple blockchains?  Should this software be decimals?  Do I have rights as a user to not run the code that you want to write?"  There's just all these existential questions that pour out at the end of 2010 and I think for me, I wanted to make that story real and impactful for people.

I sort of envision the story as like I think if it's effective, it will put you in the position of like, "Okay this is what Satoshi went through for the course of launching Bitcoin".  By the end, I just don't think he could have stayed around, like there's no scenario in which Satoshi had continued.  For me that's a big realisation because I think it says a lot about Bitcoin as a technology that it began to erode it in many ways.  The founder leaving it wasn't really even necessarily his own choice.

Peter McCormack: Do you feel like he felt forced out or do you feel like he felt like a noble desire to leave or do you think he had too much of the bullshit, like, "This is too stressful, you guys figure it out".  Do you have any kind of clue on that?

Pete Rizzo: Really, what you can tell is just -- one of the things I really did with this article, it took me like six months to write and I really tried to like spend time with the different phases of the Bitcoin forums.

Peter McCormack: Proper journalism.

Pete Rizzo: When your time preference goes this low right, you've just got to sit down.  I mean, yeah, I looked at the different phases and one of the things you can look at is just anecdotally, like number of users that are coming in, the volume of posts, like the type of posts and I think I would break it down to I think essentially Satoshi kind of goes through four phases, if we think about his time within Bitcoin, and the first one is just like there's nothing.

I looked at the whole transaction history of Bitcoin in 2009, there's like 200 transactions, non-mining transactions right, so there's nothing.  There was nobody doing anything.  If you actually download the thing, it's like there are weeks, actual weeks, where you'll just see there are no transactions running on Bitcoin; so there's just nothing happening, like no one cares. 

What's funny to me about that is there's an interesting part of the Bitcoin.org website that I found where it's Satoshi talking about the Byzantine Generals' problem.  I had always thought that like other people were like, "Oh, he had solved that", but no, he knew he solved that.  I just think the first period of Bitcoin is weird because like you're Satoshi, you're this guy, like you would know that you have created decentralised money; you know you have created a money free from government control finally, but nobody cares. 

It's like that meme with the Jurassic Park guy where he's like, "See nobody cares right", so you just think of Satoshi being in that seat and you've invented this thing.  It's a human invention; maybe it's fire, flight and Bitcoin.  When all is said and done in humanity, just nobody gives a shit.  He actually has to do stuff to get people to care about Bitcoin, so I think the end of that first phase is he really launches the Bitcoin forums. 

You might think as like that being a kind of an afterthought, like that might not be one of the most important things Satoshi did, but I really think it was huge actually because he built a community for people to talk about Bitcoin.  Then what you find is as people got together, they like built exchanges, they started trading, and Bitcoin had a price.  I think the end of that first period is like people get together and they price Bitcoin, but it is weird to think that Satoshi had to actively like core interest in Bitcoin. 

To me that was another realisation that I thought was interesting, it's like, "Oh no, he was a guy who had to go out to us".  He had to find ways to get people interested and I never really pictured Satoshi in that way as being like an innovator, like somebody who launched something who had to, in some way, try to make it appeal to people, so I think that was interesting.

The other phases are -- I think there's kind of an innocent period where people are, "Oh Satoshi, like he knows everything; he knows best", they are very reverential of him.  There's a period, after what happens like there's a pretty horrible exploit of the protocol.  There's billions of Bitcoins that are printed, there's this bug called the Value overflow exploit; 180 billion Bitcoins are printed, I think that sets off alarm bells with Satoshi. 

You really see his demeanour changes, his activity changes.  He goes into, "No, I need to ensure Bitcoin at all costs", kind of mode, and then at the end you get this really dissonant period where Satoshi is kind of doing all this stuff to try to shore up Bitcoin and people are like, "Well, why is he doing that?  Why does he have the authority to do that?  Why isn't he telling us these things?" 

This starts this questioning period, and I think when that really intensifies at the end, "Satoshi's not talking to us, we don't know, what shall we do?" I don't know, you can kind of think about it, it's like this is the natural -- you would probably expect this, right?  This is the phases of which a project would become leaderless.  But I guess to your original question, yeah, I think it was phases and I think by the end it just became very overwhelming. 

It's like how could you possibly satisfy the needs or demands of like that many people who -- think about it even today, Bitcoin has problems with that but imagine back then, I think people, they just saw him as this like figure who could solve everything and I think for him at some point once it seems he had locked down the code, he had done enough to secure it.

I get this feeling that towards the end it was like he felt like he had done enough and that was it.  He was like, "I put the scotch tape on it, like this boat's going go and I'm out".  Then he just leaped over the side, right.  So, I think it was virtuous in that way.  I think he knows at some point that the code is capable of being attacked, he wakes up to that.  I write in there it's like at some points he's like boarding for a storm.  It's like he gets the house ready and then he dips out, so I think he did what he could do, and I think he knew that he had a finite window to do it, but I think he knew that it was sort of coming where people just didn't need his authority anymore.  At some places his authority just wasn't helpful, right, if that makes sense.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how good was he at controlling his own emotions and his expression of his feeling?  Was he quite in control or did anywhere in his writings, did he let slip kind of his own kind of like whether he was feeling any pressure or was he always matter of fact about the project itself?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, Satoshi is very subdued.  All we have of his really his writings on the Bitcoin talk forums and certainly I wasn't able to add anything new there to that, but he's very taciturn, just if he says something.  He's very technical, if there's an answer that he wants to give he will give it and he doesn't really elaborate, he doesn't tell jokes, he doesn't tell side stories; there's very little of that.

One incident that I found that was really telling though was really sort of towards the top of 2010; you had this period where it's like Bitcoin's kind of getting mentioned a little bit in the news and the users, it's really building, right; because what we know is that we can get a proxy for how many users there were, because the Bitcoin forums kept a tab on how many new user accounts were created.  So, you can get a feel like this would have been -- Bitcoin had gone from like a handful of people like 20 to 30 people at the top of 2010 to like 1,000 people.

I think he really gets caught up in this excitement.  You have people who are coming who are bigger contributors now; Gavin Andresen had just debuted the Faucet, and the Faucet's like this really innovative thing where people can just get free Bitcoin, it's like an actual application that somebody builds on Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Bring it back.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, well Laszlo, there's "pizza day" right, people are spending Bitcoin, so I think in like June of 2010, he definitely gets caught up in the excitement.  There's one incident that I found where he actually moves to take Bitcoin out of beta, which is actually really strange if you think about it, because Bitcoin is still in beta today, technically.  The code is still considered a beta software; the developers I think maintain that distinction because they want people to feel like Bitcoin is experimental and that it's not a production software, but Satoshi considered and did announce that he was going to take it out of beta. 

