WBD354 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin Has No Leaders with Dan Held

Interview date: Friday 28th May

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Held. 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 Dan Held, the Growth Lead at Kraken. We discuss the concept of leaders in Bitcoin, antifragility, and dispel some FUD.

“Bitcoin grows more antifragile with these sorts of events... they’re going to lose influence pretty fast, and pretty soon, the market doesn’t care what they have to say.”

— Dan Held

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Dan, mate, what a fucking week!

Dan Held: I've been in Bitcoin nine years now and this was by far one of the most -- I keep thinking that it's going to cool down at some point, but no; Bitcoin is always full of drama and prices dropping over 50% and a lot of drama with mining, it was nuts.

Peter McCormack: 51% I think was the biggest on one exchange; I did not see that coming.  It's funny actually, because I'm in it less time than you; I'm in it four years, so I've done a cycle, so it's easier this time, whereas my first cycle, I was like, "Shit, I'd better sell; everything's going die".  But this one I kind of went, "Oh, for fuck's sake, I'll put up with it".  It's just there's a lot of weird stuff going on at the moment.  By the way, we were meant to talk about something else.  I don't have any agenda today, I've got no written questions, I just want to shoot the shit with you.

Dan Held: Let's do it, man.

Peter McCormack: So, let's talk about the Mining Council.  I was on a Twitter Spaces chat with Nic Carter and a bunch of people before we got on this talking about it.  I typically shot from the hip on Twitter, threw out some fucking hand grenades, made it clear what I think of Elon Musk and secret meetings and such; but what I noticed was there was actually a real split on this.  The plebs, the cyber hornets were like, "Fuck this, this is bullshit!" but there were some more reasonable voices.  Nic Carter wrote a considered couple of tweets about it; I saw Amanda from Galaxy Digital's mining operation write something considered about it.

I've noticed a number of people say, "This isn't such a big issue.  Actually, reporting this data is important".  I think having a range of voices is good.  Sorry, I'm going on a bit of a ramble to start here, but I think having a range of voices is good, Dan.  I think it's good to have the cyber hornets reining people in and I also think it's good to have the more, what shall we say, liberal voices with regard to this, because it's like the push and pull of politics, right; you find consensus in the middle.  But how do you take it all in?  What was your response to the Mining Council?

Dan Held: Yeah.  Bitcoin is never short of drama; there's always governance, conversations, decentralization threats, FUD, ebbing and flow on a weekly basis.  Certainly, after nine years of it, it's definitely --

Peter McCormack: Tiring.

Dan Held: I definitely have a few extra grey hairs, and I'm looking forward to Miami.  I need a couple of whiskeys; I think we all do!  But yeah, with Bitcoin mining and China FUD, so first and foremost, miners don't control Bitcoin.  So, I think that's the fundamental point I want to hammer home here; miners don't control Bitcoin.  That, fundamentally, we do not have to worry about.  Miners are the paid guards of the Bitcoin Ledger.  That's, I think, a more simplistic way to think about it, that they're incentivised to behave properly, but they do not control Bitcoin. 

So, I think that is a big concern for folks who are new; they might think that miners control Bitcoin, which is not true.

Peter McCormack: Well shall we explain why though, because they might not understand?

Dan Held: Yeah.  So, miners are paid to structure transactions appropriately, or in the right sequence.  They're paid and they're incentivised and their payment is in Bitcoin, and they've bought machines and they've put electricity through the machines to earn that block reward, which is their Bitcoin reward, and they're rewarded for behaving properly and ordering transactions in the right sequential manner.  So, if miners were to behave improperly, they would damage their future rewards, their future cash flows, because they would hurt the value of Bitcoin.  That’s that game theory that protects the Bitcoin Ledger and that's the role that miners play in that.

Now, who controls Bitcoin?  Bitcoin is controlled by the community.  It's sort of a stand-off between Bitcoin, their Core developers and the miners; it's sort of a stand-off with everyone having their pistols out and pointing them at each other.  So, miners don't control Bitcoin but at the same time, if developers or other folks try to push other initiatives, they might create a hard fork.  So, everyone has to agree together to create a Schelling point around a certain codebase that everyone agrees to run. 

That's what Bitcoin really is; it's the social consensus around code.  We all agree to run this version of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin Cash, this version of Bitcoin, which is Bitcoin, and we all agree to run that code.  The miners are like, "Well, we're going to mine on that chain", and it's sort of this consensus that's made between all these participants, and the devs aren't going to push code that the community doesn't want, and that's where the whole…

I haven't paid as much attention to this as I should, but with Taproot activation, there was a lot of different steps there because it's really tricky for anyone to make a change to the Bitcoin protocol, because you have these three big parties that play a very important part in how changes are made and promoted.  So that's ultimately how Bitcoin works, I would say, is it's ultimately community-led.  If the community abandons the code that Core developers push and that miners mine, then there is no Bitcoin if they all abandon that, or if there's a new version that everyone agrees upon. 

So, Bitcoin ultimately is the code that people agree upon is Bitcoin and that social consensus around that, and so any changes to that by miners or Core developers that isn't agree upon by the community, would be rejected.  So ultimately Bitcoin is controlled by the community.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay, that's fair.  Run a node, I get it.  If you're listening, run your fucking node; even I have one now so there's no excuse!  Okay, but just to add to that, if you were to do a risk analysis of miners and any threats they present to the Bitcoin Network, what would be in your list of primary risks?

Dan Held: Sure, the quintessential risk with miners is that they could run a 51% attack.  If you controlled 51% of the hash rate you would be able to start to mess around with the ordering of transactions, if you decided to be malicious.  Now, the only parties that would do something like this would be governments; governments would be willing to burn their future cash flows earned in Bitcoin and reorganise transactions and cause some fear and the price to drop.

The only countries that would be willing to burn that money, because you really have to -- basically, the miner game theory works on these miners would only behave inappropriately if they were willing to burn the money, so only state-level governments could do that and it would be to the tune of tens of billions of dollars' worth of mining equipment.  So that's the biggest risk that miners play, is that the miners, that a state entity could spend tens of billions of dollars without being noticed to accumulate 51% of the hash rate, then use that for malicious purposes.

There could also be a circumstance too where a mining pool gets hacked.  There's all sorts of really cool initiatives being worked on by I think it's Matt from over at Square; he's working on Stratum, which I believe is more like a decentralized mining pool, so I think that a decentralized mining pool definitely mitigates some of the concerns around mining pool hacking.

The primary concern with miners is typically around 51% attacks; the 51% attacks where they could potentially reorganise transactions.  But that hasn't happened in Bitcoin yet, and I find that very implausible that it would happen sometime in the near future.  So, I don't really think that's a major concern; the game theory has held up so far over Bitcoin's existence since 2009, since the code launched.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Let me put another couple of things in there.  You talked earlier about forking the network; our experience with S2X is that, I know we were saved by the UASF but there are threats, potential risks there, if there are disagreements with key consensus changes, that they could fork the network which could disrupt the network for a period of time.

Dan Held: Yeah.  There is a tug and pull during SegWit2x of the community fighting against Jihan Wu, and was it Bitmain?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dan Held: I haven't heard that name in such a long time, but it shows you what happens when you try to fight the cyber hornets; you're going to get burned and you're going to be pushed out.  Jihan Wu hasn't really made it; he got pushed out of his own company too.  There's essentially a tug and pull where the miners were signalling, "We want this chain", and the community was like, "No, we don't want this", and eventually the community won. 

So, it was the victory of Bitcoin users and their community over centralised powerful individuals and corporations.  Those corporations had banded together, created the New York Agreement.  The New York Agreement was essentially them and their miners, so it was the businesses and miners trying to implement a change in the Bitcoin protocol that the community did not want, and the community won.  So, this very much validates my previous statement that Bitcoin is owned and run by the community, not businesses, powerful individuals or miners.

Peter McCormack: All right, let me put another one at you; I think it's Marathon mining OFAC compliant blocks.