Then he actually counteracted that decision, but his decision to take it out of beta inspired people go to basically try to market this.  So basically, this whole thread started where people were like, "Oh let's advertise on Facebook, let's list on Slashdot, let's get on Google, let's load Bitcoin up" and they do.  They get Bitcoin listed on Slashdot, which was like a huge news aggregator, was comparable to something like Dig or like Reddit today; and it just blows up and gets overwhelmed.  So what happens is, you look at the statistics, the price goes up from pennies to 10 cents; the mining power quadruples.

There's one guy, and then there's a little anecdote story in there where he sells like 90,000 Bitcoin on an exchange for $1,000 and he like brags about how he's like taken down Bitcoin exchanges.  Really what I wanted to add was like the flavour of that time period because I think when we look back at the history of Bitcoin it like just feels like this black box; but we can find things, these people did things and this was a vibrant time where things happened, right. 

So, I don't know I just thought that that was an interesting anecdote, where I think a lot of people like to talk about the Wikileaks things as being sort of like a moment where Satoshi didn't want the project to blow up.  I think everything has prior context and I think the Slashdot thing at the beginning of 2010 is interesting because he gets caught up, he decides to do something, it causes a reaction and that reaction kind of causes this wave of things to stress the network. 

Another side effect of that is in the publicity that Bitcoin did get, what you see is that people start reporting bugs to him, they start finding exploits and I think really what that culminates with is the exploitation of the Bitcoin monetary policy where someone figures out a way to break it and they have to roll back the blockchain, but I think Bitcoin's kind of like this weird box where it's like for every action, there's a reaction and then everything adds up, right.

So, I think with this story it's like you start to get a sense of like, "Okay, where does this go back to the very beginning and how do these things kind of add up together?"  I just thought that was an interesting moment where Satoshi, he got over his skis a little bit, and he realised that and then he had to pay for that mistake and the mistake was bad.  The mistake was, Bitcoin's monetary policy was compromised; there was a chain split of like 53 blocks where there are two competing blockchains. 

There is one thing that I had to cut that was kind of funny, but there's this anecdote of this guy who was so worried about Bitcoin he took over all the computers in his house.  He kicked his wife off his computer so he could run this other chain and make sure that Bitcoin got back on a single blockchain, but you know, look, this is real for people.

Peter McCormack: Legend.

Pete Rizzo: That's, I think, what I wanted to get across in the article, like the Satoshi days, they're not this black box where nothing happens.  The people were around, it was a community that was larger than Satoshi and it wasn't just Satoshi and Gavin; the piece really deals also with transition between Satoshi and Gavin Andresen who, of course, was viewed as Satoshi's successor and really did take control of the project after Satoshi left.  Really for me that was the inspiration I really wanted to understand, how those two individuals, how they passed power between each other.

Because I think you were talking about before, am I writing a book?  Am I doing whatever?  I think I want to understand Bitcoin and I think to me, it all sort of goes back to what was that original transition of power, between Satoshi and the next guy, because that was an event that really is only going to happen once in Bitcoin, it's highly unique.  I don’t know, there's all this mythology and misinformation about it and I really wanted to just clean slate that.

The cool thing about the article is look, it's all cited, so there's 100-plus citations here; if you think that I'm wrong about anything you can dig into the citations, you can read the things and you can -- I like to think of the article as sort of a road map to this world of early Bitcoin where if you want to fork off and explore, you can.

Peter McCormack: After he announced his departure what was the reactions like?  Was it a mixture of, "Good luck, thank you", or were people like, "Can't fucking believe it".  

Pete Rizzo: So, he never announces his departure.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I thought he did?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, he never announces his departure.  No, what's interesting is that in classic Satoshi fashion, something else that I found that I don't think a lot of people know, is that 13 December is kind of when he releases his last software update.  He actually, at that point, he goes into the Bitcoin code and he changes the copyright statement to read, "Satoshi Nakamoto to Bitcoin developers", and I sort of view that as like that's his -- in the classic Satoshi fashion of like everything is cryptographic, his OPSEC is still pristine, we have his like formal resignation in the code and I thought that was supercool to find that moment.  But he continues to be active, right.

So, this is where it gets pretty unclear, and I was able to get some new emails from Gavin Andresen to understand a little bit about how this transition happened, but effectively Satoshi just absconds and he's pushing other people to become more active, and this is where I think we don't clearly know, but at some point Gavin basically publishes a blog post in which he says that he has Satoshi's blessing to take over the project. 

It appears that they exchange emails after where it's clear that that seems to have been a legitimate testament; Satoshi does seem to still be actively involved with Bitcoin and working with Gavin there after that transition, so that is new.  Those emails that Gavin provided are new and that would indicate that Satoshi was pretty active with Bitcoin and Gavin behind the scenes, sort of helping that along.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay but it becomes clear at one point -- I thought he left a message saying, "I'm going to work on other things"?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, so that's in April.  So the timeline really here breaks down as he's effectively trying to give up control towards the end of 2010.  It seems like he's messaging Gavin and messaging Laszlo, the people who were involved and it really is a few events.  One, he changes the software to be open to all Bitcoin developers, he changed the copyright; he seems like he had to have engaged in private emails to try to get people to become more involved, there is some anecdotal evidence of that.  And then there's the Bitcoin.org website, so he actually takes his name off that website and he lists the names of other contributors.

I think the interesting thing though is if you look at the other contributors he named, there really just isn't anybody else who could have taken that role other than Gavin.  It's kind of like a weird scenario where it's like I do put a lot of stake in the people who say, "Yes, any user could have taken control of Bitcoin at that point and anyone could have stepped up", and Gavin did step up.  That was something I spent a lot of time trying to scrutinise and understand and come at and I do think there are a lot of people with technical development skills at the time, because what you have to understand is that in the early days of Bitcoin everything was a lot more egalitarian; there wasn't this distinction.

Developers today are this class of bitcoiners, right; to be a Bitcoin developer, you have to be someone of immense technical expertise.  That really wasn't the case in 2010.  People were trading their own patches, so you had miners who were making their own custom versions of the code, because Satoshi really wasn’t updating the mining code.  You couldn't get hold of him, so people would just make their own software and you'd trade it with somebody else, and if his mining software is better than yours, you'd take it from him and you'd run it. 

So, it was just a lot flatter, right, there are no miners back then, there are none of these big monolithic mining pools, there are no developers, who are sitting there thinking all day about what should be done with the protocol, there is just none of this, right; there's just a bunch of people in an open-source community running code.  So, it is flatter in that sense and in a lot of ways, I think it really takes a long time to just understand how different that is, because we become so used to the way things are in Bitcoin today, it's hard to look back at that period and really see it for what it was. 

There's a nice passage I think where I go into where in the source forge code, you can see that Satoshi thanks a number of people for contributions.  I was able to reach out to a number of those people, I won't name them specifically, but they were able to provide some anecdotal information about what it was like to work with him.  And what they would say that he was very down to earth, he was approachable, he was always open to making fixes; there was nothing mysterious about Satoshi.

There was one guy who shared a story where he got on a plane, he was looking at Bitcoin, he translated the website, he sent it to Satoshi, Satoshi said, "Thanks", and like that's how people interacted with him, you know he was just another guy.