Dan Held: Yeah, I mean if you want to have fun staying poor then you can do that, because if you want to leave revenue and then -- what's hilarious about that is that people found their address and started to send them dirty tainted coins, which I thought was hilarious!

Peter McCormack: I know.  I fucking love bitcoiners; bitcoiners are brilliant.  But let's talk about that.  So, if people don't understand, do you want to explain what Marathon is doing?

Dan Held: Yeah, so essentially they're mining -- so the block reward, what miners receive in compensation for buying their machine and running electricity through it, is they receive newly minted Bitcoins, called the subsidy, and transaction fees.  Transaction fees don't represent a majority of the block reward yet, but in the future they will.  And so what Marathon is doing is they're selectively censoring transactions that they would consider to be elicit, or from addresses that are listed by OFAC as elicit.

Now, the funny part here though is it's such a ridiculous thing to do because, one, you leave money on the table and other miners will go pick that up, so have fun staying poor; two is, it's virtue signalling and totally bullshit.  What was evidenced after they mined one of these blocks is that they got people's -- with their address, people started to send them tainted coins. 

So, there's no way -- you can't stop someone from sending you a payment on the Bitcoin network.  So, if you're trying to have clean Bitcoin, good luck, because some guy in the middle of Iraq or Sudan or whatever can send you a dollar of Bitcoin from their address to your address and boom; now you're technically tainted.  Bitcoin, ultimately, it doesn't matter if they're tainted or not.

Peter McCormack: They could burn those UTXOs if they wanted to.

Dan Held: They could do if they wanted to, but the fact is like, "Oh well", now you've had these coins touch your wallet and there's all sorts of technical aspects to that of like, "Is that clean; is that dirty?"  I think it's silly to claim that like, "Oh, these are clean coins and these are dirty coins".

Peter McCormack: Okay, so really what you're saying here is that miners essentially play to a perfect free market economic incentive structure? 

Dan Held: It's extremely likely that that would be the outcome of this.  Now, certainly there could be a more dystopian version of this in the future where miners all collectively decide to censor transactions and then fundamentally Bitcoin would have some major issues there; but we would also have to depend on them not caring about money, which I find to be improbable, especially considering you can run a miner behind Tor.  So, a Bitcoin miner, you don't necessarily have an identity at all.

Peter McCormack: Also, I guess it depends on jurisdiction as well and the jurisdictional pressures you would get if you're based in the US.  I actually don't know too much about the effect on that.

Dan Held: Well, the US didn't ask Marathon to do this.

Peter McCormack: So they're butt-kissing?

Dan Held: Yeah, Marathon did this on their own accord.

Peter McCormack: Wow, okay. That's rather disappointing.

Dan Held: What a very disappointing and bootlicking sort of thing to do!  The whole point of this is that we don't do that sort of thing, so if they want to selectively not make money, then sure I guess.

Peter McCormack: Well, get fucked, Marathon!

Dan Held: Yeah, FinCEN and other regulators didn't ask them to do that.

Peter McCormack: That’s interesting.  I just made the -- well actually, I suppose if they'd have asked them, they would have asked everyone.

Dan Held: Precisely.

Peter McCormack: So really, it's just a massive virtue signal for no economic benefit and to become the most hated company in mining.

Dan Held: It's antithetical to Bitcoin's entire existence, so I find it very unsavoury.

Peter McCormack: The reason I bring it up, Dan, is I'm trying to imagine the worst-case scenario with the Mining Council, and that's the adversarial nature that I've learnt, especially now I have all my wealth tied up in Bitcoins; it is important for me to think about that.

Dan Held: Certainly.

Peter McCormack: I'm annoyed at the influence of Elon Musk because he's damaging my wealth; when he tweets irresponsibility or tweets bullshit, he's damaging my wealth.  Not that I expect the market to go up only, I want the market to naturally do what it does, but I certainly don't want the influence of some egotistical loose cannon, fourth richest guy in the world, just tweeting bullshit and it affecting what is my hard-earned money.

I'm trying to imagine worst-case scenario.  It might sound to some more reasonable people that I'm being unreasonable, but I'm wondering if, potentially, a Mining Council can lead to some form of regulatory capture or, just by appeasing a single billionaire, because essentially the meeting was held to appease Elon Musk. 

Okay, Elon Musk has tweeted a bunch of bullshit about Bitcoin energy consumption and because of that, a meeting's now been held that he's been invited to which, by the way, I don't understand why he's had an invite to the meeting because, if you think about it, what gives him the right to be at that table?  Because he's Elon Musk?  Well, that's not Bitcoin because we're all equal.  Because he holds the most amount of Bitcoin?  Well, I also think that's bullshit, because it's not his personal Bitcoin.  Then how long's he been in?  He's only been in Bitcoin for five minutes.  Someone like you deserves a seat at the table more; you've been there longer, done more for Bitcoin.

Dan Held: True.

Peter McCormack: But anyway, it's to appease him, so where does this lead to; what if Zuckerberg comes in; what if Jeff Bezos comes in?  Do we suddenly have this council of bitcoiners, billionaire bitcoiners who sit down and agree, "Well, here's an issue; we need to deal with it"?  What if pressure comes in from the regulators?  "Okay, we're going to call a meeting.  We're going to have Saylor, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg all at a table and say, 'We're not happy about X.  What are going to do about it?'"

I'm just imagining what is the worst-case scenario, and actually what it made me realise, Dan, is that we actually don't want leading voices in Bitcoin; we don't want people who can drive narrative because then there are people who can be influenced.  Rant, rant, rant!

Dan Held: Yeah, I think that's where I've talked about Bitcoin marketing and personal brands in Bitcoin and we've seen a lot of people have a negative reaction to that, and I think some of that is seeing these bigger brands, like Roger Ver and others, be on the wrong side of the debate and try to use their influence to push Bitcoin in a certain direction.

Yeah, I certainly think Bitcoin has no gods, no leaders, no kings, so having semi-leader lists would be the ideal world, but we don't live in that world; we had Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik and Satoshi, and there are eras of different leaders, and Erik Voorhees and Andreas, and there's different waves of leaders that come in and then eventually abandon Bitcoin or try to attack it. 

I think, to be on the right side, we can still have big leaders and them be good for Bitcoin; I think Jameson Lopp would be a great example.  Jameson, I think, has been on the right side of history.

Peter McCormack: Well actually he would admit, at one point, he was a big blocker.  I can't remember if it was Bitcoin Classic or Qt, he originally thought it was a good idea, realised it was wrong, changed his mind and is back on.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think in that era people were still exploring it, so that would be fine.  It's more of late-2017 on when it became like a civil war; if you were on the wrong side of the battlefield there, I think you've lost all credibility in the Bitcoin space.

Peter McCormack: I think it's a credibility that can be recovered if handled right.

Dan Held: If they were humble, sure, if they came back and said, "I'm wrong"; but I don't think that's going to happen.

Peter McCormack: God, his name's slipped my mind, the Xapo guy from Argentina.

Dan Held: Oh, Wences?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Wences.

Dan Held: He recovered, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he totally recovered.  He said, "I was wrong", he apologised, he understood, but so many seem to have lost the battle and refused to come back and say, "Yeah, do you know what, I was wrong".  It's interesting.  I think some of them still believe they're right, and I think others just don't want to admit they're wrong.

Dan Held: Certainly.  You'd have to be extraordinarily stubborn to believe that you're still right after all this time, but there are certainly individuals that I'm not going to name, but certain individuals who refuse to look at reality.  They're free to ignore reality as long as they like, and their investment can continue to go down.

It's funny, someone asked me, "Hey Dan, how do you know you're going to be on the right side of history in the future?" which I thought was a really interesting question.  How do you know, if there's another hard fork, that you're going to be on the right side of it?  What if you're on the wrong side like some of these guys were?  I actually answered that with a product management perspective; the protocol solves a problem.  At the end of the day, the protocol's solving a problem for humans and we have to look at what problem it's solving. 