Peter McCormack: But they become to realisation that he is out of the project and that Gavin has taken over, and so I have kind of got two questions.  When people realise Satoshi's out, I'm assuming a mixture; there will be people who were grateful, maybe thanking him, not knowing if he's going to read the replies; there are people who are probably claiming this is good for the project, people maybe think it's bad; and I also imagine some people like Gavin perhaps had a lot of people worry that he was just a replacement, and it was like cutting the head off the hydra; did that happen?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, not really, so one of the interesting things is that, Bitcoin's an interesting system because I think you always wonder lke who are the participants?  How many participants know the history and the system at any given time?  I think towards 2011, the top of 2011, Bitcoin is really taking off, right, and what that means is that effectively the number of people in Bitcoin is going up exponentially.  So, if you maybe have -- when Satoshi was still there, there was maybe a few thousand people who were in the project; by then it's like in the tens of thousands.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Pete Rizzo: When you're really getting into like April of 2011, Bitcoin is over $1 and this is like a watershed moment, again where it's like there had never been a digital currency that was worth more than the US Dollar; that was a big deal to people.

I think that, again it was a very exciting time for Bitcoin. I think the reactions to him leaving, so first you have, I don't think it was clear to people that he was really gone,  So if you look at the IRC logs, there's people in January, they're like, "Is he on vacation?"  They were people like, "Hey do you know, does Satoshi just like usually take a long time around the holidays to come back?"  Then there's some statements from Gavin and then Mike Hearn and a few others of like, "Satoshi said this or that", and that kind of continues through February and March. 

Then I think it really is until April where 26 April is the last known message that we have from Satoshi and what I wanted to kind of peg this article around is that tenth anniversary.  You see different reactions.  This one guy, he has this post called Satoshi Disappear Day where he's like, "We should always honour this day where our leader disappeared to kind of thank him".  You have other people who are like, "Okay, well he's gone and thanks but we're moving forward".

But I think for a lot of people I think they saw Satoshi as someone who was slinking away as the project was becoming more popular and I think feelings towards him were a little bit more negative at the time.  I didn't find anything in the text that really substantiates this, but I find myself if you really think, like put yourself in that position, you're with this project, this project is taking off and your leader's this mysterious guy who doesn't want to really go to bat for the project at all.  He's not really around, he's not doing interviews, he's not helping move this thing forward.

Then comes along Gavin who's like, "Gavin Andresen is doing all the interviews", and not only that; he's willing to go to the CIA, he's willing to go to the authorities and he's actually willing to represent Bitcoin to those people, to the most dangerous people in the world, who are like, "Yeah, they might actually kill him if he does that".  I think that really resonated with people, so I don't think it was quite as cut and dry as people saw Satoshi leaving his authority and Gavin taking it.  I actually think the users were in control and I think the users recognised and sort of wanted what Gavin provided. 

They wanted someone who was going to -- again, like this is an exciting time, Bitcoin is happening for these people who have spent years on this weird forum.  Gavin's willing to go there and I think that mattered to people and I think that transition of leadership was natural in that way.  I don't think that means that thereafter Gavin always did the best things; he made a lot of mistakes; but I think at that time, if you had to choose between those two people, is it really so hard to understand why people gravitated towards Gavin?

Peter McCormack: No, if these people are excited about -- one of the things about Bitcoin is most people, a lot of people get very excited by the price; not everyone, but a lot of people get excited by the price.  But, one of the clear indications from Satoshi that -- I mean we assume he's never monetised his creation, we make a lot of assumptions about that.  I mean he certainly could be one of the wealthiest people in the world.

So whereas a lot of other people, they kind of do want that, they want it monetised, they want the success, they want the Saylors of this world, they want Jack Dorseys, so I could see why they could look to Gavin for that.  Did Gavin assume the same role as Satoshi?  Did people look to him as a leader to make decisions in the same way as Satoshi; or during that transition, did they see him having a different kind of role and that decision-making and governance was more decentralised?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, that's an interesting question.  I think to me, one of the reasons why I've spent a lot of time with this period is like governance in Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things to me because I think people get most open-sourced projects, they're run by benevolent dictators and I think Satoshi was a benevolent dictator.  I mean he straight-up made changes to the code without consulting anybody or publishing the code for other people to look at, full stop.  He might have done that with good intentions, but he still did it, that's the way he behaved, and that was one of the things I was really trying to take a look at.

One of the funny things is if you look at the block size that he put in, he doesn't publish that as part of an update, he doesn't let anyone know who did it; he just sticks it in the code sort of unannounced.  He announces a new update and everybody updated to this block size.  You do have this thing where Satoshi does behave a certain way and he behaves in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the way Bitcoin development is done today and, say whatever you will about that, we may have made the best decisions, we may have the best version of Bitcoin development today, I think we do; but it still remains a fact that Satoshi ran the project as an open-sourced project maintainer; he made decisions carte blanche.

There's another instance in this that's called out where people are talking about fees being too high and they wanted to lower the threshold; he just does it, right.  Nobody responds to his posts for a couple of weeks, so he just makes the change that he wants to make, and he moves on.  So, I think with Gavin it's interesting because you have to assume that he's a well-intentioned human being who is trying to run this project that somebody else started and all he has to go on are the social cues of how this other person behaved.  All he has to go by is what the norms were established by that individual or not; some people I think a little bit more willing to break from that.

I think one of the early text posts I found that was interesting to me was Wladimir van der Laan who's the current Bitcoin Core maintainer was one of the first ones to kind of ring the bell at being like, "Hey, developers can still make this project centralised.  We can be the single point of failure here".  There's a nice quote that he has where he's like, "Otherwise we should call Mr Satoshi, 'Dear leader'", right.  He's making this assumption that the way Bitcoin is designed, the developers could act in a such a way, and we see this on blockchains like Ethereum, where essentially the developers are dictators and if you don't want to make their update, they're going to fork you off the chain and your money is now worthless because of the decisions that they've made.

I don't know, I tend to be more sympathetic to Gavin, I think he was saddled with a lot.  I think he made some mistakes, but I think ultimately all he had to go by was what Satoshi did and what he thought users wanted.  Ultimately, I think one of the things that I wanted to bring out in the article is that Satoshi is contradictory in a lot of ways.  I think we've come to believe that there's a certain Satoshi that's always had in mind that this was going to fight --

Peter McCormack: A mythical god.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, exactly right.  We quote a lot of his quotes now where it's like we quote his quotes about central banking, but there are quotes about micropayments.  We quote his quotes about being Gold 2.0, but we don't quote his things about Bitcoin needing to have a stable value or else it wouldn’t be used as currency.

So, I think there is -- and what I wanted to present here a little bit was getting back to like that more multifaceted Satoshi.  I mean by all means, I think you could represent Satoshi however you want, certainly a lot of people do.  But this gets us to Satoshi is a complicated figure, I don't think we can look to him to all the answers, and I think again we have ten years now to look back and say, "How have we done without our leader?" 

I think we've done pretty well, right, but we get to choose that, right, and we get to do it by our own standards in that George Washington way.  Satoshi walked away, right, and that's great but -- yeah, I mean I don't know, I think that I'm not sure what your original questions was!

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, it was more about how the governance changed.  Did people look to Gavin to make decisions the same way they looked to Satoshi, or did things change a bit?  Did it become a more decentralised form of governance and decision-making or did Gavin just go ahead and do shit?

Pete Rizzo: I think my point is that there just was no governance.  The idea of governance was still forming, and I think that's one of the things the article gets at, is that Bitcoin governance is something that is like really interpreted in a lot of ways.  Another figure who gets some airtime in this article, who I think is like among the more fascinating in Bitcoin's history, is Michael Marquardt, you might know him as Theymos; he's the moderator of the Bitcoin forums today.  I think he really sort of emerges to me as the first person who's able to really vocalise this idea of Bitcoin is the code that you choose to run, and nobody should dictate to you what Bitcoin is.  He doesn't really say it in so much terms, but he does it in actions.

There's an interesting kind of event towards the end of 2010, you know as Satoshi is kind of under a lot of stress and there's all these things going on, where he actually tries to get people together to launch a fork that goes against something that Satoshi wants.  So essentially, basically, Satoshi again trying to make the best security decisions before he leaves, he just basically shuts off all these advance transactions that he made.  He basically put hundreds of different transaction types in the code, and he shuts most of them off, except for a couple of ones that effectively are whitelisted.

Theymos and some other miners get together and he's like we're going to run another version of the software, this is ridiculous and there's a minor conflict there.  But it's interesting because today, I think most developers would agree that Theymos was correct and that the actions that Satoshi took, I'm not sure if they would have agreed with.  So, again, we get to go back and I think these…

Again, this is what I find really interesting about history, is you can kind of go back to this time period, you can take your perceptions now and you can say, "Okay, the side that I would probably side with now is not the one that Satoshi would have taken", and to me that's interesting.  I think the fact is back in the day, there was really just this idea that Bitcoin was governed by the users and that's what emerges; and I think when that emerges, that is when Satoshi seems to fade, because I think once people figure out that, "No, we're in control, we can fork, we can take responsibility if Satoshi goes rogue", that is where the mental break happens, where I think the users are control. 

I don't think Gavin ever saw that as being what Bitcoin was.  I think that he -- because again I think like Bitcoin is an interesting thing because it does come from that open-source lineage and open-source projects are typically managed in a certain way.  Typically, there is a creator who runs it, or he transitions the project to someone who operates with that authority.  Bitcoin is really rare in that it has had to evolve how open-source development works in order to succeed on its value proposition, because again the fundamental question is how can Bitcoin be a decentralised money if the developers are able to control things?

I think Bitcoin has gotten to the best version of that answer over time, but I don't think Satoshi was able to solve that.  That's why I sort of say it's like an inherent contradiction; a man invented a decentralised money; it's an oxymoron; it doesn't make sense.  So, you start with Bitcoin being in a state where it's a logically impossible mathematical problem, like is Bitcoin a decentralised currency at the point that Satoshi created it?  It's like, how do you possibly answer that question?  I think the answer is, "No, it's not", so it happened over time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a really interesting question, yeah.  I can see where you're going with that.  I also feel like a lot of weighs heavily on Gavin.  I've never spoken to Gavin apart from a couple of small email exchanges where I've asked, "Can I have some of your time?"  He's always politely declined, he's always replied, but there's something in the few words he's --

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, he's very open.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's always a few words but there's something in the few words that says to me there's something's weighing heavily on him.  He gets a lot of stick from people and some people are very critical of him, I've seen that.  I, at the same time -- and I know why they are, but at the same time just as a person, I feel like something weighs heavily on him and I kind of just hope he's okay.

Pete Rizzo: I think he's doing great; I mean he's got a family; he's got enough in -- he has plenty of Bitcoin from back in the day.  I mean you know I think his reputation in Bitcoin, and I think that great as a person, right, but I think he feels…  I mean certainly he doesn't agree with where Bitcoin went.  He knows that, right.

Peter McCormack: I thought he got rid of all his Bitcoin.

Pete Rizzo: I don't know, and I couldn’t substantiate that, I think that --

Peter McCormack: I thought I remember.  It had only come from a blog post, but I'm sure I remember reading him saying, "I've got rid of the last of my Bitcoin".  I could be wrong, that could be Mike Hearn, or I could be confusing people.  But I do hope he's okay.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, Mike Hearn was the one who sold all his Bitcoin.  I think with Gavin he wanted Bitcoin to succeed, I think that Gavin -- the choices that he made that were bad I think came much later, and again I think in this story I was really into scrutinising that because again people today, they sort of view Gavin as this, "Oh he went to the CIA, he must have been a political spook who's put in charge of Bitcoin, or whatever".  I really think that Gavin was trying to do the best thing for the project at the time and I think the users chose Gavin.  I don't really think that it was Gavin abusing his authority or anything like that; it's that simply the users wanted something different than Satoshi and Gavin's willingness to do that.

I mean think about it, Gavin chose to write on the forum that he was going to the CIA.  You don't think if that was something that people vastly disagreed with that he would still be in charge?  Like how could he have still been in charge of Bitcoin?  It's still Bitcoin, it still functions the same way.  How could he have possibly continued to be in charge if people really disagreed with it on that level?  They would have forked the code, they would have done the thing that they said they would have done against Satoshi, right.  So I think what you see is the developers are positive about it, they're saying, "This is great, we need more engagement, we need people to understand Bitcoin, thank you for doing this".

Really, I think Gavin, it's tough, you know it's like in many ways, he's like the guy; Bitcoin's the baby left on his doorstep, and he raises the kid.  Say what you want about Gavin, he didn't make the baby, but he raised the kid, right.  He is the one who -- he does this nice post where he gives this call to developers and he's like, "Your reward will be your recognition, we must come together, we must move forward", right.  I think Gavin's just the guy he picked up the flag, you kind of think about it it's like a war, and somebody gets shot down; he's the next guy who carried the flag.  Does that make him the lieutenant navy, but he is the one who had the energy, you know?

Peter McCormack: It's like the divorced parent who has to look after the child and other one goes off with mythical status.  And you're left with all the bad decisions and the tough parenting!

Pete Rizzo: Right, well I think what is interesting to me is that I think there's an inherent duality there in that and I think it's amazing how quickly Satoshi became mythologised, and just how rapidly that process took place.  Because if you think about it, as I was saying, by the summer of 2010, it's like people are emailing him and he's making fixes and he doesn't seem like a strange mysterious guy, he's just another guy on the forum; how would you know he's even different?  Everybody on the forum has a pseudonym, except for Gavin, so how would you know that Satoshi is some sort of a regular mysterious person.  People thought that he was Japanese they just assumed because like, why not?