Now with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin, we knew that Bitcoin wasn't solving the cheap PayPal problem; it was very self-evident based on how scaling technology would work and then also, from any basic empathetic customer experience, you would just know that getting people to go spend it was an incredible challenge of, you've not only got transaction fees but exchange fees and volatility fees that just made it -- it wasn't solving a problem; it was people projecting what they wanted it to be and it wasn't actually being empathetic with the customer.

Bitcoin's customers are people trying to store value in a way that's hard to seize and immutable and has a monetary policy that won't be changed, a sound money, a Gold 2.0; that’s Bitcoin's core value prop.  So as long as we remember how Bitcoin is solving people's problems, that ultimately I think is the guiding light on how we make decisions for where Bitcoin goes.  Just like with product decisions, do we build this new feature or not; is that was the Bitcoin community wants and will it actually solve a problem? 

Actually, PayPal is not solving a problem.  That was not a problem; that was a made-up problem, and if you just spent any time with your customers, you would have realised that.  So that's where the white hat narrative failed, and that's why that use case didn't make its way into Bitcoin, because Bitcoin's use case was more around storing value.

In the future, there are going to be battles based on privacy.  There might some other battles based on Bitcoin DeFi or something; I don't think that one would be as big, but the privacy one I think is probably going to be a future battle.

Peter McCormack: People have said that the privacy debate is the next civil war; I've heard that brought up a few times because the kind of things you could be debating about are unchained privacy; that could become a debate.  I think the thing that makes it interesting is, if it's going to lead to a hard fork, then there's certainly a dispute, is price the futures as soon as possible.

Dan Held: Yeah.  Are you talking like price the fork in futures?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, price the fork --

Dan Held: I agree.

Peter McCormack: -- because that was a great thing with S2X; as soon as the fork was priced, did it go up?  Bitfinex did, didn't it?  I can't remember if it went up and then straight down, but at one point it was priced about 10% of the main fork.

Dan Held: Right.  I think futures is a great way to play it.  It's basically, yeah, like we'll bet on -- let the market decide now.  You could have big whales influence that, but ultimately good luck trying to influence a trillion-dollar market; that would take an enormous amount of capital just to signal something, so I'm not sure who would risk that.

Peter McCormack: It could be a multi-trillion-dollar market by that point as well, Dan.

Dan Held: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: The thing is, if you consider Bitcoin as Gold 2.0, you want to price with the market.  You don't want to go against the market.

Dan Held: Yeah, you could get crushed.  So, I think voting based on skin in the game votes are a pretty good way to vote for these sorts of things.  It's not like over and done then, it's just a good way to signal; it's all about signalling. 

I think the privacy one is an interesting one.  I think about it as, as privacy becomes a bigger and bigger topic, I continually -- so I've got a bunch of people coming into my threads, which I'm sure you do, Monero folks and some cash folks --

Peter McCormack: Monero folks, fungibility.

Dan Held: Oh yeah, they're always trying to peddle whatever they've got.

Peter McCormack: They've been quite loud recently.

Dan Held: Yeah, so what's interesting though is I wrote an article on Bitcoin and privacy in The Held Report, my weekly newsletter, where I dig into this, where I'm like, "Okay, what is your gold standard, all puns intended, for fungibility?"  I'm like, "Fiat cash".  We would all agree Fiat cash is pretty damn good with fungibility, because it's what drug dealers use in movies, it's what's everyone uses.  Cool; all right.  You can move a couple of million around pretty easily in cash; it's risky but it's pretty private.

Here's the thing, okay, go spend it; what's going to happen?  You walk into the dealership, ten cameras record you; there's a title on file that you bought this car, you bought this Lambo; you paid for it with cash, which is recorded; your name's on it, which is recorded; then you go buy a house with cash, which is recorded, and it's all recorded, all mapped. 

So, yeah, you've technically got fungibility on your day-to-day coffee transactions, cool, great, where you can take your dirty money and go spend it on a cup of coffee, but as soon as you make these big purchases or you buy a TV online or you buy a TV in person, there's all these cameras at Best Buy that record you, there's receipt data; your cell phone's tracking all of this as well.  How are you going to hide any of that?

Peter McCormack: Well, you launder it!

Dan Held: So, what do you do?  You create a shell company and then move money through it?

Peter McCormack: You create a car wash, cash business.

Dan Held: Sure.  Okay, so everyone creates their own money laundering scheme!

Peter McCormack: No, I get the point you're saying, but there are criminals out there who've learnt ways to launder money; it's not an impossible task.

Dan Held: Sure, of course.  All I'm saying is this idea that perfect privacy on chains somehow equals freedom is completely ridiculous, because all of that money that you have has to go buy something some day, whether it be rent -- sure, if you just stored value in it and you never sold it ever, great, but everyone's got day-to-day expenses, right.  So, I find that idea that perfect privacy, like this perfectly fungible money will equal this freedom, is BS.  If you never bought anything, sure. 

Then the second one is, okay, let's say you have perfect privacy, have you ever looked at how many SDKs are within a mobile app; you know when those are tracking your movements?  If you google "What's the price of Monero?" or "What's the price of Bitcoin?" I'm sure that the NSA has flagged that for sure.  If you've made one slip-up like that ever, ever, once, then they've probably got you on a list. 

So, this idea that you have this perfectly private money which then shields you from government action, which is the whole worry, is that governments could, if they can identify folks on chains, they can penalise them, I think it's a little BSy; there's no such thing as perfect privacy.  You ultimately have to buy something and all of that's recorded, so I don't think that's very practical.  Even perfectly private money on chain wouldn't be a practical way to hide from the government.

So first and foremost, that perfectly private money solves a giant problem; I push back against that narrative because I just don't see that.  Also, Bitcoin is still the most used coin on dark markets, which indicates that Bitcoin is still very much used for those and people use CoinJoins, which is an implementation that folks can use to go mix their coins with other people.  So, I think that Bitcoin, and with that plus Lightning, has good enough privacy or, all puns intended, pretty good privacy, and I push back in the narrative that Bitcoin needs privacy to ultimately achieve the problem it's solving of storing value and being a Gold 2.0; it's just not really practical.

Peter McCormack: Well, can I disagree with you here?

Dan Held: Sure, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, I agree with your point in that you will have to buy something and records be created, yes, I do agree with that.  At the same time, that's not a reason to desire privacy, because there are other reasons to have privacy.  You've talked about if you have a large amount of cash, etc, but let's talk about people in the scenario where they have just honest money that they've earnt.  That could be where you are in the world, where I am in the world; that could be in China, that could be in Syria or wherever.  There are certain places where maybe you want to buy certain things you don't want to be tracked. 

The basis of democracy is that you have privacy because you don't want influence over your vote, you don't want any threats to your vote, etc.  I'll say to people, "Listen to this, if you go and search up 'Andreas Antonopoulos privacy', he does a really good presentation on this, talking about the basis of human freedom and democracy".  I agree with what you're saying, but I also think privacy is still important and it is desired because there are certain scenarios -- we're in a blessed position, UK and US, and there are people I think in other countries who need it more than us.

Dan Held:  Yeah, so first and foremost, privacy is a human right.  I totally agree.  So, in a perfect world, would Bitcoin be perfectly private and all these things?  Absolutely, I'd love that world; it would be nice to have.  However, it comes with the trade-off, and that's where most of the privacy coin folks don't mention this.  The trade-off comes in auditability, which means that we don't know for certain if the monetary policy has been tampered with due to an exploit, which has occurred on both Monero, Zcash and Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I personally don't want that trade-off by the way.

Dan Held: Yeah, and that's where I find it really dishonest that they don't ever bring that up.  They're like, "Oh, Bitcoin isn't as fungible as it should be.  You should just implement privacy", and I'm like, "Cool.  Then we would sacrifice the one thing that makes Bitcoin incredibly trustworthy and valuable, which is the auditability and trustworthiness of the monetary policy". 