It wasn't so cut and dry, right, where he appeared that way at first.  It really wasn't until the mainstream kind of press come in, in early 2011, as Gavin is kind of asserting, that they begin to ask, "Hey, where's the guy who invented Bitcoin?  It's great that you're in charge but who's the guy who did that?"  That's where you really see the press articles and Satoshi's last message to Gavin is, "Stop referring to me as this mysterious shadowy person", but that was something that the mainstream press had largely done at that point. 

They had already kind of concocted in their head this kind of myth of him as a shadowy founder.  And I think what's interesting is Gavin, he plays a role in popularising this I think because he's available, his face is on the forum.  He's talking to you, he looks like he could be your high school teacher, so I think Satoshi is kind of othered by Gavin, they've just become -- they're just very different people right.  Like you couldn't have two more different people.  Even the first message from Gavin to Satoshi is like, he's like, "Hey, how are you?  How old are you?  Did you go to school here?  I think Bitcoin's great, like I'd love to help you".  It's like this very chipper can-do attitude. 

I think, in articulating his story and Gavin sort of explaining how he became of leader of Bitcoin, he had to explain Satoshi's story and I think what's interesting is Satoshi's story is kind of a product of Gavin's story.  So, at the end of the article I kind of go into that really, I think Gavin gets caught up in the mythology too and I don't think he gets a lot of sympathy, but this idea that he was this good-natured guy, who was Bitcoin's protector, who was Bitcoin's leader; this is kind of stuff that people, to an extent, kind of -- I think over time he played into it and I think a lot of his bad decisions came when he played into that.  But he's a victim of mythology, I think in a lot of ways, the same ways that Satoshi is.  Both of our caricatures of how they were are pretty wrong.

Peter McCormack: There's another mythology that I'm intrigued by and I get myself in trouble talking about this, and I think you and I are aligned on this; I also think there's some mythology around the original vision and I have, God I'm going to get some shit for this, I know but I have certain sympathies towards people who were into the idea of bigger blocks; not for BSV people but for Bcash people, I have some certain sympathies for them because from everything I can see from the early days, I've read the whitepaper, I've seen some of the earlier messages, I've seen some of the discussions around transaction volume.  I think I can see how it would be very easy to be on the wrong side of the block size debate.  It wasn't very clear that this was going to become digital gold.

Now, I'm with you, I think we've got the right Bitcoin now, I think we've got the Bitcoin we need and deserve, but I can see how you can get on the wrong side of the history very easily in the block size debate, because of the vagueness around digital gold or digital payments.  I mean to me, it's very clear early on there are conversations about this being money, this being decentralised money and then other people say, "Well, gold is money", but when I say "money" I'm not talking about like anything that's tradeable.

I was like, this feels like this is meant to be money that you can use for any kind of transaction and I think there's a certain mythology around that as well.  Am I wrong or do you get similar feelings?

Pete Rizzo: I think there's a lot of evidence for either argument, otherwise you would not have the continued combativeness around this, that you would, right.  So, just the mere fact that there's continued controversy I think really would tell you a lot about the situation.  I think, you know, as I look at it, I think it is very clear that Satoshi did see Bitcoin as a decentralised money and an alternative to central banking and that he's very forward in seeing Bitcoin as those two things.

So especially in the whitepaper and then this article goes into this too, the first time he goes to evangelise it is on the P2P Foundation website.  He really does talk about Bitcoin as an alternative to central banking, as an alternative to the trust that was required in those systems.  I think that again, and this is why I raised it earlier, I think you have to deal with the question of Satoshi the innovator, the Satoshi that the person who needed to foster and build a community.

This is where I sort of wonder and I guess the only thing I could really add here is I think, as to what I was saying, like where you think about him launching the forums and you think about that not being like something -- you would think of it as an afterthought, but it was actually very important; I think it's unclear to me what Satoshi was willing to do to get people interested in Bitcoin.

So one of the things that I found, and this is going to seem kind of insane, but I actually did this process, so I actually went through the Bitcoin.org website and I compared every version.  So, I looked at like every existing version we have of the website saved and version by version how it changed.  It is true that during Satoshi's time as project leader, there was a portion of the website about the advantages of Bitcoin in which it was said that Bitcoin was for free or low-cost payments that were cheaper than credit cards.

So, I think that either Satoshi would have had to have put that there, or someone else would have to have put that there with Satoshi's agreement, because there would have been only a handful of people who had had the ability to update that website.  So, it's clear to me, and this is the way I'd phrase it, he was tacitly involved in promoting the project in certain ways and ultimately, you can only draw conclusions of that.  I do think again early on that he was very clear that this was something that was an alternative to central banking and base problems with money.

I think the question then becomes sort of like, "What was he willing to do to keep users involved?"  Even if you think about it with the idea, because there's a quote in the article where he says -- Jeff Garzik is a guy who I think gets a lot of flak as well with Gavin.  I think one of the interesting things if you look at Garzik's post and I kind of went through his history of his time, is that he codes a few patches, because he's a traditional open-source guy, right.  So, he's like, "Okay, well if I want an answer to something I'm going to code a patch and see what the maintainer says". 

So, he codes the patch that's basically saying every transaction should have a fee.  So, Jeff Garzik writes a patch, and he says, "Every transaction should have a fee".  So what Satoshi says is he says, "I think some transactions should always be free".  So, Garzik is kind of this guy who read the whitepaper, he's like, "Okay, well we're minting Bitcoins and the future of Bitcoin is going to be supported by fees".  I'm going to make the statement and I'm going to say, "All transactions should have fees", and then the founder comes back to you and says, "No, I think that some transactions should be free always".  How do you move forward with that, because you've asked the question and you've gotten your answer and your answer is kind of contradictory, right?

I think in that instance Jeff Garzik was playing the role of most people feel that all Bitcoin transactions should have fees; why?  Because we need Bitcoin to work with a fee market because that’s how it will work in the future, but that's not the standpoint that Satoshi took on it.  So again, these people were real people who had to move forward, and they had to make decisions based on past data.

I think what is clear is that the other developers over time became more assertive and thinking of the project as a scientific project that had to meet certain standards, meet certain definitions and that they really, and this is again, I would pull that quote from Wladimir, they really started to think that the project needed to be decentralised and they were willing to push that, not push that, but they adopted that as the north star.  That became the thing,

In order to resolve this contradiction, where Bitcoin was originally this centralised decentralised money, you had to actually figure out what it meant for that money to be decentralised.  I think that people who ended up on the smaller block side or the kind of Bitcoin is gold, or that sort of camp, I think they thought longer and harder about what that meant.  I think some of the people on the other side of that, if anything, I think you can fall to Jeff and Gavin for being a little bit too differential to Satoshi and his inconsistencies, because again I think Satoshi isn't so clear and I think maybe he was willing to do stuff to get us to be interested. 

I don't think that makes him a bad guy either, I think that makes him a guy who started a project that got successful.  He needed to please everybody and that's for a while what he did because that was the solution that worked for him.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it's easy to look at these things with retrospect and see what the right decision was and I do think we have the Bitcoin we deserve and I do think we have the right Bitcoin but I spent some time when I first -- because when I first properly got involved it was during the block size debate of 2017 and you're in it, and you're like, "What the fuck?"