I think that people don't realise it, like, "Okay, that's the whole point of Bitcoin and the problem that it's solving is it's being a good Gold 2.0.  We can trust in the monetary policy; we can trust in it and if you add this layer of privacy…".  I wish there was a perfect trade-off where we could add full privacy but also be able to audit perfectly, and there are ways to go in between that with turnstiles and what not, but basically the TLDR that I've gotten from all my reading into it is that you have to sacrifice some auditability, and I just don't think that it's solving a big enough problem to trade-off the problem it's currently solving for.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're talking on chain privacy versus -- if I called up Matt Odell and Shinobi and I said, "Look, between you, help me solve my privacy problem", essentially I'd have to start with a new stack and there's a bunch of things I'd have do, but I know it's possible and I think there are going to be Tors that come on the front end that make it easier; I know there's work being done that's being funded by the Human Rights Foundation, and I also know, with things like Liquid and Lightning, that there are better levels of privacy that you can get from those.

We have, I'm just going to say, completely gone off-track! 

Dan Held: We have!

Peter McCormack: I just want to go back to the question.  Yeah, sorry.  I want to go back to it because that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about.  What do you think of the Mining Council?  Is it fine; should we not care; should we be cautious; should we try and break it down already? 

What is the play that we should be doing here?  I have spoken to different people, and I speak to Nic Carter; it's a very different conversation that I had with Shinobi yesterday.  Shinobi was like, "Fuck this!  This is about Elon Musk pushing for carbon credits and wanting to sell carbon credits to miners".  He might be right; he might be wrong.  Where are you with this?

Dan Held: Yeah, great question.  So first and foremost, I respect a lot of Nic Carter's thoughts on this; I think he's done a great job of defending Bitcoin's narrative from a peer data-driven perspective.  I've been a little bit cautious of his approach and again, I really like Nic a lot so I don't think him and I are a bad disagreement –

Peter McCormack: Hey listen, if Nic listens to that, he knows we both love him and he is somebody who accepts there are different opinions.  Nic's fine.

Dan Held: Yeah, and I think him and I have talked about this before too, so it's nothing too different than what him and I have talked about.  I don't think we should even debate them on Bitcoin's energy mix.  I don't have to defend the energy mix of my TV; I don't have to defend the energy mix of my cell phone or my shirt, and if you admit that Bitcoin is dirtier, you admit that Bitcoin should be using more green energy, then you're admitting that they're right, and I don't agree that they're right.  I think that we should push back on the narrative that it's even considered wasteful at all or dirty.  I think that's a completely ridiculous narrative and a double standard that they have for us.

So, we have two different ways to fight the FUD is what I'm trying to say.  I try to fight the FUD by undermining the argument in its entirety of going, "This is a completely baseless argument.  How much energy does watching The Kardashians use; have you audited that; have you audited the existing financial system?"  By doing that, we tackle the core root of the argument.

Nic is more factual-based of looking at the data and going, "Well, here's the exact numbers.  Let's talk about it".  But I think that these debaters aren't really interested in real data, they're interested just in their own narrative and ultimately, they don't like Bitcoin; and any energy usage that Bitcoin has they will consider to be wasteful. 

So that's where I just like to undermine the core root of the argument, which is that they don't like Bitcoin, they find any energy consumption wasteful and it doesn't matter what the green mix would be; if it was 90%, they would claim it's still wasteful and it should be 100%.  If it's 100%, they would claim that the energy should be used elsewhere.  So that's where it's kind of a turtle's conversation, turtled all the way down to where ultimately, the bottom of this is like, "I'm going use energy, because you use energy and no one criticises you when you use it, so I'm going to use it as I see fit".

Peter McCormack: Okay, well I'm almost certain, in his private life, Elon Musk uses far more energy than I do, and we can debate --

Dan Held: He's got a private plane!  He's got two private planes!

Peter McCormack: Dude, I saw your troll about it.  It killed me.  What was it?  "Can we have the energy mix of your private plane?" or something.

Dan Held: Exactly.  It's so absurd.  Or the energy mix of his Falcon rockets!  By the way, I love SpaceX and I like Tesla cars.  He's built some great things in this world and I think that he's learning about how Bitcoin works; but to answer your question more directly, I first and foremost don't see it as an issue that Bitcoin should be greener.  So fundamentally, I don't really agree with the premise of creating a council for it. 

What's great about Bitcoin is people can do whatever they want, whether or not they feel that way or not, and so if they want to do that and they want to spend more money sourcing their electricity and not make as much money, they're free to do that.  I respect that and they're free to do what they want.

Miners ultimately don't control Bitcoin, so I'm not too concerned, and I think they represent a pretty small percentage of the hash rate.  It's also unlikely that they'll continue to accumulate given that a person like -- I think Nic's done some analysis and he thinks that the hash rate's not going to move in a linear fashion over to the US; it's probably going to be spread across the world.  So, it's doubtful that the US creates a mining cabal, if you will, or a vast majority of the hash rate.  So ultimately, it doesn't matter because miners don’t control Bitcoin. 

Two, most of the hash rate isn't going to move to the US, it's going to move all across the world; and, three, I find it silly because ESG stuff, I think certainly there's environmental concerns to be thought through, and pollution is not a great thing, but we all require energy to make the world work.  Energy consumption, by itself, is not a bad or good thing and ultimately, capitalism is about allocating energy effectively.

People want to make money in capitalism which means they make more efficient things, which means that those things use less electricity or energy in order to produce a value or service or good for a human.  So Bitcoin, I think, does a really phenomenal and very efficient job at doing that, so I reject the idea that Bitcoin should have to defend its own energy consumption when no one else does.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've actually got an interesting show coming up tomorrow with Nic Carter and Alex Gladstein discussing Gladstein's article regarding the petrodollar, which is very interesting because part of the article discusses that the petrodollar has propped up the fossil fuel market by having that relationship with House of Saudi, and therefore harmed the growth and the incentive structures around pushing renewables.

Look, cards on the table.  People would have followed me on Twitter long enough to know I am a semi-environmentalist and a hypocritical one in that I care about the environment.  I care about overfishing, I care about deforestation and I care about pollution, and I do think we burn too many fossil fuels.  I am a believer that there is climate change and it is caused by humans.

People are going to write to me or shout at me on Twitter for that.  It's the truth.  I've done a lot of research; I believe it is.  That said, I've become a bit more rational about how we solve this, and talking to people like you, listening to people like Marty Bent, and I'm not as far down the rabbit hole as Marty Bent with this; but at the same time, I find the way that Bitcoin is targeted for energy usage, there's a lot of the arguments that come in that are quite hypocritical. 

Like you say, we don't track washing machines, we don't track PlayStations or Christmas trees, tcwe just track Bitcoin, but let me put a different argument to you, the one that came out of the Spaces.  It felt like definitely the more liberal-leaning Bitcoin people, or the people in the conversation were saying, "The thing is, the narrative exists.  Whatever we do, the narrative exists, therefore forget the fact there's a council.  If miners choose to produce essentially what is a sustainability report or an audit that says, 'This is our energy mix', that can actually counter the FUD, that's really useful because whenever the FUD comes out you can say, 'Here is the proof'".  I've got my opinions on this, but how do you feel about that?

Dan Held: So I'm fully supportive of them trying to use that narrative battling to fight this FUD, and that's where Bitcoin has its decentralized marketing team, where I've got my narrative and how to fight the FUD and Nic has his and this mining group has theirs, and I applaud any effort to go fight the FUD.

Peter McCormack: I tell them to fuck off!

Dan Held: Yeah, that's certainly one narrative too that could work!  That’s Bitcoin's ultimate message, when you try to push against it, is it's like a glacier; it's just going to crush you.  So, I don’t agree with their method, but I applaud them for trying it; and I certainly hope, if that is the successful method that kills this FUD, then I applaud them for it.  So that's basically my thoughts on it, is that I don't think it'll work, but if it does, then that'll be amazing and I respect their efforts to try and we'll see what happens.

Peter McCormack: Okay, right, so your issue is with essentially centralising around an association of sorts, and we know historically the Bitcoin Association was a complete fucking turnip, so what's the risk though, or if you were them, what would you have done?  I know what I would have done.  I said it in the Space, I said, "Why not organisation a round table, make it public, have it as an open discussion, don't invite Elon Musk because he's got fuck all to do with the conversation, and bring in some voices?", someone like yourself, Dan, someone like Nic Carter, someone like Marty Bent, different people around the table to debate it, because I think consensus would have been reached and it would have been, "Just produce your audits.  Tesla does a sustainability audit and they publish it on their website.  You can do the same and we can point people to these things".