Well, that kind of makes sense of it because -- but really you know it's years of work, and I'm very at the basic level but understanding the tech, understanding the economics takes you there and I do have a certain amount of sympathy.  I don't have sympathy now, like by now you should know, I think it's kind of obvious the market's spoken, but I think that's more about saving face.

There is a thing where Satoshi perhaps reappeared during the block size debate.  There is that one message that --  is it, "We're all Satoshi".

Pete Rizzo: There's the one from Dorian, like when he says, "I'm not Dorian Nakamoto", or what happens is an old -- email address of Satoshi says, "I am not Dorian".  He did the same thing during the block size wars.

Peter McCormack: What are your thoughts on it?

Pete Rizzo: I think it almost doesn't matter at a certain point, again I think it's one of those, I view that as sort of like you know JK Rowling where she went back and said that Dumbledore was gay, it's like it's either in the text or it's not.  You know, it's like well if Dumbledore was gay, then you should have put it in the book, you missed your opportunity.  So, I think any post-Satoshi comments, I think the last message that he sent to Gavin and the other guys, to me that's his last message because I don't think you can prove any Satoshi going forward.

As Satoshi, I don't think we need any other person to be Satoshi, we certainly don't need a leader now.  I think really what I wanted to get out of this article again like wasn't who was Satoshi, it wasn't like, "What are his opinions and what did he think about things?" I wanted to understand what he went through and what early users thought about authority, what they thought about governance, and how they thought Bitcoin should be managed. 

I think honestly, I was surprised by just -- you know, Pierre Rochard, I think when he read it he wrote back to me, he said, "TIL", he's like "Toxic bitcoiners drove out Satoshi", and I was like, "I loved that", I was like, "That's a great way to look at this where the users just asserted authority and at a certain point, the users didn't need Satoshi and Satoshi had to step aside".  I think the article really builds over time and by the end, I think there's a velocity of events that are happening and you kind of see it's like how could a Satoshi figure ever solve this for us? 

One of the interesting events that I go into is this thing call Bit DNS.  So, this guy named Matthew Willis, he basically wrote a public blog post that was basically about, "Hey, can we have other block chains?"  And we just live in this world now where there's many cryptocurrencies and blockchains but that just blew people's minds right and people, all of a sudden they're looking at Satoshi, you know, "Satoshi, what should we do?" 

This is really where Satoshi comes up with merge mining which really just becomes the sidechains idea later.  But yeah, it's really just interesting like how could Satoshi solve that?  Is there any version of reality where Satoshi can tell you how or whether we should have many cryptocurrencies?  I don't know, what does Satoshi say about that and would you care what the Satoshi said anyway?  And the answer is people just didn't; they didn't.

Peter McCormack: There's one question I'm not going to ask you and you know what that question is, which is the question everyone will want to ask you once they've read it.

Pete Rizzo: What's that?

Peter McCormack: Who is Satoshi?  I don't want you to answer it, even if you did.

Pete Rizzo: I don't think I know any more than anyone else, yeah, I know.

Peter McCormack: I'm in that place like any attempt to dox Satoshi is disrespectful and it's wrong.  I don't know about you, but I've had over the years, I've had a small handful of people who've got in touch because they're making films or they're doing something.  There's "Finding Satoshi", or whatever and I'm always like, " No, I don't want to be involved, leave it alone".

Pete Rizzo: That's the right answer.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is the right answer but the mystery's never going to end.  But one thing I would ask you, are there any people you would say it's specifically isn't that you got from it?

Pete Rizzo: I don't think you can ever say that anybody isn't Satoshi, right?  I mean I think that, you know, I would say first this piece is specifically not about who Satoshi is.  I don't personally think I want to know who Satoshi is, I don't think we need to know who Satoshi is.  I think Bitcoin has evolved past Satoshi in pretty much every way, right.  I think it's interesting to think that he did leave this legacy, he did have this impact.  In a lot of ways Bitcoin has evolved beyond maybe what he even really thought you know was possible or how things should be.  I think that's great, and that's not really where my intent comes from.  I think maybe to just kind of talk about why it's like I can do some work like this and not be interested in who Satoshi is, right or even who he might be, I think that all we can do is look at what happened in Bitcoin. 

We live in a world of Bitcoin right now where we don't need a Satoshi, we don't need that authority figure, I don't know what we gain from that.  Certainly, I would say it's probably unlikely that the major people who corresponded with him, you could probably rule out anyone on those forums who interacted with him.  But look, there are people who at the time who even thought that maybe Satoshi was just coming back as Gavin Andresen, that Gavin Andresen was the guy who had founded the project and it wasn't so out of the realm of possibility that like he was doxing himself, right, because why not?

Peter McCormack: Every theory is possible.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, and I think what's interesting is that just everyone had those theories right.  I think that Satoshi just really became a myth and a legend in his own time, right.  I think that if anything, the article really just gets across that, who was in charge of Bitcoin?  It's always been the users, and to an extent Satoshi's authority was almost like a problem to be solved, it was the inherent riddle initially with Bitcoin is that, how do you have a decentralised money where there is a guy who can really just put anything he wants on the code and did, like he did act that way? 

I don't know, I mean I find that with my studies of Satoshi, what I'm looking for is I want to understand where this notion of Bitcoin governance came from, theories about how Bitcoin will work, how it worked happened, right, and how those evolved.  There's this one funny exchange that I found that I really loved, and it was basically just these guys on this IRC forum and they're just talking about just how could you be comfortable with some random guy picking the money supply, right, and this is back and forth and this is like 2010. 

There's this one guy who's like, "Well, I accept Satoshi's cap more than I do Bernanke's right", and I think that's interesting to me because it shows that as Bitcoin sort of evolved, there were already people then who saw the value proposition the way that it's articulated today.  The other quote from that paragraph was this guy who's basically like, "The only important part is that it's fixed and enforced by all peers and known to everyone in advance", right. 

So, even then like people were sort of grappling with these essential questions where it's like, "Did Satoshi ordain a 21 million limit?"  "Yes".  "Did it matter?"  "No".  It didn't matter to users then the same way it doesn't matter to us now and I think -- I don't know I love little moments like that where you go back and you're like, "Wow, who would you have to have been in 2010 to understand Bitcoin at that level?"  You would have to had to really understand Bitcoin and to me that's more fascinating than Satoshi because again, Bitcoin is this egalitarian decentralised project and in many ways, it's great to see users express this understanding of Bitcoin, because I think that is what the technology ultimately is at the end of the day, right.  It's a consensus technology and the consensus today is it's decentralised money.

Peter McCormack: It's quite incredible still that it works.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When you think about it, it's a -- I think there's a great meme I saw the other day where it's -- you may have seen it where it's the dad has come to his son's bedroom door and it's a stick drawing of a dad with a hat on saying, "What are you up to, son?"

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, are you winning son?

Peter McCormack: Are you winning son, that's it and the son said, "Yes, I'm rebuilding the global financial system with my fweinds".  I just thought the funny thing about that, it kind of -- that is actually happening.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Key parts of the network are Raspberry Pis, sat in people's lounge.

Pete Rizzo: Right.

Peter McCormack: Or in their office and key parts of the network are a bunch of miners within a crate in Africa or South America; that is the financial system.  It seems like it's almost like this hodgepodge of technologies has all been kind of stuck together.  It doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does and it's brilliant in design and the way it works.  But it seems both elegant and clunky at the same time, do you know what I mean?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I mean yeah, the majesty of Bitcoin I think is something that like I mean my -- it only grows for me over time.  I was saying this in a Clubhouse chat recently and it's something that dawned on me recently just on my morning run, I was like, "Wow, Bitcoin is like a deep structural critique of human life".  If you think about it in those terms, right, it's like, if you were a guy and it's your stamp on the world, Bitcoin really just cuts to the root of all these problems, like consumerism, like economic management, like life in the 21st Century; and it's like, you made Bitcoin! 

What a deep, structural critique, even eight years later, for me personally, but even 12 years later for the ecosystem as a whole, it's like we're still grappling with understanding what it is and just what a contradiction it is in so many ways and how amazing it is that it's still there right.

I guess in the context of this article that this has all continued for ten years without anyone to lead it, right.  There is no Ben Bernanke, as I said on the chat, right.  There is no person at the dial, but I do think that great people contributed, right.  I think when we look back at the past of Bitcoin, we're going to find that while Bitcoin is a decentralised technology, our understanding of the philosophy and the technology was highly shaped by individuals.  I think that comes out in a few moments in this piece where you really do get to see those early people, whether it's Wlad van der Laan or like a Theymos, they come in and their contribution is, they got Bitcoin, they understood it and they were able to articulate it and in real time.  Even if that meant going against Satoshi or disagreeing with him, like sometimes they were willing to do that. 

I think that's supercool because I think the big thing driving my work these days is I said at the beginning here, it's just if Bitcoin is an invention, we need to preserve as much of it and our understanding of it.  I think what we're going to find is probably a handful of maybe 5 to 20 people, the same thing with what we saw with democracy, when that happened, that was something that came from humans; people argued, fought, developed the thing.  We're probably going to find that like there were a few people there who were highly influential and shaping our thinking about it.  I'm not even sure if Satoshi is in the top -- like if you were to do a top ten, where he gets there finally. 

I think the other thing that's clear is that Satoshi kind of left an unfinished product because in order for it to be finished, it had to solve the riddle of him, right?  How do you replace the guy in charge?  And there was no way that he could have done that, so I think it -- like Bitcoin is just, yeah, interesting in so many ways but, yeah, I get back to that inherent contradiction of Satoshi, which is you're the man who invented decentralised money, I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Has it changed you or your conviction with Bitcoin, because you may say I was wrong and it may be because of different reasons, but when I did the interview in 2019, I thought you were a little bit cynical or maybe disillusioned a bit with Bitcoin?  To have this conversation now, I think you're in a very different space with it, are they fair observations?

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, I would say so.  Yeah, I mean I'm interested to hear you say that.  I think my disillusionment at that time was not with Bitcoin.  I think I was at the beginning of really accepting Bitcoin maximalism or just the idea that Bitcoin was the only thing that I should be working on.  I think what I was really disillusioned with at that time specifically was just a few things, you know, I was coming out of the ICO boom, that was the decentralised cryptocurrency mania of everything's an innovation, and I think also just the news cycle in general.

I think we've seen this now, it's like the mainstream media and even the crypto media I think at large has adopted this standpoint that I don't think is really quite accurate, right.  I think from the standpoint of most crypto media and mainstream media, it's like these are all stocks, these are all bonds, here's the cryptos and the Dogecoin goes up and the Bitcoin goes down and Elon Musk with the tweets.  I think my disillusionment then was just realising the extent of the system that there was no great way to build that kind of model. 

I started as somebody who's interested in media and maybe that was something that I was interested in a little bit more than Bitcoin, at least maybe initially, and I think that, I don't know, just when I saw the mechanics of that system and just that there just didn't seem to be a good way to do it, right.  I didn't know what the solution to that was and I think after putting so much work into something like a prior publication I was at and then just seeing it come to those natural points where you're like, "Oh okay, I don't know if this is -- this isn't the thing that I want to be known for.  I don’t want to have this be the thing that I did, and I contributed, because I don't think there's a way to do it right".

That was hard, that was a hard realisation and I think yeah, you maybe caught me at the beginning of that, but I think, yeah, my appreciation for Bitcoin I think has only deepened since then because I had to really sit and think about what mattered to me and where I could add value, right.  I kind of got spat out the other end of, "Okay, there is no way to fix the media in the way that it works with Bitcoin".  There is no way to have even like a -- though I do think Bitcoin Magazine has done a great job of being more of an evangelist, right, and --

Peter McCormack: They have.

Pete Rizzo: -- being more Bitcoin focused, and I'm really proud of that; but I think that some of these larger publications and things it's like they're still -- and that's why when you were talking before this recording about just super cycles and how fast things are going to take, I mean you look at…

One of the biggest frustrations I think and seeing so many people come through crypto journalism or Bitcoin journalism whatever it's just like, if you treat it as a job, it's just the thing you do when you log online, it's a silly thing and I think if there's anything that I've got to from there, it's a real appreciation of like, "Okay, Bitcoin is a real thing".  This is going to have an impact on the world.  Not only that, it's a historic impact on the world.  This is going to be one of the few things when it's the year 3040 and they fast forward through the history of the world, it's like the wheel of fire and Bitcoin, right.  When all is said and done, if this whole time period where we lived, Bitcoin might be the one thing that remains in the centre; it is that important when you understand it, really what it is.

I think my disillusionment at the time was like I didn't know if I could contribute to that anymore.  This is something I talked to with Marty Bent, I was on his podcast not so long ago and it's just I think that everyone within Bitcoin, like Bitcoin is this immense thing.  Nic Carter, the cathedral that we're all building, I think us individual people who are contributing also have to kind of take stock with it sometimes and say "Okay, what am I contributing to this thing?  Am I putting my time and personal energies in the right way towards preserving this?" 

I think that was the gut check that I got and I came out of it saying, "Look, if I am somebody who's going to chase these questions down to the end, if I'm the guy who's going to go through every Satoshi post and help people understand what it is that he did and how he managed the projects, that's the road that I'm going to take and if it's a book, if it's periodic articles like I just want to get closer to the understanding of what this thing is, because that's the time horizon that I'm operating in now".

Really, it's so freeing compared to the news cycle compared to thinking about the next day, again, "Is Doge going up?  Is Elon selling?"  I mean I can't tell you how little I care about the cryptocurrency news these days and how amazing that is.  I just absolutely could not care less whether another major bank adopts Bitcoin; zero interest.  Again, because if you know that it's going -- if you see it and you get it, the rest is noise, you know?