Dan Held: Yeah, they should have hired a coms person or some PR person to help them craft that narrative because they came back and they were like, "Look, this is just like a reporting thing.  We're not like a cabal".  So, I think bitcoiners inherently have some PTSD from these previous New York Agreement, Bitcoin Foundation, so bitcoiners are fully justified in feeling that way; so I think that bitcoiners, they're fully justified in being reactionary in the reaction.  At the same time too, you want to make sure you don't have a situation where your white blood cells kill your white blood cells and they just go into hyperdrive and get all flustered for no reason. 

Now, I think the response so far has been appropriate, to challenge the idea that there's this group, to challenge the idea that we need at group and to challenge the core fundamental reason why it exists.  I think that bitcoiners are justified in that.  I'm not saying that's my own personal belief, I'm just saying they're justified in that; they're justified to go fight control of individuals trying to control Bitcoin; they're totally justified in fighting that.  I think they probably could have handled it a little bit better.  I think that they could have handled the communication a little bit better and then I think that ultimately, again, Bitcoin is really hard to change. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, discussed this with Shinobi today.

Dan Held: I'd be interested to hear a titbit or two; maybe that'll be in a second here.  So, yeah, they don't control the majority of the hash rate; they're not close to a majority of the hash rate.  So if they want to go do that sort of thing, they're free to go do it.  Also, they're free not to earn as much money, if they want to source electricity that's more expensive but it's green.  My thing is just that what happens when you do that, and let's say Bitcoin's 90% green, and they still come after us?  What then, and you've spent all this time and effort?

Peter McCormack: That's what my worry is because I don't think this is ever about -- and they'll move the goalposts. 

Dan Held: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: I just think people have an issue with Bitcoin and I think the root of it, for a lot of them, I'm going to just say it, I think it comes from a jealousy.  The reason I think that, there are certain journalists, I'm going to call one out specifically, Nathaniel Popper, who by the way, he won't listen to this so it does matter, but his book was the first thing I read; Digital Gold was the first thing I read.  I fucking loved that book; got me into Bitcoin.  I was like, "This is amazing".  I've seen him, over time, turn against Bitcoin and then just become a social justice journalist when he started attacking Coinbase, which was totally unnecessary.

Dan Held: Oh yeah.  He said that Bitcoin is still being used for drugs and money laundering despite all of the data showing otherwise, that he uses --

Peter McCormack: I just use that as indicative of somebody who just followed something but didn't invest and has become bitter towards it, and I get it.  Look, I've seen it happen to a lot of people; people have become bitter towards Bitcoin because they've traded it badly or they just didn't get in.  I just feel like they're seeing other people get wealthy and I think they're bitter and they keep thinking, "Oh, it's too expensive", and then it comes down and they don't invest in it.  I just think people just want to attack it and they don't know what they're attacking.

Dan Held: Yeah, look, well journalists, they don't have a good knowledge of the space so they're quoting sources that have been debunked and I think Nic Carter gets really frustrated with this.  I'm like, "Welcome to the party, pal.  I've been feeling this way since 2013", this flagrantly false information, and I'm like, "You didn't even the read the Wikipedia of Bitcoin back in 2013!"  I'm like, "What the hell?"  They're like, "Oh you can print as many as you want".  I'm like, "No, you can't!  If you spend two minutes reading about it then you would know that".

So, it's been really disappointing being in Bitcoin and have to just see every publication misreport on Bitcoin, not just in a subjective manner; but objectively choosing to flagrantly misuse information and twist it, has been supremely disappointing.  So I think that, yeah, some of these folks, some of these journalists will never change.  It's not about the truth, it's about their personal narrative and what they want to craft. 

It's very explicit what they care about and what they want.  So, you've got the narrative crafting and their stubbornness and their ignorance, but then you also have, "What gets me clicks?  Bitcoin's fine, everything's doing well, Bitcoin's great"; that doesn't get you as many clicks as like "Bitcoin's destroying the Earth; Bitcoin transactions; money laundering; drugs".  It's like a CSI show.  That gets clicks and that drives revenue for the business and so they'll always introduce some negativity and variability to Bitcoin to where everyone's like, "Oh man, there's so much drama going on.  Bitcoin died again; Bitcoin fell down; Bitcoin died; miners are talking over Bitcoin", or all the dramatic things that they could talk about.  

So, I don't think that's going to change.  That's the thing, say we have 100% green energy, right, will they write about the truth?  They don't do that now so why would they do that later?  They don't write about the truth now in terms of energy mix, in terms of Bitcoin's energy consumption and how it's relative to the rest of the world.  They don't write about that truthfully now so why would they write about it truthfully whenever we do hit 100% renewable energy?

Peter McCormack: Well, my worry isn't just the moving goalposts on energy mix; my worry is that it just moves to something else.  Does the debate then move to, "Bitcoin is used by criminals and terrorists and tax evaders; we need high levels of KYC; we need these compliant blocks"?  These people who sat there with billions of dollars, who see that the network reacts and the market reacts to this kind of news suddenly say, "Well, we need the Terrorist Council; we need the Criminal…" whatever it is, and then start to drive the narrative on that.  Are they protecting billions of dollars; are they worried about billions of dollars?  That's my worry. 

I don't know if I'm being over-paranoid.  I know a lot of other people think like that, but it's really strange, Dan.  I celebrate Saylor; I think he's fucking great by the way.  I'm guarded just in case, but I do think he's a good speaker of Bitcoin, and if he's only promoting his own asset value growth, fine, but as a long as he's a good bitcoiner, I care.  I don't give a fuck about Elon Musk, I don't care.  I think SpaceX is awesome; I like some of the Tesla cars, but I think he would do whatever the -- if growth in Tesla or SpaceX came at the cost of Bitcoin, I think he would do it because he has his personal goals, whatever that is. 

So, the point I'm trying to get to is that these loud voices now make me nervous.

Dan Held: Totally.  Like I said before, Bitcoin has had loud voices before that turned against it; a bunch of different individuals from the 2013, 2014, 2015 era and 2016, 2017 around the big blocker side.  So, I think that it's natural to feel that way because Bitcoin has inherently been let down by its leaders.  The same with the Bitcoin Foundation; those Core developers, like Gavin and Jeff, I figured if they were part of the Bitcoin Foundation or not, they turned against Bitcoin as well. 

So, bitcoiners intuitively feel that they should be wary of these influencers, and I think they should.  At the same time, these individuals don't control Bitcoin.  They can prop up their own narratives, they can try to push Bitcoin in a certain direction but ultimately, at the end the day, Saylor's only so influential.  Now with Elon…

What sucks the most about Bitcoin is you have to kill all your heroes once you get into it.  I think that's been the most miserable part of Bitcoin for me is, in nine years of this, first of all now you dislike journalists, you dislike universities because of all the pedigree folks who spouted stupid-ass shit about blockchain, Bitcoin and a bunch of stupid stuff that came from all the top universities.  All the journalists misreported on Bitcoin; then you have politics and government that fundamentally Bitcoin fights against; and then you have the wealthy folks and the thought leaders.  The thought leaders each weigh in on Bitcoin and you're like, "Damn it, Nassim Taleb!"

Peter McCormack: So disappointing.

Dan Held: It's so disappointing.  Then you have other folks too, and I'm in Silicon Valley so these are tech leaders all weigh in and they hate Bitcoin.  They're like, "Oh, Bitcoin's like a Myspace".  I'm like, "Aargh!"  So, I've had to kill literally every single leader ever.  Then Elon; I went to the Falcon Heavy launch, the first Falcon Heavy launch in Florida, so I very much believe that humanity should be a multiplanetary species; this is our destiny.  It's amongst the stars and he's our best shot at it.  So, I think that's an incredibly important mission.  Bitcoin is, I would say, the number one most important mission, and this would be number two. 

So, I fully support his mission.  I'm a huge fan of what he's doing there, and so it was really disappointing to see him like he's either treating it as a joke or he's trolling or he's semi-serious to get likes to sell his carbon credits.  It was just disappointing, where I'm like, "Hey man, if we came around and fucked around with SpaceX like you're fucking around with Bitcoin you'd be really disappointed, right?"

Peter McCormack: Have you seen that interview with him where he's nearly in tears and he's like, "I wish they would come and visit us and see the work we're doing"?

Dan Held: No, I haven't seen that.

Peter McCormack: It's the 60 Minutes interview; it's worth watching.  So, he gets quite upset in it, you can tell he's upset.  It looks like his eyes are welling up.  He's disappointed because essentially there's an attack on his work.  And when he started attacking Bitcoin, I felt exactly the fucking same. I'm not building shit, my job is to ask questions; I have the most basic job ever, but I'm trying to do my part.  Whatever shit people give me, I travel the world at my expense and I go and see these projects and I report on them. 

I went to Guatemala, but I was in El Salvador, and I was like "This project, dude, I'm going to take you to El Salvador and go and see what they're doing".  When I was there it was like ten kids doing local work, getting paid in Bitcoin on Wallet of Satoshi, on the Lightning Network, and there were two shops that accepted Bitcoin, so it circulated.  Because of COVID, I didn't get to go for 18 months. Now it's this whole fucking network. 

You can go on my Twitter; everywhere you go they accept Bitcoin.  Actually, they don't just accept Bitcoin, they want your Bitcoin.  They're like, "Can you pay me in Bitcoin?"  I'm like, "I'm not giving you my Bitcoin".  I did in the end because I wanted to leave some sats there; I was buying fucking cups of coffee with Bitcoin, hilariously.

You've got this centre that's now built whereby they're using it as a class to teach people about Bitcoin, they teach people English; you've got the lifeguards being paid for by Bitcoin; you've got this whole thing that's grown.  It's like this seed which has grown about Bitcoin, and I'm thinking, "You're there, you've been in Bitcoin for five fucking minutes and now you're attacking it.  You're promoting an absolute shittiest of shitcoins.  You want to cry about it?"  I'm like, "You fucking come and visit here.  You come and see the lives that have been changed here".

These people in El Salvador, they're poor.  They are poor, okay.  We've got Jack Mallers building Strike, which is changing remittance, which is stopping people have to get a bus to go to Western Union to pick up the cash that's come from America, which is having a 30% haircut because of remittance fees.  They can sit on their couch, have it sent to their phone, free and instant, okay.  That’s on the Lightning Network.  There's this whole network being built there that is changing people's lives and he's fucking around with it

The sad thing is that -- sorry Dan, I'm just going to go on a rant, because I've had a lot of shit for trolling him back.  The sad thing is is that he can turn round and go to the bitcoiners and say, "Listen, I want to know, tell me about what you've learnt".  Every bitcoiner's going to put up their hand and say, "I'll fucking come" and he could have Adam Back come out to him and sit down with him and say, "This is what we've gone through in the last ten years; this is the civil war; this is the debate on block sizes; this is why big blocks lost; this is why the Lightning Network's important". 

He could have ten of the top bitcoiners sat around the table and explain it to him.  Rather than do that, he's just spouting shit on Twitter about Dogecoin and big blocks and transaction fees and single layers and it's all absolute fucking bullshit, and it's affecting the work of other people.  It's pissing me off.  I'm sorry to rant but like, "Just go fuck yourself!"

Dan Held: It's supremely disrespectful.  We embraced him with open arms and all you really had to do was just hodl Bitcoin and, I don't know, not –

Peter McCormack: Shut the fuck up!

Dan Held: Yeah, not trash it.  If you ask some inquisitive questions that were good and he wanted to learn, great; but instead he just trashed it with -- it felt very trolly because it was just so ridiculous, which I don’t really understand.  He actually replied to one of my tweets too. 

Peter McCormack: He did.  I saw that.

Dan Held: I joked about proof of work wastefulness where I'm like, "It's not wasteful; that was a joke", and he thought that was funny.  Then two weeks later, he complains about proof of work being wasteful.  It's just really bizarre and I don’t even know if there's going to be insight into his actions there or it's just random, but it's like, "Hey man, we're working on something serious here just as much as you consider SpaceX to be a really important thing for humanity.  We consider the same thing with money, and money is the unpinning of all of your efforts and everything else, so it would respectful if you at least took the time to learn it or at least engaged without being super-trolly.  You've got…"  I don't know how my many millions of followers he has unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: Is it 57 million, just under?

Dan Held: Yeah.  He's one of the biggest personalities in the world, so it was just very disappointing, and back to my point about killing heroes, Nassim Taleb, him and others, it's just really disappointing that you have to slay almost all your heroes when you get into Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think something else is going on, Dan, because Bitcoin isn't ideal for government, right.  We're quite public about we want to end central banking, the cancer of central banking.  We want to end the money printing system which has propped up government after government.  His businesses, all of them, survive on an intravenous drip of government subsidies, which is our fucking money, let's just be honest.  We are paying for his businesses through our fucking money.  Let's just be very clear, Elon Musk, you are getting our fucking money to do your businesses. 

If someone turned around to him and said, "You could have Bitcoin globally to bring human freedom to the world or you can achieve your goals with SpaceX and Tesla", I know which one he'll choose.  Fine, it's not that I'm holding his hands to the fire, it's just we know where his priorities are and yet he's become so influential on the market.

I think there's other people who should be far more influential in the market.  Adam Back should be far more influential on the market because his number one goal is Bitcoin, his number one goal is human freedom.  Jack Mallers, 27-year-old, killing it at the moment, his number one goal is human freedom, his number one goal is Bitcoin; yet we're all sat here reacting to the tweets of this fucking moron and he is affecting the work that everyone's doing.  Sorry, I'm really on a rant today, I don't normally do this.

Dan Held: Yeah, let it loose.

Peter McCormack: It just pisses me off when you go around the world and see the work these people are doing.  The worst thing is, when people call him out in this shit, you get all these people going, "Shut up!  Leave him alone!  Stop shouting at him!  We need Elon, we should work with him".  Do you what these people are?  They're not bitcoiners, they're shitcoiners who own Bitcoin, okay, and there's a massive difference, because bitcoiners would chase Elon out of town and say, "Look, get the fuck out of there", and we would take the 50% market haircut and then rebuild.  Shitcoiners who own Bitcoin care about their dollar value now.

Don't get me wrong, look, I'm honest, I love it when my Bitcoin wealth goes up in pound and dollar value.  I love it because it increases my purchasing power, but at the same time, if you offer me Elon Musk to fuck off and a 50% haircut, I'd take it because it's fucking annoying.  Sorry, I'm going to have to do a -- I'm really, really sorry.  If you're listening, sorry I'm swearing but --

Dan Held: Maybe you should just do a single episode of yourself just ranting about it.

Peter McCormack: Go, "Fuck this!  Fuck Elon!  Fuck…"! 

Dan Held: While you play some rock music opener, just get into it.

Peter McCormack: Look, I can do my podcast, Dan, from in my house and keep my costs down.  I go out, I've travelled the world.  Every time I go somewhere, pretty much, I'm paying for it.  I've had a couple of conferences paying my thing.  That is my thing.  I'm paying the cost; I'm going here.  Not only am I paying the costs, I know the shows I make there don't do very well because people want to hear Willy Woo and Lyn Alden because they care about their personal wealth, but I do it because I care about what we're doing here.  What we're building here is really, really important.

When you go to these countries and you see Bitcoin changing people's lives, it's really important.  Then you see this dickhead on Twitter just going on about Dogecoin and it's just like -- the thing is, the worst thing about it is I don't know if he's serious or not.  I'm like, "Does he own Dogecoin?"  I don't know.