Peter McCormack: Listen if there was one person to produce the definitive chronicles of Bitcoin, I think you're the person for it, you know I love your work.  I like hanging out with you, hopefully I'm going to see you at some point this year.  Are you going to be in Miami?

Pete Rizzo: Miami of course, yeah.  Going have me on the stage, manning the dunk tank.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll be the one probably bringing you on stage then but, look your work's brilliant, man.  Your work is brilliant, you know what I think of it.

Pete Rizzo: Thanks man, appreciate it.

Peter McCormack: I appreciate everything you're doing, I'm glad you've freed yourself of those shackles to do this because it is important work, and you are putting a marker in time to like document the history of what happens here.  I'll be interested to see how this is batched up at the end, because a disparate set of articles is one thing, a real kind of chronology of important Bitcoin information itself --

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: -- is important and I think you have a book in you and this probably all leads towards a book which is great, and I hope I get --

Pete Rizzo: I think so too, I just think that I didn't want to come to it with any preconceptions and I think the more that I try to approach doing something --

Peter McCormack: You don't have to.

Pete Rizzo: Like I always found that I was like, "Okay, I don't know this and I have to go back", and I think for me that pushed me further back into the timeline of Bitcoin, because I think this is not to critique any specific works, but I think there's been some recent attempts to do some kind of larger historical looks at things that have happened in Bitcoin and I just think that they're -- often times I think there's too much of a lens of the now, and really what I wanted to do with this article specifically is like, you've got to strip all that out.

Peter McCormack: Lens at the time.

Pete Rizzo: You actually have to strip that out, like you -- and again this goes to my current thing right now, it's like everybody's a fucking macro analyst all of sudden.  Everybody knows now how imports and exports work in Papua New Guinea, like you can give me like some deep critique!

Peter McCormack: Everyone knows how bond yields work.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, dude, it's a whole -- everybody --

Peter McCormack: I do.

Pete Rizzo: Everybody is a global macro economist like reinventing the central bank.  Look, I think that's great and that’s where we are now in Bitcoin, totally understand.  I think you guys are doing great work, but I think for me it's like just seeing so many versions of Bitcoin kind of emerge is like, I'm not convinced that we have the best version of Bitcoin now, or the most correct.  This idea that we have a super cycle, this idea that Bitcoin is an asset and it's mainstreaming as an asset and prior definitions of Bitcoin were not as correct as the definition we have now.

I think if there's a benefit and the thing that I'm trying to not lose is just being outside of that.  I don't really want to kind of fit into the -- I've seen so many of those things dissipate before.  Look, I mean Bitcoin's still a payment method, it is still a platform for applications, it is still all these things.  You may want to call it a macro asset or a macro hedge or Gold 2.0 or whatever.  I think the legacy of Bitcoin is going to be that humans are going to continue to try to put Bitcoin in boxes and Bitcoin is going to continue to break out of those boxes.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of organic really, isn't it?  It's like the push and the pull of every person, narrative, coder, regulator.  Like every single touchpoint into Bitcoin or outside of Bitcoin, it kind of pushes it -- it kind of finds where it needs to go.  It's a bit like, I don't know, it's a bit like water, it just flows where it needs to go.

Pete Rizzo: There's a great quote I love from this from like Douglas Adams who talks about the early internet and he's like, "First we thought it was a calculator" and then he's like, "then we thought it was a typewriter" and then it's like, "with the World Wide Web, we realised it's a brochure".  I think what that means to me is it's like human language is a natural constraint on Bitcoin, we want to verbalise what Bitcoin is and our act of articulating what Bitcoin is, we are putting shackles on it with our feeble human minds, right, we're trying to quantify this thing that just can't be quantified and at every point where we try to do that, it's going to break out of that box.

I mean for me I think I'm glad that you find the work interesting, I would hope people check it out.  I'm in Bitcoin Magazine, the Last Days of Satoshi.  I'll be doing some livestreaming there on Wednesday, so that would be 28th, that's on the anniversary of the old Satoshi Disappear Day, which the Bitcoin users declared at the point that he disappeared.  So, we're having Adam back on to chat a little bit about the legacy of Satoshi, Jameson Lopp, Pierre Rochard, also the Bitcoin Magazine folks Matt Odell, Christian Keroles and the great team over there.  We're streaming some content and yeah, appreciate the chat, man.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.  Well, what's next?  Do you know what you're going to attack next?

Pete Rizzo: I have a couple of inclinations.  To be honest I think I'm going to take a little bit of a breather after this one.  I think if you look at the last two, because I did the first Bitcoin War, which was after Satoshi left, but really I think that I've got to 2009 to 2012 kind of mapped out in my head.  I feel like I've really kind of gone through the bins and I've gotten everything that I wanted out of those periods.

I think the best thing I can say is like I don't have any more questions about this period, right, and I think for me, as someone who wants to understand Bitcoin, the best that I can do and I hope other people when evaluating work, it's like I think I've tried everything.  I mean I've tried to talk to the people who were there, I've read the forum post, I've read the IRC logs, I've spent time with it.  Maybe people are going to disagree with some of my conclusions; I'd love to have those conversations.

I think for me it was just again as soon as you realise that historical importance, as soon as you realise that level, it's like well you have to go through every box, you have to look at everything that's in the junk draw and see what might be there.  You know, I think even for the hardened old-timers, I mean Gavin Andresen read this and he was like, "Even I learned some new things".  For me that's awesome.

If I can teach somebody who was there a bit more than he knew, then I feel like I've done the best that I can for Bitcoin, right, that my work judged against what Bitcoin is and I feel like I've done enough.  And then to me, that's the standard that I want my work to be at going forward.  Whether it's a book or a movie or whatever, my standard is I would like the work that I've done to contribute to Bitcoin and then when you value it against it, it's comparable, maybe, a little bit.

Peter McCormack: Listen, Dude, I love your work, honestly, I always have.  So, this is probably going to come out on the day of the release-ish.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, just tell me where to find the article, I mean we will link it in the show notes.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah, Bitcoinmagazine.com, you can follow me on Twitter @pete_rizzo_ any additional underscores it might have a scammer but, yeah, again would love any feedback and to people who might be reading, I hope this gives you a new perspective on the early days of Bitcoin and I hope it encourages you to continue learning about Bitcoin because I think that's why we're all here, so …

Peter McCormack: All right, man, well listen keep crushing it.  As you know you've got an open invite on the show, any time you want to come.

Pete Rizzo: Just gatecrash!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I think -- do you know what I think we should do.  People won't know we were talking probably for half an hour before we started, just shooting the shit about Bitcoin.  There's some interesting conversations there, so let's do that one soon as well because it will be good to catch up with you.

Pete Rizzo: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Also, I look forward to seeing you in Miami and grabbing a beer, dude.

Pete Rizzo: Happy to do it, man, when you get time, appreciate it.