Dan Held: I don't know if he owns Dogecoin.  I think it's a joke.  I mean, his statements about Dogecoin he must know are false, he must.  But, yeah, I mean Bitcoin is bigger than Elon, Bitcoin is bigger than anyone.  So luckily Elon might have had a market impact but what's great is now the market's been like, "Okay, he's just jerking us around and we don't really care what Elon has to say to about Bitcoin anymore".  So, Bitcoin grows more antifragile with these sort of events where these big folks come in and swing around and try to move Bitcoin's price.  Well, they're going to lose influence pretty fast, and pretty soon the market doesn't care what they have to say.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and they're going to lose potential customers as well because people will be like, "Well, I'm not going to buy a Tesla".  A bunch of people cancelled their Cybertruck orders.  In the grand scheme, it doesn't make a difference, but at the same time it's just interesting.

Dan Held: Yeah, I just don't understand the strategy.  But the thing is, it's either trolling or there's some crazy big strategy here that we're never going to really see or know about that's happened behind closed doors with him and folks and the government and he's trying to signal to them that he's on board.   I don’t know; who knows?  We'll never --

Peter McCormack: In slight defence, it might be -- I've read a podcast, he's trying to get us to Mars and build tunnels that connect cities, make energy-efficient cars, roll-out solar power.  He's got a lot on his hands and he's the fourth richest guy in the world, everyone wants to talk to him and hang out with him; perhaps pressure like that does funny things to you and maybe that's it.

Dan Held: Certainly.  I can't imagine what it's like not only building these two companies -- in my last newsletter in The Held Report, I wrote about this, that Elon built two companies in one of the most government-entrenched industries out there; cars.  Automobile manufacturing is a 100-year-old industry.  He couldn't even sell cars directly to consumers; he had to fight state regulators because they had put up these regulations that you couldn't sell directly to consumers, you had to have a dealership, which basically entrenched incumbent car manufacturers.

So, SpaceX, on the rocket side, he fought the Air Force.  The Air Force gave a no-bid $10 billion contract to ULA, United Launch Alliance, which is Boeing and Lockheed Martin, no bid, no bidding.  So, he sued the Air Force and then won, that they had to open up bidding on these contracts.  So, he had to fight against really intense government power.  Now on the flip side, he gets grants from NASA and then with Tesla, he get grants for green initiatives.  So, he's in this weird limbo where that's got to be a really weird feeling to be like, "Fuck you, I'm going to fight you", and then also like, "Hey, can I have some money, please?"  So, he's in this weird limbo. 

Everyone told him he was wrong with both.  The amount of FUD that Tesla and SpaceX had must have been enormous.  The FUD we get in Bitcoin is probably equivalent to the FUD he got in SpaceX and Tesla, which is also weird that he would then trash us without thinking about the second-order consequences or how we felt because he's probably felt that way when people -- remember when Teslas caught on fire; remember when that was the narrative?  Think how BS that was.  It's like, "Well, what are all the other cars driving around with?  They're driving around with gasoline".

Peter McCormack: But this is why you need to watch the 60 Minutes interview, because he shows a lot of emotion in that.  I'll dig it out for you, dude, and I'll send it across to you so you can see it.  But yeah, look, it's tough; really, really split feelings.  It's just frustrating because you work so hard.

Dan Held: He's got, what is it, 50 million Twitter followers?  I can't imagine what that's like.  I've got a quarter of a million and things are already getting really crazy.  You and I have talked about this, so this is maybe the right time to bring it up because this might give people some visibility into Elon's psychology when you take this number in.  You know what I say to that?  100X it, 200X it.  So, you and I get a lot of negativity --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's bad.

Dan Held: I would say it's 60% praise, 40% negativity; it just depends on the day, depends on the topic, but it's pretty bad.  I block 100 people a day. 

Peter McCormack: I don't know the numbers.  I block around 100 people a day.  My block rule's very specific; you can criticise the fuck out of me, but if you are just abusively insulting, you're blocked, or if you're spamming.

Dan Held: Yeah, spamming's a common one.  There's so much spam where people come and try to show a coin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I had, on the back of the market dump, I had people blaming me.  It's not like one or two; hundreds.

Dan Held: Yeah, they all piled in.

Peter McCormack: My DMs were, "Get a rope and kill yourself.  Why don't you die?  I'm slitting my wrists, I've lost all my money, it's all your fault.  Go fuck yourself, you fat cunt", just continual abuse and it's not fun, and I've been through Elon's replies and he's getting 50 million times that.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think the most unfortunate thing that I don't like either is that, sure, there's people with different altcoins that they don't like me for good reason because I only like Bitcoin, and then there's traditional financial folks who don't like me because I like Bitcoin; but what really sucks is when bitcoiners don't like you because you don't like every specific thing that they want or they think I'm too commercial or something.  They've like, "Oh Dan, he wears a button-up shirt and he's not…"  I'm like, "I believe in all the same values you believe in; I just feel like being a marketer, and there's nothing wrong with that".

So the friendly fire, I think, is probably the really disappointing part, and I think that's where Elon touched on that that made it really disappointing, was that it was friendly fire.  We thought he was on the same side, then there was friendly fire.  If Elon didn't like Bitcoin and hadn't bought Bitcoin and then come in and FUDed it, we'd be like, "Okay, whatever; we're used to that".  But when it's friendly fire, I think that's when it hurts the most because you're like, "Wait, I thought we were on the same side and now you're turning your gun on me".  

So on my own personal brand, it definitely sucks when a lot of bitcoiners are super-mean and will just be super-negative for no reason, really trolling.  I see that with you too, you and I and others.  I find it was really unnecessary.  It's like, "Hey man, we're fighting the same enemy here; it's nuts".  Then with Elon, it's like, "What are you going, man?  I thought we were on the same side of fighting fiat and now you're trolling us!"

Peter McCormack: There's more reason to criticise Dogecoin than Bitcoin, a thousand times more reasons to criticise Dogecoin than Bitcoin, endless reasons; but he doesn't criticise Dogecoin, he promotes it.  He thinks it's fun but he's actually causing problems.

Dan Held: Well, this was what I thinking about too; what is fun at that level?  You've defeated the automobile industry, you've defeated the space industry, like God industries that were undefeatable.

Peter McCormack: And married a popstar, or you dated a popstar.

Dan Held: Married a popstar.  He's had three wives or whatever, you have infinity money --

Peter McCormack: Endlessly rich.

Dan Held: -- what do you do; what do you do for fun?  It's like, make SpaceX happen is part of it, but then also, I don't know, maybe he finds this entertaining because this a weird form of entertainment for him.

Peter McCormack: Dan, I'm a bit of a troll, as you know.  I tell you why I went a bit trolly, it was a reaction to the aggressive insults.  I found when I put an opinion across, and it's wrong sometimes, I get that, but the aggressive insults were a bit much.  So, I started trolling because I felt like trolling is satire; if you're insulting satire, you need to get a grip, because comedy makes the world go round.

Dan Held: Totally.

Peter McCormack: I just found it a lot easier to cope with Twitter, just being satirical.  Some of the Americans don't get it because the British satire's very different.  That, for me, was like a Twitter coping mechanism.

Dan Held: Yeah, Twitter's rough.  It's like imagining you're in a loud room and anyone can shout at you.  It gets nuts, especially when you touch a controversial topic; people are going to be polarised.  My tweet that Elon replied to got 35,000 likes.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Dan Held: Dude, on the flip side of that, so the day started off really badly, and this is probably why Elon saw it; some of these really left-wing radical environmentalists got a hold of the tweet, and some really big accounts, like CNBC producers with a million Twitter followers retweeted it with some nasty comments. 

Then, all of a sudden, I mean I've never seen a pile-on like this before; 35,000 is the most likes I've ever gotten on a tweet, but I think I had thousands and thousands, like 5,000 replies.  A lot of these were really, really negative, and it was happening so fast I couldn't even block it.  It was happening so fast.

Then Elon piles in.  The day started out really poorly and then Elon came in with a laugh and I was like, "Oh, at least I got that", but this was before he FUDed Bitcoin.  But it was insane, and this was the first mainstream level I've gotten to; 35,000 likes, that's like a mainstream tweet. 

It was just really insane to feel the heat, and people just like constantly delete your account, "You're a fucking idiot; you're a terrible person".

Peter McCormack: It's rough, man.

Dan Held: They would tc Kraken; they'd be like, "Kraken, you should fire this guy".

Peter McCormack: Oh, I've had that shit, dude, "Why are you sponsoring that guy?"

Dan Held: Yeah, so it was intense.

Peter McCormack: Twitter can be rough, man, and if you show any form of it getting to you, if you're like, "God, it's been rough today", it's like, "You're a fucking snowflake".  But usually it's from somebody, and this isn't me being arrogant, but I'm just saying it's usually from somebody with like 50 followers. 

I've said this before, when the internet comes after you, if you've never had that, you don't know what that's like.  When you've had thousands of messages over a week, "You're fat; you're a cock; go kill yourself", I'm sorry, I think even the most bad-ass toughest person would be like, "This sucks, this fucking sucks".

Dan Held: Totally.  It's a whole different way to experience Bitcoin and it really, really sucks.

Peter McCormack: You have to find a shield, you have to find a way of dealing with it.

Dan Held: Yeah, for me, it's just instant hide and block.  I have collateral damage; once a week, someone's like, "Hey, you blocked me", and I'm like, "Sorry".  If I think it's at all in the realm of trolly or being insulting, then I'm going to block.  I reached out to Andreas Antonopoulos when I first started to grow in audience size, and I've known Andreas since 2013; we worked together at Blockchain.com.

Peter McCormack: Do you know why I'm laughing?  I think I had the same conversation with Andreas.  I had it with him in Uruguay at the LABITCONF.  Tell me, I bet it's the same conversation.

Dan Held: Oh, nice.  I don't necessarily agree with how Andreas thinks about this space, but we mutually agree to disagree and we have a respectful relationship there.  I talked to him about my mental struggles dealing with the amount of negativity and he helped me think through it. 

Part of it was he's like, "Look, back in the tribal world, you would be amongst your tribe, and if your tribe was shouting at you, 'Don't do this', if you did that and then you got kicked out of the tribe you'd be in a really bad spot.  Well, we're not in a tribe any more, we're in the world, but anyone can come yell at us, so when we receive that information, we're like, 'Oh, this is a bad thing, if I don't correct this, I could be kicked out of the tribe', and that's why you have this pit of doubt in your stomach of like, 'Oh man, this doesn't feel good'".

That, plus he's like, "Look, with any great effort, you're going to have negativity.  With anyone who's ever done anything great there's been a mountain of negativity.  Anything in life, any fighter, any invention, any book writer, anything, comes with negativity and it's just part of the game.  It's part of what comes with it.  It's not a personal thing, you just have to let it pass through you and not into you".

I've had two other folks in their crypto speech reach out.  I reached out to them because I saw some of them struggling and posting tweets that showed me that they were having the same issues that I had, and I tried to pass the ball forward, or, what is it called, pass the buck forward or whatever where I tried to help boost them in a time of need because they were getting piled on and it's a lot to take in.

Look, I won State in high school football, and I played seven years of high school football.  Sorry, it was three years of middle school and four years of high school.  It was extremely gruelling to win State in Texas.  The amount of verbal and physical things that they bring you through is excruciating.  We had guys go into the Army afterwards, and the Navy, and they said that basic training was easier than our football off-season and our training.

We would go play for three hours and exercise for three hours in 110-degree heat in Texas where there was no shade, and you're hitting really strong dudes incessantly over and over again and you're suffering a lot of verbal and mental abuse by the coaches.  This was not a walk in the park.  I would consider this is equivalently rough, and I would consider it, I think, a rewarding experience; it taught me a lot, but also a very gruelling one.

Peter McCormack: I feel like a hypocrite now because I guess, if I'm posting an image to Elon Musk saying, "Don't be a dick", I'm being a hypocrite, which is one of those things where -- I think sometimes you have to self-reflect.  You have to go, "Okay, if I'm complaining, do I do it on myself, therefore if I'm being a hypocrite, therefore…?" -- have you ever read that book, The Four Agreements?

Dan Held: I think you sent that to me because I think we were talking about it.

Peter McCormack: It's really good.

Dan Held: Yeah, it mentally helps you think through these things.

Peter McCormack: Well, one of the things is, be impeccable with your word, and I'm pretty good at that, apart from when I'm on Twitter; I'm a dick on Twitter!  I'm not impeccable with my word, and perhaps that's something I need to think about.  It's funny, we started with the Mining Council and this has become a counselling session!  Think therapy!  Therapy with Dan!

Dan Held: I think it's interesting for some folks because they probably don't think through what it's like to be at this sort of level.  It's a little peek behind the curtain, if you will, and it feels douchy to even say it that way, but you know what I mean.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Dan Held: Yeah, a large following.  You like the touch the electric rod I think more than most people.  You really like to lean in.

Peter McCormack: That's because I'm a psychopath!

Dan Held: Yeah, so you receive, I think, a level of negativity I don't even see, so I respect that a lot.

Peter McCormack: Wel,l that's because I've managed to piss off bitcoiners and shitcoiners at the same time so I get it in both directions!

Dan Held: You and Udi!  You've had Udi on the show, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I have, of course.  The thing is, if you choose to be a troll, I think trolling is satire and I think, done in the right way, it's good. 

Dan Held: Yeah, I think that Eric Wall, Neeraj, Udi, you, you guys do it in I think a tasteful and funny way. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there are different ways.  Neeraj does it in a way that's very hard to dislike, he's such a nice person, whereas I know mine, I'm a bit of a dick.  But I think it's satire sometimes, and that's fine, but I also know sometimes I definitely get it wrong.  I say to my audio engineer and my producer, Ben, I'm like, "You've got to watch this because I don’t know if I'm going too far and you have to tell me because I don't want to go too far".  So, I get them to just keep an eye on me.

What's going to happen, people are going to listen to this interview and go, "Oh, I loved the first hour, then you started fucking talking about yourself, you dicks".

Dan Held: For the ranting! 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "It's all about you in the end!"  Listen we could go on -- sorry, I interrupted you.

Dan Held: I think that's a good point to wrap up on. Yeah, it's interesting, and I think part of this was about Elon's psychology, right, so what is Elon feeling when bitcoiners pile in; is Elon trolling?  Maybe this is a level of fun that he finds.  So, I don't think we're going to know, and we may not know forever but we may know in the future.  But I think part of this exercise was us dissecting how Elon thinks, and I think us, or our subjective experiences, weighed in on that a little bit.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a bit of a reflection time anyway.  Listen, Dan, you know I love you, bro.  Can't wait to see you next week.  It's been a long time, man.  We used to get to drink all the time.  I say this at the end of each show, but we're getting closer; we're going to go and have some whiskies, talk about Bitcoin and talk about some other shit, talk about life, talk about maybe both of us ending up in Austin somehow.

Dan Held: I hope so, man.  Dude, I can't wait.  I think it's been way too long, and I think Bitcoin community, in person, is critical.  I think people have gotten really tired a little bit aggressive without being able to meet each other in person and having a beer and shaking their hands and everything else, so I'm looking forward to it.  It's going to be a great time.

Peter McCormack: Me too, man.  Listen, tell people where to find your stuff to sign up to your newsletter and all that stuff.  I will stick it in the show notes, but let them know.

Dan Held: Yeah, if you're on Twitter, follow me @danheld.  If you liked this conversation, minus the mental walk-through, how we both feel about our followers online --

Peter McCormack: Or therapy!

Dan Held: Our therapy session!  If you liked my thoughts on Bitcoin, my longer-form content is on The Held Report, and so if you google that, if you sign up for the paid subscription, you get my thoughts once a week; if you're on the free one, you get it once a month.  So, yeah, if you really love my thoughts, if you want to go in further, you want to hear me talk long form about these, I write about a different topic every single week, sign up there.

Peter McCormack: Awesome, man.  All right, brother, I will see you very soon.  Can't wait to have a whiskey with you, man.  Take care, brother, and I will see you in Miami.

Dan Held: See you in a couple of days, cheers.